Miracles

Sunday’s lectionary reading was the story of the wedding feast at Cana in John’s gospel.  Jesus turns water into wine: the first of the seven signs John recounts.  All over the world, folks, like me, whose pastors’ follow the Revised Common Lectionary heard mediations on miracles.  Here’s another sort of mediation on miracles, based on a different story.

This week’s parsha for Jews around the world was בְּשַׁלַּח , Beshalach, “when let go”.  The passage tells the story of the Great Escape—the time when God saved His people from slavery.  It is the story we tell at our Passover Seder each year.  It is the story that Jesus retells at His final Seder in Jerusalem on the night before He died.

The details of the story are worth attention. The parsha begins just after the instructions about how to celebrate the events that the instructions interrupt: “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh let the people go, that God led them not by way of the land of the Philistines [the short direct way to Canaan] . . .But God led the people about, by way of the wilderness by the Red Sea,” (Exodus 13: 17-18).  When the text says “God led the people”, the writers are not kidding around, “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, . . . and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;” (13:21).  You want to talk your fodder for sermons on miracles—here it is.  You want your “sign from God” to insure this gamble we call faith pays off here it is. Clear as a bell day or night—the visible presence of the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Redeemer from the slave pits of Egypt—right there before your eyes directing your steps.  How’s that for miracle.

Then Chapter 14, the cinematic highlight scene, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are “led” to camp at Pi-hahiroth hard on the sea.  The mighty Pharaoh, heart hardened, welshes on the deal to let the Israelites go and puts 600 chariots worth of hard men in motion to get them back.

“When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. And they said unto Moses: ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ (14:10-11) Moses shouts, “Fear not”, and assures them that the Lord will fight for them and they have nothing to fear.

And then the miracle.  The movie makers, and the way we tell the story to our children around the Seder table, would have you believe that the parting of the sea is the miracle: ‘and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided [think about the creation story in Genesis]. 

But I think the miracle is somewhere else.  Somewhere a little quieter. Somewhere a little more human.  Note the crucial details: “And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”  But how can they go forward?  Just when they need reassurance and direction most, “the angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them, and stood behind them; (v. 19).  Just at the crucial moment, one set of miracles ceased.  The signposts pointing the way disappear. Disaster looms on all sides, and then the real miracle occurs.  Someone, unnamed in the story, a real nobody, follows the command God gives: “go forward”.  One heart answered the call of God to ‘fear not’.  One heart moved one step and 620,000 slaves walked to freedom. One heart, an uncertain and frightening future, and one miracle: dayenu; it is enough.

Buen Camino. 

Psalm 40* is a Gospel psalm—a psalm of good news.  What is that Good News?  Simply put, it is: the Lord can and does save.  The most basic accusation of the faithless is, “Your God cannot save.”  In Psalm 40, the writer says he was in a “pit of destruction (v.2).  Later we find some of that may have been a pit of his own making (v. 12) and some came from enemies around him (v. 14).  In the midst of that pit, he cries to the Lord (v. 13—make haste to help me).  His enemies then make the most basic attack possible, they go for the jugular of faith—they see his trouble and cry “Aha” your god cannot save.  This sneering finger pointing is one of the most basic themes of all the scriptures.  The great Pharoh would not let a motley host of slaves go free and dared God (in the person Moses) to make them free.  On the run in the wilderness, as the water ran short and the food ran out, the people cry again to Moses.  The substance of their cry, “it would be better if we had never left”, is the accusers cry—God cannot save.   Over and over again in the history of Israel, those who resist the instruction of the Lord, the Torah, accuse God.   At the most basic level, they shout “You cannot save”.  The priests of Baal surround Elijah and laugh that YaWeH can do nothing to them.  When the kings of Israel think that the armies of Egypt look like a better bet to resist the armies of Assyria and keep Israel free and independent, Isaiah tells the faithful that the accuser has won; his charge “Your God cannot save” has been vindicated.  When Herod’s terrorist death squad sweeps into Bethlehem and starts slaughtering children, the cry on their lips may as well have been “Your God cannot save.”  Even today, believers here and all over the world are challenged to vindicate their God.  “Your God cannot save” is the most basic accusation that anyone can level at a believer. 

