Wrestling with God

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Genesis 32:22-31

Our reading is of Jacob struggling with a man/angel/God but Jacob’s whole life was one of struggle.  He was the one through whom God would continue to fulfill the promise he had made to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations.  One would think that with Jacob being the one on the receiving end of that promise that life would roll on fairly easily without a hitch.  Just like people think ministers are prayer warriors who never have any real-life struggles of their own when that is definitely not the case.  Speaking from my experience and that of my friends in ministry, God sees to it that we experience probably a little bit more than our fair share of the real-life stuff so that we know what it’s like when you folks go through it and we can help.  On top of that, there are the ministry specific struggles that we get served up as well.  So, we can expect that Jacob too would face more than a fair share of struggles simply because he wears an unseeable target on his back called “God’s Promise” in a world that inexplicably turns from the One who in love made it.

Jacob struggled even before he was born.  He struggled in his mother’s womb with his twin brother Esau, who was the bigger twin.  The struggle affected his mother greatly.  Rebekah and Isaac were childless for twenty years and then like a miracle, there are twins in there and they are painfully.  She went to the family worship spot and prayed, “God, if this is the way motherhood is to be, then why am I here.”  The struggling made her dysphoric.  Dysphoria is when you can’t see past the struggle to the purpose.  So, God gave her a big picture response. “There are two nations in your womb and they will have to be separated.  One is stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.”  These two babies were the fathers of two nations that will not get along and will have to be separated.  And…all the birth order birthright stuff is going to complicate things.

And so, Jacob struggled with his brother Esau.  At the root of the problem is God’s promise.  If God had elected/chosen to fulfill the Promise through Esau who was born first, there likely would not have been a problem.  So also, if Jacob would have been born first, there likely would not have been a problem.  But the unspoken assumption here (mine at least) seems to be that they believed God’s promise to Abraham and then to Isaac would naturally pass to the firstborn son, Esau, along with the birthright, the bulk of the inheritance, and the father’s blessing.  But God chose Jacob and Jacob was born second.  So, there’s some tension here involving whether or not God’s Promise is tied to social conventions involving birth order.

 We know from what the Lord said to Rebekah that the Promise will go to Jacob, but this birth order presumption stands in the way.  Instead of just letting God make the promise to Jacob himself, there must be a way to get Jacob into the position of firstborn son.  As you recall, Jacob got Esau to sell him the birthright for a bowl of lentils.  But it seems that this transfer of birthright from Esau to Jacob was never divulged any further than the two of them and probably Rebekah.  Isaac still continues to regard Esau as the firstborn.  

A few years later, Isaac is quite aged and blind and fears he will soon die so he wants to bless Esau with a special blessing for his firstborn.  So, Rebekah concocts a scheme for Jacob to trick his father to give him the blessing, a blessing that for all shapes and purposes was rightfully his because Esau sold it to him for a bowl of lentils.  The trick works.  Isaac blesses Jacob instead of Esau.  Esau responds by saying, “Isn’t he rightly named Jacob (which means heel grabber or supplanter)?  For he has cheated me twice now.  He took my birthright, and look, now he has taken my blessing.”  

Cheating is an unfair accusation.  Esau didn’t seem to care about his birthright.  The Bible says he despised it.  He failed to tell his father Isaac that he had carelessly and disrespectfully sold it to Jacob for a bowl of beans.  The birthright was not something to be so trifled with.  Because Esau was too short-sighted and dimwitted to see past his own belly, Jacob really should have been the one to receive the blessing.  But apparently Esau never owned up to his father about selling his birthright.  Moreover, he was bigger and stronger than Jacob and likely would have pummeled Jacob if Jacob divulged it.  So, Jacob has to get his rightful blessing by means of trickery concocted by his mother.

Blessing stolen, Rebekah suspects that Esau will try to kill Jacob in order to get it all back.  The struggles of sibling rivalry thus turned deadly.  The only way she can think of to keep him safe is to send him back to where she came from under the auspices of finding a wife from amongst her brother’s people.  She gets Isaac to send him away by saying that she didn’t want him marrying any of those Canaanite women because they drove her crazy.  This was a backhanded jab at Esau because he had two Canaanite wives who actually made it a point to get on Rebekah’s nerves.  Esau hears Rebekah saying all this and decides to take off too but in the opposite direction.  He goes south to what we call Saudi Arabia to his half-uncle Ishmael and marries a couple of his daughters.

So, the struggle with Esau takes a hiatus with Jacob fleeing the land empty-handed to go to northern Syria under the auspices of finding a wife from among his uncle’s people.  On the way, God comes to Jacob in a dream and makes the promise to him.  God also promised that he would be with Jacob to watch over him and that he would bring him back to the land.  Jacob in turn makes a vow that if God does indeed bring him back to the land then Jacob would accept him as his God. 

  When Jacob reaches the land of his mother’s people, we are dupped into thinking his struggles are over.  In a storybook match made in heaven fashion he meets Rachel (his cousin) and it’s love at first.  He makes an agreement with his uncle Laban to work seven years for Rachel’s hand in marriage.  Seven years fly by.  The wedding goes down, but his uncle sends Rachel’s older sister Leah into the tent of consummation and for some reason Jacob does not realize that she’s not Rachel until morning and of course the consummating had happened.  Jacob has words with Laban about this trickery and they agree that for seven more years of work he could have Rachel as his wife after the week of wedding celebrations for Leah had ended.  Thus begins Jacob’s family struggles particularly with his father-in-law.  And also, his wives are two sisters and he also has their two servant girls as concubines and there’s a lot of competition over who can have the most babies and who can have Jacob when.  It’s nice to be wanted.

After the next seven years, Jacob and Laban work a deal that Jacob would continue to shepherd Laban’s flocks for another seven in exchange for receiving all the spotted and striped sheep that are born.  Laban had not been anything other than a contentious and dishonest father-in-law who kept changing Jacob’s terms of employment.  So, Jacob decided to get his due by means of some hinky magic.  He believed that if he put the branch of a popular tree into the watering hole, the spotted and striped rams would service the flock while the white one’s watched.  And surprisingly, it works.  Jacob's spotted and striped flock multiplied exponentially while Laban’s white-wooled flock dwindled to nothing.  Laban got very angry and made some accusations.

Jacob’s struggle with Laban culminated with Jacob having to flee for his life with his wives and children and wealth of livestock.  Laban pursued and would have killed him had not God appeared to Laban in a dream and warned him to keep his hands off.  Jacob and Laban made a peace pact and parted ways promising not to encroach upon each other.

And this brings us back to Jacob’s struggles with Esau.  It’s been twenty years.  Isaac and Rebekah are remarkably still alive.  Esau hears that Jacob is coming and gathers 400 men to go and meet him.  Jacob hears that Esau is coming with 400 men and he’s a little Verängstigt wie Scheiße.  Jacob decides to appease Esau by sending his sheep as a gift for Esau in smaller flocks to encounter as he draws near.  He pretty much gives Esau all he has.  He sends his wives and children across the River Jabbok with his remaining servants while he stays put for a night by himself.  Jabbok means to empty.  Jacob emptied himself there.

During the night he finds himself wrestling with someone he cannot identify.  All night long they go at it and the stranger cannot prevail.  As daybreak nears, the stranger decides to end the fight with a form of a Master Ninja death Touch.  He touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it.  Jacob is now a broken and completely vulnerable man but he will not let go.  The stranger says “Let go of me.”  Jacob says “not until you bless me.”  “What’s your name?” the stranger asks.  “Jacob,” he answers.  Jacob means “Heel grabber” or “Usurper” or “Supplanter.  The stranger answers, “You shall no longer be called Heel Grabber.  You are Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.”  

