Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Name Game

Exodus 3:1-15

Robert J. Elder

11th Sunday after Pentecost: August 28, 2011

When we read stories in Exodus like this account of Moses’ encounter at the burning bush, if we are like lots of other people, we may think of them as, well, stories about Moses. It may appear that one of the main reasons for the second book of the Bible is to recall the activities of Moses. We may think this story tells us about Moses’ religious experience in the desert, about his reluctance to follow God’s call to go free the people in Egypt. Seeing things from the human point of view, we think the story is about Moses.

Silly us.

That might explain the amount of ink spilled over the centuries in efforts to explain Moses’ state of mind when he came on the bush that burned and was not consumed. There have been tiresome modern attempts to describe Moses’ psychological condition at the time he encountered the burning bush. There have been some who have held forth at length on Moses’ repressed guilt for having murdered an Egyptian taskmaster, some who speculated on whether he had a speech impediment, others who believe they have found him to have been a mystic, and still a few more who have seen him as a crusading agent of political liberation for an enslaved people.

I’m not ready to deny that Moses could have been any or all of these things. He might well have been suffering from repressed guilt, he could easily have been a mystical revolutionary held back only by a halting ability at public speaking. He might have been these things and others besides, but I don’t find as much help in scripture for pursuing those biographical leads about Moses as others seem to do. When I turn to this story of his encounter with God at the bush on Mount Horeb, I am struck not so much by what it tells me about Moses, as what it tells me about God. It seems to me that for all our understandable curiosity about the figure of Moses, that is not the main purpose of scripture. This is a story in which we discover some of the most important things about God that can be found anywhere in the Bible. To miss that by dwelling too much on the quirks and foibles of Moses is to miss a great deal.

Would you like a clear description of the God we worship, the one Jesus confessed? Would it be helpful to know how God goes about working with people he calls as his servants, even those who answer reluctantly? Just what sort of God do we know through the testimony of scripture and the witness of the church? This passage supplies us with a pretty thorough profile on these questions if we will just pay attention.

This is the God who calls out, reaches out,

moves toward us, takes initiative (vs. 4).

In the story of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush, we discover a God who always takes the first step toward his people. For all the Hollywood attempts to make this Bible scene terrifying and dramatic, I believe we are meant to be struck more by the ordinariness of it, because that is the kind of time when God calls out to us, plain old ordinary time. Moses was simply the fugitive son-in-law of a fellow who owned some sheep, sheep which Moses took to the greener pastures around Mount Horeb. He was not on a spiritual quest, and he likely thought the day was going to go by like any shepherd’s other. If this was the mountain of God, it was going to come as news to Moses.

In the middle of ordinary time, while we were yet sinners, it is on a day that is just like any other day there ever was, that God moves toward us, reaches out to us, calls us. We don’t have to wait for some special place or time, some sacred site, some holy day. On a day like any other, God’s gesture is extended toward us, beckoning us. It is never the wrong time to find the call of God addressed to us. This is the God who calls us in the middle of the very sort of world we live in.

This is the God who was known by those who went before us,

by Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (vs. 6)

God was known by Grandma and Grandpa, by old Uncle Lou, by Pastor Perkins, and by our 7th grade Sunday School teacher. He comes to us through family, our network of relationships is one of God’s most effective vehicles for self-revelation. God has cared for those who went before. Now God will care for us. If we can believe that God was active in those past times both inside and beyond the accounts of scripture, then this declares that same God is the very one who steps up and is willingly self-revealed to us.

This is the same God that is known by that great cloud of witnesses, who, according to the letter to the Hebrews, have gone before us. We don’t have to step outside the faith that has been handed down to us from patriarchs and apostles and disciples. There is no need to reinvent God in our own image. This is the God who was known to those who came before us, and who wishes to know us just as he has known our fathers and mothers in the faith.

This is the God who has seen misery, heard cries of anguish,

knows what it is to suffer (vs. 7).

A close friend once shared with me the grief he went through when his father was dying.[1] His father had a rather long battle with cancer, and so he could see the end coming quite some time before it arrived. He said that one day someone who knew of his father’s condition brought him a copy of C.S. Lewis’ short book, A Grief Observed, saying, “I want to go through this with you.” Later, my friend picked up the phone and called, saying “Do you want to go through it now?” “Through what?” she asked. “Through the book you gave me.” But she said, “Oh, I didn’t mean the book. I meant the loss of your father.” That is what she wanted to “go through with him.”

So few people are open to that need to “go through” suffering with others. Often, our inclination is to run the other direction from suffering. But the ones who know grieving best, who are most intimately acquainted with it from their own lives’ experiences of loss, are frequently the ones who are able to help the most. They are the ones who in “going through it with us” go through their own grief as well and seek with us the transformation that “going through it” rather than going around or avoiding it can bring. God is like that friend. God sees, hears, knows suffering. And God says to Moses, as God says to us, “I have come...” I want to go through this with you. This is the God who sees, hears, knows who we are and knows what we suffer.

This is the God who acts not so much to erase suffering

as to transform it (vss. 8-10).

When I was in college, one guitarist we all knew, whose talent clearly placed him in a league beyond any run-of-the-mill top-40 player, was Eric Clapton. Clapton has had the sort of rugged life of big-time stardom and hard-time drug abuse that characterizes so many who emerged out of the 1970’s music scene. But then, by the 1990s, he seemed to have straightened his life around. Then one summer, his four year-old son, Conor, ran to an open window in his mother’s high-rise apartment in New York City and fell to his death.