How are we to respond?

For the last 100 years or so one common place in North American Protestant Christianity is to retreat and narrow the field of God’s saving activity.   In hope that God won’t be made a fool of Christians retreat and say, “well, God really only means to save souls”, and souls are conceived of in a sense that has no connection with life as any of us know it  – workplaces, scientific endeavors, political institutions, creative expression, educational institutions, virtually the sum of life are declared secular or neutral and thus not in need of God’s saving Grace and Power. Only souls are in need of grace, not really the world that God so loved.  Another tactic so that God won’t be made a fool is to merely baptize the present with the piety of Christian terminology.  Practices born out of religions that worship false gods are “Christianized”—music born in rebellion against God gets allegedly Christian lyrics and God is supposed to be vindicated.  Sentimental prosody pap that makes a mockery of the fullness of our emotional lives has a few words from carefully selected scripture inserted, and now it’s supposed to be fit for the refrigerator magnet treatment as “inspiring”.  Economic practices that grind down on the poor and make their lives misery are baptized with terms like Christian freedom and vocation and “see our God can save”, well at least those of us lucky enough to have been born in the US, Canada, or Europe. 

But the Good New of Psalm 40 and the story of God’s salvation from Genesis to Revelation is that God offers us a different way:  If we truly remember what God has done for us, saving us from Egyptian slavers, keeping us through the dark nights of Exile in Babylon, nurturing us even when the King’s terrorist death squads tried to take away our only hope, building us up when all of Rome was against us, protecting our Scriptures and our traditions when the supposed keepers of the faith wanted us far away from the Scriptures as possible, --if we remember all those things.  If we celebrate them year after year, holy liturgical season after season, like the Psalmist does when he proclaims “Many, O LORD my God, are (11) the wonders which You have done,

          And Your (12) thoughts toward us;

          There is none to compare with You.

          If I would declare and speak of them,

          They (13) would be too numerous to count.”

Then we will slowly, and sometimes painfully, build up a trust in the God who has saved in the past and when crunch time comes for us, when jobs choke the God given creativity out of us, when our politicians want to wage death in our names and everybody around us wants us to sign off on it, even when death strikes those close to our hearts, in those times then we will be ready for blessing for we will believe God can save, indeed “How  blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, And  has not turned to the proud, nor to those who  lapse into falsehood.”   We will even enter into the history of God’s saving works by writing our own scrolls of testimony of the great things God has done for us, we’ll bring them to the temple and proclaim them for all to hear.  We’ll let our neighbors know that while all others might shout “he cannot save”—we will offer our story that indeed he does save.  We will not hide his righteousness (his faithful promise keeping) in our hearts.  We will not be silent about his faithfulness and salvation.  We will not conceal his loving kindness.

In the Matthew’s account of the Passion week, the soldiers executing Jesus shout at him, “Save yourself, If you’re really God’s Son, come down off that cross.”  The accusers basic charge is shouted for all to hear.  And for a time even the disciples believed that charge.  Peter with the last bit of hope in his heart sprints back to the tomb when Mary Magdelene reports that it’s empty.  There he finds a few clothes and again believes the accusers charge—he walks away shaking his head.  Later, when he really meets the risen Lord, face to face, he like the Psalmist now believes that God can save—that the world can be set to rights. Now like the psalmist he’s got a testimony to bring to the temple, he cannot restrain his lips—God has kept his promise. He has brought back Israel, paid for her in blood coin, and through Israel, all of us.  God had promised a world so transformed that the faithful dead would rise from the dust and a new king would take the throne.   And there at an empty tomb was the down payment, the first fruits of that promise that God made to Abraham so long ago, I will bless you and through you I will bless all the nations.  So

Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You;

          Let those who love Your salvation (34) say continually,

          "The LORD be magnified!"

God can save. He’s saved before.  He’ll save again.  He’ll save all who are afflicted and needy.

*The painting is by contemporary American artist Phillip Ratner.  It is located in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, MD.

A Meditation on Encountering a Dangerous God
[This is actually several years old, but somehow these 12 days of the Christmas season brought back the notion that God, as one of Lewis' Narnia characters says, "is not a tame lion."]