In that moment as a new day dawned on the banks of the River to Empty, Jacob, having emptied himself of everything (that’s a Christ metaphor if I’ve seen one) Jacob became Israel – the Heel Grabbing supplanter, the younger, weaker twin who was destined to be served by the older, became the one who had struggled with God’s promise on his life, with God himself and faithfully prevailed.  While he worked for his father-in-law, Jacob became greater while Laban decreased.  Jacob let God fulfill his promise to him instead of going off on his own way.  He came back to his father’s house no longer a supplanter but now a prevailer worthy of bearing the Promise. 

So, what’s the takeaway?  It is through staying faithful among the struggles of our lives that God shapes us into the people we are to be.  Thus, in order for us to be the persons God wants us to be we will have to struggle.  The faithful life is not this “Bless me. Bless me. Make me wealthy so that I can live the easy life” kind of thing that TV preachers promise you, if you give them money.  The faithful way is the Jesus way, the self-emptying way, emptying ourselves of our grievances, of what we think we deserve, of our need to be in the right or to be vindicated, and especially of any sort of need we have to win over others.  And rather, seek the way of reconciliation, of generosity, of forgiveness.  Jacob did not prevail until he stood on the shore of Jabbok having emptied himself of everything, with a broken hip, refusing to let go of God until God blessed him with a new name.  Jacob limped away from there saying he had seen the face of God and lived.  

I hope you can catch a glimpse of the poetic beauty in this wrestling match.  I certainly can’t do it justice.  In the sufferings, the strugglings of our lives we are in fact wrestling with God as we strive to cling to him in fidelity with everything we got.  We strive for what God wants for us which is to bear the image of Jesus in this very hurting and hurtful world.  Facing our struggles faithfully, clinging to God, will cause them to take on purpose.  Suffering that otherwise seems pointless and undeserved takes on the purpose of shaping us more into the image of Christ.  Amen.  

 

Following Dreams?

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Genesis 28:10-22

Many of the songs I know on the fiddle and banjo are rooted in the repertoire of a particular family down in West Virginia, the Hammons family.  It’s figured they arrived in the US in the late 1700’s and settled in Eastern Kentucky and eventually wound up in Pocahontas County, WV.  The reason they left Kentucky had something to do with a dream, but it wasn’t what we today would call following your dreams or even the American Dream.  There were a couple of literal dreams that wound up playing out in the awake world.  Here’s the story according to Maggie Hammons Parker who died in 1987 (born in 1899) and it pertains to her great-grandfather whose name she never mentioned.

They were one of two families of white settlers living near a place called Whitley in Kentucky among a lot of First Nations people most likely the Shawnee.  They got along great.  There was an old Shawnee man who came to visit nearly every day.  They shared stories and jokes.  He often brought a little boy who taught her great uncle who was also just a boy how to hunt with a bow and arrow and how to swim.  One day another man came with the old man.  The other man said he had had a dream the night before and that for his people, whenever they had a dream, it had to come true.  He said the dream was that he owned her great-grandfather’s gun.  It was a very nice gun that under any other circumstance he would never have parted with.  But he was afraid they would kill the two families of settlers if he didn’t, so he gave up the gun.

Her great-grandfather was greatly disturbed with having to part with the gun but didn’t know what to do about it.  A couple of weeks passed and he got up one morning and said that he had had a dream that he owned his gun again and one of the Shawnee’s ponies.  So, he went to the Shawnee camp and told the man who had his gun the dream.  The man studied him for a bit and then said, “Take it, pale face, but dream no more.” 

A few days later, the old man came to see them.  He was visibly bothered but wouldn’t say why.  He actually wouldn’t talk at all.  They finally got him to speak and he said for them not to tell anybody that he told them.  He said the Shawnee were coming to kill them and they’d better leave.  So, they grabbed what they could and fled all the while listening to a war party “a-hollering” behind them.  The two families came to the Ohio River and swam across to West Virginia and kept heading east on up into the mountains until in a generation or so they wound up in Pocahontas County.

Well, there’s some similarity here to our story of Jacob’s dream.  Jacob was fleeing for his life from his brother Esau after having stolen his father’s blessing and he had this dream in which God conveyed the promise he had made to Abraham on to Jacob.  On the other hand, the Hammons’ had to flee for their lives on the coattails of some dream inspired events that may have involved some trickery as well.  Personally, I can’t help but believe that by means of those dreams about a gun God was saving the Hammons’ lives and also a strand in West Virginia traditional music.  This event occurred at the time when things were starting to get really bad between the Shawnee (and also the Cherokee) and the European settlers.  

So, let’s talk about dreams for a moment.  I think I’ve opened that can of worms.  In the Bible and in most every pre-Scientific Revolution culture, they believed dreams could be a means of communication from the divine realm to us in our everyday lives.  It is easy to understand how this could be because dreams can seem a lot like real life, but we’re asleep and so they must be like a window or a portal into someplace else.  Sometimes they can seem so emotionally impactful.  We can wake from dreams with feelings that persist for days.  Dreams can recur.  Sometimes in dreams we run into relatives and friends who have passed on and they seem to have something relative to say, if we could only remember it.  Sometimes our dreams feel so good we wish they would go on forever…and then there are night mares.  Sometimes we dream of something we wish could happen.  Sometimes we dream of walking naked through town.  Interesting things, dreams are.  Could there be meaning to them?  Can they tell us something?

There’s been a resurgence in the last couple of decades of people searching for meaning and direction from their dreams.  The idea is that dreams are a window into your subconscious.  If you can figure out what’s in your subconscious, you can figure out anything you want to know about yourself.  Moreover, they say the subconscious can tell you what you really want in life.  It will show you the dreams you should pursue.  Thus, there are lots of sites on the internet where you can go to find out what a dream means.  Things like, if you see a black dog in your dream, this is what it means.  They tell you to write down your dreams as soon as you wake up so you can figure them out and determine what your subconscious is telling you.  Do that and you’re on the way to your unique happiness.

Well, who knows.  I tend to lean towards what science says.  As best as can be determined by scientific method, there likely is not some hidden vault full of hidden treasure inside ourselves that if we can unlock it the secrets of me and my little universe of happiness can be fully manifest and I can be all that I am supposed to be according to deep inner me which is somehow divine.  Sorry, my sarcasm bleeds through.  There are things about ourselves that we are not aware of that show up in patterns of behaviour that we choose not to deal with.  There are emotions that weigh on us and beliefs about ourselves that are attached to traumatic events we chose not to remember because they are too painful to bring up.  Any credible psychologist will admit that the subconscious is a closed vault that we are clueless as to how to open it and it’s probably best we didn’t.  As far as actual dreams go, as best as anyone can tell, dreams are the brain's way of resolving what went on in a day, deciding what to keep.  If we have recurring dreams, there might be something there we need to deal with.  Since our memory of what we dream about typically lasts just minutes past waking, maybe we best just get plenty of sleep and let the brain do what it does.

That said, I’ve had dreams come true.  We don’t have space and time for them in this sermon.  What the dreams were about and what came true about them wasn’t life or world history changing, but was rather on the hilarious side of interesting.  Ask me if you know what they are.  There can be a hinky something or other about dreams.  For some people this can be very true, but for most people not so much.

I will also say that God can and does speak to us through dreams and when God does, we will know it.  Jacob here is the case and point.  We find Jacob here fleeing for his life because at his mother’s prompting and scheming he stole a blessing from his blind and dying father that was meant for his older twin brother Esau.  But his mother, Rebekah knew from a word that she had received from the Lord when she was pregnant with these twins who struggled greatly in her womb, she knew that the promise God made to Abraham to give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations was to be fulfilled through Jacob.  Jacob was fleeing for his life from his brother.  He was leaving the land God had promised to give Abraham and heading back to the land that Abraham had come from.  So, in this dream God reveals what he is up to with Jacob.  Though Jacob seems to be losing everything pertaining to God’s promise to Abraham and Isaac, he is actually going to receive it all.  This tragic turn of events was not going to hinder God’s plans for ultimately saving his creation.

In the midst of what was probably Jacob’s most painful and disillusioning moment of his life, God spoke to Jacob in a dream and got him on course.  That happens.  Don’t think you’re crazy if it happens to you.