Since that day, one news report said – rather snidely, I thought – that Clapton “has sought support through religion, therapy, and Alcoholics Anonymous.”[2] I don’t pretend to know what spiritual resources Clapton lays claim to, but I know pain when I hear it, and one of his subsequent songs – one of the most unlikely top-40 hits I have ever heard – was filled with it. Listen to some of the words he sang to his dead boy:

Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven?

Would it be the same, if I saw you in heaven?

I must be strong, and carry on,

‘cause I know I don’t belong here in heaven.

Would you hold my hand, if I saw you in heaven?

Would you help me stand, if I saw you in heaven?

I’ll find my way, through night and day,

‘cause I know I just can’t stay here in heaven.

Time can bring you down, time can bend your knees.

Time can break your heart, have you beggin’ “Please,”

beggin’ “please.”

Beyond the door, there’s peace, I’m sure,

and I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven.

These are the sorts of questions and observations only grieving parents could bring themselves to ask. Someone once said to me, “When a loved one dies, it is a feeling like no other.” And it is true. Morning after morning, we awake to the knowledge that the one who once was here is now gone, irretrievably. Yet somehow, after time, an occasional morning will come and go, and we are startled with the realization that we haven’t given a thought to our loss. It may first strike us as if we were guilty of disloyalty. How could I forget? But we don’t ever forget, not really. I have seen tears over the loss of a spouse thirty years after the actual death, which struck me as fresh as the tears shed over yesterday’s grief. We never really forget, our suffering is never really erased.

But it can be transformed. Not invariably, but we have seen it happen. The knowledge of a certain pain can transform a person into one who is more sensitive to the pain of others. This is not to say that God sends pain to us. Nor is it to say that suffering inevitably builds character. Some people react terribly, become embittered. But I think there is the possibility that God can empower us, bit by bit, day by day, to live through the pain, and to appreciate, even grow because of the difference it has made in us. This is the God who can make all things new, even the old news of suffering and loss.

This is the God who takes our own limitations and fears seriously (vss. 11-14).

God met each of Moses objections to the call to go to Egypt by taking them seriously. As soon as it became clear that God had a job for Moses, Moses went from saying, “Here am I,” to “Who am I?” “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God never says, “Never mind that now, just go and do what I tell you.” Throughout this story, God takes each of Moses’ objections with utter seriousness, and answers in kind. To Moses’ question “Who am I?” God answers, “I will be with you.” What you say, you say for me. So it doesn’t matter who Moses is so much as who God is. This is the God who takes us seriously, and makes our shortcomings irrelevant by the abundant availability of his power to bring to pass the new thing he has in mind for us and for our people.

This passage tells us so much about the nature of this God, that by the time God gets around to telling Moses the name by which he can be known, it is almost unnecessary. The literal translation of God’s name means, “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” And just what is that? Refer back to verses 6 through 14: I am the God who calls, the God who was worshipped by those who came before you, the God who knows fully what human misery is about and yet who acts to transform that misery into new life, the God who takes seriously the partnership God has entered with human beings. If you want to know the name of God, look for one who is revealed in those ways.

Look especially to Jesus on the cross, in the tomb, and raised from the dead, because this became God’s most powerful way of declaring solidarity with us in all our humanity, and transforming suffering into victory over death.

[1] George Chorba, “You Are...”, a sermon preached at 1st Presbyterian Church, New Vernon, NJ.

[2] Newsweek, March 23, 1992, p. 53..

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Gone Wandering 5: The Best of All Is Yours

20th Sunday in Ordinary time: August 14, 2011

Genesis 45:4-20 (-28)

If we were going to make a modern film of the story of Joseph, we might be tempted to take the sort of liberties with the original narrative for which Hollywood has become famous. Remember, it is Hollywood that has turned such classics as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter from a tale of tortured 19th century guilt over sexual indiscretion into the sort of modern R-rated film that would have caused Hawthorne to blush and run from the room. It is Hollywood that transformed Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame from a dark and brooding story ending in tragic death into a cartoon tale of bright songs and happy endings.

So, being possessed of such artistic license, we might take another look at the story of Joseph. What would be the motive running the narrative if Hollywood were to write the script? It would be revenge!

We could cast Matt Damon in the part of Joseph; Harrison Ford is old enough now to play Jacob; Justin Bieber could be the youngest brother, Benjamin; Keifer Sutherland as the waffling eldest brother Reuben; and maybe someone like John Malkovich as scheming Judah. We might then make the ending of the Joseph saga go more like this:

So, many years after they threw him into a ditch to leave for dead, years after they pulled him out of that terrifying pit only to sell him as a slave to a passing tribe of Bedouin traders, Joseph is only too happy to see the faces of his evil brothers again. They come to him in Egypt, hats in hands as it were, to beg for a bit of food to feed their starving people back home in Canaan. They do not know that the all-powerful representative of Pharaoh to whom they address their requests is none other than the very brother they had as good as left for dead so many years ago.

On that day, tied to that Bedouin trader’s camel, bound hand and foot, Joseph looked his brothers in the eye as they rode off and, quoting an older anti-hero, muttered, “I’ll be back!” But this was even better. He didn’t have to travel back home to make good on his threat. They had come to him. He had them right where he wanted them. The irony of it was too good to be true. His chance for sweet revenge stood right before him.

