SERMON July 19, 2020

Gen 28:10-19a; Ps 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matt 13:24-30, 36-43

(This is the manuscript for Stefanie’s sermon, but she does not always stick to the script! Also, the footnotes do not follow any academic style in particular but are there in case you want to continue reading on your own.)

Our Old Testament reading this morning skips a few chapters, but continues the story of Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Esau. It focuses in on Jacob, but it is important for us to note what has happened in the chapters in between last week’s reading and this week’s. Last week, Jacob got Esau to sell his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew. In the chapters we skipped, Rebekah seizes the opportunity to trick her husband, Isaac, into giving Jacob his blessing rather than Esau. If you remember from two weeks ago, the Lord revealed to Rebekah while she was pregnant that the older would serve the younger (Genesis 25:23). Esau consoles himself by saying that as soon as Isaac dies and the time of mourning is over he will kill Jacob. Rebekah is told about this, and so in another move to protect Jacob she arranges for him to go find a wife among her kinsfolk. This is where our passage picks up. Jacob is sent away alone. His supplanting (remember that his name is a play on words for “to supplant” and “He takes by the heel”) has lost him his family for the time. He has left behind all that he has known, the people he has loved, the routines, the way of life, the places that are familiar. He sets out for what is completely unknown. He seems to be retracing Abraham’s steps backwards to the place Abraham was called initially. Does this mean he is going backward too? Is his scheming and supplanting taking him away from God?

Alone and unmoored, he stops for the night and goes to sleep.

It is here in this liminal space that Jacob encounters the Lord. Jacob is firmly between one life and the other, between the past and the future, having to flee because of his deceit and scheming, seeking out an unknown future. Yet, God meets him here. And God doesn’t just meet with Jacob. God extends the blessing and promise originally given to Abraham to Jacob. Whereas Jacob had been scheming for a limited blessing from Isaac (which is why Esau cries, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” (Gen 27:36) and Isaac responds, “I have already made him your lord, and I have given him all his brothers as servants, and with grain and wine I have sustained him. What then can I do for you, my son?” (Gen 27:37), God bestows on him a blessing that will reach to the ends of the earth. There won’t be a nation or person who is not touched by this blessing.

So in the midst of the unknowns, in the midst of transition, Jacob joins the intergenerational covenant with God that existed before he was born and will continue long after he is dead. It becomes the anchor for him in his liminal time and space.

You might wonder what is a liminal space? I hadn’t heard the phrase until recently, and I am very happy to have it over phrases like “unprecedented” and “new normal.” Susan Beaumont says this about liminal spaces:

“Liminality refers to a quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs during transition, when a person or group of people is in between something that has ended and something else that is not yet ready to begin. Transition experiences follow a predictable pattern that involves separation, liminality, and reorientation…. 1. Separation: A period in which a person, group, or social order is stripped of the identity and status that previously defined it. 2. Liminal Period: A disorienting period of non-structure or anti-structure that opens new possibilities no longer based on old status or power hierarchies. New identities are explored, and new possibilities are considered. 3. Reorientation: A reforming period in which the person, group, or social order adopts a new identity, is granted new status, and designs new structures more appropriately suited to the emerging identity.”

She goes onto say, “The liminal period can be an incredibly freeing season in which old structures are released, new identities and possibilities are explored, and power is reassigned. It is also a troubling time during which people are subject to the lure of tricksters. Leaders and followers may be tempted down false pathways that serve no useful purpose.”

You don’t need me to tell you we are in such a space. In reality the Church as a whole has been in one even before this pandemic started. You might have heard it talked about as declining numbers, loss of respect, growing numbers of those who would say they are unaffiliated meaning atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” so to speak. Maybe you’ve felt it personally—a kind of disconnect that you couldn’t quite put your finger on or know exactly how to describe. The pandemic and all the other factors of unrest I mentioned last week point to a liminal space in our world too. We are no longer able to live life like we are used to doing. We know the future will look different, but we don’t know exactly when that future will arrive and what those differences will be. So we find ourselves in this liminal space.

