God is faithful

Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (July 30, 2023) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. A video of the entire worship service is available here.

What are we talking about? View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day: Proper 12, Year A

Photo via Unsplash. A “Jacob’s ladder,” from Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28. We read the story last week, and reference it this week.

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The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Romans 8:26

Edited Transcript

May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Please be seated.

All summer we've been reading stories from the book of Genesis, and this is the week where we'll wrap that up, for now.

What have we learned from following this family, our spiritual ancestors? What have w learned from Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, Isaac and Rebecca, and now, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah?

You might have noticed that this family... has its problems. Is a little bit dysfunctional. Might even compare to our own families!

These spiritual ancestors of ours: were they perfect? That is a rhetorical question. They were not. They were not perfect.

But God was faithful to this family.

When Abraham was an old man, God took Abraham out into the wilderness under the stars. And God said to Abraham, look up. And Abraham saw all the stars of heaven. And God said to Abraham, as many stars as you see, so will your descendants be: and you will be blessed and you will be a blessing to every nation.

Now, Abraham didn't have any children yet, so this was a quite the promise.

And God was faithful to that promise because Abraham and Sarah did have children. They tried to go about it their own way first. And we saw how that worked out with Hagar and Ishmael. They did have children and those children had children.

And in each generation the family did some things that were good and some things that we might well raise an eyebrow at.

In today's story, we see that Jacob is in his home country. He's back in the country where his mother came from, where his grandfather Abraham came from. And he is with his Uncle Laban. He has gone there to get himself a wife.
But do we remember why he's really there? Because the wife thing is kind of a pretext.

Just a few stories back, Jacob had dressed up like his brother. He put on his brother's clothes. And because his brother was kind of a hairy man, Jacob's mother helped him put goat skin on his arms.

They did all of this to fool Jacob's blind father, who wanted to bless Jacob's brother. And when Rebecca, the mother, got wind of this, she hatched a plan, that Jacob would dress up like Esau, his brother.

So when Jacob's blind father felt his arms, well, he was hairy, like his brother! And when his father pulled him close to smell him, he smelled like Esau, because he was wearing Esau's clothes. And so his father laid his hands on him and he gave him that blessing.

When Esau came home, he found out that the blessing had been stolen from him, and he was not too pleased about that. He said, soon as my father dies, I'm going to kill my brother.

This is such a loving family.

When the mother of the two boys hears about this, she pulls Jacob aside and says, you better get out of here. Then she goes to her husband and says, These Canaanite women will be the death of me! And she says, if my son Jacob marries one of these women, I do not know what I will do!

And so Isaac says, well, maybe we should send him back to the home country to get a wife. And Rebecca says, that's a great idea. And, by the way, he'll be out of the house when his brother's ready to kill him.

So off Jacob goes to the home country. He has gone back to see his uncle Laban, to get himself a wife, but he has also gone to get away from his brother who is justifiably angry at him.

Last week we heard the story of what happens while Jacob is on his journey to the homeland. He's in the desert. He lays his head down on a stone. In his dream, he sees the angels of God ascending and descending from heaven, and God stands next to him.

And God said, the promise I made to your grandfather Abraham, the promise I made to your father Isaac, I make that promise now to you.

Jacob has an encounter with the living God. And when he wakes up from the dream, he says, "surely God was in this place and I didn't know it."

And he also says, Because God has been faithful to my family from generation to generation, I too will be faithful now to God. I will keep my side of this commitment. I will do what God says to do. And he puts up a stone. He anoints the stone with oil to establish his pledge: He will be faithful to God, the way God has been faithful to him and to his family.
God has been faithful to them. Whether or not they deserved it—that doesn't seem to have mattered so much to God.
God was faithful to them, not because of how great they were, but because of how great God is. God was faithful to this family, and still is, for generations.

Now Jacob, having pledged his faithfulness, continues on his journey to the home country. And so we get to today's story. Jacob sees his beautiful cousin, Rachel. He falls madly in love with her. Then he makes a bargain with his uncle, that he will work for his uncle for seven years, and at the end of the seven years, he will marry Rachel.

Now, uncle Laban has two daughters. The first, Leah. In the translation we read today, it says, "she had lovely eyes." Which we might understand as weak praise, along the lines of, "she had... a great personality." And that adjective, lovely, could also be translated as weak. So it could be that she was sick or troubled in some way.

Either way, it's clear that Laban has these two daughters and not a lot of prospects for one of them. So Laban's got this plan. He switches the daughters! After Jacob's had too much wine at the wedding feast! And in the morning: it's Leah.

That's the story we heard today. And that's the background for the story. Now, who's not such a prominent figure in this story, this piece that we heard today?

God!

We don't hear much about God in this piece of the story today, with Leah and Rachel and Jacob and Laban.

Wee don't know what God thinks about all these goings-on. We don't know what God thinks about this deal made between two men concerning the future of two women. We don't know what God feels about whether Jacob was making a wise choice in making the deal. Whether Rachel was the right partner for him.

Nor do we see anyone in this story turning to God. We don't see anyone praying for guidance. We don't see anyone asking for help... in spite of the fact that Jacob had just said—two seconds ago!—that he was going to be faithful to the God of his ancestors, to the God who had been faithful to him.

Jacob doesn't give a whole lot of thought to who God is and what God wants and where God is in his life.I don't know about you, but I can relate. I've had experiences in my life where I have had an encounter with the living God.

Something happens in my life that convinces me that God is really present in my life, that God is faithful to me, that God is faithful to us.

And then, practically the next moment, I find myself going about my life as though there were no God for me to consult with. As though there were no God for me to pray to.

I forget so easily the promises I made yesterday and the commitment I made just moments ago to be faithful to the God who is faithful to me.

None of us are perfect. And despite our best intentions, we're going to go through seasons of our life where we aren't prayerful or where we don't trust that God is with us to guide us. We're going to go through times where we doubt. And even more likely we're going to go through times where we just kind of forget about God! It's easy, especially if things are going well for us.

That's exactly what happens to this family over and over again. They go through these rhythms of life: they encounter God, and then so easily they forget that God is there at all.

St. Paul knew this pattern of life so well. Generations down from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, St. Paul wrote, we do not know how to pray as we ought to pray.

But, St. Paul continues: But the Holy Spirit prays within us in sighs too deep for words.

Our ancestors in faith, who brought us before the living God, they—like us—didn't pray as they ought to have prayed.
But God was faithful to them. Not because of how faithful they were. Not because of how great they were and not because they earned it. But because of how great God is and how faithful God is.

God is within us, praying.

We can never stop praying, any more than we could stop our heartbeat or stop our breathing. We don't have the power to stop praying because as St. Paul told us, the Holy Spirit is within us praying in sighs too deep for words.

So even when I don't have the words... God does.

Even when I can't be faithful the way I want to... God can be.

Even when I forget to ask for help, the Holy Spirit is asking for help on my behalf.

And that is why St. Paul writes that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. This passage from Romans, chapter eight... if you don't know it, I want you to take your Bible if you have one at home, and I want you to mark this chapter. And if you don't have a Bible at home, we can get you one. But also, take this page out of your bulletin and pin it up somewhere.

"Even when we don't know how to pray as we ought, the Holy Spirit prays within us in sighs too deep for words."
And so "neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things yet to come, nor powers nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, can separate us from the love of God," which for us has been revealed to us in Christ Jesus. And has been revealed to our ancestors and to others.

God is faithful and there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from that faithfulness and nothing in all creation that can separate us from that love.

I want to close with the image of that mustard seed because sometimes the reality that we can't be separate from God is hidden from us. And that's what Jesus is talking about in all these parables today. Every one of them talks about the kingdom of God as something hidden. A tiny seed that grows into a shrub of no account: mustard. Have you ever seen mustard? If you plant one mustard in your garden, there's like 10,000 mustards a little while later. And all the birds of the air have their home in them, says Jesus. Again, you put a little bit of yeast in, it's barely anything you can see, but it leavens the whole batch. All of these parables are about how the kingdom of God is present and God's love is present even when it seems hidden.

So there is nothing that we can do, or not do, nothing that we can remember or forget, that will separate us from the love of God which has been revealed to us in Christ Jesus.

And if there's one thing that I want you to take away from our journey through Genesis, it is that God is faithful to you.
And God loves you and nothing changes that.

Amen.