Service sheet, with readings and links to hymns
As I pondered this week’s readings, the word “waiting” came to mind. Everyone in these readings is waiting for something. Jacob is heading off to his mother’s homeland in search of a wife. Everything in his life ahead is uncertain.
The Apostle Paul says that the whole creation is waiting in eager longing, that it is in labor pains. It is waiting for a new birth.
And Jesus tells a parable about weeds being sown among a good crop of wheat. The servants in the parable ask if they should not root up the weeds, but the householder says no, let the weeds and the wheat grow up together. Wait until harvest time, in other words, to see what is good and what is bad.
Wait.
But as I thought about waiting, I thought, well, wait a minute. I think I’ve preached on waiting already this year.
So I went looking. And yes, sure enough, there on the last Sunday before Lent, February 23, I preached a sermon in which I asked you, “What are you waiting for?” And the week before, I preached on living in the moment. Don’t worry about the past or the future, I said. Worry does not do any of us any good.
And even though Covid-19 was already unleashed in the world, little did I know, little did any of us know, that just a few weeks later, our churches would be shut, and we would be waiting to see what happened with the coronavirus.
And so we have waited. And we continue to wait. We expected the next phase of the Government’s reopening to start on Monday, but we have heard that it will not. So now we wait until 10 August to see what happens in the meantime. We wait with eager longing to see what will unfold in this land and elsewhere, as though we are in labor pains to see what kind of world is born from this disease and its downstream effects.
But let’s go back to Jacob for the moment. Jacob is one of those characters in the Book of Genesis that makes people ask, “This guy is in the Bible. Am I supposed to be like him?” In other words, is he really a model of good behavior that I am supposed to follow?
Well, no, not in all respects. Jacob is crafty and scheming. He is a twin, the second-born. Last week we heard how he tricked his older brother Esau into selling him his birthright as the first-born, and all for a bowl of stew. After that event, Jacob tricks his father Isaac into giving him the blessing that rightly belongs to Esau as first-born. Never mind that their mother, Rebecca, put Jacob up to it and helped set up the whole scheme. By this point, Esau is steaming mad and he threatens to kill Jacob. So Rebecca sends Jacob packing off to her brother, with the excuse that he needs to find himself a wife.
And as he sets off, he stops in a place for the night, and there he has this dream that we heard in our reading: He sees a ladder extending into heaven, with angels going up and down on it, and he hears God speaking to him, promising to bring him back to this land he is leaving, and again confirming that his descendants will extend in all directions and will be as numerous as the dust of the earth. It’s the promise God had made to Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham. And Jacob wakes up and recognizes that he has been touched by God. He renames the place “Bethel,” which means “house of God.” It becomes a place of great importance throughout the Bible.
And then Jacob sets off into the unknown. What has not happened yet, but we know from reading Genesis, is that he will end up at the house of his uncle, Laban, who is as deceitful and cunning as Jacob is. He will end up working fourteen years for Laban in order to be able to marry Laban’s daughter Rachel. There’s a bit more to it, but all that happens in next week’s reading. For now it is enough to say that Jacob heads off into an uncertain future, fleeing from a brother who wants to kill him, and not knowing what fortune awaits him in his mother’s homeland.
He is living with fear and uncertainty. But he sets off having been touched by God. He goes with the assurance of a promise. He is being held and watched over by the God of his forefathers, but more than that, by the Creator of heaven and earth, who knows him exactly as he is, but promises him blessings anyway. It is as if Jacob is wrapped in a mantle of protection and grace as he goes forth into the unknown.
We live now in the midst of uncertainty. Perhaps we wait with eager longing to see what kind of world will unfold from Covid-19. Perhaps we fear what it will be as we look around us.
But we cannot just wait. Jacob set off with a promise that he would return to his homeland. But he could not live every moment wondering when that would be. He just had to live, with whatever was happening to him right then, as events unfolded.
And so do we. Our focus cannot be waiting to see what will be, with each phase of a government’s roadmap or with each medical report. Because Covid or no Covid, our focus is still rightly the same as it always was: living in a way that is true to God and to who God calls us to be. It is to live led by the Spirit of God.
Paul writes, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” Well, we live in suffering times, but if Paul were here now, the glory he speaks of would not be everything returning to what it was before this virus hit. I doubt it would even be a world made better by getting rid of the various societal ills we were confronting before Covid and still face now: homelessness, and racism, and poverty, and environmental concerns. You know the list.
Waiting with eager longing to see what happens with Covid-19, and even waiting for a better world, are different from waiting for the glory to be revealed to us. Yes, our world is in labor pains, perhaps with the hope that Covid-19 might actually make us wake up to where our focus needs to be: living in a way true to God and waiting for redemption, asking for redemption — meaning utter forgiveness and open arms and open hands welcoming us into God’s presence. It is the promise given to us by Christ, and he was the means, the way, for it to happen.
The promise is that we are God’s children, that we receive redemption, and that we can go through life wrapped in a mantle of protection and grace — not that nothing bad happens to us (Jacob suffered lots in his life), but that the Spirit of God lives in us, so we can face an unknown future without fear.