I come to Stony Creek on Sunday mornings expecting to meet the risen Christ. Sunday after Sunday I am not disappointed.   I hear Jesus speak in the beautiful singing of familiar songs, in the written Scriptures, and in the preaching.  I see His hands at work in the announcements about mission activities, fellowship opportunities, and joyous news of answered prayers. Most profoundly, I meet Him soul to soul when I kneel with fellow worshippers and commemorate His death and resurrection with bread and wine.  All in all, the time I spend at Stony Creek comforts and enriches me beyond measure.  Recently, however, my comfortable expectations about encountering God have been turned about.  Sunday morning is no longer quite so comfortable; indeed, its beginning to feel downright dangerous to me. 

Friday, April 16^th, I had the privilege of attending Temple Beth Emeth’s services commemorating the 6 million Jewish deaths in the Shoah -the Holocaust. The highlight of the service was the testimony of a “Righteous Gentile”.  The speaker, Anneke Burke told the assembled worshipers of her meeting with God. 

In 1940 she was a typical four-year-old Dutch girl, happy and carefree.  She lived in Utrecht with her mother, father, a seven-year-old sister and a baby brother. That fall the German Army forever changed her life. Her hometown was captured and put under occupation. Life with German soldiers strutting about was a bit strange, but not burdensome.  Then the identification of the Jews started.  All Jews were required to wear the Star of David sewn on to their clothing.  They were prevented from riding the streetcars.  German soldiers and sympathetic Dutch Nazis violated their shops and homes.  Soon the Germans began to round up Jews for deportation to work camps.  Anneke’s father and mother were God fearing, church going Protestants.  In the faces of their Jewish neighbors they saw the face of their Lord.  Moved by a profound sense of Christian duty, in 1942 Anneke’s father arranged with the Dutch Underground to hide a Jewish man.  When he went to make contact with the man and bring him home, three other Jews were also there.  All four Jews were brought to the safety of Anneke’s house.  Soon they were joined by four more Jews. For the next three years, eight of God’s children spent their days in one small bedroom.  They could go into the living room at night, but no lights were allowed.  The Burke’s even dug a tunnel under the house so that when the German search parties came, the Jews could hide in the tunnel.

Now the story so far sounds like a Hollywood movie - brave Dutch Christian resistance fighters, evil pagan Nazis’, frightened Jews.  You can practically hear the swelling music and feel your tears being jerked as the Allies liberate the town and the Jews walk arm in arm with the brave Christians into the sunlight for the first time in three years. 

But real encounters with God are never quite like Hollywood productions.  Anneke never knew the Jews were in the house all those years until her parents awoke her late one night in April of 1945 and invited her to the living room to celebrate the war’s end with a group of complete strangers.  Her parents simply could not risk telling their children about the human contraband in the front bedroom.  Jews, and those who hid Jews, faced deportation to work camps at best, and on-the-spot execution at worst.  Her parents closed off the bedroom where the Jews were hidden.  Anneke was told that the bedroom was her father’s workroom, and she would be severely punished if she ever entered that room.   The children slept, locked each night, in the attic for three years so their visitors could, with some safety, come out at night.  When wartime food rations for the five members of the Burke family were first divided up to feed 13 people and Anneke ate but still was hungry. Her parents told her all the food was gone. When Anneke heard strange noises in the house, her parents lied to her.  They said she was merely hearing things. When a thump on the wall made her turn her head, her parents sat motionless.  Three years of that sort of deception left Anneke deeply scarred.  She no longer trusted her own senses.  Anneke had to go through years of psychological counseling to heal from the experience.  She still, as a mature woman, experiences moments of doubt about ordinary everyday experiences because for three important years of her life the adults around her told her that noises she heard were not noises at all, that lights she saw under doorways were not real, and  that odors she smelled were just her imagination. 

