[Propertalk] Proper 11 a

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

I try, during the Season after Pentecost, to preach on the OT of track A 
as often the congregation hasn't had these passages read in Eucharistic 
liturgies.

There's a thought at the end which I have in red in my copy. I saw this 
this morning but can't confirm that there was a woman who survived the 
Ukraine plane destruction.

Some time to edit and rethink!

Happy Weekend!

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY 
THE SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
GENESIS 28:10-19a							              PROPER  11 (A)
ROMANS 8:12-25					 
13th JULY, 2014	
MATTHEW 13:24-30, 36-43			 
PSALM 139:1-11, 22-23

	“Everything is AWESOME.”

	A passenger plane is downed in Ukraine. Two hundred and ninety eight 
die. The source of the missile was, as of Thursday afternoon, 
undetermined.

	Everything is awesome!

	The Israeli Knesset and Palestinian Parliament refuse to talk to one 
another, just about one another. Missiles are their vocabulary.

	Everything is awesome!

	Tens of thousands of children under age eighteen, some just babies, are 
brought into this country and throw themselves on our mercy.

	Everything is awesome!

	The high temperatures ranging from 80 to 100 degrees, combined with no 
rain and with high winds and thunder storms, have Washington and Oregon 
governors declaring a state of emergency because of uncontained fires 
and we’ve not yet reached the hottest month of the year.

	Everything is awesome!

	Jacob swindles his brother, Esau, connives with his mother, abuses his 
father, then enters into a racist deal with Rebekah, his mother, to 
ignore all the local woman and seek a wife from another ethnic group so 
that Rebekah can maintain her power and status.

	Everything is awesome!

	I don’t know about you, but this makes me SO happy to be alive!

	What CAN we say and do when we’re bombarded with terrible news, with 
distressing pressures on our personal and public lives?

	An internet blog on which Episcopalians post carried a story on Friday. 
“With a flood of bad news coming out Israel and Palestine, the Ukraine, 
Syria and Iraq and, finally, along the U.S.-Mexico border, it is easy to 
be overwhelmed. How does one cope and stay spiritually engaged when all 
the news is bad?

	“Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who blogs as the Velveteen Rabbi, shares some 
thoughts:

	“‘It's tempting to want to respond to the echo chamber by shouting more 
loudly. But I don't think that actually works, and I think that giving 
in to that impulse can engrave hurtful grooves on our hearts. I've 
written about that before, too – how easily the mind becomes accustomed 
to a thought pattern and gets stuck there; how our repeated thoughts 
carve grooves on the soft clay of our consciousness” 1

	I wonder what sort of a frame of mind occupied Jacob as he set out on 
that strange wife-seeking journey? Was he filled with stomach-churning 
feelings of anger, or confusion, or confusion? Had he made up his mind 
to divorce himself from his family and friends, his domestic moodiness, 
everything that had sustained him back home? Was he walking – probably 
not totally by himself, but with a few servants – was he walking, all 
wrapped up in his own thoughts and desires, regardless of what would be 
right, and good, and profitable mot only for himself but for the entire 
community? We don’t know whether he’d come to some sort of realization 
of what he’d done to his family and friends, especially his brother, and 
his provoking Esau so much that he ran off in spite to marry a local 
women.

	This wasn’t a good situation. It had the potential for all sorts of 
conflict, for violence, for hatred that would be carried on from person 
to person, even generation to generation – just like so many of the 
conflicts thriving in our own day.

	It’s so frustrating. This – our personal and public concerns – this can 
tie us up in knots. Even when there’s the possibility of something good, 
something loving, compassionate and helpful arising in our lives with 
all the noise of violence, oppression, stupidity, arrogance, and so on 
reverberating in our heads it can seem so difficult to be able to 
rejoice.

	Rabbi Barenblat suggested that “If watching the news or reading your 
social media feeds leaves you struggling with crying jags, panic 
attacks, nightmares, anxiety which won't let up, you are not alone, and 
what you're feeling is real. Different people heal in different ways, 
but I've found that the best tools include disengaging for a time from 
social media and the news, and when the obsessive anxious thoughts 
recur, just noticing them, without judgement, and redirecting my 
thoughts in another direction. For me that usually means prayer, but use 
whatever works for you: music, exercise, thinking about an event you're 
looking forward to, calling a loved one, whatever works.”

	This isn’t a case of burying our heads in the sand, refusing to look at 
what’s happening on the next block over from ours, or outside the city 
limits, or half way across the world. To do that would go just as much 
against what Jesus taught as does wringing our hands and living a life 
of pessimism. Somehow, we have to find ways not only to cope but to live 
fruitful lives that are as stress-free as we can make them.

	Easier said than done. I know I’ve put my head on the pillow several 
nights, and wondered what I’d done or left undone that had harmed 
someone, or discouraged them, or held them back – never mind what I’d 
done or left undone to God!

	Here’s the amazing thing, though. Jacob found a place to send the 
night. The whole day’s journey must have meant that it was out of sight 
of where he’d left, and all the folk he’d left behind. We don’t get a 
sense of whether or not it was a friendly or a secure place. Maybe he 
was simply exhausted and, as it was dark, he didn’t want to risk falling 
over a cliff or stumbling into an unwelcome situation. Jacob settled in 
as best as he could and probably tried to put his struggles behind him 
for a few hours while his body regained its strength.

	That was where and when God’s voice could be heard by him. Up to this 
point, he may have been too preoccupied, too self-absorbed, too worried 
about what was going on. When he fell asleep, though, God was able to 
penetrate his subconscious and to provide not only for that night, but 
for the rest of his life and for his family’s lives. Just as God had 
spoken to Jacob’s father and grandfather, and, no doubt, countless 
others as well, God found a way to allow Jacob to understand what 
Presence was all about.

	Notice that Jacob stayed put in his dream. The ladder became visible, 
but it was angels going back and forth between the real of God beyond 
our vision and God’s real here on earth. The angels had been there all 
the time. And God who stood beside Jacob had been there all that time 
also. It was simply a matter of vision, of understanding, of willingness 
to think beyond expectations which had been tainted and tarnished by all 
the things Jacob had done and all the others had done to him, just as 
it’s probably the same tarnish that keeps us focussed on missiles, and 
plane debris, and medical images of havoc in our bodies, and 
intransigent people who appear to have so little vision of what is 
possible on earth, and of what lies at the centre of God’s heart.

	No matter how horrendous the scene, how vicious the behaviour, how 
debilitating the pressures that impact us, as Rabbi Barenblat wrote, we 
have to look beyond ourselves. Looking within may only serve to paralyse 
us. If we’re to retain any sanity at all for our own lives and the lives 
of those around us – and for the lives of the millions upon millions 
whom we’ll never ever see, but whose lives we impact every day by our 
thoughts, our conversations, our actions; if we’re to retain any sanity 
at all, and to bring God’s Word of peace, and hope, and joy, we have to 
engage with the One who is ever-present and simply waits to bring us 
reassurance that all shall be well, no matter how dark things appear.

	Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Returning hate for hate multiplies 
hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. 
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot 
drive out hate: only love can do that.” 2

	Or, in Rabbi Rachel’s words, “Marinating in a perennial bath of 
horrific news can actually cause harm. Whatever obligations you may feel 
to those who are suffering, you aren't helping them by harming 
yourself.” This is probably what the enemy would have us do, the enemy 
to which Jesus referred in this second parable about sowing the seed or 
love, and of comfort, and of hope.

	The enemy, no doubt, wishes us to think that if only we get bigger, 
more powerful, longer-range missiles, everything will work out better; 
if only we can keep those pesky foreigners from taking up space, and 
resources, and so on, on OUR precious land, everything will be smooth 
sailing; if only everyone would think and act as we think, then there 
wouldn’t BE any problems in the world.

	If we continue think with the old conventional mind-set, and remain 
introspectively self-absorbed, then the weeds, all the things which 
gobble up our resources and, worse yet, our common sense and our 
abilities to function as the human beings God wishes us all to be; if we 
continue to think like that then we’ll stifle our potential to live as 
Jesus’ full sisters and brothers. And we’ll remain deaf and blind to God 
in our midst, doing two things: first encouraging us with the reminder 
of the Divine Presence with us every day in every place; and second by 
giving us glimpses of what will be.

	Jacob woke from his dream a refreshed person, not simply because of the 
sleep, but because he acknowledged his God had spoken to him of how his 
life and his dreams could play out. The promise God wished to give to 
Jacob was there for the taking. Of course, Jacob could have turned it 
down. He could have continued his days being conniving, being bitten, 
being isolationist. He might even have been a moderately successful 
farmer. Who knows? But then he would have given away the opportunity to 
have been a link in the lives of his ancestors and his future 
descendants, a link on which those around him and those comings after 
him would be able to hold when they faced their difficulties.

	God IS present – in the plane crashes, the bombed-out rubble, the 
dismembered bodies, the socially and medically deprived of the world, in 
this building right here and now. The question which comes with this 
vision of hope, though, is whether or not we’ll see, and how we’ll 
respond.
	

	Out of the debris, the flaming remains, the devastation of the 
destruction of that Malaysian passenger plane, one person, miraculously, 
survived the explosion and the thirty-three thousand foot fall. How she 
did it, I don’t know. But her words ring out: I will never be the same 
person. Just as Jacob tried to renew his life; just as we are invited to 
renew our lives to be in joy because of the Presence of God.

[I thought I read about this this morning, but can’t find a confirming 
report.]

	DESPITE the mess, the tragedy, God IS present. As Jacob said, 
“Everything IS awesome!”

NOTES:

1 	“What to do when all the news is bad” by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat 
http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2014/07/how-news-and-social-media-can-hurt-us.html 
via “The Lead” 
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/spirituality/what_to_do_when_all_the_news_i.html

2	“Strength to Love” by Martin Luther King, Jr. See also “A Testament of 
Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches”

Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)
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