(Genesis 29:15-35)

Two weeks ago, I played tour guide on an aerial survey of the family dysfunctions threaded through the Old Testament.  It was far from an exhaustive tour; it’s sort of like the Grand Canyon—even in an airplane, if you want to see everything there is to see, you’re going to be up there long enough for your brain to overload and shut down.  Even the curated version was a lot to take in, and I know a few of you were surprised at how much is there, and how bad it is.  That’s a perfectly reasonable response, and quite unsurprising.  For one thing, churches generally aren’t in the habit of focusing on the ugly stories; one of the times I got myself in trouble was for preaching on Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, on the first Sunday of Advent.  I’m still proud of that Advent series on the women named in Jesus’ genealogy, but I admit having that as the main Scripture passage on a Sunday when the reader was a 13-year-old boy was not good judgment on my part . . . even if, given his family circumstances, I suspect he was rather less shocked by it than a number of adults wanted to believe.

There’s another consideration here, though, which I suspect is just as significant, and this is one which is nobody’s fault:  the cultural difference between us and the ancient Israelites, and particularly as it comes to how we do narrative.  Ours is the culture that created the soap opera, the stream-of-consciousness novel, and the third-person-omniscient narrator.  We’re used to a lot of detail about what the characters are thinking and feeling.  We can do all that, and we can make all that work, because we are a written culture—we have words on a page to do the remembering for us.  Ancient cultures depended on oral transmission, which meant narrative form was determined by the strengths and limitations of human memory.  As such, ancient narratives—including those we find in the Old Testament—are, by our standards, plot-heavy and sparse on emotional detail.  You get what’s in the dialogue and that’s about it.  As a consequence, the text isn’t going to open up the emotional world for you.  You have to feel your own way in.

That’s part of our task this morning.  It’s also the reason I sent out the links to Rich Mullins’ song “Jacob and 2 Women”—which I guess didn’t go out until last night; sorry about that.  No doubt some appreciate the song more than others, and it’s only a three-minute song so it’s obviously incomplete, but it’s more about feeling the story than telling it.  If it shapes you a little as you hear and think about Jacob and his family this morning, that is well.  If not, no doubt that is also as the Lord wills.  However you come to our text this morning, I encourage you to listen with your imagination and try to put yourself in the story.

Read more→

(Genesis 25:1-34)

We don’t do a lot with sermon titles at VSF, but I wanted to say something about the title for this one, because I stole it.  This goes back to Regent’s fall retreat in 1997—and yes, it was only a month or so later that Dr. Provan preached the sermon on Abraham that I referenced a few weeks ago, if you were here then.  Dave Diewert, who taught Hebrew, preached at that retreat, and he began by telling us that when he was asked to speak, he agreed, and then asked in turn what the theme was for that year.  The organizers said, “The family of God.”  His immediate response was “Heaven help us.”  His sermon was a longer-form response; its title, which I have taken for this morning, was The Dysfunctional Family of God.

As such, I’d like you to think of our text from Genesis 25 as something akin to the thumbnail on a video, or perhaps a free sample at the supermarket.  It’s just a moment in time taken from a story that has many, many more moments much like it.  If someone heard the phrase “the family of God” and wanted to know what that family was like, this passage would do about as well as any to give them a feel for the answer; but then, so would a lot of others.  Not to put too fine a point on it, the history of God’s chosen family runs the gamut of military acronyms from SNAFU (to use the pulpit-appropriate version, “Situation Normal:  All Fouled Up”) to FUBAR (“Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition”).

Read more→

(Genesis 12:1-9)

25 years or so ago, the way I read Genesis 12 changed, though I didn’t realize it until much later.  I know we’ve told some of you that Iain’s name is spelled the way it is in honor of one of my professors at Regent, Dr. Iain Provan, because he and his wife blessed us greatly during the months after Lydia’s birth.  They hadn’t been at Regent long at the time, having only moved to Vancouver in 1997; before that, Dr. Provan had been teaching at the University of Edinburgh.  He’s a Scot, and if I recall correctly, his wife is Irish or Scots-Irish, so the British Isles had always been home for them and their children—until Regent called, and in 1997 they ended up moving across an ocean and a continent to Canada’s Pacific Coast.

At some point during that fall semester, Dr. Provan gave his introductory sermon in chapel.  He turned it into an introductory sermon in truth, preaching on Genesis 12 and filling in the story with all the details of his own life and his own move with his family.  There are a couple lines from his message that I remember to this day, because he was quite funny, but that’s not all that has stuck with me.  In telling Abraham’s story as his own—or maybe vice versa, I’m not sure—Dr. Provan literally shifted my perspective on this passage in a small but crucial way.  You see—and I alluded to this two weeks ago—if we’re familiar with the Bible, we tend to read its stories from above, from something of a God’s-eye view.  We see things the people in them didn’t, we’re told things they didn’t know, and we know how the story goes and what it means.  (At least, we think we know what it means.)  That perspective has its advantages, but also a downside: it cuts us off from reading the Bible experientially.  It keeps us from reading from Abraham’s point of view and thinking how everything might have looked to him.  Dr. Provan changed that for me, at least for this text.

Now, before we dive into the story, we need to do one thing more to set the stage.  If you have your Bible open to Genesis 12, look back a few verses to 11:27.  We think of this as the story of Abraham—or Abram, as he was before God changed his name—but that’s not how Genesis frames it.  I don’t know how your Bible renders the first sentence, but I’ve used the NRSV because it’s completely literal:  “these are the descendants of Terah.”  The Hebrew word here is toledot, and though there’s no question as to its literal meaning, it gets translated a bunch of different ways because of how it’s used in Genesis.

Read more→

(Acts 2:1-21)

January 1, 2023:  7 people dead and 25 injured in seven mass shootings, in Mifflin Township, Ohio; Oklahoma City; Ocala, Florida; Clinton, Maryland; Durham, North Carolina; Chicago; and Allentown, Pennsylvania.  It was an ominously bloody beginning to what has been a bloody year so far.  Though there is no universally-accepted definition for a mass shooting, by one count there had been 223 this year as of last Sunday, including eight in Philadelphia, six in Chicago, six in New Orleans, and (oddly enough) five in Shreveport.  Perhaps the worst day so far this year was April 15, which saw four shootings and fifty casualties, including four killed and 32 injured at a 16^th-birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama.  And the response of our body politic?  Cue up the fiddle tunes while Rome is burning down around our ears.  Everyone agrees these are bad things, but other than that, the only thing on which everyone is agreed is on approaching them primarily as opportunities for partisan attacks and political advantage.  Brothers and sisters, this is our nation; we are in trouble.

I don’t just say that because of mass shootings, either.  Thing is, of the various trends in our culture which disturb me deeply, that might be the only one where calling it bad is uncontroversial—and that points to the biggest problem of all.  Those of y’all who’ve been around here long enough may remember I taught a few sessions in the Opening on family-systems theory, drawing primarily on the work of Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman.  In his last book, published posthumously in 1996, Dr. Friedman judged the US to be in a state of emotional regression, rising anxiety in the culture producing hyperseriousness and driving the herding instinct.  That process has only accelerated, tribalizing our politics to the point that even when everyone agrees something is bad, that just means the tribal warfare shifts to fighting over what to do about it.

Read more→

(Acts 2:14, 22-32)

Imagine, for a moment, yourself in Peter’s sandals.  You’ve seen Jesus convicted by a Jewish kangaroo court and brutally executed by Roman soldiers at the order of a politically-vulnerable Roman governor.  You’ve seen him alive again, and even eaten with him, proving him neither ghost nor golem.  You’ve stood looking up into the sky and watched him vanish from sight.  You’ve followed his instructions, waiting with the rest of his disciples in Jerusalem for . . . well, for something to happen, even if you weren’t exactly sure just what.  And now, this morning, with all of you together at the Temple to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, that something happened, and you are experiencing the world made strange.

And what’s more, it’s not just you—everyone around you in the Temple is experiencing it, too, as your fellow disciples are all speaking at the same time in all the various languages of the Roman world.  You’re surrounded by a crowd now, a crowd of people watching in stunned bewilderment.  Some are trying desperately to understand; others have raised shields of self-defensive mockery, accusing you all of being drunk out of your skulls.  Suddenly, you feel the Spirit of God pulling you up to speak.  What do you do?  What do you say?Read more→