God came to Anneke’s family in the form of eight Jews on the lam from Nazi death squads.  The Burke’s were obedient to the teachings of Jesus and embraced the desperate ones.  That encounter left Anneke scarred for life.  Her testimony has begun to change my perspective on Sunday worship at Stony Creek.  I still love the comfortable feeling of closeness to my Lord that comes from singing the old hymns, from greeting loving neighbors, and from the rhythms of the familiar liturgy.  But I also have read with new eyes the Biblical stories of encounters with God.  He's mighty, He's loving, but He's also dangerous.  Jacob, the tricky one, was crippled for life after he met God.  Hosea heard the voice of God order him to marry a prostitute and turn his quiet life into a living billboard advertising God’s indignation with a faithless people.  Peter, the cowardly fisherman, was led to death in a Roman prison because he saw and declared, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”.  Oh, I still pray each Sunday for the presence of the Lord, but after hearing Anneke Burke, I pray a bit more warily.  The God we worship didn’t hand over His own Son to torturers so Peter Freedman-Doan could warm the cockles of his heart with familiar Sunday morning rituals shared with good friends. He comes to us so that His will be done.   

The 12 Days

Tomorrow, Christmas, is in the liturgical calendar, the first of 12 days of Christmas.  The last day of Christmas is Epiphany. On Epiphany, we, the orthodox and liturgical types celebrate the Light of Christmas' first day, Jesus, being revealed to Gentiles, the Magi, for the first time.  It is the first intimation in the Gospels that the promises to Abraham that his family would be the source of Yaweh's blessings to all families was finally coming true.
There is wrinkle in the story of Epiphany that seems ripe for a bit of midrash.  The scriptures tell us that wise men from the east, from the lands we now call Iraq, on Christmas' last day found the gift under the special star.  The scriptures are also painstaking in their efforts to show that the gift child of the first day of Christmas, well, his family is from the east also.  Abraham and Terah come from Ur of the Chaldees: Iraq.  So while it is crucial for the salvation story that a gentile boy like me gets to now, in Jesus, be counted as one of the family of God, the look that passed between Jesus and the Magi on Epiphany is a look of family rcongnition.  While Epiphany is the marking of salvation coming from the Jews to the gentiles, it is also a recognition to paraphrase St. Paul, in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, peasant on the run or rich landed gentry, no male or female, black, brown or white, gay or straight, Canadian or American or Syrian or Mexican.  In Christ we are all simply the children of Eve and Adam.  That seems, to this gentile boy, to be both the blessing and the judgement of the season.

Incarnation

On the way back from Egypt, Joseph, Mary, and the boy passed again through that town of closed inns and starry nights.  The women just stared at them.  The fury was mostly gone, now only the emptiness. Their sons were dead, and here, this One the cause of it all, was riding on though.  No angel was commanded to whisper to them in the night.  No Gabriel said,”Fly. Bundle him and flee now, tonight.”   Some of the fathers had burst forth to defend their little ones.  Maybe they hoped that the ancient songs were true, and the Holy One would command his angels to guard their ways.  But steel slit bare-handed rage just as easily as two-year old flesh.   The fathers, who watched this day’s parade, the ones who watched as the thugs took their sons and hacked and hacked, did not know of sacred dramas and holy imperatives.  Maybe they wouldn’t care even if they did know of such deeper purposes.  Who would tell them: Joseph, whose Son yet lived?  Was that day their cruel day on Moriah?  Indeed, what purpose could justify?  They knew only guilt, blood, burial, and Rachel’s tears without end.  Mary had heard hints of this hurt, the angel warned that her day too would come.  But for now, not for 30 more years and three long days, not even God yet understood loss such as this.

The Heart of the Matter*

This past week near the end of Sunday worship, I had one of those moments so aptly captured by the advertisers for a certain vegetable juice.  I had a moment of clarity, and the feeling that I should have seen this all along.  I was overcome by the realization that for all the years I’ve attended, all the sermons I’ve heard have centered on just two pronouncements: Christ crucified and life transformed.

Pastors, as you know, come and go.  Their preaching can be exciting, intellectual, full of anecdote and illustration, or maybe there are times when it’s not so exciting or stimulating at all.  Sometimes that’s the preacher (and given my limited experience preaching, that can certainly be the case) or sometimes it is me: bored, preoccupied, mind drifting or whatever.  Yet through it all, I (and ‘we’ at Stony Creek) have been graced to hear week after week, well-crafted or not so well-crafted, messages that center on Christ crucified and life transformed.  

