Beyond Right, Beyond Religion (Advent 4A)

 

Beyond Right, Beyond Religion

Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year A)

Homily delivered at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin Oregon

21 December 2025, 11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

Today, the final Sunday of Advent, is Mary Sunday.  But we hear actually very little about her in today’s Gospel.  That is because the cycle of Gospel readings for this year is from St. Matthew, and in general, Saint Matthew does not focus on women as closely as does Saint Luke.  The principal figure in Matthew’s infancy story is not Mary, but Joseph.  

 

There is an important detail in this story: “because he was a just (or upright) man, Joseph did not want to publicly denounce Mary, so he decided to divorce her quietly.”  Joseph could exercise the rights accorded to males in that society and, to protect his dignity, punish the woman who has so shamed him.  He could publicly accuse her of adultery and divorce her, and perhaps even see her stoned to death to satisfy his honor.  Some even said it his DUTY to humiliate or even kill her, to uphold the right and God’s dignity.  

 

But Joseph just can’t conceive of such a harsh way of treating Mary, although it is fully within his rights.  He decides a quiet divorce is the kindest way out of the difficult position into which Mary has put him.   Out of compassion for Mary, he decides to not insist on his rights.  He chooses a less brutal path: quietly break the engagement and send her on her way. Both paths are legal, and “right” in accordance with the law of that society. Of course, by sending Mary away, Joseph is abandoning her and her child, and condemning them horror.  But at least the law is upheld, and right is sustained.  

 

But Joseph has a dream, and an angel tells him that Mary has not betrayed him, and rather, that the child to be born is holy.  Joseph must not abandon Mary or the baby.  He is to support and sustain Mary, foster the child, and even give it the heroic, patriotic name Josh. (“Jesus” is a nick name for Joshua.).

 

On occasion, God intervenes and talks to us, whether in dreams, or scripture, or contemplative moments, or in the advice of friends.  And sometimes God tells us to go beyond right, beyond legal, beyond good, beyond nice, and truly sacrifice ourselves to make God’s love become flesh in our lives and the lives of others.    

 

Joseph chooses this path.  He listens to the dream and goes ahead and marries Mary, effectively adopting her child.  Then he spends the rest of his life supporting and nurturing the woman and child whose abandonment had been his legal right, if not duty.

 

Going beyond the right, going beyond what the rule books say, is the way of love.  It is like when Jesus says ‘you have read in the Law ‘don’t commit murder or adultery,’ but I say don’t even let yourselves be overcome by rage or lust.”

This principle has special application at this time of year, which recently has seen not just by rampant commercialism, but also increasing sectarianism.    

Some say we need to put “Christ” back into Christmas.  But they have it backwards.  I think they want to take “Christmas” that big joyous public party for all,regardless of faith, out of “Christ.”  Like the Grinch in Whoville, they want strip out the heart of Christmas--inclusive generosity and compassion.  And they steal it from our idea of who Christ is and what Christ calls us to. What they say they want is more explicit Christian branding on a holiday that has become one big shared public party, but by insisting on this, they miss the incarnation of God as a compassionate inclusive man that is the heart of the Christian feast. 

Just look at how this argument plays out.  For several years running now, some people, usually evangelicals waging what they call a “culture war,” whine about people they say are trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.”  They see “Happy Holidays” not as an effort to be inclusive and try to spread holiday cheer to all, but rather a deliberate insult to Christians and Christ.  Once they even argued that Starbuck’s Coffee’s use of red holiday cups marked with the company logo rather than white snowflakes were part of an anti-Christian plot. Such a partisan and sectarian approach contrasts sharply with a “common prayer” and “universal” approach to the faith, which sees us in community with those of differing beliefs or no belief, sees our duty as to minister to all, and sees shared holiday fun, with or without the Christian trappings, as a sign of God’s love. 

There once was a time when self-styled “Bible believing” Christians of an earlier day outlawed Christmas altogether because it wasn’t “Christian” enough.  

