The Importance of Forgiveness, Matthew 18:21-35 (Trinity 15 Ordinary 24 Year A)

Matthew 18:21-35

Photo by form PxHere Public Domain.

You won’t be surprised to know I’m going to preach about forgiveness from this passage! It became a live issue in one of my churches recently, when a local drug addict stole a donation box from the premises at the end of a coffee morning. Within the church, we’ve had different opinions on whether to support a police investigation and possible prosecution, but what we are all united on is the importance of forgiving the offender.

It’s worth beginning today by remembering what the word ‘forgive’ means. In the New Testament, to forgive is to release. Like this parable, it is often compared to a financial debt. To forgive someone is to release them from the debt to you – their moral debt, consisting of what they owe you because they have wronged you.

If you get nothing else from this sermon, please understand that to forgive is to release. It is not to excuse or to explain away, it is to release. You no longer consider the other party as owing anything to you, due to their wrong actions.

And in a sense, forgiveness releases us, too. If we hold on to bitterness, then it becomes like a chain wrapped around us. Bitterness limits us. It traps us. It imprisons us. When we release someone from what they owe us due to sin, we also release ourselves from the chains of bitterness.

With those basics established, let’s look at what Jesus teaches us about the importance of forgiveness in this parable.

Firstly, forgiveness is unlimited:

Photo by Jon Sullivan on Pixnio. Public Domain.

21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’

22 Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Peter probably thinks he’s being generous here. Some Jewish teachers said you could only forgive up to three instances of premeditated sin[1]. Seven times therefore makes him pretty holy, doesn’t it? Get to eight times and then the vengeance can start?

No, says Jesus. When he says we should forgive ‘seventy-seven times’, he is explicitly reversing what the Old Testament character Lamech said, not about forgiveness, but about vengeance:

23 Lamech said to his wives,
‘Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
    wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
    a young man for injuring me.
24 If Cain is avenged seven times,
    then Lamech seventy-seven times.’

Lamech’s seventy-seven vengeances are turned into Jesus’ seventy-seven acts of forgiveness.

Many of us know what this is like. We keep running into the person who hurt us. The old feelings begin to rise up. Maybe it’s the memories of old wounds; sometimes these people continue to injure us. The process of forgiveness has to begin all over again.

It’s no surprise in cases of people being hurt all over again that our society has come up with ‘cancel culture’. If we can just ban the people we think are wicked, those who say offensive things, then perhaps that will prevent future, lasting hurt.

But it doesn’t. Because cancel culture tells us that certain people cannot and will not be forgiven. As Christians, we have to deny that. Further, it doesn’t deal with the lasting pain. That can only be healed by releasing people through forgiveness.

Remember: we do not excuse people when we forgive them. They have done wrong, period. And our forgiveness only becomes effective if they receive it, confess what their sinful actions, and turn away from them. They may show this in a desire to make restitution. In the Old Testament, wrongdoers had to put right their actions. In the New Testament, remember the story of Zaccheus, the corrupt tax collector. When he met Jesus, he immediately arranged to repay what he had cheated out of people – and then some.

But whatever the actions of the other party, whether they accept our forgiveness or not, it is our Christian duty to offer it. And, if necessary, to keep on offering it.

Remember: Lamech took vengeance seventy-seven times, but vengeance belongs to the Lord, not us. We cannot be trusted with it. We forgive: seventy-seven times, if necessary. That is, unlimited. Our forgiveness is to be like the unlimited refills of drinks you get in places like a Toby Carvery or a Harvester.

Secondly, unlimited forgiveness is God’s model:

Copyright: Christian Ferrer / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0. Found at Words of Hope.

Here’s the issue: although the amount of forgiving God calls us to do can seem daunting at times, it is still nothing to the amount of forgiving he has done of us and of others. The master was owed ten thousand bags of gold by his servant; that servant was owed not ten thousand bags but a hundred, and not bags of gold but silver coins (verses 24, 28). There is no comparison.

This is the thing we need to remember throughout our Christian lives, and especially when we are finding it hard to forgive someone. How much has God forgiven me? And if he has forgiven me, what does that say about his desire for me to forgive others? If he has forgiven me at the cost of his Son dying on the Cross, what does that say to me when I am reluctant to forgive someone?

Now the snag with this as I see it is that some people will say, I’m a pretty good person, God hasn’t had to forgive me all that much, but someone else has done something far worse to me than I have ever done to anybody else. Hence, I am being asked to do something greater than has been done to me.

If that’s you, then listen to these words from the evangelist and apologist Andy Bannister:

Imagine that you died and arrived in heaven. An angel meets you at the gates of heaven and says, “Welcome, so glad you could make it, we’ve arranged a special surprise for you”. And he escorts you to what appears to be a cinema. He guides you to screen 1, sits you down alone, and gives you a large bucket of popcorn. “Welcome to the Theatre of Judgement” says the angel, smiles, then disappears as a movie begins to play.

Lo and behold, it’s the movie of your life—everything you’ve ever thought, said, or done is up there on the screen. Some bits are great, other bits make you cringe with embarrassment—all the stupid decisions, all the rude hurtful things you said about others, all those secret thoughts and selfish ambitions. All the things you did—but also the things you didn’t do.

Finally the movie ends and as the credits roll, the angel reappears. “Hope you enjoyed that,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re going to have a second screening, and everybody else featured in the movie is going to come and watch it—all your family, your friends, your enemies, your neighbours, colleagues—everybody is going to get to watch every little detail of your life”.

Who would want that? Who would want to show that movie to their friends, family, to their dear old granny? Most of us who are really honest with ourselves know there are things deep within us that we don’t want anyone to know about—and the Bible has a word for that stuff, for that inner brokenness we try to hide from others, even ourselves. The Bible calls it “sin”.

When we are struggling to forgive or are unwilling to forgive, let’s look at ourselves. Are we really so great? And let’s look at the Cross. How much has God forgiven us in Christ?

In the light of that, why on earth would we refuse to forgive?

Because thirdly, Christians failing to forgive is a scandal:

Copyright: Creative Commons. Creator: Cyril Gravelier. Found at Marc & Angel Hack Life.

The amount the unforgiving servant demands of his fellow servant is about one fifth of what would be paid for him in the slave market. It’s possibly only a millionth of what he owes the master[2]. Yet he makes such a scene about it. The other servants are scandalised that one who has received so much grace and mercy from the master fails to act with a comparable sense of grace.

And the world is scandalised when it sees Christians acting with a lack of grace to other people. What witness is it when we act with cruelty towards others? What witness is it when we support a politician whose policies lead to the withdrawal of healthcare from the poor, the separation of children from parents, the financial suffering of many for the benefit of the few super-rich?

Increasingly, the world looks at Christians who behave like that and they say, these people don’t remotely look like Jesus, and they certainly don’t follow his teaching.

And when that happens, the world – whom we are supposed to be reaching with the Gospel – takes one look at Christianity and says, no thank you very much. We do immeasurable damage to the cause of the Gospel when we think we can hoover up the forgiveness and grace of God for ourselves, while treating others with brutality and malice. There are far too many so-called ‘deconversion’ stories around of people who heard something of the beauty of the Christian message but walked out on church because they saw a church that would not treat others with the grace they themselves had received.

Has it ever been more urgent for the church to meditate upon the Cross, to ponder just how much we have been forgiven, and then to let that dictate how we treat others?

Conclusion

I’m acutely aware this is a tough subject. Forgiving those who have hurt us can be difficult. We need the example of Jesus and his Cross to remind us what he has done for us, and to motivate us to be Christlike in this matter.

I know that forgiveness doesn’t always come quickly. And in fact, sometimes we are more concerned to push a victim into forgiveness than we are to acknowledge the wickedness of what has been done to them. The end result is that instead of forgiving, the person who has been hurt does something subtly different but damaging. That is, they suppress their anger rather than release it. The danger in suppressing our anger is that we push it down like a Jack-in-the-box. At a later point it will spring up again with great force. And if we work to keep suppressing anger, it will come out in some other form. One such way can be certain expressions of depression.

So we come back to that theme of forgiveness being about release. Release, not suppression. We may need to feel the anger and then let it go if we are to forgive in a healthy way. When we do that, we reflect Jesus.

The other day, some words of NT Wright were posted on Facebook. They were put there in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but they seem fitting for this theme, too:

One might say that this is the vocation of the church: to take the sadness of the world and give back no anger; the sorrow of the world and give back no bitterness; the pain of the world and not sink into self-pity; but to return forgiveness and love, blessing and joy.

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p456.

[2] Keener, p460.

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Restoring the Sinner in the Church, Matthew 18:15-20 (Trinity 14 Ordinary 23 Year A)

Matthew 18:15-20

Loud Argument, free stock photo at Public Domain Pictures

When I was a young, enthusiastic teenage Christian who obviously knew everything, I once commented at a Bible study that the early church didn’t have any internal problems.

Unfortunately for me, my minister was present. He suggested I look at the New Testament a little more closely. The argument over circumcision that needs settling in Acts 15. The ways in which the Apostle Paul remonstrates with congregations, not least the Corinthians.

Whoops.

Our passage today from Matthew shows us that Jesus anticipated there would be problems in the church. Problems that included sin.

It’s no good us thinking, we’re a happy family, no-one will ever rock the boat here. If we think that, we won’t be prepared when something wrong happens among us. It’s best to know in advance what Jesus teaches on the subject, and to be prepared.

Firstly, our aim is restoration:

Public Domain image at rawpixel.com

The three stages that Jesus describes of going first of all privately to the person who has sinned, secondly with witnesses, and finally to the assembled congregation is quite reminiscent of the disciplinary process that was often followed in the synagogues of his day[1].

And the synagogues certainly didn’t rule out the idea of forgiveness for the wrongdoer[2], but Jesus is totally upfront in making the main motive for speaking to the one who has sinned as restoration.

That’s why you have the three stages. A private conversation. If that doesn’t work, take a couple of witnesses with you. And finally, as a last resort, before the whole congregation.

Jesus prioritises the healing of broken relationships, the repentance of the sinner, and the offer of forgiveness by whoever has been wronged. All of these are implied by the process he institutes. All of these will be provided for when he goes to the Cross.

The problem is that this is not what some people want when wrong has been done. On the one hand, some people want to be vindictive and vengeful. You can see that in our culture with the rise of ‘cancel culture’: express a socially unacceptable opinion and you are both ostracised and silenced. Such people will not go privately to the one who has caused offence, because they do not care for the costly reconciliation that Jesus is all about.

Does something like this happen in church circles at times? Yes, to our shame. Rather than challenging wrongdoing, people gossip about the one who has overstepped the mark. This is not the Jesus way.

And neither is the opposite approach, where rather than confronting the one who is out of line, we sweep everything under the carpet. We think ignoring sin is a version of forgiveness. It isn’t. Or we try to explain away someone’s patently wrong actions. This is a tacit acceptance of unholiness in the church.

Therefore, we begin with the private approach. If that doesn’t work, we take one or two witnesses with us. Remember, Jewish law normally required the confirmation of witnesses before a conviction.

Only as a last resort do we go public before the congregation. And only then do we consider banning someone from the church. It takes a serious level of proof to do that.

There will be some who say that you should never ban someone from the church and that you should always offer forgiveness. The problem with that in Jesus’ eyes is that some people are so thoroughly unrepentant that they put themselves beyond the boundaries of the believing community that banning them is only confirming the hardness of their own hearts.

By way of context, I am now in my thirty-fifth year of circuit ministry, and in all that time I have only ever banned one person, and I was instructed to do so by the police. The person in question was a known paedophile, and without telling you the whole story let’s just say he was a persistent repeat offender. For the safety of the worshipping community (and especially for the children in it) he had to be excluded. Tragically, he never fully embraced the costly actions required of him to facilitate restoration of relationships.

Secondly, our authority is heaven:

Heaven, free image from needpix.com

Listen again to what Jesus says in verse 18:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

It sounds like heaven ratifies what we decide. But scholars generally think there is a better translation, albeit one that sounds a little clumsy in English:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.

This strange – to us – language of binding and loosing is almost certainly about church discipline. And in the corrected translation, it is heaven that authorises us to undertake either the banning of an unrepentant sinner (that’s ‘binding’) or the forgiveness and restoration of the repentant sinner (that’s ‘loosing’).

We do not sort out problems of sin and broken relationships in the church off our own back. It is something that the court of heaven itself deeply cares about.

Why? Jesus set up the church to be a holy community of people who were reconciled both to him and to each other. It is as the holy and reconciled community that we are a witness to Jesus in the world. Anything that damages that matters to heaven. Anything that can be done to heal and to put things right again matters doubly to heaven.

And therefore, heaven authorises Christ’s church to engage in binding and loosing. It is part of our community life to hold one another accountable for our actions. If we see one of our brothers or sisters in the church acting in a way that brings disrepute to the name of Jesus, then it is our duty to speak to them, and to initiate the process I described in the first point, all with a view to reconciliation and restoration.

What Jesus tells us here is that when we solemnly engage in that, we have divine backing for our words and our actions.

That’s why we should be careful only to do this when someone has truly done something wrong. It is not to be used as a way of putting people down that we don’t like in the church. Nor is it to be used as a way of getting our own back on someone who has done something we don’t like.

I say that with some feeling, having seen someone make something up to get another church member out of a church, and also as someone who has twice been subjected to false safeguarding allegations by people in churches who took a dislike to me. I will not share the details, as it doesn’t do me any good to dwell on these things.

No. The fact that the process to restore a sinner in the church if at all possible begins in heaven is surely all the reminder we need that we are on holy ground when something like this happens. And if that doesn’t shape our words and our deeds in a certain way, then I don’t know what does.

Thirdly and finally, our armour is prayer:

Free image at pxhere.com

19 ‘Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.’

These final words of Jesus in the reading are usually quoted out of context, as if they are standalone words without a context. We quote them to talk about agreeing in prayer to ask for something. We quote them to invoke the presence of Jesus.

But they are about the subject we have been considering. The two who agree or the two or three who are gathered are the witnesses to the wrongdoing. That is the context. And it is this posture of prayer and attention to the presence of Jesus that keeps them on holy ground when dealing with sin in the church. An appropriate attitude of prayer and attention to Jesus guards against the misuses I described at the end of the last point.

It’s not just any old prayer, because prayer can become a malicious weapon in these circumstances. People include the wrongdoer in public prayer as a means of gossip rather than out of a holy desire to see restoration.

Therefore, prayer that pays attention to the presence of Jesus keeps us in the right place. Would we turn prayer into gossip if we were profoundly aware that Jesus was in our midst? Surely it is our slack attention to Jesus at times that can enable harmful talk, like gossip.

And the gossip is not justified by the wrong that the sinner has done. Remember the words of Michelle Obama about political opponents, because they are worth applying in a different context here: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ And we go high in prayer, focussed on the fact that Jesus is with us. It’s our armour. It’s our protection that helps us deal with problems in the Body of Christ in a godly way.

Not only is Christ-centred prayer our protection, but it is also God’s chosen means in our desire to someone move from their errant ways through repentance to restoration. Therefore, witnesses gathering in prayer and focussing on Jesus is fundamental to all that God – and, I hope, we – desire to see as an outcome when a member of the church has fallen into sin.

Conclusion

You may well have thought that the subject of this sermon was purely theoretical. You may wonder why on earth we have spent this time on a topic that to you sounds little more than hypothetical. If that is what you are thinking, I offer this story.

When I began in ministry, Safeguarding was only just being announced and had not come into force. How I wish it had, because I walked into a drastic situation with unsuitable children’s workers running their own empire. They did not have the best interests of the church at heart. When I challenged them, that was the beginning of eighteen months living under threats of violence and other forms of intimidation.

The other circuit ministers were highly supportive of me, having to begin my ministry like that. One of them observed that this was the sort of crisis you probably only encountered once every thirty years or so.

In parts of the world, there are defence systems against certain weather disasters that may only occur once in several decades. You might think of the Thames Barrier.

Sometimes, we just need to be ready for that ‘once every thirty years.’

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p453f.

[2] Keener, p455.

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Upside-Down Discipleship, Matthew 16:21-28 (Trinity 13 Ordinary 22 Year A)

Matthew 16:21-28

Pineapple upside down cake recipe by hawaiianfoodrecipe on Flickr. CC 2.0.

As a youngster, I was a fussy eater. But there were certain things my Mum cooked that were amazing.

One was a recipé that a cousin of mine brought back from the Orkney Islands, after being stationed there with the RAF. Orkney Bacon Savoury. Layers of bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, and breadcrumbs baked in the oven. Perfect comfort food for winter.

Another was her bread pudding. None of those fancy spices that you find in a bread pudding you buy from a baker’s, no thank you very much. Simple. Straightforward. Yummy.

And nobody made pineapple upside-down cake like her. Two main differences: first of all, none of those crimes against humanity that are known as glacé cherries. And no, not pineapple rings, oh no: crushed pineapple. Hence, with it being an upside-down cake, having the filling on top, crushed pineapple meant that the juices flowed down through the cake, permeating everything with pineapple flavour.

Is anybody hungry? Because I am, after typing that.

But never mind an upside-down cake, Jesus brings a whole upside-down kingdom. Nowhere is that clearer than in the way he sets things out here.

Firstly, we have an upside-down Messiah:

Courtesy Joni and Friends.

21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

We are so used to this, that we miss some of its importance. We have had two thousand years of knowing that Jesus refused the popular Jewish hopes for a Messiah as a military leader who would conquer the occupying forces of Rome. We have had two thousand years of reciting in the church that Jesus died for our sins, and that in his death he conquered sin and death.

Have we forgotten that Jesus’ suffering and death are not only for our forgiveness and salvation, but also a pattern for life? How often do we still seek to get our way by force, when Jesus didn’t? How often do we even think we are doing God a favour by seeking to power something through that we are convinced is his will?