When you get right down to it, that is the Gospel, the Good News; Christ has died and life will never be the same.  You see, in each of the four gospels the crucial moment in the story is the moment Jesus goes quite voluntarily to offer himself for crucifixion on the Roman cross.  God’s good work of six days has been attacked by sin.  Sin is so powerful that the very creation is distorted by it.  St. Paul says the creation “groans” under the burden of sin (Romans 8:22).  Sin inspires us, the crown of the good creation, to neglect love and think of ourselves first.  In so doing we are capable of monstrous cruelty to one another and do ourselves tremendous damage in the bargain.  Sin’s greatest weapon is death.  God’s greatest good is life.  God Himself, in Jesus the Jew, attacks sin by attacking sin’s greatest strength: its power to destroy life, its power to kill.  All that we fear, all the reasons we cling to ourselves instead of God and each other, all of it is born in the power of sin.  So Jesus walks meekly into sin’s hands and takes the worst it has to offer.  That moment changes everything.  The Gospel writer John says that when Jesus is “lifted up” on that cross, we see most clearly God’s face.  God lifts the veil between us.  There is nothing hidden anymore.  God loves us, becomes us, and comes to us to live what we fear most: death.  And God lives through it.  The stone is rolled away.  Life is victorious over death.

That story is the uniquely Christian story.  But it doesn’t end there.  Coming out of Jesus’ struggle with death is the possibility that we too may live in the power of death defeated.   Our lives, our families, our world, and the good earth itself are being transformed into new life--- abundant life.  For Christians, the story comes to a climax in Christ crucified, but it continues on in a new community of love, established around a table laden with bread and wine.  At that table, together, we feast and grow strong to carry the news of Christ’s victory over death, to live the reality of a world without fear, and to be transformed into folk who love and serve each other and our neighbors.

So I had this moment on Sunday.  I was startled to recognize something that has been present all the time.  Each week, whether I am ready to listen or ready to move on with my day.  Each week, whether the message is well crafted and well delivered or if maybe the pastor isn’t in top form. Each week, week on week, Christ crucified and life transformed has been, and with God’s grace, will continue to be, proclaimed from the pulpit at Stony Creek.  Is the service and the preaching always everything I could ever hope for?  No, but sitting among a congregation I love and who love me in turn, each week, week after week, it is certainly enough, just enough, because it gets to the heart of the matter: Christ has died and nothing will ever be the same.

*The painting is, The Crucifixion, by El Greco (around 1596 or so).  It hangs in the Prado in Madrid, Spain.

WHICH WAY TO SHECHEM?

This is a sermon I preached in 2005, and then reworked to preach in Manchester, MI in 2015. As I reworked it I was struck by 2 things: 1) Paul's letters to the churches are filled with precisely the "problem of the next day" that I refer to here as I think about the two brothers in the parable of the Father with two sons, 2) there is more to think about, for me to think about, in offering forgiveness and living with forgiveness.  In any case, I hope you find something here.

            Each week, week after week, Christians gather and pray the prayer Jesus taught.  The Lord’s prayer is almost entirely a petition—give us this, grant us that, keep us from the clutches of evil.  However, there is one passage that differs from the rest.  We pray: “AND FORGIVE US OUR---and the Greek word here is ὀφείλημα, ατος, τό, or Transliteration: opheiléma
Phonetic Spelling: (of-i'-lay-mah) which can mean – debt, sin, or offense---sins, and here’s the special part “AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO SIN AGAINST US”.