But the good news, and maybe the unexpected news, is that God meets us right here, even in the midst of this transition, and uncertainty, and unknown. It is what Jacob experienced. Right where he was, God stands next to him and reveals the heavens opened and angels are ascending and descending. He has made his bed on holy ground with rocks as his pillow. So he sets up an altar to remember the place, the covenant and most importantly, the God who meets him in the middle of his mess to comfort, reassure, guide, protect, and invite him.

Very often the holy places, the thin places, where heaven and earth seem to meet as an open door have been our church buildings and our times when we have gathered physically as the body of Christ. We have memories of sacred moments in sacred buildings with sacred friendships that seem out of reach right now.

Are we left alone?

Are we left without hope?

Let’s hear again the words from our New Testament reading, Romans 8:14-17:

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ-- if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”

We have been hearing Romans as our New Testament readings since June, and next week we’ll focus more attention on it to fully embrace what Paul is saying here and in next week’s reading. But for today we recognize that Jesus opened the way for our salvation so that we could be adopted as children of God, receiving the Holy Spirit so that we, too, cry “Abba! Father!” and share in the inheritance and life of Jesus. In John 1, Jesus calls Philip and Nathanael to follow him, and at the end in verse 51 he says, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Jesus is referencing the story of Jacob. Where Jacob named the place he was sleeping as Bethel, meaning “the house of God”, Jesus says that he is that place, where heaven and earth meet. Jesus is God incarnate, fully man, fully God. He saving work on the cross opens up our participation in his divine life.

So wherever we go, we can trust that God goes with us. If we think back we’ve probably realized we’ve been standing on holy ground unexpected in the past even when we’ve been outside of the church building. Perhaps we were in a hospital room, out somewhere in nature, maybe we were in a nursery, sitting around a kitchen table, driving in our car, and suddenly we recognize God is present with us even then and there.

Elizabeth Barret Browning captured this idea in her famous poem 86 from Aurora Leigh ending with these lines:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,

And daub their natural faces unaware.

While I was looking up this poem once more I came across an article in Church Times that had an excerpt from David Adam reflecting on this poem. He started by telling of time when he wanted to write about a student, “He was there, but he did not attend.”

[He goes on to say…]

“It is here and now in this life that we need to deepen our awareness of what is around us. We need to be attentive to the place we are in and the people we meet. This includes being properly attentive to ourselves. We cannot love our neighbours as ourselves if we do not have a proper respect and love for our own being.

In the same way, we cannot really say that we are able to give our attention to God if we have failed to attend to the world and the people around us. I am convinced that those who do not listen carefully to others are not likely to listen with care to the word of God.”

Though this was written in a pre-pandemic world, I think we all find ourselves in the danger of “being there, but not attending.” We cannot go on autopilot in one area of life without it eventually effecting every area. We do not know how long we will be in this liminal space, but we do know the God who is present with us each and every moment we tarry here.

So, in order to be in this space in such a way that we are ready for whatever future God chooses to unfold for us, I suggest we adopt the practice of Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence became a Carmelite monk around 1649 and was assigned kitchen duty. He did not love it. But despite that he chose to turn every moment, every task, into a moment spent with God and a reason to give God thanks. Though he never wrote a book his influence has been felt for centuries teaching people how to practice the presence of God in their daily lives. This is what he says:

For me the time of activity does not differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are together calling for as many different things, I possess God in as great a tranquility as when upon my knees at the blessed Sacrament….We search for stated ways and methods of learning how to love God, and to come to that love we disquiet our minds by I do not know how many devices. We give ourselves a world of trouble, and pursue a multitude of practices to achieve a sense of the presence of God. Yet it is so simple. How very much shorter and easier it is to do our common business purely for the love of God, to set His consecrating mark on all we lay hands to, and thereby foster the sense of His abiding presence by [constant] communion of our heart with His!

It is this that the Holy Spirit makes possible in us! Constant communion of our heart with His! We can cry, “Abba! Father!”

#liminal #transitions #growth #faith #God