                    

After the English Reformation, some Christians believed that the Church had not been reformed thoroughly enough, that it was not sufficiently “biblical,” and that it still was corrupted by what the early reformers called “the enormities of Rome.”  They wanted to get rid of vestments, bishops, organs, and even the regular celebration of the Eucharist itself.   These Puritans focused their political activism in Parliament on eliminating corruption and privileges of the Royal Court and the nobility, including the bishops, whom they tended to call “certain popish persons.”  When the Army raised by Parliament won the Civil War and killed the King, the Puritan regime that came into power was narrow, fundamentalist, and harsh, somewhat like an English Taliban.  They banned Prayer Book worship and bishops, and set into Law a whole range of austere measures aimed at purifying the country.

One of these measures banned the celebration of Christmas.  Its very name—Christ’s Mass—was far too Roman for the Puritans’ tastes.  The fact that is was marked by twelve days of mid-winter partying, singing, drinking, and, for the more religious, Eucharists, were equally distasteful.  Special church services, mince pies, hanging holly, big parties were banned from 1644 to 1660.

Now in fairness to the Puritans, it must be said that they were rightly concerned at the excesses of some of the partying:  then, as now, serious public drunkenness and debauchery were among the abuses attendant to the celebration of the season by some.

The Puritans, throwing away the baby Jesus with the bathwater of overdoing it in Christmas partying, banned the holiday outright.  “Christmas is a pagan celebration,” they said, “and must be done away with by true Christians.” They were putting “Christ back into Christmas” big time!

Note the theology at work here—it is exclusionary, not inclusive: “true” Christians need to show their “trueness” (and, in so doing, point out who are “false” Christians and pagans).  It is contemptuous of many of the simple pleasures shared by people regardless of belief or tradition, and seeks to parcel out good things only to those who are orthodox.   The puritans said, basically, “If you don’t know God in just the right way, you are not worthy of joy.  No parties for you!” 

 

One of my favorite choral anthems at Christmas is John Rutter’s setting of “What Sweeter Music.”  The text was written by an Anglican priest who had lost his job under the puritans.  He wrote it for a Christmas party thrown by newly-restored King Charles II.  I love the poem, with its inclusive, incarnational theology that really does put a loving, inclusive Christ into Christmas.   and have sung it with several different choirs over the years:

What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring

Than a carol, for to sing

The birth of this our heavenly King?

Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,

And give the honor to this day,

That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn

Smile, like a field beset with corn?

Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,

Thus, on the sudden? Come and see

The cause, why things thus fragrant be:

‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth

Gives life and luster, public mirth,

To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,

Who, with his sunshine and his showers,

Turns all the patient ground to flowers.

The darling of the world is come,

And fit it is, we find a room

To welcome him. The nobler part

Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath

This holly, and this ivy wreath,

To do him honour, who’s our King,

And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,

Than a carol for to sing

The birth of this our heavenly King?

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674).  

 

Even in his infancy, even in the womb, Jesus calls us to go beyond self, beyond tribe, beyond rights, and even beyond religion and sect, and to love and serve those who have no claim on us, to make God’s love present to all.  

 

May we listen to Joseph’s dream and not stand on our rights and dignities, especially when these are called “right” and “moral,” or good “Christian.” May we follow Joseph’s example, and follow the call of self-sacrifice when it comes to us.  

 

In this coming Christmastide, may we all season sing, eat, drink, and love each other well.  Let us reconcile with each other and mend family and friend relationships that have gone bad.  Let’s not begrudge our neighbors who celebrate and love without recognizing the source of their joy and love, the source that our experience tells us is God made flesh in Jesus Christ. 

 

In the name of God, Amen. 

Hope for the Cranky (Advent 1A)

 

Hope for the Cranky

 

7 December 2025

Advent 1 A

 Notes taken from a homily preached from the aisle

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7; 18-19

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

9 a.m. Sung Mass

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Grants Pass, Oregon

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen         

 

When I first became an Episcopalian, I was taken aback when Advent came.  For me, it had always been the time for preparing for Christmas.  But then, right there in the lectionary, it was all about the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord!  John the Baptist preaching doom!  Yikes!  But a kind priest resolved my conflict.  Advent is the season where we focus on, like E.B White’s Arthur, the once and future king.  We focus on the then and yet future coming of our Lord.  It happened back then, but it will happen still in the future.  As the Gospel of John puts it, “the hour is coming, and now is.” 