Oh, it doesn’t have to be the use of physical force and violence. It can be the way in which we manipulate people. Is that the way Christians are to treat people? I have certainly seen that in the Methodist Church, both at national church level and in local churches. When we want to get our way, we are prone to getting it all costs. People are just collateral damage sometimes.

Let’s just pause and consider. Does any of this sound like the way Jesus the Messiah brought in the kingdom of God? Not remotely. By no means did he hold back from declaring truth, but never did he treat other people as if they were just pieces on a chessboard to be moved around so that he got his way.

So why do we reject Jesus’ upside-down model? It might be about our fear, and our own desire not to suffer. But deeper than that, there is an explanation that only works on the ‘spiritual’ level, and that is our second point:

Secondly, it is demonic forces that resist the upside-down Kingdom:

Get behind me, Satan by Ilya Repin, found at Picryl. Public Domain.

22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ 23 But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? I think not! ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ says Jesus to Peter. Not so much ‘God forbid it,’ as Peter said, but more like ‘Satan forbid it.’

It is nothing less than the work of demonic forces to oppose the Cross and all it does. They dread the knowledge that at the Cross, Jesus will disarm the principalities and powers, as Paul tells the Colossians. The Cross will be their undoing. Peter may say things from a merely human perspective, as Jesus says, because he doesn’t want to see his Master suffer. But Jesus knows there is more at stake, and much more behind this: the power of the Cross is not only in bringing us the forgiveness of sins, it is also the conquest of evil powers. This is the only way to take them on: for by going to the Cross, Jesus will take away all their power to imprison people in shame.

You may think it is hackneyed when you watch a movie where a priest holds up a cross against a ghost, a poltergeist, a demon, or some other malevolent spiritual being. But behind that is profound truth. The Cross is God’s way of defeating evil.

And so Peter must be opposed. Jesus not only addresses him as Satan, identifying the true source of resistance to the Cross, he also says, ‘Get behind me.’ Why? Because disciples followed behind their teachers, walking behind them. Jesus is telling Peter to get back in line as a disciple. And a disciple needs to know the primacy of the Cross.

And that question of discipleship leads to the third thing we must say:

Thirdly, it’s like teacher, like disciple in the upside-down Kingdom:

Jesus and his disciples, vector image at Public Domain Vectors.

24 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

As a religious teacher of his day, Jesus was not imparting to his disciples a set of facts for them to memorise. Sometimes, we think that’s what teaching and education is – which also does a dis-service to what modern teachers do.

This was emphatically not a situation where Jesus gave them a set of dates to memorise for historical battles and wars, or when certain kings reigned. Nor was he teaching them a mathematical formula or the construction of an atom, or the kinds of rocks found in certain landscapes.

No. Jesus was teaching them how to live – how to live in the presence of God. I have said previously that a good modern substitute word for ‘disciple’ might be ‘apprentice.’ They were to learn how to live the godly life by observing how Jesus lived and then copying him.

This was something that all apprentices of Jewish rabbis did. They observed the rabbi’s way of life – sometimes down to the most private and intimate detail! – and sought to copy it.

Therefore, if Jesus their teacher were to be heading for suffering and death, they needed to be ready for potentially facing a similar fate. No, they would not be dying for the sins of the world or to conquer the forces of evil like Jesus. But they would face unjust opposition – persecution, even – because the world’s authorities would not be best pleased by the way the disciples reminded them of truth, beauty, goodness, kindness, and love.

Taking up our cross is not about us having our share of the general woes and pains of the world, although we are not exempt. Taking up our cross is not about the arthritis in our fingers. Taking up our cross is about being willing to suffer for Jesus.

Fourthly, that means there is a price to pay for participation in the upside-down Kingdom:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, public domain image by Levan Ramishvili at Flickr.

25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Could there be anything more upside-down? If you want to save your life, then you will lose it, and if you lose your life for Christ, then you will find it. This is about as far away from ‘Your Best Life Now’ as you could possibly be. There is no pursuing the good life or emphasising personal fulfilment here. The call is to put Christ first, even if that means death. For it is in putting him first that we find true life. This is ‘It is better to give than receive’ completely maxed out.

I couldn’t help thinking of the great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who returned to his native land from the USA to oppose the Nazis. He condemned what he called ‘cheap grace’ in the church, where the forgiveness of sins just led to an easy, comfortable life. Rather, said Bonhoeffer, when Christ calls a man, he bids him come die.

It’s all very well having the kind of prayers we often pray in churches here where we thank God for the freedom we have to worship him, knowing that we have sisters and brothers in Christ around the world for whom even gathering like we do is an enormous risk to their safety and liberty. But what Jesus says here is something of a warning to us that we are the Christians with the abnormal experience. We certainly should be grateful that we have our freedoms, but we need to guard against the way in which our freedoms can soften us up spiritually, if we are not careful.

Most of us in church today in the West might do well to reflect on what cost we have paid to be disciples of Jesus. Has it hurt us at times to follow him? Again, I don’t mean the regular pains of ordinary life that anyone may have to endure, such as those caused by ill-health or aging. I mean, have we been through the mill at times because we chose to walk the path laid out by Jesus Christ?

If we have never paid a price for our faith in Christ, we might ask whether we are serious disciples or merely consumers of that cheap grace Bonhoeffer spoke about.

To conclude:

Last Judgement by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P. on Flickr. CC 2.0.

27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’

We have two things here: the Last Judgment, when the Son of Man comes with his angels (verse 27), and the Ascension, when the Son of Man comes to the Ancient of Days in heaven (verse 28). We have the future, and the imminent present.

One day we shall be judged for how we responded to what Christ did for us on the Cross. But even now, Christ is reigning at the Father’s right hand. There, he prays for us that we might live in a way that turns this world’s values upside-down and witness to that coming kingdom.

How is each one of us going to live in the light of these truths?

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The Centre of Gravity of the Christian Faith, Matthew 16:13-20 (Trinity 12 Ordinary 21 Year A)

(I’m aware I preached on this passage as recently as May, but on that occasion it was a Church Anniversary at a different church. This time, it has come up in the Lectionary. There will be some crossover between the two sermons, but this is a newly-written message.)

Matthew 16:13-20

Our dog loves us to take him to a park with a stream running through it. We will collect sticks and throw them into the stream for him to retrieve. He jumps into the water, swims after the stick, and brings it back to shore.

But for all his intelligence, there is one thing he has not grasped about this game. Instead of carrying the stick in the centre, he holds the stick in his mouth at its end. Although it amuses us that it can look like he has a cigar, his failure to discover the centre of gravity can have awkward consequences. He may crash the other end of the stick into the ground and break it, for example. He clearly missed the lessons about balance at doggy school.

Finding the centre is important. A briefer version of this reading forms the centre of Mark’s Gospel. But here in Matthew, the content of this passage is central to the message of this Gospel. Moreover, the reading itself balances nicely into two halves. Hence, we’re going to think today firstly about Peter’s Confession (The Christ), and secondly Peter’s Commission (The Church).

Firstly, Peter’s Confession (The Christ)

Verses 13 to 16 are about who the disciples believe Jesus to be. He starts by asking who others say he is, but then focusses the question of them: ‘But who do you say that I am?’ (verse 15)

This is the question at the centre of Christian faith and at therefore at the centre of church membership. Who do you say Jesus is?

In the Methodist Church, people are not confirmed and brought into church membership just on my say-so as the minister. If people attend a confirmation class and I am satisfied they have confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, then I have to bring their names to the Church Council so that the church can say whether we see that these people are Jesus-followers.

And that’s important. The question is not, are they nice people? If I want nice people, I can find them in all sorts of places outside the church. There are lots of nice people in the camera club where I am a member. But only a few have Christian faith.

Nor do we simply make a decision to avoid upsetting people. Jesus himself tells his disciples here that who they confess him to be is the most important question in all of life.

Let none of us rely on being ‘good’ or ‘nice’, because that won’t cut it with God. It is Muslims, not Christians, who rely on the hope that our good deeds will outweigh our bad deeds to be admitted to Paradise. The Gospel speaks in contrast about the grace of God in Jesus, through his death and resurrection. In response, we turn from sin to him and confess him as the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And it’s a confession to be made in the midst of life and all its pressures. Note that Jesus doesn’t ask the disciples to make their confession on home territory, or in somewhere safe and familiar like a synagogue. He does this when they come ‘into the district of Caesarea Philippi’ (verse 13). Why is that significant?

The recently renamed Caesarea Philippi was as pagan a territory as one could find: famous for its grotto where people worshipped the Greek god Pan[1]

At this centre of paganism, where other gods were worshipped, Jesus wants the allegiance of his disciples.

And he wants the same from us today. He calls us to confess him as our Lord in the midst of a society that offers plenty of competing false gods. Some of these are familiar to us. Look at the worship of money and possessions. Consider the way some people are devoted to celebrities, sportspeople, and entertainers. Ponder how others put their trust in extremist politicians. Still others expect romantic relationships to fulfil them, hence the phenomenon of relationship addiction and sex addiction.

In each of these cases, good servants have been elevated to the status of bad masters. And they will not fulfil all the desires their worshippers seek from them. Welcome to Pan’s Grotto, twenty-first century style.

But there is another way by which people are tempted to Pan’s Grotto, and it has been around a long time. It is the desire or expectation to short-circuit the process of hearing from God. In the Christian tradition, we often have to ‘wait upon the Lord’ to discern what he may be saying, but some want to hear instantly. And so, they turn to horoscopes or other occult methods, where it’s not God who is speaking to them.

There is a new variation on this desire to get an instant answer. I am hearing increasing stories of people who, rather than turning to the Scriptures and prayer to seek God’s voice, are instead relying upon … AI. A recent survey showed that 48% of Christians say they would trust AI with their spiritual growth. One in three American adults believe that spiritual advice from artificial intelligence is just as trustworthy as the advice a minister would give.

Older Christians will perhaps poo-poo those figures. But sometimes it’s those older Christians who are reading their horoscopes instead of their Bible. The problem goes right across the generations.

So I make the challenge today that we all confess Jesus as Lord of our lives, and that we place all the good things of life that we enjoy or aspire to under that Lordship. And further, that in confessing Jesus as Lord before the paganism of today, we accept the discipline of listening patiently for the voice of God, instead of taking short-cuts that lead us into spiritual danger.

Secondly, Peter’s Commission (The Church)

Verses 17 to 20 build on Peter’s confession as Jesus commissions him to be the first leader of his messianic community. The Greek word used for ‘church’ in these verses, ekklésia, is used in Greek translations of the Old Testament for the People of God. And surely it’s no surprise that Jesus as the Messiah of Israel will form a community of his people.

And it is, as I have already hinted, faith in Jesus alone that is the basis for Christianity, and therefore for membership of the church. Not niceness, not sincerity, not a religious club that is the centre and circumference of our social lives, but a community of people who have put their lives in the hands of Jesus.

Now this is not humanly achievable. It only comes, because God reveals it to people and we respond, as Jesus tells Peter. When we are seeking to spread the good news, one thing we must never lose sight of is that it is not us who convert people, but the Holy Spirit. All our evangelistic witness to build the church (verse 18a) depends not upon our techniques or clever words or good answers, but on the prior work of the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus to people. Our prayers for mission begin with praying for the Spirit of God to go ahead of us and be at work before we get there. We then ask for the grace to join in with what the Spirit does first.

Isn’t it great that it doesn’t depend on us?

And isn’t it great, too, that the church is an indestructible community? What do I mean by that? Jesus says that ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against it’ (verse 18b). I have been fond of saying for many years now that we have misunderstood these words. For too long Christians have understood this as meaning that no demonic schemes can prevail against us, even when we are trapped in a corner. But since when did gates go around attacking people? Gates are a defensive measure! If the gates of Hades cannot prevail, then given that Hades is the place of the dead in the New Testament, this means that it is the church that is on the offensive, and even death cannot stand in our way!

So be of good courage when you hear the stories of church decline. Yes, individual churches may decline and close, and we are no exception to that if we default to making our church experience about our personal preferences rather than seeking to glorify God. But overall, the church cannot fail. We are resurrection people. We plunder death to bring life in the Name of Jesus.

Within all this, Peter has a particular commission, and it’s to leadership and authority in this community of the Messiah. That’s what the language about being given the keys of the kingdom, and binding and loosing on earth on behalf of heaven (verse 19) are about. While I certainly think my Catholic friends have taken this too far in pointing to the papacy, I nevertheless agree with them that at this point Jesus commissions Peter as the first leader of the church.

A church cannot be anarchy. It cannot be a bundle of people where everybody just does what he or she wants. For example, I have lost count of the number of times I have encountered arguments in churches about styles of worship, where mostly they come down to personal taste rather than seeking to please God. So, there are those whose responsibility it is to say, this is what the teaching of Jesus and the Gospel is. There are those whose responsibility is to show the spacious place that is the Gospel, but also the boundaries of the faith.

Now that’s dangerous talk, in the eyes of some. There are those who are not willing to be corrected. But also, as we know time and time again, there are leaders in the church who have exercised their ministry in harmful ways, hurting others to bolster their own power. This must not be tolerated: those who are called to lead are to keep to the Gospel teaching themselves as a matter of example, and that includes fidelity to a Gospel lifestyle.

Peter will discover what that means in the next verses beyond today’s reading: the way of the Messiah is the way of the Cross, and he will be shocked. No wonder Jesus tells the disciples here not to tell anyone he is the Messiah (verse 20), because right now that is too outrageous and revolutionary to be contemplated, even by his own closest followers.

But this is how the community of Jesus will live, and it will be what its leaders exemplify. Tradition tells us Peter himself, despite his initial objections, will give himself to this way, too.

It is as far from the pagan Grotto of Pan as you can realistically go.

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p424.

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The Extraordinary Faith of the Canaanite Woman, Matthew 15:21-28 (Trinity 11 Ordinary 20 Year A)

Matthew 15:21-28

Photo by it’s me neosiam on StockSnap

If you’ve ever had a baby screaming constantly in pain that has no words to tell you what’s wrong, or if you’ve ever cared for a child with a serious long-term health condition, then you might sympathise with the Canaanite woman with the demonised daughter. Jesus’ disciples are cruel and unsympathetic to the mother:

‘Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.’ (Verse 23)

And then, before we make any progress in understanding this story, we must look at those troubling words Jesus says to this poor, distressed mother:

‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’ (verse 26)

There are some pretty unthinking progressive Christians who look at these words and confidently tell us that Jesus, by being a Jew of his day, was a racist, and he had to learn God’s truth from this Canaanite woman.

I know the words sound shocking, but this is nonsense. It shows they have not thought about the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. In the nativity stories, it is the Gentile Magi whose faith is commended, not the Jewish leaders. Jesus praises the faith of a Roman centurion in contrast to that of others. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus’ mission – which, yes, began with Israel – is extended to the ends of the earth.

There has to be a different explanation. We’ll come to that later, but I’m flagging up here at the beginning of the sermon that we shouldn’t accept simplistic, silly answers that don’t read the story in its wider context.

Firstly, she is persistent:

The Place of Persistence by Sheila Sund from Salem, United States, CC BY 2.0. Found at Wikimedia Commons.

Notice what the disciples say about the woman: ‘she keeps crying out after us’. It’s not a one-off. It’s continuous. The need she has for her daughter is such that she will not shut up. She will not take ‘go away’ for an answer. She will not give this up as a lost cause when she seems to be getting nowhere. She keeps crying out.

You see it in other ways, when she gets into conversation with Jesus. She doesn’t take what Jesus says lying down. She comes back at him. You could say she argues with him. Audacious doesn’t quite describe it. It’s faintly shocking that she doesn’t retreat the moment Jesus pushes back.

Like many a loving parent, she will do anything for the sake of her child. And this story effectively tells us that it’s fine to display a similar attitude towards God when we pray about deep needs, be they ours or of others.

Often, the problem is that we have been brought up to be reverent towards God, and that’s good and proper. God is holy. Reverence is a right response to him. But we take it so far that we end up being unable to speak with passion to God when things really matter, when they desperately matter.

But this woman was not the only character in Holy Scripture to speak audaciously to God about a significant need. Abraham prayed and prayed for the people of Sodom, that they be saved from divine judgment. He beat God down time and time again about the number of righteous people in the city.

Read the works of the psalmists and notice just how many of the biblical psalms are ones that lament injustice and pain. God’s people cry out to him about all that is wrong in the world and in their lives. Do they stop? No. Do they get all their theological ducks neatly in a row? No. They cry out again and again in pain to Almighty God.

Then there is the parable of Jesus recorded in Luke’s Gospel about the persistent widow and the unjust judge. Time and again, she came before that judge in the most forthright of manner, until she got the justice she needed.

Let us be in no doubt that passionate, persistent prayer is fine with Jesus. In fact, it’s more than fine. Sometimes, it is the only appropriate thing to do.  

I have heard it put this way. Think of a baby who is in distress but naturally cannot articulate its pain to a parent. So, it beats its fists against the parent’s chest, as the parent holds it. Our persistent and passionate prayer can be like that. It is perfectly fine for us to beat our fists against the chest of God. That doesn’t change the fact that he still holds us in his arms, for he is our loving Father.

Secondly, she is perceptive:

Allen’s Hummingbird by Becky Matsubara on Flickr. CC 4.0.

The Canaanite woman hears beyond those troubling words of Jesus about not taking the children’s food and giving it to the dogs (verse 26). She recognises what Jesus has already told his disciples, that his mission is to the lost sheep of Israel (verse 24). This would have been commonplace knowledge: that the Jewish Messiah was for the Jews. And who is she?

She is a descendant of the ancient Canaanites, the bitter biblical enemies of Israel whose paganism had often led Israel into idolatry.[1]

So you would think she knows her place. Israel’s Messiah is only here to bless Israel.

But she seems to know more. Perhaps it’s the close proximity and the mixing of Jews with people they didn’t want to meet, but she knows that isn’t the last word about the Messiah of Israel. Yes, he will come to the Jews. But what is the vocation of Israel? Why did God choose these people?

