September 24, 2017 God's Election, Romans 9:16-24

Examination time, a one question test.  How many Biblical people can you name who went on spiritual quests to find God?  Don’t think about too long or too hard, and don’t doubt yourself if you think you don’t have enough biblical knowledge.  The answer is easy – zero.

In our scriptures no one ever goes on a quest to find God.  It is always the other way around.  God seeks people and finds them.  Sometimes they run away, like Jonah.  But God hounds them until he gets them.

It is important for us to remember that it is God who seeks us, and it is God who chooses us, not the other way around.  It is God who creates faith in us, and it is God who maintains that faith within us.  You cannot come to God by the power of your intellect or your righteousness.

This all seems good until you think about it a bit.  What then about people who reject God?  What about people who are evil?  What about people who do not know God at all.  What about them?  And in all of this with God seeking us and creating faith in us and maintaining that faith within us, where does that leave free will?  Do we have a choice?  These are not new questions.  We know they’ve been around for as long as there has been Christianity because St. Paul writes about it.  We find one of the times he writes about it in our second reading.  There to the Romans he says, “So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy…  God has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses.  You will then say to me then, ‘Why then does he still find fault?  For who can resist his will?’  But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God?  Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’”  And Paul goes on.

This can leave us unsettled.  Again, we like to think we have free will.  And it leaves us wondering about the many people who do not know God and who do not seem to have faith.  We probably even care deeply about any number of people who do not live in faith.  Has God rejected them?  Has God made them as objects of his wrath, as Paul says?

I don’t have any answers to these questions.  I wish I did, but I think we just have to let God be God and realize that there are lots of things we simply cannot understand.  I do think it is good that we have questions like this.  It shows that we care.  We are concerned about the people around us and we do not want God to withhold grace and mercy from them.

But it is also important for us to move on.  Martin Luther understood that the way God does things with faith held great comfort for him.  In his essay, The Bondage of the Will, Luther writes:

(Copyright regulations do not allow for the text to be printed here.  See Luther's Works, Volume 33, Pg. 288-289)

Can you feel the comfort and certainty Luther writes about?  It is as if he has relaxed from the greatest worry and burden of his life, which indeed he has.  In early life he was constantly plagued by worry.  Was he good enough for God?  Did he do enough?  How could he be sure God liked him and would save him?  Realizing how securely God held him brought him real joy.  And it’s ironic that when he realized he didn’t have freedom in determining his salvation actually gave him freedom in life.

Instead of constantly asking himself if God approved or disapproved of something that whole way of thinking was thrown away.  He was God’s!  He was saved!  Now he wanted to share that reality and invite others to know it too.  That is the root of true evangelism – having something good you want to share.

I’m sure you’ve all had a task or a problem that worried you.  You may have even lost sleep over it.  And then when the task is over, assuming you succeeded, you feel light hearted and joyful.  You want to share your success with someone.

If you’ve helped with the garden project at Wymans you know there’s a little equipment shed at the top of the hill.  It’s a simple structure but creating it was tricky because zoning won’t allow for a building to be put there.  All of the equipment we use for the garden could be just left outside in the weather but I’m obsessive about keeping things inside.  I came up with the design for a structure to store the equipment but would be moveable, so it technically wouldn’t count as a building – at least as far as zoning regulations were concerned.  The question is, would it work?  Now that building isn’t complicated or expensive or heavy.  I shouldn’t have worried about it at all.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?  But I have to confess I lost more than one night’s sleep over the thing.  What if my design was flawed?  What if it couldn’t be moved once it was all put together?  What if it twisted and distorted into a pile of broken wood and bent metal?

Mark helped me when we loaded it onto the church’s wagon to move it to its final place.  My heart thudded every time the structure creaked and groaned while being loaded.  The wooden structure of the wagon bent under the load, but in short order it was loaded.  It moved, and moved well.  And when it came to tweaking it into the exact spot where we wanted it Mark and I discovered we could roll this 12ft. by 24ft. structure around by hand.  The idea had worked!  And when it was solidly on the ground I relaxed for the first time in days; the joy of seeing an idea succeed!

Perhaps this is too trite an example when compared to salvation, but the relief is the same.  You don’t want to have to figure out your own salvation.  You don’t want to have to build your value based on your own skill and brains and then just hope it will be good enough for God when you die.  That’s not salvation.  That’s torment.  No, you want to live in confidence.  You want to have the confidence that you can make mistakes and know that you’re still God’s.  You quit worrying about building and are able to just start enjoying.  Again, that is the root of real evangelism.

