8th Sunday after Pentecost Sermon

A first sermon in a place feels like something that carries so much significance, so much importance.  It is natural to want to get this….exactly right.  Whatever that means and however that looks.  And while I am deeply appreciative of the ways that the lectionary offers us the story of God at work in the world, I was hoping for a Gospel reading on our first Sunday together that offered something perhaps just a bit more hopeful than weeping and gnashing of teeth.  But here we are.  So more on that later.

A first sermon in a place, at least for me, carries something of a longing to tell you what I think you might be curious to know.  Who is your new priest and how do I understand and experience God and who might we be together as we serve and work and love one another and bear witness to the goodness of God in this place and outside of it?  And there will be time for that in the days and weeks and months and years to come.  For now, in this moment, let me say how filled with joy and delight I am to be with you. Let me invite us together to hear and consider the words of our Scripture readings for this day.   Let me invite you to pray with me as we begin:

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

In these summer months, we’ve been hearing stories from the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, about God’s people.  Last week, Father Eric noted in his sermon that Jacob, who we encounter again in today’s reading from Genesis, came from something of a dysfunctional family.        There was, shall we say, a lot of drama.

And in today’s reading, Jacob is fleeing from his twin brother, Esau, who has set out to kill him.  Now, to be fair, Jacob had cheated Esau out of both his birthright and his father’s  blessing, so Esau was justifiably angry.  But Jacob is running for his life, sent by his mother Rebekah to her brother Laban who is himself an unsavory character.  It wasn’t a great moment for Jacob.

As he journeys,  Jacob turns in to sleep for the night, on the ground with a rock for a pillow, and in his dream, God comes to him, reminding him of the relationship God had with Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham and his father, Isaac.  Then God repeats the promises made to Abraham and Isaac and makes them to Jacob:  land and offspring and blessings as far as the eye can see.  And more than that, the presence of God in the midst of it all.   Jacob wakes up and utters some of the most faithful words, perhaps of his lifetime: Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.  Not: God might be here.  Not: God will eventually arrive here, but: God is here.  Now. Already.

Surely the Lord is in this place.

Surely the Lord is in this place.

But who was Jacob, the person, besides what we know from his story?  Because let’s face it, what Scripture gives us is less of who he was and more of what he did.  And isn’t that so often true of what we know of people….of one another?

When we are getting to know new people, like we will come to know one another and anyone new we meet, we tend to ask certain kinds of questions.

When we  are meeting children, we tend to ask things like: What grade are you in?  What’s your favorite subject?  Where do you go to school?

And if we are meeting people of working age we often ask: What do you do?  Which is such an obscure question isn’t it?  What we mean is: What is your vocation?

And when we meet people who are retired we tend to ask about travel or where they live.

And those will tell us some facts.  But they won’t tell us much about who the other person is.  To really know who a person is, we must enter into relationship.  And, we must be willing to be vulnerable in the process.  And that takes trust… in the goodness of humanity as God created us and in ourselves.

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus is teaching the people with a series of parables.  Parables comprise the whole of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew.  And Jesus uses what the people would encounter in their daily lives to teach them about the kingdom of God.  About who God is and who they are.  And today’s parable gives us the weeping and gnashing of teeth language I mentioned earlier.  Jesus describes things that grow in a field and likens them to people.  Some are wheat – they will provide sustenance and become nourishment even beyond the field.  And some are, well, weeds.  Weeds who seem to have no greater purpose than to choke out the wheat.   And what Jesus is noting here is that it is the son of Man who will ultimately do the sorting and separating of the wheat and the weeds.

Now, I would be happy to help God with this task.  I’d be absolutely willing to point out the people whose very presence in the world is life giving.  Those who love and serve their neighbor. Who bring joy and beauty.  Who walk in wonder.  Who choose love.  And while I’m at it, I’d be very willing to point out to God, just in case God is too busy to notice, those who are being, well, weedy, in the world.

But Jesus tells the disciples that this is not our task.  He says that the Son of Man will send his angels to do this work and that this will result in some weeping and gnashing of teeth and maybe, just maybe, I wonder if that will be a sign of regret and lament as much as anything else.  Weeping over the missed opportunity to be like Jesus in the world.  Gnashing of teeth in recognizing  too late that love of neighbor echoes first our love of God and love for ourselves.

This knowing and identifying the true character of wheat and weeds, this, Jesus says, is work best left to him.

Which still leaves us asking,  what of Jacob, who we have met in our Genesis readings?  Wheat or weeds?  Who is he if he is more than the person who was running from his angry brother?  More than the striver and the cheater?  We might not ever know, but there are some hints we have in the story today.   We hear Jacob’s beautiful confession: “ Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.”  We witness him take the rock he slept on, mark a place of holiness and anoint it with oil – marking it and naming it as Bethel, the house of God.

And if, as Paul Harvey might have said, you know the rest of his story, you know that Jacob will be the patriarchal founder of Israel….that he will fall deeply in love and be tricked  into marrying someone else.  That eventually he will marry his beloved and have twelve sons but none that he loves as much as he loves Joseph.  (And yes, perhaps you are humming showtunes in your head right about now).  We know that eventually he reconciles with Esau and we know that he wrestles with God.

But today, in this part of his story, he is a duplicitous mama’s boy running away from his angry older brother.

And as interesting as this story is, what does it mean for us, dear people of St. John’s on this day, in this place?  What does it mean that some of us know one another’s stories well and some of us don’t know each other at all and what does it mean that there are weeds and wheat in the kingdom of God?

Let’s let Paul show us the way this morning:  Paul tells the believers in Rome, and we too can take hope in these words, that those led by the Spirit are children of God, and joint heirs with Christ.   And in this, God has chosen us, chosen you, named you, identified you, just as parents who adopt a child choose them.  You are God’s chosen.  Beloved and named and known.   You in your truest identity are God’s people, choosing love each day, deciding together to Be Like Jesus in Gig Harbor and wherever you go.  You are God’s people, just as Abraham and Sarah and Jacob and Rebekah and generations before you, shining like the sun in the kingdom of God.  This is Good News, for Jacob and for the Romans and for all that grows in the fields….and for us,  for this day and for every day.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.