A wee hiatus

Now into the summer, so sermon posts will be erratic for a few months as I tend to try out different things at this time of year and not all of them are bloggable! Hope you manage to get a little time off yourselves - God bless you, wherever you are.

The Magnificent Defeat

That same night Jacob got up, took his two wives, his two concubines, and his eleven children, and crossed the River Jabbok. After he had sent them across, he also sent across all that he owned, but he stayed behind, alone.


That last phrase hangs in the air, and it’s meant to, I think.

I imagine Jacob standing still for a long time, watching as the caravans of his people and his animals trudged off into a future he couldn’t control; the usual hubbub of noise strangely subdued as evening took a firm hold of the sky and wrung the last vestiges of colour out of it. He watched them go, alone.

Alone but for the babbling waters of the river, the wind in the rushes, and the calling of the night birds.

And there must have come a moment when he turned away from where they were bound and turned back to the business for which he had remained behind.

And what that business was, the writer gives us no clue. But there’s little doubt that taking stock and remembering how he had got to this point in his life were part of what he had stayed for.

I imagine him perched on a large boulder overlooking the river as the sun sets. And though I know it’s anachronistic, I picture him drawing deep on a cigarette and cupping its glow in his hands as he slowly sighs the smoke out into the night air. He’s a man with a lot to reflect on.

For a man whose name - or new name, Israel – has entered into the pantheon of history Jacob was pretty far from the paragon of virtue we expect our spiritual heroes to be.

He was said to have emerged from the womb grabbing his older twin brother by the heel – that’s the literal meaning of the name Jacob – and a good part of his life, up to this point, has been spent in grasping, scheming and fighting.

Jacob was his mothers’ favourite, but he was always second to his brother Esau in his father’s eyes. Esau was the alpha male – the hunter and provider, and being the elder son, the birthright and his father’s blessing would be coming to him.

But Esau was also a fool. He came in famished from the field one day and sold his birthright to Jacob with a binding oath for the sake of a plate of stew. He forfeited the extra money and status that were due him as the elder son for the instant hit of a full belly. Not one of his best decisions.

But Jacob, in this incident, which hardly covers him with glory, learns an important lesson. What he can’t have by right, he can gain for himself through cunning. And a trajectory for his life was set.

Many years later, Jacob’s father Isaac was old and blind and on the verge of death and the time had come to pass on his blessing to Esau. And the cultural significance of that could easily pass us by.

In the world of their day, a blessing was much more than a vague expression of good will towards someone, like wishing them well.

A Father’s blessing was seen as passing on something of the very essence of his soul to the one he blessed; and this final blessing to a firstborn son was the most powerful of all – so much so that once it had been given it could never be taken back.

And though that idea might seem strange to us, we know enough to realise that words spoken in deep love or deep anger set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed.

And chances are you know the story of what happened next– Isaac sends Esau out hunting so he can prepare him one last tasty meal cooked with fresh game, and while he’s away Jacob and his mother hatch a plan. She covers Jacob’s arms in goatskin to make him hairy like his brother, she puts Esau’s robe on him, cooks the kind of tasty food Isaac wanted, and sends Jacob in to steal his brothers blessing.

And poor Isaac is taken in. He gives his blessing to Jacob and Esau is left empty handed. And the empty hands soon curl into fists and Jacob has to run for his life, heading far north to stay with his uncle Laban. And it was on that journey that he had his first encounter with God in a dream at Bethel, where he saw a ladder spanning earth and heaven and angels ascending and descending on it. Jacob’s ladder, we call it.

Once he arrives with Laban, he falls in love with his cousin Rachel and Laban says that Jacob can marry her in return for seven years work on the farm. But Laban was no slouch in the art of deception himself and managed to switch his slightly less desirable daughter Leah for Rachel at the last moment. I’m guessing that veils or copious amounts of wine must have been involved somewhere! So for once the deceiver was deceived. And he had to work another seven years to get the woman he really wanted.

