The stupidest story in the Bible

How much do you know about Jacob and Esau?  Odds are, pretty little.  But I was tooling around on the internet the other day, and I came across a youtube video of a long drawn out cartoon / commentary about how the Jacob and Esau story was stupid, and for a moment it made sense.  After all, that story always has seemed a little bit silly - somehow Isaac figures that goat skin all over his smooth son's arms in any way resembles his hirsute son?  It seems a little silly.  I am hardly likely to win fatehr of the year anytime soon, but oh my, I could tell the difference between my two sons no problem.  They're totally different in every way, aside from genetics, and I could tell the difference between them blindfolded.  

But maybe that's the point.  Perhaps the ludicrousness of this story underscores the ludicrousness of our faith.  You see, back in the day, Martin Luther figured something out about the Christian faith.  He figured out justification.  He figured out that the death of Christ on the cross justified us before God.  That our sins are forgiven, and that God no longer sees all our terrible sins when he looks at us.  And we are redeemed and forgiven.  And strangely enough, those of us in the church, we no longer see this as absurd.  'Of course,' we say 'why wouldn't we be justified?  Justification is the article on which the church stands or falls.'  Yes, it seems really simple, until you think about it.

How did the execution of a Jewish carpenter two thousand years ago affect you in the slightest?  How do his good works and his inherent goodness apply to you?  It's a straight up question, and one that most of us don't even think about for the overwhelmingly vast majority of our time.  Jesus gives good advice, he's a neat guy, he has interesting things to say, but does this in any way actually connect with us?  Yes.  And I'll tell you how.

As mentioned on Sunday, the Old Testament reading of Jacob grappling with God, wrestling with God until morning, it happens at a key point in the scriptures.  It happens as Jacob is trying to figure out what will happen between him and his brother.  You see, Jacob, in case you didn't know, he'd stolen his brother's blessing under false pretenses, he'd taken his brothers birthright for a mess of pottage, and he was now on the lam, watching lambs, waiting for a chance to return.  But here's the problem .  Things with his brother were bad.  Really bad.  His brother had four hundred men with him, and his brother was big and mean.  Esau was a warrior, a fighter, a hunter, an outdoorsman, he was big and strong.  And Jacob, by comparison, was a creampuff, someone who got his way by talking his way into our out of things.  He could in no way hang with his brother and fight him.  He was going to have to run, or to make things work.  But if he was going to run, he was going to have to keep running forever.  He'd already been doing that, and now, it was time to face his brother.  And his prayer to God before he met his bother was that he might be saved from the grasp of Esau, his enemy.  

After wrestling with God all night, Jacob was changed.  His hip was put out of joint, and his name was changed, from Jacob to Israel.  And so when he went out to meet his brother, it wasn't to run, and it wasn't outfitted for war, it was to grovel and to beg for forgiveness.  You see, the thing is, that if you wrestle with God, wrestle with him all night, he's going to work on you and change you, through his word.  And to do that, you have to actually be connected and immersed within that word.  You can't start off with the idea of God that you want, the God of 'itching ears,' the God who tells you what you want to hear.  You have to start off with the actual God, and to get through what he has to say, you have to wrestle with him, all night if you need to.  

You have to grapple with what God really says, and know him for who he really is.  You have to get into the scriptures, and see what God has in mind for you and for your life.  You'll come across the very real truth that the way he wants you to resolve difficulties and broken relationships is through forgiveness and reconciliation.  It's through mercy, through asking for forgiveness where it is required.  It is through repentance, and through love.  And the Biblical requirement is that if you have overstepped, you must repent; and if someone else has sinned and repented, you must forgive.  You don't have a choice.  And this isn't the sort of thing you understand unless you actually do the work, and wrestle with God, and allow him to change you through his word.  Otherwise, your itching ears will make for you a God who says that you're tops, the problems you have in your life are problems caused by other people, and all you have to do is to steer the course and wait for everyone else to figure it out.

In other words, a lot of what you have to do as a Christian is to see God, and his word, for what they actually are.  You need to see God for who he actually is.  And this is the miracle of how justification works, and how it ties in with that story of Jacob and Esau.  For justification to work, you need to see God for who he actually is, and as Jesus says 'he who has seen me has seen the father.'  If you want to know who God really is, get to know Jesus Christ for who he actually is.  Not just the parts you like, either, but get to know the parts you don't like  Wrestle with him and realize that he promises grace, but requires repentance from each and every single one of us.  Realize that the gospel is offered to sinners, and those sinners need to know their sin, and confess it, and be done with it.  In doing so, we'll be seeing God for who he actually is.  

And he won't be seeing us for who we actually are.  That's the real kicker that we weren't expecting, isn't it?  For people who want to be seen as their real selves, to be known as who they really are, they really expect and desire to be recognized as their true selves.  But I have some bad news for you in that department:  When God looks at you, he doesn't see the real you in the way we'd expect.  In a way, the story of Esau and Isaac and Jacob gets less silly the more you consider the story of Christ.  You see, the story of Esau involves Jacob sticking some goat skin on his hands and neck, and fooling his father into thinking he was his brother.  In that, when Isaac touched his hands, he felt his elder son, not his younger.

And that's what happens with us too.  When God looks at us, to bless us, he doesn't see us.  He sees the merits of Christ.  When he reaches out to touch us and give us his blessing, he doesn't see our merits, he sees those of Christ.  He sees the work and righteousness of Jesus.  When you remember that, all of a sudden, the story of Esau being an hairy man is a way better story.  God gave a blessing to someone who didn't deserve it, just like Isaac did.  He gave it to us, because looking at us he saw Christ.  And just like Jacob, we don't get the blessing whipped away because it shouldn't have been ours to begin with.  We were blessed, we were blessed at baptism, and we are blessed at the Lord's Supper.  We are blessed through word and sacrament, we are blessed through God's love, we are forgiven and redeemed.  We are given all these things because God sees Christ when he sees us.  

And the so-called 'real us?'  The sin is removed, and the rest, God looks at, and says that it is good.

Fresh eyes.

Does anyone remember the lockhorns?  Sure you do. And did you know they're still around?  Still married, still hate each other.  It's a sad state of affiars, isn't it?  Can you believe that strip is still running?  This couple has been in middle age since 1968, and has long since passed the seven year itch.  They're doing that thing

that you're supposed to do when you get married - hate each other.  It's such an expectation that we pepper even our good wishes for newlyweds with the same ideas, that they will end up hating the person that they're professing undying love to.

But have you ever wondered how that happens?  How does it transpire that couples who love each other to death end up sniping at each other constantly, and end up slagging each other off to mutual acquaintances and we think it's normal?  Shouldn't that be a pretty big deviation from what we're expecting?  Well, hold the phone, fibber macgee, because that's what this is going to be all about.  Because we're in the season of thanksgiving, and it's the season in which we, hopefully, will be looking a little closer at what we have to be thankful for.

You see, folks, it's really easy for us to fall out of love with stuff, be it each other, God, our nation, our family, whatever.  It's really easy for us to fall out of love, though.  And the biggest way in which we do that is when we take each other or anything else for granted.  It's a major, MAJOR problem.  In fact, facing people of our persuasion (white, middle class, living in the first world), it may be the biggest problem driving an awful lot of unhappiness.  We are people who are generally dissatisfied with the amazing lives we live.  Generally.  You may think this doesn't apply to you, but it almost certainly does.  And I'll tell you how I know this.

I know this because you are probably someone living in the first world, bombarded by advertising all day, and continually being told that your life up until this moment has been nothing but a failure, which could only be rectified by purchasing the latest product or service.  Think about this, as I've said many times,that 99% of ads these days say very little about the product or service in question, and usually just says a lot about your life as a failure.  You're not being sold the product, you're being sold the lifestyle, which weirdly enough never shows up after you purchase the product.  Weird right?

Anyhow, knowing that you're being marketed to in a certain way should explain something to you, or at least make it clear.  It should make things clear that you're being approached in your weakness as a satisfied person.  Have you ever asked yourself why it is that your house is like mine, a graveyard of thing that you thought would fill the gap in your life?  Well, it's for that reason, that you were sold them under false pretences.

