The hero that wasn't: Why the Jacob story isn't about Jacob

Genesis 27:1-3, 15-23; 28:10-17

            God works through cheaters and scoundrels and all the sort that don’t do things right. Of course, those aren’t the only kinds of people God uses but since we are talking about Jacob… the thoughts that come to mind are: stubborn; cheater; thief of his brother’s birthright; fought with an angel; wasn’t exactly repentant about any of this.

            I want to start by saying this: This isn’t a story telling us to be like Jacob. Most stories in the Bible aren’t fables telling us to be like the heroes; most stories, like this one, are about who God is and what God does and not what are we supposed to do. In this case, God chooses to promote this nation, Israel. Jacob becomes Israel later in life—another of those biblical name changes. Israel is God’s chosen people. God’s chosen people can trace their history to a cheating liar that stole a birthright and, apparently, that’s not all a bad thing.

It could have been Esau. Volumes have been written on why God chose Jacob over Esau; they say that Jacob was more cunning, cleverer, he had the right heart, or whatever that means. At the end of the day, God chose a cheater. Jacob—the name—literally meant “he cheats.”

            So, we could also say that this is about God choosing somebody and transforming him. Perhaps God takes all the Jacobs and turns them into Israels. This feels closer to being true but still not the point. Not every Jacob turns into an Israel. And this story still is not about Jacob. It’s true that God uses good people and bad people—after all, he used Saul, the murderer; Jonah, the pathetic prophet; and also widows and children and all sorts of people whose powerlessness is their defining characteristic. God tends to use the people who we would least expect, both good and bad. But the main point is that God uses Jacob because Jacob is in the right place at the right time. Our world is messy, and God seems to do the best he can with the mess we’ve made.

            This isn’t about Jacob; it is about God’s plan, which is a plan for nations. Through Jesus, it becomes a plan for all people. The plan, however, is not a smooth road. The danger in making every biblical story about the hero is that we imagine that God’s plan for history is to make all of us into heroes. Turn on the news and you know this isn’t exactly true. Instead of a smooth road, God’s plan is to take the bumpy road of life and have it lead somewhere meaningful. It’s a plan that even when we are sent in the wrong direction and even when we crash and burn—even, especially, when we lose something that can’t be fixed—God is there to pick up the pieces.

God rested: A Rally Sunday mini-sermon

Genesis 1-2:4a

Why does God rest?

            It seems like a silly thing for the God of the universe to do. God is infinite. God created it all… spoke and there it was. God is perfectly energetic. Clearly, God doesn’t need to rest. Since God is the utmost, the ultimate, the holiest—the outer perfection toward which humanity is striving, we might assume that God is also a perfect worker, a perfect controller of destinies, a perfect worker bee…

            But God rested.

            God didn’t need to rest. It’s not like God gets tired. It’s not like God couldn’t do whatever God pleased to meddle with creation. It’s not like God didn’t have plenty of work to do. And yet… on the seventh day God rested.

            God spent six days speaking things into existence, and it could be six days or years or six billion years—doesn’t matter in the slightest—but it does matter that God rested. God took his foot off the accelerator and said, “Here. Why don’t you take a drive?”

            That’s either the most brilliant or the most dumbfounding moment in history. God let us decide things for ourselves.

            Imagine a world where God decided not to stop and not to rest; a world where God kept things completely under control. We might still be here… but freedom? There would be none of it. Pain and suffering? No, not that either. But neither would there be love or joy. Contentment, perhaps, but joy? Nah, you need freedom for joy. You need sorrow for joy. If God never rested then there would be none of that. Life would be about us being the worker bees in turn—serving God, not knowing a thing else. Instead, we were set loose with this terrible, wonderful thing called freedom, and here we are. God rested because God loved us enough to let us mess everything up.

            That is parenting, really. And it’s rough. But God did it first.

