Sixth Sunday after Trinity,
2009
Text: Gen. 18:1-16
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
St. Stephen’s Reformed
Episcopal Church
“Waiting on the Lord”
“Then the Lord
appeared to [Abraham] by the terebinth trees of Mamre, as he was sitting in the tent door in the heat of
the day.”
It’s siesta time for Abraham, and it would be for you too if
you had to live in that kind of heat. It’s mid-day and Abraham is trying to
stay cool by sitting just inside the door way of his tent to take advantage of
its shade, and also to catch whatever hint of breeze there might be in that southern
desert region of the
But then a strange and marvelous thing happens. God walks down the road that passes by Abraham’s tent. The Scripture says Abraham looked up from his seat there in the door of his tent and saw three men passing by. And instantly – don’t ask me how – Abraham recognized them as the Lord and two of his angels.
It’s interesting how the Eastern Orthodox churches read this
passage. This picture is of an icon called “the Old Testament Trinity,” and it
is based on this passage where Abraham entertains the three men under Mamre’s oak trees. Because, you see, as the Orthodox read
the passage, when Abraham runs out to meet them, he addresses the three of them
as “My Lord.” “When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and
bowed himself to the ground, and said, “My Lord, if I have now found favor in Your sight, do not pass by Your servant. Please let a little
water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree.” It
seems that Abraham addresses the three men collectively as the one Lord. So the
Orthodox have said: Here is a manifestation of the
divine Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – sitting down to eat a meal with
Abraham in the desert. I’d love to believe it. I really like that icon. But the
problem is, in the very next passage the Lord stays behind to speak to Abraham,
while the other two men go down to
But notice that when Abraham sees them, he immediately gets up and runs out to meet them. He runs. No more thoughts about cooling his heels. No more thoughts about not over-exerting himself in the heat. He runs, and bows down, and begs the Lord not to pass him by.
What message can we receive from this? Just what St. James tells us: “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” When the Lord comes near to us in His Word and in His Sacrament, when there is an opportunity to sit down in His presence, then there’s no time to sit back and think about whether we would go out to meet Him; there’s no time to think about how it might take us away from our leisure and comfort, or how much energy we might have to exert. We must run to meet Him, and we must pray Him to remain with us, and to commune with our spirits. When Jesus passed by along the road it was to those who cried out, “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy upon us,” that he stopped and ministered. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.”
Old Abraham, the man of faith, runs to meet the Lord. But not only that, he asks that He would stay a while and allow him to minister to His needs. Isn’t that amazing! Here’s a guy who gets to have God over for lunch, and his first thought is not what he can get from God, but what he can get for God – literally. He goes out and gets butter and milk and his best calf and has his servant prepare them for his divine guest and his angelic companions. And he tells Sarah to bake some bread. That’s like a man, isn’t? His friends come over for a visit and he says to his wife, “Why don’t you bake us something” – in the heat of day, no less. But Abraham then takes on the role of a waiter, and he begins to wait on the Lord.
It gives a whole new connotation to idea of waiting on the Lord, doesn’t it? But I think it’s purposeful. There’s a great pun in this passage built around the thought of waiting on the Lord. For while Abraham is busy waiting on the Lord, literally waiting at table, the Lord asks, “Where is Sarah your wife?” And Abraham answered, “Here in the tent.” And the Lord said, “I will certainly return to you according to the time of life, and behold, Sarah your wife shall have a son.”
This, of course, was not the first time God had promised Abraham that He would give him a son. God had been promising a son to Abraham for twenty-five years, and now Abraham was one-hundred, and Sarah was ninety. I think most of our responses would be, “Yeah, I’ve heard this one before. I’m going to be the father of many nations. Right! And in my seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Tell me another one. How’s a one-hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman going to conceive a child. It’s too late!” But Abraham believed God, still after 25 years of promises. We hear no objections, no question on his part.
But Sarah is a different story. Because Sarah’s back in the tent eves-dropping on Abraham’s conversation with God. And when she hears God promise that next year she’s going to have a son, she laughs under her breath – a laugh of incredulity, “Hah! After I’m worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?” She scoffs at the word of the Lord.
You see, Sarah is prepared to wait on the Lord in the one sense. She’s prepared to serve Him, to work for Him, to be active and busy doing things for the Lord - even to bake for Him in the heat of the day. What she’s not prepared to do is to wait upon His promises – to wait on the Lord in the sense of trusting His timing, trusting that He would fulfill His word to her even when reason said she was beyond hope.
None of us like to wait. Especially in this culture in which, if we can’t get what we want instantaneously, we just choose the next option. Patience is not a great virtue in this culture in which there’s always another choice for something faster. Speed is the ultimate virtue of our day. We want faster processors, faster internet access, faster ways around traffic, faster this, faster that, because if anything could be said of this culture it’s that we hate to wait.
And for many of us – perhaps most of us – this is the way it is in our relationship to God as well. We’re so often ready to wait on God in the one sense – ready to serve him, ready to get out there and get busy doing things for the Lord – and so unprepared to wait patiently on the Lord’s timing. “Give me something to do, give me a task, give me a project, just don’t ask me to sit silently and wait for you to direct my life, or wait for you to answer my prayer, or wait for you to help with my need.” In that way we’re not unlike Martha in the Gospels, who, in Luke’s words, “was distracted with much serving,” while her sister Mary chose the better part of sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening and waiting on His word.
We hate to wait. But if you did a concordance study of the whole Bible on the
word “wait” you’d be surprised how often we are called to do just that – to
wait on the Lord.
“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.” Psm 27:14
“Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him…” Psm. 37:7
“I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” Psm. 40:1
“My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him.” Psm. 62:5
“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Is. 40:31
“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness…. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him.” Lam. 3:22-23, 25
Those are just a few passages from the Old Testament. We could keep going into the New. But the point is: the Scriptures call us to be waiters – to silently and patiently rest in God’s timing for our lives. It’s when we try to help God move along a little faster that things go very badly, don’t they?
Has it ever crossed your mind that our recent war in
Wait on the Lord, and he shall renew your strength. Wait patiently on God’s word, and He will fulfill all His promises to you.
Sarah laughed, but God answered, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Whatever it is you’re waiting for from God - an answered prayer, a healing, the overcoming of a besetting sin – that is still His word to you: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
“My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him.” +