Trapped no more
Notes
Transcript
Intro
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the advice that, ‘if they’re giving it away for free,’ you’re the product. The other day an ad popped up on facebook and I signed up to receive a free book on how I can better support people with eating disorders. I know people struggling with body image, I thought. This is free, really, ok I’m in! Great! I just needed to give them all my details, my phone number, home address, year of birth, why I was interested, etc. etc.
And then they called me. Would you like to donate to support our work. I couldn’t get a word in as the lady on the phone went on and on. I eventually hung up. The booklet finally came in the post, soggy from the rain. It was only four pages. All stuff I could have found on their website.
It wasn’t a free gift. They got all my details. I was the product. I felt pretty stupid.
But I knew next time when I saw on facebook that Conservation Australia was giving away a ‘free’ packet of seeds, it wasn’t really a free gift. I learned to be a little more sceptical. This is how the world is.
But it cuts the other way too. I remember hearing of a woman on the radio that they were calling because she had won a prize. Nah, you’re pulling my leg, she said. They couldn’t convince her it wasn’t a scam. Or I’ve got a friend that’s so worried about cyber security she doesn’t like anyone to save her address on her phone. Once I had to navigate to her house. I got lost, I couldn’t find her house! It’s possible someone really is wanting to give a gift, or to do something good for us, but we might be so sceptical, so determined not to be taken advantage of, that we miss out on the gift.
It doesn’t take long to realise that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want good things, you need to take them for yourself, don’t trust anyone too much, and always keep your eyes open for a scam.
But what if that means we’re missing out on a real gift?
Today as we continue in the story of Jacob – we’ll see a picture of a man brought to his knees (literally) as he tries to use his craftiness to get God’s gifts without God himself. Jacob wants to be clever because he thinks if he can take God’s gifts for himself by his own smarts then he’s still in control. But of course, it is his very craftiness that stops him receiving God’s blessing.
But here’s the good news, God gets through to even the craftiest and cleverest of schemers. And there’s good news for us too, because Jesus offers us another kind of wisdom that cuts through the need to scheme and be clever to protect ourselves, so that we too can receive God himself.
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Context
As we saw a couple of weeks ago, Jacob was blessed by God before he was born. When he was in the womb, it was prophesied that he would be the one that would inherit God’s promises rather than his twin brother Esau.
But this wasn’t enough for him. Jacob didn’t want to receive the blessing as a gift, he wanted to take the blessing.
Jacob was smart. So he knew the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent in the garden. He looked back at Adam and eve and thought to himself: Idiots! How could they get tricked by a talking snake? But instead of learning to trust God as the source of knowledge of good and evil, he looked at that story and thought. If I want to get ahead, I need to be like that snake.
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So he kind of latches onto the idea of using tasty food to tempt people to make bad decisions. I mean, Jesus says be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but Jacob just goes with the serpent bit! And it works for him. He fools his brother Esau with some lentil soup into giving him the family inheritance, and he fools his Dad with some spicy goat into blessing him instead of Esau. I mean look at that food, I’d probably be tempted too.
Now of course this didn’t go down too well with Esau. But Jacob was ready. He knew the story of Cain and Abel. He looked at Abel and thought. ‘Idiot!’ How could abel have been so naive? The message Jacob took home was not ‘I am my brother’s keeper’ as you might hope, but, when brothers get jealous they tend to kill, so he runs away.
Jacob is the guy determined not to be scammed or taken in. And it’s kinda worked so far, except for the completely dysfunctional family, he becomes rich and successful.
And so we arrive at today’s story. In Genesis 32, Jacob has been on the run from his brother, but now Esau is coming. And Jacob is terrified because he hears that Esau has an army of four hundred men with him coming to kill Jacob and everyone with him.
But don’t worry, Jacob, as always, has a plan.
First plan, he’ll divide his group in two, so if Esau attacks, half of them can escape.
Clever, right.
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But that’s not all. He’s going to try to pacify Esau with gifts.
He sends out flocks of sheep ahead of him as presents for Esau. Maybe that will calm Esau down. Failing that, it will at least slow him down. It’s a lot harder to attack when you’re also managing a big herd of livestock. You see, Jacob is a schemer, and a gift is never just a gift. He’s too smart for that.
But he’s still not sure that will work. And so he reaches for the final card up his sleeve. The very last ditch effort that he hopes will save his skin: prayer.
That’s right, here’s this guy, blessed by God, chosen to carry on the promises to Abraham, he’s literally had visions of angels, but until now, he’s never prayed.
Because he doesn’t want to be in God’s debt - there’s no such thing as a free lunch right? But now, for the first time in his life, he addresses God and prays for help.
From verse 9...
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‘O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac... I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant... Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. 12 Yet you have said, “I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea.”’
It seems pretty good right? A good prayer?
But there’s a hint in his prayer that, even now, Jacob has got a scheme going, and he’s trying it out on God.
Have a look, who does he address the prayer to? Whose God is it? [congregation participates]
Not Jacob’s God.
He’s not willing to call God his God. He wants God’s gifts, God’s protection, God’s blessing. But I’m not sure he wants God himself in his life.
Now Jacob is a pretty extreme example, but actually, when it comes to this prayer, well actually, some things about it are not too different from prayers I’ve prayed, and maybe you’ve prayed too. ‘God you should really help me with this problem in my life,’ but I’m thinking, God, you kind of owe me this one.
Sometimes we can try to have it both ways. We want to hold onto our cleverness, not be fooled by anything, stay in control – and fair enough, we know how the world works – but we also don’t want to miss out on any gifts God might offer. We want God’s gifts, but not the giver. And so we negotiate with God. We work on some sly deals. God, you can have this part of my life, I’ll do this for you, but I’m not going to consider that, and this part of my life is off the table.
In response to a cynical world, we become schemers too.
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Well the story goes on, Jacob wrestles through the night with the mysterious figure. When the figure sees that Jacob is someone who will never give up, he injures him. Now our translation has ‘struck it on the hip socket.’
It was perhaps a little more painful than that. The Hebrew is more like ‘inner thigh’ or ‘groin.’ Jacob is punched in the groin here. It really doesn’t get more painful or humbling than that. But, typical of Jacob, he still determined not to get out of the situation without something. He asks for a blessing and receives a new name – Israel – it means ‘struggles with God’. The sun comes up, and Jacob – or Israel as we should now call him – limps away. It’s a lesson he’ll never forget.
Now I don’t think any of us are trying to do deals with God to get him to protect us from a brother who is trying to kill us - if you are, please call the police. But there are plenty of ways that we might try to get God’s blessings, without God himself.
I’ll just mention two today: the way we use the Bible, and the way we use our money.
As I was preparing this talk, I came across a quote:
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The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly...
Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.
Sounds like it could have been written yesterday.
But this is a quote that’s 200 years old from a Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. And he’s not anti-intellectual, he’s a philosopher for heaven’s sake.
True, some parts of the Bible are hard to understand, which is why we work at it. But Kierkegaard knows human hearts. Our tendency to use our cleverness to dodge God, to try call ourselves good Christians, receive God’s gifts, but keep God at arm’s length.
We’ve been spending some time over the last weeks in the Old Testament, and sometimes it’s hard work - like most things worth doing. But we’re working hard together. And if you’re confused or just want to discuss things - my door is always open!
But other times, we’re tempted to use our smarts to discount God’s word, so that we don’t have to engage with it. This is not coming out of genuine questioning, but out of a desire not to be challenged.
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The big one, when it comes to the Old Testament, is to discount it on moral grounds. I mean look at the violence. You can’t deny it’s pretty disturbing in parts. The problem is when, instead of taking these questions to God and wrestling with him through scripture, we just dismiss it as no longer relevant. We might say to ourselves, this was clearly written by primitive people, so I don’t need to pay attention to it. But this can be a way of avoiding an encounter with God.
Or perhaps we have questions about who wrote it - especially the Old Testament. Some people believe that God narrated the scroll of genesis to Moses word for word. Others believe that it came to us through oral traditions that were influenced by but also differed in important ways from other near eastern stories. The authors claimed that Yaweh is not like the gods of the other nations - these traditions were gradually compiled by editors and passed on by scribes over centuries. This could also be the case.
But whether it was dictated to Moses or put together through a prolonged process of editing has absolutely no bearing on whether it’s God’s word. The bible itself says that God can speak through a donkey. He’s absolutely capable of guiding and inspiring a bunch of editors.
Wherever we land on these questions, they aren’t an excuse, a way of dodging God himself.
Instead, I challenge you to lean in. Take your questions to God and wrestle with him. Don’t let him off the hook! But be warned, in a wrestle with God, he will win and you might get injured, but you’ll be blessed by the encounter.
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Another way I wonder that we might be tempted to use our cleverness to avoid God is with our money. It could happen two ways. Instead of being fully generous, we try and manipulate God with money thinking that, if I donate to that charity or that ministry, well then God really owes me. And we expect God to pay us back somehow, with money, or in our relationships or health of whatever else.
Or it can happen the other way – and I know this is where I’m tempted. I hold back on being generous, keeping money aside, telling myself I’m saving it for a truly good cause. That’s wise, right? Only the really truly good cause never comes, and the money I meant to give away is still sitting in my bank account.
You can see how both of these approaches might feel wise, feel like the clever thing to do, but actually they’re both ways of using our smarts to avoid God and to stay in control. But God is onto our schemes. He knows how our hearts work.
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So here we are. We should all just trust God more, stop playing games with him. I can finish the sermon now, we can sing a couple of songs and go home.
Can I? Can the sermon just end there? Is it enough just to say trust God more?
If we ended here (and some of you might think I’ve spoken for long enough), this would be a bad sermon.
Because the thing is, no matter how much we tell ourselves to trust God more - we can’t. We can’t because we’re swimming in a culture where we always to be on guard in case someone takes advantage of us. What good is it telling you to be more trusting everything in our world tells us otherwise?
The thing is, our problem with scheming doesn’t just come from our brains. It’s deeper than that. It’s sunk deep into our hearts. Just telling ourselves to think differently isn’t going to cut it.
We can’t stop here, but Jacob’s story doesn’t stop here either.
The sun dawns the next day after Jacob’s night of wrestling. Jacob is now disabled with this hip injury. He couldn’t fight Esau even if he wanted. He’s been forced to be totally vulnerable.
Jacob approaches, bowing to the ground seven times, not daring to look up.
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But Esau sees Jacob and runs towards him. I wonder if Jacob thought he was about to cop it. But, to his surprise, Esau doesn’t attack him. He embraces him.
“Esau said, ‘I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.’”
Jacob is forgiven.
And his response is profound.
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“to see your face is like seeing the face of God—since you have received me with such favour.”
Jacob saw God in Esau, because Esau shows us what God is like.
The story ends with Jacob arriving in the city of Shechem and when he gets there he builds an altar called “El-Elohe-Israel.” That is an altar to God, the God of Israel – God the God of Jacob. Jacob had been blessed by God since birth, but it was only now, through his experience of radical grace from his brother Esau that Jacob knows God. God became not just the God of his father and grandfather, but his God.
You know, I think Jesus had Esau in mind when he told the story of the father’s embrace of his prodigal son. You know the story. Like Jacob, the prodigal son takes his family inheritance, something that would have been his anyway, he rejects his family and runs off. But despite the offence of his son’s behaviour, the father forgives his son, and runs out to meet him. Jesus is telling us that the grace Esau shows to Jacob is the same grace God shows to us.
Friends, this is the only way to repair a heart that is addicted to scheming and suspicion – the radical generosity of God that tells us there is no need to behave like that, you are free from that because, like Esau, you already have everything in Christ.
Jesus is our true elder brother, who despite all our failures, like Esau runs to embrace us. But of course, in this case, Jesus is the one who became vulnerable, who took on weakness and injury for us. Jesus’ death on the cross shows us another kind of wisdom that is completely unlike the scheming we see in our world. The world tells us that you need to protect yourself because everyone is potentially going to take advantage of you. The cross tells us that there is nothing that God will hold back from us. There is no need to watch our back when God is the God who becomes vulnerable, even to the point of death, for the sake of a bunch of crafty schemers like you and me.
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As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians.
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
No one could have predicted the cross. God becoming nothing. Christ crucified is another kind of wisdom to the wisdom Jacob was following, and it’s a wisdom that brings freedom. The cross shows us that Jesus has no other agenda other than to bring us into his family. And as this truth sinks deep into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, the desire to keep ourselves on guard from God, falls away. This is what changes our hearts.
Knowing that Jesus has held nothing back from us is the only way we’re going to be freed to use our money and resources to be generous. It’s the only reason we would continue to turn to scripture even if the bible is sometimes hard to understand.
Friends, God does not want us to placate him with gifts or to scheme to somehow get the most out of him. He just wants us to come to him. In fact, he’d rather a wrestling match with us than we keep him at arm’s length, at a safe distance. So whether you’re up for a wrestle, or ready simply for that embrace, the message of Jacob’s story is that God wants to be a generous father to us, if we would only receive that gift.