God at our side
Commentary
Object:
Genesis 28:10-19a
What is the connection between heaven and earth? What makes Jacob think that he is the chosen one through whom the nation of Israel will come into being? Genesis is full of these questions, with story explanations for the reason things are as they are. This story, which we traditionally call "Jacob's Dream," is one of them. (Although the translation in the King James Version and carried forward out of respect for tradition is incorrectly rendered as "ladder" actually should be read as "stairway" or "ramp.")
We need to begin our reading of this event back in 25:19, where we learn that Jacob and his fraternal twin, Esau, had fought each other even in the womb. Their struggle is paralleled by their parents choosing favorites in 27:30-40, we learn that Isaac favors Esau, who is the rugged outdoors type, and Rebekah favors Jacob, who tends to stay near the tents and is, evidently, a great cook. Furthermore, Esau marries wives from among the Hittites and Rebekah cannot stand her daughters-in-law.
The beginning of the current arc of the story takes place as Isaac, grown old, blind, and feeble, decides the time has come to give Esau his blessing. [Remember, the boys are twins, both the same age. But this blessing meant that Esau, being Isaac's favorite, would become the sole heir and lord over his brother as well as his half-siblings and their mothers.] Depending on which chapter in Genesis we read, either Esau has already sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils (25:29-34) or Rachel devises a plan that will result in Jacob inheriting everything her husband has (27:1-29).
The plot, of course, is discovered, but not until it is too late. Isaac has blessed Jacob, and Esau will not inherit the land and all that his father has. Isaac is bewildered, Esau is furious, and Rebekah hurriedly sends Jacob back to her homeland, to her brother, for his safety.
As he is traveling as fast as he can, night falls. He makes himself as comfortable as possible on the ground, with a stone for a pillow. While he sleeps, he dreams. The dream is suggestive, in the original Hebrew, of him being at the foot of a staircase that leads to an enormous temple in the sky, where God dwells. On this staircase are "the angels of God... ascending and descending on it." YHWH, "the God of Abraham... and the God of Isaac" is standing next to Jacob, and renews the covenant made with Jacob's father and grandfather, saying that the covenant is directly tied to the land on which he has been sleeping. Even so, he is to continue his journey, confident that he will return to this land, and that the LORD will be with him "wherever he goes."
This story has been important to the Jews for 2,600 years. As long as they were in the Promised Land, formerly known as Canaan, they knew who they were and whom to worship (even if they did, from time to time, worship other gods). This land had been given to them by God. They had battled to gain it from the original residents, who worshiped in ways offensive to God, and then struggled to establish themselves as a nation and suffered a civil war which split the nation in two.
Thus split, first the Northern Kingdom (Israel) was defeated and taken into exile by the Assyrians, and then Babylon had defeated Judea (the Southern Kingdom) and they were carried away into Babylon. In the thinking of the day, this meant that the Babylonian gods were more powerful than YHWH. Worse, their exile separated them not just from home and Solomon's Temple, but from God. As Psalm 137 phrases it, "How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?"
For these reasons, this story of Jacob became hugely important. Eventually, they decided that they could sing the songs of YHWH even in captivity, because of this promise from the LORD. Even more important as their theology developed was the promise to Jacob that the land would belong to his offspring. No matter how difficult life became for the Jews, they had hope, a hope inherited from their ancestor.
The same can be said for the Jews of the Diaspora: "No matter how far we may be from our homeland, no matter that the only temple we have is too far away to sacrifice in, God has promised to be with the descendants of Jacob wherever we go." Even today, at every Passover meal, the last cup of wine is drank with the toast of "Next year, in Jerusalem!" Many Israelites today still believe that the original boundaries of land promised to Abraham in Genesis will be theirs, which is the source of the struggle over lands directly bordering modern-day Israel.
Second, this story indicates that God is closer than we think. In this dream, God has left the temple of the heavens, where he lives, to come to Jacob where he is sleeping on the ground. Even if we have the idea that heaven is "up there" somewhere, God is standing next to us. We can compare this with the scene of the Ascension (Acts 1:9-11): Jesus symbolically rises into a cloud (becoming invisible to the disciples) when two "men in white robes," standing by them, ask: "Why are you standing, looking up toward heaven?" Why indeed, if God is right here, next to us?