It wasn’t so they could simply have their own private bless-up. It was so they could bless the world. It goes all the way back to God’s call of Abram in Genesis 12. God chooses a people for himself, but the Chosen People’s calling is to bless the world.

So, yes, Jesus as Messiah comes to the lost sheep of Israel. But it can’t stop there. Why should she and her daughter also not be blessed by the God of Israel?

And as I said in the introduction, signs of this are spread all through Matthew’s Gospel, from the Magi to the faithful centurion to the Great Commission.

The blessings we receive as the Church are not for our sole benefit. We are blessed so that we may become a blessing to others. I often pray that way when I close a meeting, that we will be sent with God’s blessing so that we may bless others.

This should challenge the ungodly notion we sometimes adopt where we think that some people deserve God’s blessings and others don’t. We have certain people down as ‘Canaanites’ today, but could they be people whom God wants to bless? Does God want to bless benefits scroungers? Yes! Does God want to bless people who come to this country on small boats? Yes! Does God want to bless the politicians I despise? Yes!

Blessing is never about who deserves it. None of us deserves blessing. We are all sinners in need of grace – even the most godly or the most respected people in the church. Blessing is always about grace, ‘outrageous grace’ even, as the singer Godfrey Birtill calls it.

Which ‘undeserving’ people are we going to pray for this week, that God will bless them?

Or perhaps it’s the other way round, and we ourselves feel unworthy. We have a pervading sense of shame, whether we have done anything shameful or not. Then for us this is Good News: God delights in the thought of blessing people like us.

Thirdly and finally, she is faithful:

Free Public Domain image at PxHere.

Look at the way Jesus commends her in the final verse of the reading:

Then Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.’ And her daughter was healed at that moment. (Verse 28)

She is a woman of faith in the qualities we have already noted: her persistence and her perceptiveness. Towards the end here, she doesn’t even reject Jesus’ challenging riddle about the children’s food and the dogs: she takes the riddle and extends it:

‘Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ (Verse 27)

She certainly belongs with the other Gentile heroes of faith in Matthew’s Gospel that I have already mentioned. The Magi may have arrived at the house where the young Jesus was by the dubious method of astrology, but when they left, they followed the clear directions of God in a dream. That was faith in action. The Roman centurion with the paralysed servant learned faith from his experience of being a man under authority, and Jesus said he had never met anyone in Israel with such great faith.

Which of us wouldn’t want Jesus to say to us, ‘you have great faith’? Which of us wouldn’t want to hear Jesus say, ‘Your request is granted’? Surely that’s exactly what we long to hear from him.  It’s like wanting to hear him say to us at the Last Judgment, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’

The Canaanite woman’s faith had been learned in adversity, desperate as she was for her daughter to be healed. How often faith grows in such circumstances. Look at those churches that have grown despite persecution. We might prefer the thought that our faith grow while we are sitting comfortably. But comfort rarely requires great faith. (And that might be one reason for the decline of faith in the West, where we ask more questions about God and suffering than those who live with daily adversity.)

Her faith had also been formed, ironically, in exclusion – as one who was not part of the Chosen People. She was an outsider. She didn’t belong. Yet God used that to form the ‘great faith’ which Jesus commended.

I wonder sometimes whether those of us who wish we had more faith and who even ask for more faith really know what we’re asking for. What are we letting ourselves in for? Because the testing ground for great faith includes the terrains of hardship, difficulty, danger, and misfortune. You can see it in the Scriptures. You can see it in the lives of the saints down the centuries.

We may sense God leading us down a particular path for our lives, one that initially excites us. But then we discover it requires of us greater fortitude to endure than we ever anticipated. It asks of us greater forgiveness of others, including those who are in the company of the faithful, yet have a particular propensity for cruelty. But faith walks the way of the Cross.

Which of us will walk this road? Which of us will be commended by Jesus for having ‘great faith’ in him?

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p414.

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How to Help Those in a Storm, Matthew 14:22-33 (Trinity 10 Ordinary 19 Year A)

Matthew 14:22-33

Jesus walks on the sea. Public Domain image at Wikimedia Commons via Picryl.

Let me take you back to my first appointment in the ministry, over thirty years ago. I am sitting in a circuit staff meeting, and all the ministers are expressing frustration with difficult people in their congregations.

Then, one of the ministers has a brainwave. “Let’s plant a totally new church in the circuit,” he says, “and transfer all the troublemakers from all the churches there. Keeping them in one place should contain them.’

“We’ll call it the Sin Bin Church.”

Needless to say, we never acted on this idea! But it did release a pressure valve in a tense conversation.

Rather, as has been well said, ministers should no more complain that people come to them with problems than doctors should moan that people come to see them because they are sick.

And Jesus has some troubled disciples in this story. So how does he go about it? Jesus’ example can help all of us when we want to respond to the needs of others in Christ’s name.

Firstly, Jesus spends time with the Father:

Busy cat overwhelmed by work. Easy-Peasy AI. CC 4.0.

Matthew 14 has begun with Herod’s execution of John the Baptist (verses 1-12). Jesus then wants to withdraw for some solitude (verse 13), only to be followed by a huge crowd. He heals the sick and feeds them (verses 14-21). If Jesus had needed time alone after John’s murder, how much more does he need it now?

For Jesus, it is a priority to spend time with his Father in prayer. He prayed and fasted in the wilderness before his public ministry began. He prayed before choosing the twelve apostles. He prayed most passionately of all before the Cross in Gethsemane. There is something about prayer that is essential for him.

What is it? Well, some people today dismiss prayer as useless. I can understand some of those reactions when we see some Christians writing feeble comments like ‘thoughts and prayers’ on social media posts about terrible tragedies in the world. What good are thoughts and prayers, ask the critics, when what people need is practical action?

And the church has inherited this bias towards action rather than prayer. I think it’s telling that the traditional Methodist expression when a minister wants to retire is that they speak of wanting to ‘sit down from the active work.’

And congregations expect their ministers to be busy. If they are not, they must be lazy. This causes many problems, not least that some church members are too afraid to approach their ministers, because they think they will be too busy for them.

What happened to learning from the way Jesus spent time with the Father? Was Jesus just wrong and impractical? Or have we got it wrong?

Eugene Peterson certainly thought today’s church was dangerously mistaken. He wrote an essay called ‘The Unbusy Pastor’ found in his book ‘The Contemplative Pastor’, in which he argued that being busy was a sin. Busyness, he said, can be a sign of vanity, because it betrays a mindset of wanting to appear important and significant. Or it can be a subtle form of laziness, where we abdicate the call to make decisions and fill the space with action instead. Ultimately, he said, busyness was the enemy of spirituality, because it crowds out prayer.

And I confess to that last one at times, not least this week, when I skipped my night-time prayers the evening before I wrote this sermon.

Prayer and action are not opposed to each other. Prayer is the fuel that provides the energy for the best and most holy action. Prayer is where we find direction for what to do when we act. When I don’t forget my night-time prayers, one regular part of my routine is to consider the next day’s diary and pray that I will be a blessing to all those I meet, or phone, or email.

So if we want to make a difference for Christ in the world and if we want to help people, our starting point will not be by throwing ourselves into the needs of the world. It will be by lowering ourselves to our knees before the Father.

Secondly, Jesus spends time with the fearful:

Fear. Public Domain image at Needpix.

His friends are in trouble in their boat, even though they are experienced fishermen. Yet something has gone wrong. If you put data from the different Gospels’ accounts of this story together, you will find that instead of them staying close to the shore as you would expect when crossing the ‘top’ of the Sea of Galilee, they have drifted three or four miles out. They are off course, and vulnerable to the weather conditions.

Jesus sets out from his solitude on the shore to help them, and the distance the disciples are from land is enough to knock on the head the old sceptical idea that Jesus’ walking on the water was just him walking on stones beneath the surface. However, he’s not doing this as some demonstration of power to impress them: he’s walking on water, because he is using his divine powers to meet a need: the need of those disciples.

And when he reaches them, there is something I’d like you to notice about how he interacts with them. Let me contrast it to what sometimes happens with us.

Do you sometimes find that when you meet anxious people (and the disciples have big-time, life-and-death anxiety here) that their anxiety spills over to you? It happens to me at times: I start to take on their anxiety, and I respond in a stressful way that isn’t helpful. This happens a lot in families, as a psychiatrist called Murray Bowen observed. It also happens in religious congregations, as a rabbi called Edwin Friedman noted, building on Murray Bowen’s work. Friedman called for leaders and helpers to develop something you may have heard of: a ‘non-anxious presence’.

And that is what Jesus does. Yes, he absolutely cares about the fear his disciples have and the anxiety it is causing them. But he doesn’t let it infect him. He stays, in Bowen’s word, ‘differentiated’ from them. Jesus stays secure in the strength he has found in prayer and in knowing his identity as the Son of God. Because of that, he can stay calm as he reaches them. It makes all the difference.