 

This matters a lot to me, especially this year.  

 

Remember that line from C.S. Lewis?  He talks about the times when our faith just doesn’t give us the lift it once did.  He calls them “dry times,” when the water of life seems to have stopped flowing.  Well, for about a year, I have been in one of those.  It may have something to do with the direction our country has taken, enough to make anybody lose hope.  I have felt alienated from my family, from fellow church members, from God. Everything in my life seemed to worry me as much as paying bills or taxes. Even my back and neck started hurting again. 

 

I have heard some people characterize such a spiritual funk as a crisis of faith, as doubt, or the sin of despair.  Others call it depression.  But I realized about the end of summer that what I was experiencing was none of these.  It was more akin to grouchiness, crankiness, being a curmudgeon, what my father used to call being “techy,” a vague annoyance at the world.  Then when fall came in full force, in all four choral groups I sing with, we began to prepare Christmas music, with all its joy, happiness, and sense of things having been set right in the world.  My first reaction was to think, “here we go again!”  It’s been 2,000 years and the world is just as screwed up as it was then.  What difference does it all make? 

 

But then something happened.  That music and joy started working on me.  It opened my heart.  I started having feelings again.  Good feelings.  And I realized that to no longer be a grouch all I had to do was decide to not be one.  To stop blaming my malaise on others or outside things, no matter how broken and twisted they were.  And my hope returned.  I am so thankful.   

    

When I was young, I sometimes heard in Church sermons on what they called the “signs of the times,” or the signs of the end-time.  Most of these were disastrous indications that the world was going to hell and destruction.   Some people misunderstand scripture and think that the prophets provide a television guide like prevue of coming events, and those are not good things.   I only later learned that this was a gross misunderstanding of the New Testament idea of “signs of the times.” 

 

But the prophets always talk to their own day.  The prophets talk about the horrors of their own age and say these will continue to occur, and maybe even get worse.  But they also see that becaue of God’s love, it will end well.  They see a future where the crooked will be made straight and illness will be healed, where weapons of war will be melted down and beaten into farming tools. 

 

So when Jesus says to the biblical literalists of his own day, “You know how to read the weather, but not read the signs of the times,^” he is not saying you don’t recognize the bad things on the prophetic list of coming distractions,  the rotten things that supposedly will precede the coming day of the Lord.  No--he is saying you don’t recognize the good things in my ministry--the healings, the granting of sight and speech or the ability to walk on one’s own--that are signals that in Jesus the good things of the hoped-for day of the day of the Lord are already here.    

 

It is part and parcel with the heart of our faith.  We look about the world and see it is broken.  We hope for God to come and set it right.  That’s what “day of judgment” means, after all.  In the Old Testament, the Book of Judges is not about legal court and people in white powdered wigs wielding gavels and being called “Your Honor.”  It is about people like Samson, Deborah, Judith, Barak:  military heroes who set things right and liberate the oppressed.  That’s the basic idea of the “Day of Judgment.”  Oppressed and abused people see the day when things are set right as an occasion for joy and hope.  But what if we are the abusers, the oppressors?  The it’s a day of doom and fear.  And we all are both oppressors and oppressed.  If we ask who are the wicked who might get the worse of it when things are set right, if we are honest, we see that, in the words of Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” 

 

And that is why the prophets give us the great call, “shuvu, shuvu, Yisrael,” “turn back, turn back, O Israel,”  It’s why John the Baptist says again and again, “Change your ways, for the Day of the Lord approaches,”

 

Repentance is not about beating ourselves into submission and forcing ourselves to follow impossible rules.  Such a bulldozer approach to our lives is a recipe for unhappiness and tension—the very kind of tension that leads us to feel compelled to engage in the very things we should turn away from. Paul several times suggests that instead we should “clothe ourselves in Christ” or “look upon the face of Jesus: to bring more and more light into our lives, and that this will change us.  The Colossians passage that usually is translated, “put to death your earthly parts,” is   a bad translation.  The Greek is much clearer: “let the earthly parts of you die.”  As we are changed by focusing on Jesus, the light he gives us actually empowers us to show love, and the bad behaviors will of themselves drop off and cease. 