Jacob wakes up filled with awe. "Surely the LORD is in this place -- and I did not know it." So he names the place "Beth-el" -- "the house of God." It is a gateway into heaven, a place to meet God. Thus, it is an explanatory story about the origin of Bethel as one of the "high holy places" where the ancient Jews used to worship. Jacob sets up a worship pillar of stones, the ancient prototype of the altar of sacrifice in the temple of Solomon (which is to be made of uncut natural stone), and he pours oil on top of it. In so doing, Jacob is acknowledging his side of the covenant with God: "If God will do all that he has promised, and if he sees to it that I have clothes to wear and food to eat and that I return safely to this place, I will worship God in this place and I will give 1/10th to God." Jacob could drive a hard bargain.
This offering of olive oil is a foreshadowing of the role of olive oil in the temple worship. In the Middle East, even today, olive oil is central to the lifestyle of the people. In Old Testament times, in addition to being ubiquitous in food, olive oil served as a skin ointment, and as lamp oil, both at home and in the temple. The holy oils in the temple, including the anointing oils, all used olive oil as a base. The grain offerings in the temple were made of "choice flour: unleavened cakes mixed with oil" (Leviticus 7:12). Since it does not spoil easily, unlike animal fat, and was highly portable, it was even used as currency.
The temple and all its ritual and sacrifice and pomp is far in the distant future, long after Jacob's death. Jacob is one man, one frightened (awestruck) man, hearing the voice of God in a dream and taking it seriously. He uses what he has at hand to honor God and to seal a covenant that we still claim for ourselves as spiritual descendants of Jacob, from whose line Jesus was born.
Romans 8:12-25
This passage in Romans relates to the Jacob story in an interesting way. Jacob, in standing at the bottom of that stairway to heaven, is at the very point Paul refers to with his readers. We, like Jacob, are at the meeting point of heaven and Earth.
Paul talks about a split between the flesh and the Spirit, not because the material world is evil, but because the Spirit encompasses so much more than the material world. If all we focus on is the things we can see, touch, taste, and hear, we will miss the mark (the meaning of the word sin in Hebrew, which is the word to which he refers).
In scientific terms, this is absolutely accurate. Elephants and whales communicate with each other in sounds far too low for us to hear with our ears. We must record these sounds in other technological ways in order to even know that there is sound there. And with their voices in these subsonic waves, they can keep in touch with others of their own species over vast distances. The honeybees see flowers in the ultraviolet range of light waves, seeing stripes and dots that are invisible to our natural eyes. Our dogs can smell our car -- as opposed to all other cars -- when it is a block away; pick up the smell of a human being after merely sniffing an article of clothing; and hear the rustle of a mouse under a foot of snow. Some animals can even smell when a person is about to have a seizure, has low blood sugar, an infection, or even if a person has cancer. We ought to be amazed at how little we can see, smell, or taste of this world!
But if Paul is right, there is a reason we miss so much. We are intended to be led by the Spirit of God, to be aware of things beyond this material world. We are intended to be the offspring of God, part of a spiritual family that knows no end. We are always like children to God, even in adulthood, much as we are to our earthly parents, who will always see us as the small child we once were in sort of an overlay of the person we have become. God is even more aware of us, since God can see not just who we appear to be, but what we are like inside -- our fears, our hopes, our buried anger.
Paul employs a play on words in this passage. In Greek, the word "boy" is the same as the word for "slave," so one might call a slave to attention by calling out, "boy." (Which is why it is a serious mistake to ever call an African-American "boy" -- he is not a slave, but a free man, and to use that diminutive is to reduce him to slave status, in English as well as the ancient Greek.) He says, "You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption."
When a child experiences the break-up of the family, and one or the other of the parents remarries, deciding what the child will call the step-parent is touchy business. "You are not my father/mother," the child may snarl. It is helpful to say, "No, I will never try to replace your father/mother. I know I will never replace that person in your life, and you don't have to call me 'Mother' or 'Father.' " Then knowing that the memory of the absent parent is safe, the child may elect to call the new step-parent by a pet name or some other accommodation, such as an alternative word for "Father" that is different from what s/he calls the biological parent.
When we become part of the family of God, there is no competition between those who conceived and gave us birth and God. Soon enough we find that no matter the hour of the day or night we can call out to God as little children do and our "Abba" -- literally "Daddy" in Greek -- will hear us and be at our side as quickly as we can call out. [Compare this with the dream of Jacob, where God is standing by his side, even as he watches the angels ascending and descending the staircase to heaven.] This is why the children of God do not live in a spirit of slavery, where fear is what makes us behave. We need not fear God -- though we might keep a certain sense of awe -- when we are in need, or when we need advice.