Something else that needs to be said with respect to following our dreams.  It’s very popular today for people to give the advice that we should follow our dreams, follow our passions.  Go and be and do what we really want to be and do and that’s the path to happiness.  Jacob here is not following his dreams.  He’s watching for God to fulfill the Promise.  The next 20 years of his life are not storybook-dream-come true stuff.  They are quite difficult, full of hard work and routine abuse from his father-in-law.  Yet, through it all he finds that God is blessing him.  Eventually, he has to flee with his family from his father-in-law and his posse and go back to the Land of Promise and face Esau who actually welcomes him home. God had looked after Esau too. 

Jacob cannot be accused of following his dreams, his passions, in the pursuit of happiness.  That follow your dream stuff is a myth of wealthy, Western culture and quite frankly, you pretty much have to be independently wealthy to do it.  Jacob pursued what God wanted for his life and God made it happen.  God protected and provided for him through a life full of normal work and family struggles just like we all have.  

I find Jacob’s reaction to this dream to be profound.  “’Surely, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.’  Overcome with reverence he said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is the house of God, the gate to Heaven.’”  His response reminds me of Peter, James, and John and their response to Jesus when Jesus took them up a mountain and was transfigured and the Father spoke and the Spirit was there as a cloud.  They responded, “This is GOOD!”  In Jacob’s dream God promised that he was and always would be with Jacob and Jacob realized God was with him.  He had been in God’s presence and it was good.  The presence of God is the fullness of life that we all seek.  Seek God’s presence above all else and God will take care of the rest.  Amen.

 

Family Politics

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Genesis 25:19-34

Let’s take a moment to catch a glimpse into how big and spread out the family of Abraham was by the time we get to the birth of the twins, Esau and Jacob.  As you know Abraham came to the land of Canaan believing a promise by God to give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation.  He and his wife Sarah had no children at the time and so they brought his nephew Lot just in case he could count as a descendant.  They wandered the land nomads with no children to speak of.  

This childlessness threatened God’s promise.  So, Sarah took matters in hand and convinced Abraham to have a child by her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar.  It was a common practice back then that when a slave girl was giving birth Ma’am would stand over her pretending to be the one giving birth so that she would call the child her own.  Thusly, Ishmael became Abraham’s actual firstborn, but not a child of the promise.  

Not long after that God opened Sarah’s womb so to speak.  She was in her 80’s and Abraham in his 90’s.  Their first and only child, Isaac, was born.  As you would expect, Sarah became jealous of Hagar and Ishmael and certainly did not want Ishmael to receive the birthright inheritance due the firstborn son when it “rightfully” should be Isaac’s.  So, she had Abraham send them away into the wilderness and knowing better than to refuse her, reluctantly did so.  He sent them off with only a wineskin of water and a loaf of bread.  God saw this act of injustice (if not attempted murder) and saved them and promised to make a great nation from Ishmael as well.  

Ishmael eventually settled in what we call Saudi Arabia and like his half-nephew Jacob, he too had twelve sons.  You may also remember that it was to a caravan of Ishmaelites that Jacob’s sons sold their brother Joseph and they in turn sold him to Pharoah.  Story for another day but mind you, if you let your cousins get too distant, you may wind up in the slave trade together.  Just saying.

Time went by and Sarah died.  Not long after, Isaac and Rebekah marry only to remain childless for twenty years.  Abraham also remarried and at the ripe young age of more than 110 he sired another batch of children.  His second wife’s name was Keturah and they had six sons and 7 grandsons and some great-grandsons.  Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac, his most favoured son who was not really his firstborn son.  The firstborn son was Ishmael, but we won’t talk about that.  To his other children, Keturah’s children and to the children of some concubines, he simply gave gifts.  Abraham sent them all away too.  He sent them east into what we call Jordan today.  It was the promised child, Isaac, who was to be the only one of Abraham’s offspring to live on the land God had promised Abraham.  But, just imagine the expanse of it all, Abraham’s descendants were spread out from Israel to Saudi Arabia to Jordan.  Please notice how Abraham sent the “illicit” children away to other lands and gave Isaac, the child of the promise, the Promised Land.  

That gets us to today’s reading concerning the birth of Isaac and Rebekah’s twin sons, “the Twins”, Esau and Jacob and the little problem of the birthright due the oldest son.  The descendants of Abraham are a massive extended family.  As you might guess, this could prove problematic, but interestingly not among the array of half-siblings that were spread out all over the place.  The problem lay between the twins, Esau and Jacob.  

The birthright matter is important.  The birthright wasn’t simply a matter of who gets the bulk of the inheritance and the father’s blessing.  The oldest son indeed got the bulk of the estate while the other sons got a pittance and daughters got nothing and yes there’s nothing fair there.  The birthright also entailed that the oldest son would be the spiritual leader of the family once the father passed.  The big thing about the birthright was that the one who wields it is the one who bears the family honour, the family reputation.  It wasn’t simply a matter of the estate.  It was about the family name, the reputation. Moreover, in the matter of Abraham’s family the birthright also involved the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham.  The oldest son would be the one through whom we should expect that God would fulfill the promise.

Reading along in this story, as it does involve the fulfillment of God’s promise, we might could expect that for the “royal family” here things would be storybook perfect.  Everything should be all “Will and Kate”.  It seemed to start that way.  Isaac and Rebekah were a love-at-first-sight-match-made-in-heaven couple, married for life, no polygamy or concubines.  It was just the two of them and the twins.  Things should have been perfect just like the Cleaver family from Leave It to Beaver, but it wasn’t.  There’s sibling rivalry, deception, parents playing favourites, and one grand estate dispute.  The only things missing from the deal were a gallery of paparazzi and a tabloid.

Esau and Jacob must have been fraternal twins as there was nothing identical about them.  Esau was biggish and hairy and his skin tone was a bit reddish.  He loved to hunt and to be out in the fields.  One could say he was short-sighted, lived for the moment, couldn’t see past his belly.  He seems to have been the more aggressive of the two brothers, an alpha-type oldest sibling.  He was loud and lived for the day.  I’m stepping out on a limb and saying that he probably wasn’t someone you’d want making decisions pertaining to the future of the family business nor the one who would give the family the best reputation.  On top of everything, he traded his birthright to his twin brother for a bowl of stew which makes it seem that he just really didn’t care about the role and the politics of being the oldest brother.  One could argue that this stew thing was just a fake trade with no signed papers or anything and so nothing really changed, but still, the birthright was a serious matter and Esau didn’t seem to care about it.  Oddly, Esau was his father’s favourite.  Isaac loved the wild game he cooked.  Should we ask if maybe that’s kind of a shallow reason?

For Jacob, on the other hand, the birthright mattered.  We could play with sibling personality and birth order dynamics psychology stuff.  From that perspective, we could say that Jacob being a twin probably had a chip on his shoulder about being treated as the youngest sibling, labelled a mama’s boy who was sheltered and spoiled, simply because he came into the world a few minutes later.  When in actuality, he was the smarter, more responsible twin who actually cared about the family honour and the promise.  Those are personality characteristics typical of the oldest sibling that Esau should have had.  Yet, Esau was the carefree “let’s go hunting and camping instead of dealing with things” kind of guy which are personality characteristics we would expect of a youngest sibling.  In this stew for birthright deal, to me, it appears Jacob is simply proving he would make the better oldest sibling.  

So, if we were to psychologize the whole situation, Jacob was more like the oldest sibling than Esau was and yet he was forced into the role of being the youngest sibling simply because he was born a few minutes later.  It would have been a completely different world for him if he had just come out first.  On top of it all, and I will withhold comment on it, we have parents playing favourites here and that never goes well.  There was indeed some sibling rivalry there and I’m sure Jacob got pushed around a bit by his brutish big brother for being a “Mama’s boy” who hung around the tents with the women folk.  I think things were unfair for Jacob.  Just because Esau came out first shouldn’t mean he should get the lion’s share of the inheritance and bear the family honour and all that especially when he wasn’t qualified.   That’s my opinion and with me being the youngest in my family, it’s not all that unbiased.

Sadly, Jacob gets painted in a bad light.  I’m sure we have all heard our fair share of sermons and Bible study lessons that portrayed Jacob as not just clever but conniving, a trickster who was covetous of his brother’s birthright and would do anything to get it.  He’s also the one, who at his mother’s behest, steals his blind father’s deathbed blessing by pretending to be Esau.  Then, when he was in a faraway land shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep, he miraculously winds up with all the sheep.  One could say he did that by trickery as well.

But, I’m not so sure about painting Jacob in such a negative light.  He is described here not as conniving or wily, but as “quiet”.  The Hebrew word there means “perfect, righteous, peaceful.”  I don’t know why the translators use “quiet” unless maybe they mean “still” in a prayerful kind of way.  As a point of interest, this is the word used to describe Job’s “righteous” character.  So, let us consider that there was a bit of depth, one might say spiritual depth to Jacob.  He wasn’t brutish as was his brother.  He stayed around the tents as opposed to living in the fields with the livestock.  He was his mother’s, Rebekah’s, favourite, I think, because she knew that Jacob was the one to receive the birthright and his father’s blessing because God had told her so.  One can say that quite often it is the case that “Mama knows best” and it was she who instigated a lot of the stuff for which Jacob gets called dishonest and conniving.  We are also safe to wager that she told her favourite son that God had told her while she was pregnant that there were two nations wrestling inside her and that the older would serve the younger.  We call him a conniving, self-seeking trickster, but he really wasn’t.  Jacob sought what God wanted for him but would be denied him because of birth order politics.

Well, I’ll wrap this up by saying that the family of Isaac, Rebekah, the twins Esau and Jacob, the family of the Promise, was not a perfect family and yet God worked through them.  There was rivalry, deceit, and favouritism just like any of our own families.  And so, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if our families are not perfect.  Imperfection and brokenness aside, it was God’s promise and their pursuit of it that mattered.  So also with us, our families are imperfect and broken as well, but that’s not what defines us.  What defines us is our desire to follow Jesus and become like him, who is the firstborn Son of God who bears the honour of this church family and each of our families included in it.  Amen.

 

A Family Plan

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Genesis 24:34-67

This story of Abraham’s servant going to find a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac and everything happening so according to plan, if I can say it that way, it just seems so right out of the movies.  It starts with what appears to be the makings of a very old school arranged marriage that’s not fair to anybody, especially the woman.  Arranged marriages always leave you asking the Tina Turner question: “What’s love got to do with it?”  But surprisingly Rebekah is given the choice and it’s a choice remarkably like the one Abraham made in responding to God’s promise.  Like Abraham, Rebekah had to leave her native land and her father’s house to go to a land she’d never seen, but a land that would become hers and her offspring will become a great nation.  Like Abraham she goes.  If Abraham is called the father of faith, Rebekah rather than Sarah should be called the mother of faith.  She arrives and is immediately struck with, smitten by Isaac whom she finds doing a prayer walk in a field.  The story ends with the words, “and he loved her.”  This is the only place in the Bible that I am aware of where a husband’s love for his wife is actually noted.  Also, their marriage is one of only a handful that’s not complicated by other wives and concubines.  

Probably the most astonishing thing of all in this story is the role God has in bringing them together.  Abraham sends his head servant off on a fool’s errand – “Go find a wife for my son from among my people.  These Canaanite women just ain’t like us.”  The servant loads up a small caravan of ten or more camels and goes to roughly the area Abraham came from.  He goes to the local watering hole, the well.  That’s where the local shepherds like to watch the young women come to draw water from the well.  There’s just something about watching a woman draw water apparently. Expecting that there will be women coming, he prays and basically tells God what to make happen to make it clear to him who is the right woman for Isaac.  It will be the woman who gives him water and waters his camels too.  As soon as he opens his eyes, there’s Rebekah.  She fills the bill.  Gives him water – check.  Waters the camels – check.  Related to Abraham – check.  A match made in heaven.  Pray, faith, wait, God comes through….umm….hmmm….It does happen, you know.  I don’t know if you have ever had your jaw dropped by God when you asked for a sign, a specific sign, and you got it.  I have.  It happens.

Well anyway, the idea that God can play matchmaker and that a marriage can be life-long and monogamous are ideas that challenge us these days.  There are all kinds of views out there these days on love, marriage, and family.  Just to pop off a few, there’s the idea that we are not complete or whole without a significant love relationship.  You may remember the iconic moment in the vintage 90’s film Jerry McGuire when Jerry played by Tom Cruise, says to Dorothy, played by Renee Zellweger, “I love you…you complete me.”  That one turned up all kinds of red flags in the world of relationship advisors who say, “You should be complete in yourself.  You shouldn’t need another person to complete you.”  Well, yeah.  If you’re saying that to someone you just recently met, red flags should be flying.  That’s just your body pumping some feel good hormones at you.  Even in the long run we cannot make another person responsible for making me feel complete.  That’s a huge burden for one person to bear.  

But…there’s the other side of that coin.  We do need relationships, significant relationships with significant others to be complete…if there is such a thing as completeness in this life.  We are not independent, autonomous, rational, decision-making individual beings who can do and be what we want to do and be with no consequences to others.  We are relational beings.  Sure, there’s some “unique to me” stuff floating around in us, but for the most part, I don’t know who I am apart from the relationships (not just love relationships) I have and have had and some relationships are more foundational to who I am than others so that without those people in my life I am very incomplete and, in some cases, freaking devastated.  

Then there’s also the idea that there isn’t just one person you’d make a good fit for.  Danny DeVito’s character, Eddie, in the movie Jumanji: The Next Level voices this in some advice he gives to his grandson, Spencer.  Spencer is a bit broken up over a relationship that is on the outs with a girl with whom he was well fit.  I couldn’t find the quote exactly but DeVito says something like “Don’t get too bent up over one girl. If I was your age, I’d just go ride the subway. There are all kinds of girls there to meet and one in five of them I’d marry.”  When it comes to mates fit for us, there is more than one person with whom you could make it work, but still, one asks is there that one person we are meant to be with.  It depends on who you ask.

Then there’s what’s vogue today in popular relationship psychology.  Some will say monogamy and marriage are unrealistic expectations only meant to cause us shame and guilt.  They say we are living longer now and people change and grow and you can’t expect life-long commitments.  So, grow as a person all you can with the person you’re with now and there’s no shame in moving on to someone else.  We should all be mature adults and able to let go of people when they or we need/want to move on.  It only hurts if you hold on to those unrealistic expectations.  They also make the argument that Evolutionarily speaking we are not wired for monogamy.  It’s better for the species if we have more than one partner.  To that I say, in every culture that has endured, those evolutionary urges have always had to be curbed.  Stable communities require relationships based in trust and for some reason, the evolutionary urge to have more than one partner does a world of hurt in the trust department.  

Then there’s the biblical perspective.  Well, honestly, it’s all over the place and you have to say that the role of Scripture at times is to show us that some things are wrong, for lack of a better word, by making them look accepted and even right; things like polygamy and giving a slave to your husband as a wife to bear children for you.  These things are wrong.  Just because it’s a seemingly accepted practice in the Bible doesn’t make it right.  If you pay attention to how having multiple spouses plays outin the biblical stories, you find it leads to a world of hurt.  

King Solomon is probably the worst example of them all.  He was the wisest and richest of all of Israel’s kings but he had the habit of marrying to form alliances with other kings.  He had over 700 wives who were princesses and 300 concubines.  Nowhere is love mentioned in these relationships.  These women were simply “treaty-trophies” to him.  There seems to be such total disregard for the fact that they were real women, real persons, and certainly not property.  In the end, Solomon’s marrying for political reasons led him to put shrines to other gods in the Temple so that his wives and he along with them could worship their own gods…in the Temple…and he did it with them.  Polygamy damaged his relationship to God…we can only imagine the damage it did to the women.  Polygamy (or polyamorous relationships as they are called today) only led to idolatry and shallow family relationships.  As soon as he died, Solomon’s son split the nation.