You can hear it in the exchange in the middle of the reading. As Jesus gets to them, the disciples are terrified, and they think he is a ghost. But he says, ‘Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.’ (Verses 26-27)

By beginning in prayer to the Father, not only do we find strength and direction for what we are to do, we find our identity renewed. We are beloved sons and daughters of him, adopted into his family, and assured of his enduring love for us. These truths are underlined and renewed in us through prayer, and they enable us after that first step of spending time with the Father to take the second step of spending time with the fearful. Our peace will be a gift to those who are afraid.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus spends time with the faithless:

I find your lack of faith disturbing – by Erik-M1999 at Deviant Art. CC 3.0.

Here, I’m talking about Peter’s desire to walk on water. We normally take his basic desire as a positive. We see it as an example of faith, that we need to take risks to achieve things in the kingdom of God.

But here’s my question. Even if Peter hadn’t sunk, what would he have achieved for the kingdom of God by walking on the water like Jesus? I can’t think of anything. And although Jesus responds to Peter’s request by saying, OK, then, come to me, is that necessarily a stamp of approval on his actions? I am by no means certain.

To me, Peter’s actions here seem rather more like the wilderness temptations that Jesus resisted, where Satan urged him to do something spectacular just for the sake of it. ‘Throw yourself off from the top of the Temple.’

But that is not faith. That is testing God. Sure, faith can at times involve doing some quite dramatic things where God intervenes, but there is a purpose behind them when the Father calls us to risky actions. Here, as I said, there is nothing to be achieved by what Peter wants to do. Could it be that what he is actually trying to do is either impress the other disciples or set out on some childish form of exhilaration? Either would fit with his impulsive character.

And I think this is the lack of faith that Jesus cites in him. By allowing Peter’s rashness, he trains him in the ways of sober, sensible faith. He saves him from himself and allows him to learn this lesson. (And if you think that’s a fanciful reading of the text, let me just say that it’s the way John Calvin understood it.)

Now I realise this is a different way of reading the text from the predominant popular ways of seeing it. But when we absorb it, we see that this is good news. It tells us more about the compassionate way in which Jesus meets those in need – this time those who lack faith, or who are prone to foolish decisions. Could that not describe many of us, from time to time: short on faith and long on foolishness?

Well, if it does, then here we have Jesus reaching out to us in kindness to lift us up after we have made a mess of things. Jesus, who is rooted in prayer and his true identity, and who differentiates himself from fear as a result, can minister to us when we have been silly or stupid, when we have embarrassed ourselves and even when we have caused embarrassment to the church. He hears our cry for help, he catches our hand and says, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ (Verses 30-31)

Don’t let the failures and the foolishness of the past dominate your mind and control your outlook. Jesus comes to lift you up and take you forwards.

And we have the privilege of sharing that same good news with others, who may think God has given up on them, when he hasn’t.

Also be encouraged if your life of faith has not been spectacular. Jesus never called you to show off. He called you to trust him.

Conclusion

Jesus, then, has given us a model for serving others. He first spent time with the Father in prayer, and that enabled him then to spend time with the fearful, not taking on their fear but leading them into peace, and then time with the foolish, restoring them to quiet faith.

Is there an appropriate final response? The final verse of the reading says,

Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’ (Verse 33)

Perhaps that’s where we need to end, too.

In worship.

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The Virtues of Wrestling with God, Genesis 32:22-31 (Trinity 9 Ordinary 18 Year A)

Genesis 32:22-31

The London International Invitational Wrestling event took place from 10-11 December 2011. Wrestling 166 on Flickr by Greg Cullen. CC 2.0.

I was sharing at Midhurst on Easter Day about how one of my ministerial student friends in Manchester invited me and others to go with him to watch bouts of professional wrestling. I never understood the fascination and never accepted his invitations.

Why? For me, wrestling was irredeemably camp, and that’s not me. I associated it with my grandmother watching the Saturday afternoon wrestling on World Of Sport with Dickie Davies from 4 pm every week. As she cheered and booed the likes of Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo, I couldn’t wait for it to end so that we could get the football results.

Wrestling was unwelcome for me, and the first thing I want to say about this story is that Jacob’s overnight wrestling with the mysterious man was also unwelcome.

Life is challenging enough for Jacob at this point in his life. He is heading for this first meeting with his brother Esau in years. Esau, you remember, is the twin whom he tricked out of his blessing from their father Isaac. How will Esau receive him? Will he want revenge? Jacob has already prepared to soften the blow by arranging for members of his family and household to go ahead of him, along with gifts for his brother.

The mysterious man in some way represents God, given that at the end Jacob says he has seen God and lived (verse 30). What we read about here is an unwelcome wrestling bout with God, whether that was directly with God or with his representative.  

It is not too much of a jump to recognise the seasons in our own lives when we find ourselves wrestling with God, and that the experience is equally unwelcome for us. We believe God is in charge of our lives, but events happen that we do not want. Ill health. A job loss. Estrangement from family members or friends. A death. We all too easily expect life to resemble a Hallmark greetings card or the cover of a box of chocolates, only for major incidents to throw us off course.

And when they do, it is not unusual for us to end up complaining to the God who has allowed these things. As Jacob might have wondered why he had to face Esau with no certainty of a good outcome, so do we remonstrate with God for our circumstances. Very few of us accept the undesirable circumstances placidly. We are wrestling with God, although it feels like God has come to wrestle with us.

We were never promised the easy life we long for. Jesus said, ‘In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’ He would then go to the Cross.

A little girl once asked her mother, ‘Mummy, do all fairy stories end with the words, ‘And they lived happily ever after’?’

‘No,’ replied Mum, ‘Some end with, ‘When I became a Christian, all my troubles disappeared.’’

I wish it were different. But God has not opted for a way of working where he routinely presses a button and we fly away from danger in our ejector seat. Instead, he has chosen a path that takes us through unwelcome situations to lead us into greater depth, for our sake, for the sake of others, and even for his glory. That is, after all, what Jesus did through the Cross.

To that end, he has given us resources to help us. We have the Book of Job to read. We have those Psalms that we call ‘The Psalms of Lament’, in which the psalmists eloquently and passionately bring their pain to God. They give us permission to say exactly what we think. As the early church father Athanasius said, ‘Most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.’

When we find ourselves caught up in an unwelcome bout of wrestling with God, let us pray that he will do a deep work in us and through us as he accompanies us through this time we would have preferred not to have happened.

Secondly, wrestling with God teaches us trust.

Diverse people stacking hands together at PxHere. Public Domain.

That may sound unlikely at first: why would you grow in trust in this One with whom you have wrestled and complained? But listen to the text in verse 25:

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.

 When sunrise comes, Jacob will limp past Penuel (verse 31). This is Jacob, the fixer, the manipulator, the one who has sought to control his own destiny and the lives of others. Mister Independent now has a limp.

Will he now at last realise that he cannot be in total control of his lot? This is the time for Jacob truly to be a man of faith, rather than one who deceives in order to get his own way.

Faith is about both belief and trust. Believing certain things to be true about God, the world, and us. And trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jacob’s challenge here is to embrace the ‘trust’ part of faith. A man who limps is at a serious disadvantage as he prepares to meet the brother he so sorely wronged all those years earlier. He has already tried to butter up his brother by planning to send his family members, servants, and herds ahead of him – but what if they don’t impress Esau? What if all that is left is for him to face Esau with a limp? How can the man who even wrestled for hours with God’s own representative have a chance? There is nothing left but to trust.

And when we wrestle with. God over those unwelcome intruders into our lives, be they health, relationships, work, finance, of any other major aspect of our existence, there is nothing left but to trust in God.

It’s what the Apostle Paul did with his ‘thorn in the flesh’, whatever that was. It’s what Jesus did when the Father would not remove the cup of suffering from him.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask God to remove trials from our lives. After all, we shall pray in the Lord’s Prayer in a few minutes’ time, ‘Save us from the time of trial.’ But there are occasions where he does his deep work when we are in the furnace before deliverance comes.

I have spoken before about examples of this in my own life. The lung surgery I had in my twenties that gave me an experience of what it is like to go through major surgery. My encounters with depression. Playing my part in caring for my father through his Alzheimer’s Disease. I would happily never have had any of those experiences. But by letting me go through these, God has given me things whereby I can support people.

The mistake would have been to listen to the lies some Christians tell about these experiences. ‘If you haven’t been healed, then you don’t have enough faith.’ ‘If you suffer from depression, then you must have committed a sin.’ For to believe those lies stops us from trusting our Father in the darkness.

God invites us to trust him as we limp along after wrestling with him. He is the One who works all things together for good for those who love him. If we are struggling right now, let us take courage to trust him.

Thirdly and finally, wrestling with God leads to blessing.

A figurine of a man holding a child at Picryl. Public Domain.

This may be the opposite of what many Christians expect. We have just spoken about trust, and many of us have gained the idea that Christian trust is something simple and serene. Struggle doesn’t enter into it: that would be the opposite of trust. We ‘let go and let God.’

Now there are Christians who seem to have a gift for such trust. But many of us do not. And we are not necessarily inferior in God’s eyes because of that. Listen again to Jacob and his mystery divine assailant:

25 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. 26 Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ 27 So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ 28 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.’

