The saints of past and the present are people like most of us, those who are without all the resources of life, who weep and don’t have it all together.  They are people who long for justice and often don’t see it. They are those who pray for peace despite the constant onslaught of violence.  What makes them saints, those blessed people who make God’s love visible, isn’t the fact of any of these normal human situations or longings.  Instead, it was they have turned their lives and longings toward the light of Christ, basking in His radiance and absorbing it into nourishment for the world.  It is in this turning toward the light that they provide an opening for the healing love of God against those forces of darkness that seek to undo love and destroy God’s creatures through pride and shame.

God is not just liberating Israel from Egypt, but is also liberating them from the entire pattern of life that Egypt represents.  So, to offer a new pattern, one that doesn’t depend on controlling people and exploiting the world, God offers them a strange food, one that can’t be identified according to any of their old ways of knowing or stored up for more than a day’s time.

It is in my inability to speak, the weakness of my words, the seeming failure of my prayers, that the Spirit moves into my heart, hearing its hope and grief, and offering my deepest self to God.  The Spirit shares in the loss of words, speaking only in sighs, and yet the Spirit’s groaning on our behalf is understood by God. When we no longer know what to say, the gate to our deepest prayers is opened. 

Reading the story of the binding of Isaac in our age, might strike us as an encounter with a primitive god, a dark picture that bears no likeness to the enlightened faith we’d like to claim.  And yet I think we need this story now more than ever.  Ours is a world that desires to control more and more, to solve every problem, to heal every wound.  And while that might seem good on the surface, it makes it impossible for us to live into the fact of our limits, our vulnerability, the absurd pieces of our life that could never fit in some neat rational system.  Faith, hope, and love are not achievable by algorithm or formula, or knowable beyond the risk of faith. 

Hospitality is one of those words that is often overused and underdefined. It would be easy to think of this critical act only in terms of dinner parties and festive receptions, of attentive hosts and lavish welcomes. And all of those things could be a part of hospitality. In its roots, however, we find a more dangerous reality. The word hospitality means, most literally, welcoming the stranger, and the stranger in the ancient world was as often as not an enemy. The word host, in fact, comes from the Latin hostis which means enemy as well as stranger. To the ancient understanding an encounter with some unknown person could end with a curse as much as blessing. And yet, in the vulnerable world of nomads in the arid lands through which Abraham traveled, reliance on strangers was as necessary as it was perilous. Good hospitality, then, was a way of welcoming a stranger so that instead of ending up enemies, both parties left as friends.