After toying with them for a time, forcing them to perform a handful of degrading tasks, then threatening their little brother with capture, Joseph finally revealed himself to them. He dropped his regal face down close to theirs and growled, “Don’t you know me? I’m your very own brother!”

After a brief gasp of recognition, swords were drawn instantly, once the ten realized the danger this one they had thought long dead now represented to them. Surely he would kill them like worms. Their lives weren’t much, yet they realized their only hope for such lives as they had would be to fight their way out of the Egyptian court. They would have to make plans on the run from there, if they managed to get out alive. Reuben – the cowardly eldest who on that fateful day so long ago had failed to stand up for his youngest brother, only lamely suggesting that they not kill Joseph – Reuben now lived to regret his long-forgotten moment of compassion. Joseph dispatched him first with a fierce swing of his broadsword. Then he turned on the others, all but young Benjamin, who wouldn’t have been much help in a Pillsbury bake-off, much less a sword fight. Benjamin spent the next half hour cowering in the corner, whimpering.

One by one they came at Joseph, and one-by-one, his excellent swordplay and superior weapon dispatched each maniacally bad brother to his well-deserved fate, until at last he was face-to-face with his real nemesis: Judah. Judah was the evil one who had not only come up with the idea of selling his own brother – he had personally dispatched his own sons when they displeased him, and killed one of his daughters-in-law. This was a bad man. After a furious fight, where the two combatants spun through the room, tearing at every drape and smashing every bit of crockery that was at hand, Joseph looked him in the eye and said only, “Hasta la vista, Baby!” before dispatching him.

Afterward, Joseph rescued his innocent brother, Benjamin, rounded up his wives, and went back to his father Jacob where they lived happily ever after.

Cue the music. Roll the credits.

That might be the way Hollywood would prefer to play on a story so ripe for the revenge motif, isn’t it? But that’s not how it went, was it? On one level, our passage celebrates something very unusual that happened in the life of this peculiar family. On another level, it celebrates something much bigger, standing as a sign of God’s loving grace that until that day had been only a dream in the mind of a slave boy in the Pharaoh’s employ.

After all the teasing and testing, most of which we did not get to read because it would take up too much time (you may want to go home and catch up on the rest of the story this afternoon), after all that the moment came when Joseph’s brothers, appearing before their former victim in a scene rich with irony and potential for revenge, Joseph’s brothers knew to their horror who it was that stood before them, clothed with the authority of the Pharaoh. This one they had believed was long dead by their own violence against him now stood before them with the power of life and death over them. And in that moment, Joseph did an unexpected thing, the sort of unpredictable thing that makes for the sort of story which could be remembered for 30 or 40 centuries. He did not pull out a sword, he did not call down the guards on his hapless former tormentors, he simply cried out to them instead, “Come closer to me!”

He laid aside the marks of his office, his royal authority, his golden robe, his magnificent turban, and in their place he reclaimed the office which he had craved ever since he last laid eyes on them, the role of son to his father, brother to his siblings: “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” Old Jacob, who got this whole story rolling. Was he still alive? It was a way of asking, “Is there still a family in which I may be a brother, a son again?”

When I was a young boy scout, I found myself on a long hike with some of my scouting friends. The talk turned to another scout who was not walking with us. Pete, the son of our pastor, was my friend. But because others I was with started bad-mouthing him, I joined right in. I found myself going on the way gossipers do when the person whose character they are assassinating isn’t within earshot, and had just said something like “He thinks he’s too good for us because his father is the minister,” when who should step out from behind a tree just ahead of us but Pete! I was mortified, but only for an instant.

Without missing a beat, Pete – a mature 13 year-old to my young 12 – said, “Aw Rob, you don’t mean any of that,” and put his arm around my shoulder as we walked on. It was a moment of grace I never forgot and never shall. As Joseph said to his brothers when his father, Jacob “was gathered to his people,” as the Old Testament described his death, “Do not be afraid! ... Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good...”[1] My comments must have been intended to do hurt and to harm, but my friend Pete absorbed them in his goodness. Probably part of my penance is that I would one day become a pastor and repeat this story on myself.

Joseph prefigures the work of Jesus in an important way, doesn’t he? In Jesus’ earthly ministry, God set aside his divinity and took up humanity. In Christ God set aside righteous vengeance toward those who have wronged him, and took up forgiveness and reconciliation instead. Faced with the pure goodness of God, we may be only too aware of our failures, our shortcomings, our inabilities to love fully, our submission to hatreds both petty and profound, we may fear evil at the hand of God and desire to run away, to separate ourselves from him. But in the person of Jesus, God turns to us instead and says, “Come closer to me.” Coming close enough to us really to know us, God fell upon us and wept with us in Jesus, and weeps with us still for all the distance we so stubbornly place between ourselves and God in every single day of our lives. God weeps, and yet God repeats, “It is I, Joshua ben Joseph, Jesus, son of Joseph, your brother. What you meant for evil, I turn to good. Come closer to me.”

