I have seen the wind. I have seen the wind on the Sumas prairie, where I grew up, near Abbotsford, BC. One fall, in the 1970s, we woke up after a night of the howling wind that picks up speed as it swoops down into the Fraser Valley near Chilliwack and into the Sumas flats. Our neighbour, half a kilometre away across the fields, had just finished building a brand new house and loafing barn. The wind blew off the roofs of both buildings and dropped them several hundred feet away, in the open field. Another neighbour, also half a kilometre away, slightly to the south of us, had one of those old, hip-roofed barns, 40 feet wide, 100 feet long, and a roof that covered a hayloft 20 feet high down the middle. The wind had taken that roof away too – with its huge 4 x 16 inch beams that supported the roof, it must have weighed several tonnes. My father’s buildings were unharmed. Years later, I was in Egypt with MCC, and my parents came to visit. They were with me over Christmas and New Year. My teenage sister was left to look after the farm, and on their return, picked them up from the Vancouver airport. She had to break the news to my father – the roof of his barn was gone. Well, not gone, it was lying in the field a 100 feet away. If watching TV counts as seeing, we’ve all seen far worse – Katrina, for example, or the recent tornados in Missouri that killed more than a 100 people, or the occasional tornados in Ontario. But seeing a disaster on TV is not the same as seeing up close, the destroyed buildings of a neighbour. I have seen the wind in Egypt too. Every year, in spring, around Easter, there are a number of Khamsin. The word means ‘50’, because that’s how many days the season lasts. Khamsin are strong winds that blow in from the western desert – sand storms that are as bad as prairie snow storms. There are sand drifts inside every crack in the windows or doors, and for weeks, everything in the apartment feels gritty and all of your clothes chafe because they’re filled with sand. The khamsin are like thunderstorms, they clear out the humidity and the pollution, but they’re definitely a mixed blessing. Winds can be fresh breezes, bring cool dry air; but they can also be storms, destructive, wounding. Metaphorical winds too can be fresh breezes, bringing new ideas, fresh ways of seeing, or they can be destructive and wounding.
If you follow the news, you’ll know that the winds that blew through Egypt recently have not been entirely peaceful. The old Pharoah is gone, but much of his regime is still in place. In the current power vacuum, the police and the military are no longer restraining the radical Islamic groups that are trying to drive a wedge between Muslim and Christian Egyptians. In Libya, Egypt’s neighbour, Canadian warplanes are among the many that are still dropping bombs – another wind of change that has become destructive. You may have read the same story I did when the bombing started. The first time bombs were dropped from an airplane was November 1, 1911, almost exactly 100 years ago. They were tiny, little more than hand grenades. The damage they caused was mostly psychological, not physical. The target? The Libyan town of Tripoli. It took only a few bombing runs before there was an unfortunate error and a bomb hit a Libyan field hospital, causing the first deaths from aerial bombing. Winds of change can bless or they can destroy.
Our challenges in Canada are not so stark. We are, however, confronted by some winds of change within our church, Mennonite Church Canada, and within our city, Toronto, to name only two. In both cases, it seems to me, it remains to be seen whether the winds will bring fresh air, or whether they will be destructive. Marilyn asked me to preach early Monday morning, July 4. You may remember that this was the first day of the Mennonite Church Canada assembly. Before saying yes, I wanted to see what the lectionary texts would be. Three of them were the texts we have heard this morning (if we were Anglican or Catholic, we would also have read a fourth text, a Psalm). The Old Testament reading, the story of Jacob struggling with a mysterious figure, immediately reminded me of a book I had read shortly after it was published in 2005, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. It seemed too good to be true: Mennonite Church Canada was going to allow the leaders of a GLBT group to be present and speak publicly at an Assembly – the first time since the Assembly in Abbotsford more than ten years ago. I would be able to preach on a text that has been creatively reinterpreted by gay Jews and Christians, and end with the happy message that I had seen fresh winds blowing in Mennonite Church Canada. That’s not how it turned out, but I had said yes, so here I am. I didn’t really expect much from the Assembly – I finally have enough life experience to know that change rarely happens as smoothly or as quickly as we would like. If I hadn’t yet learned that, the lectionary texts we heard this morning would have taught me that.
We heard three texts this morning. Jeff Taylor, Alicia and I attended a one-day seminar last fall on preaching. It was led by Alan Rudy-Froese, who is now the professor of preaching at AMBS, our seminary. One of the things we learned was about focus. I can’t remember the acronym, but the rule went something like this: pick one text, find one problem in the text, find one problem today, and connect the two or apply the problem in the text to the problem in the world today. And, spend about a quarter of your time on each of the four elements. I should warn you that I’m going to ignore everything we were taught and meander through the three texts. I trust that some of you will go home with a nugget you might remember for a week.
I begin with the story from Genesis. The book I mentioned earlier was written by Rabbi Steven Greenberg. Greenberg is an Orthodox Jew, the first openly gay rabbi in the Orthodox movement. There are, broadly speaking, three movements within North American Judaism: Liberals, Conservative, and Orthodox. The Orthodox are the traditionalists within Judaism: they keep all of the 613 traditional Jewish commandments, although they have had to creatively reinterpret some of them. It’s rare for GLBT persons to remain in that community, and the notion of a gay Orthodox rabbi is a bit like the notion of a gay minister among the Amish – it’s just not thinkable. When Greenberg came out, he didn’t have a congregation; to his surprise and relief, he was allowed to keep his position at a national Orthodox organization, and the seminary that has authority over rabbinical ordination did not strip him of his ordination. He tells this story in the first part of his book, and then goes on in the second half of his book to wrestle, as
a committed Orthodox Jew, with the familiar texts that are the basis for the Jewish laws against homosexual relationships. When I looked at the book again in preparation for this sermon, I was surprised to discover that there is in fact only one reference in his book, apart from the title, to our text from Genesis. Before he came out, Greenberg had written an article for a major Jewish periodical describing what it felt like to be a gay Orthodox rabbi. He had signed the article with a pseudonym, Yaacov Levado. The name Yaacov Levado means ‘Jacob alone’ or ‘Jacob is alone.’ I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what it feels like to be alone or abandoned. It’s a feeling I know only superficially from my own experience, one I’ve had to learn about from friends or from books like Greenberg’s. The aloneness that Greenberg talks about in his book is not the solitude that introverts like me want more of. It’s the feeling of having to go through a crisis alone. Most of us have some experience of that feeling, at least temporarily. Erika and I were abandoned by our movers ten days ago – we felt alone for several hours, till nine of you showed up to help us. What began as a very unpleasant experience ended up as a wonderful experience of community. ‘Community’ can be a tiresome cliché, but it feels great when it happens. That was fairly trivial example, not at all what it must be like to feel alone for months, or years, or decades. GLBTs are not, of course, the only ones with experience of aloneness – there are other people living with the burden of social stigmas. But reading a book like Greenberg’s is a good place to gain an appreciation for the Jacob Levados we might encounter. Rereading Greenberg’s book brought home to me again how difficult it must be to be a GLBT person within most religious communities. Why is it easier to be a GLBT person in a secular context like my workplace than in most churches in MC Canada? I hope for our church, Mennonite Church Canada, that while we wait for the theologians to figure it out, more congregations will become places where Jacob Levados will not be alone.
‘Jacob was alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.’ Greenberg has practiced the traditional Jewish form of reading called ‘midrash.’ He has picked out two key words from the text and applies them creatively to his situation. Much of his book is hard-nosed, honest historical critical interpretation, but there are more striking examples of this kind of creative reading in his book. It’s not just a Jewish way of reading: Christians do it too. In the story as we now have it, however, if we look at the story as a whole and at the context, it seems clear that Jacob chooses to be alone. That he chooses to be alone at night indicates that he is preparing himself for a spiritual test. In most traditional cultures, it is common for individuals to undergo trials that are both spiritual and physical. In many cultures, enduring a trial of some kind is the way one is recognized as an adult member of the community. Those who have been or wish to be recognized as leaders within the community must undergo another test. Jacob has left his father-in-law Laban and is preparing to meet Esau, the older twin he had cheated of his birthright. The outcome of the trial that Jacob chooses to undergo will show whether Jacob is truly fit to be the patriarch of his own clan. Will he become independent of the authority of his own family, represented, surprisingly, by his older brother, Esau, rather than his father Isaac. Will he in fact be able to separate himself from his father-in-law, the family of his two wives. Jacob was alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. Jacob wrestles with the man through the night and proves himself to be stronger – the man wounds him, but Jacob prevails and demands a blessing. The man blesses him by giving Jacob a new name, Israel. The blessing confirms that Jacob, Israel, will become the nation or people God had promised to Abraham and to Isaac. Israel, or Jacob, will indeed be distinct from the nations founded by his uncle Ishmael and his brother Esau. The name ‘Israel’ means ‘El struggles’; and within the new name is the promise that Jacob / Israel now has a personal, family, or national God who will struggle on his behalf against the gods of the other peoples or nations. The name is suitable for Jacob, the narrator suggests, because Jacob has ‘struggled with divine beings and with humans, and has prevailed.’ The humans are most likely his father-in-law Laban and his brother Esau, and the ‘man’ he has wrestled with must be representative in some way of the divine order. Jacob has overcome those who were once his clan, and their divine protectors. He is ready to start his own clan, protected by his own god.
It is in many ways a mysterious story; why, for example, does the man wound Jacob before blessing him? There is an easy answer: Jews don’t eat the sciatic nerve of animals, and the story explains why they don’t. But why is this relatively obscure law connected to a story as significant as the renaming of the patriarch Israel? Why does the text say that Jacob wrestles with a ‘man’ when it would make more sense if he wrestled with an angel? Perhaps there is an obscure recognition of a psychological fact, that anything that makes us special also makes us different from the crowd and may wound us. To return to the book that provoked my reflections: Rabbi Greenberg hints that being gay is, for him, both a wound and a blessing. It has and continues to cause him pain, but it has also been the cause of blessings he would not otherwise have known.
The story is mysterious, and there is little in it, I suspect, that speaks to our own experience. We are not alone in finding the story strange. Other biblical authors domesticated the story: it is retold in dramatically simpler form in Genesis 35:9–10: ‘God appeared again to Jacob on his arrival from Paddan-aram, and He blessed him. God said to him, “You whose name is Jacob will be called Jacob no more, but Israel is your name.” Thus he named him Israel.’ There is no struggle, no wounding, just a respectful meeting between God and patriarch. God gives Jacob a new name, for no reason that is apparent in the text, but just because. The prophet Hosea, on the other hand, has another enigmatic version of the story (Hosea 12:4–5): ‘The Lord once punished Jacob, requited him for his deeds. In the womb he tried to supplant his brother; grown to manhood, he strove with a divine being. He strove with an angel and prevailed – the other had to weep and implore him.’ Doug Johnson can probably pull a sermon out of that but I won’t even try.
The early church allegorized the text. Allegory allows a lot of freedom in interpretation; one of the more common interpretations found in the theologians of the early church goes like this: The story is an allegory of Jewish struggles with Jesus. Jesus is both divine and human, god and man; Jacob, or Israel, struggled with god and man, that is, Jesus, and prevailed when Israel crucified Jesus. Does that work for you? It doesn’t work for me – I’m afraid I can’t get into the spirit of that kind of interpretation, I want to know how the first audience might have understood a text, even if that understanding is far from my own concerns. But, there is something to be learned, I think, from understanding how a text was read by the early church. Like me, you may sometimes wonder what possible relationship there is between the various lectionary texts. To use the example of our texts this morning: we have this story in Genesis 32, the feeding of the 5,000 in Ma
tthew 14, and Paul’s anguished reaction to Jewish disbelief in Romans 9:1–5. Who thought that these texts fit together, and why? The groupings are ancient. I suspect the early church’s interpretation of this text from Genesis explains why it was paired with Romans 9:1–5 in the lectionary. Paul cannot understand how the Jews can reject Jesus; clearly it was somehow foreordained. Jacob’s struggle with the god-man, a story found in the Torah, foreshadows the Jewish rejection of Jesus. Paul’s anguish in his letter to the church in Rome is a good example, for Christians, of another case in which change is both a blessing and a wound. Paul’s attitude is an example of how we might all respond to those who, we believe, don’t get it. Paul does not curse or condemn his fellow Jews; rather, he wishes that he could suffer on their behalf.
When I first looked at the lectionary texts, I asked that the three we heard this morning be read in the order Genesis Matthew Romans. I thought I could read them with you as a kind of triptych: the texts from Genesis and Romans would be the two sides, two texts in which the blessing is also a wound. In the middle is the gospel, the largest panel in the triptych, the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand. It’s a story about indiscriminate generosity and grace – all who come have enough to eat. There is even plenty of food left over – no one has felt the need to take extra and hoard it, all who come are fed until they are satisfied, without questions about their social status, financial resources, or the like; there is no distinction between rich and poor, saints and sinners, Jews and non-Jews.
However, when I looked more closely at the context of this story in Matthew, I saw that my symbol of a triptych might be a bit too neat. Our reading begins, ‘Now when Jesus heard this.’ The ‘this’ that Jesus has just heard about is the death of John the Baptist, executed by Herod. Jesus intends to withdraw to a quiet place to reflect on what this means for his own career. The crowds, however, won’t leave Jesus alone. Jesus has compassion on the crowds and heals the sick among them. The contrast with Herod is stark: Herod executes, Jesus heals. When evening comes, the disciples want to send the crowds away but Jesus won’t let them. After a day spent healing the sick, he is now prepared to feed the crowd also. This is something only Jesus can do. What I mean is this: The day before, Jesus heard that a colleague in the work of the kingdom had been executed. It is not a normal person, I think, who can continue caring for other people when his or her own life is in imminent danger. We hear stories about people who do this, in war zones, in the midst of epidemics, and so on. But these stories confirm how rare such self-giving really is. What we can all do is be disciples and distribute the food that Jesus has blessed to the crowds that are hungry.