You might think Jacob’s request for a blessing is another example of him trying get something out of the other party at their expense. And we don’t know all his motives. But whether or not his motives are pure, the divine messenger does indeed bless him. He gives him a new name:

‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’

What Jacob has done here is honoured with a blessing. God approves of his wrestling to the point of prevailing.

Yes! God invites the struggle, and ultimately, he blesses it.

If you are wrestling with God about something, I want to encourage you to continue to do so. Be persistent. Persevere. You will prevail if you do. And you will discover blessing, perhaps of a style or magnitude you never considered.

This may not only be to do with the areas of life we have already pondered where we wrestle with God over adverse circumstances in our lives. One area where it is important that Christians wrestle with God is in prayer, and especially in intercession.

There are examples in Scripture and church history of people who have done this. The prophet Daniel confessed and interceded on behalf of God’s people in respect to their sins that had led them to exile in Babylon. He was eventually granted remarkable visions of God’s will, not just for his own people, but for the nations.

In World War Two, a group of people at the Bible College of Wales gathered to pray against the advances of Hitler and the Axis forces. They believed that if they succeeded, the spread of the Gospel would be hindered. Day after day and night after night they prayed, led by a man called Rees Howells.

I have been in the company of people I would call ‘prayer warriors’, and to listen to them struggle with God over issues of social injustice and personal pain was like listening to women in labour. But they persisted, and God blessed their wrestling in prayer.

When we wrestle with God, let us resist the temptation to dismiss it as unwelcome and seek an easy life. Let us trust God even in the wrestling, and let us persist until his blessing comes.

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Parables of the Kingdom, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 (Trinity 8 Ordinary 17 Year A)

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Airbnb: 10 Downing Street: Perfect for short stays by Dunk on Flickr. CC 2.0.

When I see pictures of Number 10 Downing Street, my only surprise is that it isn’t a revolving door. This is the week in which our nation has had its seventh new Prime Minister in ten years.

And one of the early criticisms of Andy Burnham, as he announced his first policy decisions, was that many thought he was a people-pleaser. To be a people-pleaser is a weakness. You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

21/07/2026. Bath, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Andy Burnham visits First Bus’s Bath Depot. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street at Flickr. CC 4.0.

Yet what is one of the most frequent comments I get when people discover I am a minister? They say, “Oh, it must be so hard trying to please everyone” – as if pleasing everyone is what I should do, despite the fact that we recognise elsewhere such behaviour is a weakness.

It is not my job to try to please all of you. It is my job to please God. Whether I do or not is another matter. But that is why I am paid a stipend, not a salary. A stipend is a living allowance so that I can pray and seek what God wants me to do.

All that said, I nevertheless want the content of my preaching to reach as many people as possible. And most weeks, I know that’s a forlorn hope. The theme will be relevant to some people, but not to others.

However, this week is unusual. We heard a variety of short parables from the teaching of Jesus. They come from a block of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven. So, while I am not setting out explicitly to please any of you, I do hope this week that there may be brief relevant elements in the sermon for most people.

We have five parables in our reading, and I will offer a brief point from each.

Firstly, the mustard seed:

Mustard seeds by Jessica Spengler on Flickr. CC 2.0.

We live in a world where people think they need to get known in order to have influence for good. You have to climb the greasy pole of politics, but to do so you need to be known. You may want to publish a book to get your message across, but publishers will ask what kind of a platform you already have: how many people follow you on social media, how many are signed up to receive your email newsletter, and so on. And we have the whole realm of the ‘social media influencer’, who has thousands of followers on YouTube or maybe Instagram. There they pronounce their views and review products that have been sent them free of charge by the manufacturers.

Before we scoff too loudly at current trends, let’s reflect on how many of us said when we were children that we wanted to be famous. How many of us encouraged our own children to follow their dreams, because anybody could see their dreams come true. It’s all cut from the same cloth.

But in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Jesus reverses this. What we do in our present obscurity leads to future greatness in the kingdom.[1] Jesus himself lived out this example. Craig Keener says that Jesus came as a meek servant, wandering around Galilee healing the sick with his group of obscure disciples. The Romans took no notice of him until he offended Jewish aristocrats over the temple system.

In a world with governments in turmoil and full of wandering teachers and magicians, Jesus’ initial arrival as a meek and politically inconspicuous servant rendered his mission as opaque as his parables, except to disciples bearing the insight of faith.[2]

Jesus was content with obscurity. Yes, Jesus, the Son of God! But he knew that even there, without being famous, without being a public face, God could and would do his kingdom work through him.

Are we content to do kingdom of God things quietly, and leave the growth to God?

Secondly, the yeast:

Yeast by Chris Campbell on Flickr. CC 2.0.

This parable says something similar but takes it a step further. It says something like this: if you are willing to accept the call to serve the kingdom of heaven in obscurity and trust the outcomes to God, will you also be open to just how much God can accomplish this way?

Let’s listen again to Craig Keener:

Although Roman cities had bakeries, Galilean women baked their own families’ bread … The amount of flour involved here … represents roughly fifty pounds, providing enough bread for over one hundred people. A housewife would not normally fix so much meal and could not knead more than this; the unnatural magnitude of the illustration probably suggests that the kingdom far exceeds daily examples to which it may be compared.[3]

Do you want to see God do big things in the world? Then learn that your part in that purpose is not to hype things up but to continue working in obscurity and praying that God will spread the influence far and wide. It’s not something we hack for ourselves.

In pointing out that the word ‘yeast’ is better translated ‘leaven’, Maggi Dawn puts it this way:

If you joined (or observed) the great trend for making sourdough bread during the COVID pandemic, you will understand this: while yeast is something you add to flour to make it expand, leaven is more like sourdough: you add the flour to it, and the new flour is absorbed into the whole. The Kingdom of God is less about making small things bigger, and more about transforming the nature of everything it touches.

Are we ready for God to do something bigger than we can conceive? Do we want him to do that? I’m sure we do. If that is the case, then our task is not to fire up the hype machine, but to continue doing kingdom work in obscurity while praying that he will transform the nature of everything he touches through us.

Thirdly, the buried treasure:

Buried treasure by Carol VanHook on Flickr. CC 2.0.

I bought my current camera three years ago. It’s far and away the most complex camera I’ve ever owned. It’s also easily the best camera I’ve ever had.

But that also means it is by some distance the most expensive camera I’ve ever bought. How did I afford it, especially on a minister’s income? I traded in every piece of existing camera equipment I owned but could do without. I sold other possessions over a significant period of time.

And I’m glad I did it. For me, it was worth it, even though the new beast took a lot of getting used to, and indeed I am still learning more about its capabilities and features.

Jesus tells us in the parable of the buried treasure that the kingdom of heaven is worth so much that it will cost us everything we have. It is not that the owner of the field now uses the treasure to lead an extravagant lifestyle; instead,

The man not only recognised that its value outweighed all he had, but he acted accordingly.[4]

You can see the question this poses of us. Christianity is no hobby or leisure pursuit. It isn’t a preference, or a taste. It will take all we have. It will reorder our priorities. We do not just add it as a layer on top of everything else: rather, we start again from scratch with our lives when we enter the kingdom that Jesus announced.

For while the gift of salvation is free, discipleship is costly. As the great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out, there is no such thing as ‘cheap grace’ in God’s kingdom. How can there be when it cost Jesus everything?

Fourthly, the merchant and the jewels:

The Austrian Imperial Crown Jewels, Imperial Treasury Museum, Hofburg Palace, Vienna by Alex-David Baldi on Flickr. CC 4.0.

Just as the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast are quite similar, so are the parables of the buried treasure and this one. Both have something to say about the cost of discipleship in God’s kingdom.

But look how willing the merchant is to sell everything he has in order to buy a fine pearl. Yes, taking up the challenge to follow Jesus is a costly affair. But it is not all misery. When we throw our lot in with Jesus wholeheartedly, we shall discover that it is all worth it. We shall find the joy of the kingdom.

In that sense,

the kingdom is like the merchant, not like the jewel: it’s less about some product or result you are promised, and more about what happens to you.

The kingdom changes us. We become different people. Our values change. What was once significant to us is no longer, for the kingdom has made us see everything in all creation differently. Disposable people are now precious to God. The things that the world chases after are no longer satisfying to us. A switch has flicked inside us. Now life is illuminated in a different way. It can’t be any other way:

One who was unwilling to sacrifice everything else for the kingdom, who did not believe its reality sufficiently to stake all one’s future on it, was unworthy of it.[5]

But if we are sold out to Jesus, then everything is new.

Fifthly and finally, the net:

Setting a large haul seine by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute on Flickr. CC 2.0.

This final parable, which picks up on the common sight around the Lake of Galilee of fishermen separating the edible and kosher fish from the inedible[6], makes the most serious point of all.

This is the end game. This is where it is all leading. A final judgement, where God will vindicate the righteous and send the wicked to eternal loss, puts paid to the idea that God’s love means he will save everybody, whether they like it or not. Again, Maggi Dawn puts it well:

the Kingdom of God may be the best thing ever, a matter of immense rejoicing, freely offered to anyone who wants to join it — but it’s not fluffy. It’s free, but it’s not cheap. It demands something of us, and its consequences are serious.

Jesus doesn’t tell us here who are the wicked and who are the righteous, but I think it’s safe to assume that the righteous are those who have responded positively to the kingdom message. They have embraced God’s free gift of salvation in Christ by repentance and faith and have taken on board the blessings and demands of the kingdom. They are the ones who have sold everything to gain treasure and rejoiced in their pearl of great price. They are the ones who are willing to work in obscurity like the mustard seed or the yeast, not building their own reputation but that of Jesus, as they seek to transform everything they touch.

Whichever of these parables speaks to us today, they all speak to us about our life in the kingdom.

And whichever it most relevant to us in our current situation, Jesus asks us, as he did the disciples at the time, ‘Have you understood all these things?’ (verse 51)

Have we understood the response we need to make to God’s kingdom?

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p388.

[2] Keener, p387.

[3] Keener, p388f.

[4] Keener, p392; italics his.

[5] Keener, p392.

[6] Keener, p392.

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I Can Hear Music: Are We Climbing Jacob’s Ladder? Genesis 28:10-22 (Trinity 7 Ordinary 16 Year A)

Genesis 28:10-22

I cannot sing to save my life. I cannot play an instrument (although I once made an abortive attempt to learn the guitar). But I love music. It soundtracks my life. I hear somebody say something, and I make an association with a song lyric. In the immortal stylings of the Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music.

And that was my experience coming back to this famous passage, three years since it last leapt out at me in the Lectionary. As I read the text, I thought less of theological terms and more of song titles.

I will freely concede that the author (or authors) of Genesis had no clue about the people who went through my mind: the aforesaid Beach Boys, Del Shannon, Bonnie Raitt, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Kate Bush for starters. But I am going to use some of their song titles to peg the teaching of this story for us.

Firstly, Jacob is On The Run:

If Pink Floyd are too weird for you, I’ll let you have Del Shannon’s Runaway

or my preferred version of that song by Bonnie Raitt:

Why has Jacob ‘left Beersheba and set out for Harran’ (verse 10)? Because he has tricked his elderly, frail father Isaac so that he can steal his twin brother Esau’s birthright. Now, his mother Rebekah, who has conspired with him against her own husband and other son, urges him not only to leave for his own safety but also because he needs to find a wife if the birthright promise is to be fulfilled through him.

Lies and deception in a family. What a mess.

And nor will Jacob be the only person to run from others or from God in the Scriptures. Adam and Eve have already tried hiding in Eden. Later, Jonah will try to escape a call of God that he doesn’t like by jumping on a ship going in the opposite direction.

But God loves runaways. Adam and Eve are unsuccessful in hiding. God uses a storm and a big fish to catch up with Jonah and redirect his life. And in this story, Jacob too cannot run from God.

God didn’t stop pursuing runaways with his love when the pages of Scripture were closed. He chased after an English professor who had had enough of ideas about God after he witnessed horrors in World War One. But later, he would grudgingly become what he called ‘the most reluctant convert in Christendom’. Looking back, he would actually say he was ‘surprised by joy.’ His name? Clive Staples Lewis.

This story reveals God’s care for runaways. He has not changed his character. I wonder whether this gives us heart for those we love who have caused us such sorrow by refusing to share in our faith. Are you like me, and have loved ones for whom you pray pretty much every day? Then take heart. God loves your runaways. Keep praying, and one day he will act to make himself known to them. He may even be preparing things behind the scenes now.

Or are any of us in some sense runaways? We may have faith, but like Jacob we may be running in fear because we know we have done something terrible. Or we may be running away like Jonah, because we fear the cost or consequences of saying yes to something challenging that we know God has spoken to us about.

Either way, the safest course of action is to give up running. God has grace and mercy for even the worst things we have done. And nowhere is their greater peace than in the centre of God’s will for us.

Secondly, Jacob Sees a Stairway to Heaven:

There is a popular misconception here, perhaps encapsulated in the old slave spiritual ‘We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder’:

We think we have to climb the ladder from earth to heaven. Runaways often think this. To atone for their wrongdoing, they must make the effort to attain the moral heights that they have so singularly failed to ascend.

But in Jacob’s dream, the ladder (or ramp) is placed on the earth, ‘and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’ (verse 12). We don’t make our own way to heaven. God’s messengers check out what’s happening on earth and report to the Lord.

And it is the Lord himself who has set this ramp upon the earth to reach heaven. He reaffirms the covenant that he had first made with Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. Now the promise comes down the line. It still stands. God promises the same innumerable descendants who will bless the earth, and he promises to take care of this runaway (verses 13-15).

There’s a word for this. Grace.

This is not the popular idea of being good enough for God. It is not about keeping the rules as a way of gaining entrance to heaven. It is not about our good deeds outweighing our bad deeds, as our Muslim friends hope.

This story is an early sign of what is to come in all its fulness in the Gospel announced by Jesus and the apostles. We are all failures, whether or not we are runaways. But God has made a way back to him. The ultimate stairway to heaven will be the Cross of Christ. Grace and mercy pour out to us from the loving heart of God.

And sure, you’ve heard that thousands of times before. But it bears repeating. Even we who hear about grace every Sunday slip back into old ways of thinking and behaving from time to time. ‘I haven’t repented enough.’ ‘I haven’t lived as Jesus wants me to and I don’t deserve his love.’

Remember grace. It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as a stairway from heaven.

Sometimes we want to insert moral conditions to the receipt of God’s love, because we realise just how scandalous it is. If this grace is how God operates, then the logical consequence is that it is open to all, even to the worst of people.

Around the time of 9/11, I used to write a regular column in a local newspaper. That week, you can imagine I suddenly had to change what I had prepared. Whilst expressing horror at what the terrorists had done and saying they deserved the judgment of God, I also told the true story of Henry Gerecke, an American Lutheran minister who was appointed as the Protestant chaplain to the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

Gerecke had lost a son to the Nazis. He really didn’t want to be a chaplain to these monsters. But God would let him have no peace until he agreed.

And then, he set about sharing the Gospel with these evil men. Some resisted, right up until they were hung. But others wept, confessed, repented, and threw themselves on the mercy of God.

The newspaper didn’t include that part of my article.

And some of us would like to pretend that it didn’t happen. But the story is documented[1].

All of us depend on a stairway from heaven.

Thirdly and finally, was Jacob Running Up That Hill?

Now that might not seem an obvious choice of song until you remember how the chorus begins:

And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places

A deal with God. That was Kate Bush’s original title for the song, until EMI’s marketing department said that certain countries wouldn’t play it with a title like that.

So – did Jacob make a deal with God? It rather sounds like it at the end of the reading. ‘If God will be with me … if God will protect me … if God will provide for me … then he will be my God and I will give him a tenth of all I have’ (verses 20-22). If you do things for me, then I’ll do stuff for you. I have read the passage like that for years. I might even have preached on it that way.

But not anymore. It’s a vow (verse 20). And the scholar John Goldingay (whose commentary on Genesis I bought with your very kind Christmas present of a book token) says that Jacob is just beginning near the end of where God ended in the promises he made to him in the dream[2]. There might be a bit of contract language still present, and of course Jacob still has a lot to learn, but essentially the runaway has found grace at the foot of the stairway from heaven and now he makes a response of gratitude.

Forgiveness is not a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card. As the theologian Amy Orr-Ewing says in her recent book on forgiveness,

If the basis for divine forgiveness is repentance, it should follow that a perpetrator of crime – seeking divine forgiveness – is willing to pay the civil or criminal penalty for their crime.[3]

There is no deal with God, but there is the response of honesty and gratitude. As August Gottlieb Spangenburg, one of the Moravian bishops who influenced John Wesley put it in a hymn,

What shall we offer our good Lord,
poor nothings, for his boundless grace?
Fain would we his great name record
and worthily set forth his praise.[4]

Jacob himself begins with the giving of a tithe. We can give, we can pay forward God’s grace to others, we can look for a place to serve in the church, we can consider how to bless others with God’s love in the world – it may be a cliché to say that the possibilities are endless, but it’s not far from the truth.

And don’t say, I can’t do anything very well, just do something out of gratitude to God. As the late Leonard Cohen said, ‘Forget your perfect offering.’

After all, Jacob will make some very imperfect offerings from hereon in. He, the deceiver, will suffer deceit at the hands of his uncle Laban. He will be in fear and trepidation when the time comes for reconciliation with his brother Esau. He will wrestle with God through the night and come out limping.

Let us simply acknowledge that we who have run away from God have found him build a stairway from heaven to us so that he can show us his grace. Now let’s simply get on with the gratitude.

And let God hear your music.

[1] Tim Townsend, Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis

[2] John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament), p454.

[3] Amy Orr-Ewing, Forgiveness: Reclaiming its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear, p27 n7 on p179.

[4] Singing the Faith #671 verse 1.

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