 

Paul talks about putting the example of Christ before our eyes, putting gratitude for what he has done for us in our hearts.  A heart full of gratitude has little room for the selfishness that generates unjust, hurtful, abusive, and wanton acts. 

 

I read in Tertullian this last week a great line I had never noticed before: “When a person who cares only for themselves dies, the whole world breathes a sigh of relief.”  Repentance gives that relief without us having to die. 

 

Hope is what Advent is all about.  We see the world and see that, even 2,000 years after the coming of our Lord in the flesh, it is still a profoundly broken place.  And, in the words of the poet, what happens to hope deferred?  Does it dry like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?   For me this last year, it made me cranky. 

 

The message of Advent, which talks about how God has come already and will still come again, is this:  don’t give up on hope. 

 

Sleepers, awake!  Cast aside the works of darkness and don the armor of light.  Put on Christ.  And all will take care of itself. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

 

Jesus' FOcus on the Family (Proper 27C)

 

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
9 November 2025—11: 00 a.m. Sung Mass

Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

In the culture wars over sexuality and marriage, some people often say that they support the “Biblical view of marriage.”  When I hear that, I often wonder what Bible they have been reading, since so many different forms of marriage are discussed and endorsed in different parts of the Bible: a nuclear family and couple of a man and a woman (Gen. 2:24), polygamy with one man and several wives or broader polygyny including concubines and slaves, whether your own or your wives’ (Genesis; Judges; 1-2 Kings), levirate marriage to produce offspring for a dead brother (Gen. 36:6-10), forced marriage between a rapist and his victim (Deut. 22:28-29), and even simply the act of forcible rape of women in war as “spoils of war” (Numbers 31:1-18; Deut. 21:11-14).     All of these marriage forms discussed and endorsed in parts of the Bible are based on the idea of the woman as the chattel possession of the man.

 

Now I admit that idealizing the family is big business.   Witness over the years the success of “Little House on the Prairies,” “Father Knows Best,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.”   The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” ministry attracted millions of people struggling for happier, better lives by seeking direction from what Dobson claimed to be the teachings of the Bible. 

 

But the Bible even at its best is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You only have to read it to realize how messy and twisted families can be.   If you idealize the patriarchal family, just look at the horror stories in the families of the patriarchs themselves: hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear. 

 

Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading.  But it is key in seeing what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

 

Opponents approach Jesus: Sadducees, conservatives who accept only the Torah as scripture and are wary of later prophetic and wisdom writings and their new-fangled ideas like life after death or angels.  

 

In order to make a point for their conservative denial of life after death, they pose a hypothetical question of property:  seven brothers die in sequence, each marrying the deceased brother’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah.  “If there is a resurrection from the dead, to whom does that woman belong?”   For them, wives and children are chattel, are items of property. Women can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives.  Since this woman clearly can’t belong to all seven, the resurrection is an impossibility, rather like a dirty joke. 

 

Jesus replies: “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. All belong to God alone.” 

 

The three great branches of Judaism at this time had completely different takes on the messiness of life and prospects for life after death. 

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated.  They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah and the Community’s ascetic rule of life would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness.  They were this-life denying but future-life affirming. 

 

The Sadducees of today’s reading believed that the Law controlled life’s messiness, but rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body.   Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!”   The Sadducees would have agreed.  They were this-life affirming but future-life denying. 

 

The Pharisees too believed that the Law brought order to life’s messiness, but rejected the asceticism of the Essenes and the reluctance of the Sadducees to accept immortality and resurrection.  They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming. 

