Sermon

You Are Israel

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

It is not uncommon for Christian people to frame the phases of their lives with the phrases of the Bible.  We appropriate its stories and its language to our individual experiences.  So, for example, when we’re feeling dried-up and desolate, we speak of finding ourselves in a desert place.  After long vigils, when we finally discover some truth, we’re apt to recount that we’ve heard the “still small voice.”  And alone, with haunting dreams, or maybe even nightmares, of a brother we’ve swindled in some small or large way, or with a limping morning sharp with too much revealing light, we talk about having “wrestled with an angel.”

On the whole, these are very good ways of taking ownership of Holy Scripture, making its story your story too.  But the business is not without its hazards.  Because when we use the Bible’s stories like shorthand, we also tend to narrow their concerns and tame their provocations.  I recall, for example, once overhearing at coffee hour a prosperous parishioner confide that he was experiencing the despair of Job.
The conversation circle, styrofoam cups and sticky pastries in hand, braced itself for the worst.  But as it turned out, it was only that the most sought-after preschool had rejected his toddler’s application.  So much for Harvard College!

Most of us are not so self-absorbed.  And domesticating the Bible to fit our inner lives isn’t really the issue.  Because the real issue is that the Bible is meant -- as Timothy reports in this morning’s epistle -- to shape, instruct, warn and even vex the life of a people, a community chosen to show forth God to the world.  Holy Scripture, he says, “is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone of God may be...equipped for good work.”  To be sure, each of us is commended to cultivate the holiness that breathes through the pages of the Bible; but that takes place within a context larger, longer, more diverse and more vital than the small precinct of the private soul.

Thus, I am wont to point out that you can read your way through almost any one of the New Testament texts with a view to what they might say about your particular spiritual condition.  But when you do, you’ll discover that by and large the writers don’t concern themselves much with your personal questions or your moral quandaries.  They do care deeply, however, about the life of the community.  What is its character?  Is it egalitarian in its social arrangements?  Does it resist injustice and oppression?  Is it inclusive and welcoming of the stranger?  Does it manifest the love of Christ Jesus?

Thus, when the authors of Genesis shaped the story of Jacob at Penuel, they did so not just to account for his besting God in combat, or his escape from the wrath of Esau, but to account for his new name:  “Your name is not Jacob any longer; you are Israel...”

You are Israel!  But Jacob’s name was not given to him alone.  It was promised to his children and his children’s children.  It became the spacious name of an elected tribe; and Jacob, thereby, became a “corporate personality.”

In an age of self-indulgent and self-referential individualism, we have trouble getting hold of a corporate sense of belonging.  In America especially, we have trouble getting hold of a sense of belonging beyond a kind of jingoistic patriotism, which is again getting played out in the current campaign rhetoric.  But that is not the posture of the Bible.  And the posture of the Bible, with its corporate sense of belonging, is given in peculiar ways to children.  A story to illustrate.

One of my colleagues tells of a junior high school teacher in his parish who teaches world history and cultures.  He was having his class study the ways in which memory--personal, family and community memory—create identity and belonging.  So he asked the children to share their earliest recollections.  The answers came as you might expect:  grandma’s cinnamon rolls; Mom’s lullabies; Dad’s bedtime stories.

But then it was the Jewish kid’s turn.  And David Shapiro, without missing a beat, said, “I remember Abraham.”  “Angels descending,” said the teacher, “sucked air from the room.”  And had the rest of the twelve-year olds not been yelling “Abraham who?”, the teacher would have cast himself in terror to the floor.  As it was, he hardly breathed.  Who had told little David that he was part of a people?

In just this way, Scripture attests that Jacob’s contentiousness is Israel’s stormy history with Yahweh.  His refusal to let God go is the people clinging to the covenant; God’s blessing is their very existence.
However personal it was--intimate, mysterious, life changing--God’s ambush of Jacob at the Jabbok was not a private affair.  It was to become an affair of God’s people as well.  It is a story about them and about us.

“You are Israel,” God said to Jacob.  And so too are we.

Thus when Jacob reached the river, we were there--stripped, agile, ready for anything--and desperately afraid.  When a man appeared and fought with him all night, we felt the sweaty grip of a God mortally engaged with our lives.  When He hit Jacob with a cheap shot, we too went slack, wounded as much by all our old treacheries as by our going-to-the-mat with God.

When Jacob gained the upper hand and the blessing, we prevailed with him.

And finally, when the sun came up on Jacob--and he realized that the face most to be feared was not that of his brother Esau, but God’s--we too marveled that the worst was over.  So, relieved, we crossed the river, dragging our leg like a prize.

And now too we know--because we were there and it happened to us--that God does not despise us for our deceits, but forever ambushes our lives with new chances.  We know that God does not renege on promises made even under duress; that God may slip away at daybreak, but never abandons.  We know also that God can render us vulnerable to our fast-approaching Esaus, our homeless poor, our hungry Haitian refugees -- the siblings we robbed of their birthrights and with whom we must make peace.  And we know also that the gracious reunion of sinners and sinned-against is blessing.

You are Israel.  How our hardened hearts expand at this announcement!  What a panorama of possibilities it opens!  What a knowing hope presides over our lives!  What deep water we wade in!  What a great and rambling house we abide, with our father, Abraham; and with Christ, the first-born brother; with mothers and sisters of every faithful age surrounding us in the great cloud of witnesses!  We are an ancient people blessed.  And all we need to do to know that is to recover our memory and live in its truth.

A coda.

A decade ago, we celebrated the end of the second millennium of Christian history.  I was in Rome that year and brought back a lovely little wooden cross that was designed as the emblem of the Jubilee Year 2000.  It’s three crosses really, superimposed on one another and each slightly smaller than the next.  Together, the three crosses are meant to symbolize the Trinity, of course.  And they are arranged in a concave fashion, the twelve arms of the cluster curved inward to surround and protect an image of the globe at the center.

That image is the memory and the promise we are called to live.  A memory and promise that we should live with assurance, as the people of God, as the people of Israel, as the people of the Resurrection.  It is, after all, the memory and the promise that we are all one people with one shared story, living in one world, surrounded and embraced by a healing, redeeming and liberating God.  We may slip terrified into the night or limp heavily into the morning light,  but we are not isolated or alone –- either in place or time.  The story is ours and the promise –- as the psalmist reminds us today –- is that the Lord will watch over our going out and our coming in, from this time forth for evermore.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral