The Con-Man in the Wilderness

This sermon was preached at our Evensong service on Sunday 24th March, a week that had been pretty eventful in the political life of the UK, as the country prepared to leave the EU - the original 'Brexit Day' was supposed to be 29th March, but at this point in time, who knows if/when it will be!
The Old Testament reading for the evening was Genesis 28:10-19.
Hope you enjoy the sermon...

What a week it’s been for the UK politically! As the now-potentially-postponed Brexit-day loomed ever nearer, concerns this week grew amongst the public and politicians over the possible impacts of the UK leaving the EU with no deal. We’ve heard about all sorts of planned emergency operations on how as a country we’ll mitigate any fallout, including measures to control traffic, a ministry of defence underground control-centre and the stockpiling of food and medicine; and across social media, the UK’s fastest growing petition has been shared thousands of times garnering literally millions of signatures in an effort to rescind article 50 and keep the UK within the EU. And only yesterday, somewhere in the region of 1-2 million people marched through London, demanding the government give the people of the UK another vote on the matter.

People, it seems, are worried. Some people, at least. There is fear that the UK is leaving behind prosperity and security, and moving towards an unknown future. We are in a political wilderness, unsure where to look to find a home, whether to turn back to what is known, or press onwards into whatever may lie before us, whether it be a brave new world, or a beckoning abyss.

Just a picture of Farage 'cos I've been talking about Brexit. Nothing to do with the title of this sermon at all...

There’s a convention with sermons that we preachers find a real-life situation, and then crowbar it into whatever topic we’re preaching on by saying “and that’s a bit like Jesus”. Well, don’t worry, Brexit is not like Jesus. But this odd limbo situation that the UK finds itself in at the moment is a bit like the reading from our Old Testament this evening. You see, in our reading Jacob finds himself in a very similar situation, although, purely from the excerpt we heard tonight, you would not necessarily know it.

Tonight, all that we heard was that “Jacob left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran.” and then that “He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set.” But, if we only read a few verses back, we start to understand why Jacob is on this journey – he is on the run from his brother Esau who has vowed to kill him. This isn’t a holiday or a business trip – Jacob is running for his life.

There’s another interesting bit that we, non-native Hebrew speakers, miss. The names of the places here are important. Jacob is running from Beer-sheba towards Haran. Beer-sheba is named after the well dug there by Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, and Haran means ‘parched’. Jacob is fleeing in the desert from his home in the place of the well, towards the parched land, where he hopes he will find refuge. He is leaving behind security, and moving towards an unknown future, unsure where to find a home, or whether he will survive the journey, let alone the arid, parched destination.

I think you can probably see the similarities with Brexit – leaving behind security, and moving towards the unknown, which could be good, or could be bad, but according to all known sources, does not at this point sound a great place to make your home.

And so, continuing our story, Jacob weary from his journey so far, stops at a random place on his way. Later the story tells us the place was once called Luz, but at this point, this place is not given a name. Jacob is weary, though, and tired, and needs somewhere – anywhere – to rest and just sleep. And so, he stops, in the middle of nowhere, a nothing-place, not worthy of being named. There are no comforts there, no place to take refuge, only stones strewn about the barren ground, so Jacob places his head upon one of those stones, stares up at the stars in the heavens and falls asleep. He must have been exhausted.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s where things change. Here, in this space of waste and waste of space. Here, in the barren land, Jacob meets God. Not back at his home, or at the place Jacob is going towards, but here in this wilderness.

And that gives us cause to stop and think, especially in this season of Lent. It wasn’t at the start of his journey in which Jacob met God, sending him out on some quest. It wasn’t at his point of destination that Jacob found God waiting for him with a great ‘well-done!’ at the final finish line. It was on the journey, at a low point, in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere that God found Jacob.

That phrasing is the right way round too – in this dream, the famous Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob doesn’t climb those steps to meet God. The reading told us what happened, ever so matter-of-factly. “And the Lord stood beside him”. It’s God who comes to Jacob, not the other way around. God climbs down those steps into that nowhere place, and stands next to this lowlife.

And Jacob was a lowlife – make no mistake on that. The reason he was on the run from his brother is that he’d defrauded him. He’d cheated him out of his father’s will. He’d stolen the rights of the firstborn son, and tricked his father into leaving everything to him. His brother had every right to be absolutely furious; Jacob had made him landless and stolen his future. Jacob deserved to be on the run, he deserved to have found himself in the middle of nowhere, using stones for a pillow and staring up at the stars in the heavens in fear for his life.

But, still, God met him there.

God met someone completely unworthy of meeting God in a place completely unworthy of that meeting. And he transformed all of it. The homeless con-man who has betrayed his family gets promised a home here where he lays and a family spread out over all the earth, and the wilderness nowhere place becomes the house of God and the home of Israel.

And God did that because that’s what God does. He meets us where we are, on whatever wilderness journey we are on, to Haran the Parched Land, to the utopia or dystopia of Brexit Britain, to the cross on our Lenten pilgrimage to Easter Sunday.

That’s what God does. He meets us where we are, as unworthy as we are, fraudsters, lowlifes, those who have betrayed and let down those we love and those who love us, whoever we are, and he changes us, and he promises us something new.

He meets us where we are. That’s what God does. All we need to do is stop – out of choice, necessity or exhaustion, it doesn’t matter – and look up to the stars in the heavens. And then, we might just  find God to be closer to us than we ever knew.

“And the Lord stood beside him.”

Amen