What's in a cliche? (sermon prep for July 31)

 One of my closest friends is a long-time hospital chaplain.  Whenever he would tell me a story of a particular tragic death, or a family that had experienced an unusual amount of loss or violence, he'd always end with, "I really wrestled with God over that one." 

It was one of those things that went in one ear and out the other.  "Wrestling with God" is such a familiar phrase that it washes over you when you hear it.  But my friend wasn't that sort of guy: he wasn't trite, he wasn't particularly sunny, and he definitely wasn't theologically unsophisticated.  So one day I asked him, "What do you mean when you say 'I wrestled with God'?  What does that look like for you?" 

"We go back and forth," he stated, matter-of-factly.  "Like in a relationship."

In our story this week, Jacob sets the bar for wrestling with God.  Read Genesis 32:22-31 at www.oremus.org, then walk through it piece  by piece here:

Background:  Jacob has been living for many years with his father-in-law Laban, and has been told by God to go back to where he came from.  One big problem: he's got to cross paths with his brother Esau to get there.  Jacob was living with Laban in the first place because Esau wanted to kill him.  Oops. 

Jacob has made preparations to meet Esau, including sending him gifts and dividing his family, servants, and livestock up so that if one group were attacked the other would survive (let's not even go into the way he plays favorites here).  When we meet Jacob at 32:22, he's sent everybody on ahead of him and stayed behind, camped beside a stream (this looks a lot like where we found him when he was running from Esau in chapter 28).

He wrestles with "a man": Yes, it's God.  God meets Jacob in the form of a human man and physically grapples with him until daybreak. 

How do we know it's God?  The story stands between two appearances of God at Beth-el (as noted, in chapter 28 and again in chapter 35).  Interpretation of this passage has identified the assailant as God from the earliest times.  Jacob knows that he is wrestling with God and shows us that by demanding a blessing from the man.  Finally, the blessing comes in the form of a new name that only God has the power to give.

He asks for a blessing:  Blessings are for real in the Old Testament.  They are objective, permanent, active things that have power apart from the giver and the recipient.  That's why Isaac can't take back the blessing he gives to Jacob, thinking he's Esau.  When Jacob asks for a blessing, he's not asking for the man's goodwill, for the man to make a gesture over his head, or for the man to promise him something.  He's asking for an immediate, verifiable, powerful transformation of some sort.  He wants something new, now.

He receives a new name:  What he gets is a new name, Israel, which in the version of the text that we read this week (NRSV), means either "the one who strives with God" or "God strives."  That is, of course, exactly what has passed between the two.  Jacob struggled with God, but so did God really, truly struggle with Jacob - so much so that in the end God had to stop playing fair and strike Jacob's hip. 

How is the new name a blessing?  It's not, really.  The blessing is what the name marks, which is the bond between Jacob and God that has been forged and cemented in this struggle.  In the words of my friend, they've gone back and forth, just like you do in a relationship.  God has challenged Jacob to muster everything that he has within him in this wrestling match, right at a time when Jacob needs everything that the has in him to face his brother, Esau.  Jacob walks away with a limp not because he failed, but because he was so strong and so tenacious that God had to do something extreme to call him off.  He's now marked as a "striver" rather than a loser. 

And here's the blessing for all of us.  Jacob was forced to block out everything that he was afraid of - his brother, losing his family, losing his possessions - and take his fight to the source: God.  When it was over, he had nothing left to fear and had gained the blessing of a powerful relationship with the one who is all power and all blessing.  The biblical commentator Terence Fretheim writes that struggling with God "in the night" provides "a gracious rehearsal for the actual life circumstance."  He continues, "To go through it with God before we go through it with others provides resources of strength and blessing for whatever lies in the wings of life" (NISB v.1, 1994, 569). 

Sermon prep for July 17: poetic justice?

Commentary by Ray Webster

First reading: Genesis 29:15-28 Jacob marries

These great stories from Genesis tell us the story of the descendants of Abraham – our ancestors in faith, the first people (in the telling of it in Genesis) to believe in God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Today we come to the story of Jacob’s marriage. People are often startled by Jacob’s behavior in Genesis. He tricked his brother Esau out of his birth right, and now Jacob finds himself with a prospective father-in-law who tricks him in turn.

