Archives for 2014

The Rock of Our Salvation

August 24, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Isaiah 51:1-6
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on August 24, 2014

The exile had come to an end, and the people of Judah were finally returning home. It had been a long forty years since a substantial group had been forced to leave Jerusalem and go to Babylon, and even though that first generation of exiles had largely died, the continuing generations did not let go of the hope of returning home that had been shared with them. But what would they find there? They knew that Jerusalem had already been largely destroyed during the multiyear siege that predated their forced departure, and they had to suspect that things had been left to decay even further, that the symbols of their culture and faith, especially the temple, would have been completely destroyed.

So as they made their way home, the prophet Isaiah knew that they needed some words of encouragement. He started out by calling out to get their attention. There was so much going on around them, so many things to distract them, so many things to keep them from being able to catch this new word, so much that would make it easy to ignore what he had to say, yet they so needed to hear him. Once he had gotten their attention, he pointed them to the past, offering reminders of how they had made it through all of the struggles that they had faced along the way in hopes that they would be inspired amidst the new challenges ahead.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,
and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Isaiah made it clear that all the stories of the past still mattered. Everything that would emerge from this time of transition and change would be rooted in what they knew very well, in God’s continuing faithfulness from generation to generation. The stones of their life together might be cut and chiseled and shaped in new ways, but they wouldn’t miss that it was all from the same rock.

The prophet continued by directly invoking the story of Abraham and Sarah. Just as God’s faithfulness broke through the bleak desperation of their lives in giving them a son after years of barrenness, so God would make a new way for them as they returned from exile. They too could count on God for amazing faithfulness, to comfort Zion amidst continuing distress and change, to transform the wilderness and desert into the lush beauty of Eden, and to show them a way of joy, gladness, and thanksgiving for the journey home.

In our world these days, we too need the prophet to remind us of the rock from which we are hewn. We certainly may not have all the burdens of the returning exiles, but there is plenty that weighs on our hearts in these days. Our world is filled with much strife and sorrow: war in too many places, conflict that simmers and so easily boils over, the devastation of infection attacking people and places in our world that already face incredible struggle, people who face persecution or death because of their confession or the color of their skin. All the pain and hurt is enough to make you want to move as far away from it all as possible. But then we still face the grief that emerges so close to home on days like today, when we mourn the death of one of our own and carry all the other concerns that weigh on our hearts and minds each and every day. There is so much to distract us from the source of all things, from “the rock from which [we] were hewn,” from the one who bore us into this life and who journeys with us every step of the way.

So when the prophet invites the exiles of Judah to listen, he might just be speaking to us too. He might just be offering us a memory of God’s promises that we have experienced in our own lives. He might just be giving us a reminder of God’s presence amidst all that weights on our hearts. He might be showing us a way of comfort amidst all the pain of our lives. And he might just be giving us hope for new life when we find ourselves in our own desert places, places where joy and gladness can blossom abundantly and thanksgiving and rejoicing will spring forth.

The prophet might have stopped there, thinking that comfort would be enough to get the returning exiles through their first days back home. But the comfort and hope we have in God is not the end of the story—there is more still ahead. These promises, this comfort, this new life—all these things are not just for self-preservation but rather are given so that they may be shared. As much as the returning exiles were desperately desiring the fullness of God’s hope for themselves, they also needed to share it with others. All their actions in rebuilding the city, in reshaping their life together, in restoring God’s promises in their midst, would help demonstrate God’s salvation and God’s hope to others in the world who needed to see these things for themselves.

Just as the exiles had waited so patiently and hopefully for God’s new life to emerge in their midst, so the prophet said that even “the coastlands wait” for this good news and that God’s salvation will reach to every shore. All the new things ahead would not just be for the benefit of the returning exiles—they would be for the blessing of all creation. These new things would replace the old in a dramatic transformation:

the heavens will vanish like smoke,
the earth will wear out like a garment,
and those who live on it will die like gnats.

But this was not the end but rather a beginning, the beginning of a world where God’s “salvation will be forever,” where the old things, as good as they might have been, will be replaced with something far greater.

Just as the prophet’s words of comfort and confidence speak to both the exiles and us, his words of challenge call to us as well. Amidst all that weighs us down, amidst all that distracts us from God’s new thing, amidst all that keeps us focused only on ourselves as we seek God’s comfort in our lives and our world, we too are called to bear God’s new life into the world. We are called to share the teaching and justice of God with all people and to work to make it real here and now. The faithfulness of God that sustains us also calls us to share that faithfulness with others, to share our confidence that God’s salvation and new life will prevail amidst everything that changes, to make God’s deliverance clear here and now and forever.

So amidst all the things that weigh us down in these days, with death and sadness and pain near and far, with all creation crying out for a new way, God’s promise of comfort and new life resounds loud and clear, inviting us to make these things real not just for ourselves but for all people, reminding us to return to the source of our being and find the hope of new life.

So amidst all the challenge of these days, amidst the pain and hurt and sorrow of our lives, amidst the war and strife of our world, may we return to our roots, look back to that rock from which we are hewn, find our comfort in God’s promises, and share this hope of new life with all the world each and every day. And when we struggle to hear and live amidst all the noise around us, may the rock of our salvation, the comfort that comes from God alone, and the promise of new life in Jesus Christ our Lord, bring us back to our faithful God, who promises to bring us comfort and peace and to make all things new. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sitting at the Welcome Table

August 17, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 15:21-28
preached on August 17, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

(“I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table” audio)

That wonderful song, rooted in the life of slave communities in the deep South and sung in that recording at a rally during the Civil Rights Movement, seems strangely appropriate for today’s reading from the gospel according to Matthew. The Canaanite woman in this text seemed intent upon singing exactly those words even when Jesus himself tried his best to deny her a place at that table. Just as Jesus arrived in a town away from everything, in a region filled with people who were unlike him, this woman came up to him, begging him to heal her daughter: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

At first, Jesus completely ignored her. You have to wonder what was going through his mind to drive him to behave like this. Was he just tired and a little zoned out after an intense week of teaching and healing, not to mention all the traveling involved? Was he so marked by the cultural influences of his day that he could not look past her different race, gender, religion, and ethnicity to offer her compassion? Or was he so intent on completing his mission to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” that he could not offer even a little to others along the way? Whatever the reason for his silence, when he ignored this woman in this way he looked a lot more human than divine to me.

The woman, though, didn’t give up so easily. When Jesus ignored her, her cries grew louder: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Now she was starting to get on everyone’s nerves. The disciples started complaining to Jesus, but why? Were they just reporting the unrecorded complaints of others? Were they too embodying the sort of attitude of their time toward people who were different? Or were they a bit afraid that she might draw more attention to them in this community where they were actually the outsiders? Whatever the reason, the disciples told Jesus to send her away, and he did, finally telling her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Still, this was not enough to convince her to go away. When her loud cries for help were ignored, she fell on her knees before Jesus, pleading with him, “Lord, help me.” This time, Jesus’ response to her went from quietly disrespectful to directly demeaning: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Again he insisted to her that his purpose for ministry didn’t involve her or anyone like her. While we may lose a bit of the cultural or linguistic play on words at our distance, Jesus’ intent in his response to the Canaanite woman seems clear to me: he had had enough of her. It was time for her to go away and leave him alone, and he would tell her whatever was needed to make that happen.

But even with this response the woman did the unimaginable and came back at him a fourth time. As one commentator paraphrases it, she basically told him, “Yes, Lord, I am a dog, so treat me like one. Give me the crumbs [from that table].” (Stanley P. Saunders, Preaching the Gospel of Matthew, p. 153) After this, Jesus couldn’t turn her away, so he turned toward her instead. He healed her daughter and praised her faith, her belief that “she and her daughter should receive mercy from the ruling activity of God.” (Jae Won Lee, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, p. 361) With her persistent faith in God’s mercy and compassion, she had claimed her place at that welcome table. She was willing to accept a lower-level grace for now, for the sake of her daughter, but by her persistence she made it clear that she would one day sit at the table, no longer relegated to lap up the crumbs on the floor with the dogs. She knew better than Jesus did in that moment that the incredible depth and breadth of God’s love breaks through every human limitation and makes a place for all at the welcome table.