This is an important thing for us to communicate to our congregations: We should not be afraid of God. God is a good father. He is patient, kind, and fond of us as a good earthly father is to his children. We should not be afraid to be completely honest with God, even when we have done the wrong thing. God already knows us, has watched us throw tantrums, hears our jealousy of others, and knows that we are ambitious for acclaim or that we shun the limelight. God knows better than we that our motives are often unclear, are never pure, even when we have convinced ourselves that we are only doing this to survive or for the welfare of or our love for others. God knows how petty we can be and loves us anyway. So when we have been hurt or have missed the mark and are terrified someone will find out, or when our fondest hopes have been trashed, we can fling ourselves on the God who loves us like a daddy ought to and be comforted and told what to do to make it right.
Notice that daddy God will in fact push us to make things right, make amends, fix what we have broken. This is what it means to suffer with Christ so that we can be glorified with Christ. Jesus is the example of what the Spirit can accomplish in us and what we can accomplish with the help of the Spirit. We can make the natural world more beautiful or destroy it with our waste and unthinking abuse. We can love others, spread joy, make people glad by our presence, or we can be angry, destructive, perverted, and a deadly companion, a person others avoid or run from. Our reliance on God's Spirit is what makes the difference.
Paul says that the creation has been waiting for us to take up our power as children of God to keep things from descending into decay. The closer we come to being the salvation of the world, the deeper the groaning of the world, waiting in hope. Just as when a woman is nearly done giving birth, her groans get louder and deeper, so the world is groaning, each one of us is groaning, to get the pain over with, to arrive at the point where we can trust that God loves us, and that God loves the created world and wants only the best for us.
Sometimes our desire to birth a better world comes down to just that: prayers without words, without plan, without the ability to say what we want. We sit by the bedside of someone we love, watching them breathe, hearing their moans of pain, and we wish we could fix it, right now, this minute. We want to keep this person with us no matter what but not at the price of their deep suffering. We watch our child coming home from school or the playground crying because s/he has been wounded in body or soul, and we want to be able to keep our child safe from the pain the world can inflict with a careless word or flip of a hand or the aiming of a weapon. Our pain is that such things happen to the good and the bad, and we feel powerless to change it.
Even then, God hears us. The Spirit leans down and lifts up our sighs, our tears, our anger, and lifts it up to God, and God understands what we cannot say even to our best friends, even to ourselves. "God searches the heart," Paul says, and the Spirit interprets our needs. We are never misunderstood or overlooked by God.
In fact, Paul goes on, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." We may not be able to see this at the moment, but we will see later on that not one thing that happens to us is useless or unable to be redeemed in God's way. As a child, you may have not had the parents you wished for or needed. They may have been violently angry and vicious at times or usually absent even in the same room with you. Or you may have lost a parent at an early age, leaving you with overwhelming melancholy. This is not what God wanted for you. But if you let God work in your life, you will find that an inner gentleness will grow and flower, and that you will be able to recognize in others the need for the gentle friend you can be, and you will be able to share what you have learned to make the life of that person easier.
You may not have reached that space yet but know that it will come and as Paul says, "If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Patience is a hard thing. In America, we are taught that everything ought to happen NOW. We are praised for how fast we can answer a question in class, how quickly we can run a race, find a fact, or do a task at work. There is seldom praise for the slow answer, the steady hand, the repetition needed to achieve a superior intellect or product. But in God's Spirit, we can wait. We will learn that just because we cannot see it doesn't mean it isn't on the way.
It's like waiting for a package to arrive. We can order online, and we can choose regular delivery or next day delivery, but we cannot know when the package will actually arrive. A snowstorm might close down an airport. The truck's engine might overheat, leaving it stranded, waiting for another truck to arrive so the shipment can be moved on. We can sit by the window, watching for the truck, waiting as the day wears on and night begins to fall and feel angry or sad that our package has not arrived. Perhaps while we are turning on the lights, we hear a knock on the door, and the delivery man is trotting across the street, back to the truck, before we can even shout out a "thank you." In that moment, we are happy, even excited, because we were so sure the company had failed us. But it had done things to get that package delivered that we will never know about so that we would not be disappointed.
It is the same with the Christian life. We, who have been chosen, are justified (realigned so that we are parallel to God's will) and will also be glorified (made to shine before others). That is a promise to hold on to no matter how long we have had to keep our faith, especially in what the world may call our darkest hour.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
I love to feed the birds. I have three feeders for seed-eaters, occasional treats of raisins for the robins, and hummingbird feeders. But my love of birds causes me all sorts of problems in my garden.
It's not just that I have a love of finches and so have thistle seed feeders. (And never mind what the gardening shop says, my thistle seeds DO produce thistle plants!) There are always seeds that the birds just do not enjoy as well as others. The birds will get on the board feeders and stomp and shake their bodies until seeds are flying in every direction just so they can get to the sunflower kernels. And why any birdseed mix contains millet is beyond me -- none of the birds seem to eat it. So it all takes root in my garden. And I wind up with more weeds than garden plants.
This is pretty much what Jesus is talking about in the first parable for today. Some "enemy" came and "sowed weeds (tares) among the wheat." Maybe this enemy thought it would be funny. Maybe he just wanted to cause the farmer more time and energy. Maybe he hoped the weeds would choke out his enemy's crop.
In the human story, good loving people are forced to live with bullies. As children, we learn to deal with or get away from the playground bullies. As teens, we learn the hard way or the easy way to avoid those kids who are always ready to cause trouble. As adults, we learn that no matter how clean and polished a person may look, we learn that "the devil wears a three-piece suit and keeps his fingernails clean. Did you think he wouldn't?" [This is so common a song lyric that there are too many websites to list.] What's a person to do?
"Shall we tear it out?" the slaves/servants ask?
Well, there's a problem here. These weeds (tares) look too much like the wheat to just tear them out. Just as carrots, when they first come up, look just like dill, these weeds are too hard to distinguish from the wheat. Besides, the wheat is delicate at that stage. If you go tromping through the wheat, you could do twice the damage the weeds alone are doing. So no, "we can't pull it up. We just have to let it grow until the wheat grains are set, and then cut down the weeds and burn them."
Can we be certain that such people will reap what they have sown? Jesus' answer is, "Yes, but in God's time, not yours. We have to wait until the end, when we can tell the weeds from the wheat. But count on it, the weeds will not be mistaken for the wheat then."
This is the second of three agrarian parables that Jesus uses to talk about the kingdom of heaven. The first was the parable of the sower, where Jesus talks about the difficulties seeds (disciples) have in growing up to produce a crop. This parable of the weeds among the wheat is about the problem of knowing one plant from another (knowing evil people from good people, and why God allows people to do awful things). The third is the parable of the mustard seed, in which Jesus encourages us to understand that the size of the plant has no relationship to the size of the seed from which it grows (have courage to do what little you can do and don't worry whether it has any lasting effect on the world).
These parables are harder to take than we have been led to believe. It is always the little things in the parables that carry the most weight. Tiny seeds that produce huge plants that in turn provide nesting space for little birds. Weeds that threaten to choke the harvest but cannot be ripped out because the wheat would be pulled out with them. Seeds that fall on pathways and amongst thistles and in dirt that will not support a root system and so cannot produce a harvest. Why, the disciples ask, does he always speak in riddles? Jesus' response is stranger than we can possibly anticipate: He tells riddles, parables, and stories to deliberately confuse those who hear them.
He tells these pretty little stories to throw off the authorities. They can dismiss them as meaningless storytelling to amuse the masses. But for those who really listen to them, they are the words of life.
My New Testament professor, Henry Gustafson, told us one day that the parables are intended to drive us a little crazy. They don't always make much sense. But they have the same function as when, to entertain a fussy baby, grandma used to dip a feather in honey and hand it to the baby. Try as she might, she cannot pull the feather off the fingers of one hand without the other hand getting all sticky. Frustrated, she puts her fingers in her mouth and starts to cry, only to discover the wonderful sweetness of the honey. She can't put the feather down. She can't stop playing with it.
The parables call us to enjoy their sticky sweetness. But the more we think about them, the more troublesome they become. They are impossible to ignore. We keep mulling them over, asking ourselves, "What in the world does Jesus mean by that?" We may come up with a variety of possible meanings to each and every one of them. Then we discover that they all tend to stick together to give us an overview of the kingdom of heaven. So keep playing with them. Know that a professor's interpretation may, in the end, be less meaningful for us than that of a truck driver mulling over the same small story. Have fun!