            The central message of the Jesus movement is “God forgives sinners!” Now that wasn’t so new to Jesus’ Jewish listeners.  The Torah, the five books of Moses, talks about the day of atonement, sin offerings, and the like.  The psalms and the prophets are full God’s word of pardon to his people.  But quite scandalously to the Jewish religious authorities of that day, the  forgiveness that Jesus proclaims is available quite apart from the Temple in Jerusalem.  Then, as we read on in the Jesus prayer, the passage seems to imply that as members of the Jesus is King movement, we must do the same that God is doing.  Forgive us as we forgive others.  The context of the prayer in Matthew emphasizes just that point.  Look what Jesus says in Matthew 6: 14 and 15.  Immediately after teaching the prayer, he says “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Now think about it—that’s a little intimidating.   As we forgive others so we are forgiven: that we are forgiven only in so far as we forgive others?.  I can just hear the hemming and hawing, the fits of “”Well that really means . . .”  But quite plainly it seems to me, Jesus insists that the only way to be liberated, to be healed, to be free at last, to live in peace with God and neighbor is His way, the way of forgiveness of sins.  In effect, what Jesus tells us after he teaches us the prayer is this.  “If you don’t forgive your brother, as you have been forgiven, then maybe, you just don’t believe that I really bring the Great Forgiveness straight from the Forgiving Father.  Maybe you don’t believe in My death and resurrection.”   Failure to forgive is not some little moral fault like having a few too many on Saturday night, it’s denying the central claim of the faith we profess: faith that sins are forgiven.

That[PF1]  does not fit well with our notions that all we have to do is pray to Jesus and all is right with the world.  Jesus seems to be saying we actually have to participate in the act of forgiveness for there to be forgiveness at all. 

            So what is this forgiveness that is so central to the Jesus movement and apparently so central to our Christian lives?  Well here’s a picture of it.  It’s a story that Jesus tells.  Folks have started to complain that Jesus, this supposedly pure guy, announcing that God is acting right now, this holy healer, well he, as the beginning of Luke 15 tells it, “Welcoming sinners and eating with them.”  So Jesus tells three stories, one about a runaway sheep, another about a coin that is misplaced, and finally one that begins, “there was a man who had two sons . . .”  You might have heard this story.  The older son is a straight-laced, by the book, I hope a guy like that wants to date my daughter type kid.  The younger son, not so much.  He’s the kid that at about 7 or 8 already had the twinkle of mischief in his eye.  Now in his late teens or early 20’s guy, well he wishes his father were dead already so he could get his hands on his share of the family estate.  Not only does he wish it, he marches right up to dad and says it, hand out, “gi—me”.  Well you know the story.  It does not work out well.  The money is squandered and the young man has no choices left.  He’s got to come home, tail between legs.  But here’s the surprise, cue the Hollywood lighting, strike up the music from Halmark movies, post the cuddly baby and soft cat videos on Facebook.  The Father runs out to embrace the young man as he trudges along.  The father welcomes him home.  The Father clothes him in rich robes, puts the family ring on his finger and orders up a celebratory feast!!  Now that’s what forgiveness looks like.  That’s where I could end this morning and we’d all be off the hook, “Well God forgives us.  Isn’t that just sweet, might dang convenient too.  What’s for Sunday supper?”

Oh, and remember the prayer you said this morning—you’re supposed to do the same sort of thing.   Hmmm….are you like the Father?  At least the Father had it easy, it was his son.  The prayer we said doesn’t limit us to forgiving our wayward flesh and blood.  We are to forgive “those”---those anybody at alls ----apparently, who sin against us. 

            And the difficulty I have with the story of the man with two sons is this.  Let’s call it the problem of we the living, the next day problem, the time goes on problem.  Do this.  Pick one of the boys the older son or the younger son, whichever one you are most like—straight and upright picture of moral rectitude older son or wastrel, low down younger son.  Now imagine it’s the morning after the joyous return.  The smell of porridge cooking wakens you and you head down to the kitchen only to find your brother there.  What gets said?  What’s not said but stirs around in brain, heart and stomach?  The older brother how does he live with forgiviness—well the retirement home on that nice little bend in the river where the trout jump is out of the question now—1/2 the family estate is gone, so you’re just getting a ½ of the ½ that’s left when the day comes.  If you’re the younger son, how do you live into forgiveness?  How does it feel to see your brother’s eyes pass over you?  The past is not going to ever go away.  There is no gone and forgotten in this world.  There is a next day.  So take a moment, pick a character and honestly, quite honestly imagine what you would do or say.  What is it like to forgive?  Can you forgive?  What is it like to be forgiven?  Can you live into forgiveness?  What do you do with remorse?  Does it ever go away?