To the other extreme, the New Testament would seem to offer celibate singleness as the way to go, but with the advice that if you can’t control your urges, it’s better to marry than to burn with passion or to be untowards to another.  But the singleness thing was simply the bias of the Apostle Paul whose opinions were skewed by his own ability and preference to live single and probably more so by his very urgent expectation that Jesus would return at any moment and that, to him, was more important than love, marriage, and pushing a baby carriage.  That noted, there is nothing wrong with staying single but in the New Testament the overall bias is that monogamous, life-long marriage is the best way for women and men to partner up.  We also find that marriage should be rooted in love, a love that grows and blossoms to resemble the way that Jesus loves the church and the church loves Jesus – unconditionally and selflessly, full of hospitality, generosity, patience, kindness, and forgiveness.  Serving, not demanding to be served.    

Turning back to our reading here about Isaac and Rebekah, there’s a couple of things to notice.  First, in God’s plan for healing his very good creation from evil, sin, and death through a people of faith, marriage and family play a central role.  Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is the story of marriages and families who are trying to be faithful.  It’s not the stories of faithful individuals.  Moreover, even Jesus was born and raised within the context of the marriage and family of Mary and Joseph.  Solid societies are built on solid families not on individuals seeking self-fulfillment.  

Second, one could make the argument that yes, there is that one certain somebody that God would have us to be with.  But we need to acknowledge that if God does indeed bring two people together, those two people need to keep God in the relationship, acknowledge that the relationship is a gift from God not to be taken for granted, and in times of trouble we must always let God and the relationship take precedence over “me, myself, and I”.  God has a purpose for our marriages, for our families.  The best way to keep things healthy is to together seek that higher purpose. 

To close, I think I need to say that this sermon is not meant to be part of the ongoing debates of who can and cannot be married due to sexual orientation and what constitutes a family.  As far as I’m concerned, the love of Christ will and should always surprise and challenge us in its scope.  God’s heart will always be bigger than our own and God’s arms open wider than our own.  It’s best we learn to live with that reality.  I’m simply trying to say that in God’s plan to heal this hurting creation, particularly the aspect of wounded human community, the roles of marriage and family are vital.  Amen.

 

Beyond Child Sacrifice

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Genesis 22:1-14

Last Sunday was Father’s Day and that usually invites some interesting posts on social media particularly on the religious side of things.  Take this one for example from a Facebook page called ‘God Is Not Real’.  It reads:

“I'm bothered when religious people make claims about God taking sides in a war or favoring any specific country. If God were a loving father, as he is alleged to be by his followers, then he would PREVENT wars from happening in the first place. Can you imagine a human father with a son and a daughter brutally fighting each other over some trivial matter, like property or political discourse? And their father knows about it and allows it to happen, or worse yet, aids one sibling in the destruction of the other? That would be absurd, and we'd say of that father that he is a horrible parent. That is why I wrote in a 2013 essay that ‘We know for fact from listing qualities of a ‘loving father' that God most certainly isn't one.’”

I’m not going to argue this one down because it would just begin to sound like two fifth graders in a contest to see who can stand the furthest from the urinal and still hit it.  That might be fun for the boys involved but who wins pales in comparison to the mess that’s left behind.  Just ask the custodian, teacher, or parent who has to clean it up.  Back in the day, we would have made the kids responsible clean it up.  But not today. I can only imagine the lawsuit that loving parents would wage against a school system should it make the children responsible clean up that kind of mess.  Should God be any different with the horrible, horrible, horrible messes that we humans create by doing things God has for millennia said don’t do?  Should God make humanity clean up its messes and learn from them?  We humans have a propensity to do things we know are horribly wrong, indeed evil.  

But I will say this to those standing on both sides of the argument this post invites.  It is problematic to reduce biblical faith to a matter of beliefs vs facts or what God says vs what Science says.  The Bible is the story of the fidelity of God to a people and the fidelity of that people to God.  It is about fidelity between two parties, a relationship.  In that relationship one of the parties, the people, have a problem with fidelity for being overly self-involved and becoming addicted to things.  It’s not about who has the right beliefs and most accurate facts.  It’s about how God continues to deal with the infidelity and addiction of his people to heal them.  God stays faithful, holds them accountable, forgives and heals.  It’s not a pretty story and there are areas to find fault, but it's an accurate portrayal of who, what, and how we humans are.  Don’t smash the mirror.  Study the person that’s in it.  

I would also warn against being what is called anachronistic which involves judging the moral standards and values of past cultures by the moral standards of our present culture.  What a Western Gen-Xer or Millennial calls a “loving father” should not be used to judge what we define as a biblical definition of fatherhood.  There’s a couple thousand years between those two definitions and they are very different cultures.  The task for us is to know what they did and why they did it.  So also, we should neither ignore lessons learned over the past couple thousand years.  Both times and cultures would agree that fathers (parents) should discipline their children and that doing so is love.  But…sparing the literal rod?  That comes from a time when children were regarded as a little more than livestock.  How literal do you want to be about that?  How many of you could take a wooden stick and beat a child?  We now know that there are better ways to correct a child than traumatizing them with physical abuse.  Maybe we should let that spare the rod stuff stay in the past and pursue better avenues to discipline.  

I would also say that I am a bit sympathetic with what the poster is saying.  Political leaders and religious communities should not be running around claiming God is on our side.  If God is on the side of anybody in a war, it is the side of those who are seeking to love, feed, and house the enemy, the side of the children who are being scarred for life by bombs and bullets, the side of those having to suffer the horrors of war.  Why doesn’t God prevent it?  Good question.  I would like to know that too.  

One answer is that love involves giving the one you love freedom and free will which involves the harsh reality of eventually letting the people you love make their own mistakes.  Loving fathers (and mothers) will from time to time have to let their children suffer the consequences of doing what they have told their children time and time again not to do.  This is especially true when it comes to matters involving addiction.  So, it is with war.  War is rooted in the revenge addiction, power addiction, wealth addiction, and usually narcissism of certain powerful individuals at the top of the food chain.  They are the ones who tell the lies that delude the masses who unfortunately buy into the stinking thinking of wanting to rule the world.  Unfortunately, “God is on our side” is one of those lies.  The only way humanity is going to learn that war is not an option is to suffer the consequences of it.  Unfortunately, we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and the only lesson we seem to be learning is how to do war with bigger and more effective means. 

The best way to approach this subject is to try to determine as best one can what the biblical definition of a father is and hold God accountable to that. If you’re interested, the best definition of what the Bible would call “Fatherhood” I have found for why we call God the Father “Father” is from a book written by a woman, Marianne Meye Thompson (spelled with a “p” if some of you Chesley Thomson’s are wondering).  She looked at a couple of Old Testament examples of fathers, particularly Abraham and Job, to garner an understanding of what Jesus may have meant by calling God the Father “Father.”  She gave a list of things that a father did: the father brings a family into existence, provides his children with an inheritance, protects and provides for his children, and is a figure of authority to whom obedience and honour are properly rendered.  I would add disciplines or rears rightly his children, himself has faith, and rears his children within the context of faith.  If a father fell short in these responsibilities, he would be seen as dishonourable in the eyes of the broader community.  The standard was not whether or not you were a loving father.  It was whether or not you kept your responsibilities and were honourable.  Oddly, things like affection and attending to the emotional development of your child, and helping them to pursue their dreams would have been absolutely foreign ideas back then.  

With respect to a child’s responsibilities, children were to honour and obey the father and serve the needs of the family, and be faithful stewards of the inheritance until it became theirs.  This be all you can “be all you can be”, “the world’s your oyster”, child-centred, go to therapy world we live in would have been utterly foreign to them…as it was in our own culture not less than 100 years ago.  We might want to ask if our ideas of “loving father” which involves a whole lot of pandering to individualism might actually be an aberration that we as a culture need to put a check on.