Robert Alter writes:

It has been clearly recognized since late antiquity that the whole story of the switched brides is a meting out of poetic justice to Jacob – the deceiver deceived, deprived by darkness of the sense of sight as his father is by blindness, relying, like his father, on the misleading sense of touch. The Midrash Bereishit Rabba vividly represents the correspondence between the two episodes: “And all that night he cried out to he, ‘Rachel!’ and she answered him. In the morning, ‘and, …look, she was Leah.” He said to her, ‘Why did you deceive me, daughter of a deceiver? Didn’t I call out Rachel in the night, and you answered me?’ She said, ‘There is never a bad barber who doesn’t have disciples. Isn’t this how your father cried out Esau, and you answered him?’”

Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2004, pages 155-156

Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his daughter Leah, and then his daughter Rachel – the one Jacob loved. In the unfolding story in Genesis, Leah is the mother of six of Jacob’s sons: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun. Jacob had two more sons by the slave girl Bilhah: Dan and Naphtali. And then two by another slave girl: Gad and Asher.

Then Rachel would have a son, Joseph, whose story we will read – and then another, the youngest, Benjamin. These were the twelve sons of Jacob who was also called Israel, and the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.

By the way, I highly recommend Robert Alter’s highly praised translation of and commentary on the first five books of the Bible: The Five Books of Moses, quoted above.

Second reading: Letter of Paul to the Romans 8:26-39

When my home rector as a student, Bishop Wylie, died, many years ago, he left instructions that my old boss in New York, Bishop Rockwell, preach on Romans 8 – this great majestic chapter from the Letter of Paul to the Romans. Part of these words are indeed often read at funerals in the Episcopal Church and they are fitting statements of the central Christian belief in the resurrection in Jesus Christ.

Our passage this week starts with a less familiar verse – much less often read – but of equal importance.

The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

There are times when we do not know what to say to God. Either the situation is too tough. Or sometimes are hearts are too full. The Holy Spirit, who is God dwelling within us, speaks in the silence within, too deep for words, in love.

And then come these great words of Christian faith and hope:

What then are we to say about these things?

These things that happen to us, that happen in this life. What are we to say about death and loss?

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

And then these great words. In many ways they are the center of my faith:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Jesus put before the crowds another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

The mustard seed is tiny, but a great plant grows out of it. Just so the kingdom of heaven – the sovereignty of God’s love in our lives, and our trust in that love – can be as small, as tiny, as a mustard seed but out of grows something great. Our lives. Our Christian lives. The life of the Christian community.

For the Kingdom (sermon from July 17)

 (The readings for July 17 were from Genesis 28, Psalm 139, Romans 8, and Matthew 13)
 
If you're ever in the South, you'll notice there aren't a lot of really old places.  There are venerable, elegant banks and state buildings, and if you head out of the city you'll find some plantations to tour, but your neighbor isn't going to be living in a home from the early 19th century.  Each town won't have the little clapboard houses of the first settlers like you find in New England or New York state.  And the reason is simple and practical:  there was a war there.  Only 150 years ago, which is a little blip on the cosmic time-line, the American South was a disaster zone.   During the Civil War, towns and downtowns and farms and fields were leveled and burned and changed forever in more ways than a landscape can tell, and in more ways than people can remember.  Today, if you shoot through Atlanta on Interstate-75, you're going to see success: tall buildings, thousands of cars, bridges and apartments that are new and shiny with this unbelievably cheery sun lighting it all up.  But if you were running from Atlanta in 1864, it would have looked just like that scene from Gone with the Wind, where Rhett Butler is racing a horse and wagon through walls of flame as Sherman's army burns everything to the ground.  Atlanta, a real place you can see today, looked like a furnace of fire.

When Jesus talks about wheat and chaff and the furnace of fire today, he's talking about a real place, too.  South of Jerusalem there's valley called Gehenna that captured the imagination of Jesus' friends the way a haunted house captures ours.  The valley was once home to people who worshipped a god called Molech, and by Jesus' time ideas about the horrible things their cult had done were part of popular lore.  People may have burned trash there and Roman soldiers may have practiced cremation there, so evoking Gehenna brought up for everyone images not only of fire, but of ritually unclean and morally abhorrent things.  In the Bible, Gehenna stands for everything that’s opposite to the kingdom of God, and to say a person would end up there meant that the more God's kingdom comes, the more God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, the more painful life will be for those who are opposed to God's will. 

So in the parable today, the one we just read about the wheat and the chaff, we could say that Jesus is being descriptive.  He’s describing how people who are committed to bad things would experience the coming of something good.  Which is easier to hear than if he were being entirely prescriptive about it - we don't want him to be saying here, "Bad people are going to live in a bad place forever and ever" which is our own popular idea about hell.  Because if you believe the latest research, a lot of us here today are uncomfortable with the notion of eternal punishment - either we don't think about it, or we just don't buy it.  A few years ago a huge scholarly study found that while 74% of Americans believe in an afterlife and believe in heaven, only 58% believe in hell (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, June 2008).  And that statistically significant sample of people who believe in heaven without believing in hell looks awfully like us.  Many are Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, Reformed Jews, or members of the United Church of Christ.  Many live in urban areas where they meet lots of different types of people, or they have lots of education or work experience, so they've been exposed to different types of ideas.  The sociologists and theologians who published the study had some thoughts about why hell has dropped off the map for so many people, and it seems to boil down to a couple of things. 

First, the difference between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is often cast in terms of belief or non-belief.  Do you believe in God?  Do you believe Jesus is God?  Good - heaven's up that ladder over there.  No God?  No Jesus?  Sorry.  But people today see that their neighbors and their family members are good and kind and live according to God's will even if they are Buddhist or Muslim or atheist, and they're not willing to consign them to a Judeo-Christian underworld.  The second thing is that the difference between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is often cast in terms of doing good or doing bad.  But we understand that being human is complex.  Institutions and systems and states can lock all kinds of people in bad behaviors; sick families, sick circumstances can create sick individuals; what one group of people thinks is good another thinks is bad; and besides, our religion teaches us to love and to forgive.  Who wants to walk down Michigan Avenue, looking at all those people around you like they're a waving field of grain, and decide "this one's in and this one's out ... she's wheat and he's chaff ... he's going to get punished, and she's going to be with God." 

Here's the thing.  That's what happens when we decide what hell is.  That's what happens when humans do the choosing: we look at all of the people around us and since we can't possibly know about a person's soul, we decide who's good and who's  bad based on things that aren't eternal.  Like the servants in today's parable, we want to get in there and do a weeding even if it means that healthy plants get ripped up in the process.  That's how you get a Holocaust or a Bosnia or a Rwanda.  That's how you get prejudice and apartheid.  But if you know better, if you’re rightfully sensitive to the evil that happens when we start deciding who is saved and who is lost, you end up with the problem of what to do with evil at all.  How do we talk about it?  How do we discern what it is?  How do we teach our children and grandchildren about life in this world?  And if it does make itself known to you -  if, God forbid, something terrible happens to you or someone you love, or to the place where you live, like it did for us almost a decade ago, how do you suddenly make sense in a Christian way of this thing we're afraid to touch with a thirty foot pole?  We don't even like to hear Jesus talk about it.

This is the part where we need God.  Not for clues about what eternal punishment looks like, because God doesn't actually give us a lot of concrete information about any place called hell in the Bible.  God does, however, give us tons of clues about what the kingdom of heaven looks like.  And salvation - making your home with God - depends on being for God's kingdom.  When we look to Jesus, we see that "God's kingdom" means health, sight, abundance, rest, reconciliation, peace, and unselfish love.  But it comes at a cost.  Those things don't just happen - they have to be prayed for and worked for, and there’s plenty in this world that is against them.  You know it when you see it - you know that in God's kingdom children are safe, and you know that people who hurt children are not for the kingdom.  You know that in God's kingdom people are governed wisely, and you know that leaders who abuse their people are not for the kingdom.  You know that in God's kingdom people are judged by their hearts, and you know that those who judge by any other standard are not for the kingdom. 

As people of faith, we believe that God's kingdom is here now, but is also coming.  We pray that one day it will be all-in-all - that every child will be safe, that all communities will know peace, and that all hearts will be united with God and with one another.  And when that happens, the person who's committed to anything else, be it hurting other people, hurting the land, even hurting his or her-self will experience the pain and suffering that comes when there's a radical paradigm shift.  If you were a slaveowner in Atlanta in 1864 and you lost your home, your farm, your laborers and your status as a powerful person when the army rolled in, you would weep and you would gnash your teeth.  And not only you - as St. Paul says in the second reading today, the whole creation would groan along with you, because your paradigm shift, the change you’d be forced to make, would cost everyone.  God wants slaves to be free, but God doesn't want a city to burn.  God might want people to take action against injustice, but God hurts for the young soldier who has to draw his weapon.  

