Fairhaven UMC

I mentioned this before probably, but my ethnic heritage is decidedly bland. It’s largely German, Swiss, large amount of Swiss, which is kind of weird actually. French, English, Irish, you know, your basic northern Europeans, not a lot of spices or tomato, you know. We’ve been here a good while.
 It’s been since the 1740s or earlier for a lot of the Swiss and the English, which is a very long time to remain in love with the promised land of Butler County. The French side is the most recent, and even that particular great-great-grandfather got here in 1900, so that’s still 120 years ago. Unsurprisingly though, the traditions that my ancestors may have brought with them across the Atlantic are virtually gone. I don’t know what they ate.
 I don’t know their religious customs. The churches in Porterville and elsewhere that many of my forebears would have helped found, they started as Swiss reform churches, but they’ve been Americanized into just Bible churches now, they’re called, for decades. My French great-great-grandfather, I imagine, was Catholic, but he’d have been traveling quite a ways every Sunday to find a mass, so presumably he just didn’t. And here we are.
 Accordingly, I look with envy upon some of the things the spicier ethnicities of Western PA have, you know, like clubs and pierogies and holiday traditions and special days at Kennywood. I’m especially jealous, you know, of the rare and unique ones, the Lithuanians, the Ruthenians, because I’m just American. And indeed, the US census shows that a lot of the English, a lot of the Scots, Irish families who have been in this region, in the Appalachian region for a long time have simply just marked American on their census for years and years and years, because any identity beyond that is gone. My homeland isn’t the Alpine lakes of Switzerland, though I’d like to see them.
 It’s the glacial valleys, the rolling hills of Slippery Rock Township. It’s changed. There’s a novelty t-shirt store at the Robinson Mall with a shirt in the window that I’ve seen many places elsewhere. and it says, American by birth, Italian by the grace of God.
 And that’s a joke, I assume. Maybe not for some Italians who are really into it. But there’s something to that also. We carry different identities at different depths within us.
 And the identity of our birth is not necessarily the one that we claim, the one we retain throughout our lives. Like in this example, an Italian-American who was born and raised in the US has a really wide choice as to how Italian they want to be, right? They could easily discard their home culture entirely as my European ancestors did eventually until American is what they are above all else and no one else, maybe not even their kids, knows their heritage without doing some hardcore research. Meanwhile, you could have an adopted child, right, who might identify with their biological family to some degree, and their DNA will never change, but it’s also quite likely that their last name will change and that they’ll consider themselves to be more fully a member of that adoptive family. It’s quite likely that their adoptive parents just become understood as their parents, right? And those who gave them birth might get that added distance of biological parents.
 You know, the same way a woman often changes her name upon marriage. Men do now occasionally. I have some friends who hyphenated theirs to symbol a new family as a fusion of the old. And whenever you change your name, it’s not that the old has gone away, but that you’ve chosen to become something.
 You’ve chosen to create something new, and that’s what you’re claiming now. The name that will one day be on your headstone, the name that your children will bear, that’s something that you choose, that you create together in a new marriage. So you get what I’m saying here, that identities are fluid, are complicated. Who you started as, even down to the level of your DNA, is not necessarily the determinant of who you end up as in life.
 Life happens, we grow, we change. Over time, some of us might as well become a new person entirely. And I would argue that’s actually exactly what Jesus calls us to over a lifetime of discipleship and growth. By the end of our lives, by our older years, with God’s help, with God’s shaping touch, we should be unrecognizable from who we started as, in the best way possible.
 You know, disciple of Jesus, child of God, should become our above-all identity as we grow over time. I remember the words of 2 Corinthians 5, 17. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away.
 Look, new things have come into being. Complete change, complete transformation until it’s just newness. And we see something like this happening within Jacob, a kind of metamorphosis. Over the last month or so, I’ve been working through Jacob’s saga in Genesis, and what we have seen over the last three, what you might call, episodes is the sprouting and maturing of Jacob’s faith.
 In today’s reading, we might reach what we might call that maturing. Jacob began his story as a man who, despite his heritage as a son of Isaac, as the grandson of the great patriarch Abraham had zero relationship with God. Instead, he’s what his given name describes. Jacob means supplanter or one who seizes, and indeed he seeks to build his own power and fortune by hustling.
 If there’s one thing Jacob is, it’s a hustler. He manipulates those around him. His only mention of God before his exile, you’ll recall, was this offhanded remark to to his father as he’s trying to embezzle him in the wake of extorting his brother Esau’s entire inheritance. Jacob uses God as a tool, just kind of a rhetorical device.
 Whenever he is sent into exile, whenever he sets up camp at Bethel, it’s there that he sees this vision of angels ascending and descending a staircase to heaven. And he hears the voice of God directly speaking to him for the first time in his life. He’s never met God before, he’s never had any concept of God, and then God breaks through in this vision. And for the first time, a real relationship opens up between Jacob and the Lord, despite Jacob never having sought one.
 It’s not like Jacob went into the wilderness to meet God. No, Jacob had no interest in that. But God promises to be with him even as he’s leaving his homeland until his destiny is fulfilled. God promises that he’s never alone, even as he wanders into the desert and away from his family into an uncertain future.
 And so for Jacob, after Bethel, God is no longer this abstraction belonging to his father and his grandfather. Faith isn’t just something that his parents and grandparents had. The God of Abraham is now his too. One that he knows personally, one that he’s met, one that he has spoken to.
 Surely God was in this place, but I didn’t know it, Jacob says. And so it’s been a couple chapters, we skipped a couple chapters, since we last encountered Jacob at the beginning of his exile. And since then, now that we’re in chapter 32, he’s grown up quite a bit. A lot has happened in his life.
 It’s been a while. He’s gotten himself a couple wives, Rachel and Leah, those are stories of their own, in his mother’s homeland. And he’s had a really successful run back there. He’s been working the land of his cousin Laban as kind of an indentured servant.
 He’s paying off his wives, right? He was, Laban promised to give him his wives if he would work for him for a number of years. And he and Rachel and Leah have begun having sons who will become the fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel. But now the land is getting a little bit tight for both Laban and Jacob to live in peace. Some friction is emerging between the two clans.
 Laban’s family is getting jealous because Jacob’s doing really well. He’s become a very successful farmer, very prosperous, got all these strong young boys, right? And God tells Jacob that it’s finally time to go back home and also to finally face his brother Esau, whom he pretty aggressively screwed over. His servants warn as he heads back to Canaan, the land of his father, that Esau, his brother, is coming to meet him with 400 men, which he reasonably assumes is probably not a great sign. Jacob, at the beginning of this chapter, is panicking.
 You know, his brother’s essentially raised an army that’s marching towards him, and he prays. Lord, God of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac, who said to me, go back to your country and your relatives, and I’ll make sure things go well for you. I don’t deserve how loyal and truthful you’ve been to your servant. He’s right.
 I went away across the Jordan with just my staff, and now I’ve become two camps. Save me from my brother Esau. I’m afraid he will come and kill me, the mothers and their children. You were the one who told me.
 I will make sure things go well for you, and I will make your descendants like the sand of the sea so many you won’t be able to count them. He’s terrified. And he anticipates crossing back over the river to his homeland to face these skeletons that he prayed would stay in his closet forever. He thought all that was long gone.
 And on one hand, he really trusts that God is calling him back. He does go after all, but still not fully. He isn’t both feet in. Deep down, he’s still that desperate boy who hung on to his brother’s heel at birth, trying to control his own fate by force of will.
 And so he prepares this big strategy, right? This big game of showering Esau with gifts. He’s sending before him all kinds of dozens of animals and this fortune and so all these presents to Esau. So by the time Jacob arrives, Esau’s softened up a little bit. He’s like, Oh, well, this is nice.
 And when a reading this morning begins, he sends the first group over into the land to encounter Esau and offer this peacemaking gift. So he sent his wives, his children, the servants, a lot of animals ahead, but he stays behind on the riverbank, and this mysterious man shows up and starts wrestling him. What a weird moment. And they wrestle, and they wrestle through the night, And the man takes a cheap shot eventually, ’cause it’s gone on too long, and he either rips Jacob’s thigh muscle or dislocates his hip, depending on which translation that you read.
 And yet he still doesn’t win. Jacob persists, insisting that he won’t let this man out of a headlock until he gives him a blessing, which is a recurring theme for Jacob, you’ll notice. He’s always trying to get that blessing. And so he does.
 The man gives him that blessing. He asks him his name, Jacob, but then he renames him and he says, Your name won’t be Jacob anymore, but Israel, because you struggled with God and men and won. Israel means struggles with God. This mysterious attacker turns out to be God himself, but he refuses to speak his own name.
 In the midst of the struggle with himself, with his fear, and directly now with God, Jacob becomes a new man with a new name. His identity now has been forged in his wrestling with God. He started out that fight. He started out on that side of the river as Jacob, but now he’s Israel.
