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.

Matthew 24:36-44: Looking ahead to First Advent

Sunday, November 28 begins our year-long reading through the Gospel of Matthew.  The lectionary (as Ray Webster likes to say, the “batting order” of Scripture lessons that we read each Sunday) consists of a three-year cycle of readings: A, B, and C.  We use a lectionary called the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL, for short).  It was created by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1980’s, but is based on the traditional pattern of seasonal and yearly readings that most liturgical churches were already accustomed to using.  In fact, the first complete lectionaries of Christian Scripture date back to the seventh century!  Today almost all Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant denominations (Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.) follow the RCL. 

All of last year we read from the Gospel of Luke in year C.  This Advent we begin again in year A with the Gospel of Matthew (you guessed it – Mark is read in year B!).  During various seasons of the year, notably Christmas, Lent, and Easter, we will read from the Gospel of John.  To summarize, here’s how the Gospel readings in our lectionary work: beginning with Advent each year, we read Matthew in year A; Mark in year B; and Luke in year C.  John does not have its own year, but is read on important days (Christmas Day) or during important seasons (Lent) every year.  We will say more about how John differs from the first three Gospels when we begin to engage readings from that book in the Christmas season. 

You may have noticed in church that our Old Testament readings over the last few weeks have been more hopeful.  Look back at Jeremiah 23:1-6, where God promises that good leaders will “shepherd” God’s people.  Or, read this upcoming Sunday’s lesson from Isaiah 2:1-5: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”  All of the sorrowful and war-like images painted for us over the course of the summer and fall are resolving into images of a renewed and peaceful creation. 

At the same time, however, our Gospel readings have taken a darker turn.  A few weeks ago Jesus forecast the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, and last week we witnessed his crucifixion.  This upcoming Sunday’s reading is Matthew 24:36-44, a passage of Scripture whose theme is the necessity for watchfulness.  Here are some things to think about as you read the Gospel lesson from Matthew:

Apocalyptic:  When you think about “the coming of the Son of Man,” or “the day your Lord is coming,” there are probably some cultural images that rise to the surface for you.  A term that comes to mind is “apocalyptic.”  In everyday speech, apocalyptic describes books and stories like On the Beach, The Road, “By the Waters of Babylon” or movies like “28 Days Later” and “Quiet Earth.”  In biblical studies, apocalyptic is a genre of speech or writing that is vividly descriptive or revelatory – in fact, the word apocalypse means to reveal or to uncover something.  Apocalyptic language is meant to tear down our everyday ways of thinking about things so we can see things in a different way.  Or, as Paul implies in this upcoming Sunday’s epistle, apocalyptic language uncovers for us a reality that we may not perceive: “the night is far gone, the day is near” (Romans 13:12).

Jesus’ language in this passage from Matthew is apocalyptic.  The reality that he is seeking to uncover is the immediacy of the Kingdom of God.  Some of the images he presents sound a little bit like cultural apocalyptic (“two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left”); yet he himself admits, “about that day and hour no one knows” (Matt. 24:36).  If the words that Jesus uses to describe the arrival of God’s kingdom are not scientifically precise, then what can we know?

The Kingdom of God:  We can know something about what God’s kingdom looks like.  This is where the rest of our lectionary readings come into play this week.  Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, and Romans 13:11-14 contain messages of peace, unity, and light.  There is an end to war, people who have lived in fear worship together, and others are given strength to live honorably, as though all of their thoughts and deeds could be laid bare in the light of day.  This world is the one that Jesus is “apocalypsing” to his hearers.  It is a world about which the psalmist can say, “Peace be within your walls/ and quietness within your towers.”  However, Jesus does indicate that the arrival of this reign of peace and light will disrupt something about the world as we know it.  I don’t think that there will be a day when the person sitting in the office next to you is whisked away.  I do think that Jesus may be trying to tell us that not every person buys into this vision of the Kingdom of God.  It takes a lot of courage – and grace – to believe that the biblical dream of unity and peace is what is “really real,” but it is our job to be watchful, and to search our own hearts and the world around us for signs of it.

What better time to be searching than in Advent?

(The Rev. Danielle Thompson)