So here's the other part where we need God.  With God, that burning city, that furnace of fire isn't the final word.  It isn't the end of things.  That slaveowner's reckoning, that soldier's memories of war, the conflict inscribed in that very land is only one part of the story.  Because repentance is possible, redemption is promised, and God will never leave us.  Look at this story of Jacob today, who’s fleeing from his brother, who’s afraid and goes to sleep in this insignificant place only to discover that he has found heaven.  That no matter where he is and what happens to him, God will be there, and God will bring him home.  Our whole Bible is this story of forgiveness and reconciliation and hope that everything will be with God.  And just as God promises to bless the world through Jacob, God promises to save the world through Jesus.  It doesn't happen all at once, it may not even happen in the course of a lifetime, and it doesn't happen easily.  But it's the work we're given to do - not saying what's out, but drawing everything in.  And again, as Paul says, to wait with patience and hope for things that we can’t see now, for it will be our salvation and it will be our joy.

Jacob's Ladder

 On a fun note, July 17's reading from Genesis features Jacob's ladder (probably more like a "stairway to heaven," which is its own kind of fun).  Did you ever make one of these as a kid?  I may give it a shot this weekend:   http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Jacob%27s-Ladder-out-of-String

Sermon prep for July 17: really? Do we have to go there?

Jesus grasps Adam and Eve's wrists and liberates them from Sheol

Ray and I have committed to preaching about Genesis this summer as a way to provide consistency, and also to explore some really fascinating stories.  But when you get a Gospel reading like the one appointed for July 17, it’s hard to stay focused on Jacob and Esau.  The parable of “the weeds among the wheat” ends with this statement of Jesus in Matthew 13:

Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. ⁴¹The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, ⁴²and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Great.

If you read all of Matthew 13, you’ll find that Jesus’ explanation of his parable (above) comes at his disciples’ request – after he’s already moved on and told a few less “colorful” parables.  They are dying to know what this one means, just as the servants in the parable are dying to rip up the weeds, and just as we are dying to figure out what to do with these uncomfortable words and images.

Nobody really gets what they want here.  The servants are told to wait and let the reapers sort things out.  Jesus’ disciples hear his explanation, but are then treated to another parable that includes fiery furnaces and gnashing teeth.  We’re left with the two hard conclusions, plus a cultural context of our own that doesn’t deal well with either of them: first, sorting out the good from the bad isn’t our problem, just like it wasn’t the servants’; second, God will do the sorting and it ain’t gonna end well for everybody. 

Again, great. 

A lot of the scholarship I read wants to make only these points, that God is in control of this situation and you and I shouldn’t be wandering around worrying about who’s wheat and who’s a weed.  When left to our own devices, we do a pretty bad job at that.  God’s judgments are about hearts – not skin color, social status, sexual orientation, how well one is able to meet a variety of expectations, etc – so there’s comfort in knowing that God is in charge.  I totally agree.

But frankly, that reading of these parables is skewed toward comfort – true, authentic comfort, but comfort none-the-less.  It avoids the part where a sorting actually occurs.  It avoids the part about hell.  And as a Christian and a preacher, I feel called to handle those things … but preferably at arm’s length.  With tongs.  Wearing a hazmat suit.  Is that an option?

So the sermon this week will have to deal with punishment – more specifically, a place of punishment called “hell” in older translations of the Bible.  And we’ll also need to talk about a place of refreshment called “heaven,” which is where Jacob’s ladder reaches up to in the reading from Genesis.  I honestly don’t know how far I’ll get or how deep I’ll be able to go in 10-12 minutes.  But this is a part of our inheritance that we have to engage, and a sermon is one way to do that creatively, honestly, and – this is important – communally. 

(See the posting below for some background on terms used for “hell” in the Bible.)

