Present

Scriptures:     Genesis 28:10-19       Psalm 139:1-12, 23-34

Romans 8:12-25         Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Any Lord of the Rings fans out there?  One of the more haunting characters is Gollum.  As I understand the story, he started out as a creature fairly similar to a hobbit, and his name was Smeagle.  But one fateful day, he and his brother happened upon the ring of power – which enslaved anyone who wore it – and Smeagle killed his brother.  From that point, the ring took over his life, warping his mind and body more and more.  He developed a split personality, Smeagle who was cringing, submissive, sometimes helpful, and Gollum, who was hostile and would violently attack anyone he thought would come between him and the ring.   As much as Gollum wanted the ring, it was his actions would eventually end up causing the destruction of both the ring and Gollum himself.

In our Old Testament reading, we meet one of the more fascinating characters in the Bible, Jacob.  Isaac was Jacob’s father, and Abraham was Isaac’s father and Jacob’s grandfather.   There’s a tendency to want to put the Biblical characters up on pedestals, to look on them as these perfect people doing perfect things perfectly, whose morality is unrelentingly perfect (and unbearably boring) – but that’s not who these people were.  Jacob, far from being perfect, was a real piece of work.  He was the slightly younger of two twin brothers – his older brother was Esau.  The pregnancy had been troubled – we’re told that even in the womb, the twins fought one another.  As the twins were born, we’re told, Esau came first, but then came Jacob’s hand grabbing at his Esau’s heel.  And this would set the pattern for Jacob’s life.  Jacob wanted to grab everything he could for himself – and, in particular, if Jacob could grab something belonging to his brother Esau, that was twice as much fun.  Esau, by contrast, comes across as an ok guy – good hunter, good provider, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Jacob would eventually end up grabbing Esau’s birthright and tricking his father Isaac into giving Jacob the elder son’s blessing that Isaac intended for Esau as elder son.  Bottom line: Jacob was out for Jacob and nobody else.  He was perfectly willing to trick his own father and cheat his own brother in order to benefit himself.  If Jacob came here to Emanuel Church, of course we’d let him in, but I’d be pulling aside the ushers to caution them to keep an eye on him, to lock up the china cabinet and keep him away from the offering plate.

The saying goes that “cheaters never prosper”, but up to this point, Jacob had done a lot of cheating, and he had been doing pretty well – he had prospered - but when he cheated Esau out of his father’s blessing, his sins caught up with him.  His father Isaac was disgusted with him, Esau wanted to kill him – and so, as the saying goes, it was time to get out of Dodge City. 

And it is here, while Jacob is on the lam, that he has a vision of a ladder going up to heaven, with angels ascending and descending.  A better translation might be a stairway to heaven…..but now I’ve got some of you thinking of that Led Zeppelin song that played at your high school prom, circa 1979.  But anyway….Jacob also heard God telling him that the land on which he was sleeping would belong to his offspring.  God said, “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.”  We’re then told that Jacob woke up and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it! How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

This is the beginning of a change in the life of Jacob.  It’s only a beginning. Jacob would eventually run to the home of his uncle Laban, who was as much of a cheat as Jacob was….and they would spend decades trying to get over on one another, like two scorpions on a bottle trying to sting one another.  But change was starting to happen in Jacob’s life, nonetheless.  Later Jacob would have another divine encounter, as he wrestled with a mysterious figure who appeared to him, and gave him a new name, Israel.  And throughout the rest of the account of Jacob’s life in Genesis, the name would shift back and forth between Jacob and Israel, showing Jacob as a kind of dual character, sort of like Smeagol and Gollum – the name Jacob was used when he was up to his old tricks, and the name Israel was used when he was starting to live into the character God intended for him – and of course the name Israel became the collective name of Jacob’s descendants.  Or maybe Jacob’s character was like the field in Jesus’ parable – overgrown with weeds, but with some wheat there as well.  And, yes, Jacob, also known as Israel, eventually did have a reunion of sorts with his brother Esau, who had also attained a measure of prosperity over the years – a reunion that was cautious, overly polite to the point of walking on eggshells, and painfully brief.  But the brothers finally did come together once again to bury their father Isaac before a final parting of ways…in the words of the Leonard Cohen song, very much a broken Hallelujah, but a reunion nonetheless.

Where do we expect to meet God?  “In church,” we might say – that’s why we come to church, to spend time with God.   But God is not only here in church, but around us and even within us.  And it is often when we’ve hit bottom, as Jacob hit bottom after his greed had destroyed his relationship with his family, that our hearts are ready to experience God.  Centuries after this story, Paul wrote, “Who can separate us from the love of God?” – and Paul’s answer was, absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God.  And Jacob’s story is a demonstration of this – God came to Jacob, not when Jacob was at his best, but when he was at his worst, at his lowest, when he had hit bottom.  And Jacob’s life changed – slowly, painfully, but for the better.

For much of his life, Jacob’s character had just about no redeeming qualities.  There was nothing to like about a man who would steal your eyeteeth right out of your mouth if you weren’t careful.  Had Esau succeeded in killing Jacob, we’d have likely said, “Good riddance” – but then practically the whole rest of the Bible wouldn’t have been written, because practically the whole rest of the Bible was about Jacob’s descendants, including Jesus.  We don’t get Jesus if we don’t put up with Jacob.  As much of a jerk and a screw-up as Jacob was, God had plans for Jacob.   And no matter where we find ourselves, God has plans for us.  More than that, God may have plans for that person you or I think is past redemption.  God who did not give up on Jacob will not give up on us – AND will not give up on those we may think are beyond God’s love.   As the saying goes, God loves us just as we are – AND God loves us too much to let us stay that way.  If we have an encounter with the divine, our lives will change – perhaps slowly, imperceptibly, but they will change.  And so will the lives of our neighbors.

In our Gospel reading, we have Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds.  A man plants wheat in a field, and then an enemy plants weeds.  The man’s servants want to pull up the weeds – surely what you or I would do – but the man tells his servants to hold off and let both grow, because until they had grown, the weeds looked a lot like the wheat, and it was hard to tell them apart.  Jesus’ picture of a field full of both wheat and weeds is a picture of us as individuals and us as the church.  As much as we’d like to pretend that all the good people are in church and all the bad people are on the outside, it just isn’t so.  There are plenty of bad people on the inside and plenty of good people on the outside. More than that, none of us is entirely good or bad – we all have both good seed and weeds growing in our lives.  And throughout history, attempts to pull the weeds, to root out the so-called bad people – be it the Crusades or the Inquisition or the Salem witch hunts or the McCarthy hearings of the 1950’s or Islamic groups like ISIS or white-supremacist groups like the KKK or Christian fundamentalist groups who harass LGBT persons or others deemed insufficiently pure – inevitably such attempts end up empowering bad people and imprisoning or killing good people.  As fallible human beings we can’t tell the weeds from the wheat, in the lives of others or even in our own.  As Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Ultimately Jesus’ parable is a call to leave judgment to God.  Our part is to exercise patience, and to love – to water and tend the garden, even if we end up watering some weeds along with the wheat.

“Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”  May we be surprised by joy at God’s presence, not only here in church, but out there in our daily lives; not only in the lives of those we consider saints, but those we write off as hopeless sinners.  And despite the weeds, may we tend whatever garden God has entrusted to us. Amen.