 

Jesus, close to the Pharisees here, affirms both this world and the world to come.   “Being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is not an expression of ascetic contempt for the body and marriage.  Remember that story about Jesus turning water into wine at that wedding in Cana.  In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned” marriage as a “manner of life.”   He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic.   He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine, beer, and good food. 

 

You see, Jesus accepted—indeed, reveled in!—life in all its messiness, but didn’t lose hope for something better.   

 

Part of the problem is we idealize things and pretend the messy parts don’t exist—another way of not affirming this present life.  In the hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs. On occasion guests comment “What a lovely family!”  I smile politely in return.  That collection of pictures is carefully curated!  Thankful as we are for our family and all the happy memories, we realize the photographs tell only part of a complicated story.   We don’t hang some pictures because they are just too painful: those taken at funerals or during episodes of mental illness of some family member, when a loved one was in prison, during estranged feelings, or after suicides, divorces, tragic accidents and grim degenerative illnesses.   But all this is part of real life.  And accepting and loving life means bearing this brokenness with grace as well.

 

For Jesus, God’s love is revealed in the differences between this life and life in the age to come.  This age is messed up, the age to come, fully in accord with God’s will.  Here, we make exploitative contracts and unfair subordinating relationships, including marriage.  Men take wives as chattel.  But in the age to come, there will be a radical equality:  no exploitation, privilege, or abuse.  Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person equally to God: “[They] neither marry nor are given in marriage... because they are like angels and are children of God.” 

 

“In the resurrection all will have God as father”:  this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage. 

 

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9).  This is not a prohibition of calling a priest “father” or “mother.”  It is not about titles.  It is a hyperbolic saying about real-life fathers. For Jesus families aren’t absolute, and even good fathers are defective when contrasted with the True Father.  

 

In Mark 3, Jesus’ Mother and brothers think Jesus has gone mad, and ask him to abandon his mission and return home.  His reply is biting:  “Who are my mother and my brothers?  Not you, but those who follow God along with me—they are my true family!”  In all of this, Jesus suggests that our earthly relationships—no matter how good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true relationships God created us for. 

 

Some people today, triggered by experience of abusive patriarchy, object to Jesus’ way of referring to God: “father,” abba, or “Papa.”  Jesus clearly is not saying God is a biological male or our parent in any literal sense.  Elsewhere, Jesus uses feminine images for God: a nursing mother, a brooding hen.  All the same, he tells us to pray, “Our father.” 

 

I find it curious that the people who are most quick to urge us to always use peoples’ preferred names, titles, and pronouns at times seem to be the most resistant to using the designation for God that Jesus gives us:  Father.  Granted, its use may be merely an artifact of the patriarchal culture in which the Bible was written.  And granted, its use can be a trigger for some.  But Jesus uses the image again and again, even as he deconstructs oppression, patriarchy, and toxic hierarchy. 

 

Admittedly, expansive and inclusive language in our worship and our God-talk is necessary to break down patriarchy’s abusive oppression.  But we should not let our own triggers and justice agendas become obstacles to hearing what Jesus is teaching us here: that our relationship to God is like the relationship of a child to the best of all possible fathers: intimate, loving, and fully trusting.

 

Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is not that in the afterlife people are celibate or neutered, or that human relationships, including families, cease. His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better in the world to come.  Life will then fully embody what we were created for, and not be diminished and twisted by the brokenness we have come to see as normal. 

 

Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in the God whom he called abba.  It’s not just what Jesus taught.  It is what his birth, life, death, and resurrection are all about.   Incarnation demands that we see that all human life is redeemable.  

 

 

 

So what part of family life and relationships will endure?  Not the nasty bits, to be sure.  I suspect we will be very, very pleasantly surprised by what God actually has in store.  Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison. 

 

The fact is, no family is “normal” or ideal.  We try our best to muddle along, and trust in God’s love and healing power.  On occasion in moments of mutual support and love, of cozy familiarity and even intimacy, we see glimpses of God’s ultimate good intentions for us.  And these glimpses are sweet indeed. 