Think about your own life.  What happens between us when somebody has acted disgracefully like the son the Father runs to meet?   Do we admit our disgrace?  Are we a people who will allow those who have disgraced themselves to admit it aloud?  Do the words “I’m sorry” cross our lips easily?  Don’t the words “I forgive you” get choked off by our self-serving sense of right and justice?  Even if we get as far as leaving our pride behind and say the words, how do we put life back together again?  What about the problem of the next day?  The problem of life goes on?

            Now that story sets a high bar, and as I’ve tried to indicate a difficult and maybe puzzling bar.  So let’s turn to the story in the day’s reading that addresses the problem of the day after, the problem of life goes on—the story of Jacob encountering Esau.  It’s a story with two surprises for those who want to be disciples of the Forgiving One.  Once upon a time, there were two brothers.  They were so different, that even as they grew in the womb together, they fought toe and hand.  Esau was born first, and thus deserved the birthright and promise passed from Abraham to Isaac his father.  But Jacob, coming out of the same womb, was even then grasping onto Esau’s heel as he entered the world and took his first breath.  Now Esau grew to be a man’s man—hunting and working hard in the fields.  Jacob stayed in the tents with his mother.  One day, when Esau came home quite hungry from a hard days hunt, Jacob made him trade his birthright for food.  Later, as their father Isaac was about to die, a blind old man, Jacob tricked Isaac. It was time to pass onto the older son the blessing of the Lord—you remember the blessing from Genesis 12—I shall make you a great nation and through you all the nation’s of the world will be blessed.  Well a blessing that big, once given, can’t be taken back.  So Jacob, the tricky one, disguised himself as Esau, and Isaac gave Jacob that blessing.  Esau got so mad at his slimy little brother that he nursed murder in his heart.  So Jacob took off—yes he went on the run, back to his grandfather Abraham’s old homestead, way off in Haran.

The part of the story I read happens over 14 years later.  Jacob made quite a family for himself in Haran.  He’s got 2 wives and 2 concubines.  He’s got 12 sons.  But the blessing is not complete.  He does not live in the land of promise.   So he and all of his family, his servants and his flocks set out for home:  the promised land.  There’s just one problem.  Esau lives there.  Esau, the brother who had the blessing stolen from him.  Esau, who, last anyone knew, wanted to murder Jacob.  As Jacob comes to the border of the promised land, he sends gifts ahead to his brother, sheep and goats—better a little poorer but still alive he figures.  Then, he splits his party up: concubines and their children first, then wife number 1 Leah and her children, and finally the beloved wife, Rachel and the beloved child Joseph last of all –maybe some will be safe from his murderous brother.  The night before they all cross the Jordan into the danger of the promised land, Jacob goes off alone.  There he meets a man.  They wrestle all night.  Jacob wrestles so hard the man blesses him, changes his name to Israel—for he had wrestled with both God and man his whole life, and come out still alive.  Now its time to meet Esau.

The stage is set, so now listen to how real life forgiveness takes place between flesh and blood folks like us.  “And Jacob raised his eyes and saw, and look, Esau was coming, and with him were four hundred men.”   Not a promising start to things now is it?  For Jacob, the moment of truth is now.  Mustering up his courage, he walks past his flocks, his family, and alone approaches his brother, bowing down seven times in an act of formal and very submissive obedience. 

Listen again to surprise number 1, “And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell upon his neck and kissed him, and they wept.”  Sound familiar, a story with a running man . . .this time he wrestles the wrestler Jacob into an embrace.  He fell upon Jacob’s neck, and he didn’t have a dagger in his hand, no he had tears in his eyes.  Jacob and his family are stunned.  Instead of just rage over the theft of the blessing and birthright, Esau has greeted them with open arms and tears of joy. 