Having said all that, let’s play a game called “Let’s not jump to conclusions”.  We just read together the story of God commanding Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of the promise, on a three day journey to Mt. Moriah (which would later become the Temple Mount), and there offer Isaac as a burnt offering.  Abraham set out and even made Isaac carry the wood.  He lied to Isaac profusely about what was going to happen, that God would provide the sacrifice.  Abraham himself couldn’t believe God would have him do such a thing.  He followed through right up to the point of raising the knife to bring it down to kill Isaac when an angel stopped him and there suddenly was a ram in the thicket.

I hear this story and I am appalled.  The trauma that Isaac must have suffered, Abraham too.  He loved his son, which was something uncharacteristic of a father in those days.  What kind of a God would demand such a thing?  What kind of a “loving father” would follow through on it.  It would be very easy to dismiss this God and this faith on the basis of this atrocious treatment of a child.  But…let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Let’s dig a little deeper.  

The nations around Abraham practiced child sacrifice.  It was not uncommon for a father who sought to be a powerful leader of a great nation to sacrifice his firstborn son to the Canaanite-Phoenician-Moabite god named Molech.  If this passage says anything, it is that Israel by command of its God will not sacrifice children as did the surrounding nations!  Even so, as the centuries went on, the kings and oligarchs of Israel and Judah (in like manner of today’s presidents and billionaires among the Epstein class) began to sacrifice their children to Molech believing that sacrificing their firstborn, their namesake, would make them powerful and all the more wealthy.  Guess what God did?  When they began to do that, God first sent the Assyrians and then the Babylonians to rout them and carry them off the Land into exile as a humiliated nation.  God even let the Babylonians destroy his Temple.  The sacrificing of children in the pursuit of power and wealth would not be tolerated by God among God’s people, then…nor now for God is on the side of the children.

Atrocious things still happen to children today.  In the pursuit of their own wants and desires, adults inevitably sacrifice their own children.  We are not remiss to ask God why he allows it.  I certainly have my questions as to why God let things happen to me in my childhood that scarred me.  I could have gone the route of revenge and prayed to God to get them or found some way myself of getting back at them.  But revenge can become an addiction.  Grudging is an addiction before which we will become powerless.  If I chose that route, I might feel as if I got even but the law of generational trauma dictates that I would only wind up sacrificing my children just as I was sacrificed.  The route I chose was to do everything I could not to do unto others as was done unto me and more so to seek to forgive, something which took God’s help and which he showed up for and led me to do.   

I’ll close by saying let’s not judge the stories of the Bible at face value nor the God to which the book gives witness.  They are multi-faceted and meant to be mined deeply.  But, let us also not be so shallow as to say its God’s rule book meant to be followed or else.  Remember that just about everybody around you has suffered some sort of childhood trauma to varying degrees.  Tread lightly, gently.  Amen.

 

Alive to God

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Romans 6:1-14

Sometimes in life in order to understand where we are at in things we need to step back and examine what we would call the “big picture”.  Faith plays a big role in that.  If we are of the conviction that our lives somehow fit into the “Big Picture” of what God is doing in God’s very good Creation we will value things and go about life differently than if we thought we were just here fending for ourselves.  

Our reading from Romans this morning is one of the Apostle Paul’s “Big Picture” moments.  On the surface it seems to be about what Baptism is but when you start mulling on it, it becomes one of those places where we catch a glimpse of Paul’s “Big Picture” of what God did do, is doing, and will do in, through and as Jesus the Christ.  When we get inside his “Big Picture” one thought that really sticks out is that in, through, and as Jesus Christ God has changed human existence.  Jesus is the new Man, Christ, as opposed to the old Man, Adam.  As the old humanity flowed forth from Adam so now in Jesus Christ there is a new human existence coming forth.  The difference is that the new human is in union with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit and that changes everything.  In Paul’s thinking God is changing humanity from “in Adam” to “in Christ”.  At the end of the Age, the Day of Resurrection when Jesus returns, the change will be complete.  All Creation will be made new.  Until that time God the Holy Spirit is at work calling people to fidelity to Jesus Christ, creating a community of people centered on him who have a sense of this new life in Christ in which we are being healed of our Sin-sickness. 

The old humanity, which Paul would call “in Adam” and which Paul names after the Bible’s story of Adam being the first human, is diseased.  We are sick in our minds with a disease called Sin that twists our perception of reality to be grossly self-oriented.  It makes us misunderstand God, ourselves, and each other.  We are unable to perceive God as we should and so we put ourselves and other “idols” into the place of God and in turn we each do not just do bad things, but rather we do evil things even when we think we are doing good.  

This disease of Sin culminates in Death and though death frees us from the misery of Sin we are especially fearful of Death because it ultimately dethrones us as our own gods.  Death, and particularly our ignorance of what comes after death, a-fears us with the fact that the day is coming for each of us when the unholy trinity of “Me, Myself, and I” will end, the day when “I” who likes to sing, ‘I did it my way” will be humbled if not humiliated into apparent non-existence because death shows no mercy.

But the finiteness of Death is not the final word in God’s very good Creation.  Because God loves us and is deeply wounded to the core with our addiction to Sin, God has acted to heal us.  In, through, and as Jesus Christ, God the Son took upon himself - unioned to himself - the Sin-diseased nature and flesh of the old humanity, “Adam”.  Infusing himself into humanity is another way of putting it.  Like putting a food colouring in water, the colouring works its way into every molecule of the water changing it to become colored water.  (Also, forgive me for using the male singular pronouns.  The more accurate pronouns for God would be Us-self, Our-self, and We-self but be a bit too distracting at the moment.) 

Back to the topic, as Jesus, God and Sin-diseased humanity became one – two natures, one person.  Just as Jesus touched lepers and took their disease upon himself and healed it, God took the disease of Sin into himself so that we will be healed.  Jesus then lived the faithful life that we are unable to live though tempted in every way as we are.  He then died the death that is the consequence of sin.  Then God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead with a human body, indeed created matter, that is now healed from sin and that will not die - voila, the first born of the new humanity that Paul calls “in Christ”.  In the wake of Easter God has poured the Holy Spirit upon the followers of Jesus.  And to keep us humble, I am quite sure the Holy Spirit is at work in people outside of what we would call the church.  The Holy Spirit opens our eyes so that we see, experience, and understand the nature of God as God has revealed himself in Jesus as unconditional, self-giving, redeeming, healing Love.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us healing our Sin-diseased nature making us desire to be more Christ-like, making us desire to live a faithful life.  Then in the end when the Day comes, God will raise us from the dead as well.  All creation will be healed of the futility it now suffers.

  Back to Paul and his “Big Picture”; Baptism fits into this “Big Picture” as the moment a person has for certain passed from the Old Humanity of Adam into the New Humanity in Christ Jesus.  It is the outward sign of an inward working as theologians of the past called it.  Paul believed that Baptism is a mysterious participation in Jesus' own death and resurrection with the result that the person baptized has died the death that sin begot and is now alive to God in Christ.  The person being baptized is in essence being put to death and raised to new life in Christ.  

Understanding Baptism in Paul’s way is probably a bit out there for most of us.  Most of us have probably just been taught that Baptism is simply a ritual Christians do to say they and their children are Christians.  And, being Christian is simply a way of living where we clean up our acts and try not to do anything wrong so that we can stay on God’s good side.  

But, that’s not what Paul says Baptism is!

Baptism is incorporation into a new humanity – a new human existence that God brought into being when Jesus was conceived in his mother’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit and brought to its completion with Jesus’ resurrection in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We have called ourselves Homo Sapiens but now we are Homo Christiens.  This new humanity is now at work in us as we are “in Christ” by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit who is in us freeing us from our enslavement to Sin and Death as we go about walking in the Way of Jesus. 

