Eight Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack

Genesis 29.15-28
St Paul to the Romans 8.26-end
St Matthew’s Gospel 13.31-33,44-52

A very good thing to do is to take the Sunday sheet home and put it on the fridge, or under your morning coffee pot, so that each day you can remind yourself which of the midweek services you’re going to try and drop in to, and put all the other notices in your calendar. And also, this week, we would do well to take one of the Lord’s mini Kingdom-image parables each day (He gives us a handful in today’s Gospel), take one each day and ask - how does this or might this connect today with my actual lived experience. Or perhaps do it in the evening (stick the Sunday sheet next to your box of nightly lapsang tea leaves, or cheeky Dairy Milk in the cupboard) and ask at the close of each day how one of these mini parables connects with the day just gone. 

Likewise those stunning words from St Paul today in Romans. The whole of the Gospel in a few short verses, truly:

-It’s all about love.

-The Holy Spirit is alive and active in our lives.

-It’s all about God’s grace, and nothing can stop God pursuing His loving purposes.

-We do not judge, how could we? All is given, all is consummated in Christ.

And all that is just a few short lines from St Paul to the Early Church in Rome. 

But it’s not these amazing words I want to focus on today… It’s the portion of Genesis we heard. The Telenovela Drama in the lives of Jacob, Leah and Rachel!

What are we to make of it all? Well, first we might pause to notice that throughout the Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament) the great heroes of God’s people are also always breaking God’s own laws! 

King David - the archetypal hero of God’s cause, and yet he’s an absolute wrong-un, taking Bathsheba and having her husband murdered in battle to cover his tracks. Abraham the great Patriarch, and yet he treated his family so cruelly, not honouring the law. As does Jacob today, and who tricked his blind, dying father Isaac to inherit the covenant in the first place, also contrary to the law.

What are we to make of this? Heroes and anti heroes in one. Is the text purposefully undermining its own narrative of these men? I think the answer is yes. We are supposed to see this.

I’ve said before about the richness of the dramatic irony in the Hebrew Bible. It isn’t a problem, it is a gift. The tensions and dissonance create endless opportunity for new insights, new understanding - of God and the human condition. They may not be simple to get hold of, they may not be clean and tidy, but maybe that’s because they’re real. Clean, shiny, simple approaches (which have been tried again and again) quickly fall flat on their face. Instead, God is inviting us to a never-ending wrestle with these texts, and these people. Scholars and teachers are provoked and inspired. Stories live. We see the human condition again and again in the mirror of these sacred words.

In short, God is at work in the mess and the struggle, not despite it. Our Christian tradition is swift to tell us, in all sorts of ways, that God chooses to work in the fleshy and messy and complex. The Incarnation itself is the foundation stone of this theological principle, of course. And rising from the Word made flesh, we find again and again that God is in the mystery and the mud. We shouldn’t therefore be surprised when it’s true in the Hebrew Bible too. 

Rejoice in the mess and fraught-ness of the Old Testament, and see where it takes you. Ultimately, of course, it will lead us to Jesus. The flaws and failings of Jacob, and the other patriarchs, of the judges and kings, even back to Adam and Eve: it is all leading us to face our need of God. No king can save us, I can’t be by own saviour. We need God. 

And so, on our way home to God we are invited to dig in the mystery and the mud in Holy Scripture and in our own lives, and that’s where again and again, muddily and mysteriously we find God at work. 

So briefly back to Leah and Rachel and the best wedding sermon I never heard…

but a delighted member of the congregation at said wedding and her husband got the text from the officiating priest and gave it to me. And I was amazed. The sermon at this wedding about ten years ago now was basically this. Jacob, Leah, Rachel. It’s the story for all of us. Jacob has snared the girl of his dreams (at very considerable effort - seven years slave labour - we might add), and he takes her to bed on the wedding night, and the next morning he wakes up next to Leah, who is anything but the girl of his dreams. That’s marriage, the priest said, we all go to bed with our Rachel and wake up with our own Leah. Shocking! I know!

But actually… there’s a truth there. People (hopefully) commit to a wonderful person whom they love, but as people and relationships change we very often find ourselves in relationships with someone who is very different from the person we committed to all those years before. We ‘wake up with Leah’. It might be their personality and approach to life, it might be their physical or mental health, there are many different ways for men and women to go to bed with Rachel, and wake up with Leah. This rather bold priest went on to say, that that is the point, really. You have to keep falling in love with the people you love, keep learning to love who they are and are becoming, not expecting them to be the person you thought you knew then. And actually it’s true not just of marriage and romance, but friendships, work, vocation, even our relationships with ourselves, and with God for that matter. All these realities are not static, or things we possess. They are dynamic and mysterious, (the mystery and the mud) and our life’s work is the go on discovering who they are, who we are, who God is: an unfolding journey and becoming. It requires a Christ-like sense of freedom and un-possessive-ness, falling in love again and again with the you and me and loved one and God and everything I do wake up with as the days and years roll by, rather than the versions fossilised in my head.

And would you look at that(!), that is exactly what St Paul is saying to us and to the Early Church in Rome today - ‘the [Holy] Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not pray [or live or love] as we ought’ but ‘God searches the heart’ interceding for us, bringing us to live in God’s love and purposes. Because we have been called and equipped, St Paul says. And (in our imperfect, faltering through life) nothing, nothing can separate us from the One who calls us, who died for us, and who is our life, our hope and our joy. So, hold fast and go into this week, into the mystery and the mud, discovering the unfolding reality of you and me and God waiting there to be met and embraced It may not be easy, but it is real and good, and God is with us.