What can we say July 23? 8th after Pentecost

    Genesis 28:10-19a. A great text to linger over little details, not tying it all up in a bow, just letting it be there in front of people. Jacob came to “a certain place” – and it’s nebulous, meaning a specific place, or really just any place – and why? “He stayed there for the night, for the sun had set.” Indeed. It eventually gets dark. Your running has its limit, always.

   Jacob is in a desolate place, sleeping out of doors, a stone for his pillow. I might mention St. Francis sleeping on rocks and in caves – which he loved doing, believing it put him closer to God’s most enduring creation, and also in solidarity with Jesus, our ‘rock,’ who slept (or tried to sleep) on that Maundy Thursday night in Caiaphas’s prison.

   Is it over-psychologizing in a sermon to speak of finding yourself in a hard place? A few, like Franklin Roosevelt, do their best all day and then sleep like a baby no matter what. I struggle – and the night hours are the darkest spiritually and mentally. Could it be that, during such harrowing nights, “the Lord was in this place, but I did not know it”? Psalm 56 says “Lord, you have kept count of my tossings” – in the night, when God seems absent or silent or both. 

   To me, this text invites the preacher to make a regular cadence of “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it” throughout the sermon!

   Is it just a dream? Or a mystical reality conveyed through a dream? Jacob sees a ladder – although the Hebrew probably means more like a “ramp.” It’s okay to stick with “ladder,” given “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,” and the shrewd thought from Steven Covey that we spend our lives climbing the ladder of success, but then when we get to the top, we realize the ladder is propped up against the wrong wall.

   Is the church a ladder? Our way to God or God’s way to us? St. Catherine of Siena envisioned the cross as a ladder we climb to get to God the Father.

   So to reflect on “the Lord was in this place, but I did not know it.” Isn’t God there when we aren’t aware, when we aren’t praying or seeking God at all?

 I wrote something of a memoir called Struck From Behind: My Memories of God. It’s not a dull account of my career or life, but a collection of memories, of ways God was there when I didn’t realize it at the time, but only in retrospect, years later (playing on Thoreau's "Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark"). I love inviting people into this kind of exercise: take some time to think back over your life. When was God in some place and you didn’t know it? The preacher could play with this one all day.

   Lots of weirdness in family and personal memory! Jacob had more than his share, parents with favorites, brutal sibling rivalry – and way more dysfunction around the corner with his wives, concubines, and foolish children. God is still “in this place,” maybe especially in such broken, wounded places. If the Lord is in such places, even when we are unaware, then we are invited into the other great prayer Merton offered:  whatever the circumstances, whatever happens, “Lord, let this be my consolation – that wherever I am, You are loved.”

   Jacob was “a border crosser, a man of liminal experiences” (Robert Alter). And this (from my book on the theology of hymns, Unrevealed Until Its Season) – on who’s climbing Jacob’s ladder in the old spiritual / hymn: “Soldiers of the cross! Of course, the old spiritual was thinking one way. But maybe we can jump to the soldiers at the cross, the ones who nailed Jesus to it, the ones snickering, the ones gambling over his clothing. And the ones he forgave, although they didn’t repent or ask for any mercy. Pondering this, the way God showed up to Jacob in his anxious flight from God and goodness, and the way Jesus our ladder to heaven forgave unrepentant soldiers of the cross, we know the only answer to the hymn’s other questions: Sinner, do you love my Jesus? and If you love him, why not serve him?

   Psalm 139 is pitch perfect for this theme, this experience: on the run from God, but – dang – can’t quite elude the Almighty, the All-compassionate one.

   Romans 8:12-25. There’s just so much Gospel here! Verse 18: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed to us” – which is so true and the ultimate prophetic word. But when I spoke at the Festival of Homiletics in May (watch here!), I spoke on how clergy can give too much hope, or too much hope in false things, or an excess of hope that is a kind of theft. This idea was prompted by Kate Bowler’s fabulous thought in No Cure for Being Human: “Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered, or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present.” I’ve seen clergy offer a skinny feeling hope that is more misguided optimism to families facing horrors. I’ve known clergy have urged the downtrodden or oppressed to stay in their place because, hey, heaven will be so great you’ll forget all this! I alluded to Blanche Moore, a woman in North Carolina who slipped arsenic into her husband’s and then boyfriend’s food until they died – making me wonder if by injecting overdoses of hope we’ve killed the church.

   We should preach more often on “Creation sighing, in the pangs of futility… the whole creation groaning in labor pains.” All the bad news, weather disasters, pandemics, vast hordes of people displaced and miserable: instead of trying to justify why a good God would cause or allow such things, maybe we parse all the arrggghhhhh out there as creation in the birth pangs – and so it’s weirdly hopeful, although the realization of that hope isn’t any time soon. Back also to what Henri Nouwen wrote (see last week’s blog!) about the twins arguing in their mother’s womb about whether there’s life after birth, or birth at all, or a mother. The clincher is when the girl asks is her brother notices those painful squeezes. He has, of course, and calls them quite unpleasant. She says They are getting us ready for another place, a space of light and freedom, where we will see our mother face to face.

