July 16, 2023
Pentecost 7
Lectionary 15
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Genesis 25:19-34; Romans 8:1-11
We started out the day by hearing about Isaac and Rebekah, and their sons Jacob and Esau. Now all of this happened thousands of years ago and far far away in a world almost nothing like ours, and we might wonder why we keep reading this stuff. The short answer is: We read it because it’s our story…We hear it in much the same way that we hear stories of our ancestors, grandma and grandpa and beyond, and those stories tell us something about who we are too, and sometimes they tell us something about who God is – the God who has been with us through all those events and stories we hear.
So to refresh your memory: A long time ago in a land far away, God promised a couple named Abraham and Sarah that they would have countless descendants who would be a blessing to the world. Now this was an impossible promise, because these two were well into their sixties and seventies when the promise was spoken. Who has kids at that age? But sure enough, when Abraham was around 100 and Sarah 90 or so, they had a son, and they named him Isaac.
God makes promises, and God is faithful to those promises.
When Isaac was forty he and a woman named Rebekah got together, so they would be responsible for the next generation that God had promised to Abraham. But Isaac and Rebekah also had troubles trying to produce offspring, til finally, after being together for twenty years, they got twins. Twins they named Esau and Jacob.
God makes promises, and God is faithful to those promises.
Now Esau is the oldest of those two sons, so he’s the rightful heir of pretty much everything; he has a kind of favoured status in the line of descendants. But one day he’s really hungry, and his brother Jacob has food, so Jacob offers to give Esau some food if Esau will give him all those rights he has as the oldest son. And Esau says, “OK. I’ll sell you everything for some lentils.”
Esau can’t see beyond his own hunger for a minute or two. Jacob takes advantage of his brother’s weakness to get what isn’t his. Their dad likes Esau better than Jacob, and their mom likes Jacob better than Esau. You can see how the whole situation is kind of messed up.
And God makes promises, and God is faithful to those promises. God is faithful, even when God has to work with short-sighted, manipulative and fighting siblings, or with parents who play favourites. God is faithful to the promises that God makes.
We hear these stories because they tell us about the faithfulness of God. These are the early tellings of the story we’ve heard so much about how God gathers people together and showers them with love and faithfulness that never stops even when their relationship with God is rocky, or God is about to lose patience, or the people just can’t get their lives figured out. And through these always-loved people God will be working out another really big promise: That all the nations of the world will one day come with these people to the mountain of God, to bring an end to the ways of violence and to learn the ways of peace.
A few minutes after we heard that story we heard eleven verses from a letter that St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome. If you listened closely while Nancy was reading, you might have found yourself saying something like “Huh?”, or “Couldn’t Paul have tried to say that clearly?” or just “Why are we hearing this?” It gets kind of convoluted.
But here are a few things to remember if you're ever listening to a reading from Paul, or if you’re sitting down to read what Paul wrote. First, Paul is a particular person who lives in a certain time and place. He’s a Jew from the middle east in the first century. He’s not a Lutheran. Or a Protestant or a Catholic or a Mennonite. And he believes that Jesus, who is also a Jew, is the Messiah; but Paul has never stopped being a Jew.
He’s writing a letter. He’s not writing a textbook or a long philosophical or theological article, although it might sound like it sometimes. He’s writing a letter, and letters don’t always make sense or set things out clearly. Think of a gushy love letter if you’ve ever written or received such a thing, or think about an e-mail gone wrong and you don’t even realize it til you’ve hit send. He’s writing a letter to a group of people who he’s never met in a place where he’s never been. They’re a congregation in Rome. Some of them are Jews, like Paul, who have spent their lives all wrapped up in those stories like that one we heard about Isaac and Rebekah and Esau and Jacob; those stories about the faithfulness of God. Some of them are non-Jews, or Gentiles, who haven’t been hearing those stories for long and who don’t follow the same customs as the Jews in the congregation. But all of them, Jews and Gentiles, share a trust that Jesus is the Messiah.
Now sometimes different groups in a church don’t always get along. You know. I know it’s hard to believe. But it’s like that sometimes. So Paul wants to make it really clear that both people, the Jews and the non-Jews, are a part of this church, even if they don’t all become just like each other. To the Gentiles Paul says, “Your Jewish siblings are those first people called by God, people through who God is working to bless all the nations with peace. So respect them. Honour them.” And to the Jews God is saying, “Your Gentile siblings are part of this people of God now too. You’re their people, they’re your people, so respect them. Honour them. You are all part of God’s promise to bring all the nations of the world together to learn the ways of peace.” To all of them Paul is saying, “Some of you follow old old practices taught by a long Jewish tradition. Some of you don’t. But you all belong, you are all bound together by that faith you share in a God who is faithful to you.”
That might be a good way for us to think of ourselves too. We already do. But we hear these stories, even these convoluted words of Paul and the story behind those words, and we remember that we are a part of God’s plan to learn and to teach the ways of God’s promised peace.
Because that’s what God promised. And you know, God is faithful to the promises God makes.
One more thing about Paul’s story: He’s had a long and difficult go of it. He’s travelled all over the place for years, and all that travel wears on a person. He’s been shipwrecked, arrested more times than he’d like to remember, and whipped and interrogated and argued with by people who hold power over him. He’s been shunned by his own people, and people in the very churches he’s helped to start have sometimes just had enough of him and have decided they’d rather hear something different from someone else. He’s been in conflict with himself, and he’s wondered whether he’s on the right track or whether it’s all just been a waste of time. He’s been discouraged by all the ways that he doesn’t do what he knows is right, and does do what he knows isn’t right. For all his confidence and even arrogance, he knows that he’s weak, he’s mortal, he’s a sinner, and will stay that way through to the end of his days. He’s under no illusions about that. He probably knows that about the people he’s writing to in Rome as well, and I suppose that if he were writing to us he’d know that about us too. But he also knows that he’s loved, always loved. And I bet he’d know that about us too.
He wants to assure those Romans – and we listen in and we hear that this is our story too! - that they and we have been given the gift of God’s Spirit, which is the Spirit of life and peace. We might be overcome sometimes by worries about death or our failings or weakness or sin; those things we know will always be there. But you, Paul says – we - have been given the Spirit of the risen Christ, and that Spirit is life and peace. None of your weakness, or your dying, or your sin, or your feeling like outsiders or your feeling smug and special, or your being afraid, or your being divided, can separate you or any of us from the love of God.
It’s like Paul is saying “You’re all a part of this: God’s people, Christ’s resurrection, the Spirit of life and peace and love, and you will always be a part of that story. And you all, we all, are coming together into the presence of God to learn the ways of love, life, and peace, so that God’s will for life and peace will be done. Even when it’s hard to see. Even when we don’t understand how. Even when the promise seems impossible.
Because God is faithful to the promises that God makes.
We need to hear these stories of our God who makes a promise, and is faithful to that promise.
A world of Brady landfills and Prairie Green landfills, and women with names like Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, needs that promise to come true. A world of law enforcement officers and city officials trying to figure out what to do about blockades and the real living and loving people who guard them needs that promise to come true. A world of Ukraine and Russia and Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Israel and Palestine and LGBTQS+ and Proud Boys needs that promise to come true.
So we keep on hearing the stories of that promise of God. That impossible promise that we are all a part of. And God is faithful to that promises. It will come true.
AMEN.