What is the connection between heaven and earth? What makes Jacob think that he is the chosen one through whom the nation of Israel will come into being? Genesis is full of these questions, with story explanations for the reason things are as they are. This story, which we traditionally call "Jacob's Dream," is one of them. (Although the translation in the King James Version and carried forward out of respect for tradition is incorrectly rendered as "ladder" actually should be read as "stairway" or "ramp.")
We need to begin our reading of this event back in 25:19, where we learn that Jacob and his fraternal twin, Esau, had fought each other even in the womb. Their struggle is paralleled by their parents choosing favorites in 27:30-40, we learn that Isaac favors Esau, who is the rugged outdoors type, and Rebekah favors Jacob, who tends to stay near the tents and is, evidently, a great cook. Furthermore, Esau marries wives from among the Hittites and Rebekah cannot stand her daughters-in-law.
The beginning of the current arc of the story takes place as Isaac, grown old, blind, and feeble, decides the time has come to give Esau his blessing. [Remember, the boys are twins, both the same age. But this blessing meant that Esau, being Isaac's favorite, would become the sole heir and lord over his brother as well as his half-siblings and their mothers.] Depending on which chapter in Genesis we read, either Esau has already sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils (25:29-34) or Rachel devises a plan that will result in Jacob inheriting everything her husband has (27:1-29).
The plot, of course, is discovered, but not until it is too late. Isaac has blessed Jacob, and Esau will not inherit the land and all that his father has. Isaac is bewildered, Esau is furious, and Rebekah hurriedly sends Jacob back to her homeland, to her brother, for his safety.
As he is traveling as fast as he can, night falls. He makes himself as comfortable as possible on the ground, with a stone for a pillow. While he sleeps, he dreams. The dream is suggestive, in the original Hebrew, of him being at the foot of a staircase that leads to an enormous temple in the sky, where God dwells. On this staircase are "the angels of God... ascending and descending on it." YHWH, "the God of Abraham... and the God of Isaac" is standing next to Jacob, and renews the covenant made with Jacob's father and grandfather, saying that the covenant is directly tied to the land on which he has been sleeping. Even so, he is to continue his journey, confident that he will return to this land, and that the LORD will be with him "wherever he goes."
This story has been important to the Jews for 2,600 years. As long as they were in the Promised Land, formerly known as Canaan, they knew who they were and whom to worship (even if they did, from time to time, worship other gods). This land had been given to them by God. They had battled to gain it from the original residents, who worshiped in ways offensive to God, and then struggled to establish themselves as a nation and suffered a civil war which split the nation in two.
Thus split, first the Northern Kingdom (Israel) was defeated and taken into exile by the Assyrians, and then Babylon had defeated Judea (the Southern Kingdom) and they were carried away into Babylon. In the thinking of the day, this meant that the Babylonian gods were more powerful than YHWH. Worse, their exile separated them not just from home and Solomon's Temple, but from God. As Psalm 137 phrases it, "How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?"
For these reasons, this story of Jacob became hugely important. Eventually, they decided that they could sing the songs of YHWH even in captivity, because of this promise from the LORD. Even more important as their theology developed was the promise to Jacob that the land would belong to his offspring. No matter how difficult life became for the Jews, they had hope, a hope inherited from their ancestor.
The same can be said for the Jews of the Diaspora: "No matter how far we may be from our homeland, no matter that the only temple we have is too far away to sacrifice in, God has promised to be with the descendants of Jacob wherever we go." Even today, at every Passover meal, the last cup of wine is drank with the toast of "Next year, in Jerusalem!" Many Israelites today still believe that the original boundaries of land promised to Abraham in Genesis will be theirs, which is the source of the struggle over lands directly bordering modern-day Israel.
Second, this story indicates that God is closer than we think. In this dream, God has left the temple of the heavens, where he lives, to come to Jacob where he is sleeping on the ground. Even if we have the idea that heaven is "up there" somewhere, God is standing next to us. We can compare this with the scene of the Ascension (Acts 1:9-11): Jesus symbolically rises into a cloud (becoming invisible to the disciples) when two "men in white robes," standing by them, ask: "Why are you standing, looking up toward heaven?" Why indeed, if God is right here, next to us?
