The Rector's sermons for August are on this page. Please scroll down to see them all, with the most recent sermon coming first.

Pentecost 15, Proper 16A 8/24/08      St. Augustine ’s Church

Rev’d Jennifer Phillips  Ex.1:8-2:10;Rom.12:1-8;Mtt.16:13-20

Tell the truth now, who, before hearing this morning’s reading from Exodus, would have had a clue who Puah and Shiphrah were? These are heroes of the Torah, the two Hebrew midwives who schemed to outwit the Pharaoh reigning over Egypt in his genocidal intention to control his population of immigrant slaves by murdering all the boy-children. It’s a perennial story: those in power profiting off the labor of a minority of those they regard as different from themselves, getting worried when that minority reproduces more quickly than themselves (and in oppressed and very poor populations, families tend to have more children to try to make ends meet, or because their other options are limited, or because they lose so many babies to sickness or dangerous delivery - now as then!) The midwives use the mythology of the rulers against them: “these slave women are tougher than the delicate wives of the aristocrats, they say. They give birth themselves before the midwives need be sent for,” and the rulers buy their story which feeds their own vanity, their own prejudices. This is the backdrop for the birth of Moses the great prophet, born as a slave, and saved to lead his people because of the quick action and courage of Puah and Shiphrah of blessed memory, without whom the Israelites would never have crossed the Red Sea to freedom. The fact that we know their names, that they were recorded but the name of the great Pharaoh was not: that, too is a wonder!

If you grew up in Sunday school, you will know the story of Moses so beloved to children: a baby laid in a basket woven of reeds and sealed with pitch, set afloat down the Nile to take his chances -- would the crocodiles get him? Would he drown? Or might some kind woman who comes to that area of the river in the early morning to bathe find and adopt him? But did anyone talk to you about Shiphrah and Puah and their extraordinary courage? Not to mention the mother of Moses so determined to save her child’s life? (Rabbinic tradition names her Jochebed.) She was canny enough to know she could say with a straight face in perfect truth to Pharaoh: “Sure, I did what you commanded and put the child in the river.”

 And that other woman whose name we never learn: in the wonderful irony of the story, it is Pharaoh’s own daughter who comes and discovers the baby. She knows it is a Hebrew child, and knows just why he has been abandoned. One of the baby Moses’ sisters is a maid servant to this young woman (was this Miriam, who became the great leader of her people and a prophet in her own right?) - maybe it was she who made sure Pharaoh’s daughter would bathe at just that spot on just that morning; or maybe the princess knew exactly who this baby belonged to and took pity because her maid was his sister. In any event, Moses’ own mother was taken in as his wetnurse and paid for the job. Talk about subverting the plan of the powerful! There is a whole collaboration of women in this story to save life, against the decree of the Pharaoh - their web of determination subverts the plan of the empire and changes history. So Moses became part of Pharaoh’s household by adoption. And Shiphrah and Puah who began it all? The text says that they feared God -- their trust in God was unshakable -- and that God blessed them and made them mothers of great households in their own right; the Great Rabbi Rashi said “The midwives became the founders of dynasties of priests, Levites and kings.”

What was the Pharaoh thinking, that first of all he could get away with a quiet genocide - not rounding up his adult slaves and simply killing them, but by practicing selective infanticide by proxy? What could be more likely to breed violence and revolt than killing all the sons? Yet it is a technique still practiced by despots. What was he thinking, that he would try to employ senior midwives (personally, in a private audience with them!) to go against everything they were trained to do, that they found their identity in doing: bringing new life safely into the world? Why would he assume they would comply-- just because he was the most powerful guy in the country? Arrogant enough to be pretty stupid as a ruler, and to sow the seed of his own downfall! Blind to the motivations and actions of the women and slaves who surrounded him and upon whose labor his empire was supported!

In this astonishing episode in the Torah, God could almost take the day off, as a group of women -- Israelite and Egyptian, young and old -- take over, acting to preserve life, to open the door to the future, and to move the divine story of salvation forward. They carried the blessing for the people. Their conspiracy of compassion undid the powers and principalities that thought to oppress and obliterate them. This is at least as important a story as the much better known tale of the man Moses confronting Pharaoh as God reigns down twelve plagues of vermin and sickness on the Egyptians - for Moses, God had to work very hard indeed; no day off!

What do they say to us, these foremothers in faith - Shiphrah, Puah, Miriam, Jochebed, and the daughter of the Pharaoh? Perhaps that when all the powers of the world line up against you, dealing death, that trust in God, wit, determination, and working together even with unlikely allies can subvert death-dealers and serve life. Perhaps that, as the concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl famously said, even in the worst of circumstances the ultimate freedom is the freedom to choose who one will be in the midst of suffering and powerlessness. Purveyors of death operate by trying to coopt those less powerful through the changing of their deepest patterns of thought. They are those enemies who inflict pain and then say “where now is your God?” They are those who try to use the hands of children against their parents and parents against their children, of doctors against their patients, of students against their teachers, as proxies of violence. They are those who spread lies and operate out fear, despite all their pomp and clout.