H-E-double-hockey-sticks

The place we call "hell" goes by a few different names in the Bible:

Hades:  the Greek place of the dead.  Souls in Hades were called “shades.” It’s sort of a  neutral place, but by the time of Homer and Pythagoras people were developing ideas about rewards and punishments in Hades.

Sheol: in early Jewish thought, Sheol is an underworld/nether-region.  It was the common place of the dead, where all led an “unenviable,” and “gloomy” existence.  The Septuagint (early Greek version of the Old Testament) called Sheol “Hades” because of the similarity between the two places.  As ideas about resurrection developed, Sheol/Hades became a temporary abode of dead, where souls waited to be brought back to bodily life.  One interesting view held that bodies went to Sheol/Hades and souls went to heaven, and were united in a general resurrection. 

In the Bible, Sheol/Hades isn’t necessarily a place of punishment, but a place of safe-keeping for the dead.  It and Death will be thrown into the lake of fire at the resurrection (Rev. 20:13).

Gehenna:  This is the bad one.  Gehenna refers to the Valley of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem, where folklore held that people who worshiped the god Molech sacrificed children.  It is also thought that trash (and corpses) were  burned there consistently.  This appears to be a medieval rabbinic tradition, and there’s not a lot of archaeological evidence to support it.  Regardless, in the imagination of people in Jesus’ time (and following), this was a place where bad things happened.  Gehenna names all that is opposed to God’s kingdom.

Matthew chapters 5, 10, 18, and 23 all mention Gehenna, as well as Mark 9, Luke 12, and James 3.

Hell:  a word with Germanic/Norse origins.  In folklore/legend there was a place called “Hel” that was the abode of the dead and a figure named Hel who ruled there.  The King James Version of the Bible translated Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol all as “hell.”

(For more information on all of the above, see The Anchor Bible Dictionary, a series of dense reference volumes edited  by David Noel Freedman and a million of his closest friends – published by Doubleday, 1992.)

Birth order blues (sermon from July 10)

Jakob Steinhardt, Jacob and Esau

(The readings for July 10 were from Genesis 25, Psalm 119 (105-112), Romans 8, and Matthew 13)
 
We all know about oldest children.  Esau's not quite your stereotypically conscientious, over-responsible, people-pleasing firstborn, but anybody who has one of those types for a brother or sister knows that the notion of a birthright is still kicking around in our day and age.  Ever have a teacher, or a coach, or a minister call you by your older sibling's name, or ever have to listen to adults tell stories about what a great student he was, or what a great runner she was, or what a joy it was to have so-and-so in confirmation class?  Did you ever sense, like Jacob and Esau both did, that somebody was playing favorites in your family?    That mom or dad liked one of you best, for whatever reason, or that the adults who were supposed to love you equally sided with the kid who was more like them, or more like who they wanted to be?  That one of you was the chosen one? 

That's one reason why this story's hard to stomach.  From the very beginning we see not only two brothers at each others' necks, but a whole family dividing up.  Isaac and Rebekah each have a favorite child.  On the one hand, Esau's a great hunter, so Isaac favors him because he really likes eating game.  Sounds practical enough, but it's hard to avoid the image of Esau as a very handsome, very athletic, very masculine guy who fulfills a certain active, physical ideal of what a man should be, and Isaac is just really proud to be the father of such a commanding person.  Whereas Jacob is quieter.  We're told that Jacob prefers to live in tents, which means he farms, he cooks, he hangs close to home.  He's probably with his mother more, but even so we don't know why Rebekah favors him.  Maybe it's because he's the youngest, and she has a mother's sensitivity to her more vulnerable child - which, by not having the birthright, he is by default.  Or maybe it's that oracle, that thing God spoke to her before the boys were ever born: "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger."  In which case, she isn't siding with the more vulnerable child at all - she's siding with God, who seems to be saying that Jacob is the one that God chooses and that God will use to do special things. 

So there's the real problem with this story.  God appears to be playing favorites.  God appears to be acting inequitably.  And this favoritism, this siding on the side of Jacob then becomes part of a whole biblical tradition: Jacob's children will become Israel ... and Esau's children will become the kingdom of Edom, which for many years is Israel's bitter enemy.  There's so much strife between these two nations that prophets will write about it, and years later our Apostle Paul will pick up their writings and ponder a phrase that many of us have heard before and that sends chills up the spine of anyone who cares about fairness: Paul repeats the words of God in the prophet Malachi, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." 