  Jacob has been forgiven by his brother, and here’s surprise #2.  Nothing really magical takes place here.  No little hallmark angels appear in the sky.  No sentimental Hollywood style music begins to swell in the background.  Forgiveness is offered, and a much-relieved Jacob takes it.  But no sweet reunions take place.   In fact the story is very clear.  The past between Jacob and Esau has not been wiped out by Esau’s running.  Even as he accepts forgiveness, Jacob takes the opportunity to take sideways note of the blessing of Isaac he stole so long ago.  Remember how he tries to get Esau to accept his gifts?  He say, “ . . . for God has favored me and  I have Everything,”

Or think on Esau.  He’s has always been an emotional, and perhaps a bit dimwitted, brute of a man.  What impelled him to run forward and fall upon his brother’s neck in a tearful embrace?  This story, like so many others in the books of the Old Testament, doesn’t tell us much about the inner workings of the characters minds.  All we see is their character revealed in word and deed.  Something has driven Esau forward.  There may be a hint of his motivation in the offer he makes—“Let us journey onward and go, and let me go alongside you.”  Jacob offers a fairly transparent lie in response, “the nursing sheep and cattle are my burden, and if they are whipped onward a single day, all the flocks will die. . . .let me drive along at my own easy pace . . .till I come to my lord in Seir.”  So Esau tries again, “Let me set aside for you some of the people who are with me.”  Maybe Esau is contemplating folding Jacob and all he possesses into his own fortune.  After all, he is the older brother.   Jacob puts him off again.  And as soon as Esau leaves, Jacob and his family turn the other way and head in the other direction.    Some sweetness and light eh?  This is not the stuff of a Hollywood ending.  This is the stuff of real life.  Oh the story tells us that the brothers meet one more time.  A few chapters later they bury Isaac, their father, together at the oaks of Mamre.  No words are recorded at their meeting. 

The point I see here is that forgiveness among us isn’t always perfectly given nor perfectly received.  The results may never be perfect either.  You see, this side of the Kingdom, forgiveness between us is full of ambiguity and mixed up motives.  In our own lives, in our own homes, yes, even in this place called Stony Creek, there are some we need to forgive and probably, if we’ll admit it, some who could offer forgiveness to us: there may be a wife that needs to say “I’m sorry, forgive me” to a devoted husband she has neglected or worse.  There may be a father who needs to turn to a daughter and say “Forgive me for being so harsh.”  There maybe someone in the next pew you need to go to and say, “I’m sorry, I’ve gossiped about you.”  But Esau and Jacob remind us that there is no instant magic to be found.  Distrust and hard feelings may not disappear.  For we are like Jacob and Esau—full of the good and not so good stuff of humanity.  We hurt and give hurt.  We are offended and give offense.  We trespass the boundaries of love and in turn others trespass the boundaries of love against us. 

What are we to do?  Our prayer each and every week asks that we be forgiven as we forgive.  And this story tells us that it’s just hard slogging work.  You want to know just how hard and thankless it is?  Remember the One who told the story of the Running God.  He knows a thing or two about how hard forgiveness is.   Jesus’ arms were wide open on that Friday he offered us forgiveness for good and for all.  How could he keep them open for so long? [PAUSE]   Forgiveness is messy, sometimes bloody work.

What’s the Good News in all this for us, the disciples here at Stony Creek?  Well, note how this little section of the story of the running brother ends—“And Jacob came in peace to the town of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Paddan-Aram, and he camped before the town.”  Paddan-Aram is in the land  Haran, where grand father Abraham got his call from God.  For Jacob it was the land of escape and exile from a brother with murder in his heart.  Shechem is in the land of Canaan, across the Jordan.  Shechem is in the land of Promise.  In Hebrew, Shechem means “saddle” or shoulder.  It describes a geographic feature.  A High point from which one can look back and see clearly where one has come from, and look forward to see where one must yet travel.  Which way to Shechem?    Forgiveness, that’s the only way to Shechem, the only way to safely, in peace, whole, come into the Promised land.  You see, Remember how Jacob describes his brother as he accepts forgiveness, he says, “for have I not seen your face as one might see God’s face.” Forgiveness, clumsy, mixed up, given without the best of intentions, grudgingly accepted for the sake of not getting something worse, forgiveness somehow reveals the face of God.   The way to Shechem may be a hard and complicated mess as this story tells us, but the only way to Shechem is to live up to our prayer—“ forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  Amen. 

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 [PF1]