But there is a core of personhood, deep humanity, with the capacity to serve life and trust God, for those individuals who are ready to take the risks and bear the consequences of so choosing. This is what Paul was talking about when he wrote the the followers of Jesus in Rome: “I appeal to you, sisters and brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good, and acceptable, and perfect.” And he goes on to say, don’t be divided off from one another by the false discourse of the powerful, for we, with diverse gifts and opportunities, are members of a single body; we are one body in Christ. That is the reality; believe in that.

Puah and Shiphrah  are the midwives and mothers-in-faith of all those brave people in history who refuse to become murderers despite the attempts of those with the power of life and death over them to coerce them. They are the ancestors of those who operated the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves, those who smuggled Jews out of the ghettos of Europe, those who slipped bread to prisoners behind fences in so many wars, those who hid the children so they could not be abducted as soldiers by the enemy, those who refused (then and now) to give up the cause of the poor and helpless because governments tell them there are no resources, the poor are unworthy of their effort or deserving of their fate, and that their own children will suffer if they act for the children of others. They say to us: “Do not believe that your hands are tied and you are helpless to do right because someone more powerful tells you so! Do not tire or lose heart in doing good. Do not be afraid of those who can crush the body but cannot destroy the soul,” (just as Jesus was to say after them.) And like those hopeful people who bring together young people from Israel and Palestine, from Northern Ireland and the Republic, and from both sides of other entrenched conflicts because they believe in the eternal and absolute possibility of peace, do not assume that the children of your enemy must be your enemy as well; conspire, breathe together, share one holy Spirit, one holy breath, and you can take down walls the way the little weeds take apart concrete pavements, a centimeter of life and growth at a time.

 

Pentecost 14, Proper 15A 8/17/08              St. Augustine ’s Church

Rev’d Jennifer Phillips     Gen.45:1-15;Rom.11:1-32;Mtt.15:10-28

What, if anything, keeps you from forgiving those who have done your harm?

One of the profound learnings of the 20th century after the Holocaust was the huge importance of listening to the victims of violence and sufferings. That action epitomized by the intention to silence and absolutely obliterate whole populations from the earth and from history taught those who came afterward to look back and to listen, even for the silenced voices and to make room for them to speak from their unmarked graves. And so for every genocide since!

In the Scriptures, the voice of the victims of great suffering is preserved as the voice of lament. From the poet’s hand, the voices of those trodden down by the powerful, those sent to the grave by outnumbering packs of enemies, those languishing in prisons, those starving, sick, forsaken, wounded, and alone, are raised in question and in protest. “My life is wasted with grief, and my years with sighing!”(31); “I am utterly numb and crushed; I wail because of the groaning of my heart!” (38); “Why do you stand so far off, Lord, and hide yourself in time of trouble?”(10); “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (13); “All day long they mock me and say to me where now is your God?” (42); “In the evening, in the morning, and at noonday, I will complain and lament, and God will hear my voice!” (55); “Rescue me from evildoers…see how they lie in wait for my life!” (59);”have you not cast us off, O God?” (60); “I am sinking in deep mire….My eyes have failed from looking for my God!”(69); “Do not cast me off in my old age; nor forsake me when my strength fails!” (71); “How long will the adversary scoff?...Never forget the lives of your poor!” (74); “Will those in the grave rise up and give you thanks?” (88); and above all, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And are so far from my cry and the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the daytime but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest!” (22)

There is intensity, grief, outrage, moral indignation, sarcasm, perplexity, entreaty, and finally a howl of distress and pain, as fresh from ancestors millennia ago as from the voices of those suffering now, weeping over the corpses of their relatives in Georgia and Ossetia, frightened and hungry in the refugee camps of Darfur, searching for the graves of their sons and husbands in Chile, camping beside the ruins of their homes on the Gulf Coast. The wail of lament is coupled with the demand that God show strength and vindicate the helpless ones:“Give judgment for me, Lord!” (26, 43) “Rise up, O Lord; lift your hand…do not forget the afflicted!” (10); “O God of vengeance, show yourself!... Give the arrogant their just deserts.” (94) “When he is judged, let him be found guilty, and let his appeal be in vain! Let his children be fatherless and his wife become a widow.” (109)