   Then – and it almost seems to easy, which is a warning flare!!! – Jesus and his alluring habit of addressing God as Abba, Father. Jesus did – and Paul picks up on this in profound ways. Notice it isn’t that you just decide, Oh, I’ll call God Abba. It is the Spirit that enables and empowers this “cry” (so it’s a plea for help?). It’s not the word Abba that carries any magic; it’s the deep sense of the intimate relationship. We are children of God, no small thing… and then heirs (getting better…) – but then Paul has to add “provided we suffer with him.” Not “in case, by some remote chance, we suffer.”

   God as Abba explicates Genesis 28 and Psalm 139. It is precisely because God is such an Abba that he materializes, he is mystically present, always, everywhere, even if unsought, unwelcomed, misunderstood. I think of Dar Williams’s moving song about her daughter, envisioning the day she will send her out into the world on her own: “You’ll fly away / but take my hand until that day / So when they ask how far love goes / When my job’s done you’ll be the one who knows.”

   Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.    One way the Lord is present and we do not realize or understand it, thankfully, is in the life of the church, broken and riddled with lunacy as it may be – and including the churches we think are irreparably flawed. Matthew 13, the wheat and the tares: I hope that the scholars who say the ‘interpretation’ in 36-43 doesn’t emanate from Jesus but is spin from early church leaders are correct. Jesus’ lovely, realistic, merciful parable is twisted into something ominous and threatening.

   The question in Jesus’ simple, unexplained parable isn’t Am I wheat? Or tares? You’re both, of course – The story is about the community, the people of God. The Church is wheat, and tares, both, and we like to think we know who’s who, as if you could simply put a sticker on each person’s nametag so we could accurately identify who’s who. Tares? Sit in the back on the left… Wheat? Up front, on the right… We’re so confused: can we even distinguish wheat from tares? We assume we’re the wheat and those guys who are so wrong are the tares – grieving Jesus’ heart.

   Churches divide, despite Jesus’ prayer for unity on the last night of his life (John 17). Ephraim Radner, in his dense but wonderful A Brutal Unity, speaks of the solidarity to which we are called: “Solidarity is about giving oneself over to another across an otherwise entrenched and immovable boundary… In doing this, we confront the ‘otherness’ of God even in the otherness of” the one from whom we are separated.” 

   Robert Farrar Capon points out, "This is no way to run a farm. Maybe Jesus was just not as good a gardener as he was a carpenter... Programs designed to get rid of evil are doomed to do exactly what the farmer suggests they will do. Since good and evil commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings, the only result of a dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody." He suggests that the devil's best strategy is to sucker good people into taking up arms against one another, while he sits back and laughs.

   Images are our only chance to help people imagine a diverse, divided church staying together. I was vacationing in Scotland and lucked into a conversation at a pub with a shepherd. Like a professional. One question I asked was Why do you never see just sheep, or just goats, but always both? He replied, We’ve found over the centuries that they just do better together.

   Francis Schaeffer, the godfather of evangelicalism, wrote about the way we fail to love within the church: Christians “rush in, being very, very pleased to find other men’s mistakes. We build ourselves up by tearing other men down.” We are to exercise love in even the toughest situations – the obligation of “loving our brothers when it costs us something, loving them even under times of tremendous emotional tension, loving them in a way the world can see.”

   I love this scene in Stephen Bransford's novel, Riders of the Long Road. Silas Will, a circuit rider back in the 18th century, was grilled with hard questions by a young man about God, evil and suffering. His response? 

 

   "'God sees much more than we see. He sees the beginning and the end of things and He is doing what is best from all that He sees. God would never kill a child. But there is an invisible war that goes on around us while we live here on earth. God promised to destroy the Devil.' The young man asked, 'Why won't God finish it now?' Silas was thoughts for a moment, and then suddenly leaped up, bent over with excitement. 'They asked Christ the same question.  Look here, watch down here.' He bent over. 'Christ said the Kingdom is like a sower who sowed good seed, but in the night his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. See, here are the good grasses' - his hands stroked the grass - 'and this pennyroyal here is like the weed.' One hand closed upon a large mint-leaves pennyroyal stem. 'Look at it, and look what happens when I pull it out.'  Silas yanked the pennyroyal up by the roots. It exploded from the ground, showering both of them with dirt from its spreading roots. 'This is what Christ said. The people urged Him to pluck all the weeds from the wheat field, but He said, no, let them grow together because to pull them out now will destroy much innocent wheat. See the grasses that have died here because I pulled up the pennyroyal? We know pennyroyal roots grow under ground, tangled beneath the other grasses. God knows the roots of evil grown around every sickness since Adam and Eve. Yes, God can purge the world of sin and death right now, but He doesn't because all have sinned and we are all so tangled with the corruption of sin that He would destroy us and the whole world in that selfsame moment. What kind of God could do that?'"