[1] Genesis 49:33 and 50:19-20.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Gone Wandering 3: Wrestle Mania

Gone Wandering[1] 3: Wrestle Mania

Genesis 32:22-31 Sunday, July 24, 2011

We have come some distance so far in our short series of readings from Genesis for the summer. We began with the birth of Isaac’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau, moved last week to Jacob’s dream at Bethel of the heavenly stairway with angels ascending and descending. This week we bypass stories of the bait and switch pulled by Jacob’s Uncle Laban when Jacob married first Leah, thinking she was Rachael, then finally married Rachel. As we re-enter the story today, Jacob is on his way to meet with his twin brother Esau. Because he snookered Esau out of his first-born birthright those years ago, Jacob was understandably anxious about the coming meeting. He sent presents on ahead in hopes to appease the long-simmering anger of his brother. He lay down next to the river for a fitful sleep before the next day’s meeting, and it was there, on the banks of the river, that he wrestled with God, who gave him a new name. He had, all his life, carried the name Jacob, which in Hebrew means “one who grabs by the heel,” as he had done, emerging from Rachel’s womb, contesting Esau’s right to be called firstborn. Now, following his struggle at the river Jabbok, he received a new name, “Israel,” which means “the one who strives with God.”

We wonder about all the struggle chronicled in the stories of Jacob. We wonder if, by the end, he will be different than he was at the beginning. Will he always be the same, grasping, conniving person, or will he finally become a person who can be real with others, whose life can be honest and forthright, and satisfied.

Israel: the one who strives with God. Probably that would be a good name for many of us. Few people in my experience come to faith as an easy, simple matter. For most of us there is some element of struggle, whether it is for understanding, or a sense of calling, or a desire to experience the presence of God more directly. We all struggle with God, seeking God’s blessing, some word from God about the purpose, the meaning of our lives.

I recall hearing a story about a pastor in his earliest ministry, when he served a very poor little church in rural Tennessee.[2] The church had been in existence about fifty years but had never had a called pastor. The lives of the people were filled with tales of the sort of hard-scrabble existence that once characterized a good portion of the population of the South, and still does in many places. When the pastor came to that poor little church and community they wanted to celebrate his arrival by decorating their small one-room frame church building. They had no beautiful art to hang above the pulpit behind the preacher, so they had a contest for something to hang on the wall as a centering point for their worship. One of the children won the contest. She had found, in a magazine, a close-up picture of the face of a bulldog. That picture won the contest, and it was put on the wall above the pulpit in the sanctuary, with the following words written underneath it:

Get a good grip on your faith and don’t turn loose!

The people of that poor little country church were saying to God what Jacob said to the angel. “We will not turn you loose until you bless us.”

Sometimes faith has to be like that: tenacious, unyielding. Sometimes faith has to be gripped so as not to let it slip from our grasp, leaving us without faith, without hope, without purpose. Do not turn loose of God until you are blessed, be insistent about it, like the psalmist who cried, “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?... Rise up, come to our help.”[3]

One thing is sure. No one comes away untouched from grasping after God. Jacob found that he had a limp in his gait from that day on, a persistent, step-by-step reminder in his hip socket that once upon a time he had grasped after God and perhaps had found more than he bargained for.

What led to his grasping for God?

Remember that twenty years before, Jacob had cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright as the eldest son of Isaac. He had run away to Haran from the anger of his brother, where he arrived with only his walking stick and his life. While he was there he worked for Laban, his uncle. He earned two wives from this sharp dealing relative (perhaps it takes one to know one!), as well as amassing an Old Testament version of a sizable fortune in oxen, donkeys, flocks, slaves, wives and children. Now he prepared to return home to encounter his brother. Word was out that Esau had put together a small welcoming party of 400 soldiers. What would you do? How would you feel?

After sending all his entourage and his goods across the Jabbok River, Jacob remained behind, where he spent that famously restless night which turned into a wrestling match.

Have you ever had a sleepless night? Of course you have. You toss and turn, items from the troubles of the day rolling through your mind. The problem isn’t that you are sleeping. The problem is that you are very much awake when you should be sleeping. You worry, you fret. Small problems loom large. What am I going to do about the mortgage payment when there’s nothing in the bank? Where did I leave that memo that was supposed to be on my boss’s desk by this morning? How can I possibly clean the house in time for company when I have to work until 5:30? In the quiet of the night when our defenses are down, thoughts return to us, unbidden, until we find we cannot sleep. We are wrestling with our anxieties, if not with angels.

Consider Jacob’s guilty reflections. I can imagine Jacob thrashing back and forth until he bid God to help him in his worried sleeplessness. And God came, not as a host of angels or a menacing thundercloud on the mountain, but in a form unbidden, as a man who would wrestle with him until together they had made peace for Jacob. One writer asked, “How could Jacob even stay in the ring with God?”[4] But this was not God in all God’s glory. Here God took human form to encounter Jacob at his own level. The man who wrestled with Jacob – whom Jacob was entirely convinced was God – could not defeat Jacob any more than Jesus sets out to defeat us when we encounter him. It is not his purpose. God’s purpose is transformation, which is why God could transform Jacob’s name into “Israel,” while Jacob could not fathom the name of God. Staying perfectly in character, Jacob demanded a blessing from those he engaged. As he demanded a blessing from his brother, his father, his father-in-law, so here he demanded a blessing from God.

But a blessing from God never leaves us unchanged. God’s blessings are the very stuff of change, and Jacob discovered as dawn broke that the stiffness in his leg wasn’t his arthritis acting up. He was going to be sporting a limp in his walk from that day forward. Each step of the rest of his life would serve as a reminder of the One who, in blessing him, also transformed him into someone more human than he had been before.

Jacob went to Esau, limped up to him as it turns out, and did not make demands of him but simply invited him to share in the bounty which he now recognized had been showered on him, not by his own craftiness, but by the undeserved grace of God.

What Jacob learned at last – and maybe the limp he had to carry through his life was to serve as his daily refresher course – was that it is never by our strength alone that we do what we do and become what we become. The miracle in this story is not that Jacob finally came to terms with the fact that he was a sly deceiver – which he likely knew already. The miracle is that God recognized that quality in him too but loved him anyway.

What was true for Jacob can be true for us. As we limp along through our lives, finding daily reminders of our own shortcomings, we may rest in the assurance that God loves us enough to transform us, enough to save us, enough to wrestle with us through all the failures we throw in our own way, and his, contending with us through the man Jesus, who – like a mysterious wrestler in the night – came to us so that we might come home to God.

[1] Third in a series of five sermons on the Jacob/Esau cycle in Genesis.

[3] Psalm 44:23.

[4] Terrence Fretheim , New Interpreters’ Bible, Volume I, Abingdon, 1995, p. 568.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Rung by Rung

July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-17

Romans 5:12-19

Perhaps you have heard this old story by Matt Suhey, running back for the Chicago Bears. If you have not heard of Matt Suhey, it is probably because you are much more likely to have heard of his more famous, and faster, teammate, Walter Payton, a superstar running back in the 1970s and 80s. Anyway, Matt Suhey and Walter Payton were once on a camping trip together in Alaska. Matt Suhey awoke to find Walter Payton lacing up his running shoes. “What are you doing?” asked Suhey. “There’s a bear right outside our tent, and I’m getting ready to run.” “You can’t outrun a bear!” said Suhey. Payton replied, “I don’t have to. All I have to do is outrun you!”

So much for team solidarity. The story has a point, though, that ties in with our reading about Jacob. As you know, Jacob made his early life’s work a continuing effort to cheat his older brother out of the family inheritance. Once he was finally successful, Esau was understandably perturbed. So while the cover story for Jacob in our morning reading was that he was sent out of the country by his mother to search for a suitable wife, we know that in reality, he was also fleeing the wrath – and probably the superior aim – of his brother. Jacob was on the move. It might be less poetically stated by saying he was on the lam. He didn’t have to outrun a bear, all he had to do was outrun his brother, Esau. But he couldn’t outrun his fear of being in a strange place, his loneliness as he left behind all the familiar people and places of his life, or his guilt for what he had done to his brother.

Jacob thought that being on the move was a thoroughly horizontal proposition. We all suffer from the same delusion. Get out a road map and plan a route, say, from South Dakota to Indiana, and we’ll probably think of the whole drive as a long itineration along a surface that is mostly as flat as the pages in the atlas, more or less. Only a meddlesome person would take the trouble to remind us that we would be traversing the surface of the earth, which is a sphere, a globe, so that there is no truly direct way from South Dakota to Indiana, unless we were prepared to bore a hole in the ground and travel through the earth in order to maintain that straight line.

On a more spiritual level, though Jacob thought of his trip as a pretty straightforward journey, he was soon to discover that God had in mind another dimension for all his moving to and fro. Probably Jacob’s dream is the most graphic reminder there ever was that our journeying in this life is more than moving on the horizontal. God has in mind a vertical dimension for our lives. He made that abundantly clear to Jacob while the young fugitive lay near a rock and dreamed of the angels of God running up and down a heavenly escalator to be about God’s bidding in the world.

This is a truly revolutionary dream, because for all our suspicions that heaven and earth have little to do with each other, Jacob’s dream declared to him and to us that God has continuing association with earth, that earth and heaven are not separated by some great divide, but joined by the unfathomable purposes of God.

All of us harbor our own stories of the road. A light-hearted decision made, a mate chosen, a career almost accidentally embarked upon, a friendship casually engaged, so many events in our lives – which we would have thought existed in a more or less horizontal dimension – have developed into deep experiences which reverberate profoundly throughout our lifetimes and have influenced every action since. We are spiritual creatures, no matter how seldom we pause to think of ourselves in that way, and anything we do is riven with spiritual implications, touched by the purposes of God.

I remember once receiving a little Sears Roebuck guitar for Christmas. I didn’t much play it after I got it because in a few short days I discovered that it wouldn’t play itself, that I would have to go through the digit numbing pain of learning where to place my fingers and when to strum in order to make anything resembling music come out. All in all, it seemed like too much trouble. The little guitar sat in a corner for a few weeks, until my older brother got it in his head that he could teach himself to play, and before you knew it he was doing just that. But after all, it was my guitar. I couldn’t let that happen. So I began the arduous process of teaching reluctant muscles to work together to make music. As things stand, I would appreciate it if you would help maintain the secret that my brother remains my superior in guitar playing to this day, but my initial and hardly commendable motivation to stay even with him, forced me to learn, and kept me from missing the opportunity to expand myself in those learning-filled adolescent days, learning how to play a guitar so that my singing could be accompanied by my own playing. But, having learned that, what became of that ability?

