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GOOD PEOPLE...BAD PEOPLE???

10/20/2019

Genesis 32:22-30
The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”
Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

We hear a lot in the news recently about the #Me Too movement. That is where people, usually women, but not always, have been abused or degraded, again most usually, but not always in a sexual manner – generally by rich, white, powerful men who used their positions of power to escape any condemnation for the things they’ve done. Men who, because of their wealth, their power, and their whiteness have somehow been seen as having a ‘right’ to do whatever they want. To attempt to stand up against these people is to be ostracized, humiliated, and locked out of their professions with no further chance of growth or advancement.

This can, of course, go far beyond individuals. We have a worst case scenario right now, where certain leaders – lusting after real-estate deals and Syria’s oil fields – have used their power to throw the Kurdish people – including innocent women and children – into a nightmare where they are being murdered for no good reason whatsoever – except that rich, white, powerful men say so.

These arrogant, greedy folks have always existed – we’re just starting to name them as such these days.

The Old Testament has several instances of this behavior – “power” generally meant life or death power in biblical times – and there are puzzling instances of God actually favoring these scoundrels.

The most famous, of course, is the much beloved King David who saw Bathsheba bathing and decided he would have her for himself. When he found that she was already married, he simply arranged to have her husband killed in battle. You can do that when you’re king. He’s still Israel’s “greatest king” and God’s much blessed son.

There are several other instances, such as David’s son, Solomon who allowed the worship of foreign gods in the Temple – where others who would later do the same suffered severely from God’s wrath. He still is known as the wise, and blessed, King Solomon.

The biggest of these scoundrels though has got to be the “hero” of today’s story – Jacob. Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, who lied and cheated his way through much of his life and still God loved him to pieces.

It was Jacob, the younger twin, who took advantage of his father’s blindness to cheat his brother Esau out of the birthright blessing that was rightfully his as the elder brother. When Jacob ran off to live with his uncle, Laban, out of fear of Esau’s justified wrath, he ended that relationship by tricking Laban out of a huge chunk of his flocks and then lying about the theft of Laban’s household gods.

Running from Laban, he could only run back toward his brother Esau and that is where we start today. Jacob has been given word that Esau is coming to meet him – and he doesn’t know if that’s in war or friendship.

They stop for the night and – Jacob, being Jacob – he sends the women and children ahead, over the river, and stays behind alone. Apparently we’re not supposed to notice that this maneuver puts the women and children in Esau’s path first while Jacob is left safely on the other side.

Then comes one of the most perplexing stories in the Old Testament – Jacob wrestling with an angel. To give Jacob his due – he’s not totally a monster, just an weak opportunist -- he is trying to return home – with everything that word means to him. He wants to go home – but knows that when he was there he was a spoiled little “mama’s boy” who was willing to cheat and steal to get what he wanted. He is well aware there is probably not a warm welcome awaiting him. He can’t go back, and he fears going forward. He's stuck.

Here in this “in between” place – hovering somewhere between home and his years of running and hiding – Jacob makes a choice to become a different man.

Although the scripture refers to the midnight visitor as an angel or even as Godself, there is internal evidence here that suggests this story was already ancient long before Abraham left Ur and that the visitor was actually a demon. The visitor’s insistence that they have to stop at daybreak suggests a demon, who are known to not tolerate sunlight, as well as Jacob’s insistence on knowing the visitor’s name, since in ancient days knowledge of an entity’s name was thought to confer power over that entity.

Here, after all the years of running, Jacob finally faces his demon – both literally and figuratively. And he wins – not by theft or trickery as she's always done, but by persistence and not giving up. Here Jacob finally looks God “face to face” and lives.

And from this point on Jacob is a different man. No more lying, no more stealing (that we know of). Here, from this day forward, Jacob is no longer Jacob, but “Israel”, because he “wrestled with God.” Here he becomes the much beloved patriarch and ultimately, father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The traditional answer to the perplexing stories of God seemingly helping cheats and tricksters along is that God wants to show that God can use even the jerks in life to fulfill God’s purpose. Maybe.

Or maybe this type of bible story is simply trying to explain that somehow since God was OK with the fact that some of the Hebrew heroes were really jerks so the people didn’t have to feel bad about them. Maybe.

Or maybe Jacob went on being a jerk for so long because he was really good at it and before today’s story had never reached that low ebb where he could finally see God’s face and try a new way. Or maybe all three of these explanations.