Jacob wakes up filled with awe. "Surely the LORD is in this place -- and I did not know it." So he names the place "Beth-el" -- "the house of God." It is a gateway into heaven, a place to meet God. Thus, it is an explanatory story about the origin of Bethel as one of the "high holy places" where the ancient Jews used to worship. Jacob sets up a worship pillar of stones, the ancient prototype of the altar of sacrifice in the temple of Solomon (which is to be made of uncut natural stone), and he pours oil on top of it. In so doing, Jacob is acknowledging his side of the covenant with God: "If God will do all that he has promised, and if he sees to it that I have clothes to wear and food to eat and that I return safely to this place, I will worship God in this place and I will give 1/10th to God." Jacob could drive a hard bargain.
This offering of olive oil is a foreshadowing of the role of olive oil in the temple worship. In the Middle East, even today, olive oil is central to the lifestyle of the people. In Old Testament times, in addition to being ubiquitous in food, olive oil served as a skin ointment, and as lamp oil, both at home and in the temple. The holy oils in the temple, including the anointing oils, all used olive oil as a base. The grain offerings in the temple were made of "choice flour: unleavened cakes mixed with oil" (Leviticus 7:12). Since it does not spoil easily, unlike animal fat, and was highly portable, it was even used as currency.
The temple and all its ritual and sacrifice and pomp is far in the distant future, long after Jacob's death. Jacob is one man, one frightened (awestruck) man, hearing the voice of God in a dream and taking it seriously. He uses what he has at hand to honor God and to seal a covenant that we still claim for ourselves as spiritual descendants of Jacob, from whose line Jesus was born.
Romans 8:12-25
This passage in Romans relates to the Jacob story in an interesting way. Jacob, in standing at the bottom of that stairway to heaven, is at the very point Paul refers to with his readers. We, like Jacob, are at the meeting point of heaven and Earth.
Paul talks about a split between the flesh and the Spirit, not because the material world is evil, but because the Spirit encompasses so much more than the material world. If all we focus on is the things we can see, touch, taste, and hear, we will miss the mark (the meaning of the word sin in Hebrew, which is the word to which he refers).
In scientific terms, this is absolutely accurate. Elephants and whales communicate with each other in sounds far too low for us to hear with our ears. We must record these sounds in other technological ways in order to even know that there is sound there. And with their voices in these subsonic waves, they can keep in touch with others of their own species over vast distances. The honeybees see flowers in the ultraviolet range of light waves, seeing stripes and dots that are invisible to our natural eyes. Our dogs can smell our car -- as opposed to all other cars -- when it is a block away; pick up the smell of a human being after merely sniffing an article of clothing; and hear the rustle of a mouse under a foot of snow. Some animals can even smell when a person is about to have a seizure, has low blood sugar, an infection, or even if a person has cancer. We ought to be amazed at how little we can see, smell, or taste of this world!
But if Paul is right, there is a reason we miss so much. We are intended to be led by the Spirit of God, to be aware of things beyond this material world. We are intended to be the offspring of God, part of a spiritual family that knows no end. We are always like children to God, even in adulthood, much as we are to our earthly parents, who will always see us as the small child we once were in sort of an overlay of the person we have become. God is even more aware of us, since God can see not just who we appear to be, but what we are like inside -- our fears, our hopes, our buried anger.
Paul employs a play on words in this passage. In Greek, the word "boy" is the same as the word for "slave," so one might call a slave to attention by calling out, "boy." (Which is why it is a serious mistake to ever call an African-American "boy" -- he is not a slave, but a free man, and to use that diminutive is to reduce him to slave status, in English as well as the ancient Greek.) He says, "You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption."
When a child experiences the break-up of the family, and one or the other of the parents remarries, deciding what the child will call the step-parent is touchy business. "You are not my father/mother," the child may snarl. It is helpful to say, "No, I will never try to replace your father/mother. I know I will never replace that person in your life, and you don't have to call me 'Mother' or 'Father.' " Then knowing that the memory of the absent parent is safe, the child may elect to call the new step-parent by a pet name or some other accommodation, such as an alternative word for "Father" that is different from what s/he calls the biological parent.
When we become part of the family of God, there is no competition between those who conceived and gave us birth and God. Soon enough we find that no matter the hour of the day or night we can call out to God as little children do and our "Abba" -- literally "Daddy" in Greek -- will hear us and be at our side as quickly as we can call out. [Compare this with the dream of Jacob, where God is standing by his side, even as he watches the angels ascending and descending the staircase to heaven.] This is why the children of God do not live in a spirit of slavery, where fear is what makes us behave. We need not fear God -- though we might keep a certain sense of awe -- when we are in need, or when we need advice.
This is an important thing for us to communicate to our congregations: We should not be afraid of God. God is a good father. He is patient, kind, and fond of us as a good earthly father is to his children. We should not be afraid to be completely honest with God, even when we have done the wrong thing. God already knows us, has watched us throw tantrums, hears our jealousy of others, and knows that we are ambitious for acclaim or that we shun the limelight. God knows better than we that our motives are often unclear, are never pure, even when we have convinced ourselves that we are only doing this to survive or for the welfare of or our love for others. God knows how petty we can be and loves us anyway. So when we have been hurt or have missed the mark and are terrified someone will find out, or when our fondest hopes have been trashed, we can fling ourselves on the God who loves us like a daddy ought to and be comforted and told what to do to make it right.
Notice that daddy God will in fact push us to make things right, make amends, fix what we have broken. This is what it means to suffer with Christ so that we can be glorified with Christ. Jesus is the example of what the Spirit can accomplish in us and what we can accomplish with the help of the Spirit. We can make the natural world more beautiful or destroy it with our waste and unthinking abuse. We can love others, spread joy, make people glad by our presence, or we can be angry, destructive, perverted, and a deadly companion, a person others avoid or run from. Our reliance on God's Spirit is what makes the difference.
Paul says that the creation has been waiting for us to take up our power as children of God to keep things from descending into decay. The closer we come to being the salvation of the world, the deeper the groaning of the world, waiting in hope. Just as when a woman is nearly done giving birth, her groans get louder and deeper, so the world is groaning, each one of us is groaning, to get the pain over with, to arrive at the point where we can trust that God loves us, and that God loves the created world and wants only the best for us.
Sometimes our desire to birth a better world comes down to just that: prayers without words, without plan, without the ability to say what we want. We sit by the bedside of someone we love, watching them breathe, hearing their moans of pain, and we wish we could fix it, right now, this minute. We want to keep this person with us no matter what but not at the price of their deep suffering. We watch our child coming home from school or the playground crying because s/he has been wounded in body or soul, and we want to be able to keep our child safe from the pain the world can inflict with a careless word or flip of a hand or the aiming of a weapon. Our pain is that such things happen to the good and the bad, and we feel powerless to change it.
Even then, God hears us. The Spirit leans down and lifts up our sighs, our tears, our anger, and lifts it up to God, and God understands what we cannot say even to our best friends, even to ourselves. "God searches the heart," Paul says, and the Spirit interprets our needs. We are never misunderstood or overlooked by God.
In fact, Paul goes on, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." We may not be able to see this at the moment, but we will see later on that not one thing that happens to us is useless or unable to be redeemed in God's way. As a child, you may have not had the parents you wished for or needed. They may have been violently angry and vicious at times or usually absent even in the same room with you. Or you may have lost a parent at an early age, leaving you with overwhelming melancholy. This is not what God wanted for you. But if you let God work in your life, you will find that an inner gentleness will grow and flower, and that you will be able to recognize in others the need for the gentle friend you can be, and you will be able to share what you have learned to make the life of that person easier.
You may not have reached that space yet but know that it will come and as Paul says, "If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Patience is a hard thing. In America, we are taught that everything ought to happen NOW. We are praised for how fast we can answer a question in class, how quickly we can run a race, find a fact, or do a task at work. There is seldom praise for the slow answer, the steady hand, the repetition needed to achieve a superior intellect or product. But in God's Spirit, we can wait. We will learn that just because we cannot see it doesn't mean it isn't on the way.
It's like waiting for a package to arrive. We can order online, and we can choose regular delivery or next day delivery, but we cannot know when the package will actually arrive. A snowstorm might close down an airport. The truck's engine might overheat, leaving it stranded, waiting for another truck to arrive so the shipment can be moved on. We can sit by the window, watching for the truck, waiting as the day wears on and night begins to fall and feel angry or sad that our package has not arrived. Perhaps while we are turning on the lights, we hear a knock on the door, and the delivery man is trotting across the street, back to the truck, before we can even shout out a "thank you." In that moment, we are happy, even excited, because we were so sure the company had failed us. But it had done things to get that package delivered that we will never know about so that we would not be disappointed.
It is the same with the Christian life. We, who have been chosen, are justified (realigned so that we are parallel to God's will) and will also be glorified (made to shine before others). That is a promise to hold on to no matter how long we have had to keep our faith, especially in what the world may call our darkest hour.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
I love to feed the birds. I have three feeders for seed-eaters, occasional treats of raisins for the robins, and hummingbird feeders. But my love of birds causes me all sorts of problems in my garden.
It's not just that I have a love of finches and so have thistle seed feeders. (And never mind what the gardening shop says, my thistle seeds DO produce thistle plants!) There are always seeds that the birds just do not enjoy as well as others. The birds will get on the board feeders and stomp and shake their bodies until seeds are flying in every direction just so they can get to the sunflower kernels. And why any birdseed mix contains millet is beyond me -- none of the birds seem to eat it. So it all takes root in my garden. And I wind up with more weeds than garden plants.
This is pretty much what Jesus is talking about in the first parable for today. Some "enemy" came and "sowed weeds (tares) among the wheat." Maybe this enemy thought it would be funny. Maybe he just wanted to cause the farmer more time and energy. Maybe he hoped the weeds would choke out his enemy's crop.
In the human story, good loving people are forced to live with bullies. As children, we learn to deal with or get away from the playground bullies. As teens, we learn the hard way or the easy way to avoid those kids who are always ready to cause trouble. As adults, we learn that no matter how clean and polished a person may look, we learn that "the devil wears a three-piece suit and keeps his fingernails clean. Did you think he wouldn't?" [This is so common a song lyric that there are too many websites to list.] What's a person to do?
"Shall we tear it out?" the slaves/servants ask?
Well, there's a problem here. These weeds (tares) look too much like the wheat to just tear them out. Just as carrots, when they first come up, look just like dill, these weeds are too hard to distinguish from the wheat. Besides, the wheat is delicate at that stage. If you go tromping through the wheat, you could do twice the damage the weeds alone are doing. So no, "we can't pull it up. We just have to let it grow until the wheat grains are set, and then cut down the weeds and burn them."
Can we be certain that such people will reap what they have sown? Jesus' answer is, "Yes, but in God's time, not yours. We have to wait until the end, when we can tell the weeds from the wheat. But count on it, the weeds will not be mistaken for the wheat then."
This is the second of three agrarian parables that Jesus uses to talk about the kingdom of heaven. The first was the parable of the sower, where Jesus talks about the difficulties seeds (disciples) have in growing up to produce a crop. This parable of the weeds among the wheat is about the problem of knowing one plant from another (knowing evil people from good people, and why God allows people to do awful things). The third is the parable of the mustard seed, in which Jesus encourages us to understand that the size of the plant has no relationship to the size of the seed from which it grows (have courage to do what little you can do and don't worry whether it has any lasting effect on the world).
These parables are harder to take than we have been led to believe. It is always the little things in the parables that carry the most weight. Tiny seeds that produce huge plants that in turn provide nesting space for little birds. Weeds that threaten to choke the harvest but cannot be ripped out because the wheat would be pulled out with them. Seeds that fall on pathways and amongst thistles and in dirt that will not support a root system and so cannot produce a harvest. Why, the disciples ask, does he always speak in riddles? Jesus' response is stranger than we can possibly anticipate: He tells riddles, parables, and stories to deliberately confuse those who hear them.
He tells these pretty little stories to throw off the authorities. They can dismiss them as meaningless storytelling to amuse the masses. But for those who really listen to them, they are the words of life.
My New Testament professor, Henry Gustafson, told us one day that the parables are intended to drive us a little crazy. They don't always make much sense. But they have the same function as when, to entertain a fussy baby, grandma used to dip a feather in honey and hand it to the baby. Try as she might, she cannot pull the feather off the fingers of one hand without the other hand getting all sticky. Frustrated, she puts her fingers in her mouth and starts to cry, only to discover the wonderful sweetness of the honey. She can't put the feather down. She can't stop playing with it.
The parables call us to enjoy their sticky sweetness. But the more we think about them, the more troublesome they become. They are impossible to ignore. We keep mulling them over, asking ourselves, "What in the world does Jesus mean by that?" We may come up with a variety of possible meanings to each and every one of them. Then we discover that they all tend to stick together to give us an overview of the kingdom of heaven. So keep playing with them. Know that a professor's interpretation may, in the end, be less meaningful for us than that of a truck driver mulling over the same small story. Have fun!