 Supplanter is who he was born as, this schemer, this striver. What wrestles with God is who he’s become. And that’s a really different way to live. Finally, Jacob, now Israel, sees God’s blessing and grace as his own, as really, truly being something he has.
 It’s striking, I think, in this story that God has already promised Jacob his blessing and promise like decades ago now, back at that night at Bethel when they first met. Years and years have passed. God already promised back at Bethel that all this stuff was going to be Jacob’s. Jacob already had God’s blessing without even asking for it.
 But it’s only whenever he wrestles with God that he demands it, that he then truly accepts the love and the grace of God given to him. God essentially has to like reverse psychology Jacob into finally getting it. He had to fight him so he knew that he wouldn’t have to fight anymore. God has to force Jacob to see that a path of grace has been laid wide open for him his whole life if he’s just willing to go.
 And our paths as Christians are not so different. No mysterious men are wrestling us on the side of the road, hopefully. But the promise God places upon our lives, that we are reborn and renewed and claimed as children of God through Jesus, is given to us at baptism. It’s totally free, it doesn’t require a single thing from us, just like whenever God promised Jacob at Bethel.
 We are marked and sealed as God’s beloved from the very beginning, before we even ask. But it’s most often in wrestling with God and man, in the words of Genesis, over the course of our lives, that who we have always been in Christ becomes the identity we claim deep in our souls. Grace and blessing are free. They’re always free, and yet we have to learn to receive them.
 Our lives are not so different than Jacob’s journey from home to exile and back home again. times will come and continue to come over and over and over again when we stand on the riverbank and we can choose to strive and flail and scrap on our own, looking with anxiety on what is to come, or accept that God is already with us, fighting for us in the midst of life’s battles, calling us to be more than we were born to be. And this is what spiritual maturity looks like. And I suspect it’s rarely a one-time thing for most of us.
 Maturity is just getting it right more often, right? But a decision we have to make over and over again. Is this my struggle to deal with myself? Is it on me? Or is it God’s? hand it over to God, to accept the blessing, is to transcend our own identities and to be renamed. We’re not striving, we’re not supplanting, we’re not scrapping anymore. We’re renamed.
 God has given you and me every single thing that we need. The question is whether we’ll break down, surrender and just accept the grace and love that has been ours all along. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.

So you didn’t hear me last Sunday on Jacob and Esau, our first iteration of where Jacob and Esau show up, the sons of Isaac and Rebekah. So I’ll give you the gist of it. And that’s basically, I don’t like Jacob. That’s a big part of it.
 I don’t think that’s an incredibly brave opinion either. I don’t think the story is written in such a way that you’re supposed to like Jacob. Jacob is a snake. In last Sunday’s Old Testament reading from Genesis, we heard this famous tale, one of the big ones of the Abraham cycle, of Jacob stealing Esau’s inheritance as firstborn.
 He waits until Esau has this weak moment. He’s really hungry, to be specific. And Jacob gets his brother to agree to hand over his birthright, his inheritance as firstborn son, in exchange for a nice hearty bowl of lentil stew. And Jacob has been a schemer and a striver since literally the very moment he was born.
 He was born trying to weasel his way into the firstborn position. He is born yanking on Esau’s foot. Esau comes out first, the twin boys are being born, and Jacob reaches for his brother’s foot trying to throw him behind so he can be the first one born, So he can get this great inheritance from his father. Jacob, who is his mother’s favorite, Rebecca, has no interest in being in second place at any time in his life.
 While Esau seems like more of an agreeable, if kind of dumb, oaf, he’s his father’s favorite. He’s a hunter. He’s a simple guy. Anyway, whenever we meet Jacob this morning, the major reason that he’s on the road– so he’s in the middle of the desert outside Beersheba– The major reason that he’s on the road to this other village of Haran is ostensibly to go stay with a relative of his mother’s for some time.
 He’s hoping to find a wife among his cousins, which is weird to us now, but wasn’t then. And but really a major factor here is that he’s running away from his brother. Esau is justifiably considering killing Jacob because Jacob has not only swindled him out of his inheritance, Jacob has done more since then. So we skipped a couple chapters between last week and this week.
 In the meantime, Jacob has also impersonated Esau to try to receive his father’s deathbed blessing. This is even more devious than the whole lentil stew episode. So Jacob, if you don’t know this story, Esau is notoriously hairy. That’s his whole thing.
