St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
I’ve struggled with Jacob for a long time. I really don’t like him. I know I wouldn’t trust him if I met him. After all he is a liar and a cheat and the Bible doesn’t make any excuses for him. He is slimy, and I don’t like slimy people. He was picking fights with his brother Esau even before they were born, poor Rebecca. Then he takes advantage of hard-working Esau’s exhaustion and hunger and gets him to give up his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. Scumbag that he is, he tricks his blind and dying father into thinking he is his older brother and giving him the family blessing. It’s a very big deal. Such a big deal in fact that his mother – she’s the one he got his trickiness from – has to spirit him out of town to keep his brother from killing him. Talk about a dysfunctional family! I know people like Jacob, people who only think of themselves, and that’s why I have so much trouble with him. And still when the Old Testament speaks of God, when God himself speaks to Moses, it is always as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob holds a high position as one of the three patriarchs, and we know that God loved Jacob, God chose Jacob, not Jacob at his best, or what he could have been if he had cleaned up his act, or as he would be if he repented of all his sins. No, God loved Jacob just as he was and chose him to be the father of the people of Israel. This is a marvelous story. It’s been twenty years since Jacob fled in fear of his life. He showed up on his uncle Laban’s doorstep and worked seven years to marry his beloved Rachel, except it turned out that Uncle Laban had that sneakiness gene as well and Jacob woke up in the morning married instead to the big sister, Leah. Uncle Laban as good as told him that as long as he was a guest in his house, Jacob would be playing by Laban’s rules and the younger daughter doesn’t get married before the older one. So he had to put in another seven years to marry Rachel. Now, on this night he is out in the desert, having escaped from Laban, and not without stealing all the goodies he wanted. Jacob has done very well for himself. He’s got his two wives and two concubines, eleven children…can you imagine traveling with that family? Not to mention the donkeys, cows, sheep and camels and God only knows how many slaves. We don’t know what happened, what change of heart he had, but Jacob has decided that it is time to patch things up with Esau. The last words he heard from Esau’s mouth were a death threat, and he has no reason to believe that anything has changed, but he’s sent word ahead of him that he’s coming. Well, he’s still Jacob, still one to hedge a bet, so he’s divided his traveling party in half, so that if Esau and the four hundred men who are with him kill one group, Jacob, assuming he survives, will still have at least one wife, one concubine five or six kids, and plenty of livestock and slaves. It would have been hard enough to go to sleep with all that going on, but suddenly he was not alone in the black night. From out of nowhere he was attacked. He never saw who it was, but the attacker was strong, The text tells us it was a man. It must have felt like a man with grasping hands and the leverage of arms and feet dug into the sand, and the voice was a man’s voice that Jacob could hear clearly in the night air, but when the daylight broke and it was all over he knew he had wrestled with God himself, had been wounded by God himself, and blessed by God himself. Before he was confronted by his brother he had to be confronted by God. The Jacob who went to meet with Esau was not the same Jacob who had tried to sleep that night. He was a Jacob who had faced God and lived, a Jacob who had persisted, who had struggled in the darkness against someone who could have killed him but didn’t, no longer Jacob but newly named Israel. He had been transformed and was ready to meet his brother and face the consequences of his self-centered behavior. Our lectionary pairs this story with a parable that Jesus tells. It’s about a judge, whom I think I would like just about as much as I’d like Jacob. He’s blatant in saying that he doesn’t respect God or people and that just because he can he refuses to grant justice to the poor widow. But he’s up against one feisty widow, one who will stalk him and pester him and badger him and make herself a total annoyance until finally he gives in just to make her go away and gives her only what she deserved all along. Now, the mistake that is easy to make is to try to make this story into a clear allegory in which we are the widow and the judge stands for God. Understood that way it gives us a simplistic theology, that if we pray hard enough and long enough, if we pray right, eventually we’ll get God to give us what we want. The fallacy with that message is that even if he doesn’t give instant service, it does make God into the celestial bellhop, and that if God fails to answer our prayers pretty much the way we want it is because we haven’t prayed adequately. Where does that leave the parent of a dying child? Where does that leave someone who lives in a war zone or suffers from a terrible accident? I hope you hear me clearly. This judge is not like God at all. Jesus does preface the parable by telling the disciples that it is about prayer, and it is. But what if God is more like the widow? What if the point is not so much that we should be persistent but that God already is, and that we’re the ones who come around and offer ourselves in response to his persistence. Maybe the point of both of these stories is about God’s relentless engagement of us, about how we receive God’s grace because of God’s persistence. To be in relationship with us, God is willing to ambush us in the darkest places of our lives, willing to hold us against all our might, willing to leave us with a limp to remember him by if that’s what it takes for us to know we belong to him. God is willing to be as obnoxious as the widow, to call us again and again, no matter how hard we try to ignore him, until we, like the unjust judge, give in. God badgered Anne Lamott like that. She is the former drug addict and alcoholic, now a self-avowed Jesus freak and author of Traveling Mercies and Bird by Bird, wonderful books that I hope many of you have read. She had no use for Jesus in her life, until she came upon a little black Presbyterian church when she was hung over and recovering from another abortion. She’d sit outside that church and listen to the people sing. She even dared to walk inside and sit in the back row but she leave before the service was over so she didn’t have to meet the people. But one day, when she got home to the houseboat she lived in, she realized that Jesus had followed her home like a stray cat that was mewing mercilessly to be let in. I can’t quote her in church, but she said, All right bleep bleep bleep, come in. Ask her now. Jesus is her best friend. Jesus is the Lord of her life and her reason for living. She’s still a very complicated person, just like Jacob, who has not cleaned up her language and she has strongly held political opinions not all of us would agree with, but she clings to God as strongly as God clings to her. You all know that until after November 11 I’m not allowed to preach a sermon that is not about stewardship. You’d fire me, wouldn’t you? Seriously, this is about stewardship, and I’m not narrowing it down to the capital campaign or the annual pledge drive. I’m talking about stewardship that is ultimately about how we live our lives, and I preach that 52 Sundays a year. I hope somebody has noticed. It is about how this God who tackles us in the blackest hour of the night, this God who will badger us, pester us, nag us, follow us home and clobber us with bricks if we don’t pay attention to the pebbles he throws at us, it is about how this God loves us relentlessly and wants only our love in return. Our love that is not afraid to embrace him with all the strength we’ve got. Our love that is not afraid to let go of material possessions. Our love that is not conditional. Our love that holds nothing back because everything we have is a gift from God given with utter abandon by a God who is willing to be foolish, to be absolutely desperate, who was willing to die on a cross and to be raised from the dead, to come to us in an absolutely unfathomably illogical story that is profoundly true to bring us to the knowledge that we are made in his image. We are all made to be so much better, so much kinder, so much more giving and loving than anything we can imagine. God loves us this much and is willing to give Godself so radically and ridiculously so that we can love ourselves, love our neighbors, and love this world that he has made out of his love. Oh, my God, isn’t that the best news you could ever hear? Amen.
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters