Am I not pretty enough?

SERMON PREACHED AT THE WAIAPU CATHEDRAL CHURCH
of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST
NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 20 (17th August) 2014
             

Readings:         Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
                         Psalm 67
                         Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
                         Matthew 15:10-20, 44-52

Under the influence of the (unfairly depicted) Pharisees the crowd asks a question that demonstrates that they have come to see themselves as a clean redeemed, pure people. The very notion of “purity” post-Hitler should send shivers down our spine. Yet Hitler’s belief in a pure master race is not unique to him. Anti-Jewish pogroms by Hitler and Stalin, ethnic cleansing or genocide as perpetrated by the English in Scotland and Tasmania, of various shades of Muslim by the Ottoman Empire, of Bengalese by Pakistanis, of Croats and others from Serbia, of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda: the history of human purity-hatreds is a dark stain on the our story. It is recreated in J.K. Rowling’s depiction of Voldemort and his loyal wizards, committed to the eradication of mud-bloods, striving for ethnic purity.

Exclusivist purity is an attitude all too easily recreated in religion. It mars the history of Judaism, Christianity and even Islam. Religious purity obsessions taint the witness of all of us who are descendants in faith of Abraham, despite Isaiah’s joyful pronouncement that God “will welcome foreigners” (Is 56:6). As many Muslim leaders are currently pointing out, the evils of ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by ISIL/ISIS in the power vacuums of Iraq and Syria have no basis in the sacred texts of Qur’an. Similarly, even the often militant texts of the Hebrew Scriptures are adamant that military action is the domain of the Creator God, not of humans.

But I doubt if many of us see ourselves implicated in the raids of Kristallnacht in 1938, of the Rwandan rivers flowing with blood in the 1990s, of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the same decade, or the current ethnic atrocities of the Central African Republic, Sudan, Syria or the Sinjar Mountains in Iraq. Yet we must see the finger of Jesus, criticising the Pharisees, at pointing at our own potential for sin, or the whole scene remains far removed and abstract.

When, where, how do we see and hate otherness in those who God calls across our path? It is my suspicion that much of the debate about homosexual law-reform in many Christian circles is about otherness, about using a preconceived or misconceived or conveniently and selectively conceived idea of God’s holiness codes to maintain some kind of ideological purity in church pews. It is equally my suspicion that a tendency in some circles to ensure that Anglican liturgy remains pure and unsullied by modernity, by data-projection or by accessible, participatory music is driven not only by an unstated theology of salvation by good taste, but by a latent desire to ensure that those with whom we share our pews don’t look ethnically or chronologically or socio-economically too different to ourselves. I am often amused, incidentally, by the claim that there is only one degree of separation in kiwi culture, a claim that perpetrates a myth that we are all pakeha, middle-class, and “decile ten educated” † and which leaves us cosy within the holiness codes of that myth.

Jesus points the finger at any phariseeism that begins to infiltrate our lifestyle. In Anglican circles we are particularly prone to forgetting our need for God, forgetting that God is an utterly unmerited invader of our lives, forgetting that God is the absolute holiness within which the grot and squalor of what Samuel Wesley called “the mean altar of my heart” has no place. We lose touch too easily with the desperation of the foreign, outsider woman who cries out “have mercy on me, my daughter is tormented.”

Jesus is trying to teach establish a faith, a Godward journey of embrace, as Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has called it, rather than one of exclusion. We probably often find ourselves smiling our agreement with Jesus, tacitly ticking off on our fingers the ways in which we are not like the Pharisees. There is no such reading of the gospel. In the moment we do that we become like the Pharisee who watches the powerful but corrupt tax collector with disdain. When we smile indulgently at our ideological purity, and shut the door on those who vote or act or worship in ways other than our own we have become Pharisees, and there is, as the old prayer used to put it, “no health in us.” Does someone wipe their nose with their hand, sniff noisily, or expectorate, as Churchill put it, on the pavement? “Am I not pretty enough” sang country singer Kasey Chambers, pretty enough to be in your pure world? The very fact I quote a quote a country singer may give some Anglicans a shudder: am I not pretty enough to participate in the sophistication of Anglican Christian life?

I recall well my first months at my rather Brideshead Revisited theological college, when I deliberately drank beer at college functions, while some of my colleagues sipped their sherry and their gin, and all moved away from me on the bench. Colleagues at the nearby alternative college moved away because we drank alcohol at all! I recall well my seclusion as I drew on my pool of resources for preaching and teaching in the college chapel, quoting this contemporary author or singer while my erudite colleagues quoted the Greek and Latin Fathers in original languages. I remember well my confusion as the more profound liturgical participants glared at any error a naïve newcomer might make when it came to the appropriate moment for genuflection at the Mass, all metaphorically moving away on the bench.

