Broken open, like bread

Here is the text of my sermon at St Aldhelm’s, Branksome, on Sunday, 20th October, 2019. It takes whatever inspiration it has from the Old Testament reading of Genesis 32, 22-31. The other readings were 2 Timothy 3,14 – 4,5 and Luke 18, 1-8. 

A surfeit of riches is ours by way today’s readings. St Paul (if it be he) counsels his protégé Timothy, commending qualities such as patience that he himself did not always display (we’ve all done it.) In the Gospel reading Jesus encourages persistence in prayer by painting the picture of a miserable old judge who can no longer be arsed but is eventually provoked into enforcing justice by the implacable entreaties of a village woman…and would God react in such a way, grumbling and prevaricating like that old curmudgeon? No! He responds at once, having been all ears, all eagerness, waiting for the chance. He responds with a parent’s loving availability (even though it often feels otherwise to us – but that is another story.)

 

I want to focus however on the first, the OT reading. This passage is a simple and short cameo featuring Jacob wrestling with an angel and I think it is full and beautiful with meaning and import. Drawing it out however requires us to review some of the previous – and look ahead to a couple of future – episodes in this inter-generational drama, a kind of Biblical soap opera.

 

Jacob is of course a member of that crucial Biblical family that descends from Abraham, his grand father. He in turn is father to Joseph whose abduction at the hands of his brothers takes the action to Egypt from where eventually Moses, an alleged descendent, leads the people back to the Promised Land, to the place of Kings and of David and of Jesus – and the rest, as you might say, is our history.

 

So Jacob is as it were Old Testament royalty. But he and his family are also fairly dysfunctional. No time here to trace all the evidence of that among other generations. But just consider Jacob himself: the younger of twins he is a mother’s boy, always resentful of Esau his more masculine brother. He makes the latter promise his inheritance in a boyish and surely not legally binding manoeuvre when Esau returns famished from hunting. Later he is putty in his mother’s hands as she arranges for him to deceive the elderly and ailing Isaac to give to him the principal blessing (and therefore inheritance.) Jacob is weak, scheming and shameless. He flees for his life subsequently and falls in love with his cousin Rachel. After 7 years working for his uncle Laban he gets too drunk on his wedding night, is put to bed with the older sister Leah instead, and only notices the confusion in the morning. In a buy one, get two deal he is presented with Rachel too a week later but has to work a further 7 years. But Jacob is lucky, good fortune just comes his way. When his share consists of striped lambs, then they all are born with stripes. When his share is spotted ones, they are all born spotted. He accumulates a fortune. He seems to lead a charmed and privileged life, like Mr Johnson, except Jacob was able to have two wives and two concubines and in his case it was all legit. Children flow, through Leah and then through Jacob’s maid, and then Rachel, and then Rachel’s maid. Rachel concludes the 12 with of course Joseph. It is noticeable in the Biblical account however that all these complicated couplings are arranged and initiated by the women. Jacob himself seems to have gone where and to whom he was directed, and at most stages of his life there seems to be a listless and rather self-preoccupied aspect to him – even in old age when he rather petulantly urges his sons to go in search of help from Egypt but is angry and self-pitying when they return without Benjamin.

 

But, into this charmed (perhaps not very charming) life there occur two moments when – solitary and in extremis – there is revealed in Jacob (and perhaps despite him) an unexpected, depth and dignity, moments when his – and our, the readers’ – horizons are extended.

 

The first is when, having been sent away by his father to seek a wife in the old country, he settles to sleep, alone and vulnerable, in lonely country. He is awakened by the vision of a ladder joining earth to heaven up and down which angels are in constant motion. He discerns a vocation, calling him out from self-obsession to see his life as significant for the future and for others. He is to be the father of many generations who will inherit this land upon which he is a stranger. God promises not to leave him. And Jacob resolves in the morning as he sets up a stone obelisk at this Bethel, that the Lord will be his God – and he will give to God a tenth of all he receives.

 

The second such ‘stripped bare’ encounter with reality, and with God, occurs much later. Now rich and successful, he flees from Laban taking his wives and concubines and children and servants and flocks (and Rachel’s ill-gotten household precious religious images.) Jacob is a rich man now. But he is in dread of meeting Esau, the brother he humiliated all those years ago. So he has sent a succession of herds and flocks ahead of him as offerings to buy Esau’s good will. He hears however that Esau is yet hastening towards him (to kill him, Jacob assumes, not to embrace him as turned out to be the case.) So with heightened fear he divides his family and wealth into two caravanserais in hopes that he might at least salvage one part after a likely ambush by Esau.

 

And it is at this point that we now meet Jacob, all alone, by the brook called Jabbok. Or not quite alone. ‘And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day…’ Jacob’s thigh is wounded by the man’s touch and eventually they stand back, neither having prevailed. Jacob vouchsafes his name but the stranger, instead of giving his name, gives a blessing. The encounter concludes with a verse of scripture I find haunting and evocative, after Jacob has named the place in order to preserve the memory of having met God face to face, ‘And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.’

 

Into Jacob’s life, with all its privilege and perversity,  into his and his family’s divisions and dysfunctionality, we yet see in those two moments, one at Jabbok at sunset and the other at Penuel at sunrise, the real Jacob, stripped, vulnerable, exposed, and yet revealed and real, and beloved and called and blessed.

 

My friends, what we see highlighted in Jacob we may also discern within ourselves. No matter how unappealing is our main story, or our undeclared and secret story, God finds moments of weakness in which his love can find entry.  I wonder, where in your life at present is the crack which makes you vulnerable and through which God may be seeking to enter more deeply? It may be in a turn of events that overwhelms you with gratitude. But just as effectively it may take the form of family difficulties, or it may be uncertainties or stress at work; it may be through work’s ending, or changing direction; it may be a new or persistent illness, your own or someone else’s; it may be the death of another, or an increased awareness of your own mortality; it may be in a crisis of confidence or some other crisis that is hardly visible even to you, so deep does it go.

 

I have only yet mentioned Jesus in passing, with a nod to today’s Gospel reading. In a sermon, that’s never a good look. Jesus is after all at the centre of our understanding of God.

 

But wait, the Old Testament is BC, before Christ, or BCE, Before the Christian Era – but it is not at all ‘before’ Christ the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the Word that was, in the beginning, ‘and the Word was with God and the Word was God…In him was life, and the life was the light of men’ (to use those phrases from the opening of John’s Gospel so familiar to us from the Mass of Christmas.) In that lonely place called Penuel, where Jacob comes face to face with himself, confronting a crisis of anxiety and loneliness and fear, when he grapples with an angel who fights all night, and where (he believes) he comes face to face with God, we see a crack form in the apparently successful, entitled and even manipulative veneer that has been most of Jacob’s life. As the camera pans back and above, and we see this newly humbled and yet somehow heroic figure, now damaged, halting and lame, limping alone towards the rising sun, and towards his nemesis and his suppressed fears to be faced in the dreaded approach of his brother – in that moment, do we not see Christ in him? That angel with whom he wrestled all night may have been an expression at last of an inner struggle, of course, and in some measure I am sure it was. But whenever a person’s veneer is penetrated the crack tends to form the shape of the cross. In that suddenly diminished and yet new person that is Jacob limping alone we see the mark of Christ.

 

And might we not see Christ also in each one of ourselves, when similarly humbled, and fallen, through struggle or failure, or suffering or disappointment, we too are broken open, like bread, like bread broken in the hands of Jesus, bread that is good and plentiful – and given for others?