Over the centuries since this first encounter, the followers of Jesus have often been too much like Jesus at the start of this story. We have let our exhaustion or anxiety in the moment shape our reaction to those in need. We have been so focused on our own understandings of ministry that we miss the people we weren’t expecting to encounter along the way. We have even fallen into the traps of the world’s ways to ignore those who cry out for help because they don’t look like us, live like us, think like us, love like us, or even cry out for help like us. If we haven’t done it ourselves, others surely have done it in the name of Jesus at one point or another.

We need people like the Canaanite woman to remind us that our reaction to injustice is so very often shaped less by God’s commitment to the humanity of all and more by our preferences. We need people like the Canaanite woman to step up and sing loud and clear, “I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,” claiming their place not under the table scavenging for the leftovers of justice and peace but a place where the fullness of new life from God is provided abundantly for all. And we need people like the Canaanite woman to urge us to action so that we can respond to the cries for compassion that are offered right in front of us, to challenge us to set aside the fears that all too often drive our actions, to bring us together in offering a united cry for justice and peace that is more than empty words, to join in God’s work of making all things new.

There have been plenty of people in our world crying out like this Canaanite woman in recent days, insisting that they too are gonna sit at the welcome table. Even on vacation over the past two weeks, I couldn’t escape the cries and shouts for justice in our world. All over London, thrift shops run by the relief organization Oxfam highlighted the great need of response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, where two generations of occupation have kept the Palestinian people from living life to its fullness and left Israelis at risk, only to have recent warfare bring further death to both sides in this intractable conflict as everyone seeks a seat at the welcome table.

Then, when I tried to turn to my social media friends on Facebook and Twitter to provide a bit of company along the journey, I was overwhelmed by the outcry over the troubling death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager stopped for walking in the middle of the street by a white police officer in a suburb of St. Louis last weekend. When the police offered limited, confusing, or conflicting answers to reasonable questions about the incident—in the rare moments when they spoke at all—the community’s peaceful protests escalated as the police approached the protestors in military riot gear. Images of these protests bear an eerie similarity to photos from the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement, and it is clear that even fifty years later, with some real change in our world, there are still people crying out for a seat at that welcome table.

And there are so many other places where women and men cry out for justice and peace and wholeness and new life in our world—among Ebola victims in west Africa, amidst renewed conflict in Syria and Iraq, alongside power struggles in the Ukraine and Russia, even among the poor and marginalized much closer to home—women and men and children cry out for a seat at that welcome table.

So what are we to do with all this pain around us, both far and near? Is our best response to be like Jesus at the beginning of the story, to ignore those who cry out in hopes that they will be respectful and just go away, or to tell them that they are a distraction from our bigger purposes, or even to insist that they are something less than human because they have dared to challenge the established order of things and seek a seat at the table with us? Are we to take a step even further and respond with violence? Or can we find a better way than what Jesus did that honors both these cries and the humanity of those who cry out, that shows compassion to those who suffer, that offers a word of grace to those in need, that embodies God’s love for all—love whose power is greater than even the smallest portion of crumbs—that offers a much-needed seat at the welcome table of our world?

In the midst of all the pain and war and suffering that marks our lives and our world, we can live and pray and work in ways that honor the loud and soft cries of those who are in need so that God’s love might touch each and every place where new life is needed. So may we join in God’s work to make space for everyone to have a seat at the welcome table, not leaving anyone just to pick up the leftover crumbs but ensuring that all God’s people can know the full abundance of God’s grace, mercy, peace, and love. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Loaves and Fishes

August 3, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 14:13-21
preached on August 3, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Our beloved former member and ruling elder Jackie Acampora had a miserable dread of dealing with the church budget. She was one of the most gifted and talented ruling elders I have ever known, but church finances were not among those gifts. I think Jackie would have preferred swimming in a pool of hungry sharks to being a part of most of our budget conversations, and more than once we playfully threatened to elect her treasurer, knowing that if we did she would have immediately resigned!

Jackie’s church financial philosophy can best be described, as she herself put it, as “loaves and fishes”—as in put in what we have, see that it surely can’t be enough to meet our needs, and trust that God will work out the details. It’s a wonderful philosophy in theory, but it rarely satisfies the accountants among us, let alone those like me who depend on the church to help pay our bills, but for better or worse, we had to admit that Jackie’s philosophy was often about as good as a more structured approach, because at the end of the year the numbers usually came out better than we ever imagined they could.

Our reading from Matthew this morning directly references that miracle that Jackie regularly referred to when it came to church finances. This strange and wonderful miracle of Jesus feeding a crowd of thousands with just a few loaves and fish is one of the few stories told in all four gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. It all began with a tired Jesus and a hangry crowd. One of my pastor friends who is also a mother recently introduced me to this new word “hungry,” a mix of hungry and angry that makes things particularly miserable but is such an accurate description of what happens to us—and what I think was happening in that crowd that day.

The disciples sensed what was going on in the crowd, and they asked Jesus to call it a day and send everyone away to get something to eat in one of the nearby villages. Jesus would have nothing of this, though. “You give them something to eat,” he told them. Now this seemed preposterous and crazy. While many of Jesus’ followers in our time have developed incredible skills in preparing meals for churchgoers on short notice, the first disciples were not quite as gifted, and there were no professional caterers in the Yellow Pages of Palestine! Even more, the disciples seemed ready to get away from the crowd, too. They had not expected Jesus to welcome this hangry crowd of thousands to their private retreat by the lake, and so they had no confidence that even the amazing healer Jesus could pull off such a massive meal on such short notice!

So the disciples took inventory of the food they had available—five loaves and two fish—and reported their supplies to Jesus. But instead of giving up on what seemed to be an impossible challenge, Jesus took what they had, “looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” Along the way, somehow, someway, something happened. The five loaves and two fish multiplied to be enough to feed the crowd of five thousand men—the only ones who seemed to count in those days!—plus the accompanying women and children, with twelve baskets full of leftovers, too.

Did the crowd manage to order delivery to their picnic blankets via their iPhones and so eliminate the need for the disciples’ small stash to feed everyone? Did God miraculously multiply those small provisions into enough to feed such a large crowd? Or did something change the hearts and minds of the crowd and convince them to share the food that they had brought along with those who were not quite so prepared? Whatever happened, it was another triumphant moment for Jesus. The hangry crowd was calmed, empty stomachs were filled, and another miracle added to the books.

This feeding of the crowd of five thousand plus is absolutely amazing, but like so many of Jesus’ miracles, it isn’t always so clear what this means for us today. What do these loaves and fishes matter for us today anyway? Is there anything more to this story for us than yet more proof of Jesus’ abilities to make things work despite the bungling of the disciples? Does this miraculous meal suggest that our approach to church picnics might need to be changed a bit, with the menu made a bit more limited and supplies trusted to go further? Can we carry anything more from this than that sometimes we should back down from stressing out over the details and trust that God will provide?

I for one surely hope that there is more to this story for us than any or all of that. All too often I look around and see our world filled with the mindset of scarcity brought by the disciples, with concerns that we simply don’t have enough to go around and so we shouldn’t even try to share, with fear that we must preserve what we have and use it only for ourselves rather than offer it generously for the good of all. Far too often, our default response is that there is not enough to go around—not enough bread and fish to feed the crowd, not enough wealth to support those who are in need, not enough security to treat others with the full dignity of humans created in God’s image, not enough food to share with those who are not just hangry but truly hungry, not enough resources for us to welcome a few more children who face danger and death in their homelands. Some days I think it would take a miracle in our own time to set aside our risk management and fear-mongering so that we can live like people who have enough to share.

But Jesus is always ready, even now, to step in and tell us that we already have enough to go around—enough bread and fish to feed the crowd, enough wealth to share, enough security to step back from our fear, enough food to share generously with the hungry, enough resources to let us be confident that we will have enough to care for ourselves and others. Jesus is ready to show us this miracle that we need in our world, the miracle of a new spark of generosity, the miracle of new care for those truly in need, the miracle of sharing amidst our fear and trembling, the miracle of an abundant feast that is enough to remake and reshape us and all creation.

And ultimately that miracle begins at this table. This table stands as yet another place where just like that grassy spot by the lakeshore Jesus can work a miracle. This is the place where bread and juice become something more than just the ordinary things that grace our table, the place where a little becomes a lot because we share it with one another, the place where we are mysteriously united with the women and men who have gathered here before us and beside us and will come behind us, the place where somehow we miraculously meet Jesus. God’s promise is made clear at this table: Jesus always brings us enough—enough to sustain us at this table, enough to carry us on the journey, enough to allow us to set aside our fears, enough for us to share with others who are in need, enough for everyone to gather and be fed.

So maybe Jackie was right. Maybe we don’t need to worry so much about how things work and how the bills get paid. Maybe we can trust that loaves and fishes will be enough. Maybe God’s abundance can be miraculous for us too. So may the strange miracle of the loaves and fishes be a miracle for us, too, so that we can share God’s miraculous abundance far and wide each and every day. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Incredible Love

July 27, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Romans 8:26-39
preached on July 27, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

During my seminary years, a week or so after my grandfather died, I received a brief handwritten note from the president of the seminary, Laura Mendenhall. I received three of those notes during my time as a student there, but that first one comes to mind every time I hear this morning’s text from Romans. She lifted up a slight adaptation of these beautiful words, “In life and in death we belong to God,” that is familiar to many Presbyterians from the opening question of the Heidelberg Catechism and the Brief Statement of Faith in our Book of Confessions. Those words that had grown in meaning and importance for me even before those difficult days had been a tremendous comfort to me through my grandfather’s illness and death. Laura thoughtfully reminded me in her note, though, that our tendency in such times is to focus on how our loved ones belong to God in death, so she encouraged me to remember that he had belonged to God in his life, too.

So today, amidst these familiar words that bring us so much comfort and hope for a life beyond our known days on earth, I think Laura’s encouragement to me to remember that we belong to God in life matters so much more than ever. The news tells us about so much death these days: continued civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, repeated rocket launches into Israel, a commercial airliner shot down in the midst of internal conflict in Ukraine, two other aviation accidents in Africa, capital punishment administered with unexpected and unnecessary suffering in our own nation, new conflict emerging in Iraq and Afghanistan despite our best efforts to bring peace, and so much more.

But when we remember Paul’s words to the Romans only in these times of death, I think we end up giving them less power over us. They may bring us comfort in such moments, but the gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ is not only to change things for us for eternity—God’s love in Jesus Christ changes things for the whole world now, and the real power of this love comes when we allow it to change us and our world.

This transformative power of God’s incredible love is not something we embrace only when things are good—in fact, I think that it is when things are most complex and confused that this love matters the most. Paul knew that for himself. His life had been filled with joy and sorrow, trials and tribulations, and so he wanted his listeners to have the same kind of trust in God’s love that had sustained him through all those things.

So in Romans 8, he asks a series of rhetorical questions that make it clear that the gift of God’s love takes hold in us when things don’t go as we expect.

If God is for us, who is against us?
Who will bring any charge against God’s elect?
Who is to condemn?
Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

The answer to all these questions is simple. Nothing. No one. Not anything. And so amidst all the confusion and uncertainty of our world, amidst the death too often that seems to pervade our lives and our experience, amidst all the war and strife that seem to reign, amidst all the evil that creeps into things, amidst the exhaustion and confusion that so easily become the norm for us in these days, we have everything we need in the gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Secure in this gift of God’s love, comforted by God’s presence amidst anything that may come our way, it is then our call to embody this love throughout our world. If we have truly been changed by this incredible love, then we will want to change our world with it, too. When we look around, there are sure plenty of places that could use a good dose of God’s love these days. What would it look like if God’s love for all people and our common creation in the image of God stood at the center of our reaction to the conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip? What would it look like if God’s love for the victim and the perpetrator was the first thing that we considered when we thought about how and whether to administer capital punishment? What would it look like if God’s love for all the children of our world was first on our minds when we are confronted with the influx of child refugees from Central America in our nation? What would it look like if God’s love for our enemies came to mind when we found ourselves at odds with another person? And what would it look like if God’s love for the world stood at the center of our budgets for our households, for our church, for our city, and for our nation?

I suspect that if we took a close look at these and other things, we would find that sometimes we allow our actions to create barriers between us and our experience of God’s love. But the good news is that while we may put things between us and our understanding of this love, not even these actions in our lives and in our world can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ. Nothing, Paul says, can separate us from God’s love,

neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation—

nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

With this incredible love in our midst, pervading our lives and our world even when we try to push it away, it is our call and our responsibility to offer this love to others without reservation or fear. We may get love wrong and share it too broadly, but I for one cannot believe that a God who loves us so much would ever penalize us for sharing too much love with our world. We may find new and better ways to embody God’s love in Jesus Christ over time, but even the smallest steps toward doing that are a gift to our broken and fearful world. And sometimes we may even get hurt for loving too much, but in those moments God’s love shines through all the more, for when we love others as God loves us, we see God’s love for us in new and different ways.

So as we go forth this day, with these wonderful words of love ringing in our heads and echoing in our hearts, may we embody this love with everyone we meet so that all the world may know God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Blessing for All

July 20, 2014 By Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 28:10-19a
preached on July 20, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Forty-five years ago today, a tremendous journey for humankind reached its pinnacle with the arrival of Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s journey to the surface of the moon was an incredible mark of human achievement, not so much because of their bravery or personal action or even because Aldrin was a Presbyterian ruling elder who took along communion to share on the surface of another planetary body but because it was the culmination of more than a decade of intense work by thousands of people who did everything from design the spacecraft to sew the uniforms and everything in between. Neil Armstrong, the first of those two astronauts to step out of the lunar module and onto the moon’s surface, made this so abundantly clear in his famous words as he took that first step: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Now in our story from Genesis this morning, I think Jacob manages to flip that line around completely, for every one of his small steps on the journey recounted here seems to be a giant leap focused on himself. Jacob is quite an incredible figure in the stories of Genesis, and his outsized personality towers over one part or another of half of the book. Here, though, we see him relatively early in his life, but still after his trickster tendencies were fully revealed when he bought the family birthright from his slightly older twin brother Esau with a bowl of food and then deceived his father into offering him the blessing intended for Esau. Here Jacob had just set out on a journey to his mother’s homeland, where he was to marry one of his cousins. Esau was furiously angry with him for stealing the birthright and his father’s blessing. And Jacob had no idea what would really be coming next for him in his life.

So amidst all these things, after a long day’s journey, Jacob settled down to sleep. It’s hard to tell whether the sleepless night that ensued was brought on by all that change that was swirling around him or the rock-hard pillow that he found for himself, but either way he had a vivid dream that night. He saw a ladder on the earth, probably a lot like the temple that marked the town where he had stopped to sleep, reaching up into heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it. But then suddenly the Lord came and stood beside him and offered him a strange blessing for his journey and promise for his life:

I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 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.

This promise and blessing was largely a repeat of what the Lord had promised Jacob’s grandfather Abraham in a large family and a generous gift of land, but it went further to speak to Jacob’s situation, too. He was not yet married, but God promised him a large family. He was leaving the land of his birth, but God promised to bring him back. He was journeying out on his own, but God promised to go with him.

When you think about it, this was an astonishing promise. By our human standards, God had no reason whatsoever to deal with Jacob. He was on this journey for himself and no one else. He had little or no concept of how the lives of others would connect to his own, no sense that any of his steps mattered for anyone else but himself. He was even willing to deceive his own father so that he could receive a special blessing after he had already won his brother’s birthright with a bowl of food for an empty stomach. By even the most generous ethical standards, we would call Jacob a liar, a cheat, and a fraud. Yet God made it clear that there was more to Jacob’s story. He would not be defined by his homeland or his brother or his lineage. He would carry his own story of life and living. And he didn’t have to deceive anyone to receive God’s blessing that would surround him all his days.

God’s blessing of Jacob here is important for the development of the story of God’s people in Genesis. Jacob eventually was given a second name “Israel,” for he fathered twelve sons who were the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel that figured prominently into the later stories of God’s people. And the story of Jacob’s most beloved son Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers and yet opening the door for them to survive and thrive there in new ways remains the greatest biblical witness to God’s providence in our world.

But what does this story mean for us today? I hope and pray that we are people who recognize our connectedness to one another better than Jacob did, who like Neil Armstrong understand how even one person’s seeming achievement is built upon the intensive and careful work of others. So when we hear God’s promises of presence and blessing to Jacob, they extend to us, too. We may not be directly linked to these promises to Jacob, but we do believe that our common heritage of faith through Jesus links us to the gifts and responsibilities that these things bring, not as a replacement of the Jewish people of any time or place but for the flourishing of all humanity in our common witness. Ultimately the gift and responsibility that flows from this blessing is at the center of all the blessing that we enjoy from God, for we are not gifted anything for our own sake but so that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.”

Even Jacob knew this. After he awoke from his encounter with God at Bethel, in the verses beyond our reading this morning he offered his own response, promising that if God took care of him along this journey, then he would be faithful to God, make that rock-hard pillow the foundation of a temple, and give ten percent of everything to God there. Now this response was far more conditional than God’s original blessing, but Jacob offered it nonetheless, for he knew that he had no choice but to respond to the abundance of God’s gifts to him along this journey.

In the midst of the sad and difficult events of this week in Israel and Palestine and Russia and the Ukraine and the crisis of child refugees unfolding in our own country, I believe that responding to this blessing in these days requires special attention to God’s call to bring and bear peace. In today’s reading, God promises Jacob and his descendants the land where he had this dream, a place he named Bethel, meaning “house of God” in Hebrew, because of the incredible encounter with God that he had there but now known as Beitin, a Palestinian town under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. While I can’t do justice to the complexities of this conflict in one sermon, it is still very interesting to note that God’s promise of land here is linked with a promise that Jacob’s descendants will be a blessing for all the families of the earth. In light of this blessing, I for one struggle to see how the escalating crisis in the Holy Land in recent days can so highly prioritize the safety and security of land for one group of people above this gift of blessing for all people in such a way that over three hundred people have been killed, many if not most of them innocent Palestinian civilians. God’s promise to Jacob here is less about any benefits for him or his descendants, and far more about how he and all his descendants, including us who are grafted into this family through the love of God in Jesus Christ, can be a blessing to all the earth by bringing a new and different way of life into all our encounters with one another.

So like Jacob we too are called to respond with gratitude and hope, to set aside our tight grasp on using God’s abundance and blessing for our good and instead to join in God’s work of blessing of all creation so that all people may live in peace. May our encounters with God, then, be filled with this kind of love, joy, peace, and hope, so that we and all the people of the earth may be blessed as Jacob was every step of the way. Thanks be to God! Amen.

In light of this word, we offered the prayers for all of God’s people shared by the elected leadership of the Presbyterian Church (USA) as the Prayers of the People in worship.