I don't like that phrase.  Nobody likes that phrase, because it doesn't make any sense to us.  It doesn't sound like our God.  Like I said, we care about fairness.  You don't give a cookie to one kid and a carrot to another; you don't let the guy on steroids into the hall of fame.  And we care about equality: no person is worth more than another.  So where does God get off loving Jacob best?  Where do the prophets and Paul get off inscribing this into our religion?  Where are we left if our God isn't the all-loving, all-accepting, all-favoring parent that we want God to be?

How about another question: why do we care?  Why does it matter who God loves best?  Recently, a group of us at the church had a pretty passionate discussion about a joking nickname some Lutherans, Episcopalians, and other Protestants use to describe themselves: "the frozen chosen."  And none of that passion was around the frozen part, the part that suggests that we're reserved or rigid or chilly - it was around the word "chosen" and the idea that we might view ourselves as God's elect, or even as an elite group within our own society - an in-crowd, set apart from the rest of the world.  The people who hated the nickname hated it because it sounded exclusivist and superior - so their hatred was in the right place.  But the energy there, the empathy, the reason we cared so much about the word "chosen" is because we all know what it's like not to be chosen.  No matter how great things have turned out for you, no matter how well you are loved or how secure your situation seems, you have been picked last for the kickball team.  You have been turned down for a date.  You have lost a job, or a 401K, or a marriage, or somebody you loved.  You may have lost hope.  At those times, you feel left out.  Left out of the blessing, left out of the promise.  Or chosen, but for the wrong things.  Singled out to carry burdens that are too heavy.  And the idea that God might have something to do with all this is unbearable.

Because what we want from God is love, a love we say is bigger than anything we can imagine, that nothing or nobody else could give us, and we don't want to be left out of that, let alone anyone else.  We believe our God is the one who takes away the sin of the world - not a chosen few.  We believe our God is the one who draws all things unto God - not one or two or twenty things.  We believe our God is the one who renews the entire creation - not a tree here and a mountain there, and this or that particular, chosen human being.

And we're right.  In fact, that's what the prophet Malachi and Paul are trying to get their brains around.  Because while we’re worried about God being too choosy, too small, they’re confused by the fact that God seems to be expansive, and so freely choosing.  They're looking for cause and effect: be good, and God will favor you; follow the law, and God will reward you; be the oldest son, and you will inherit the earth.  And to them, that looks like love and hate.  But God’s love they can't quite figure out.  Israel survives the invasions and wars and exile that her neighbors - like Edom - don't, but Israel doesn’t feel like she's being rewarded for anything.  And yet God loves her, a group of people who are defeated and dispersed and just as disobedient as any of us.  Paul is working in this brand new church, among these brand new people called Christians and sees that pagans - non-law-abiding, non-Jewish people of all stripes ... us, essentially - are being brought into the communion of God's chosen people and are claiming God as their own.  And he knows it's right!  So he looks at the story of these two brothers, Jacob and Esau, and thinks, "Well, if God can choose a youngest son, a quiet man, a person whose father prefers his older brother - a person who stands to be left out - and make of him a great nation, then I guess God can choose anybody!  I guess God is big enough and free enough to love the entire world!" 

Which is good news for us.  It's good news for us when we are weak and when we are hurt, because God chooses us; it is good news for us when we are the outsider, because God chooses us. It's good for the younger sibling in each of us who is longing to be seen and for the older sibling in each of us who is always striving to measure up.

But it's challenging news.  For one thing, if God loves all of us and chooses every one of us to be blessed and to share in God's promises, then we have a lot of siblings we didn't count on.  We have a whole world full of brothers and sisters who are also chosen, in which case fairness and equality melt away and what we are called to is radical, invested love, care, and concern for one another.  Which is hard.

And finally, it’s challenging because if God loves all of us and chooses every one of us to be blessed and share in God’s promises, then we have to pay attention.  It means that God is reaching out for us all the time and we have to be humble enough and willing enough to hear that voice.  Like the good soil in Jesus’ parable we’ll want to be deep enough and still enough to grow. 

Perhaps the best news of all, then, the thing we see in Jacob and Malachi and Paul is no matter who and where you are, God will find a way to let you know that you are chosen.  God will bless you and will make you a blessing, and will use you to keep a promise to the entire world.  