Now, make whatever you like of that small illustration, but that simple journey toward musicianship, begun almost as much in competitive spite or sibling rivalry as with any more admirable motivation, has over the years resulted in uncountable hundreds of opportunities before wonderfully diverse gatherings of people in varying states of appreciation for my musicianship; fellowship, in my growing up years, with dozens of other fellow-travelers who like to play guitar together; zillions of campfire sing-alongs with the faces of young people and old folks smiling and singing, people who – even though some of their voices have now gone silent – remain more real to me at this very moment than many of the folks who populate our more run-of-the-mill dreams; and many evenings in which the only audience for my playing was myself and the angels who must have needed some musical accompaniment while they made their way on that heavenly escalator back and forth into my growing-up world.

All of us have similar stories. Things we thought we did for only the most pedestrian of reasons, we later may have discovered were experiences that have enriched our lives, breathed into us the very breath of life. Perhaps a casual conversation started at a dining table in school was transformed into courtship and a life-long conversation over breakfasts and dinners; or a childhood choice one day to read instead of play baseball was transformed into a decision to major in English and teach others to love reading; or a fascination with toy trains became a first step toward a lifetime of engineering or public works; or any of a hundred other decisions, once made and for whatever reasons, have turned into life-transforming journeys.

Jacob’s dream was granted to him to tell him what we all know in our bones if only we stop to think about it long enough. It is that the God who created us loves us still and will make of our own common experiences something holy, something truly redeemed. It is perhaps summed up in the phrase which typifies God’s dealings with Jacob and everyone of us ever since. “Behold, I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go.”

It was a promise that God would have to repeat several times through the years before humanity would begin to really believe it, if we ever really have.[1] That is why it is one of the names for Jesus that we hear most often at Christmas: Emmanuel. God with us. Jeremiah reports that God gave the assurance of his presence to his troubled people in just these words that Jacob heard no less than 6 times as they were being assailed by armies they could neither defeat nor understand.

“I am with you.” It is the heart of the story – the heart of any story worth anything more than a good cry, when you get right down to it. All good love stories have that element. Juliet promised to be with Romeo, even unto death. And, as it turns out, that plot wasn’t invented by William Shakespeare. The very same promise was God’s promise to his people, and Jesus lived and died that very promise for us. Says Paul in his letter to the people in the tiny church in Rome, “For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift of that one man Jesus abounded for many.”

New Testament scholar, Paul Achtemeier says, “thus does grace triumph over evil, by burying evil in an avalanche of grace.”[2] I really respond to that image! Think of the little things we have entered into, the small decision to take up the guitar, the tiny misstep from which we have learned immeasurable lessons. To shift metaphors, the tiny specks of our little life’s choices are bobbing on the ocean of human existence, until God picks us up on a mountainous wave and we find ourselves cascading atop the foaming water on our way toward the shore of his purpose.

Perhaps Paul was able to see it more clearly than anyone before him. From the time of Adam we have been on the move, yet the one evil we have never outrun is our sinful selves. But one day, Jesus appeared on the road of our aimless wanderings and things took on such a direction that the world has never since been the same.

Since I began with a story about two friends, perhaps I can end with one. There is an old Asian story[3] that one day a man found his neighbor on his knees, searching for something. “What are you looking for?” came the obvious question. “My key. I’ve lost it.” Both men proceeded to take to their knees and continue the fruitless search. After a while the neighbor said, “Where did you loose it” “At home.” “Then why are you searching for it here?” exclaimed the exasperated neighbor. “Because there is more light here.”

If we have found ourselves – like Jacob – tempted to wander far afield, leaving home looking for something to fill the emptiness of our lives, we can be sure that as earnestly as we may search, God is as near at hand as our next heartbeat, as present to us as our restless dreams, as ready to define our lives into purpose and meaning as he is to suffer and die on the cross for us.

Dear friends, as we scurry about the level places of our lives, we may be reminded that there is a ladder, extending to heaven, and that earth and heaven have met in Jesus Christ. We need never be alone and lost again, no matter where we are.

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[1] Genesis 26:3, 26:4, Isaiah 41:10, 43:5, Jeremiah 1:8, 1:19, 15:20, 30:11, 42:11, 46:28, Haggai 2:4, Matthew 28:20, John 13:33.

[2] Romans, by Paul Achtemeier, John Knox Press, 1985, p.102.

[3] The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello, S.J., Gujarat Sahitya Parakash, Avand, India, 1982.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Gone Wandering 1:

Living in Tents and Other Quiet Pleasures

First in a series of five sermons

on the Jacob/Esau cycle in Genesis

15th Sunday in Ordinary time: July 10, 2011

Genesis 25:19-34

Today we embark on something that preachers aren’t supposed to do during the summer months, at least according to common ecclesiastical wisdom: we are starting out on a five-week series of sermons! Not only is this considered the “low season” for church attendance – an odd time to expend the extra effort required to put together a coherent series – but all this effort is dedicated to an Old Testament character. Still, over the next several weeks, I will try to walk us through the story of Jacob, patriarch of Israel, to see the ways in which the record of his life speaks to the activity of God in our lives today.

Why would a sermon series about Jacob be of importance today? He was a man born of a time and place so different from ours that we might suspect that we could do just as well attempting a sermon series on the minds of alien invaders from another galaxy.

I’ll tell you a couple of reasons why I think it is important to encounter Jacob and his strange Old Testament world. His other Bible name was “Israel;” biblical tradition traces all the Jewish people who once called Israel home back to this man. To understand Jesus’ ministry in Israel, we must understand Israel, and to understand Israel, we must understand the one in whom the story about the nation of Israel first began to take shape, the man named Jacob.

