Forgiveness

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 50:15-21:

There is a story told about a new minister to a congregation and on his first Sunday there he preached a sermon on forgiveness, which was well received. The next Sunday he preached exactly the same sermon, which left people a little puzzled, but wondering what he would do the next week. But on the third week, he delivered exactly the same sermon of forgiveness, and so that week some leaders of the church paid a nice visit told him to tell him that while they appreciated the message the first time, they wanted to make it known that they expected to hear something different the next Sunday. But, for the fourth time he delivered the same message, only this time he added at the end, and when we start practicing forgiveness in all that we do, then we’ll move onto a new topic.

Now giving the same sermon on forgiveness over and over again is probably over-kill, although it does make sermon prep really easy, we can’t really hear about forgiveness enough because while we very often talk about God forgiving us, it’s also, and just as importantly as us forgiving others and us seeking forgiveness. Indeed, Jesus says that unless you forgive you will not be forgiven. Pretty high standards. But here is some good news. The first is that holding a grudge, the desire to get revenge is actually programmed into us by evolution. We want retribution for what has wronged us. We want vengeance. We want something bad to happen to the other person. This is a natural part coming from the base part of our feelings. Even people who are opposed to this, still feel it, as maybe perhaps summed up by an essay written by Rev. Mary Lynn Tobin in response to September 11, called “Vengeance is the Lord’s (but something inside me wants to ‘bomb the hell out of them’).” and so if you judge yourself because you hold grudges and want revenge, you can let that go because it’s natural. But it’s a matter of what you do with those feelings.

And so here is even better news. Forgiveness is also a part of who we are. It too has been programmed into us by evolution. The desire to heal and rebuild relationship and community are just as much, or maybe even more, a part of who we are as revenge is. In fact, in every animal that has been studied except for one, they have demonstrated acts of forgiveness, conciliation and reconciliation.  The one animal that doesn’t do this is the house cat, and for those who own cats, and those who dislike cats, this should not come as a surprise.  The reason why it is found in other animals, including humans, is because we live in community, and to stay in community which is necessary if we are to survive, we have to have the ability to forgive wrongs.

Speaking Out

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28:

In the book of Numbers and in Exodus, we are told that God will punish the sins of parents to the third and fourth generation (Num 14:18; Exod. 34:7), and while there are other passages that counteract that, in particular Deuteronomy, and then Jesus saying that the blind man was not born blind because of the sins of his parents, we can still see if maybe not punishing to future generations, that the sins the parents committed keep happening generation after generation. That is even true today. There have been some very interesting sociological studies of crime extending through multiple generations. In one study in England it found that 2/3 of all male youths convicted of crimes came from just 10% of families. And while there were many reasons, much of it was about expectations and also about learned behaviors. The same way that families will have multiple generations of doctors or lawyers or even preachers. We imitate what we see our parents do. There are learned behaviors that we follow. The same is also true in churches.

Every church has a unique DNA that is learned about how things happen and how we do things. One church I served had a particular way that they handled conflict, and so you could read back through the history of the church, which was over 100 years old, and keep seeing the same things happening over and over again, especially when it came to conflict. People learned the behavior of how that church operated. But, what I can also say about that church is that in knowing that history, they were making a concerted effort to stop it. To break the pattern, and learning and teaching healthy and appropriate ways to deal with conflict. And so sometimes the sins continue, and sometimes they can be stopped. We see this in families as well. Linda’s father was physically abused when he was a child by his father, as, more than likely, his father had been abused, and his father had been abused, for who knows how long. But you know what he didn’t do to Linda or her sisters? Abuse them. He stopped the pattern of behavior and hopefully that behavior has now been wiped out of the family line. It is no longer being perpetuated and carried on generation after generation.

Wrestling With God

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 32:22-31:

Names are important things and convey things about a person. They can give some connection to heritage or family or culture, or perhaps the name means something specific that is supposed to be conveyed. There is also a certain type of person that we associate with some names. So, if I say Cindy of Jennifer, we have an idea of who that person is, or we make a preconceived notion based on other Cindys and Jennifers we have known. And I’m sure you’ve probably met someone and they told you there name, and you wanted to say “No” because they name didn’t match them. And then there is the idea that not naming someone or not using their name is a way of negating them, as we talked about in the story of Hagar in Abraham and Sarah refusing to use her name. That’s why the black lives matter movement has the emphasis of using say their names in order to give identity and belonging and purpose. Names are important things. When Linda was pregnant with our first child Samantha, we already had a girl’s name picked out, But, we didn’t have a boy’s name. So I suggested that we consider using the name of the first Yankee who hit a homerun at the next Yankee game we attended, and Linda was on board.

