Don't Expect it Won't Hurt (Reflections on Pentecost 18, Year C 2022)

 

"The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel" Wm. Dyce (Scottish, 19th Cent.)

“The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel[i], limping because of his hip.” (Genesis 22:31) 

I must confess feeling a weird kinship with gimpy Jacob, the hero of our First Lesson in RCL for Pentecost 18, Year C (Genesis 32:22-31). Many moons ago, on the Saturday before I was to celebrate my very first mass as the pastor of Faith Lutheran Church of Philadelphia, I indulged in my favorite hobby at the time, horseback riding in Fairmont Park. I had my horse up to a pretty good canter when I lost my balance and fell from the saddle. Figgy, the horse I rode back then, was a very polite mare and stopped to let me climb back on. I didn’t think anything of my little spill until I rode her back to the barn. As I was currying her down and cleaning up the enormous dump of poop she always made after a ride, I felt a certain stiffness in my inner thigh. I started to suspect something might be amiss. 

By the time I’d driven back home from the barn I was in so much pain I could barely get out of the car. I’d either torn or severely sprained a groin muscle. Three times in my life I’ve broken bones, but I never hurt so much as I did after that fall. I limped—literally—for months after that accident. 

Shortly after my fall, it came to pass that I had go to Center City[ii] for some churchy thing. When a pastor wears clerics in Center City, it’s always wise to have a roll of one dollar bills in an accessible pocket because you’re going to get hit up by any number of sidewalk mendicants. I call this “paying the bum tax,” which is, perhaps, a rather uncharitable characterization, but doing it is in keeping with Jesus’ instructions[iii]. I was walking down Walnut Street when I spied a middle-aged African American lady sitting on some unidentified object in front of a store. She was bundled up from the cold (it was December) and had two or three over-stuffed shopping bags at her feet. She seemed to be speaking to the passers by, and I guess I took her to be a street person. I prepared to hand out the alms I suspected she’d ask of me, but, just as I limped passed her, she said, “You’re Jacob, and the Lord has put your hip out of joint.”

 Of all the weird stuff to say! But I thought about this for a second. Here I was, starting a new life as pastor of Faith. A Lutheran call process can move slower than a sloth on Quaaludes, and I’d just survived six months of nervous unemployment during which my meagre finances managed to stretch like the loaves and fishes. I’d left my home in California and my family and friends and moved across the country to go to seminary. I left a good teaching job for an uncertain future, and I gave up a bunch of stuff (Stuff I don’t need to enumerate here) in order to limp into this new chapter. Maybe I was like Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok. 

When I turned around to talk to the lady, she had vanished just like the mysterious wrestler in the story from Genesis. 

We don’t know if the wrestler was God or an angel or just Jacob’s conscience. When we meet him he’s returning to his homeland, the land promised to his grandpa, Abraham. He blew town years before after screwing his dimwitted twin brother Esau out of his birthright—an act to which Esau took considerable umbrage and determined to kill Jacob in retaliation. Jacob escaped to his Uncle Labon’s land and fell butt-over-teakettle in love with his smoking hot cousin Rachel[iv]. Laban forced Jacob to work for him seven years before he allowed him to marry her, but, on what would’ve been Jacob’s wedding night, Laban pulled a gypsy switch and substituted Rachel’s not-so-gorgeous older sister, Leah, in Rachel’s place. Then, having tricked Jake, Laban made him work another seven years to marry Rachel. During fourteen years in Laban’s employ, Jacob put away quite a nest egg—mostly at Laban’s expense. Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to get Rachel pregnant. He had no trouble at all knocking up Leah, but he broke her heart and never loved her even though she bore him many sons. He also had children with the handmaids of both Leah and Rachel[v]. 

Now, older, presumably wiser, the dad of eleven boys and one girl, and the husband of two sisters, Jacob stands at the edge of the river, ready to return to his native land and claim the promise God had made to his father and grandfather before him. Only one catch: Esau is coming his way with 400 other dudes, and Jacob can only assume they haven’t come to throw him a Welcome Home party. 

What does he do? He sends his family and servants (along with a considerable bribe!) ahead as an advance party to soften up Esau, and he spends the night alone on the eastern bank. But he can’t sleep. He wrestles with God or with himself the whole night. I’ll bet he had a lot to consider—his dishonest dealings with his brother and father, his marital life, his relationship with his in-laws, and the promise he hoped on faith to inherit from God. What did it all mean? It had darn well better have been worth it, because he stood a really good chance of being dead the next day. 

But Jacob was a tough old bird, telling God, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And Jacob is blessed, but he is also left limping. In the gospel lesson (Luke 18:1-8), Jesus tells us to keep crying day and night, to keep believing, to keep praying and asking, to keep holding on and demanding the blessing. But he doesn’t say we won’t be wounded in the process. 

According to the Pew Research firm, only 64% of Americans consider themselves Christians.[vi] Compare that with about 30% of us who have no religious affiliation whatever. You won’t need to read a crystal ball or bird entrails to figure out churches are going to experience an odyssey of changes in the very near future. Some of us are going to get knocked down and come up limping. Big changes are on the way, but it’s no time to be quitters. For anyone who feels the faith of our ancestors has something of value to share with the world, we’ll just have to hang on like Jacob did—crying, wrestling, and demanding the promised blessing. 

It’ll be worth it. 

Thanks for visiting me this week. I’m always glad when you stop by!

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[i] Literally “Face of God” in Hebrew. It’ll make sense if you know the story.

[ii] That’s Philly speak for “downtown,” in case you’re not a native.

[iii] See Luke 6:30

[iv] We’re told that the day he met her “Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud.” (Gen. 30:11). That chick must’ve been a really good kisser!

[v] That kind of thing was considered okay in that culture.

[vi] For more on this click https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

Jesus and the Desperados (Reflections on Pentecost 18, Year C 2022)

 

"Cleansing the 10 Lepers" James Tissot (French 19th Cent.)

“Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17:19) 

Jesus seems to have a thing for desperados. In the Gospel lesson for Pentecost 18, Year C (Luke 17:11-19), we find Jesus and his posse in a border town. Luke says they enter a village in “the region between Samaria and Galilee” (v. 11). I guess this was one of those indeterminate, liminal places on earth that don’t quite qualify as one place or another. 

I’m kind of familiar with border towns having grown up in Southern California. In my misspent and reckless youth, just about everyone knew you could get lots of cool stuff cheap by crossing the US/Mexico border into Tijuana. You could score lots of illegal stuff there, too. There were bars where Gringo college and high school kids hung out where no one asked for ID, and no shortage of shady characters offering all sorts of illicit forms of recreation. 

Of course, one mustn’t judge all of Mexico by Tijuana any more than one could judge all the US by National City on the north side of the border. These border spaces aren’t representative, and they tend to get a bad rap—a sort of mystique as the places of the outlaws or the outcasts. It’s not surprising that Jesus runs into a whole gang of lepers while travelling through these parts. 

There weren’t fences or customs kiosks in the territory between Galilee and Samaria, but pious Jews knew where the line was, and they avoided the towns that sat on it. Good folks don’t hang out in border towns. 

I have to make a quick digression in case you need a refresher course on the history of the region. Way back in the 10^th century BCE, right after the death of King Solomon, there was a big feud over who would take over Israel. This resulted in a civil war which ended with the nation splitting into two countries—Israel in the north and Judah in the south. About two hundred years later, courtesy of a long series of weak, impious, and corrupt kings, Israel fell to the brutal Assyrian conquerors. These guys, as brutal conquerors are wont to do, forcibly relocated a bunch of folks from other parts of Mesopotamia into the region. The Israelites inter-married with these foreigners (You’ll note Jesus calls the grateful leper a “foreigner” in verse 18) and adopted some of their customs. The Judeans considered that these folks had perverted the true religion and polluted the gene pool. Some time around the second century BCE the folks living in the northern part of Israel, the Galileans, decided that the Judean religion was really pretty cool after all, and decided to return to the more ancient traditions. This created, geographically, a sort of Jew-Samaritan sandwich with traditionalists in the north and south and Samaritans in the middle. Some Galileans found the Samaritans so distasteful that, when making pilgrimages to Jerusalem, they’d rather detour miles out of their way into the foreign lands east of the Jordan than cross through Samaria. 

But Jesus doesn’t see the borders. He never has a problem crossing into places where “decent folks” fear to go. Here in the un-named border town, he’s approached by a gang of outcasts. The leper gang is, it appears, made up of both Jews and Samaritans. You know the old saying, “Misery loves company.” When your skin is inflamed and most everybody finds you gross, disgusting, and obviously cursed by God, when nobody wants to get close to you, you might want to hang with the people who are dealing with the same problem. Religious differences don’t matter when you’re sick. Everybody who suffers belongs to the Church of I Want to Get Well. 

The gang of lepers are desperados—they’re desperate to get some help. They’ve heard of Jesus, and they know him by name. Even though they may have formed a sort of community of outcasts on the border, their main goal is to leave it. There are, after all, some communities which serve their purpose and need to be abandoned. Even if you can find great sympathy and fellowship for a time, the place on the border is not a permanent home. It’s better to be home than to be in a hospital or rehab center. It’s better to be free than to be in jail. It’s better to be part of the world than to live on its margins. 

Jesus, who doesn’t see national or denominational differences, is willing to heal the ten lepers. He tells them to show themselves to the priests, the ritual which must be done before re-entry into the community is established. The ten desperados do as they’re told. It’s an act of faith. It makes them clean. 

I don’t, as a general rule, believe in “faith healing,” at least not to the exclusion of doctors and modern medicine. All the same, I will pray for wholeness and health for anyone, and I do so on a regular basis given the life I lead. I don’t believe that anyone is ever really healed without faith. Like the lepers in the story, every desperado needs to believe in wellness. You’ve got to have trust and vision to see beyond your illness. If you can’t imagine wellness, you can’t get well. 

The highlight of the story, however, is the one effusive act of gratitude made by the Samaritan leper. You’ve got to love this guy. He gets it. The other nine lepers may have been cured of their disease, but only the Samaritan was “made well.”  He’s the only one who has crossed the border into the territory of the living. Time in the borderland should change us, don’t you think? Knowing the accepting, healing, and welcoming power of Christ has to have some effect on us. I mean, if we’re not thankful for what God has done, if our vision doesn’t change, if we don’t grow more patient, more joyful, more understanding—were we really made well? 

Think about it. And thanks for looking in on me this week.