And I am alluding too to reverse-Phariseeism, the unholier-than-thou Phariseeism of that moment in Arlo Guthrie’s classic anti-war tirade, “Alice’s Restaurant” when a hardened crim asks Guthrie

      “What were you arrested for, kid?”
      And I said, “Littering.”
      And they all moved away from me on the bench there,
      with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things,
      till I said, “And creating a nuisance.”
      And they all came back, shook my hand,
      and we had a great time on the bench.

In what ways do we generate Phariseeism, ensuring that our world is not infiltrated by those who don’t think or speak or act like us? We cannot rest cosily behind any sort of holiness or purity codes or liturgical or academic or political or musical excellence. We are to be merciful, as God is merciful to us, inviting as God is inviting to us, hospitable as God is hospitable to us. We are to be the porous people of God, and that may well mean we have often to be uncomfortable in our journey of knowing Jesus and making him known, of being Jesus to a community that is in so many ways crying out for the crumbs of love and inclusion beneath the table of faith.

TLBWY



† A socio-economic grading of NZ Schools

Dancing amen despite despair

I write in my “Gospel Comment”† of  the gift that is flowing from uncluttered, pre-scientific cultures back to our rationalist, materialist world. In its wackier forms it may appear as the “tree-hugging, alfalfa-munching, muslin-wearing” naiveties of New Age and neo-hippie groups. I am no fan of forms of angel-touting mysticism that sidestep the brute realities of the Incarnation and the Cross, but if push were to come to shove I would prefer that idealism to the cynical rationalism that reduces the central truths of Christianity to fairy tale status, labelling itself “progressive” while dismantling the great Christ-stories of hope and comfort.

In some areas we have grasped this well. We have reclaimed the wonderful respect, for example, that Māoritanga can give us for Ranginui and Papatuanuku, rightly speaking out when we exploit and destroy God’s earth. With the Celts we murmur our “amen” when we lament an attitude that sees “the earth [as] a witch and we still burn her, Stripping her down with mining, and the poison of our wars …”.  We voice our opposition (I hope) when that is, as it so often is, the dominant trend in our greedy exploitative culture. We must, for when we do not we are failing in our obedience not so much to the “marks of mission” but to the very commandments of our faith: we are stealing from God’s garden and from the hope-baskets of our descendants.

But we are doing so, too, if we take the texts that are texts of comfort in our whakapapa* of faith and render them meaningless. The balancing act is fraught. Karl Marx famously called religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” It can be, if we allow it to be; if it leaves us cosy (which was not what “comfortable”, that maligned word of liturgy, meant) and complacent. “She’s right, Jack” is not the gospel-message.

Nor, though, is “if it can’t be measured it don’t exist.” When I am confronted by the recent horrors of Gaza or North-East Iraq, Central African Republic and Sudan, I will try in some puny human way to respond, giving to aid organizations, writing to politicians, what Paolo Freire called “conscientization” or “consciousness raising.” I will also stutter prayers, often wordless, participating strangely in that mystery St Paul called “the groaning of the Spirit.” When a child dies (more obviously back in the days when clergy saw more funerals) I will offer words and touches of comfort, but, more importantly, I will whisper prayers, entrusting this and all brutal contexts of grief into the weeping heart of God that is also, inexplicably, the eternally-dancing heart of God.

For, beyond the child’s death, beyond her parents’ grief, beyond our speechlessness, God dances “amen” to and with all creation. That resounding “amen” of course can’t be measured, for it is eternal. That is why it is the last word in the New Testament.


† On Matthew 15:21-28 I wrote as follows:

It’s dangerous to put modern interpretations on an ancient text. Matthew wants us to see yet another example of the mustard seed faith that Jesus called for back at Matt 13:31-32 (or three weeks ago in liturgical time). Here in this woman is the great faith born of desperation and proximity to disaster. In the “Global North” (“West”, “First World”, whatever) we have tended to rationalize such faith away, making it an intellectual proposition. Listening to the stories of Indigenous and other non-rationalist believers I am increasingly unsure that this is wise: should I poo-poo the stories of those who have cried out in the face of evil and experienced the hand of God? Despite all the ransacking of the Global South “pre-scientific cultures,” that went on in the name of “progress” it may be the mustard seed of faith that is the gracious gift of the dispossessed, given back despite everything, back to those of us who believe safely from the comfort of our armchairs.

*Very roughly “back-story” or heritage. 

In grateful thanks to a resurrection-rumourer

It was a privilege for me to sit at the feet of Paula Gooder, the biblical theologian who addressed the recent clergy school in Rotorua. This is the second time I have sat at a Paula Gooder seminar, the last being in Darwin two years ago.  She is an outstanding teacher, enormously compassionate, engaging with those who see the world through different lenses to hers. It is for good reason that she is one of the consultant theologians to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Critical to Paula’s reading of the New Testament is her near-namesake Paul’s constant emphasis on the centrality of the resurrection. For some this is a hard pill to swallow, and certainly in the 1950s there was a rationalist tendency to put the resurrection of Jesus and the future resurrection of the dead into either the “piffle” or the too-hard basket. It became trendy to note that neither Mark nor Paul tells the resurrection story, and therefore to surmise that Matthew, Luke and John got out their respective creativity-pens and made up a jolly good yarn or three.

That trend, in academic circles, lasted for a decade or so. Gradually though it crumbled under pressure from historical and liturgical and even pastoral theology, amongst other directions. Slowly the argument that the first Christians were unlikely to risk life and limb for a pile of piffle came to reassert itself. So too did the not-so-minor point that both Mark and Paul in fact demonstrate a very strong narrative commitment to the resurrection. Mark shows this by placing us in the shoes of the frightened women who were the first witnesses (Mk 16:8) who despite their fear nevertheless went on to stutter the Good News (See Mk 1:1), so that even we have heard it. Paul, who probably influenced Mark considerably, takes a different route: “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we of all people are most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).

In some small theological circles there is still a tendency to suggest that Paul and Mark were clearly a little naïve, and that we know much more in our scientific world. This is a dangerously paternalistic view. If I learned one thing from working amongst Indigenous it was that we should not trivialize the pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment world view. As I read of the methane explosions currently beginning to shatter scientific complacency in North Siberia I suggest that scientific method may not be Good News, after all. From that realization I find myself committed to eco-issues, but more of that another time.

Sometimes, when I preach, I fear you must get tired of someone banging on about resurrection and all that stuff. Must every sermon spiral its way back to Easter Sunday? It must: however much we care about justice for minorities and the oppressed, for the environment, for fiscal responsibility and global economics, we do so from the strange starting point that, 2000 years ago, God breathed light into human darkness, and commissioned us  to “go, tell it on the mountain.” We feed the hungry, clothe the naked, release the captive so that they too can feel the heart-warming resurrection-touch of Jesus.

All this was made clear once more to a gaggle of clergy gathered together in Rotorua. Thanks for letting me be there.

Maranatha and the butterly wing once more

SERMON PREACHED AT THE ORMOND CHAPEL
HOSPITAL HILL
(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 17 (27^th July) 2014
       

Readings:       1 Kings 3:5-12
                       Psalm 119:129-136
                       Romans 8:26-39

                       Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

When Matthew wove together his collection of Jesus sayings, seeking to inspire his little community of perhaps forty or so people, nestling probably at Antioch in south-central Turkey, he did so with an eye to inspiring them to be the most effective witness possible to the Jesus-story. It is fair to say he incorporated (or perhaps accentuated, or even invented!) more Jesus sayings about judgement and end-times urgency than did his spiritual confrere Luke. It is probable that his little Antiochene community was under far more pressure to surrender its faith and its spiritual integrity than Luke’s.  He emphasises Hebrew Law far more than any other writer, perhaps as a corrective to a growing abuse of Paul’s teachings, teachings that already reflect a struggle with the questions of morality and law within Christian circles. These were volatile times. Antioch would go on, under first Peter’s, then Matthew’s, and then many others’ leadership, to become one of the great cradles of Christian thought. Paul, incidentally, never enjoyed a happy relationship with Antioch, though I like to believe the fable that Paul and Peter were martyred together, and like to believe that in the face of the imminent glory of God they got some differences sorted out.

So Matthew emphasized the importance of witness, witness to Christ in the maelstrom world of flux and antagonism around him and his Antiochean community. He used the teachings of Jesus to emphasize the need to cling on to Jesu-focussed integrity, so that this tiny little huddle of often frightened believers might indeed be the mustard seed of faith that transformed the wider city and region. I figure that Matthew, whoever he was (for he wasn’t necessarily the tax-collector of the story he narrates) might have been rather chuffed to see his town become one of the great Christian metropoli for nearly thirteen centuries, though he would have wept to see the bloodshed, not atypical of that region not far from where ISIS rebels are now persecuting, pillaging and slaughtering Shiite and Christian believers alike, would have wept to see the bloodshed that dominated the last four Crusade-pillaged centuries of his beloved hometown.

Mustard seed faith: it is a lovely image of how a small and faithful community can infiltrate the larger “meta-narrative” of the wider community. While I prefer to apply it primarily to the Jesus-story, there is no doubt that at this moment there are Jews and Muslims and Christians praying for peace and demonstrating peace-values, justice values together in the Middle East, swimming against the tides of ethnic hatred that dominate that region. There’s no doubt that a young woman like the feisty Malala Yousafzai, having survived an assassination attempt, is articulating a mustard seed faith in the power of girls’ education to transform the world. There is no doubt that those who continue to speak out against the power of the exploitative multi-nationals and self-interested governments on behalf for example of the people of Bhopal, or the sweat-shop workers of Bangladesh, or the refugees fleeing Sri Lanka do, like a prisoner striking damp matches in a darkened cave, sometimes succeed to change the world.

Like Matthew, Rachel Carson never lived to see her mustard seed of environmental concern at least begin to challenge international greed. Like Matthew, activist Steve Biko (whose icon adorns my cathedral office wall) never lived to see apartheid fall. In all these cases though the story is not and never will be over: bombs still fall on Gaza and Israel, corporate giants still rape the world’s resources, the ANC practices its own forms of exploitation now it controls South Africa, and the skies still pour their hard rain around the globe.

That is why I prefer to apply the image primarily to the Jesus-story of Resurrection and Second Coming: when women receive all the education we need them to have, injustice will still be perpetrated. When the executives of great multi-nationals finally discover compassion and justice new exploiters will rise to take their place. When Bangladesh or Sri Lanka become places of justice, new sweatshops will appear around the world, perhaps even in the nations that currently make up the crumbling empires of the global north. It was only when Europe finished stripping its forests bare to make capital, after all, that global south nations like Brazil or Burma emulated them in order to survive. From the Jesus-parable perspective only the fulfilment of the ancient prayer “maranatha, come Lord, come and wind up cosmic history,” will fulfil the mission of mustard seed faith.

We stand on the shoulders of Matthew and his small community of mustard seed believers. Hopefully, despite overwhelming doubts, we still whisper our prayers for the coming of God’s reign of justice and love. I believe the fulfilment of that reign is thoroughly other-worldly, yet its DNA can and must be implanted in this world, too. With Paul we participate in the groans of God’s Spirit, groaning in prayer as we witness Gaza, Sudan, north-east Iraq and countless more theatres of suffering. Like Matthew or Paul or Rachel Carson or Steve Biko we may never see even the flawed and tainted answers to our prayers, let alone their final fulfilment, but we join in the murmur of beating butterfly wings, participating in the rhythm that will one day initiate God’s eternity. For me when the evidence of human hatred becomes too great I fall back on the ancient (fifth century) Jesus Prayer of Orthodox Spirituality: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us”: the exercise of that mercy would be, in the end, the coming of the Reign of God.

It’s all mystical stuff, and it must be, for it is otherworldly. It is though mere dross if we don’t also strive to change our lives to be the answers to our prayers, striving to live lives more fair, and just, and Christ-centred. It is our commission, not to mention our pearl of great price, as we obey Jesus’ command from the climactic end of Matthew’s story, “Go … baptize … teach.”

TLBWY

A Vibrant Soul: Rest in Peace.

Lynda Patterson 1974-2004

 

The National Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, the wider  church too, beyond our shores and beyond our denomination, was shocked last Sunday to hear that Dr Lynda Patterson, Dean of Christchurch, had died suddenly (of natural causes) the previous night.

Lynda has been for the last many months cast into the frontline of the conflict between Diocese and elements of the Canterbury community; she fought, with her bishop and close friend Bishop Victoria, for the right to rebuild the lost Cathedral in a manner meaningful to a new world and a new church. Lynda has been the stopping point for vitriol and abuse and threats since she stepped up as acting Dean in December 2011. She was appointed permanent Dean of Christchurch in November last year. She was not being melodramatic, a fortnight before that, when she told her fellow cathedral deans she believed the role might kill her. We knew it was true.

Originally from Northern Ireland, Lynda has been a prophet, a pastor and a priest, as well as a healer, a reconciler, and a theologian par excellence, something of a treasure in the NZ Church since David Coles ordained her in 2004.

The cathedral community and Diocese of Christchurch have lost a wonderful, vibrant human treasure: Bishop Victoria Matthews in particular has lost a close friend and confidant. The tight-knit community of deans has lost an inspirational friend and colleague. The loss is tempered only by the privilege of sharing in some small way in the too-brief journey of a wonderful and Christlike soul and servant of God.

Lynda Jayne Patterson: may she rest in peace and rise in glory.

 

MH17, Bentiu, Gaza and Boko Haram: resounding "no" of emptiness?

SERMON PREACHED AT

THE CATHEDRAL of St JOHN THE EVANGELIST, WAIAPU

(NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND)
ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 (20^th July) 2014
           

Readings:       Isaiah 44:6-8
                       Psalm 86:11-17
                       Romans 8:12-25

                       Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

If MH370 just a few months ago did not sufficiently remind us that human lives and infrastructure are unbelievably fragile, then the equally senseless loss of lives on MH17 has reinforced the message.  Yet we are terribly Eurocentric in our sensitivities: 307 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the last eleven days, and that figure will already be out of date. According to Al Jazeera more than 2,000 Nigerians have died in insurgency uprisings in 2014, many at the hands of Boko Haram (and 200 kidnapped schoolgirls remain unaccounted for). Médecins Sans Frontières report that in one South Sudanese refugee camp, Bentiu, three children aged under five are dying, on average, each day.

The statistics are horrendous, and to avoid compassion fatigue most of us keep them at arm’s length until sudden tragedies occur. Human nature is such that a local story will tear at our hearts strings more than the frightening statistics that emerge from the lives of those who Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Soft local news will sell papers and ratings far more than the ongoing narratives of the world’s tragedies, to which we allow ourselves to become inured.  It was probably ever thus.

The scriptures of our faith drive both to and from the heart of human tragedy and were written from the heart of suffering. Despite deep social pain the author of Isaiah 44 was able to voice words of hope and comfort: “Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one” (Is. 44:8). Despite the tumult (and despair) around him the author dared to believe in the claims of the one God on his life and the life of his people. Despite, or perhaps because of the tumult (and despair) around him the author dared to proclaim the unique and demanding status and the absolute claims that God made upon his life and his people’s lives. Dare to believe, he demanded of his audience and of us.

He did not just demand belief, but demonstration of belief. It will be no surprise to you by now that I will always maintain that the first demonstration of belief is corporate worship. We are not a political party of either wing, fighting for justice for the dying children of Sudan, or for the dying children of the late term abortion clinics, or for dying mother earth. We are the servants of the God who is revealed primarily in the stark contrast of a criminal’s death and an other-worldly and beyond-words resurrection. We are not a political party of left or right, though we may sometimes support them; our compass bearing is, while never forgetting the wretched of the earth and the plight of the poor, set on a point beyond comprehension, a point beyond understanding, and a point that breathes resurrection hope even when Ukrainian insurgents shoot a plane out of the sky, or infants and children die of dysentery at the rate of several a day in a Sudanese camp, or our loved ones are killed on the road.

We are commissioned by God-in-Christ to demonstrate hope-beyond-death by our response to the broken and the mourning and the wretched of God’s earth here and now. We are commissioned to compassion and justice, but we are commissioned too to proclaim a divine love that whispers that the death of a Sudanese child in a refugee camp or an HIV specialist en route to an Australian AIDS conference is not the final word in their life or ours or our planet’s.

We know, of course, that there are those who profess the same faith that we profess, whose message of hatred or disinterest all but drowns out any breath of compassion from the witness of the church. We are often embarrassed by the outpourings of bigotry dressed up as a Christian message from some wings of the church. Homophobia or xenophobia dressed up as moral purity, or (and I think no less damaging) proclamations of the non-existence of God dressed up as theological sophistication, are equally the workings of tares amongst wheat, and need the purging fires of God. I can only really address the tares amongst the wheat of my own life, and pray God that somewhere in God’s grace the wheat will slowly strangle tares, for as long as I live this side of the grave.

This side of the grave? We must not lose sight of the “not yet,” the rumour of resurrection that is the complete and future encounter with a healing and forgiving and resurrecting God. That encounter, in which God is seen (though the verb is inadequate) no longer through a darkened glass or a circumcised human intellect, that encounter is the only dimension of our faith that can ultimately  make any sense of the tragedies of missing or destroyed airliners, of economic and social and political injustice, of the death of the earth’s species, or even of the simple random injustice of metastasizing cancer cells . When Paul wrote of creation’s groaning for completion he was not writing of some future extinction point but the utter and eternal transformation of meaninglessness into meaning and of temporary existence into eternal existence; transformation of mortality, as he put it in his correspondence with the Corinthians, into immortality.

Creation’s fulfilment for which Paul yearns is not merely the fulfilment and redemption of all humans, and certainly not merely all Christians, while others burn eternally. It is unrighteousness and injustice, not, thank God, we who are unrighteous and unjust, that will be purged in the fires of which Matthew’s Jesus often spoke. Any proclamation that denudes the gospel of God’s “it is good” to existence, God’s “yes” to creation, God’s “yes” to those who we have loved and to those who have been loved but who have died in an airbus downing or a Sudanese camp or the Gaza, anything less than the promise of resurrection hope for them leaves us will nothing to say. Nothing to say, apart from, as Paul again puts it, mere dross (his word is stronger): anything less should be pruned from our proclamation.

To proclaim anything less than that leaves us with no more than human hatred gunning down an airbus, or killing Palestinian civilians or South Sudanese infants.  To proclaim anything less that all creation will one day rejoice, and that all life will one day “shine like the sun in the kingdom (Reign) of heaven,” and that all who have died will one day live, is to sell short the good news of Jesus Christ. In word and action we who bear Christ must not proclaim less than the fullness of Easter hope, or Flights MH307 and MH17, and Gaza and Bentiu and Boko Haram have the final word. Let it not be so in your life or mine.

TLBWY

Another retrospective: Jacob was an slimy man

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’ CHARLEVILLE
NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(17^th July) 2005

 

Readings:      Genesis 28.10-19

                        Psalm 139.1-11, 23-24
                        Rom 8.1-25
                        Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

A week ago  we heard the story of Esau, the hairy man, being cheated of his birthright by the wily younger brother Jacob. Esau, you may recall, was famished, and surrenders his right to inheritance for the immediate gratification of a plate of pottage. 

There are a number of ways we might water down that story, one that has always struck me as a study in the ways in which slimy cunning over common sense. There is a sense in which Esau deserved to lose that which was his by right – he was hardly likely to have been at death’s door if he was able to hold a conversation with his wily brother, and so it seems he was is a sense simply irresponsible in giving away that which should by rights have been his.

Perhaps indeed he was no more than a paradigm of the twenty first century – for surely more than any other at least in the last twenty ours is the era of instant gratification. “Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name” wrote tragic icon Jim Morrison in the era of hippiedom. In his day the words were shocking and provocative, risqué and daring. Today they are passé. Almost any movie or tv programme works from the common assumption that if you find someone cute you sleep with tem and then find out later if you have anything remotely in common: “will you still love me tomorrow?” was Carole King’s more honest and timeless cry from the heart. Esau was interested in the tonight – Jacob, however slimy he was, was interested in tomorrow.

In that alone there is a message for us as the people of God. We are called not to live as a people with no tomorrow but as a people who believe that tomorrow is God’s tomorrow. W are called to live as a people who believe in the judgement of God. Many of the parables of Jesus are parables of judgement- and this is especially and disproportionately the case in the Matthew account of the Jesus story. Will you still love me tomorrow? The gospel, particularly in Paul’s hands, is clear that we cannot earn the love of God, yet there are strong hints that we should at the very least live and act as though we had to. Therein lies a paradox at the heart of Christianity: we cannot earn our ouvre to God, yet we should live as though we are desperate to please our God and our judge, for he sees us as if though the eyes of our neighbour.

Jacob though stands for something else. What Jacob does in tricking the not-very-bright Esau is far from a model of how we are to behave in the service of God. Yet God has revealed the divine name as not being a name, controlled and neatly tucked into a box by the speaker, but an action. “What is your name?” asks Moses, and God, who will not be backed into a corner replies with the indefinable sentence “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be.”

God demonstrated this in the lives of the Fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, long before Moses encounters the divine presence at the burning bush. Esau may be not very bright, and Jacob may be a slime-ball, but God turns their rivalry into one of the great tales of faith. For Jacob, over the next several weeks of our readings, grows into the great father of faith that he tricks Esau into letting him become.

God’s will is done, and is done despite our human foibles. This willing of God is in our story today ratified by a promise: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” As was the case with the promise given to Jacob’s grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, God is faithful to his word. God’s word is action. As we shall see in weeks to come, the people of God are born of this determination of God. This is the promise in which we too stand: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…”

 

TLBWY