Or maybe ..... the answer is as simple as this: God loves us all. Heroes and cowards, peasants and kings. God loves us all and will continue to give us chances to redeem ourselves from our bad behaviors. Some of us just need more redeeming than others.

And it may not be the ones we think.

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EVERYONE IS AN EXPERT HERE

10/13/2019

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Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Everyone is an expert these days. If a baseball team loses a game, there is no shortage of self-proclaimed experts who will immediately begin to broadcast their vast knowledge of what went wrong and how it would have been different if everyone had just listened to them. When a natural catastrophe hits, the air is suddenly filled with experts expounding on what should have been done to prevent it.

Social issues abound in experts. Take homelessness, for instance. The loudest experts will almost always turn out to be A) people who have never been unemployed; B) people who have never been economically insecure; C) people who don’t actually even know any homeless people; and D) people who get all of their information regarding a wider world from one source.

And the angrier a person can make themselves feel – about nearly anything – the more of an expert they become.

All of this relates to our reading today because Jeremiah was attempting to deal with the same problem of too many experts. Our current reading comes from a letter that Jeremiah wrote to those who had been taken into exile in Babylon when the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar attacked and conquered Judah. What we refer to as the exile was actually a series of staged removals – about three of them. The 3rd group removal took place in about 581 BCE, the first about 16 years earlier.

While we today may get confused by the multiplicity of “exiles” here – which gets even more confusing when we add in the destruction of the northern kingdom, Israel, about 120 years prior in 722 BCE, and the exile which followed there – we can be sure that the Hebrew people knew it well and were not confused by it. Like the grieving we discussed last week, this would have been part of the history which helped to shape the Jesus we follow.

Jeremiah’s letter was written to the first wave exiles, around 597 BCE. This group included not only ordinary people, but the king himself, priests, most of the skilled artisans, and prophets (the prophet Ezekiel, for instance, was taken but Jeremiah was left behind in Jerusalem).

Apparently the Jerusalem that was left behind was filled with ”experts,” especially the false prophets, who were telling those in exile just what they should do – fight and resist – or maybe repent really hard because God is mad at them personally for something they have done – or maybe just go with the flow because God is going to destroy the Babylonians any minute now and the whole thing will be over with and you can come home again soon.

It was the advice of these false experts that moved Jeremiah to write and send the exiles the true word of God. And this true word was to settle where you are taken and – this is the important and difficult part – continue to know that God is with you there and that God is shaping you for what you will need to be when you return. Don’t fight, don’t resist, but settle in and make your homes there.

We know that conditions in Babylon were actually not as bad as we might imagine. This was not abject slavery as we think of it here. The Judahites were allowed to marry and live together as families. They had their own homes. They could even worship as they pleased with – of course – the exception that they had no Temple here. This time of exile was quite possibly the time when they developed the concept of synagogues – giving them a place to gather and pray together when they didn’t have the temple to be the center of their lives.

The point which Jeremiah makes so strongly here is that God knows what God is doing. Just a couple of verses beyond today’s reading is one of the loveliest promises anywhere in scripture: I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. The Judahites are to accept – even in the midst of what seemed to them like utter failure and despair -- that God has brought them to this place and God is – and will remain – here with them. Trust God.

We, like those ancestors from so long ago, still have to learn this lesson. We still love to blame someone, something else whenever things go wrong for us. We want to be able to point our fingers and say, “it’s all their fault -- I would have done it better.” We really want to be our own experts.

Many things went wrong in Jesus’ life. It would have been nicer, I’m sure if things had worked out more smoothly for him. If things had only gone the way he wanted then to go. But in the scriptures he had learned a harder lesson: Whether things went his way or not, he trusted his God and, except for one fleeting, oh-so-human moment at the very end, he knew his God was with him, always.

Sometimes we just have to, in the words of St. John of the Cross, "Go out into the darkness and put our hand into the hand of God. That shall be a better light, and safer than any known way."

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GRIEF IS A BITTER LEGACY

10/6/2019

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Psalm 137:1-4
By the rivers of Babylon--there we sat down
and we wept when we remembered Zion.
And so we hung up our harps, there upon the willows.
For there our captors asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How could we sing God's song in a foreign land?

Lamentations 1:1-4
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
   she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
   has become a vassal.
She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
   they have become her enemies.
Judah has gone into exile with suffering
   and hard servitude;
she lives now among the nations,
   and finds no resting-place;
her pursuers have all overtaken her
   in the midst of her distress.
The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals;
all her gates are desolate, her priests groan;
her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter.

