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)