Behind the lament is a conviction that God is just and merciful - that these are God’s nature - but that God seems to us slow to act, bewilderingly silent and mysterious; and that the righteous who suffer are entitled to remind God that it is God’s job to act like God in bringing justice. Those who bear appalling harm may even cry out to God for appalling recompense: “Let [my accuser’s]…children be waifs and beggars; let them be driven from the ruins of their homes….Let his descendents be destroyed, and his name be blotted out in the next generation.” (109) “Let hot burning coals fall upon them; let them be cast into the swamp never to rise up again!” (140); “Let them be disgraced and terrified for ever” (83); “Let them fall on the edge of the sword and let them be food for jackals!” (63); “the righteous will be glad when they see the vengeance; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.” (58); “Happy shall he be who takes your babies and dashes them against the rock.” (137). Alas, these are the horrors that we human beings do, and wish God to be complicit with us in -- not what God does. You may have noticed that these bits are often whitewashed out of the Sunday lectionary! That they are preserved in the Psalms allows us to put them on our lips when our hearts are filled with bitterness and rage, trusting that God knows better than to do everything we ask in the despair of the moment, and recalling that our enemies may pray the same prayers against us.

Joseph, whom we meet again at the close of his long story in today’s portion of Genesis, is the victim whose suffering is vindicated, but not through revenge, rather through gaining prosperity and comfort and finally the chance to forswear revenge in favor of reconciliation. I note that the reconciliation comes only after Joseph makes his brothers sweat, fearing that they are to be treated as badly as they treat\ed their youngest sibling. By an elaborate scheme, Joseph arranges for them to be stopped carrying stolen goods he has planted on them, and plots to abduct his youngest brother, but finally he can’t keep up the deception and having mortified and threatened the brothers, he reveals his identity with tears and reassurances -- and that’s where the story we heard today picks up. Today’s Psalm “O how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!” sounds saccharine, even ironic, after this dark and turbulent story of the family of Joseph! But the tale offers the hope that God upholds the innocent sufferer at last, and the larger divine purpose will not be averted by the betrayals and machinations of misbehaving human beings. The victim’s role may be as crucial and compelling as the role of any of those with power - and finally, more so. This does not make the suffering less real, less painful, nor the outrage of the victim less just. Joseph’s brothers, most of them, are no nicer at the end than they were at the start, and likely not much more trustworthy, though they do have the decency to be embarrassed by what they did and to admit the justice of Joseph’s cause. It is clear that Joseph is the one who has gained wisdom, for he realizes that the forgiveness he has withheld is a great weight chiefly to himself. He is the one ready to stop carrying the load of old resentment, just as it was the wronged brother Esau whose heart changes toward reconciliation with the offender, Jacob, in the previous generation. To be free of the continuing suffering for the past, Joseph has only to decide to lay it down -- not to forget it, but to set it aside, and be vulnerable enough to risk new relationship.

So is this a lesson that the abused should just forgive and forget? By no means. And I think this is what the elaborate deception about the planted “stolen” silver cup is about. Is Joseph naïve? No. Joseph tests out how his brothers will respond when the accusation of the theft is demonstrated to be true. They neither run nor pull out weapons to fight, nor do they point the finger of blame at the beloved youngest brother Benjamin in whose bag the cup is found. They admit the right of Joseph to take their lives or make them slaves for betraying his hospitality - and only then does Joseph reveal himself and embrace them. They, too, have grown up over the years and now they are mature enough to receive genuine reconciliation when it is offered to them.

And so, let’s turn to the Gospel according to Matthew, whose lessons track along with the Genesis lesson in an interesting way:

   Jesus is using pretty ribald potty humor in graphic language to make a point. In our Scripture translations it sounds like a rather elegant teaching on character and plumbing. The bottom line is that it is the content of our hearts and minds that are either treasure or kaka (as the Greeks say). 

It is a lovely (and stunning) moment in Matthew when Jesus then proceeds directly to the area of Tyre and Sidon (Canaanite country) where a Syrophonecian woman, a Gentile, accosts Jesus calling him - of all names for a Gentile to choose - “Sir! Son of David!” and crying out for him to have mercy on her because of the suffering of her daughter. Jesus refuses to answer her even a word. Evidently she follows along still pleading. The disciples say something which might mean either, “Release her - send her away” or “give her what she wants and get rid of her” because she keeps bugging us. Jesus speaks rudely about her - for he sees himself as the one called on behalf of the Jewish people. But this upstart foreigner has the gall to worship him - right down on her knees and touching her head to the ground at his feet. How embarrassing is that? He makes a slur about her foreignness - essentially calling her and her household “dogs”, but she refuses to take offense and turns his words into a clever justification for helping her. Surely, she argues, she should be entitled at least to the leftovers of Jesus’ healing work for the Jews. Clearly, Jesus is stunned, stopped in his tracks. Maybe he hears what has just come out of his own mouth as that which threatens to defile him. I picture him reaching down to take her uplifted hands between his own and raise her to her feet. He speaks to her particularity - she has his full attention now. He doesn’t say just “woman” but “O Woman” (the woman), “Your trust is huge! Let it be for you as you desire!” Matthew tells us that from afar, from that moment the sick child was healed. Only after this remarkable and moving story of Jesus’ utter change of mind about the scope of his divine mission does he go up the mountain and work the miraculous feeding of the four thousand-plus with a few loaves and fish. Matthew understands and wants us the hearers to understand that Jesus’ Eucharistic identity - the Sacrament of feeding he both does and is - is not just for the Jews, but for everyone, even the most obvious outsiders. It’s bigger than even Jesus realized at the time.

