Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
This is an interactive manuscript. To follow links, click the highlighted words below.
Recently you’ve gotten to hear about some of the difficult times I had in seminary, especially after a terrible and emotionally-wrecking time in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).
After my experience, and my inability to even discuss it, my seminary and diocese thought I hadn’t gotten enough out of the experience. They felt I needed to go through it all over again.
It was agonizing, as I’ve said before. I already had been making plans to serve at a small church I’d helped before. More than that, it meant diving back into one of the worst experiences of my life. It made me frightened and angry. It made me wrestle in my relationship with God.
My second unit of CPE was not what I expected. I found a completely different type of program, one that wasn’t involved in hospital work like most units. This one took seminarians and placed them in various church-lead non-profits throughout Atlanta.
I chose to go to the Friendship Center, the primary ministry of Holy Comforter Episcopal Church near Little Five Points in Atlanta. The Friendship Center works with those living with various mental illness or disabilities. I say primary ministry because these participants made up the vast majority of the church’s congregation.
I loved my time at Holy Comforter in Atlanta. It one of the great highlights of my seminary education, possibly my whole ministry. I loved working with those parishioners, and they were wonderful in how they shared that love back. Even as I was wrestling with God and my relationship with Him, I was able to find joy working in the church.
Making me go back to CPE should not have happened. As I mentioned recently, it made me angry at those who made me go through for what they had done. Unfortunately that made me angry at God too.
Yet out of all the hardship, injustice, and anger something good resulted. I received a wonderful gift at Holy Comforter in Atlanta, and as a result I got to do some good work for what is often a vulnerable population.
Sometimes we face hardships. Sometimes that makes us challenge God. Those dark times, though, often result in something good.
In Genesis, we see a literal wrestling between Jacob and a stranger we often identify with God, just as Jacob does later in this reading. Jacob holds the stranger down, but ends up having his hip thrown out of socket, a permanent injury he lived with for the rest of his life.
Yet out of that hardship, good does come. Jacob not only receives the stranger’s blessing, he receives a new name: Israel. This name is cared on by God’s Chosen People, showing that the blessing Jacob received not only impacted him, but all his descendants still yet to come.
Those descendants, the children of Israel, are the subject of Paul’s words to the Romans. Now this is a conversation we don’t get a lot of context for in our readings for today or in the coming weeks. This section spans to the end of chapter 11, three chapters in total.
Paul talks about what we see a great deal in the Tanakh, the books we refer to as the Old Testament. There the Ancient Israelites are often rebellious, to the point that they must wander 40 years in the Desert before going to the land God had promised them.
Their rebellion doesn’t end there. As they make their new home, they still fall away from God time and time again. As the final result, the nations around them conquer them and they are exiled from the home God gave them.
Even after they returned, the Ancient Israelites still don’t quite get it. They often struggled with holding the word of the Law over the spirit of the Law. That spirit comes directly from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. You might be more familiar with these verses in how Jesus quotes them when He gives us the Two Great Commandments.
The struggle between word and spirit of the Law is something we see directly in Scripture. In Ezra and Nehemiah, we see the Ancient Israelites return after the Exile. When they find the scrolls of the Law while rebuilding the Temple, they see the law about not marrying foreign wives. Since they have been living abroad for so long, most of them have married foreigners, so they put them out.
In doing so they forget what all the Law says about letting the stranger in and how others might come in to join the People of Israel. They forget the truth that the Book of Ruth was written to remind them of, that King David himself was a descendant of Ruth, a foreigner who married a Hebrew.
The struggle in understanding the Law continues up to Jesus’ time. Herein lies most of the conflicts Jesus has with the leaders of His fellow Jewish people in His day. It doesn’t end with Jesus either. Many Jewish leaders continued to persecute the early followers of the Way, as Christians called themselves at the time. Paul himself was one of these persecutors.
Yet in this rejection, many of the Gentiles are able to come in and receive God’s Grace, as Paul tells the Romans. In chapter 11, Paul compares this to grafting. That is when you take a branch and connect it to another tree in such a way that it begins to be a part of that tree and grows with it.
This, Paul says, is what has happened with the Gentiles. As God’s Chosen rebelled, it opened up the way for the Gentiles to join in through the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. That in turn, as Paul tell us, will lead the People of Israel to come back into the fold. In this way, the wrestling that start all the way back with Jacob/Israel himself has given the opportunity for all people to join in. At the same time, it allows for God to fulfill His promise, the promise made to Abraham all those years ago.
Wrestling with God is hard. It can lead us to exile, wandering blindly, anger, or even having our joints torn out of our sockets. It can lead to a lot of bad things for us.
At the same time, a lot of good can result from it. This can be unexpected good, the kind of unanticipated thing like Jesus feeding 5000 people with just 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread, on His day off even!
There are times we all find ourselves wrestling with God, or at least encountering things that lead us to wrestle with God. The results are never good, and yet God often works something good out of our wrestling and rebellion, whether for ourselves or for others. The hope is that we can see that good and follow Paul’s hope in laying down our strife, seeing the unexpected things God has worked, and returning, once again, back to the fold.