What can we say July 16? 7th after Pentecost

    Genesis 25:19-34. Rebekah’s discomfort with her twins in utero would prove to be nothing compared to her pains over them as grown men. Our text raises important and awkward questions about God and fertility (which I explore in some depth I my book Birth: The Mystery of Being Born). I think it’s important to clarify, even as a sermon aside, that Bible people or at least the writers perceived their lives as entirely hinged to God, so that whatever happened must have been at God’s behest. My OB/GYN friends understand well why infertility happens, and it’s not in any direct or fathomable way God’s infliction of God’s plan or will. No theological problems arise, really, from this assertion, as the gap between the Bible’s worldview and our own is always across such gulfs.

   The twins struggling in Rebekah’s womb: it’s slightly different, but Henri Nouwen’s great story (in Our Greatest Gift) about fraternal twins arguing in their mother’s womb bears repeating here; check it out. The girl tries to persuade her brother there is life after birth, and that there is a mother. He pooh-poohs such a notion. She then reminds him of the painful squeezes they experience – which she believes are getting them ready for this better place where they’ll see their mother face to face. Lovely stuff.

   Our story is lovely in its earthiness. They were “quiet, living in tents.” You let that linger. And then the family dynamics – hardly a family to emulate! Jacob is the mama’s boy; Isaac and Rebekah have their favorites. The famous Alan Bennett “On the Fringe” comedy routine pokes fun at the text – and I suspect the storytellers who passed all this along before it landed in Genesis, and throughout history, there’s a chuckle in here somewhere. Maybe at Jacob’s expense. I wonder if a sermon would dare to name gender stereotypes and how they lead to misperception and trouble.

   I wonder, given where we are in 2023, if these unidentical, combative twins might mirror race, or political ideology in our country - or traditionalists and progressives in United Methodism. Black and white, Progressives and Conservatives, clearly kin... and yet so different, so implacable, so ill-equipped to get along. Yet Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper was that we would be One. It wasn't a command, but a prayer - and the enabling of oneness was to come the next day in his crucifixion, and in the sending of that Spirit he promised right before he prayed. Esau and Jacob are at odds for years - but at the end of the story, even these two reconcile. 

    I'm drawn to speak of race - noting our genetic closeness (blacks and white virtually as identical as twins...), yet our sibling rivalry type division - perhaps explained in a fascinating way by Lloyd King, a man Studs Terkel interviewed for his book Race. King said our problem isn't that we hate each other. Rather it's that we love each other. Like a marriage that got off to a rocky start, we think we might prefer separate lives so we don't kill each other. But we really do love each other.

   The lentil stew: always remember Esau when you eat lentils, anywhere, anytime! He sought immediate gratification over long term goods – but we can’t praise Jacob for being far-sighted. He’s atrocious, a tad wicked, ripping off his own brother, defying Psalm 133.

   Psalm 119:105, incidentally, is the cadence we use after the Scripture reading each week in our contemporary service!

   Romans 8:1-11. I’ve often thought that if Paul wrote only Romans 8, and nothing else, we would still praise him as our grandest theologian. What a chapter! Beginning with the simplest, most crucial declaration: “There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus.” Churches have spewed, and still spew, endless volumes of condemnation – and many, like myself, have become adept at self-condemnation. None of this is of God.

   Notice verse 8: “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” – which implies you are so amazing, no matter how small you might be fooled into thinking you are, that you can actually please God! I am fond of Michael Gorman’s new commentary and his wisdom on this text: “In Romans 8, the Spirit is clearly the Spirit of cruciformity,” a “cross-shaped participation in Christ.” “Life in the Spirit is a life of joyful, resurrection-infused cruciformity.” I had to read and re-read that slowly. Joyful resurrection-infused cruciformity?! Is this an oxymoron? Irony? Paradox? And Gorman brings to resolution what he argued about the “I” in the previous lection: “The introspective, frustrated ‘I’ of Romans 7 has become the liberated, united ‘we’ of Romans 8.” I’d not noticed Paul’s shift from 1^st person singular to the possessive plural!

    This liberated “we” is God’s new family, united with God as our Abba, intimate father. So lovely and tender! We see here “in” and “with” modes of participation – reminding me of Sam Wells’s case that the most important theological word in the Bible is “with”: God is with us, and thus we are with one another, and with others. Notice also for Paul, here, grace not only forgives sin, but “defeats the power of sin.” It’s medicinal. It heals and liberates. Thankfully, verse 11 appears in our funeral liturgy – as it should.

   I love preaching on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, Jesus’ parable of the sower. Every few years, when this text appears, I get a bag of seeds and fling them around the sanctuary as I’m preaching (you can watch one example here!). My history with this text goes back to a summer internship I did during seminary. The pastor, Marion Crooks, began his sermon by singing “What Kind of Soil Am I?” (to the tune of “What Kind of Fool Am I?”). He asked Am I thorny, a barren road, or fertile soil for God’s Word? Great sermon. But years later I read lots of commentaries on the parables, and they all were obsessed with the weirdness of this sower – which must have been Jesus’ point. What kind of sower is this? I might sing. Willing to waste seed, not frugal, downright profligate – like grace.

   In my sermon last time, I spoke of my first rural appointment where I attempted a vegetable garden. I measured seed, bought just enough, planted so very carefully – and as unlike Jesus’ sower as possible. The surprise came when my carefully planted squash was mediocre – but then I had what country folk call “volunteer squash.” I must have spilled some seed in an unplowed area just outside my garden – and that was the fabulously productive squash. Why? There’s power in that seed. There’s power in the Gospel. You never know where it’ll spring up.

   I make this a parable about church life. We are so careful. We measure predicted results. We don’t risk much. Then Jesus lures us to be like this sower, flinging it around everywhere, trying any and everything. So what if stuff doesn’t work? It’s always been that way. But then you get volunteer squash people where you least expect it. And you’ve embodied as a church what the grace which founded the church is like, not measured, or plunked on the likely ones, but strewn all over the place.

   How lovely of Jesus, by the way, to be preaching and find his illustrative material in a day laborer working in a field behind him. Millet's painting (above) captures the peculiar beauty of such everyday labor. Van Gogh did his own cover of the Millet. He'd started into the ministry before becoming a brilliant painter; he wrote that "I have sometimes had a lesson from a German reaper that was of more use to me than one in Greek." The simple observation of labor, so lovely, inherently godly, worth noting with no moral in a sermon. 

   I’d add that scholars generally regard Jesus’ explanations of his parables as later interpolations. They usually are pretty lame, like explaining a joke, or taking the rough edges off a bawdy story. In the case of the sower though, the interpretation isn’t so bad, especially part 3, where it is “the cares of the world and the love for money that choke the word.” Indeed. Back to What kind of soil am I? or maybe rather, What kind of world is this where the Word of the crazy, generous Sower is always being swept aside?

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   Check out my book Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week - in which I explore each act of weekly worship, and then how that act is lived out between Sundays. Great group study (people tell me!).