ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at Evensong and Benediction on the 4th Sunday after Trinity, 27 June 2010.
Readings: Genesis 27.1-40; Mark 6.1-6.
This evening the first lesson wins by several lengths. Jacob deceives Isaac, his aged and blind father, by dressing up as his hirsute brother Esau, wearing his clothes, faking the smell of animals he's killed, with the help of his eavesdropping mother Rebekah, and stealing the blessing which is Esau's. No one could come out of that well. God's not there at all. The story takes place on a low human level. As a drama, it would do well, I think, as a Channel 4 play, some time after the watershed; but the plot could equally serve a stage comedy. Humour and the Bible don't always go together, but they do here. We, the audience, are in on the deception. Esau strides offstage to hunt with his bow and arrow; his mother and younger brother stay on stage, plotting mayhem. Fast dialogue keeps the action moving, there's little time for evil reflection, and we develop a sneaking sympathy for the lovable rogue, Jacob, the younger brother with the moisturiser encouraged by his mother to steal a march on the less complex elder brother, daddy's favourite, who's good at games. Rivalry between brothers, with an eventual reconciliation, is a folk-tale theme. Here the brothers represent, in folk-tale form, what's going to happen between the Israelites, that's Jacob, and the Edomites, that's Esau. Israel will rule over Edom, but Edom will eventually achieve independence. So it's a great story. The question remains, why bother to read it in church?
On the surface, I suppose, there are some dull moral lessons, such as make sure you bless the right person. The story turns on the belief that blessings and curses have an objective power. Once delivered, they can not be taken back. Isaac could not go back a few hours and unbless Jacob. So what we say to each other, what we set in motion, always matters, and in the cases of blessings and curses, tend to boomerang back at us, hours, days, years later. And I am sure there are other useful lessons to be learnt about keys to wardrobes, mothers and keeping little brothers in check. But can there be a Christian reflection on such an over the top OT story? The answer could be no. The story of Jacob and Esau does not appear once in our three year lectionary of readings at Mass, a sure sign of relegation to the second division.
Nevertheless, I think that the story of Jacob's deception of his father is a comment, and a helpful one, on how we live our lives today. I say our lives, not those of other people. By associating this story with a television play, or a stage production, I created a distance between ourselves and the action. We do that all the time; this is how other people behave, I'm fine. But this evening's first lesson is how all people behave from time to time, until we come to realise that our lives are becoming unmanageable and we ask God to help us put things right. What often happens is that we allow ourselves to be swept along by our emotions and those of other people into circumstances beyond our control, dealing out and receiving blessings and curses, with no thought for the consequences for ourselves or others. We might not reach the stage of dressing up in our brother's clothes, in order to deceive our blind father, thus changing the course of history, but it's just a matter of degree. Outwardly it is possible for us to lead relatively normal lives, maybe not happy, because we tend to look in the wrong place for happiness, but normal and sane. Yet inwardly, from morning to night, unless we have developed some spiritual discipline, our awareness, our life, is dominated by events, other people, selfish plans, fantasies, and persistent memories, each coming into focus during our waking hours in a random, chaotic fashion. No wonder things go wrong some times, and we find ourselves part of a plot which in our right minds we would never have entered.
These are the people, ourselves, with whom God is determined to engage. Although we think we've squeezed Him out, as He is squeezed out of the story of Esau and Jacob, actually God is here all the time. The divine presence is always with us, but we think it's absent. That's the great illusion of the human condition. The spiritual journey heals that illusion, helps us to see the God who has been with us all along, however out of control our story has become. Not only is God here, but he wants to be heard, he needs to engage with us again, because, as the life of Jesus shows, it is God's nature to heal and to restore. The Christian message to the world is that God has crossed the frontiers of divine life to be with us. I might be a mess, I might be hiding from God (a temporary measure, of course, to get my own way), I might think I don't matter to God any more because I care so little for Him, but He, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is "not ashamed to be called my God" [Hebrews 11.16] The Old Testament is the story of God choosing a mutinous, fickle, ungrateful people, and sticking with them. That is God's freedom to do what he pleases. As God says in Exodus, I am who I am, or, in another translation, I will be what I will be [Exodus 3.13] And it pleases him, whatever we think of him, to stick with us. It's not down to us to project on to God the role of headmaster or absent father. God reveals himself as He is, and He is free. Our clue to this freedom is the freedom of self-giving shown by Jesus in his life and death, a freedom he has given to us. That is God's blessing on us, a free divine life, a blessing which is like that given by Isaac to Jacob, and can not be revoked. Much of my life might be the knockabout stage performance of Jacob, Esau, Rebekah and Isaac, tragedy and comedy. God is watching my life, my stage perfomance, with humour, love and forgiveness, and He wants me to accept Him as part of it again, chaotic though my life is, and then that stage comic performance can become real life. I am made real again by the attention God shows towards me. He is glorious in his faithfulness. And when I look up from whatever I am doing and return his glance, I cross the frontier from falsehood to truth, and into the divine life of God.