Baptism is our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  With respect to that Paul writes, “You must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”  Elsewhere he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).  For us, this basically means we are dead.  We no longer have a claim to ourselves to do what we want to do with the lives we still live.  Rather, we must live as disciples of Jesus in prayerful discernment in order to do what Jesus is doing in and through us in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We cannot seek conformity to the world but rather we must yield to the Spirit’s transformative power at work in renewing our aims and ambitions to reflect the new life called “in Christ”.

If we are to take Paul’s Big Picture seriously, then this is who each of us is.  We each have died and been raised with Christ.  We each belong to Jesus Christ who loves us each and gave his life for us each.  Our lives will never be our own.  Therefore, we must live as living witnesses to Jesus and the new life that is in us.  God has rebirthed God’s image in us.  As God is the loving Communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – Three Persons who give themselves so completely to one another in unconditional love that they are One and the Same in Being, so are we to put “me, myself, and I” on the back burner and live according to unconditional love in all our relationships.  Afterall, “me, myself, and I” was crucified and buried with Jesus.  We must give space and time in our lives to foster the awareness that the Holy Spirit is with us – we are never alone.  Nor are we left to our own efforts for the Holy Spirit is at work in each of us making us each more like Jesus.  We must listen for Jesus to speak and sense the Holy Spirit’s moving and prodding.  Most importantly, we must learn to rest ourselves in the sure knowing that we each are a beloved child of God and that God loves us each as much as he does Jesus, the only-begotten Son.  We are each here to help and support each other in any way we can to remember who we are “in Christ” and to live as those who are alive to God.  Amen.

 

The Marks of the Kingdom

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Matthew 9:35-10:14

As best as we can tell from the Gospels, it appears that Jesus began his ministry wandering from town-to-town teaching and preaching in the region of Galilee. It seems he liked to start his visit to a town by teaching in the synagogue. We know that he did have some rather large outdoor moments like when he preached the Sermon on the Mount and when he fed the 5,000-15,000. He also wound up getting invited to dinner quite often. And, it goes without saying that he spent a lot of time just teaching his disciples as they made their way from place to place. Nevertheless, the local synagogue on the Sabbath seemed to be where he made his initial stop when he came to town.

Now surprisingly, we don’t know much at all about what went on in the local synagogue back then. Synagogues arose during the Babylonian Exile as places for the displaced Jews to go and be Jews together and the practice followed them back from exile. We know that after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the Temple in 70AD and then for sure by the 300’s AD, the synagogue became very important as a place of worship. But as far as in Jesus’ day, we know there was a place called a synagogue in most small towns in Israel and throughout the Roman empire where there were large communities of Jews. The word itself means “the gathering” and that seems to have been the synagogue’s most important function. It was a place for people to gather.

In the first century, the synagogue building seemed to have been a large, walled courtyard that may or may not have had a roof. There were benches for sitting around the walls with one important spot called the “Seat of Moses” where the head teaching rabbi sat when they gathered on the Sabbath. Outside of the Sabbath, it seems the courtyard served as a marketplace or park. Similar to how the rural/small town church used to be the social hub a few decades ago in North America, the synagogue was more so a place for fellowship in first century Judaism. The crowds that Jesus had compassion for were likely townspeople fellowshipping at the synagogue.

As far as what synagogue worship was like, well, your guess is as good as mine. As important as these places were, none of the rabbis or the Temple authorities ever wrote down the rubrics of what synagogue worship would look like. We know there was prayer. They probably read the story of the Exodus, a few excerpts from the Law, and a bit of a prophet read by whoever was invited to read. At some point, a local rabbi would give a short commentary on one of the readings. There might be some discussion. That’s about all we know.

As I mentioned earlier, Jesus liked to start his local ministry in the synagogue, but things didn’t always if ever go without confrontation. He and his Kingdom of God message stirred things up. In the Gospel of Mark as a matter of first course, we see Jesus visit the Capernaum synagogue. Capernaum and a house there seem to function as a home base for Jesus. The people, the crowd, at the synagogue were amazed at his teaching. Just then a demoniac challenged Jesus calling him the Holy One of God. Jesus told him to shut up and cast the demon out of the man, an act of the Kingdom or reign of God being at hand. The crowd was gobsmacked.

But tides change. When Jesus went to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he was given the Scroll of Isaiah to read. News of Jesus and his ministry preceded him. They wanted to hear what their hometown boy, whom everybody knew, would have to say. He read a passage about things the Messiah would do, things only God could do, the miraculous things which he had been doing. For his brief commentary on the passage, he simply said “Today, this passage has been fulfilled within your hearing.” That prompted some heated discussion for which they ran him out of town.

From then on, most of his teaching moments in synagogues which were always accompanied by healings and exorcisms were met with opposition from the synagogue authorities, the scribes and Pharisees. No wonder Jesus said that the crowds for which he had such compassion were like sheep without a shepherd. When it came to the crowds fellowshipping in the synagogues, distressed and dejected due to Roman oppression, the shepherds did not feel compassion for them but rather an apparent love of authority over them.

So, Jesus would come to a town and go to the synagogue and teach/preach that the Kingdom of God has come near and he demonstrated it by healing people, casting out demons, holding the authorities accountable, touching the unclean, eating with tax collectors and sinners, and sometimes he even raised the dead. To these crowds of troubled people of God and to the outcast among them he came and brought real hope. He didn’t come with a moral code to be obeyed or else. He didn’t come saying, “believe what I believe or else.” He certainly did not come preaching, “Believe in me or go to Hell when you die.” He came bringing the Kingdom of God.

Well, that was a long time ago in a land 9,353 kilometers (5,812 miles) as the crow flies from my recliner. What does Jesus bringing his Kingdom look like today in our communities? A primary marker for the presence of Jesus and his kingdom is compassion for the crowds, a real burden to do something to uplift the multitudes of people in our communities who are troubled, cast out, and vulnerable like shepherdless sheep. Israel in Jesus day was a land occupied and overtaxed by a foreign nation and there was widespread hopelessness. In the small towns the people gathered at the synagogue. That’s not our context today, but there are still a lot of people troubled by economic hardship, medical issues, family problems. It’s a huge list. There are plenty of people ostracized in our communities, lots of young people being ostracized in online communities. There are still all those phobias and -ism’s that people use to build walls to throw people off of. There are vulnerable people all around. People getting scammed in ways we can’t even imagine. Are we moved with compassion?

About crowds, it’s a reasonably sure bet to say that the primary place Jesus saw the crowd was at the synagogue. For us today, local churches are not the place people are gathering to. The gathering places are online. They are at sporting events and concerts. We have to go to big cities to see people crowding through the routines of daily life on public transportation or going to shopping and education centres. Nevertheless, people gathering for fellowship is a rare gift if you can find it. Today is not the day to expect people to come to a church and discover the secret gem of compassionate fellowship that we house in our small congregations. Rather, the harvest is out there at the county fair, the fitness center, the beach, the Tim’s, and so on. But – and this is scary - the predominant place that people are gathering now is online in social media outlets were taking advantage of or outright attacking the vulnerable is the name of the game. Human beings need face-to-face, in-person community.

Jesus said pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers out into the harvest. That’s us. Notice in the passage that those workers were immediately all listed by name. The small church is like the theme song to that TV show Cheers from years ago. “Sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your name. And they’re always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name.” People long to be known. So, we need to be the people who go out there among the harvest and putting our fears and shyness aside we learn people’s names and something about them. We take nothing with us like agendas and we expect nothing in return. We just go and listen giving love and support. We just want them to get a sense of the peace of Christ that abides with us. Who knows? Maybe they will want to know where we got this peace from and come and fellowship with us. Amen.