What's the solution?  Well, it's not too complicated.  Have you ever found something in your house that you were sure you'd lost forever?  Ever been looking for something sensible, like a hammer or whatever, in your

house, and found something that you've lost a long time ago, like an old record player, or a gameboy, or a shirt that you haven't worn in forever?  And then, all of a sudden, you're totally delighted by this hitherto unknown treat, because you're seeing it with fresh eyes.

Seeing things with fresh eyes is fundamental to not just this story, but to the Christian experience in general.  Look at the reading that we had from Sunday, in which ten lepers asked Jesus for healing on the road to Jerusalem.

12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy[a] met him. They stood at a distance13 and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

14 When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.

15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

17 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”

As I mentioned on Sunday, part of what is important in this is that this is a foreigner, someone looking at Jesus and his ministry, and possibly the faithful God himself, with fresh eyes.  Someone capable of doing what we are incapable of doing, of looking at this relationship with fresh eyes, and seeing it perhaps almost for the first time.  Seeing Jesus from the outside instead of from the inside.  Because Jesus, like everything else, gets a little drab the closer we are to him.  As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt.  It's a real thing.  And we've lost that ability to see Jesus with those fresh eyes, instead seeing so many many other things rather than God in human form.  We see the pews, we see the potlucks, we see the narthex, the elders, the council, in fact, we see everything but God in human form.  His news about forgiveness of sins was great a while ago, but now, well, it's old, daddy-o.  But looking at things with fresh eyes is key to finding satisfaction not just with God, but with everything else, too.  Sure enough, as I said on Sunday, do you have any idea how paradisical your life would appear to someone from Syria?  It would doubtlessly be paradise.  Nobody would be trying to kill them, nobody would be trying to bomb them out, the government wouldn't be trying to gas them to death, there wouldn't be war all around them all the time, and it would be wondrous.  What do you think they'd thank God for on Thanksgiving?  Just pumpkin pie lattes?  Or that they live in paradise.  

Your life is pretty amazing.  It might not seem like it, because you're viewing it from the inside, but take a second to look at it from the outside.  Try to see your life as though you were a foreigner.  Try to see your wife or husband from the outside, as you used to.  Try to see your house not as someone living it, but as someone shopping for it, someone homeless, someone from Syria whose home has been bombed out.  Try to see your office not as your cubicle, but as someone who is unemployed, and desperately seeking work.  Try to see your cars not as the person who had to drive it, but as someone who has to walk everywhere.  When you look at your faith, at God, see him not as a lifelong Christian who is kind of bored with the whole thing, but as someone bent double under the weight of their sin, desperate to be free of it.

In a sense, at Thanksgiving, it's time not just to be thankful for big meals, but thankful for the regularity of our lives, the routine, and asking that we may find joy in it again.  Or, as GK Chesterton puts it:

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun: and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

The breath of God

Do you remember that part in the Last Crusade, when Indiana Jones is working out how to get through all the devious traps between him and the Holy Grail? Sure you do.  The first trap is the breath of God, and the clue is 'only the penitent man will pass.'

Now in this version, if you are not sufficiently penitent, then a massive set of whirling blades will first cut your head off, then presumably cut you in half.  But hold on a minute here, because that's not really what the breath of God is all about.  Or is it?

The point I was trying to make on Sunday was about fire and breath, specifically that almost all of us have a view of fire that is that it is extinguished by breath, by blowing on it.  This is how we are born and raised, since the first time we encounter fire, pretty much, we can make it go away by blowing on it.  Candles, matches, any of these things; they're all extinguished by blowing on them semi-forcefully.  But then comes the moment when you find someone with dying embers making up a fire, and they want to get the fire up and going again.  And so what do they do?  They kneel down before the dying coals, and do something that you never expected - they blow on it. Hard.  And what happens?  The fire springs to life again.

This is, as I said on Sunday, the most counter-intuitive thing in all of creation.  It's absurd, if you think about it as a child.  The most tried and true method of putting out fires that you've ever known and

there someone is using it to make a fire bigger.  But that's the crazy thing about how fire and air work.  Fire exists only in the presence of something called the 'fire triangle.'  What's the fire triangle? I'm glad you asked.  Fire can only exist when it has heat, fuel, and oxygen.  If you remove one of those things, then the whole thing collapses.  Any firefighting techniques are designed to do just that, to remove one side from the fire triangle.  And blowing a candle out removes the fuel from the fire.  But hold on there campers, because that same activity also adds oxygen to the fire.  So if it's a small flame, it'll go out.  If it's a big simmering fire, it'll get much bigger.  And this is the point.  The breath doesn't change at all, as you've only got one set of lungs to breathe with.  The breath doesn't change, but the fire does.

The reading from Habakkuk for Sunday was all about suffering, issuing forth the usual refrain of saying 'how long, O Lord, must we wait.  How long must we dwell in sadness and shame.  How long must we be put aside and passed over. Why must the wicked prosper, and why must the good be beaten down and messed around?  All good questions, to be sure.  And in these cases, we may very well feel as though we are a candle in the wind, We may very well feel as though we are a recently struck match that is threatening to go out with that kind of wind.  Buffetted on all sides, it may seem like the weak flame of our faith is threatening to go out.

But the Epistle reading talks about fanning into flame that gift of God that dwells in you.  Fanning into flame that spark, that gift, that spirit of God that is in all of us.  That spark that was given to us in our baptisms, when the Holy Spirit was given to you, and faith was created in your heart, that spark.  And that's the spark that we're asking to be fanned into flame.  If it's a strong faith, then the suffering you encounter will be like the suffering found in the book of Romans, which produces perserverence, and perserverence, character, and character hope.  And hope does not put you to shame.  That's what suffering does in the spirit of the great of faith, who, when they encounter suffering, have their faith fanned in to flame by it.

And is that you?  Yeh, probably not.  There's a good chance that when you see yourself, you don't think of a towering faith that can withstand all comers, and never cracks a smile, or flinches or cries for nobody, uh-huh.  You don't have that faith, do you?  No, you don't.  I'd bet that you have that faith when the days get short, and the chips are down, does that suffering fan you into greater faith, or does it threaten to stamp it out?
that wavers constantly between extreme clarity and desperate lack of belief.  Something vascillating and oscillating between knowing Jesus so clearly you could almost see him, and thinking that the Holy Scriptures and everything in them is a bunch of hokum.  That's you.  And when the storms come,

If you're a regular human being, then there's a good chance that your faith, your frail human faith, gets blown out, extinguished.  And what's left behind?  A smouldering wick, with smoke coiling towards the ceiling, and a tiny spark in the middle of it.

And that would be the end of the story, except for what Jesus has actually promised to do, and who he actually is.  This is a key difference, don't you know.  Jesus says quite clearly that he has come for the lost sheep of Israel, that it isn't the well who need a physican, but the sick.  He hasn't come to bolster the strong and uplift those who are honestly doing sort of okay.  He came for those who are browbeaten by the world, who are pushed around, who are ground into the dirt.  He came for the lost sheep, and will leave the other ninety-nine until he finds the lost.  He came for the sinners, the doubters, the liars, he came for the adulterers, he came for the frail, he came for the poor.

He came for you.

In all these discussions of candles and flames, lest we forget the words spoken of Jesus in the Gospels, where it says that he will not snuff out a smouldering wick, or break off a bruised reed.  Jesus is in the business of working with weak faiths.  He's in the business of working with what is smouldering, bruised, ready to break or go out.  He's in the business of working with one spark, one frail ember, and fanning it into flame.  And that spark, I'm happy to tell you, doesn't go out.

Have you been baptized?  Then you have received the Holy Spirit.  Luther's catechism says about it that 'when connected with the world of God, it as a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Spirit.'  And what do you bring to your baptism?  Nothing but your sins.  What do you leave with?  That spark that will always be smouldering away, no matter how bad things get.  And if there's a spark, it can be fanned into flame again.  It's not too late.

PJ