            So, today is Rally Sunday and the service is packed full of so much stuff I’m not going to say much today. I’m going to give it a rest. I figure if it’s good enough for the God of the universe it’s good enough for me. Some of you may need a rest, too. You may feel like there’s no time for it, especially now that the fall is here. Others of you may rest too much and you might need a kick in the pants, but I’m not talking to you. Most of you need more rest than you give yourselves. If it was good enough for God it is good enough for you.

            So, as we get into the busy-ness of everything, today I just want to sit with the creation story and ponder what it means that God took a break. Then, I’m going to do the same.

Living on the side of the coin

Matthew 12:1-8

            One day, Jesus and the disciples were walking the wheat fields on a Saturday—Sabbath-day in the Jewish world. You probably know the story. They’re hungry so they grab a few grains to eat, infamously breaking that commandment of honoring the Sabbath day by keeping it free from work. The eating is not the problem; the plucking, however, is strictly forbidden. They also might be breaking the stealing commandment as well, since we have no reason to believe this was a field any of them farmed, but putting that aside let’s focus on the Sabbath-violation because that’s what the Pharisees are most concerned about anyway.

            They have Jesus dead to rights. This is a clear violation of the law. More to the point, no holy person—if that’s what Jesus really is—would allow this kind of sacrilege under his sight. It’s an affront to their religion; they might as well be Roman pagans.

            This sets the stage for a conversation that we are still having today. You might not realize it, but this debate between the Pharisees and Jesus is happening in Christianity in the modern world every single day. It is scripture like this around which many of the biggest disagreements between Christians are staged, because it is scripture like this that calls into question the law and the law is a big deal for Christians.

            Here’s what I mean: Imagine a scenario where Jesus agrees with the Pharisees. He says, “Yep. No plucking grain on the Sabbath. You are no longer my disciples. You can’t be disciples because my disciples are perfect followers of the law.”

            Imagine what that would mean. It would mean that we—today—would have no choice but to be orthodox followers of the law if we were to call ourselves Christian. It would mean that the Christian faith was only about making good choices, being good people, following the prescriptions set forth by the law—found in our Bible—and that would be it. End of story. Honor the Sabbath. Period. No excuses. No lake homes. No sports. Nothing. No doing homework. No turning on the TV to watch football. To do any of that would be anti-Christian.

            Imagine a world where Jesus took the law to its fullest conclusion, as he does with the rich man who comes to him and tells him how holy he is—to whom Jesus says, “Give it all away”—and imagine that world without the follow-up, “For mortals it is impossible but for God all things are possible.” This would be an easier faith. It would be about absolute devotion. Christianity would be like Hassidic Judaism or Orthodox Islam. For some, Christianity is exactly like this, even if the devotees of this kind of Christianity often seem to be the biggest hypocrites.

            But for most of us we have, whether we realize it or not, sat with scripture like the one today and begun to ask the question, “What is the purpose of the law?” Is it to make us holy? There are a lot of people who would say “Yes” to that question. They are Christians, Jews, Muslims—some people of all faiths believe this. For them it is about devotion, submission, complete observance. Others have taken scripture like this and said, “It’s a free-for-all! Look, Jesus says there are no rules!” So we have relativists who use the parts of the Bible they find palatable, but as with so many things if you go around the circle of belief far enough you end up in the same place. Relativists, too, tend to judge their worthiness based on how faithful they are to a cause, whatever that cause may be, and so whether you are a right-wing fundamentalist, who claims the ultimate authority of the law, or a left-wing fundamentalist, who claims there is no law, you tend to find yourself in the same place: Justifying yourself by your observance of principles.

            So many people find themselves on one side of the coin or the other, but Jesus—like Jesus always seems to do—straddles that tiny grooved notch between the sides of the coin. Jesus seems to be the only one not at all interested in the things we are doing in and of themselves but instead he turns around and asks the Pharisees (and us along with them), “Why are you doing what you are doing?”

            Plucking grains on the Sabbath in itself could be good or bad. If it’s about your own selfish hungers, if it’s because you planned poorly or because you don’t care about stupid traditions, then it’s a real problem; but if it’s because you’re feeding somebody in need, if it’s because your love of God and the people around you trumps your love of yourself then by all means break the stinking law because the law exists for God, not God for the law. This is a radical statement. Have you thought about this? The law exists for God, not God for the law, which means in every point of the law we are to ask ourselves “Am I observing this law for God or to feel better about myself?” And if it’s the latter then we are condemned even by following the law!

            So, this gets really interesting for us today, because just about every contentious issue we face as Christians exists on this continuum of law and gospel that comes out of scripture like this. And it’s not a free-for-all. We can’t do anything we want, but Jesus does change the rules. The question we face is the same one Jesus implies to the Pharisees: “Why are doing what you are doing?” That might be the biggest question for any Christian to answer. “Why are you doing what you are doing?”

            But the thing about that question is that it’s a personal question. It’s for you and God. Too often our debates in Christian circles become about other people. We like to imagine we have God’s boundaries all figured out, so other people need to get themselves inside the boundaries, but more often our desire for others to get into the box of the law has more to do with us than it has to do with them. How often when somebody talks about sin do we imagine the way we most often sin and then apply it to others?

I’ll give you an example. Some of you may recall the story of the Prodigal Son. Here’s the Cliff notes version: Father gives Son his share of the property, he goes away and squanders it, he returns and the father welcomes him home, and the brother of the Prodigal Son gets his underpants all in a bunch. I want to call attention to the blunt, stupid response of the elder son who gets stark, raving mad at his father for throwing his brother a party—that prodigal son who went away and squandered all his share of the family fortune. The elder son says, “When this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you [threw him a party]” (Luke 15:30). This seems like a valid criticism, except nowhere anywhere in the story does it say the prodigal son did anything with prostitutes or had any sexual endeavors whatsoever. The elder son is projecting his own sinful desires on the brother. He is projecting what he would have done on his brother, because he is assuming his brother’s sin is the same as his own. His brother did mess up but his vices were different. When we assume we know how others sin we are usually only projecting our own sin.

There’s one more example of this that came to mind for me. There’s a cartoon that goes around Facebook in pastors’ circles every once in awhile. I assume it’s only in pastor’s circles because, let’s face it, most of you don’t share pastor-related memes on Facebook because most of you have a life. Anyway, this cartoon has a pastor in the pulpit preaching on the woman at the well, who you might recall is called a “sinful” woman according to scripture, and the pastor says, “And we all know what her sin was…” And in the pews are several men thinking, “Adultery… prostitution… sexual indiscretion...” And then there’s a woman in the back thinking, “Wanting to kill all the men who assume a woman’s sin has to be something to do with sex.”

It’s funny but it’s true. We love to assume sin on other people. Instead, we need to turn again as Jesus would have the Pharisees turn and look inside ourselves and ask “Why am I doing what I am doing?” Not “Why are they doing what they are doing?” It starts, and ends, with me. It’s a lot easier to tell other people about their own shortcomings than it is to deal with your own, and it’s easier still when you become confident in your own standing before God to tell other people that they should be practicing their beliefs just like you. God doesn’t call each of us to be the same. We are called to different things in life and we are called differently to be followers of Christ. To assume otherwise is foolish and it leads to thinking that, “Well, probably only a few people like me will be in heaven.” That, my friends, is blasphemy and its own special kind of sin.

I know because Jesus died so we can forget about nonsense like that. Jesus died so that this law-business is more than wisdom given or taken at a whim, but so that all it is null and void in the face of the grace of the cross and the empty tomb.

            Because of Jesus’ death we are free to live a life worthy of the Gospel, not confined to living a life in worry of the law. We are Easter people; not Pharisees; which means we live on the side of the coin. Not trumpeting the law because we see the sin in others; not saying “Anything goes!” and everything is true; but instead clinging to Jesus as the one way, even as we see Christ in all the unexpected places doing all the unexpected things, even breaking the law. It’s easier to live on one side of the coin or the other, but the one nice thing about living in that challenging place between the law and the gospel is that you have Jesus on your side. And that’s a pretty good thing to have.