In the course of learning about this man, we may begin with bright hopes of sharing a story about a person of high character. But it won’t take very long to find such hopes disappointed. We may take him or leave him, but in the end, Jacob will strike us as a figure characterized by the sort of ambivalence that marks any real human being. One scholar (Terry Fretheim, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume I, Abingdon Press, 1995, p. 516.) said that, take him or leave him, we will discover him to be sometimes simple, other times complex, sometimes positive, other times negative, sometimes clear and other times ambiguous. In the end of the story, the biblical miracle is that God takes him, just as he is. This is the story which sets the tone for the whole history of Israel, and which sets the reconciling stage for the work of Christ and his ministry. If God takes on one such as Jacob, the thinking will go, then why would there not be hope for me? I may be no better than he was, but I am certainly no worse!

In this story, then, we have the gospel in a nutshell. We may be self-serving, ambitious, scheming, capable of tawdry little episodes in our lives, but God knows we are also capable of high morals, clear values, good works. In any case, God takes us, will have us, just as he had Jacob.

So scene one in our story for this first week in the series opens on the front porch of Isaac’s and Rebekah’s house. Both are praying for children. In scene two, after the same sort of barrenness which her mother-in-law, Sarah, experienced, Rebekah was given a difficult pregnancy. We are startled to learn in a blunt way that she is to give birth to twins, when the narrator flatly declares, “The children struggled within her.” Children? That’s the first we know there is to be more than one child born.

Right away, Rebekah questioned the purpose of life. We might think that to be an overreaction, but the word used for “struggle” can be literally translated “crush.” Anyone who has ever felt a baby move knows the trampoline effect of even a single child in the womb. With twins, using the word “crush” might not be an overstatement. Even before birth, these two boys were engaged in a struggle, contesting with each other, trying to crush one another, vying for the all-important first place in the birth order. In a literal way, when it came to inheritance in those days, the last one out was a rotten egg, or at least as good as. The contest in Rebekah’s womb was an omen of a life-long struggle to come between these two boys and the nations to which they would give rise. By the time Rebekah was on the gurney, heading to labor and delivery, she was more than ready either to die or to have the boys’ conflict out in the open.

Scene three is the delivery itself, an all-important moment in a society that promised everything in inheritance to the first-born son. By the social standards of the time, whichever son emerged first would inherit Isaac’s birthright, along with the promises God had made to Abraham, and through him to Isaac and the nations to come from them.

No wonder that when the boys came out, and hairy Esau came first, Jacob came along right behind, clinging to him by the heel. Years later, when Jacob would wrestle with an angel, I wonder if it reminded him of the intrauterine wrestling match with his twin brother.

Then the scene shifts abruptly. The boys are grown. Esau has become a hunter, a man with a subscription to Field and Stream and a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck, more often than not to be found in the wild, stalking game, sleeping under the stars. In contrast, Jacob was “a quiet man, living in tents,” tending to the front lawn and the morning paper, enjoying a more domestic, settled life than his brother.

At last comes the critical scene in this little piece of the drama that was Jacob’s life. The paragraph starts innocently, “Once when Jacob was cooking a stew,” it says, “Esau came in from the field, and he was famished.” It is easy to see what is coming. Esau, a man of the hunt, preferring to live in the fulfilling present than sit around awaiting a secure future, Esau gave up his privileged position as first-born son, future heir, in favor of stew for lunch. Short-term satisfaction was bartered away for long-term entitlement. While Jacob seems to be a bit of a schemer in this, there is not much of a kind word for Esau in the passage. In the end, five verbs describe what he did in simplicity itself: he “ate, drank, rose, went away, despised.”

But what does this make Jacob? A schemer, to be sure. Opportunistic. Clever. Patient, even. In his quiet tent-living, Jacob had apparently had plenty of time to consider a way to wrest the birthright away from his brother. When the moment came, he seized it without hesitation or second thought. At this moment, he doesn’t seem like much of a model of religious faith, does he?

Here, then. we have a plain word about the way God works in the world. God does not wait for plastic saints to be born before taking action. God’s purposes can be accomplished even through the lives of scheming, clever, quiet tent-dwellers like Jacob. That his mother favored him over Esau surely was a leg up for him, and demonstrates again that God chooses to work in and through human actions and choices, our participation – even our bad decisions and off-center intentions – are redeemable by God as he creates the future. By granting Rebekah the “insider” information that the elder son would serve the younger – making this a text favored by the babies of families everywhere – God helped plant within her the kind of predisposition toward Jacob that would help bring God’s desires to pass.

Both boys come off looking less than saintly, and to try to make just one of them the villain is to misunderstand what the story is about, as well as to misunderstand what it is like to be human and alive in a world filled with confusing choices and opportunities. Jacob took advantage of his brother in need. And Esau came off as the most careless of sons, so casually despising his birthright. Why would God choose either one of these two to carry forward the promises he has made to Abraham and Isaac?

It seems to me that this is the question of the hour not only for this passage, but for us in our struggle to walk in faith. Why would God choose me? Or you? No one is more aware of our own shortcomings and failures, our dull bad-choice moments as well as our scheming hearts than we are. No one is more able to see the manifold reasons why we are bad candidates to carry forward the work of God’s kingdom than we are. And yet, God has chosen us! Some days we may doubt it, but we are seated here this morning, more than for any other reason, because we are responding to some call to us. Even if we are aware of it only in the vaguest way, even if we came to worship today almost by accident – as an afterthought – we are here, and God’s plan is now prepared to make use of our awkward commitments even if it beats us to see how or why.