(This sermon was preached by Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, July 3, 2011)

Grapes?

I really wanted to work some green into our blog design in honor of the Season after Pentecost - and with a nod to my churchmates Richard Hoskins and Eve Webster who have been making green things grow this summer. 

But the really green templates made me feel a little nauseated.  So I went with grapes, which are green with the added benefit of being holy.

Hope you like it!

Below:  Beautiful churchyard, mediocre photography ...

Sermon prep for July 10: a tale of two brothers

Read Genesis 25:19-34 at http://bible.oremus.org/. 

You don’t have to know what “Edom” means to get what this week’s reading from Genesis is about.  Jacob and Esau are fighting from day one, and in a moment of mindless vulnerability, Esau gives something of value to Jacob – from the looks of things, Jacob one-ups him.  And if you’ve heard the rest of the story (see Genesis 27), you know that it doesn’t stop here.  Big problems are ahead. 

As relatable as a story of filial struggle is, let’s look at the context of this story specifically:

Who are Isaac and Rebekah?: Isaac is Abraham’s son – not his only son, but his “promised” son, born to his wife Sarah (Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Sarah’s servant Hagar, was sent away with his mother in Genesis 21).  Isaac married Rebekah, whom he loved.  We see in this week’s Scripture that the two parents played favorites: Isaac loved Esau because he was a great hunter and Rebekah loved Jacob. 

What’s up with the heel?:  The Hebrew word for heel is eikov (it also “because of” or “following from,” as in “on the heels of …”), which is like the name Ya’akov (Jacob – James in English).  Jacob is so named because he was born right after his brother, and was grabbing Esau’s heel.  Eventually, the name came to mean “one who supplants” because of the idea – borne out in the image of one person gripping another’s heel – that the older brother would serve the younger one. 

Later on in Genesis 38, there’s a pretty heavy story about Judah (one of Jacob’s sons) and his daughter-in-law Tamar.  As Tamar is giving birth to twins, one sticks his arm out and a string is tied around it so that everybody will know who the older son is – but then he pulls his arm back in and the other twin makes his escape.  The midwife cries, “What a breach you have made for yourself!” and the son is named Perez, which means “breach” or “breakthrough” (peretz).  Perez – who actively seizes the position of elder son – ends up in the line of David, and in the line of Jesus by way of Mary’s husband Joseph. 

Okay – what is Edom?:  Edom means “red,” and became a nickname for Esau after he sold his birthright for Jacob’s lentil stew (“that red stuff”).  There is a tradition that Esau overtook the area south of Judah, which became the kingdom of Edom.  Edom was powerful and autonomous until it was seized by the Israelite kings Saul and David.  When the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II attacked Judah, the Edomites helped him plunder the land and kill its inhabitants. 

The point is this: the two nations referred to in verse 23 are Israel and Edom … and they don’t like each other.

But the point of the story of Jacob is that through him – that is, through Israel – all nations will come to know God: “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring” (Gen. 28:14).  And the way to get there will not be through enmity, but through reconciliation.    

(Danielle Thompson)

Isaac and Rebekah: A Love Story (sermon from July 3)

(The readings for July 3 were from Genesis 24, Song of Solomon 2, Romans 7, and Matthew 11)

I remember, as a teenager, walking down the street behind my grandparents and noticing that they were holding hands and whispering to one another.  They'd been married forty-something years at that point; they had three children and eight grandchildren and did everything together.  So of course I knew that they loved one another, but that was the first time I realized that they were in love with each other.  I hadn't known they shared such an abiding affection.  Seeing this private exchange changed the way I thought about them - and about my family, and my own hope of love - forever. 

Though it has a specific place in my grandparents' story, that image of a long-married couple holding hands is sort of iconic - it's the kind of thing love stories are made of, and we encounter scenes like it again and again when we talk about the great relationships we have known, or when we celebrate weddings and anniversaries.  These narratives about what romantic love looks like - our love stories - actually do something for us: they show us what we want.  We want to believe that people aren't randomly thrown together in time, but are meant to find one another.  We want to believe that our relationships have a bigger purpose, or participate in something bigger than ourselves: Love, with a capital "L."  And we want to believe that this kind of love is possible - for us, and for all people. 