Communion on a Sunday with no Communion

1 Corinthians 11:17-34

So, no communion today. It’s a fourth Sunday of the month. Hence, the great irony of preaching on communion with no communion following two Sundays of preaching on Baptism with no baptisms. This got me thinking…

Nothing is so important for the practice of the church than the Lord’s Supper. I think that’s mostly true—at the very least, nothing that is regularly done in the life of worship is more important. You could say baptism is even more central but we are baptized once. Communion allows us the regular practice of receiving Jesus intimately, physically. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

But communion is also a difficult thing to wrap our heads around. It wasn’t that long ago—and in some places even to today—that we practiced communion once a year, maybe twice. In the days where pastors and preachers would travel by horse and buggy communion practice became very occasional. In some churches it would be years between communion celebrations. Because of this, communion took on a different kind of gravitas. It was something special, occasional, rare. Jesus, however, gave us only one instruction about how often to do communion: “Do this as often as you drink of it. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes,” he said.

That could be interpreted a number of ways. So, too, can the bit about preparation for the Lord’s Supper. Paul’s letter to 1 Corinthians is pretty clear that we are to “discern the body” of Christ or risk judgment on ourselves, but what does that mean? Do we have to reach a certain level of worthiness in God’s eyes to receive communion? Do we need to have a certain level of understanding? If so, I’m a little concerned, because I’ve done plenty of first communion classes and I can tell you that what we talk about then doesn’t stick much between then and when we talk about communion in Confirmation. If it doesn’t stick then I don’t have a lot of hope that it sticks beyond that either. Should we institute a test before receiving communion where all of you come forward and answer the question, “What does the Lord’s Supper mean to me?”

You can see what I mean. There is legitimate fear around communion. It’s not just “Am I worthy?” but also “Will I mess it up?” Will I drop the bread/wafer? Will I spill the wine? Will I accidentally eat the wafer on an intinction Sunday and stare, wide-eyed at the wine that I was supposed to dip that wafer in? We’ve all been there.

A new day--What baptism means to me

Romans 6:1-11

Baptism is daily dying and rising.

I don’t remember the first time I heard that but I guarantee that I, like maybe some of you, was surprised to think of baptism in that way. I thought of baptism as something that happened a long time ago. It’s something in the past; something to remember or, more likely, to have others remind us of. It is a passive past action. But that’s absolutely not true. It’s not passive, it’s not past; it’s active and present reality. It doesn’t just save us for some future but drowns us daily. Baptism is something that lives with us. If you have been baptized and do absolutely nothing with it then you aren’t so much a human being as a human in waiting, or if you’re treating baptism as insurance to allow you to do whatever you please, as if baptism is the one and only key to salvation, then Paul has some strong words.

He says, “You … must confess yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” You must confess you are dead to sin and alive to God…

Here’s a completely non-comprehensive list of what that means:

It means that you must be dead to hate and bigotry and any way you may try to lift yourself over another person. Rather, you must be alive to humility and seeing others as equally beautiful children of God.

It means you must be dead to narcissism. You can’t believe you are the center of universe because this God who brought you through the waters of baptism demands you see yourself not as creator but as creation. To be alive to God is to admit that I am not God, which is done daily through every action we take and every word we speak that points not to myself and how great I am but to God and how great God is.

To be dead to sin and alive to God means we stop counting the score, we stop judging whether others have done enough to please God, and instead we live out of the joy of abundance and practice gracious giving, not overly concerned about what others are doing but instead giving of ourselves more fully and loving more strongly—even if somebody might take advantage of us. We know that ultimately there is nothing we can lose that matters.