Needless to say, his relationship with his Father-in-law wasn’t exactly cordial after that and things only got worse when thanks to some creative animal husbandry, Jacob managed to get his flocks to thrive at the expense of Laban’s.

Eventually things got so bad between them that Jacob decided to do a runner and head back home, knowing full well that at some point he would have to face the wrath of his brother.

And that’s where we find him in today’s reading: right on the cusp of that encounter he’s been dreading for years. Esau is coming out to meet him and he has 400 men with him.

And Jacob sits alone, on a rock by the river Jabbok. Fearing the worst; fearing for his life, and the lives of his household, who at that very moment could well be being slaughtered.

Jacob, the arch-manipulator, the cunning strategist has come to the end of his own considerable resources. And he sits there as helpless in the face of what’s about to happen as any man could possibly be.

And it’s then that God barrels into him and knocks him flying. And so begins a scrap that makes John Wayne and Victor McLaglen’s fight scene in the Quiet Man seem like a storm in a teacup.

What are we to make of the strange account of what happens next?

Parts of the story seem almost mythic – the business of the assailant having to be gone before daybreak sounds like the old legends of demons or spooks who can’t stand the daylight. What do we make of the killer karate move that dislocates somebody’s hip with one punch? And if Jacob’s attacker were God, why did God find it so hard to overcome him and get away from him? And why does he never actually say that he IS God? Read the text carefully and you'll see that's the case.

This is all very odd.

And I found myself wondering if it’s possible that the attacker was an ordinary man, but Jacob gave this encounter such significance and weight it was as though God himself were wrestling with him?

Indeed, there’s a part of me that wonders if this attacker, hidden in the darkness of night, mightn’t have been Esau himself. He knew Jacob was on his way. He was probably longing for revenge. This feud had always been about the two of them – maybe Esau wanted to settle it one-to-one. Mano-a-mano as they say in the movies?!

Was having Jacob beg for his blessing some kind of compensation for losing his Father’s blessing all those years ago?

Was he keen to get away before dawn because he wanted to get one over on Jacob without being recognised?

And when Jacob said of this event “I saw God face to face” did he mean it literally, or metaphorically? Was that just a poetic way of saying that as he wrestled with his enemy he knew his life was in the balance?

I think it’s fascinating that when the brothers meet in the light of the next day, one of the things Jacob says to Esau is that to see his face is like seeing the face of God. Did Jacob realise in that moment just who he had been wrestling with all night? Did he recognise God at work through the agency of Esau's wrath?

Just a theory. Drop it if you don’t like it.

Here’s something more important to hold onto from our story this morning:

Like Jacob, sitting on a boulder by the river Jabbok, there are times in our lives when we get to the end of ourselves. No matter how resourceful or wise or cunning or able we might be, there come times when we can get no further under our own steam. We are literally at our wits end.

We cannot make that relationship work. We cannot unravel the mess that life has become. We cannot deal with the anger about what happened. We cannot hold things together any longer. We cannot fix the problem and it refuses to go away.

These times come to us all, believer and unbeliever alike.

And in some ways those times are harder for the believer than the unbeliever because we believe in a God who is supposed to be good! So where is he? What kind of a God sits back and lets this kind of thing happen?

We grow angry – and the wrestling begins. Days, weeks, months, maybe years of it. Backwards and forwards. Scrabbling to lay hold of some truth in the darkness; to get a foothold on the scree; to catch a clear glimpse of this God that we are struggling with.

But here’s the thing that God’s people have found throughout the generations and that’s testified to in so many places in the Scriptures, though it’s seen most clearly in today’s story – it’s the wrestling that brings the blessing. That brings us to a deeper understanding of the God we worship.

We don’t have time this morning for me to run through the roll call of the Old and New Testament giants who discovered that truth, but think of how Abraham must have wrestled when God commanded him to sacrifice his son Isaac; how Moses must have wrestled when God told him to go back to Egypt and set the people free; how the Psalmists wrestled with the seeming unfairness of life and the injustices they saw around them; how Jesus wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying it could happen in some other way – any other way.

But they hung on. They refused to let go. And spent and exhausted though they were in the struggle, they found their blessing. God provided a ram for Abraham’s sacrifice and Isaac was spared; Moses found the strength to stand before Pharaoh and deliver the people; the Psalmists found deeper insights into the nature of the God they worshipped; Jesus found peace, and committed his spirit into the hands of the God who can raise the dead.

It’s in the wrestling that we find the blessing.

Perhaps you don’t need to hear that today. You might not be ready for this word. But one day you will be – because there will come a time when you find yourself like Jacob - alone, and at the end of your own resources. It comes to us all.

But maybe that’s where some of you are this morning. Something has happened that’s brought you to the end of yourself and called into question your whole idea of who God is and where life’s going.

I want you to believe me this morning when I tell you that that can be a good place to be. Because in the struggle to understand, to hold on and keep faith, we come to believe in a deeper way and see God with new eyes. The magnificent defeat of our anger, our doubt, or our naivety is a victory, both for God and for us.

But we don’t come through it unscathed. No-one ever does when they tangle with God.

The sun was bleeding over the horizon as Jacob gathered himself, dragged himself to his feet, and set off in pursuit of his family and his brother.

Limping, as from now on he would always limp. But blessed with a new name, and a different identity. Jacob the grasper had become Israel, the one who grapples with God; broken in body, but sounder in soul, and ready to face whatever the future might hold because he had wrestled with the one who holds the future.



(Title, though not sermon, due to Fred Buechner)

Pentecost, Frankly.

To be perfectly honest, getting a flatmate had never been on my agenda.

I was quite happy in my own space, king of my own domain. It was messy and chaotic, but it was my mess and my chaos and it was great having the freedom to leave the place as I wanted it. It was my stuff, my story, my home.

I’d known Frank from a distance for a good while, we moved in the same circles and had spoken together quite a few times, and though I liked what I’d seen there was something about him that left me a little uncomfortable. He seemed just a bit too perfect.

He had that easy way with people that I coveted; he seemed to be at home with everyone which meant he was either fake or too good to be true. I’d watched him at parties; seen him move between the different cliques with ease, and wondered where his allegiances really lay. Wondered where that self-confidence came from. He certainly didn’t give the appearance of being anything special.

The day he arrived, I almost didn’t hear the knocking – I had the telly up loud because I was working in the kitchen – but on the edge of my hearing I thought I picked up a rhythmic thumping and went into the hallway to explore. A fist was softly hammering on my door. It was Frank. I hid my surprise behind a smile that didn’t reach my eyes.

I’m not sure who told him there might be a vacancy. I’d flirted with the idea of sharing the flat for a while and maybe I’d said something in passing – these things have a way of getting around. But it’s a whole other thing having someone standing on your front doorstep with a rucksack on his back and asking, in a very matter-of-fact fashion, if he can move in.

What can you do?

The truth was, I had space aplenty. I just didn’t want anyone invading it.

But in that split second, confronted with the 6 cubic feet of another human being filling my doorway, my brain went absent without leave and I found myself saying – “sure, come on in; you can stay as long as you like”.

And so it began.

It’s strange how having another person living with you in your home can change the way you see things. It’s not that they start nit-picking or dropping those dreadfully obvious hints that they want something done instead of just coming right out and saying it. Frank had the good grace never to do that.

But with him around I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before. The toilet door that didn’t shut properly; the piles of books in the hall I’d been stepping over and around for weeks; the habit I’d developed of always having the radio or the telly on for the sake of having a bit of noise about the place.

He never once said anything, but I began to see my place, and to a degree, myself, through different eyes. I began to notice things, and ever-so-slowly, began to change the way I behaved. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

Frank was around the place a lot – he worked from home – and we soon settled into a routine where at some point during the day we’d sit down for a coffee and a blether. I quickly realised that he was a good listener, and over time he became a good friend.

He’d listen to my tirades when things were getting me down in my work or my relationships. He had the good sense to allow me to let off some steam, and then when I’d calmed down, we’d pick our way through what had happened to try and get to the nub of it.

Sometimes, having listened to me rant, he’d call me an idiot; sometimes he’d assure me that I wasn’t an idiot, despite what everyone else was suggesting.

He was Frank by name and Frank by nature: he tended to speak the truth whether I wanted to hear it or not. Didn’t make him a comfortable person to be around at times; but even when we exchanged hard words I knew that deep down he was rooting for me and that I could trust him.

We talked a lot, especially in those early days, but I learned almost as much from just watching him going about his life. That ease I’d noticed at parties wasn’t fake. He was an enthusiast when it came to people.

I remember one night we were out for a meal with some friends and he got into conversation with one of the waitresses: he wasn’t chatting her up – he was just chatting. The rest of us had done what convention dictates and treated her as a waitress – Frank treated her as a person and in his company she opened up like a flower, laughing and joking with us, making recommendations, joining in the banter as she cleared the tables and brought more drinks. He did that kind of thing all the time.

It’s hard to define, but Frank was one of those rare people who bring a little more zest and colour into things. He didn’t take life at face value; he liked getting to depth. He loved to savour the richness of people and experiences. He noticed things, and in noticing them, he gave them worth.

At first our friendship was pretty one-sided, I guess. I did most of the talking and learning and changing, he did most of the listening. But after a while it felt like we were on a more even footing: never equals, but allies. I stopped offloading so much and began to listen more; trying to find out what motivated him, what is was that he really wanted in life. He seemed to value having someone to share his thoughts and his plans with.

And between you and me, I wonder if what brought Frank to my door that day wasn’t his own need, but a need he perceived in me. And I wonder if this whole thing wasn’t some kind of a ruse, cooked up so that Frank could get alongside me and teach me how to live. God knows, he has his work cut out. But I’m glad that he took on the challenge.

****************

True story. Or not!?
95% true, if you substitute the name ‘Holy Spirit’ for the name ‘Frank’.

Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day in the Church’s Year when we remember the remarkable events that we heard read to us from the book of Acts. The disciples, gathered together in Jerusalem, have a profound experience as the Spirit of God, who had been withheld from all but a few select individuals in Old Testament times, is poured out on the infant church in tongues of speech and tongues of fire, to their own amazement, and that of the thousands of Jewish men and women gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost.

In one sense, it was the birth of the church and it’s rightly celebrated as such.

But it’s very easy to get distracted by the fireworks of Pentecost Sunday, and the church often has. Parts of the worldwide church want every day to be Pentecost – they strain and strive after profound spiritual experiences; and there’s nothing wrong with that, I guess, as long as the spiritual experiences don’t become the focus.

When anything other than God becomes the focus of our worship, we risk making it into an idol, and we’re especially prone to idolise our feelings. We go looking for that experience, or that feeling in worship, and if we don’t find it we assume God’s not there, when he might very well be there, seeing how we cope without the experience we thought we needed.

So some in the church spend their days trying to re-create the feelings or the experience of Pentecost, But there are other parts of the church where folk look back to the first Pentecost like a history lesson. Wasn’t that marvellous what God did back then, the tongues of fire, and the strange languages and all that. Wasn’t it wonderful?!! And the silent majority in the pews think – well maybe it was wonderful, but I wasn’t there to experience it. What’s it got to do with me?

Well in our reading from John’s gospel, Jesus tells us what Pentecost is about for you and me, and it’s not really about the fireworks at all. It’s about Frank, or to give him his Sunday name, the Holy Spirit.

The Scriptures teach that we are all made in God’s image. All human beings are created in the image of God – we share that in common. And as part of that image, we all have spirit – the life force or essence within us that makes us more than bags of meat and bone.

But the Spirit we’re thinking about today is not the individual human spirit, or even the collective spirit we experience from time to time when people gather together in churches, football stadiums, theatres and concert halls.

The Spirit we speak of today is God’s Spirit, as much a part of the Triune God as the Father and the Son. As much a person as the Father and the Son. And the role of the Spirit is to open up to us, in a personal way, the truth about God and the truth about ourselves. And having done so, to help us to change.

There are many words used of the Spirit in the Scriptures – here Jesus uses ‘Helper’ but elsewhere he is spoken of as a Counsellor, or a Companion, or a Guide.

And though the Spirit is around us and at work in the world in countless ways, what Jesus is promising here as he leaves his disciples is something more that that. He’s promising that if we ask God, the Spirit himself will come to live, not near us or around us, but within us.

It’s a preposterous notion. But it’s exactly what Jesus says.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, who will stay with you for ever. He is the Spirit who reveals the truth about God. The world cannot receive him, because it cannot see him or know him. But you know him because he remains with you and is in you”.

There are plenty of new-age spiritualities which – in spite of the evidence of several millennia – still like to think that buried deep in our souls or psyches there’s a god or a goddess just waiting to be unleashed. That’s just Narcissism by another name. It’s all about us.

Christianity makes a different kind of claim, though it’s no less outrageous. Our claim is that the Spirit, knowing full well that we are neither gods nor goddesses, still wants to come and live with us, and will put up with our mess, and get involved in the saga of our lives, so that through his patient persistence we can become the children of God that God always wanted us to be.

He’s a kind of midwife, I guess. Bringing to birth within us all the good things that make for a rich, deep, satisfying God-centred life.

And something you need to know about the Spirit is that he’s a persistent so and so. He’ll stand and knock at a door for ages. But he’ll never batter it down. He was brought up well, you see. He only enters when he’s been invited in.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock” says Jesus in the book of Revelation. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me”.

Jesus, Frank, the Spirit – it’s all the same, really. It’s God, softly hammering his fist against the door of your life and trying to get in.

Don’t be distracted by the Pentecost Fireworks. It’s really not about the tongues of fire and the funny languages. Marvellous though they were, they were never the focus. The miracle that Pentecost reveals is that the God who seemed so far beyond, is ready to make his home in you.

There’s plenty of space in there.

The question is, are you ready to share it?

Mary's Prayer

For a few years now I've been blessed with a wee group of folk who lead intercessions and put them together for a Sunday. They bring different voices and different insights to our worship and I am really grateful for their input. This was Mary Havard's offering on Sunday on the theme of 'change'.

Let us pray

Dear Father we come before you today in prayer for those who are experiencing a change in their lives. Please help them in faith to look forward not back.
What has been is past, opportunity lies ahead.

Change can come in many ways:
loss or change in work,
relocating to a new house
even moving to a new area.
A bereavement,
the arrival of a baby in the family.

Please dear Lord
give courage and support to those in need of it,
for you are always with us.

We all have to adapt to change,
to disappointment and sorrow
and we remember the good things in life,
friendship, companionship and love;
the greatest of these is love.

We give thanks for that which brings joy and happiness.

In the circumstances of world changes which have come due to recession,
we find many changes in our own lives.
We cannot deny that this has been caused by avarice and greed.
Father please help us to be thankful for what we have.

We pray for those who are working for recovery.
For those who have left family and friends
as they bravely risk life and limb for peace in theatres of war.
So often we hear of those who make the ultimate sacrifice,
and  we pray for those at home who are left with the pain of loss.

The hymn “Look forward in Faith”
is a sign post to dealing with changes in life
and reminds us, Lord, that you are steadfastly there for us.

We give you our thanks in the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.