This sense of a greater meaning and purpose in love is all over the story of Isaac and Rebekah.  In fact, what we're getting when we hear it today isn't even a straight-forward telling of their tale - it's the interpretive, hopeful re-telling of their story by Abraham's servant, who's just discovered Rebekah, wants to take her home to Isaac, and is blown out of the water by how all of the pieces have fallen into place so that these two people can come together exactly as they're supposed to. 

Granted, this guy has a definite stake in the idea that Isaac and Rebekah are meant for one another. He's charged with finding a wife for his master's son, and since God has promised Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky, this nameless servant ends up being the trustee of untold generations.  So he prays, asking God for more than a hint, more than a sign pointing him to the right woman - he asks for the right woman to walk up to him, wave her hands in front of his face, and shout, "It's me!  I'm the one!"  And according to the story, she does.  Rebekah falls perfectly in line with the servant's vision before he's done  visioning it, and everybody seems to agree that something promising - if not something special - is going on here.

If you think about the story of Isaac more broadly, you may recall that something like this has happened around him before.  Last week, in fact, we heard about a time when he was a boy and his father, Abraham, was about to sacrifice him, when at the very last moment, a ram appeared on the scene, clearly provided  by God to stand in for the beloved child.  Rebekah's appearance has that same sense of redemptive promise, that same sense of divine provision, but with an important message about fulfillment.  For when she gets close to the fields and sees Isaac walking toward her, we get another one of those iconic love story moments: Rebekah sees Isaac, Isaac meets Rebekah, and it's love at first sight.  He takes her home, she becomes the matriarch of the family, and he loves her.  Their relationship doesn't satisfy or propitiate anything - it isn't sacrificial.  It's a constructive and positive sacrament of human love at the center of this ongoing biblical narrative.  And as the story says, it was comforting, which in the language of the Bible doesn't mean that it was therapeutic - it means that it was strong and durable and protective, like a fort surrounding this primeval human family. 

And if you know anything about this primeval human family, you know that they need something like a fort - they need all the help they can get.  When we talk about pre-marital counseling, Ray always jokes about the geneagram, a sort of family tree where you use different shapes and symbols to track the things that happen in the life of a family system - which ends up being a lot of difficult things: deaths, separations, divorces, childlessness, or rifts between parents and children.  If we were to do a geneagram for Abraham's family, I'm not even sure where we'd start ... how do you chart Hagar and Ishmael, a son and mother forced to leave their home and wander in the desert?  How do you chart Isaac and Abraham with that ram?  How do you chart Isaac's son Jacob deceiving his father and brother, or his sons selling their brother, Joseph, into slavery in Egypt?  It all sounds really epic and terrible, but if we dig deeply into our own families, we find this-millennium versions of some of the same stuff.   Alienation, betrayal, conflict, and death still wind themselves like a snake around the branches of our family trees, and disappointment is the fruit of many a relationship that hangs there, be it between siblings, parents and children, or life partners. 

Which is why it matters that when we hear the story of Isaac and Rebekah today, thousands of years after it happened, this unambiguous picture of their love is preserved for us.  For we receive it not merely as a love story, but as the story of our own people, the family through which God's blessing opens out onto the whole world: "in the calling of Israel to be a people, in the word spoken through the prophets, and above all in the word made flesh."  The descendants of Isaac and Rebekah are Jacob and Joseph, but also Moses, David, and a man named Jesus who sends the roots and the canopy of this family tree shooting out into all the world, picking up all families and all relationships - drawing all of creation into the close of God's embrace, where at the center of things is included this simple, eternal testament to human relationship: "Rebekah became Isaac's wife, and he loved her." 

  

That's not quite kismet - it's actually what we call redemption.  And it justifies everything that our love stories tell us that we want to believe in: a sense of meaning and purpose, participation in something larger than ourselves, and the righteous belief that we can love and be loved despite any evidence to the contrary.  God created in the power of love and we were created to love as the primary act of our existence.  Creation continues by means of love and uses all kinds of human love to do its work.  Believe in the love that God has for you and that you are due simply by virtue of being here; believe in the love that you are called to give; and remember that inscribed in the tale of your own human family, there is an ancient and endearing love story. 

(This sermon was preached by Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, July 3, 2011)