We are to be dead to sin by calling a thing what it is. Evil is evil. Good is good. And when we don’t know which is which we are to turn to God with the same humility that it takes to admit that I am not God. We are not to say “anything goes” but instead to sit in patience and prayer to discern God’s will for us.

To be dead to sin is to not trust my old self to determine right and wrong or when I am justified or not. It is not trust my own sense of what makes me righteous. It is not to trust my desire to take good things by force. It is especially not to trust that I can save the world, or that the world would be a better place if only I had more power. Instead, to be alive in God is to trust that God will take me, in all that I am and all that I am not, and make me righteous apart from what I can take and what I would accomplish if given the chance. To be alive in God is to put aside all quests for personal power; it is to give up my power for the sake of others.

There are countless examples of these things in our life.

Baptism, Repentance, and Grace

Acts 2:37-42

When a scripture reading begins with “Now when they heard this…” it sort of begs the question of what it is they heard. Like when you find “Therefore” in scripture and ask, as you should, what is the therefore there for?

            In this case the things that the people heard about were things about Jesus, specifically Acts 2:36, which reads, “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

            Ouch.

            Not “this Jesus, the Son of God” or “this Jesus” period, but “this Jesus, whom you crucified.” You did this, Peter says, pointing the finger at the very people who are beginning the church.

This gets at a strange tension in what it means to be a Christian. Yes, we are people who follow God, but we are also people who would probably nail our God to a cross again if we were given the chance—probably not knowing what we were doing. These people in Acts were the original big tent church, spirit-filled, Pentecostals of a sort. These, of all people, were ready to receive the body and blood of Christ in communion with the words “Given for you” or “Broken for you” or “Shed for you.” And yet, these were also the people who betrayed Jesus to be crucified. At least they were by association. To be a Christian is to be a person who is saved by Jesus even while we are people who killed Jesus in the first place. As with these people in Acts, that cuts us to the heart.

            So we repent. We ask forgiveness. Not cheap forgiveness; not “because we got caught so we sort of feel bad about it” forgiveness, but real, tough forgiveness. The kind that sits with us. This is evident enough in what Peter tells us to do: Repent, be baptized, participate in the life of discipleship through teaching and visiting and eating together and praying together. All of this happens as a gift of God who, Peter says, calls us to him. God calls us; we respond by how we live.

            This is really what the sacraments are about: God’s gifts pushing us to respond by living out of gratitude for the grace we have been given.

Active attitude, passive resistance: Putting on the armor of God

Ephesians 6:10-20

            I’ve always thought the warfare language around faith was kind of troubling. I mean, God, I hope I don’t demonstrate my faith in you by going out and slaughtering a bunch of villagers. That sounds like I’m some Viking praying to Odin, not so much a Christian. I mean, I can sort of understand the Old Testament; the rules were different then—it was about setting Israel apart, and, yes, there was a lot of killing going on there—in spite of God giving the Israelites an explicit commandment, “Thou shall not kill”—but these examples of killing tended to lift Israel over some occupying force, some people who were not where they belonged, and so while it may still make me a bit uneasy I can understand it. But, after Jesus, the warfare images feel like they maybe shouldn’t be needed. After all, we are no longer Jews or Greeks, so what on earth are we fighting about?

            Yet, the images persist, begging us to consider why. Paul, in Ephesians—in Ephesians of all places, where he has spent pretty much the entirety of his letter talking about unity in and through faith—writes about putting on the armor of God because of the threats to the people from the ruling authorities. This sounds like it might be the pregame pep talk leading to war. This has been used by Christians during the Crusades and the Inquisition, where putting on the armor of God has meant converting the savages by means of a sword. Something about that doesn’t feel right. If someone came to ransack our town and told us to convert or die we would (I think rightly) assume that their faith is pretty weak if it takes threats of violence to achieve conversion.