 So Jacob wears fur on his arms, animal fur on his arms, and he comes up to his blind father Isaac and asks for his blessing to try to convince Isaac that he’s his hairy brother. He says, Feel my arms. So I don’t feel bad now that Jacob has stolen these things now that he’s wandering through the desert alone. He’s spending the night in a cave with a rock as his pillow, and he kind of deserves it.
 Jacob is terrible. He has this drive and this talent for deceiving and defrauding even his own family. And it’s hard to think that it’s anything but well-deserved, that maybe for the first time in his life, he’s feeling fear. He’s feeling vulnerability.
 He’s experiencing the concern that he might suffer the way he’s making other people suffer. And yet, we find at the beginning that he doesn’t leave under cover of darkness. He doesn’t leave in fear. He doesn’t flee into the night so no one knows.
 He’s always been his mother’s favorite, we know this, but even Isaac, in the midst of this stealing of the blessing of the inheritance, has an enormous amount of grace for Jacob. Before sending him away, he’s being sent away to diffuse the tension, you know, Isaac and Rebecca don’t want their sons killing each other. Isaac calls Jacob in to receive a blessing for the journey. And this one, he gives him voluntarily.
 These are verses three and four. Isaac says to Jacob, God Almighty will bless you, make you fertile. He’ll give you many descendants so that you will become a large group of peoples. He will give you and your descendants Abraham’s blessing so that you will own the land in which you are now immigrants, the land God gave to Abraham.
 Isaac is just overflowing still with grace, with love for his complete jerk of a son. And he promises that God is even more so. But it seems like as Jacob leaves, he doesn’t really believe it. Maybe finally, as the consequences of his actions are finally catching up to him, he’s on the run, maybe he’s feeling some guilt.
 It’s worth pointing out that, you know, even though he receives this blessing, Jacob doesn’t really seem to have much of a relationship with God at this time. In fact, the only reference to God that Jacob has made to this point, you know, he’s probably in his 30s now, the only reference to God that he has made to this point is found in chapter 27, while he’s impersonating Esau, while he’s wearing the hair on his arms, Blind old Isaac asks Jacob, as he’s pretending to be Esau, how he was able to hunt and prepare an animal so quick to bring him dinner. And Jacob actually lies to his blind, innocent father about God and says, the Lord your God led me right to it. And I found this deer because God sent me to it, which is just lie upon lie upon lie.
 This is a notably terrible instance of Jacob taking the Lord’s name in vain in order to manipulate other people. And so even Jacob’s relationship with God, if one really exists, is rooted in lies and deception. And so in the desert outside Beersheba, with his head on a rock pillow, maybe Jacob has some sense that he’s finally reaping what he sowed. And so having gone as far as he could for a day’s journey, he makes camp for the night.
 He plops his head on that rock. And that’s the closest thing to comfort he can muster up in the desert. He’s having a terrible time. But somehow he falls asleep.
 And then he has a vivid dream. Jacob saw a raised staircase, its foundation on earth and its top touching the sky. And God’s messengers were ascending and descending on it. And suddenly the Lord was standing on it and saying, I am the Lord, the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of Isaac.
 I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will become like the dust of the earth. You will spread out to the west, the east, the north, and south. Every family of earth will be blessed because of your descendants.
 I am with you now. I will protect you everywhere you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done everything that I have promised you. This isn’t a confusing or abstract dream.
 He doesn’t need anyone to interpret it for him. It’s not impersonal or distant. This is a message straight from God. And that’s really unusual in much of the Old Testament.
 You usually get word from God from an angel or from a voice, but God is standing on this staircase talking to Jacob. Jacob might have pretended to hear from God before, you know, to trick people. But now, amusingly kinda, God seems to introduce himself. He goes, I’m God.
 I’m the God of Isaac, the God of Abraham. And God makes it very clear that he actually is with Jacob. Jacob has lied about it before, but actually, God is there. The Lord meets Jacob, this complete jerk who has not known God before as anything but a card to play.
 He meets him in the wilderness in this moment of complete displacement, uncertainty, exile from everything and everybody he knows. And God’s been with him all along. Imagine as Jacob sees these angels, these messengers climbing up and down the staircase to heaven, touching the earth right next to where he now lies. He realizes, I have never been on my own.
 All of this striving, all of this scheming, Not that he’s gonna let any of that go anytime soon, as we read forward. But his life has been in God’s hands all along. God moves him towards fulfilling the promise that he made to his grandfather, Abraham. And so it’s kind of funny in a way that Jacob names the place that he’s in, this cave, this spot in the desert, he names it Bethel, which means the house of God.