You’ve heard me say this before but it bears repeating.  God made you.  And God likes the work he did in your creation.  God delights to have you and is glad to save you.  Your relationship with God is not one where God just puts up with you the way you put up with annoying relatives at the Thanksgiving table.  No, God sees you as a guest he is excited to have.

Salvation is God’s work through and through, beginning to end.  How it works is beyond what our minds can comprehend.  But it is God’s mind that counts here, not ours.  And God will hold and keep us always.

September 17, 2017 Jacob’s Homeward Journey Genesis 32:1-33:17

I don’t know what your opinion of Jacob is but I don’t like him.  He lies.  He cheats.  He steals.  And he swindles.  While he gets caught from time to time he usually gets the better end of the deal and comes out on top.  At the beginning of today’s reading I consider Jacob to be a coward.  He’s heading home and at some point he’s going to have to face his brother.  You’ll remember well that the last time these two were together Esau avowed to kill Jacob.  After all, Jacob had swindled him in a pretty big way.  Now Jacob learns that Esau is coming out to meet him with 400 men.  Jacob could only imagine this to be an army. 

Should Jacob run away?  Where would he go?  He was already on the move away from his uncle Laban.  Jacob decides to send presents to his brother.  Perhaps these will placate Esau’s anger, and also Jacob can learn how Esau reacts.  If Esau destroys them violently Jacob knows he’s in trouble.  Do you see how Jacob is using other people and other things as a buffer around himself? 

Jacob prays to God asking for help.  It’s hard to know how sincere this prayer is.  It is definitely the prayer of a desperate man.  And then he does what I think is the most cowardly thing of all.  He separates himself from his wives and children and goes off by himself.  No one knows exactly what he meant to do with this.  It looks to me like a man who is running away.  Let Esau kill the wives and children and have all the stuff.  If he comes looking for Jacob among them, the most likely place to look, Jacob will be gone; total cowardice.

Jacob may be able to flee from Esau.  Jacob could not flee from God.  You simply can’t get away from God, as Jacob discovered.

The wrestling match between Jacob and this mysterious man, who we later learn is God, is about the most bizarre stories in the Bible.  It raises hosts of questions, most especially, how can it be that God can’t beat Jacob?  But I suggest you set a literal interpretation of this text aside if you can.  In the same way Adam and Eve aren’t intended to be seen as historical people neither do I think the equality in this wrestling match is to be taken literally.

There are two issues in play here, and that is where we are to focus.  First, God makes Jacob a down and desperate man.  To use terms of struggling with an addiction, Jacob hits rock bottom.  He’s in deep trouble.  All is lost.  There’s nowhere to turn.  There’s no one to help him, and there’s no one to blame but himself.

We all have struggles in life.  Sometimes we have to learn things the hard way.  I wouldn’t wish anyone to have to bottom out before they can begin to recover but sometimes it is that way.  And God takes Jacob there.  God completely takes away Jacob’s ability to fend for himself.  He will emerge from this wrestling match limping and injured.  Actually the text is probably using euphemisms here when it says the man struck Jacob on the hip socket.  A serious permanent injury, yes.  But you’ll remember from last week that Jacob was having lots of kids.  He’ll have one more, but that one’s already been conceived.  There will be no more.  This injury has probably caused sterilization for him.

Do you see how incredibly rock bottom Jacob has become? God has even had to take away a big part of his manhood.  Harsh; but when we the readers take a step back and consider all the deceptive schemes this man has been up to his whole life and the number of people he’s swindled, we realize he probably deserves it.

Before we move forward there is the second issue in play here.  Look carefully at the order of events in this wrestling match.  Jacob’s been wrestling with this man all night until daybreak.  He’s exhausted, and now he’s been crippled with a serious injury.  Does Jacob let go?  He has no hope of winning after all.  No.  He doesn’t.  He clings on.

Put yourself in the place of a Jew living in exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.  Your nation’s defeated.  Your capital city lies in ruins.  The temple, the house of God, the house where God has promised to dwell forever, has been destroyed.  You feel as beaten down and helpless as Jacob did.  Are you going to let go?  Are you going to give up on faith?  Are you going to say, “Well, I guess God’s promises weren’t real after all.  And perhaps there is no God at all.”  Indeed some Jews did feel that way.  But many did not.  Instead they clung on, and just like Jacob refusing to let go without a blessing so too did the Jews cling on to God and remind God of his promises:  You promised us a land.  You promised to dwell in the temple.  You promised an ancestor of David would be king.

Why couldn’t God truly beat Jacob in the story?  It is for the exact same reason that God remains bound by his promises.  God could have annihilated Jacob that night.  God could have had the Babylonians completely destroy the Jews for their sins.  But God had made promises.  And they were going to hang on and boldly hold God to those promises.

We often think of faith as a personal experience where we seek tranquility and peace.  It can be that way, and indeed it often is.  But it isn’t necessarily so.  Our Jewish faith ancestors knew that faith could resemble a wrestling match with God.  Each hurts the other, but neither ever lets go.

God wouldn’t let go of Jacob no matter how cowardly and disgusting his life was, and Jacob wouldn’t let go of God either.  That is true faith.

The next day Jacob faces his own problems for the first time in his life.  Alone, limping, emasculated… Jacob goes out in front of his wives and children and servants and many possessions to meet his brother.  He has no possibility whatsoever of defending himself.  What will come will come, and he’s going to have to take it like a doormat.

The story takes a startling turn.  Esau is not at all mad but rejoices to be reunited with his brother!  And there’s more.  Esau asks why Jacob had sent all the gifts.  Jacob says they were to find favor with him.  But Esau says, “I have enough my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”

Esau is not asking for anything, not even his birthright which Jacob swindled from him, and not even the blessing of their father which Jacob outright stole from him.  Esau doesn’t even ask for an apology.  Esau is kind, merciful and forgiving.  He embodies every virtue the Bible holds up.

That is one of the most bizarre story twists I’ve ever encountered.  You’ll remember that the Jews traced their ancestry to Jacob.  The nearby nation of the Edomites traced their ancestry to Esau.  The Jews hated the Edomites and the Edomites hated the Jews.  Yet here in Jewish scripture we find that Jacob, their ancestor, acts scandalously most of the time.  Esau, the ancestor of one of their enemies, embodies all virtue.

Jacob has had a long hard road.  He’s been a tough character.  But God never let go of him.  And Jacob wouldn’t let go of God either.  Though the story isn’t nice Jacob finally comes round to where God wants him to be.  It would be wrong to say, “And they all lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t.  We’re going to skip over most of the remaining chapters about Jacob’s life, but from here on out we find Jacob a more honest man.  It took a long time and a lot of pain for him to get there.

May we learn from Jacob’s mistakes and have the integrity and courage he shows without having to have a wrestling match with God.  But know that if necessary God will do what God needs to do to have you.  May we always cling to God with the same ferocity that God clings to us.

September 3, 2017 Jacob’s Vision Genesis 28:10-22

We pick the story of Jacob in Genesis exactly where we left off last week.  You may remember that Jacob has swindled his brother out of their father’s blessing.  This blessing wasn’t just some ordinary words like you’d find in a Hallmark card.  This blessing was to receive headship of the family, which was far more than just land or money.  It included the covenant that God made with Abraham.  You’ll remember God reinstated this covenant when it was passed on to Abraham’s son Isaac.  And now the covenant rested with Jacob.  This was a covenant about being a nation, God’s chosen people.  The people who would bear God’s name into the world.

How could Jacob have acquired for himself such a covenant by means of trickery and theft?  He and his mother had conspired to swindle it from Esau, its rightful recipient.  What makes it even more complicated is that we remember that Jacob and his mother are really only acting to bring about a word from God about Jacob and Esau before they were born.  They knew it was to be God’s will that Jacob got the blessing, not Esau.  They were merely acting to make it reality.

Last week I tried to show how puzzling this all was.  By what Genesis tells us Esau appears to be a hard-working, decent, upright sort of man.  Perhaps he’s a bit dim, but that’s hardly a fatal drawback.  On the other hand Jacob has a history of manipulation and exploitation.  Why would God choose treacherous Jacob over good Esau? 

I’ve been using four commentaries from four different biblical experts as we’ve been working our way through Genesis; trying to make sense of these difficult stories.  The experts seldom agree with one another, often outright refuting the other’s interpretation!  That’s okay.  The biblical texts are complex and speak in different ways to different times and places.  It is okay to interpret them differently.  But for some things we just want a bit more clarity.  With the whole Jacob and Esau situation we are left to realize that we have to let God be God.  God does things in God’s own way and in God’s own time.  Sometimes things make sense to us.  Sometimes they don’t, but we are encouraged to trust all the same.

Well, not surprisingly, Esau is livid when he finds out what Jacob has done.  He begins to plot to kill his brother because then all things will come back to him.  Of course killing someone is not something to consider lightly.  Who knows if Esau was just blowing off steam or if he was really planning to do it?  Whatever the case, Jacob realizes it is time to get out of town. 

Picture him.  He’s forty years old.  He has no spouse, no children, no money, no house.  He has only the clothes on his back.  Who knows what’s going on in his heart, but he certainly can’t feel good about the fact that he’s in this situation because he obtained a holy blessing through deceitful means.  He’s heading off for his uncle in Haran.  The distance from Beer-sheba to Haran is no short jaunt.  He’s not going to do this in an afternoon.  It’s about 500 miles.  On foot.  With nothing.

I think the Interpreter’s Bible Commentary sets it up nicely for us.  I want to read a few paragraphs from it:

“In the Genesis story Jacob was a wanderer; that is the first fact which makes his story so poignant for many a heart.  Men and women often feel themselves in spiritual exile – not pilgrims, for there is no clear quest before their eyes; but just poor, lonely travelers through what often seems an empty land.  They long for an experience like Jacob’s, to show that in the most desolate place there can be a shining something which bridges the gap between earth and heaven so that henceforth all the horizons of hope and trust are lifted and enlarged.  And the promise that lies in the story of Bethel becomes the more touching when it is remember that Jacob was not only a wanderer, but a guilty and burdened and remorseful one.  He had not deserved a vision of God.  But he needed it; and all his life in his groping and unworthy way he had desired it…

“Thus is was in beauty and benediction that the vision came to Jacob.  Notwithstanding all that he had done, communication between earth and heaven was not broken.  The Lord God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac – the God of his fathers and of all the inheritance of his home – was with him still, and would go with him on the way ahead.  In that experience of Jacob is expressed what the Hebrew people felt about their whole contradictory history: in the midst of ignorance and evil there is still the possibility of a saving revelation.  Even on the rocky slopes where Jacob was alone there rose the shining stairway that brought the heavenly glory, with angels going up like prayers of [humans] to God and angels coming down like the grace of God to [humans].  That vision epitomizes the whole wonder of the Hebrew faith and hope as they move through the Old Testament to their culmination in Christ.”  (Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Volume 1, Pg. 689-90)

This vision is the first recorded time that God has communicated directly with Jacob.  Who knows how Jacob felt about what he had done?  Perhaps he was afraid of what God would do to him because of his stealing the covenant position God had established with his ancestors.  Whatever the case, in the vision God verifies that he will indeed be with Jacob.  That includes all Jacob’s flaws and failings, and his successes too.

It would be great if when we return to Jacob next week we find him to be a reformed character; as if the vision had caused him to mend his ways and start walking the straight and narrow path.  We’ll discover that is not the case.  He’s heading to his mother’s brother, Uncle Laban.   We’ll discover that Laban and Rebekah are cut from the same cloth.  Laban will be conniving and deceitful with Jacob, and Jacob will continue to be conniving and deceitful himself; ultimately fleeing again when his deeds catch up to him. 

No, like an addict who can’t beat an addiction, Jacob’s ways won’t change for a long long time.  But we will read when he hits rock bottom, and when he does then he does change.  For now he knows that God is with him, and God will stay with him.

Perhaps you’ve always felt like you were a good person and that you deserved God’s blessings.  If that’s the case then the story of Jacob probably has little to teach you.  But if you are a person who’s made mistakes, and continued to make mistakes, and sometimes found bad things inside yourself that are absolutely unbeatable no matter how hard you try, then you can understand Jacob.

It would be great if God gave each of us a vision when we were down and desperate.  (Actually it would be great if God gave us visions before we got to that point!)  But I suspect few if any of us can truly claim such a thing.  God seems distant and silent.

But God is not.  God speaks to us in many and various ways all the time.  We have benefits Jacob did not have.  Jacob was all alone.  There was no church to go to, no synagogue, no community of likeminded believers he could turn to.  He had no Christ, no atoning sacrifice, no sacraments, and no scripture to turn to.  All of this was yet to be, for we are still in Genesis, the story of origins.  It is hard to be a trail blazer.  We cannot read our life situation onto Jacob.

Let’s conclude with the deal that Jacob makes with God, for Jacob is still a wheeler-dealer.  He makes a vow to God saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one tenth to you.”

This is the passage that gives root to the idea of tithing ten percent.  Jacob is not asking God for a lot – not prosperity or land or prestige – just food, clothing, and a peaceful return.  He acknowledges that what comes to him, by whatever means it comes, is coming from God.  This is actually a profound vow coming from this accomplished manipulator.  We too do well to recognize that even if we’ve acquired something by toil and hard work and the sweat of our brow, it is still coming from God.  Only God can create from nothingness.  I think blessings come to us all the time.  We just fool ourselves into thinking we’ve earned them, and thus we deserve them.  No, all things are God’s gifts.

We’ll leave Jacob there until next week when we see him starting to get into the business of women, wives, and children.  Not surprisingly that’s not going to go too well.  But until then we live in faith and hope and honoring the God who created us, loves us, and like Jacob, is always with us.