Wrestling with God

 Jacob was alone, then he wrestled with God until morning.

This is the reading that we had from Sunday, and it's one of the most important ones for the modern context. That is, Jacob, whilst he is alone, must wrestle with God by himself. For a long time. 

In reality, we don't wrestle with God as much or as often as we ought to, precisely because we fear what would happen if we did. Jacob ends up changed after he is done, renamed by God, yes, but certainly change and different by the time it is over. He is not himself anymore, or not what he used to be. He is given a new identity, a new role, and a new image of himself, and his interactions with his brother change as of that moment. But we don't wrestle with God, and consequently, things don't go overly well for us. 

I'll explain what I mean. Picture math. 

Looking at that makes my head hurt. But math is a complicated thing, to be sure, but it comes down to small constituent parts very easily. And all math is built up off of simple concepts: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Those things add up and are used to make more and more difficult concepts, so that, by the time you have increased in complexity enough, you can do compound interest, land the space shuttle, whatever you need to do, because the math gets more and more complicated, but still requires those constituent parts.

Now, if you would have said as a grade schooler 'yes, I know multiplication, division, addition and subtraction, and now I don't have to know anything else,' like you'd be wrong, obviously, but you'd be wrong in a very particular way. Because eventually, you would come up against a problem that your four bits of math couldn't solve, and you'd have two choices - to buckle down and learn how fractions work, or to insist that math just can't explain this, because it doesn't fit with the math you learned as a child.

People learn about the Lord as children, in Sunday School. They learn about him, and the ten commandments, the Lord's prayer, that kind of thing. And it's not as though the God that you talk to as an adult is different in any material way from the God you talked to as a child, but you had to learn about him differently then as to now. Not because he was different, but because you were. The God of the Bible is infinitely more complex than you learned about as a child because you weren't up for the challenge, and your problems were much much smaller then. The mistake that gets made is that if you stop learning about God and wrestling with him, then you'll come to the came conclusion that people can get to with math.

What I learned about as a child doesn't cover this, therefore it doesn't work.

That's not true. It didn't stop working, you did. Math gets more and more complex to solve more and more complex problems. If you're counting to 12, you can get that done in a sesame street song, but if you're flying to mars, you're not gonna fit that into simple mnemonic lyrics. If all you know is how to count to ten, or whatever, you're not making it to mars anytime soon. If all you know is the lyrics to 'Jesus loves me,' it's all technically true, of course, but then grappling with the enormity of why bad things happen to people you like, or if your pets go to heaven or whatever, aren't covered in those lyrics. 

So you gotta wrestle. In the same way as Jacob, when all is calm and still, you have to wrestle with God until morning. It's a heck of a process, and one that must be done if you're going to get anywhere. Otherwise, nothing changes, especially you. You won't learn or grow, or be changed at all, because it'll be just you again, as usual. But if you wrestle with God, if you have problems, concerns, difficulties, and so on, you may find that wrestling with God answers a few of those questions. Maybe all of them. Maybe you need to grow, and the only way to do so is through conflict, at the end of which you're not yourself. You're something better.

Thanks

 Ten Lepers. 9 leave, one returns to give thanks.

This is a story you know by now, so I don't have to hyper-explain it, but there is a peculiar turn of phrase that occurs in the English language printed text. A long time ago, I used to teach elementary school kids about Greek mythology, and in doing so, we talked about Owls as a symbol for Athena, being the goddess of wisdom as she was. And I would ask the kids why it was they thought that the owl was a symbol for wisdom, and they would invariably say 'Because owls ask a lot of questions.' You know, Whoo whooo? 

It's a cute idea, but one that doesn't scan, given that 'Who' doesn't mean 'who' in ancient Greek. Words and expressions don't carry one to one from one language to another. So when I talk about this turn of phrase, I'm well aware that it doesn't mean in Greek what it means in English. 

Ten Lepers, having to stand a distance away from Jesus even when they're begging for healing, and they call out 'Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.' And Jesus has mercy on them, and tells them to show themselves to the priests. As they go, they are cleansed. The one who comes back does so to give thanks, which he does. Then the text tells us 'Now he was a Samaritan.'

Now he's a Samaritan. Okay, so what was he before? The answer: A leper. Because being a leper is all you are, and all you can be. You're not a carpenter or a father, a wife or seamstress. You're not a patron of the arts, a lawyer, a patrician or a plebe. You're a leper. And lepers are grouped with lepers, for obvious reasons - lepers make more lepers, so the only people they can freely associate with are other lepers. And that's what you get. Remember social distancing, which is a trick that we used recently to try to curb infection rates of COVID-19, and realize that this tactic has been in use for thousands of years. Lepers make more lepers - the only way to keep that down is to have as little contact as possible with lepers. So you put them with each other. 

But when they went away and were healed, and as they were healed, the identity of leper was removed. The identity through which everyone else saw and perceived them, that was gone, replaced by who they were apart from their disease and diagnosis. When the one leper returns, the text says 'Now he was a samaritan.' Now. Yes, now. He wasn't before, he is now. What was he before? A leper. And that identity was so strong that it overruled everything else. More than being a man or woman, slave or free, Jew or Samaritan. And those are strong identities, because, as we know from the story of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well: "Jews have no dealings with Samaritans." Unless they're both lepers. Then they're equal in their diagnosis - equally bad. 