            So, it seems like we might be heading that direction. Paul takes us to the precipice of where we have been before—war, death, destruction—it’s the old ways again, time to pick up our swords or grab our guns and head to battle, but that’s where things change. It’s precisely at this point where we discover the change in what it means to be a God-follower after Jesus. Yes, we put on the armor of God but the armor of God is not battle armor. Rather, Paul says it is the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, and shoes to proclaim the gospel of peace. Paul’s message is particularly effective because he leads us down one avenue—war, battle, man-things—and takes us on a sharp left turn toward something different, a saving grace that requires us not to fight for our lives but to give our lives away. This is the stunning left turn of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

            But, if I’m being honest, this is kind of a tough turn to make, especially for men. Many men are excited to throw on the armor. And here I want to draw a quick distinction between joining the military, which at its best is about serving for peace at home, and going on a personal war, which is about achieving our own ends. Paul wasn’t writing against the choice to defend your country—after all, the people to whom he was writing were under foreign rule already, rather he was taking a certain attitude that tries to achieve its ends through violence and turning it around.

Now, we don’t go to battle as much these days. We certainly don’t do religious wars so much anymore, which is I believe very much for the best. But instead we throw on our Vikings horns or cheese heads or Sioux and/or Fighting Hawks jerseys or smiling Golden Gophers shirts—because nothing so terrifies the enemy as a brick of cheese or a grinning rodent—and then we go and cheer on our team. Or we throw on the armor in other kinds of competition. We throw on the armor of a business suit and make cunning deals and take home lots of money. We put on the metaphorical armor of parents and we defend our families. One of the reasons I find that men do not connect so much with the church these days is because there is sometimes very little here that feeds that sense of going to battle for something. The church may feel passive because we are preaching a grace given to you, for you, and there’s nothing for you to do about it. There’s nothing to seize; no dragon to conquer that isn’t beaten for you. Some of us are like those knights in medieval stories who apparently go kingdom to kingdom looking for a troll or dragon or monster of various size and strength to slay. It’s their purpose.

            Some people just need to battle. But this is where we tend to misunderstand the role of faith, because there are things worth fighting for. Putting on the armor of God is not a violent exercise but it is not a passive one either. Instead, it is living a life worthy of the Gospel to which you have been called. There is a response to grace and that is in how we live. It is what we do with those shoes we put on that are supposed to be bringing peace. It is the work we do—fighting for our families, our communities, our selves. We do this not primarily against antagonistic regimes—I feel like many Christians are walking around looking for a made-up enemy to fight and so they go to battle against the “the culture” or “the world” or worse yet a particular subset of people they imagine to be the enemy—no, most of the time we aren’t fighting anything but ourselves and the power of sin over us.

            The thing we should realize—that is so hard to realize in the moment—is that most of the fights we fight against sin are not fights at all. We don’t wage war on cancer—cancer is part of us. We don’t battle depression—depression is woven into us. We don’t go to war with grief—grief is the product of love, which is the very thing we are fighting for. Often what we need is an active attitude that accepts a passive resistance. Accepting that I cannot fix a thing is the hardest thing to do, but it is very close to what putting on God’s armor is about—it’s remembering that I am not the one I am fighting for.

            But many of us are only happy trying to fix things. If there’s nothing to fix we feel we are lacking a purpose. So, when some tragedy strikes we try to fix it. When others are sick we try to fix it. When something we cannot repair gets broken we obsess over trying to fix it even when it cannot be done. A relationship is not a pipe. A human body is not a car. So, to put on God’s armor is a reminder of our vulnerability, and it’s an acceptance of the things I cannot change, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. That doesn’t mean—just because we admit that we can’t do it all—that there aren’t things worth doing. And that’s where I worry that we lose men in the church, because just because you can’t fix everything—and you have to rely on a higher power to save you and the people you love—doesn’t mean that you can’t be the hands and feet of Jesus. In fact it means you have a real duty to do it. We all do.

            So let’s put on the armor of God for the right reasons. To do good for the world. To be little Christs. Then, let’s accept we can’t do all the good we would like. So, we remember what we are fighting for—not our strength but the strength of God through us.