As Peter and Paul recognized, Christ came as an ambassador sent by God to bring near those who had been at a distance, in other words to join Jew and Gentile, and to reconcile the whole cosmos with God, from whom it and we had become estranged. God’s massive and costly and lovingly gracious work of reconciliation then becomes the model for our own. It is the path to become set free from bondage to sin - our own sin of hardness of heart and the sin of others that binds heavy burdens upon its victims. In our personal woundedness we may be only part-way on the journey of awareness of the way what others have done to us has become a burden we tie fast to ourselves, and what it may take for us to come to a point of readiness to turn it over to God. If we are still calling out for revenge, we are not the first to do so, and God listens and bids us not to seek our own revenge but to leave that to the divine wisdom and justice - a huge act of trust, and not an easy one! If we are afraid our hurt might be forgotten by everyone and our wounds become invisible and thus our selves and histories be in some degree blotted out or lost, we are not the first to demand that God remember and act like God on our behalf. We are reminded that God loses nothing that God has made and God’s mercy is over all of it - we are engraved into God’s skin, as it were. And when we are ready and able to come to the Holy One and not only have our burdens lifted but be picked up ourselves and carried in love, then we shall be reconciled in the one whose power of forgiveness enables our own.

Pentecost 13, proper 14A 8/10/08           St. Augustine ’s Church

Rev’d Jennifer Phillips  Gen.37:1-28;Rom.10:5-15;Mtt.14:22-33

Franklin Delano Roosevelt began one of his presidential addresses to the nation with the greeting: “Dear Fellow Immigrants.” From the Statue of Liberty to the Mexican border fence, people in the United States are constantly reminded that nearly all of the residents here have come from somewhere else within a few generations. Except for the indigenous tribes of the continent, whom settlers displaced into exile in their own territories, we are a nation of immigrants, and therefore to some degree, a nation of exiles. So as we hear the stories of the Bible about wandering people, from Abraham, to Jacob, to Joseph,  to Moses, to Joshua, to Peter and Paul; as we hear the descendents of the Israelites reminded “a wandering Aramaean was your father” and the new Christians told, “you are strangers and sojourners no longer but fellow-citizens” with Christ in God’s empire, fellow-residents and heirs in the household of God; we identify in some visceral way with the idea of the alien coming home. The commandment always to practice radical hospitality to strangers is founded on this archetypal experience of being children of the stranger and sojourner from our biblical roots.

I went to a conference led by some priests from western Indian tribes of the US and Canada , and remember vividly hearing an Ojibwa speaker describing the way his people experience reading the Bible, particularly the stories of the Old Testament. (I paraphrase…) We are people of the land and landscape, he said, even when for some of us the tribal lands are not the ancestral lands of our particular families, still this continent has housed us since the dawn of our history. When Americans of European descent read the Bible, they tend to think of themselves in continuity with the Israelites and then the Jews and then the apostles, and the Gentiles whom the New Testament describes as grafted onto the rootstock of Israel . You say: This is our story, too. But for an Ojibwa reading the Bible, these are not our stories, not our people. So, wonderful as they are, they do not reveal God to us in the same familial and personal and intense way. The Bible-lands are never “our country”. It is this continent, these landscapes that most reveal God to us. This is true, even though my tribe was evangelized over 5 generations ago, are Anglicans, and embrace hymns from the Episcopal tradition as our own sacred music, and we read the Bible in our own language.  We hear the stories differently, because they are not the stories of our spiritual forefathers, but come to us from a foreign land. Even the way the sacred texts are authoritative for Indian peoples is different from the way they are for most of you.

Aboriginal peoples will find their divine calling to practice hospitality from a different set of stories and experiences than the children of immigrants. I remember this talk, now years back, and the conversation that followed as poignant and intriguing. Everyone in the room began telling the stories of their own ancestors, recalling the countries their grandparents had come from, the mixing of their ethnicities, the travels they and their parents had made, and their own personal myths of origins.

As an immigrant, I have been absolutely shaped by the experience of compulsory leaving home for a place of exile, carried off from everything that was familiar including most of the family, and coming a great journey over water to a new land. As a young adult returning to Britain for a few years, I discovered that there could be no recapturing the relationship with the homeland and its residents, no way to ever fit in there again, where I had become equally foreign. Some immigrants are thrilled to be in the new land and to become part of it, some are reluctant, driven by necessity or need; some always perch at the margins as resident aliens. Each of these trajectories shapes the soul a little differently, as we hear the ancient stories of Jewish exile and return and as we hear the Gospels and earliest Christian texts speak of God’s reign, of heaven, and of God godself as home, and this world, this life, as the place we perch as resident aliens.

Joseph, son of the wanderer Jacob, grandson and greatgrandson of nomads, is carried from Canaan to Egypt . On the surface of it, this is the reverse trip from the journey to the promised land that Moses will lead. Joseph is embedded in a large family, doing fairly well, and of his many brothers, this young one is the favorite of his father and also the beauty of the family. And he knows it! He comes to grief while wearing a fancy coat with long sleeves - hardly a working-man’s garment. Later on in his story we hear that Joseph is attractive to men and women alike, charming and handsome and used to being able to persuade others to like him and go along with him. But among his siblings, he stirs up jealousy, hatred, and abuse - and he is left out, left behind. We meet him wandering a bit forlorn on the trail of his brothers; though he must know they will not welcome him, like many a youngest sibling, he follows after hoping they will include him. Instead they see him and plot to kill him and make it look like an accident. They strip him, and only at the last moment decide to sell him into slavery rather than murder him. Thus he is carried off to Egypt by traders, while his family back home are told he is dead.

I have a dear friend who as a young adult was extraordinarily beautiful, and who has often said this was both blessing and curse. Nice to have people smile on you, want your company, have plentiful dates, look good in your clothes, get attention when you walk into a room. Miserable never to know whether someone is being nice to you because they genuinely like you or because they look better beside you, or want to acquire you and show you off to others as a trophy. Miserable to have your surface always seen, with few looking further, few noticing when you are troubled or unhappy or feeling bad about yourself. It may be hard to feel sympathy for the rich and glamorous in their tabloid plight - for Paris and Brittany and Tom Cruise - but they know this particular misery well! Many being jealous and trying to tear you down. In the midst of such turbulence, it can be hard to establish a  real and a trusting  self and steer a  righteous course through the world. So it was for Joseph. A big part of Joseph’s story is the tale of having to leave home and become an alien and forge a new identity in order to receive his family and his home back on his own terms. Joseph lands on his feet, as we will see next week. He prospers in Egypt . But even more important, he is transformed from a rather vain and pathetic adolescent into a man of moral substance and strength by making meaning out of his exile and coming to terms with the identity into which God summons him through it.

The story invites us to take the worst experience of ourselves in our lives and question it for the activity of God. How is it that we may not simply be broken, worn down, embittered or enraged by ill-fortune, loss, and suffering, but instead let these be crucibles in which we are re-formed toward the likeness of Christ, made more just, more compassionate, more able to take the first step toward reconciliation with those who have wronged us, more appreciative of the ways in which God blesses us when we least expect it? Search for the Lord and God’s strength, says the psalmist; continually seek God’s face.

In Matthew’s Gospel we glimpse the disciples catching sight of Jesus walking across the waves on a stormy night. Who do they know better, spend more time with, than Jesus? Yet they say to each other, It must be a ghost! Peter swallows his fear for long enough to climb out of the boat when Jesus summons him, but fear overtakes him and he sinks again. And so for us, so often, in the midst of our own storms. There is Christ, but we don’t recognize that familiar figure near us. Or we get up our gumption to cry out to God, to move toward God, to take those first steps in trust, and then when we see how rough the water is, we panic and feel ourselves starting to sink. As Peter discovers, it is in the thick of the storm and in the very middle of sinking, in the worst of experiences, that we can discover who Christ is, where God is for us in our plight - near enough to seize our hand, right there being revealed in the heart of the storm.

As St. Augustine of Hippo famously said, “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.”

It takes a change of mind to not seek to escape the places of our own exile and distress, but to seek the face of God right there. It takes a change of mind to embrace our experiences of being a stranger and sojourner, a bird without a nest (as Jesus describes himself in Matthew’s Gospel ( 8:28 ), as blessing rather than curse. Christians in the biblical tradition are bound to be spiritual exiles, at home nowhere in this world, but yearning for both a lost paradise and a dreamed-of heaven, where God will be all-in-all and we shall come to rest in God. Peoples of the land may experience the journey differently than peoples of the Book, but we all go a journey toward identity and reconciliation with others, ourselves and God. We are all called to pass along the hospitality we have received, and more, to those also aliens in a strange land, in exile.

At the end of Joseph’s story, he returns with the bones of his father to the land of Canaan and passes by the pit where his brothers had thrown him in his youth; had he not been dropped there, they might have murdered him before his alternate destiny with the traders caught him up; had he not gone to Egypt (as we will hear) he and his family might have starved in later years. The place that seemed a curse was revealed as the place of divine blessing and hope. On this return trip, he pauses to say a blessing over the pit.

And you? Is there a pit in your life over which you might need to say your own blessing? An exile to be transformed? A resented chapter to be embraced as an interval of divine transformation and a chapter of the story that makes you who you are and invites you, surprisingly, even from its depths, to give thanks?

Pentecost 12, Proper 13A 8/3/08                St. Augustine ’s Church

Rev’d Jennifer Phillips   Genesis 32:22-31;Rom.9:1-5;Mtt.14:13-21

Who is the angel, or the person, or even the aspect of yourself with whom you wrestle in the dark of night?

Jacob is on the road with his wives, children, slaves, camels and goats, heading for the territory of his older brother, Esau, on the way to the land of his father-his own inheritance. He hasn’t seen that brother whose birthright and blessing he stole for many years. He doesn’t know fully how wealthy Esau has become, how he has prospered and produced his own family and tribe -- all he can have in his mind is the trauma of their parting as young men, Jacob fleeing in fear of his life, his brother’s red-faced rage and betrayal. We know Jacob is frightened - he sends on ahead to Esau a big gift of donkeys, sheep, and slaves as a bribe for his own safety. Ahead is the moment of reckoning - but in fact it arrives before Jacob ever lays eyes on Esau. Jacob’s own divine messengers were sent on with the gift and have returned to Jacob’s group saying that Esau is coming out to meet Jacob with a great host of 400 men. Sounds like an avenging army on the march toward them! The rabbis commenting on this part of the text argued both ways: it was an army coming to do battle; no, it was an honor guard being sent out to welcome Jacob. Was Jacob himself unsure? And did those “messengers”, the emissaries from God watching over Jacob, purposely describe Esau’s host ambiguously, so that Jacob would be left to wonder and to worry?

Jacob is pragmatic but no hero, as we know. What does he do? He divides his own family and slaves and livestock into groups, saying he hopes that if one is attacked the other may escape. But what he’s really doing, as we hear a bit later, is to send the women and children out in the vanguard so that if there is an attack, they will be first hit, and Jacob himself and his personal guards might escape. Fraught with fear, he stops to pray, reminding God of God’s promise to do him good when he returns home. I’m not worthy of your kindness, he prays. Darn right! He doesn’t say, spare my family and all of us. He prays, “Deliver me, Lord, in the event that he starts killing the mothers and children. Again he prepares a large offering for Esau and sends it up front as a bribe to appease and deter his brother’s violence. Jacob knows that Esau has every justification to wipe him out. In the middle of the night, Jacob crosses back over the river Jabbok, and then again seized with panic, sends the women, their maids, and his 11 children back over to camp between Esau and himself, serving as a decoy. Jacob is alone behind the group, across the stream, cowering and sleepless, and it is there that “a man” -unidentified: human? angelic? demonic? who is this stranger? - wrestled with Jacob until the breaking of the day. “To prevent Jacob from fleeing,” says Rabbi Rashbam. Neither wrestler overcomes the other and as day breaks, the stranger, seeing that he cannot prevail, wounds Jacob magically in the groin -- the place of promise, the reminder of all divine covenants for future generations. Jacob holds his opponent fast, and demands a blessing. This is the Jacob we know and love, the upstart! Even wounded, he is going to extract a blessing he hasn’t quite earned by righteousness. The stranger asks his name - for to know another’s name is to have a spiritual power over them. This stranger, whom the weight of tradition, though not the text itself - identifies as an angel of the Lord - then renames Jacob , Israel . From a personal name, Jacob (the supplanted, the heel) receives the new tribal name of a people yet to be born, Israel , (from a root meaning superior). Jacob also wants the name of his opponent - the angel will not give it, but instead blesses Jacob. Remember that the word for blessing can mean both wound and divine favor; and then he disappears. Jacob knows what has happened to him at the ford of Jabbok; he calls the place Peniel - Face-of-God. It is God who wrestled with, smote, and blessed him. The sun rose upon him, the blessed one. Now he has not only the stolen blessing of his father, but the divine blessing. 

The story continues: Jacob lifted up his eyes, and look: Esau came and with him 400 men. Has Jacob’s character been wonderfully transformed by meeting God? No. The text says, Jacob divided the children to their mothers, to the handmaids, to Leah and to Rachel. And he put the slaves and their children in front, and Leah (poor unloved Leah!) and her children next, and himself with Rachel and his favorite son Joseph at the back. He kowtows all the way up to meet Esau.And Esau ran to meet his brother, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they both wept. What a reconciliation! Esau, the wild and hairy hunter, is the one who has learned how to forgive and heal and move on.

Was it a crisis of conscience Jacob had there at the ford? Did the rascal, the thief and deceiver, wrestle with his own better self. Is that why neither could completely defeat the other - because only together could they be a complete human being? Do we also wrestle in the night watches with our own shadow-selves, until morning shows us both that we are irrevocably wounded creatures, but also that we belong to a future larger than ourselves - that our lives are spared to us for the sake of those who will come after, and for the larger plan God has in mind? There is no fleeing from God, no hiding out. As the psalm (139) says: Whither can I flee from your presence?... You are aware of all my ways…. Before a word leaves my tongue you know all about it…. If I got up to heaven you are there; if I lie down in the grave you are there also… Even the darkness is not dark to you….  When I wake up, I am still with you!

At the last, Jacob is just a flawed and rather cowardly human being, this one through whom God founds Israel . Just an ordinary and not entirely nice guy! A man with gifts and flaws, but one whose entire life is inextricably bound up with God, a spiritual wrestler, the cumming serpent who bruised his brother’s heel, now walking with a limp himself.

And so to Matthew’s Gospel and his particular telling of the story of the feeding of the multitude, 5000 men - oh and by the way also some women and children, says the narrator sounding rather like Jacob! Jesus has been preoccupied teaching and healing and suddenly there they are in a deserted piece of country, villages a long way off, darkness falling, the inept disciples taking stock and discovering they have no provisions but five loaves and two fish. Very simply, Jesus takes, blesses breaks and gives them back, and suddenly there is food enough for everyone and a full 12 baskets full left over. No stars, these disciples, heirs of Jacob, buffoons and skeptics and bumblers as they are portrayed more often than not, but like Jacob, they and the gifts they have, warts and all, will be enough for the divine task at hand. Jesus shows them to themselves, shows them their own hidden resource. This is one of those rare stories of Jesus that appears in all 4 Gospels, similar in the main details: anxious disciples, big crowds, a few loaves and fishes, everyone fed, baskets left over. It is John’s Gospel that explores the feeding explicitly as a sign of God’s reign. It’s like the feeding with heavenly manna for Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness, say some of the crowd - and it is, but more. Jesus goes on to say, this is a sign - the real bread from heaven: it is me, I am the Bread of Life and if you are fed by me you will never hunger again, and may have eternal life.

You are the ones the father has drawn together and fed, Jesus tells them. It’s not your project, your doing, but God’s for you who receive me and who see the Father in me - bread for the life of the whole cosmos, bread for your life, beloved community whom I gather here.

So we have the two parts of the story that make up a whole. There is the flawed individual wrestling with the angel, the demon, the self through the dark night, confronting the claims of conscience and history that must be owned in order to go forward with authenticity and blessing, knowing the self to be part of the community of future promise. And there is the flawed but faithful beloved community, the friends of Christ, those fed by Christ’s body and so made one and made fully and eternally alive. Both the soul and the community are the arena of God’s provision, God’s love, and God’s work of reconciliation. Both Matthew’s and John’s feeding stories are followed by reminders that there are some people who don’t want to be part of the beloved community Jesus gathers; in John, they eat the bread and complain and go away because the teaching is too hard, or because the community is imperfect. In Matthew, some critics carp that Jesus is breaking the tradition of the elders and not washing his hands (out there in the middle of the fields!) before eating. People still avoid the church, avoid God, for similar reasons: “it’s too demanding to be religious, we don’t have time; or: there are sinners in that church. They mess up. They don’t do things the way I was taught. They hurt my feelings. They offended me!”  All probably true, but then, as Peter says, when Jesus asks if he will go away, too, “To whom would  I go? You have the words of eternal life!”

The beloved community of Christ are those who know ourselves to be hungry, and to have been fed by God’s presence in one another’s company. We are those who wrestle with God and ourselves and though hurt, will not let go until we have won our blessing. We are those who, though limping, go forward toward our reconciliation; those who, though we may be at times deceivers, cowards, thieves, doubters, scoffers, and fools of every sort, people of divided loyalties and self-interest, understand that there is no one else to whom we can go but God, no salvation in ourselves, no path forward that will escape suffering. But, oh the joy of the embrace, the forgiveness, the promise fulfilled, the banquet shared, the abundant life and blessing given to us!

Pentecost 11, Proper 12A                       St. Augustine ’s Church

Rev’d Jennifer Phillips  Gen.29:15-28;Rom.8:26-39;Mtt.13:31-52

Between the two great stories of Jacob - the ladder to heaven and the wrestling with the angel- comes today’s story of Jacob’s labor for his two wives. It would be easy to lose sight of this seemingly human little episode of 14 years, between the divine encounters, except that we remember: without the matriarchs of the story, there is no future, no promise fulfilled, no generations to come! Jacob’s part of the bargain is sealed by his promise to give God back a tithe - the first tenth part - of all that God will give him.