Matthew's First Day

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Matthew 9:1-34

It is a rare person who hasn’t had an eventful day at some point in life, good or bad, that had the significance or should we say the power of changing everything.  A moment that you know that from this point forward things are going to be different.  The type of days about which we say, “This is the first day of the rest of your life, how are you going to live it?”  “There’s an irrefusable opportunity here, but are you going to take it.”  Or sometimes it is one of those things that happens that leaves us and the people around us saying, “You never know what a day is going to bring.”  Things happen that change everything and you have to go on.  Do you get out of the chair and get on with it?

Here we find Matthew in such a moment – the first day of the rest of his life.  In the Gospel that bears his name, he is the fifth named and called disciple behind the fishermen Peter, Andrew, James, and John.  Some others seemed to have volunteered but without necessarily counting the cost.  He was faced with an invitation from Jesus to follow him.

Matthew was a tax collector in the small little town of Capernaum up on the northern tip of the Sea of Tiberius, Galilee to the locals, but you know how the Romans liked to put their emperor’s name on things when they occupied a land.  And you also know, tax collectors worked for those Romans collecting taxes for them.  Roman taxes were a burden for most everybody.  It was very easy to get behind on them.  You were taxed on your land and because you had a head (the head tax).  There were tolls on roads and customs at borders.  You were taxed on what you wanted to sell and sales tax on what you sold.  Tax collectors typically came from already wealthy families and found ways to extort more tax than was required to further enrich themselves.  They kept a ledger of who was and was not paid up and had Roman soldiers at their disposal to enforce things.  Thus, they were considered to be traitors.

Matthew was sitting in his tax collector’s booth one morning there on Main Street.  A crowd had suddenly formed down at the sea shore and was rather exuberant, praising God loudly.  As the crowd headed on up into town, he was able to gather that that guy Jesus had told a paralyzed man his sins were forgiven which upset the religious hoity-toities.  Then, to prove he had the authority to forgive sins, Jesus healed the man and this wasn’t the first time this Jesus of Nazareth guy had done such a thing in the last few months since that John the Baptist freaky dude got arrested.  A paralyzed man would have been considered cursed by God for his secret sins and by this healing apparently Jesus proved he had the authority to amend that.  Jesus was verging on God’s territory which the hoity-toities claimed as their exclusive domain.  

When Jesus in the midst of the crowd passed Matthew’s booth, he stopped and said to Matthew, “Follow me.”  Perhaps Jesus knew Matthew was looking for a way out of the ledger keeping and the bullying and being seen as a traitor.  Matthew found himself having the courage to get out of the chair and follow.

They showed up at “the house” about lunch time.  It was probably that guy Peter’s mother-in-law’s place.  When they entered the dining room, already reclining there at the table were a few of the other tax collectors in the area and a handful of those people that the religious hoity-toities liked to pass judgement on because they had better things to do on Saturday morning than go to synagogue and listen to the Rabbi’s argue about irrelevant stuff. Nor were they able to afford to make a trip to Jerusalem once a year to make a sacrifice so that they could be considered good people.  Nor could they afford the Temple tax that those religious hoity-toities were glad to collect and take to Jerusalem on their behalf.  With the Romans around you had to pay to live and make a living.  With the hoity-toities, you had to pay just to be a good person.  Matthew started to feel at home with the people at Jesus’ table and reclined.

The hoity-toities from the sea shore also followed Jesus to the house.  When they saw the company he kept, they went behind his back and questioned his disciples as to why he sat at table with such as these, you know, people like Matthew.  I’m sure Matthew was a bit put out by their judging him.  Jesus got wind of it and got quite frank with them.  He quoted a short verse from the prophet Hosea telling them, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire compassion rather than sacrifice.”  Boy, did he hit the nail on the head…but who was the “I” he was referring to?  Himself?

Then some of John the Baptist’s followers showed up.  They were staying in the proximity of Jesus since John got arrested.  They had seen the heavens opened and heard the voice when John baptised Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.  John’s disciples, like the hoity-toities, were expecting the Messiah to show up at any moment to kick the Romans out.  They, like the hoity-toities, thought they could hasten his coming by following the Law of Moses and praying and fasting a lot.  They wanted to know why Jesus and his disciples didn’t do the same.  Jesus answered by making a cryptic clue to himself being the Messiah here now and that it was time now to celebrate because it won’t be long before the hoity-toities make him gone, if you know what I mean.  The new, the works of power, that he was doing will tatter that old religion like sewing unshrunk cloth onto old cloth or putting new wine into old wine skins.  So, it’s best to put new wine into new wineskins like these tax collectors and sinners.

Just then one of the town leaders, a powerful man, rushed in, knelt before Jesus, and begged him to come to his house and lay his hand on his little twelve-year-old daughter because she had just died and Jesus could make her live.  Whoa.  Touch the dead?  Raise the dead!? Did this man know what he was asking!  Who did this man think Jesus was?  These are things only God can do.  Jesus didn’t deny having that kind of power nor did he try to talk the man down.  They just all got up from the table and went with the man.

On the way, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years came and touched the edge of Jesus’ robe.  Blood was life and she was bleeding to death from where God brings life into the world.  That’s not good.  The hoity-toities had laws about ritual purity.  They stigmatized her as impure in the eyes of God and by touching Jesus she would have made him impure as well.  Jesus felt the touch, but he didn’t get angry with the woman.  He simply encouraged her and told her that her faith had healed/saved her.  Suddenly, she was healed.  This is new wine for sure.

Then they made it to the leader’s house.  Jesus went up to the dead girl’s room.  He took her by the hand.  Touching dead people also made you impure, by the way.  But the girl got up.  She got up!  That there is some new wine too.

When they came out of the house, two blind men started following Jesus loudly shouting over and over, “Jesus, son of David, have compassion for us”.  Jesus made it back to “the house” and invited them in.  Yes, the blind also carried the stigma of being cursed by God for some secret sin.  “Do you believe I can do this?”  Wait a minute.  Do what?  They answered, “Yes, Lord.”  Hold on. Jews only call God Lord.  What are they saying?  Jesus said, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” He touched their eyes.  Their sight came back.  Jesus told them not to tell anybody he did that, but they went and told everybody.  How could you not?

Now here’s the clincher.  Jesus and the disciples set out from the house to go camping and fishing or something.  Just then someone brought a demon possessed man who couldn’t speak to him.  Lo and behold, Jesus cast that demon out and the man could speak again.  Everybody was saying nothing like this had ever happened in Israel before.  The hoity-toities, well, they said that it was by the authority of the ruler of the demons that Jesus could do these things that only God could do.  

So, that was the first day of the rest of Matthew’s life.  You never know what a day is going to bring.  What a day.  What Jesus did that day impacted Matthew so much that he continued following him.  It led him to collect stories about Jesus and write something called a Gospel voiced to speak primarily to the hoity-toities in the wake of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD.  The Pharisees and the followers of Jesus were the two predominant forms of Judaism that survived that event.  Matthew was trying to build a bridge.

Jesus brought something new, unconditional compassion in the power of the Holy Spirit, while the Pharisees were clinging to the old.  Allowing God, allowing Jesus to do something new in our lives is a difficult thing.  I remember the night I finally said yes to the inner tug of the voice of Jesus saying “Follow me.” And the day I said yes to the inner tug of the voice of Jesus calling me to the ministry.  The first time I stepped into a church service and felt that there was a sweet, sweet Spirit in the place and I knew it was the presence of the Lord.  I remember the day Jesus took away the burden of the anger, hurt, and unforgiveness I felt towards my mother and step-father because they had chosen themselves over their families.  He took that burden, and it weighed a lot, and replaced it with a joyful love for them.  I remember how when antidepressants brought out that old family tradition or should I say the demon of alcoholism even in me, the good son, the minister, I remember the night Jesus utterly took that compulsion to drink before which I was absolutely powerless away.   There’s more, but I think I’ve made the point that Jesus changes things.  He brings new life and changes things.  

But we need to be careful about how we cling to the old, about how we can be hoity-toities.  We can stand in judgement of even our own children and ignore the new, the unconditional compassion of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that he touched us with and claimed us as his own.  Do you remember the day that happened for you?  Amen.