In the end, we do make a difference in the work of the kingdom, and even our compromised, stumbling attempts to discern God’s will and do his work are honored by him, refined by him, made whole through Christ in such a way that our lives have meaning far beyond any meaning we might have imagined for ourselves. Jacob, standing in the shadow of the doorway to his tent, watching his brother Esau slouch away, rubbing the remnants of his afternoon stew from his beard, Jacob probably was unaware of a potential for fulfillment of God’s purpose dwelling in that moment. But his lack of awareness of it did not make it any less real.

Neither does our lack of awareness of God’s immediate purpose in our lives mean that there is none, only that we have not yet begun to see it. God is still working on the future that we may create together in relationship with him in Jesus Christ. That is the legacy of Jacob and the promise which has continued through the faithful people who have called him father right up to the present day. We are in their number. God has chosen us and has plans for us, too. Praise be to God.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Spiritual Variety

A Communion Meditation

June 12, 2011

I Corinthians 12:1-13

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.

Diversity is meant to be a given in the church. It has been since the beginning. In fact, diversity is in the very nature of God, whom we have come to know in our own faltering human thinking as three-in-one, one God, three persons: Creator, Spirit and Savior. Diversity exists right within the Holy Trinity. In our reading from Paul’s letter we have the earliest reference to the Trinity in the New Testament. We believe in one God, yet we see the manifestation of God in widely diverging ways. Within the person of God there is diversity. Since this is so, why would diversity not then be a hallmark of God’s church?

When we ordain and install new officers in the church, when a new pastor is called forward to be ordained to serve the church of Jesus Christ, these, or words like them, are the opening phrases of the service of ordination:

There are different gifts,

But it is the same Spirit who gives them.

There are different ways of serving God,

But it is the same Lord who is served...

Each one is given a gift by the Spirit,

To use it for the common good...

In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, with the help of the community, all members were and are encouraged to discover the gifts we have received and use them for the upbuilding of the church of Christ and for service in the world.

So, clearly, diversity marks the nature of God and God’s provision of gifts and abilities to the church.

Paradoxically, unity is also a characteristic of God and is meant to be a mark of the church in the world. I remember reading these words somewhere:

“You think because you understand one you must understand two,

because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and.”1

There is truth in the assertion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you piled all the unassembled pieces that make up an automobile into a heap on the ground, then put another set of those same exact pieces next to the pile, only this set as an assembled car, who could deny that the whole car is greater than the sum of its parts? The church is more than its individual members, sitting in our homes leading our separate lives. There is something essential about the nature of God that God’s diversity is at work only when it is at work in unity. We think because we understand one we must understand two, because one and one makes two. But we must also understand and. What is it about being the church together that makes us more than a sum of disparate individuals?

By the 14th chapter of First Corinthians, Paul is arguing that the gifts the Spirit gives are useful only if the church, rather than the individual, benefits. To ask, for instance, as we take part in a commitment program for the church, gathering together our treasure for the common good, “Yes, but what’s in it for me?” is to inquire by means of a non sequitur. “What’s in it for me” is, in the end, irrelevant to the Christian enterprise except inasmuch as what is “in it” for everyone, may include me.

Believers differ from each other, but each has been given a gift by the Spirit, the very first of which is the ability to confess that Jesus is Lord. These gifts are not granted for individual use or control, but so that the whole body may prosper. For someone to say they can worship God on a mountaintop is to miss the entire point. Worship isn’t about us and our private experiences of God. It is about the community into which God has placed us and the contribution of our own gifts which we can give the community.

Now, sometimes people look at Paul’s list of gifts and think quietly, “Well, I certainly can’t do any of that.” He mentions such gifts as the “utterance of wisdom,” “the utterance of knowledge,” and “gifts of healing,” and the “working of miracles,” “prophecy,” “discernment of spirits,” “tongues...” Let’s see, was it Tuesday or Wednesday last week that I was uttering knowledge and discerning spirits...?

I’m not putting those things down, and the fact is, Paul was pointing to activities that were prevalent in the Corinthian church. We have our own gifts and fascinations. Everyone has a gift to share. Perhaps it’s compassion, or, yes, knowledge, or a strong arm, or a good idea — the church can always use a good idea! Gifts don’t have to be dramatic or esoteric to be gifts. And one that is under-appreciated in most congregations I’m familiar with is the gift of financial giving. I know that the annual stewardship conversation of our congregation is half year or so away. But it never hurts to offer a reminder about it near the half-year point! Every year there are households in our church and most other churches which pledge or give nothing. Likewise, every year there are households that pledge and give generously. Paul praised those who gave liberally in Corinth. Still, maybe it’s not everyone’s gift to give liberally, but it’s important just to join in, just to be a part of it: diverse, but also unified in Christ’s body.

One old pastor said once that if being a Christian has not had an impact on our lifestyles, then it is possible we are believers but not yet disciples.

Today, Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate the diversity of our gifts before God in our celebration of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus’ good gift of himself to the church. And we might think about ways we can respond to Jesus’ amazing gift of himself to the church, by seeking means by which we may also give of ourselves. Today is a day to be thankful for the untiring work of the Spirit among us, continually celebrating our diversity and making us one.

Thanks be to God.

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[1] Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret J. Wheatley, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1994) p. 9.