After a few weeks of on and off Sundays we are finally back on schedule with the Lectionary and the same readings (more of less) that our brothers and sisters are reading today.
Before we get into specific readings, I want take time out for a quick reminder of some scripture study terminology to try to avoid any confusion here. I have been referring to what we’re doing here as readings from the Old Testament, just to avoid confusion, but the better wording should refer to them as the Hebrew Scriptures or, in Hebrew, the Tanakh.
Other words you might hear are Torah, which is the Hebrew word for the first five books – those supposedly written by Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Pentateuch is the Greek word which means the same as Torah and is used more commonly by Christians since Greek was the lingua-franca of the near east in the earliest centuries of Christendom.
Early Christians continued using the scriptures they knew and merely added on new specifically Christian writings as they were accepted. After enough of these latter accrued, the writings were divided into Old and New Testaments simply to indicate which were pre-Jesus and which were post-Jesus.
If you ever get confused, please ask. Since we are not bible scholars gathered here I will continue to use Old and New terminology because that is clear enough for our limited purposes.
Back to today...while the Epistle and Gospel readings given for today are not quite so woe-filled, the readings offered for the Old Testament are definitely heavy on the sorrowing. Remember, we’re reading only the Old Testament this Summer and Fall because Jesus learned from them and was shaped by them.
Today we actually have five different Old Testament readings offered: two from Lamentations, one from the prophet Habakkuk, and two different Psalms. As we heard, I chose one from Lamentations and one of the Psalms.
Lamentations has traditionally been ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah, but this is apparently not so widely accepted any more with many thinking it may be a collection of the writings of several people. It is just what it says it is – a collection of five poems of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 586 BCE. It’s bitter conclusion suggests the possibility that God may have finally rejected Israel once and for all. While admitting that God can still chose to save the people, no guarantee is offered, and there is a very real possibility that God will not so choose.
The second reading is Psalm 137, written during the Babylonian exile, and echoes the grief of a people far from their home.
I chose to have us only read four verses of each of these readings today, just for brevity’s sake, but the sorrow is heavy all throughout them both. These two readings are drowning in grief and mourning. We, as Christians, unless we are full-on bible scholars, tend to cherry-pick our way through the Old Testament, focusing most often on the ones that offer us the hope of a savior, whom we identify as Jesus.
But, remember, Jesus was not a Christian. He was as much a Hebrew as any man of his time. These writings reflect the deep, deep grief that is an integral part of the Hebrew believers’ being. If we pay attention when reading the Old Testament we can find that this sense of mourning and grieving runs all through the Hebrew Scriptures. Israel and Judah covered a small area geographically and the times they were powerful were few and far between. They were often beset by their more powerful neighbors and all too often forced into a subservient, vassal role.
The Children of Abraham went down into Egypt to escape famine in their home territories. Received at first as guests, they gradually became slaves and God had to rescue them in the Exodus. When they first went into Canaan their enemies were mostly as small as they and they were able to carve out a place for themselves, and briefly rise to a time of greatness under David and Solomon, but that time did not last and a combination of weaker kings and stronger neighbors led to a series of exiles and enslavement, including the most well-known, the long exile in Babylon.
Closer to the time of Jesus, armies from Greece, then Rome, turned them into puppet states, with no real power at all. There is so much for which to grieve in Hebrew history, and the Old Testament is not shy about sharing its grieving.
Yes, there was hope and joy and prayer in the readings Jesus knew, but there was also despair and failure and mourning. Jesus brought all of these to the teaching he gave his followers – many of whom – the Hebrew ones – would have been raised on the same mix of emotions.
Triumphalism is a Christian addition to the mix. We are assured that God is always for us, without doubt. We are assured that Jesus conquered sin and death for all time. Christians took that sense of triumphant assurance out in the world and conquered the known countries of their time, something the Hebrews had never down.
Jesus gave us all that is in the Hebrew writings – but he gave us something more, as well – something that came from himself. He was, as we all are, a mixture of what he had been given and what he created on his own. He took the lamentation of his teaching and mixed it, as compassion and mercy, with the assurance of his beliefs.
Thank God for both.

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GOOD PEOPLE...BAD PEOPLE???

EVERYONE IS AN EXPERT HERE

GRIEF IS A BITTER LEGACY

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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