Natalie's Grace Notes

  Friends, today in our Old Testament reading, we have one of my favorite kinds of Bible stories to preach on: a really weird one. I adore how this story didn’t come off weird in antiquity, and I and it’s a fun one to look at because of how our modern eyes see it! So, here we have it: the time Jacob got in an all night long wrestling match with an angel, and emerged with a name change and a bad hip. Perhaps the oddest part about this story is that it’s picking up in a rare, relatively dull moment in Jacob’s story. Wrestling with an angel is far from the strangest thing Jacob’s done. First, as a young man, he was making a really delicious sandwich, and his older brother, Esau, came inside after a long day of manual labor, was famished, and had to have some of that BLT. Jacob’s response? “Sure, you can have a bite of my sandwich–if I can have your birthright.” Well that escalated quickly. Jacob’s relationship with Esau only got worse from there. On their father, Isaac’s, death bed, t...

  Friends, we’re now in the fourth part of this five part sermon series I put together based on a book titled Half Truths by a United Methodist colleague named Adam Hamilton. In Half Truths, Hamilton presents five different Christian cliches, platitudes we spout off too often to one another, often when we’re going through a hard time, or we know someone else who is. Many of us even believe these cliches are scriptural, but they aren’t. We’re looking at the limitations of these phrases, and what we might replace them with. The cliche we’re looking at this week is the only one in this book that I’ve actually never heard anyone say: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” This is simply a cultural difference between me and Hamilton. This is the longer way to say a cliche I’ve heard many times, one I suspect you’ve heard, too: “the Bible says __ in black and white.” But, before we get into the shortcomings of that phrase, first, many words about that Psalm I just asked our poor l...