But the healing is a great moment in which the identity of sin is no longer considered by the Lord. That is, in the same way as people are all the same in their leprosy, they are viewed the same by Christ as well. He doesn't heal the Jews but abandon the Samaritan - he sees people afflicted and heals them equally. And this is a clear distillation of the idea that there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, all are one in Christ Jesus. Seeing that played out shows us that there are people who are equally afflicted, and equally in need of aid. And if you extrapolate that, we are all equally sinners, identified with that far more than we are our nationality or ethnicity. And we are all in need of a salvation that we can't get ourselves. And if being a leper is too esoteric for you, then I'd like to point out that we are all going to be equally dead someday, and that all skeletons tend to look pretty much alike. 

The Lord Jesus is the one who sees through all the petty differences that we erect for ourselves, and identifies our needs first and foremost. He sees the fact that we are desperately lost, that we are devastated in our sinfulness, and cannot free ourselves. On our own, all of us are just hurtling towards death anyway. So he sees the need, and meets it. And in that moment, we go from being equally damned, to equally redeemed. Just as in the grave there is no Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male or female, so too are those differences gone in paradise. All are one in Christ Jesus. 

Pay attention to yourselves

 I think what I enjoyed the most from the reading from Sunday was the little line in there where Jesus says "pay attention to yourselves." Yeah, about that. About that.

When Jesus says things about having to forgive, about not leading these little ones into sin, he says in there, in the sandwich of words 'pay attention to yourselves.' And truly, as Christians, it's a matter for us to consider - that is, how much of our focus on sin is focus on sin outside ourselves? The answer? A lot. But that's the human condition. 

It's normal to think of ourselves as being the baseline, the neutral, the base, and everything else is a variant around us. And when we think about sin, we think about the sin of other people as sin. That's what makes the world fall apart. That's what causes degradation and collapse. When other people do bad things, that's what sin is. But sin is like breath, as I'm fond of saying. That is, it's much much easier to detect someone else's bad breath than your own. And it's much much   easier to detect someone else's sin than your own. After all, how often has someone offered you a breath mint, or a life saver or gum or something, and you just sort of stared at them. What could they possibly mean by that?

They mean you stink. And believe it or not, your sin is perfectly on display to everyone you know....except you. All the people around you, they know that you have a terrible temper, that you're mean with money, that you're a gossip or a fraud, they know you talk about yourself far too much, that you don't bother thinking too much about anyone else's needs, and so on. They all know these things, even though you don't see them as being integral parts of yourself. 

But when Jesus makes a caution, and says that if you lead little ones into temptation, it would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea, he follows it up by saying 'pay attention to yourselves.' And that's a line that you really shouldn't skip over. For in reality, there's likely a lot of time that you spend thinking about the sins of others, what they should or should not be doing, how badly they've gone off course, why they should smarten up, that kind of thing, but Jesus doesn't tell you about that, does he? He says 'pay attention to yourself.' For if we are to be serious, and to assume that Jesus is being serious too, he means what he says. When he says that it is dangerous business to tempt others into sin, that we should be as concerned about that as we are about the sins that we easily identify in others. If we believe that sin is bad, as we do, then we run head on into the reality that we have, whether glibly or deliberately, convinced others to sin who would not have done so otherwise. We took people who were wavering on the fence, not sure if they wanted to go down a path or not, and talked them into going all the way. Sure, they were thinking of dishing out the new hot gossip, or telling you something that they should have taken to their graves, or whatever, and you and I persuaded them to do what they should not have done. In that moment, the conversation could have gone either way - they could easily have been talked out of sinning, but we became enablers, and talked them into it. We did so because it suited us to do so, and like it or not, that sin becomes our problem. Pay attention to yourselves indeed - this is something that we have fallen into on multiple occasions. 

So, if Jesus is truthful, if it matters that we lead others into temptation, then what is to be done here? And if Jesus is truthful that if someone sins against you and repents, over and over again, then you must forgive them, does this apply to us? Pay attention to yourselves, once again.

For in reality, we all know that this is true, do we not? Have we not cursed those who have led us into sin and temptation? Do we not think that they truly ought not have done that? Have we not desperately pleaded with divine providence to smite those who refuse to forgive us for our actions? We believe sincerely that people really, truly, genuinely should have to forgive us when we have gone far wrong. It comes down to the idea that even when we do not deserve to be forgiven, we still should be, because we're us. And that's typically where we can tell that something is true, you know? Like when we believe that other people should do it. And here we are, at the intersection of truth and effort, where we understand that the way we believe that other people should behave is not always the way we want to behave.

We can smell their breath. But they can smell ours.

Pay attention to yourselves, then. Understand that these are words spoken not to people who have long since become dust, but are words spoken to you, too. And that's the issue that we are all going to have to deal with - the things we know people should do are not things that we do, and once we acknowledge that, then we're going to have to deal with the fact that Jesus is pointing out to us our need for a breath mint. Which he provides.

Why be a Christian at all? It comes down to forgiveness of sins, you know. And the forgiveness of sins that we're looking for is the forgiveness of sins that comes through the blood of Jesus. And that is the only way you can ever get or find some solace in the midst of the gap between how you feel people should behave, and how you behave. The greatness of the faith that we have is it's not about telling you to be better. Jesus doesn't show up and tell you to get better breath, you know. Instead, he shows up and says to you 'you need a breath mint. You stink. But I'm going to provide you with one' and then does. The whole work of redemption, of salvation, is simply that. There are ways people should behave, and when you pay attention to yourself, you find that you have not done it, and Christ is the one who makes you whole through the cross.