It happened to be that we were going to see the Yankees play the Cubs, at Yankee stadium. Early in the game, almost everyone in the stadium thought that Gary Sheffield had hit a homer down the left field line, and we thought “well, Gary’s not a bad name.” But, as I said, it was almost everyone, but the one person who didn’t think that was the only one who mattered, which was the third base umpire who called it fair, and this was before instant replay was allowed. Later in the game, Derek Jeter, the Yankee captain, came up with the bases loaded. Jeter had never hit a grand slam in his career, and we thought, this is it. And what was great is you had two options of using either Derek or Jeter, but Jeter flied out, although he did hit his first grand slam the next day. Then in the seventh inning our hard hitting left fielder Hideki Matsui came up, and, of course, he corked one, and Linda immediately turned to me and said “we are not naming our son Hideki,” although Matsui could have worked as well. But, in the end it didn’t matter because we had all girls, and so never got to use our boy name, which was cooper by the way, for Cooperstown, New York. Names are important things, and they matter, and we see that in scripture as well.

Blinded

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The scripture was Genesis 27:1-29:

One of the common ways that God is referred to in scripture, especially in the Pentateuch, which is the first five books of the Bible is as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Some have argued, however, that God might be better referred to as the God of Abraham, Rebekah and Jacob, as Rebekah plays a much bigger role in scripture than does Isaac. Although we might also use all the matriarchs names in there as well. Last week we heard the story of Abraham getting Rebekah to be Isaac’s wife, in which Isaac is not involved until the end, and Rebekah is one of the primary actors throughout that entire story. And then we have today’s story, in which while Isaac is involved, but, again, Rebekah is the mover and driver of the story. In fact, especially in comparison to Abraham or Jacob or even Rebekah, we know very little about Isaac or his life, and have few stories about him as a character.

But what we do know is that after they marry, Rebekah remains without a child, just like Sarah, which obviously endangers the promise God has made to Abraham and to Isaac that they will have descendants more numerous than the stars. And so we are told that Isaac prays to God for assistance, and after twenty years of marriage, Rebekah gets pregnant with twins. But, they are wrestling and struggling with each other in the womb, which also presages next week’s passage of Jacob and God, and so Rebekah goes to seek guidance from God, and God tells her that there are two nations struggling within her, and “one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” It is striking that this oracle is given to Rebekah and not to Jacob, and it also appears that perhaps she does not tell Jacob that she has received this bit of information, because we are told that while Rebekah loves Jacob, who is the second born, that Isaac loves Esau.

Obadiah: Turning Back Those In Need

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Obadiah 1:1-4, 10-17:

There is a Depeche Mode song from the 80’s that says “I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors, but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor and when I die I expect to find him laughing.” That’s how I feel sometimes about God when it comes to Sunday’s messages. I began planning this series on the 12 minor prophets last summer, long before we knew the results of the election and certainly long before I knew what that president would or would not be doing when we got to each of the individual prophets, but sometimes the scriptures just seem to match up with world events, especially when it comes to controversial events. Just once I would like the scripture to match up positively with something that’s happened in the world, but that doesn’t seem to happen nearly as much, if ever, as scripture calling us out as individuals and as a nation for some action we have undertaken, which, I think, is where we find ourselves today.

Now just by a show of hands, who here had ever heard of Obadiah either before today, or before you saw that Obadiah would be covered today? That’s about what I thought. The first time I heard about Obadiah, or at least could remember it was while I was in seminary, but it was not in class, instead it was through my wife Linda who came home and told me right at the beginning of the school year that she had a student named Obadiah, a girl by the way, and I was like “okay.” And so, she had to tell me why she thought this was important information for me to know because she was named after one of the prophets, and so then I had to go look it up. Obadiah is one of the few books that is not covered at all in the lectionary, and according to what Biblegateway.com, based on what verses and books people look up and read on their site, Obadiah is the least read book in the bible, and six of the top 10 least read books are all minor prophets. So, if you have never heard of Obadiah you’re in good company.

Wrestling With God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 32:22-31:

We are now one week down in the Olympics, with one week to go. Some of the things that were expected to happen, happened, and some things not expected to happen, also happened, just like life, and so we continue looking at what the Olympics can teach us about our faith, and today we look at one of the oldest of the sports, wrestling.  Wrestling was one of the original sports found in the ancient Olympic Games, as well as those of the Isthmian Games, which took place in Corinth. But, of course, the sport is even older than that.  It’s said that wrestling has been found among every culture in the world, and thus may be one of the original sports in which humanity participated. Since somehow walking is also an Olympic sport I’m going to have to say that it’s probably the oldest.  There is a Sumerian wall carving from around 3000 BC which depicts a wrestling match, along with what appears to be a referee overseeing it.  In a carving from the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ptahhotep, around 2300 BCE, it shows six different wrestling holds, five of which we still use.

Wrestling also has had spiritual ramifications as well. According to Shinto legend, the ownership of the Islands of Japan was established when the thunder god Take-mikazuchi defeated his rival in a wrestling match, and in Greek myth, Zeus and his fellow Olympian gods wrestled the older Titan deities for ownership of the universe, ending with Zeus defeating his own father Kronos.  So perhaps it should not be surprising that we also have the story from Genesis we heard this morning of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious stranger, whom we come to see as God. But perhaps, because of its prevalence and apparent importance in the ancient world, we should be surprised that wrestling is not found more often as a theme, or an event within scripture, but what is even more striking that of the places in which wrestling does occur, all of them, except one, which is a passage in Colossians about Epaphras wrestling in his prayers on behalf of the Colossians, all of the other references are found in the story of Jacob.

Standing Up and Speaking Out

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Genesis 37:1-28:

In the high school I attended, athletics reigned supreme.  To give you a small sample, our football and basketball teams played for the state championship in two of my four years, our soccer and golf teams won the state championship, and our softball team won several, and the level of play was high.  One of the members of our basketball and track team could dunk the basketball after beginning his jump at the top of the key, and he went on to the University of Arizona. The quarterback who graduated the year before I did, went on to become the starting quarterback for Ohio State, and the quarterback who graduated the same year I did went to play for Utah.  Our kicker was all-American, and two people from my graduating class of 336 played in the NFL.  And, as you might guess, when athletics rule supreme, the players who play them also rule supreme.  Jocks were the BMOC’s, the big men on campus, looked up to by many, supported, lauded and favored by much of the administration and some of the teachers.  Allowed to do things and get away with things that other students couldn’t and administrators often turned a blind eye to how some of them treated other students, causing them to be loathed or even hated for the special treatment they received.  I was thinking of that this week as I pondered the beginning of another school year, and as we continually hear stories about bullying and other inappropriate behaviors that take place at school, and as I thought about this story of Joseph that we just heard.

In Numbers we read that the sins of the father will be passed onto the third and fourth generations.  And while we could argue about that, or perhaps argue about what that really means, we do see those sins continuing through the Abrahamic line, into this the third generation from Abraham.  There is a DNA in their behaviors that continues to repeat itself, and so they keep making the same mistakes, although it also allows them to keep doing some things well.  The same thing happens in our families and in other organizations as well.  Churches and other social organizations, like schools, will develop a certain DNA, and if you track through the history of a church you will see the same things happening over and over again.  And those things will continue happening until someone steps up and stops it.  Until someone says enough is enough and begins to move things in a different direction, or at the very least says this is wrong, the same things will repeat themselves over and over again.  And that certainly is happening with Jacob’s family.

Jacob was the favored son of his mother Rebekah, while his father Isaac, favored his older brother Esau.  Plotting together with his mother, Jacob is able to steal both Esau’s birthright and also the blessing due to him as the first born son, causing Esau to hate Jacob and to plot to kill him.  Sounding familiar?  Isaac too was the favored son, at the very least by his mother, who plots to have the older son Ishmael expelled from the household so that only Isaac will inherit from his father, even though he is the second born son.  And while we don’t know anything about what Ishmael things about all of this, we might surmise that he has some hate in him for his brother, and his people the Ishmaelites become contenders with the Israelites and also play a part at the end of this story.

Wrestling with God

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Genesis 32:22-31:

There something important and powerful about a name.  Names have meanings and we associate certain things with a name, including such things as ethnicity or nationality, or age, as name popularity comes and goes, and sometimes just intangible things.  When I hear the name Jenny or Steve, I just imagine a certain type of person in my head.  Have you ever met someone and when you found out there name, you thought either a, that it sounds perfect for them, or b, that the name didn’t seem to match them at all?  Parents know that there is a certain amount of pressure that comes with picking out the right name for a baby, as you don’t want to give your child the wrong name.  When Linda was pregnant with Samantha, we didn’t know if she was going to be a boy or a girl, and while we had a girls name picked out, we didn’t have a boys name set, and so I proposed that we consider naming them after the first Yankee that we saw hit a homerun at the first Yankee game we attended after we found out Linda was pregnant, which just happened to be against the Chicago Cubs.

© Scott Stantis 

In the first inning, Gary Sheffield hit what Gary and  nearly everyone in the stadium thought was a homerun, and we thought well Gary’s not bad.  But as I said nearly everyone thought it was a homerun, but the one person who counts, which is the umpire, didn’t and so Gary was out.  In the fourth inning,, Derek Jeter came up with the basis loaded, and we thought how great would this be.  Derek had never hit a career grandslam, and as a Yankee fan this was our opportunity to name our potential son after the greatest Yankee of my generation, and one of the greatest of all time, and plus we could use either Derek or Jeter as a name, but he simply flew out.  Then in the seventh inning, Hideki Matsui, our hard hitting Japanese right fielder came up, and sure enough he hit one out, and as soon as it was clear it was going to be a homerun, Linda turned to me and said “we are not naming our son Hideki,” and so my dreams of a Yankee name were out.  There is something powerful about a name.  They often give meaning and importance, especially in the Bible.

When we looked at the story of Hagar, I remarked that neither Abraham nor Sarah ever used Hagar’s name because to do so would give her position and place, and that Hagar is the only person in the Bible to name God.  And of course they also represent people whose names are changed with changing circumstances.  Abraham starts out as Abram, which means exalted father, and then is changed to Abraham, which means father of many, or father of nations.  His wife sarai’s name is often said to be princess, although there is also a meaning of controlling or contentious, which certainly matches her personality better, but then it is changed to Sarah, which means, mother of nations, but the name change does not always necessarily indicate a change in personality or character as Sarah demonstrates and the same could be said of today’s passage.

Neither Here Nor There

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Genesis 28:10-19a:

One of the things I like about the Bible is that, for the most part, it does not try and hide the skeletons that are in the closet, they are there for everyone to see, warts and all.  In the gospels, the disciples just never seem to get it, one of them betrays Jesus and all the others flee at the end, and Peter, the seemingly key disciple, through his impetuousness constantly getting into trouble and putting his foot in his mouth.  There are three major patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Indeed, God will sometimes be referred to as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac or the God of Jacob. Abraham twice lies in order to save his own life and says that his wife Sarah is not his wife but instead his sister and as a result, Sarah is taken into two different harems.  But that seems like nothing compared with Jacob, who is probably the hardest of the three to talk about because to use some church appropriate language, Jacob’s a scoundrel, but he’s not even really a lovable scoundrel.

Last week we heard about Abraham sending his servant back to his native land in order to find a wife for Isaac.  That wife is Rebekah, and in passages that we skip, Rebekah and Isaac have twins.  Esau is the first of the twins to be born, but as Esau is born, his younger brother comes out holding onto his heel, and because of this he is named Jacob which means something like “usurper” or “overtaker” or “grasper.”  And so it will be as when they grow up with Jacob becoming a con-artist, someone who takes as much advantage of situations as he can to get what he wants. Esau is the one who goes out does the hard work, whereas Jacob wants to stay close to the house, and he’s definitely a momma’s boy.  One day Esau comes in from the fields, and he finds Jacob in the house having been cooking some stew, and Esau basically says he’s so hungry he could eat a horse, and so Jacob tells Esau he can have some food if he’ll turn over his birthright, which Esau does.  Now we can certainly question what Esau is thinking here, but it begins to indicate how Jacob is going to go about things.  But then, under the direction of Rebekah, who seems to favor Jacob over Esau, Jacob tricks his father Isaac into giving him blessing to him rather than to Esau as the first born son. 

Now the story of the trickery over gaining a blessing and the birthright, should remind us of the finagling that Sarah does in order to get Isaac the blessing and inheritance as the second born son, by expelling  Ishmael into the wilderness, which is where we find we also find Jacob.  Except Jacob is not in the wilderness because he has been expelled, but instead because he is fleeing for his life.  When Esau hears what Jacob has done in stealing his blessing, Esau plots to kill him, and so Rebekah tells Jacob to go back to the ancestral land, her land, to find himself a wife, and so Jacob flees into the wilderness, which is where we find him.

Although Jacob now has both the first born birthright and blessing, these don’t mean anything to someone on the run, someone running for their life, and for the first time, maybe in his life, but certainly in the narrative, Jacob is alone.  He is not at home and he is not where he intends to be, and he is certainly nowhere where he ever imagined he would be, maybe he’s even beginning to think about the type of person he is, although I think that’s probably a stretch as we will see, but Jacob lays down in the middle of nowhere and goes to sleep, and to show how desolate his existence has become we are told that uses a rock for his pillow, not the most comfortable of equipment.  And yet it is here that Jacob encounters God.  He is not in the family land, where he is heading, nor is he in the Promised Land, where he is fleeing from.  He has neither what he had or what he will get.  He is neither who he was nor who he will become, he is in other words neither here nor there.   He is between places.  He wants to be better and more important than he is, and he wants to be someplace else, he is between two worlds and yet that is where he encounters God.

But, when we look in scripture we find that this is not unusual as it seems that people encounter God more often when they have left their normal lives, when they are in the wilderness either literally or metaphorically, and so it is here with Jacob.  Jacob does not encounter God at home surrounded by family, he encounters God out in the wilderness.  Traditionally we know this story as Jacob’s ladder, but that’s really incorrect.  Instead, the word here for ladder is best translated as staircase or ramp, but Jacob’s ramp just doesn’t have the same ring to it.  Now here is a picture of the famous Ziggurat of Ur, which is in modern day Iraq.  The soldiers going up the stairs give you a sense of the dimensions.  A Ziggurat, which is obviously a manmade structure, is where the gods of the ancient near east were said to have lived.  People would go up the stairs to the top in order to commune with the god they were worshipping.  This is probably what Jacob is dreaming about, and that’s what the word here would indicate, but there is a key difference between what Jacob dreams and how a Ziggurat was understood.  The gods of the ziggurats did not go up and down the steps, the way the angels do, not does the god come down to the ground.  The god who lives on the ziggurat stays at the top and if anyone wants to have a conversation then they have to go up to the top.  But notice what happens in Jacob’s dream.  God does not stay at the top of the staircase; instead God comes down and talks with Jacob.  That would have been a truly remarkable idea in the ancient world, just as the idea that God is not stationary would have also been extraordinary, but what God says to Jacob is that God will go with Jacob and bring him back.  God is not limited to a particular location.

Now the reality is that while we may acknowledge that God is everywhere, we often don’t live like it.  We come to church on Sunday in order to “get close with God”, but then when we leave here we act as if we leave God behind.  Never interacting with God until we come back here again next week.  Or worse, we leave not just God behind but our faith and beliefs as well.  I once worked with someone who constantly acted unethically, and when I called her on it she said she said her confessions each night so she had nothing to worry about.  That is leaving god behind and going out into the world and then coming back to where you think God resides and acting as if they two places are not connected.  It also says that we can deal with God where and when we want, and perhaps God is not present in those other places.

Sometimes this is so we can ignore God’s strictures in our lives, but often it’s because we don’t think that God wants to deal with us, and so we think if only I were a little better then God would like us and would want to love us, or we want to put off dealing with God until something else happens.  As soon as I stop drinking or doing drugs, as soon as I stop feeling so depressed or miserable, as soon as I stop mourning, as soon as I feel ready then I will be ready to encounter God, because then God will be willing to love us.  The problem with that is that just like with Jacob, God cannot meet us where we want to be, or take us for who we want to be, God can only meet us where we are and as we are.  God did not wait for Jacob to reach his destination, or to become a better person, to become less of a scoundrel, instead God encounters him where he is not where he wants to be.

Noted Christian author Tony Campolo recounts a time in which he had gone to Honolulu to speak at a conference.  His first night there, Campolo woke up at 9am his time, although unfortunately it was only 3am in Hawaii.  Knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, he decided to walk to a small diner nearby that was open all night.  At 3:30, he says, a loud, provocatively dressed group of prostitutes came into the restaurant at the end of their night.  Their crude and loud talk made Campolo uncomfortable, and so he prepared to leave, but as he did so, he heard one of the women say “tomorrow’s my birthday.  I’m going to be thirty-nine.”  Her friend responded, “So what do you want from me, a birthday party?  You want me to get you a cake and sing you happy birthday?”  “Come on” the woman said, “why do you have to be so mean?  I was just telling you, that’s all.  I don’t want anything from you.  I mean, why should you give me a birthday party?  I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole life.  Why should I have one now?”

When Campolo heard those words, he made a decision.  He stayed in the diner until the women left.  Then he said to the owner, “Do they come here every night?”  “Yeah,” he said, “you can set your clock by it.”  “What’s the name of the woman who said she was having a birthday,” Campolo asked?  “That’s Agnes” he said.”  “What do you think of us throwing  a party for her – right here – tomorrow night?” Campolo asked.  A smile crossed the owners face, and he said, “That’s great!  I like it!  I’ll even make the cake.” (SLIDE 6, CAKE)  At 2 the next morning, Campolo went back to the diner.  He put up decorations and a big sign that said Happy Birthday Agnes.  The workers at the diner had obviously gotten the word out, because by 3:15 just about every prostitute in Honolulu was crowded into the place.  At 3:30 sharp, the doors swung open and in came Agnes and her friends.  Campolo had the entire group scream “Happy Birthday, Agnes.”  Agnes was so stunned, that a friend had to hold her up, while everyone began to sing Happy Birthday.  When the cake, covered with 39 candles, was brought over, Agnes began to cry, and before the cake was cut she asked if she could take the cake down the street to show it to her mother and then come right back.  The owner said that would be fine, and Agnes walked out with the cake.  When the door closed behind her, a silence filled the diner.  Campolo broke the silence by saying, “What do you say we pray?”  He said it probably seemed strange for an entire room of prostitutes to bow their heads in prayer, but that’s what happened.  Campolo prayed for Agnes and the other prostitutes in the diner, affirming that they were beloved daughters of God, with great value, worth and promise.  When Campolo finished praying, the owner said “You never told me you were a preacher.  What kind of a church do you belong to?”  In a moment of divine inspiration, Campolo said “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.”  And the owner said, "No you don't. There's no church like that. If there was, I'd join it. I'd join a church like that!"  The owner had certainly never heard the story of Jacob

Jacob did not plan on meeting God where he was, and I am pretty sure that Agnes never thought she would meet God at 3:30 in the morning either.  In fact, I am pretty sure that Agnes, and every other prostitute in that diner, probably thought they were unworthy of God’s love and that they would not be welcome in any church that they walked into.  How many others like Agnes are out there?  People who are hungry for the word of God, people wanting to be told that they are beloved children of God and that God loves them and cares for them and wants to be in relationship with them, but are afraid to allow God to meet them where they are and are even more afraid of how they might be received if they are to walk through those doors?  Are we a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning? Are we a people that believes in a God who not only throws parties for prostitutes at 3:30, but that loves them as beloved daughters?  Are we a people who can encounter God at 3:30 in the morning in the middle of nowhere?  Because I would be willing to bet that Campolo had an encounter with God that morning just like Agnes did.  I know that there are lots of people in this community, and maybe even some of you here today, who believe that God cannot have a relationship with them, that they are not ready or worthy, but God cannot meet us where we want to be but only where we are, but there are only two ways they can know that.  One is for us to tell them, and the second is for us to welcome them with open arms when they walk through the door.  When asked why he was having dinner with prostitutes and tax collectors and other sinners, Jesus said “those who are well have no need of a physician… for I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

Rev. Geoff McElroy, a United Methodist pastor in Georgia, says “Jacob’s vision at Bethel speaks to one of the core beliefs of biblical faith: the Creator God, the God of Israel, the God of the covenant is not a God that abandons or ignores but is a God who is ever-present. Even in the dark times of life, when the biblical writers speak from their own places of abandonment and exile, there is usually a conviction alongside their laments, a conviction that God is somehow, someway still present and at work, that the promise still holds.”

Jacob is the ultimate scoundrel, fleeing for his life, and is on his way to someplace else, but he encounters God in the in between, he encounters God in the neither here nor there, and God tells him that not only is he important but that the promises of Abraham will continue through him.  We have a message for the world.  We are here to proclaim the gospel, that is literally the good news, but we also need to remember that God can only meet us where we are and as we are.  All of us know people who are desperate to hear the word of God, and so my charge to you this week is to talk with just one person this week and to tell them that God wants to have a relationship with them, that God loves them and that we love them and want to have a relationship with them, that we are here not because we are perfect, but because we are imperfect and that God cannot meet them were they want to be but only where they are regardless of where that is, so invite them to join us next week to hear another message about one of the ultimate con artists and his literal struggle with God, and it’s a message I think they might like to hear.  And then here is my next charge, we need to be ready to welcome them as another child of God with whom God wants to be in relationship.  May it be so.  Amen.