Leavening

 Friends, we now have our third and final week of The Jacob Saga, and it’s perhaps the most impactful of all of his stories: the day he gets in an all-night wrestling match with a stranger and emerges with a broken hip and a new name. Just one thing after another with this man, I tell ya. Boredom is a luxury he never gets to enjoy.

But first, before all that weirdness, some important context about Brother Jacob: he’s still quite far from perfect, but he’s trying. At least as hard as a totally clueless man of his day was able to try. His mistakes are legendary—his wives engage in a who-can-have-the-most-babies contest that he signs off on, ensuring even more Genesis violence—but today he’s a father of eleven children. He’ll have 2 more in time. Despite stealing from his father-in-law, he’s managed to broker peace with him. Still on the move to the land God promised him, Jacob has sent his huge family on ahead, and he’s hanging back, because he fears the Great War is coming. He’s sent word to his estranged brother Esau. The fuzzy Elmo-looking man Jacob swindled a birthright out of over a bowl of soup. The guy who wanted to kill him a few chapters ago. He could do it, too. Esau may look funny, but he’s a hunter. It’s a rivalry that makes the conflicts in the Middle East look tame. Still, Jacob reconciled with Laban, and he wants to make peace with his brother. He’s even prepared to bribe him—if Esau still wants to kill him, Jacob has a whole lotta livestock to give away. They’ll either make a generous gift, or, if Esau remains unswayed, Jacob can throw all those sheep in the air and run in the other direction.

All kidding aside, though, Jacob is tired of running. Something new has been rising within him. He doesn’t know how to describe it yet, but it’s like yeast. It’s heaven, leavening. It’s the Kingdom that Jesus likened to a tiny mustard seed that becomes a giant plant, or a small pack of yeast that rises enough bread to stock the grocery store ten times over. Something that started almost imperceptible in Jacob is taking over. Every day there’s been more Kingdom there, and less of Jacob the thief and cheater. By morning, all the Jacob will be gone, pushed out by God.

Jesus spoke in simile a lot because he very much wanted what he said to be relatable. When asked, as he was in this morning’s Gospel reading, what the Kingdom of Heaven is like, he could have answered that question any number of ways–there’s a whole lotta clouds, and the angels jump around on them! There’s harp music all day long, and there’s a stairway to get there for you Led Zeppelin fans. 

But, no, that MIGHT be an accurate description of a place you go when you die–and by the way, you don’t have to believe heaven looks like that! I don’t!--but Jesus isn’t trying to describe that side of the Kingdom. There’s a promise waiting for those who have died, a paradise where we are at one with God and one another. But we pray that God’s Kingdom will come on earth and heaven. Jesus is telling us about the earth side of the Kingdom–what might this world look like if it were revolutionized by Jesus’ love ethic? What could grow in our world with only the tiniest germination?

And rather than breaking into a huge theological lecture that would go over every single head, Jesus brought it down to the level of the people. The people are farmers. The Kingdom of Heaven is the littlest seed–a mustard seed! About the size of a poppy seed, for those of us who have never planted mustard, the seed grows a huge, sprawling plant, from tiny beginnings. Jesus gives a ton of other comparisons for the Kingdom of Heaven, because, even then, not everyone farmed. Well, there’s people there who like to cook, too–the Kingdom of Heaven is like a very small amount of yeast that you need to drag out ALL the flour to mix with to keep churning out more and more bread. For the record, for those of you who have never prepared homemade bread, my recipe only calls for one of those grocery store yeast packets mixed with 2 cups of flour to make two big loaves. The Kingdom of Heaven is the same kind of crazy baking that feeds 5,000 men with five loaves of bread and 2 fish from a kid’s lunchbox.

What is God leavening in us, in our churches, in our community, in our country, and in our world? And where is it growing from? Or, to bring this back to Jacob’s story–what are we wrestling with through the dark night? While sitting alone in the dark, dreading seeing his brother the next morning, Jacob gets challenged to a wrestling match by a total stranger. It’s very telling that Jacob didn’t find that at all odd, and just went with it. It was the perfect metaphor for his life–he and Esau fought in their mother’s womb, fought all through childhood and young adulthood, and made death threats as adults. Darkness. Chaos. Lots of fighting. Jacob needs to fight in the dark one more time to work it out of his system for good.

What fighting are we trying to get out of our collective system? Some of y’all know that I took a road trip with my son Daniel on Friday and Saturday, and we went to the Chautauqua Institute. We spent time with clergy friends that live and serve there, and experienced the Divine in that rich environment. We also attended two lectures by an actor named Rainn Wilson. Rainn has a company, a book, and a podcast, all named Soul Boom, and he’s been making the case that a spiritual outlook needs to inspire a wholescale revolution of society as we know it. In the morning lecture he focused largely on climate change and pollution, and in his afternoon class he talked about personal spiritual growth, marriage, parenting, and family, and what it is to live this life.

What are we doing on this spinning orb we call earth, and, more importantly, do we want things to continue as they are? Some of us are wrestling with climate change–and that smoky air we had last week after the Canadian wildfires was a sobering reminder of the pain of our Mother Earth. Some of us are wrestling with low wages, unemployment, and the economy. Some of us are wrestling with war. Some of us are wrestling with this increasingly violent world, and these political divisions that feel like they’re getting way worse every year. Some of us are wrestling with how hard it is to secure, and pay for, decent healthcare. How hard it is to educate our children. How hard it is to keep food on the table. How hard it is to know we’re safe, and how much more troubling all of these concerns are for women than men, for people of color than white folks, for the disabled than the able. 

Where is this world headed? On many bad days I have feared–someplace awful. Someplace I don’t want my kids to have to deal with when they grow up. Is there any hope at all?

There was an audience Q and A at Chautauqua, and I got to ask Rainn a simpler version of these existential questions. I said, Hi! I’m Natalie, a pastor from New York, and I’ve read your books! They’re great! So much food for thought! But I just finished the last page…so what do I do now?

Rainn was feeling kind of spicy that day. At one point, he called an entire section of the audience “idiots” because they sat too close to his right ear. So when I asked “what do I do now?”, his first response was a snarky joke: “Oh, nothing, there’s really no point even going on with life now that you’ve read the whole book.”

But then he said, “real talk, service. We start rebuilding this world through service.”

Jacob ended a wrestling match with a stranger by asking him to serve him. “Give me a blessing.” Well, turns out the stranger was God incognito, and the stranger told him, “you’re done being that rotten Jacob. He’s been squeezed out of you. You’re Israel now.”

Jacob might not have done well seeing Esau again. But Israel limped up the hill, and Esau hugged him, and asked to meet his kids.

Love, beauty, and healing were leavening within them for years, and the dough was finally ready. It was the Kingdom of Heaven, not formed by a stairway going to the sky, but by two estranged brothers hugging.

A hug is a tiny act of service, a mustard seed planting the Kingdom. Forgiveness is an even bigger act of service. 

What would the perfect hug heal in this world? What conflict might be stopped dead in its tracks by one person offering to serve the opposing side?

I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers–after all, Rainn Wilson just called me an idiot–but I’m not losing hope that I’ll hug an estranged family member, too, and the Kingdom of Heaven will rise.

Amen.