A transcript of a presentation given to a small group on 10/20/23. Edited for clarity. Given by Pastor Sierra Ward.
Every talk should begin with a good story, and the story of this new church is no different.
It was God’s regular practice to come and walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden each evening. He would talk to them about what was going on, but Adam and Eve made a decision to distrust him and go their own way which ripped apart that relationship with God.
Because of that they did get to go their own way, they got to build their life through misery and pain and struggle. But God never gave up on having a people who would listen to Him, that would be in relationship with Him, that would trust him and that he could trust.
The story continues with Noah and then with Abraham. God reaches out to Abraham and he says, “Trust me. Follow Me.” I like to think that God is working all the time to all the people but amazingly for some reason Abraham listened and accepted that invitation to relationship and believed that he could trust God and follow God. This isn’t to say that Abraham was a super special fella’ because he sure had many flaws and made many mistakes along the bumpy road of following God - but he did follow.
It’s also worth remembering that Abraham wasn’t Christian or even a Jew. We know this but perhaps forget to remember. He was right there at the beginning, he was the beginning of that relationship with God where God promises to bring him along and make a great people out of his line.
And so Abraham miraculously has a son, Isaac at 100, and Isaac has two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob and Esau are twins and very different as brothers go. One is very powerful, and masculine and one is less so, but has many qualities of manipulation and conniving and cunning.
When it comes times for the birthright to be given, the younger brother, Jacob, figures out a way to cheat Esau and steal it. You can imagine what this does. Esau is obviously furious and ready to kill Jacob.
Jacob decides that he’s going to leave town, going to escape and go far away and hope that Esau’s rage will die down. As he’s leaving town, he spends goes to sleep on a rock and he has this dream and in the dream there’s a ladder or stairway to heaven and heavenly beings going up and down.
In the morning he says, “God, I don’t have any experience with you, I don’t know if I can trust you. But if you will take care of me in these next few years and if you bless me, THEN maybe I’ll come back and maybe I’ll follow you. Maybe then I’ll trust you.” He builds an altar there with this promise in mind and he says, “We’ll see. I’ll experiment with it.”
He goes to the far off land, he meets his Uncle, he marries his cousins. And he ends up building a huge family, twelve sons, and daughters, and relatives, and sheep and flocks and herds and pretty soon he has a huge compound. Then his uncle starts to get jealous and he and his wives decide that maybe it’s best split ties and go back to his homeland, where his dad is still alive. Where his brother Esau is.
So they round everybody up and start the trip back towards Esau. Jacob doesn’t know how Esau is going to receive him. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He’s scared, because Esau in the meantime has become even more credibly powerful and prolific. He has many armies and is generally an even more terrifying person.
As they get closer and closer, the doom keeps descending and descending and Jacob says, “I’ll divide up my flocks and my herds and my shepherds and we’ll send them in groups ahead of us. That way Esau will perhaps feel like these are gifts and they will assuage his anger. The shepherd’s will say, “Please look kindly on your brother!”
So he sent all his flocks and herds and he’s down to his little children and his wives. He says, “It’s almost night. I’ll divide these people into two camps. That way if one is attacked in the night at least I’ll have the other one.” He’s terrified. He really had no idea how this is going to go.
He puts his family in two camps and decides to spend the night alone. As he’s sleeping, someone comes and starts fighting with him. Jacob’s hair trigger stressed in this situation and so he’s fighting back for his life. And all of the sudden the man touches his hip and throws it out of joint and in that moment Jacob realizes that this isn’t just a man, this is a heavenly being. He grips on to the man and says, “Please bless me, promise me this is going to go okay.” And the man says, “I’m God. And I’m going to rename you, because you have wrestled with me. You are the father of my people. So no longer will your name mean deceiver, manipulator, instead you will be Israel - which means to wrestle, to duke it it out, to grapple. You will be the father of my people. Because I want my people to be people that will wrestle with God.”
When he wakes up in the morning Jacob can’t believe what has happened. And he names the place Peniel, which means “I have seen the face of God and I have lived to tell about it.”
Jacob is coming home, he’s returning to the same terrified moments of escaping Esau to the place in memory where he made this contract kind of thing with God, “If you provide then… maybe….” And he has this experience with God. And even before Jacob can say, “Okay I trust you now.” God preemptively says, “You still don’t have to trust me, but I’ll make you a great nation, but I want you. I want you to wrestle with me.”
So he goes to Esau and Esau isn’t nearly as scary as Jacob was convinced and things are fine. They even meet with an embrace and a kiss. Esau has made his life, and isn’t threatened by his goofy brother.
The rest of the Bible is the story of Jacob’s family. These people that wrestle with God and follow God and who try to figure out what it means to live with Him. We still don’t really know, we look at history and we wonder what does it mean to really follow the God of the Universe. This God is so outside of our comprehension.
One of my favorite verses is from Isaiah 1:18 - “Come now, let us reason together.” Isaiah is writing about a God who is frustrated with his people, who’s saying “I don’t want your sacrifices, and your religious rites, I don’t want your good behavior. I want you to come and talk to me. I want to be in relationship with you. I want that thing in the Garden, where we talked and we walked in the cool of the evening, and we wrestled it out.”
And this is still what God wants for his people.
Then Jesus comes, the face of our God of the Universe. And what happens? People say, “Well you’re doing things wrong. You can’t possibly be God and so we’ll kill you. Because God would keep the rules, after all. It is is God who gave us the rules, so if you were God you would keep the rules.” It seems heretical that Jesus says, “No! The rules were only to help you live but what I really want is a change of heart.” When asked what the best commandment/rule is he says to love God with all your heart, your soul, your mind.
To be continued…
To be continued ?!? But …. But what happens?! What’s next?? What’s this leading to? What’s St. Jacobs ??