 

Thanks be to God.

 

 

A Wound that Heals Us (Proper 24C)

 

Marc Chagall, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel 

 

A Wound that Heals Us
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24 Year C RCL)
19 October 2025--10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Readings: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

When Ronald Reagan was running against incumbent president Jimmie Carter in 1980, only one presidential debate took place.  Reagan perhaps won the debate by use of a single memorable line.  Exasperated when Carter began to relist the deficiencies he saw in Reagan’s position on Medicare and Medicaid, Reagan interrupted, “There you go again!”  The audience burst into laughter.  Reagan had defused the criticism not through any refutation of fact, but just by strategically expressing well that most human of emotions, desperate exasperation.

 

“There you go again!” These words express frustration at someone’s apparent inability to change, whatever the relapse.  We often silently reproach ourselves with them.

 

Today’s Genesis reading tells the story of a man who has a hard time changing his conniving, self-seeking ways.  Even in the womb, he seems to struggle with his twin brother.  When Esau is born first, the feisty younger twin rejects his second-place by grasping Esau’s heel. So his parents name him Jacob, “Heel.”

 

A maneuverer from the start, Jacob plays on Esau’s simplicity and hunger to get him to ignorantly trade away his property inheritance for a dish of lentil stew, that the King James version inelegantly calls “a mess of pottage.” Later, he impersonates Esau by wearing fleece sleeves to imitate his hairy arms to trick his father and steal Esau’s spiritual blessing.

 

Esau, exasperated and resentful, plans simply to murder Jacob as soon as their father dies and take back his rightful inheritance and blessing.  So Jacob, ever wily, leaves town to lie low for a while.   He goes to his uncle Laban’s home far away to wait until things calm down.

 

Jacob clearly is in distress.  During his escape, he has a vision of a ladder into heaven, and for the first time connects briefly with the God of his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac.  He calls the place Bethel, the House of God.  But he remains Jacob, the heel. 

 

Uncle Laban too is a trickster.   When he settles on a bride price for Jacob to marry one of his daughters, he tricks him into paying double—a work contract of fourteen years instead of seven—and taking on the unwanted elder daughter as well.  But Jacob’s hard work and business savvy pay off. When the shared assets grow to a size worth arguing about, tensions develop.  Jacob knows it is time to return to Canaan when, as he says to his wives, “Your father is not treating me a nicely as he used to.”

 

Now comes the problem of divvying up the wealth. Jacob still has tricks up his sleeve, turning the tables by tricking the trickster.  He rigs the process of selecting flocks in his favor, and ends up with the lion’s portion.  So he has to flee his uncle by night too, just as he had to flee his brother.  “There you go again!”  

 

As Jacob returns to Canaan, he is afraid that Esau still will murder him.  So he sends messengers with kind words.  They return and say that Esau is coming to welcome him home—accompanied by 400 armed men!

 

Yikes.  The big hairy man may be dull, but he clearly does not forget a grudge. 

 

Jacob is prudent.  He divides his large caravan into two camps:  if Esau takes the first by violence, at least Jacob might have half his family and goods left.  Then he sends all the huge baggage and livestock train in several small groups ahead, all with the instructions that if Esau challenges them, they are to say they are gifts from Jacob for his dear brother Esau.   Finally, he sends his own immediate family.   But he still is too afraid.  He alone goes back to spend the night on the riverbank.

 

That is when today’s mysterious story occurs.  A stranger accosts Jacob and wrestles with him in the dark until the break of dawn, when the stranger, desperate to end the match, performs some kind of ninja trick on Jacob’s hip.  Jacob can no longer wrestle.  He might as well give up.  But he continues to hold on for dear life.  The stranger says, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”  Jacob replies, “Not until you bless me.” 

 

Jacob has run out of tricks.  He is desperate, unsure that his maneuvers will turn away Esau’s wrath.  He might lose everything in the next few hours.  The struggle in the dark in some ways represents the struggle going on in his heart:  his fears and plots versus the hope for a new day.  All he can do is hold tightly.  “Bless me,” he begs, “Bless me.” 

 

The stranger asks, “What is your name?  Who are you?”  “Jacob,” is the answer, “a heel, a trickster.” 

 

This confession, this avowal of stark truth when all options and plans are gone, marks a real change in Jacob’s life.  The stranger blesses him in reply, “Jacob is not your name, but Yisra’el: ‘It is God who Struggles.’”  “You are a heel no more.  You don’t need to struggle any more, for God is the one who struggles.” 

 

The day comes, and Jacob, forever changed, limps back to cross the river to his family.  His limp will stay with him the rest of his life.  He greets Esau later in the day, and the brothers are reconciled (with Esau in fine Asian style first refusing all the gifts, and then, after his brother’s urging, accepting them.) 

 

Today’s Lectionary includes this story along with other scriptures telling us to persist in seeking God: Jesus’ parable of a corrupt judge cowed into granting an annoying petitioner’s request simply to gain some peace and quiet, 2 Timothy’s counsel to hang in there whether the times are favorable or hard.

 

But the story of Jacob’s wrestle is not just about holding on tight, bulldozing ahead come hell or high water.  The key is in the words of blessing:  you don’t need to be a heel.  You don’t need to struggle.  Because God struggles with us, God struggles for us.  Be still and know that I am God. 

 

How many of us are Jacob here?  Do we say to ourselves: “There you go again! What can I do to get out of this fix? How can I turn back the clock?  How can I keep from the bad same old same old?”

 

When others have hurt us, how many of us are like Esau here?  Do we want to blurt out “There you go again,” and never again have anything to do with them, or worse, want to work them harm?

 

In all of this, God is there, loving us, supporting us, and holding us tightly.  In our desperation, we have to hold tightly onto God, and not let go, even though everything is going wrong and we may get hurt in the struggle. “I won’t let go, not until you bless me. Not until you tell your name, show me who you really are!” 

 

The good news is this:  our failings and the failings of others are ways that God shows his love and grace.  St. Paul knew this when he spoke of the mysterious “thorn” God had placed in his flesh: “but [God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness’…  for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12: 9-10).

 

Charles Wesley wrote a poem about this story that captures the need for persistence: 

 

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
and I am left alone with thee.
With thee all night I mean to stay
and wrestle till the break of day.

 

Wilt thou not yet to me reveal
thy new, unutterable name?
Tell me, I still beseech thee, tell,
to know it now resolved I am.
Wrestling, I will not let thee go
till I thy name, thy nature know.

 

My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath thy weighty hand,
faint to revive, and fall to rise.
I fall, and yet by faith I stand;
I stand and will not let thee go
till I thy name, thy nature know.

 

Yield to me now—for I am weak,
but confident in self-despair!
Speak to my heart, in blessing speak,
be conquered by insistent prayer.
Speak, or thou never hence shalt move,
and tell me if thy name is Love.

 

‘Tis Love! ‘tis Love that wrestled me!
I hear thy whisper in my heart.
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
pure, universal Love thou art.
To me, to all, thy mercies move—
thy nature and thy name is Love.

 

Such prayer must begin in honesty about who we are.  Jacob must speak his old name before he can be given a new one.  Each and every prayer, each and every eucharist is a revolutionary act, subverting the system of oppression and accusation, including self-accusation. It tells us “heel,” “deceiver,” “fighter,” is not our true name. 

 

This week, find something in yourself that needs forgiving, needs remedying. And in your prayers, pray that God will help you with it, simply help.  And then be patient.   Say you won’t let go until he blesses you.  Be like that persistent annoying woman in the Gospel reading.  And forgive yourself.   

 

Also find something in someone in your life that needs forgiving, needs correcting, something that makes you angry and want to say “there you go again!”  And just forgive them.  If that’s not possible, ask God to help you forgive.  And say you won’t let go until he blesses you in this. 

 

In the name of Christ, 

 

Amen.