After the first encounter with God in the dream, the text says, Jacob lifted up his feet; he didn’t just get up and walk on, he levitated, he was light as air, in his joy over the good tidings he had received from God that he would be watched over, cared for, and made a blessing to all people of the future. He comes to a well - yet another of the life-giving sites of the desert land that becomes a place of divine omen. The stone proitecting the mouth is so large it takes three shepherds to shift it, but Jacob in his en-lightened state, moves the stone aside. Jacob inquires about Laban, his hoped-to-be father-in-law wanting to know how to approach him about marrying a daughter of his. He waters Laban’s sheep - a good act to launch the relationship - and suddenly there is the lovely Rachel before him, and he is overcome with emotion. Laban welcomes this kinsman warmly and Jacob asks for the hand of the younger daughter Rachel and agrees to work for seven years for her. But as you have heard, Jacob, the deceiver, is himself deceived. On the marriage night, it is Leah Laban sends in to Jacob and he does not figure this out until the next morning.

This is astonishing - was it so very dark? Did Leah keep her veil on the whole night? Was Jacob too drunk with the celebratory wine? He loved Rachel for seven years yet did not know he was not with his beloved? Did Rachel conspire so that her less pretty and older sister might not be shamed to be married second? Or perhaps did Jacob not realize, and understand the justice of what was happening - that his own deception should end up recompensed with Laban’s deception, and that he should have to work to earn what previously he had stolen - the thing he most desired. After another 14 years he marries Rachel also, and the text says he despised, even hated Leah, but God vindicated the less-loved wife and gave her the first son and heir for Jacob, Simeon, and then two more sons, Levi and Judah. With each Leah hopes against hope that Jacob will love her more than, or at least as much as Rachel, but he does not. Rachel remains childless and eventually send her maid to Jacob to produce two sons for her mistress. Rachel says, significantly of the first birth: “With mighty wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister, and have prevailed!” Jacob will use almost the same words of his own night wrestling with the man-angel from God. There is competition and strife among the women, and among the women’s maids, but Rachel with those words stands in parallel with her husband, a wrestler against the odds. Twelve sons are produced and at least one daughter - only one who is named - Dinah - who will have her own story to tell.

There will be more deception yet - Jacob breeds the sheep and goats for Laban and when Laban promises him the spotted lambs of the flock, manages to produce many more spotted than solid-colored offspring. When Jacob and his family leave Laban’s service, Rachel, too deceives her father, stealing his household gods by hiding them under her skirts.

The cry of Jacob to Laban on the morning he discovers he has married Leah is disingenuous at best: Why have you deceived me? At last he understands his brother Esau’s position when his birthright and blessing was stolen. Laban patiently explains the justice of the custom of marrying the firstborn daughter first, and Jacob seems to accept both the irony of his complaint and the necessity of doing the right thing. And Jacob with no further complaint does  it, but his insight does not prevent him from further deceit, further sin.

All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose, says Paul to the Romans. All things! Finally, not even our sin has the power to separate us from God’s terrifyingly intentional love for us. Not our own deceits and deviousness, not our doubts or deficiencies! Nothing we do has power to thwart God’s purpose for the cosmos and for our eternal destiny; we do however have power to make our lives and world miserable, to make mistakes and bad judgments, and to do all those things we wish we would not do, don’t intend to do, and then go out and do anyway. Jacob, Rachel - they have no special holiness or immunity to the messes of the human condition. But under and through their stories is the shining thread of God’s presence in and for the world, God’s action within history, made conclusive for us in Jesus Christ, as Paul says: It is God who justifies. God who did not withhold God’s own Son but gave him up for us…who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

You will recall that Jesus does NOT say, like Jacob, Why have you deceived me? Why have you betrayed me? - not to Judas, not to Pilate, not to us. Rather, Jesus, and God through Jesus, says It ios necessary that these things should happen. You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you. God’s story is ultimately the story that is unfolding in the cosmos and in all our human stories, including yours and mine. So this awareness is the pearl of great price, worth everything we have. The reign of heaven is unfolding from God’s hand, God’s imagination, God’s heart. It is like a great net thrown in a pond that drags out everything - old boots, rusty wheel-rims, a baby carriage, a ring you thought lost forever, weeds and roots, fish, frogs, mud, gold coins, all woven together  into the story, the divine movement, of creation, salvation, and resurrection.

It comforts me somehow, this heaven-image of everything being pulled out of the pond together, this treasure of old and new things with value we cannot imagine or understand from where we see now. My life and yours also: the junk of it, what seems like old debris, perplexing events, mixed motives, broken relationships, fits and starts, triumphs and failures, priceless gleaming moments, deepest precious yearnings - all being gathered into some kind of harvest by God and sorted out, washed off, and somehow saved and made new and part of something much larger than we know. The story of the saint stands beside the story of the rascal…and in the end most of Scripture’s characters are more rascal than angel! So there is certainly room enough and love enough and mercy enough for us.