“Jacob’s Dream” Genesis 27:1-4, 15-23; 28:10-17

  A few weeks ago in worship I prayed a prayer thanking God that not everyone in scripture is perfect. That prayer was prayed in the context of 1 Corinthians and how it reminds us of God’s redemption even when we are broken people. Friends, that exact same prayer could be prayed over the story of Jacob as well. 

Often when we think of Jacob we equate him with the new name that he received from God - Israel. He was the father of the twelve tribes. He was one of the patriarchs of the nation of Israel. And he was not perfect. 

The story of Jaco is a fascinating one. Literally from the moment he came out his mother’s womb grasping on his brother’s heel, he spent his entire life trying to get one foot up in the world by any means necessary. And sometimes those means were a bit unsavory. Instead of feeding his twin brother when he was hungry, he had him sell off his birth rite for a bowl of stew. He went to his elderly father, whose vision was failing, and pretended he was his brother so he could get his final blessing. It doesn’t necessarily get better for quite a while from that point in Jacob’s story - but by the end of his life you can tell that he is a man who had been changed by the grace of God. 

But that isn’t where we find ourselves at today. Not yet. This is closer to the beginning of Jacob’s story, where he is being sent away for his life. His brother Esau, for who that final blessing of Issac was actually intended, is none too happy that it too has been stolen from him and actually threatened to kill him. So Jacob is sent off, on the run if you will, to go and live with his mother’s brother, his uncle, Laben. It’s a long journey, that he wasn’t apparently prepared for. And while on the run, God’s grace catches up to Jacob in the form of a dream.

God came to Jacob, yes that Jacob, and said: 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, east, north, and south. Every family of earth will be blessed because of you and your descendants. Why Jacob? Why now? Why will he become the one to carry on the promise given to Abraham?

I sometimes wonder if we have some of those same questions about ourselves. Who are we to be the one through whom God is going to reach out to this community? Who are we for God to call us to be partners in spreading the Gospel message? Why us? Why now? Especially in all of our flaws and brokenness and sin?

But then we look at people in scripture like Jacob and realize that if God can use them, then God can use us. God came to Jacob and gave him a vision that was so much bigger than anything he could imagine on his own and essentially said - I’m going to use you in this way. I know that its so big.  But trust and believe that I am going to be with you every where that you will go. 

Friends, are those the type of visions that we are praying for in this place? Visions of revival? Visions that are so big that we know that they have to from God? Because that’s what I see when I look at Biblical visions like this - they are so large that they challenge even the most fearful among us and call for us to trust God. 

  Jacob knew when he woke up that he was standing on holy ground. And that thought terrified him. He was struck by the fact that he was in the awesome presence of the Lord Almighty. So he made a monument, a sign of worship, and made a promise that the Lord would be his God. 

We are a people full of excuses. If anyone knows that it’s Jacob. Why did he buy the birth rite - because life isn’t fair. Why did he steal the blessing - because his mother told him too. Why was he on the run - because his brother unfairly was trying to kill him. 

But at some point all of our excuses run out, friends, and we come face to face with God. For Jacob it was in a dream. A dream that he had not earned and did not deserve, but came from God any way. 

When we set down our excuses church, we can pick up trust and confidence in our God. Confidence that even when God is calling us to big things, that we can respond. 

Jacob may not have been asking God for a vision, but God showed up anyway. 

If that’s what happen when we fail to ask God to show up, what do you think can actually happen if we call upon the name of the Lord? 

It’s time for us to set down our excuses. That we are too young or too old. That we don’t have enough people. That no one shows up. That we don’t have enough kids. And pick up trust in the Lord my friends. It’s time for us to claim the promise of God, even if we don’t understand it.

Jacob probably had grown up hearing about this promise land that his dad would talk about. He would have grown up hearing about his grandfather Abraham and how God counted it as righteousness that he left his home and family in order to follow God. And now here is Jacob, utterly broken in spirit, being told that he was the one chosen to live into that promise of old.

Friends, the past year and a half have felt a lot like a breaking, have they not? They have taken us apart from what we are comfortable with and set us in an unfamiliar place. But it is in this place that we, like Jacob, can clearly hear the call of God. If we are willing to listen. 

Now is the time for us to trust and believe in the Lord our God. We need to pray to the God for a vision that moves us forward, out of the place of who we once were into the place of who we will be. We pray that God open up our hearts to be stirring with the Holy Spirit. We pray that God start to give us glimpses of vision in our hearts. 

What does that look like? I don’t know. But I do know that the next right step is to pray and then to wait on the Lord. Would you join me, my friends? Would you join me in seeking the face of God? Amen. 

“The Creation of the World” Genesis 1:1—2:4a

 At my first church I spent time volunteering with the Wesley Foundation at Penn State. Every day we would have folks around to talk to students as they arrived at the free coffee house run by the foundation and then each Sunday we would have an evening worship service. While the service itself was mostly run by the students, I was privileged a few times to preach. One of those times of privilege came as part of a sermon series that I still think of today called “The Attributes of God.”

Attributes seems like such a large word, but then again God is so big that any words would use to describe him seem small in comparison. The first week of that sermon series, right after the students arrived on campus was “God is the uncreated creator”.

If we are going to tell the story of our God and how there are none that are like him, a good place to start is at the beginning. The very beginning. With the book of Genesis and the story of creation. It is here that we find out that “In the beginning God created.”

Let’s stop there at those first few words. In the beginning. God existed, brothers and sisters, before time itself. God existed before anything else even was. In other words, before God started to create all that was present was nothing. Sometimes we describe that as chaos. When nothing had order. When nothing was. And God spoke everything into creation into being from that moment in the beginning. 

I want you to let that grandness wash over you again this day as we dive into these words from Genesis 1. God spent the first few days of creation making the earth into something that would a habitat. God created land and earth. Sea and sky. Day and night. In other words before human beings or any animal of the sea, sky, or earth came to be, God made a place for them. 

God did nothing by accident. Even when everything around God seemed to be a void made only of chaos, God still took control, creating exactly what we would need even before we knew we needed it. 

God is so much bigger than anything we can even begin to imagine. Let’s put some numbers to the vastness of God’s creation that came to be with us in mind. The sun, that which warms us and brings around the light of the day, is 93 million miles away from the earth. God placed the sun exactly where it needed to be. 

Then on the fifth day, God created inhabitants for this perfect place of God’s creation, all out of God’s imagination and love. God filled the earth with all sorts of creatures, finally resulting in God creating human beings in God’s very image to be stewards over all of this beauty that God had called forth. 

Why is this story of God creation so important? Because it reminds us of the strength and majesty of our God. Sometimes, my friends, we fail to live as people who live into this call to domino and stewardship that God granted us with on the sixth day of creation. Sometimes we arrogantly start to act like we were the ones who brought creation into being, the most powerful, and when we start to think like that - we push God father and farther from the place of honor that he deserves in our lives. 

When God created he didn’t just create things - he created a whole new order. A new way of being. And then created us with a call to relationship. See, while God did speak to earth into being, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t intimately involved. No. God wanted to know us and love us. From the biggest moments of our lives to the smallest details of our days, God wants to be involved and God wants to walk with us. 

I was speaking with a friend recently about prayer. As she was listing all of the things that she brought to God in prayer - I noted the things that seemed to be absent. The small parts of her day. That brought us into this powerful conversation about how we invite God into the little things - the things that we don’t think are worth God’s time or we think we can handle on our own. For inviting God into each and every decision we make, that is when we learn to trust into our God who is above all and in all and through all. 

What would happen if we again embraced God as the uncreated creator? What would happen if we asked God to help us grow in our fascination of all that he has done for us? What would a healthy awe and reverence for our God who is infinite and immanent? In other words there is no way to measure how big God is, yet he is in everything, even to the smallest moments of our day?

It is not lost on me that this was the first attribute that my colleague preached to hurried college students out of a fourteen-week sermon series. I think in her wisdom she knew that in the chaos of moving into dorms, starting new classes, meeting new friends, that they needed a reminder that God was with them every moment of every day. 

But that reminder is not just needed by college students at the beginning of a new semester. It is equally needed by you and me right now. We need to be reminded of God’s strength and majesty. We need God to capture the attention of our heart and call us to our knees with anything and everything in prayer. 

We are in need of people who realize that the call to discipleship is a call to putting God in the right place in their lives - not off on a shelf until they feel like something is being enough to need him. But right at the very center of every day. 

Friends, may this be your day of new beginning. A new beginning of your relationship with God. God who creates, loves, and sustains. God who brings order to the chaos of our lives and provides what we need before we even know that we need it. God who created out of nothing, but called everything that he created “very good”. Let us step boldly into this place where we declare that we do not own God, but instead we follow the God who loves us, in everything we do, every single day. Amen. 

“Mutual Consolation of the Saints” Matthew 18:15-20

 “Be kind.” “Treat one another with respect.” “Say you’re sorry if you hurt someone.” Simple directions that we teach the youngest of children, and yet they still flummox us as adults. 

In some ways it seems odd that this idea of mutual consolation of the saints finds itself into a discussion about the sacraments. We have spent the last month together diving deep into the meaning of baptism and holy communion in our lives - which are strictly speaking the only two sacraments of our particular faith tradition. However, its the meaning in our lives part, that draws us into this discussion on the concluding week of this particular series. 

I grew up in a day and time when “community” was used as a buzzword. In fact, I went to a Wesleyan college that prided itself on being a Christian community - but if you asked any of us who attended what that actually meant, we probably wouldn’t be able to tell you in concrete terms. As a result, this idea of Christian community became elusive and we were pretty disappointed. 

The same thing can happen in churches. We fail to define what it means to be the Church, the body of Christ, and as a result, we all bring in our own expectations, which often leaves us feeling disappointed. 

Today’s scripture lesson is one that is unique to Matthew - you won’t find it in the other Gospels. Jesus is about to head towards Jerusalem, where he knows the death that is awaiting him. So he is desperately trying to explain this Kingdom thing to the disciples again - because when he is gone, its all going to be entrusted into their hands. To go and make the Gospel known. To go and really live it out. 

And maybe its the living it out part that Jesus knows is going to be tricky. Remember that at this point, Jesus’s followers are Jewish. They are living under the rule of the Roman government. And Jesus, he’s about to send them out to live this way that is contrary to anything and everything that they see around them. In fact, it was different from the way of life that they knew about. 

Jesus knows that these faith communities focusing on the Kingdom of God are going to need one another, so he wants to leave them with some concrete instructions - if you have disagreements, which you will, this is how you disagree differently. This is how you support one another on this side of eternity.

But because we are on this side of eternity, the community that we create is going to be imperfect. And in its imperfection, we are going to find some imperfect people, people like you and like me, who don’t get it right all of the time. So we need to know how to live when things aren’t as we expected. 

So what does that look like? Chiefly never giving up. Yes, we know that sin breaks apart are human relationships, but Jesus is essentially saying, you keep going back to that person until they truly listen to you. Why? Because they are your brother or sister and you need them. And they need you. 

In essence, Jesus is telling us how to love one another when its hard.

Friends, that is a message that we still need to hear today. Because we are imperfect community of human beings, there are times that we are going to hurt one another. We may not intend to, but it can still happen. There are times when we will let our own wants self-centeredly guide us over and above thinking about what is best of the body. There are going to be times when we think we know everything and rush in to make a sweeping decision, when there are really some other voices we need to hear from first. 

So what are we going to do on days like that? What are we going to do when it is hard to love the person who is sitting next to us in the pew?

The way of the world tells us to write them off. Someone wrongs you? You don’t need them in your life any more. Think of how many times this has been the broken approach to even some of our most important relationships. 

Other times we try to tell others who are hurt how they should act, saying things like “well that’s just how that person is” or “you need to get over it.”

Resting in-between those two extremes is this third way of Jesus. A way that is marked by continually showing up for one in a way that doesn’t make excuses or seeks to cut people off, but instead has the sole purpose of building up the body. 

Which is something we do not see modeled in the world around us. 

This way of Jesus is about reaching out to a person who has sinned or caused harm and saying, we want to walk alongside out in a way that builds you up and restores this community to right relationships. And we are going to keep showing up again and again and again.

In many ways it reminds me of Peter asking Jesus how many times he should forgive a brother or sister - is seven too many? To which Jesus replies, no seventy times seven. 

In other words, saying “well I tried” and only trying once is not going to cut it in this faith community. 

The problem, brothers and sisters, is that I still don’t see a lot of this happening today, do you? I see people who deeply wound others within the body of Christ, to the point where folks feel that it is unsafe to belong, and we never correct those individuals causing harm. And I equally see us pretending that there aren’t any problems at all, which leaves unaddressed things sitting like an elephant in the room. 

We need this third way of Jesus just as much today as the disciples did long ago. We need this way that invites us to ask how things could truly be different if we live our lives striving for reconciliation. 

Remember those sacraments we have been talking about for the last few weeks - holy communion that helps us to remember that we are the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood; baptism - that reminds us of our need for forgiveness - those aren’t just acts that we do. They should get into our hearts and spirits in a way that makes us want to be in right relationship with God and with others. Because our faith is not a solo journey. Yes, it is true that no one else can make the decision for you to follow Jesus, but it is equally true that we are not supposed to walk this life of faith alone. 

So lets sit in these questions in the coming days. How do we support one another in the body of Christ? And what would it look like if we lived into these verses in Matthew? What example could we give the world? And how may this world even change because of it? We’ve tried the other ways friends - the ignoring bad behavior and the cutting off for the slightest thing. It doesn’t work. So let us instead step into this new way - the way of our Savior. Amen.