 It’s not as if this random cave is the gate to heaven. This is not the place where the angels come and go. On the contrary, wherever Jacob is, there’s God. This is just the first time he’s seen God there.
 Listen to verse 16. When Jacob woke from his sleep, he thought to himself, the Lord is definitely in this place, but I didn’t know it. Wherever he walks is holy ground and it always has been. The same way this spot right here and your life and my daily life is holy ground because God is with us.
 Not just Sunday, not just in the sanctuary, every spot, every moment is a place where heaven and earth meet, where there’s a staircase between earth and heaven. God is not far away. All sorts of people, Christian or not, this is a human universal, seem to look for experiences of God at what have been called thin places, if you’re familiar with that term. These places where heaven and earth seem closer together than elsewhere.
 And there is something to that. Humanity has made pilgrimages for millennia to try to meet God in a special way. Think of the millions of Catholics who go to places where a vision of the Virgin Mary has been sighted. They go there because they want to see God in some way.
 Think of Christian travelers who go to remote windswept British islands that are dotted with monasteries to learn how to pray. Or think of the people who make trips to Jerusalem to walk where Jesus walked. They go there because they want to see God in a different, closer way. Or closer to home.
 Think of places like Jomonville, where children and adults alike feel they’ve gotten to know and meet Jesus in a special way, different than in day-to-day life. But that’s a matter of our perception, not of how present God actually is. God isn’t actually closer to us in these places that feel magical to us. God’s right here.
 Like Jacob, it’s hard for us to notice the angels ascending and descending right in front of our noses until we get some mystical vision of it happening. And then we find that we’re surprised that God is with us all along because we so rarely feel it. The famous priest and writer Thomas Merton tells of an experience that he had as a young man in 1958. He was walking among shops on the corner of 4th and Walnut Street in the very non-magical city of Louisville, Kentucky, on a perfectly average day.
 And he remembers in the midst of shopping, just buying stuff, getting some shoes, whatever, He was suddenly overwhelmed amidst the crowds on the sidewalk with love for all the people around him. He was just overflowing with love for all of these strangers that he didn’t know while he was out buying shoes. The holiness of that very regular place of these people he’d never see again in his life just overtook him. Now if you’ve been a Methodist for even a couple years, I’m sure you’ve heard the similar story that marked the moment of John Wesley’s transformation in 1738.
 He wrote in his diary, In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle of the Romans. Doesn’t start out very magical, right? About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation. An assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
 It’s not that John Wesley had never met God before that time. It’s not that God wasn’t there until that moment. That was the moment he opened his eyes and could see. And I can tell you that for me, I’ve had at least one moment like that myself.
 Whenever I was 18, between high school and college, Stormy and I went on a mission trip to Guatemala. We were in El Quiche, which is a northern region. Lots of Maya people live there. Almost nobody speaks Spanish.
 They’re all Maya Indians. And our host took us up to a hill outside town. You can see for miles across the valley, just this flat valley surrounded by high, cold mountains. And this hill had always been a significant landmark in the area.
 For a very long time before Christianity came to dominate, it had been the site of sacrifices. It was like a pagan temple. They would sacrifice animals, things like that there. Later in the 1980s and ’90s, it was a fort and an outpost during the Guatemalan Civil War.
 That was a genocidal war. It killed like 200,000 people. And standing in that spot at sunset on this place that had been a temple, that had been a fort, looking out over an enormous cemetery on one hand and this village in front of us and thinking Thinking about all the dark history that had flooded this place, I had this sense, this overwhelming sense, that Jesus is the hope for healing and redeeming the whole world, the only hope. And I wanted to devote my life to being part of that work.
 So here I am. That was the moment where things started to shift. And it can be tough to hold on to, but here is the key day after day. The Lord is definitely in this place, but I didn’t know it.
 Wherever you are, wherever you go, whatever challenges and joys you encounter in your days, whoever you have been, for better or for worse, God is right here, right there. And God’s angels, God’s messengers are ascending and descending right in front of you. If you go up to heaven, he’s there, the psalm tells us. If you descend to the depths of hell, he’s there.
 If you fly to the far side of the sea, if you are hidden in deepest darkness, he’s still there. The love and the promise of God is yours. On this day I pray that you will receive and perceive that presence in a new way. Open your eyes and see the God who has never left you alone.
 In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO].