A Homily on Genesis 32:22-31 and Matthew 14:13-21
by Griff Martin
For the Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Twentieth of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
August 2, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Some day we are going to look back on the year 2020 and try to make sense of all this... and what a project that will be. Last month the Times ran their normal feature which they run most Julys where they recap the first 6 months of the year… Our year started with the Australian wildfires (which seem like such a distant memory, don’t they?) and almost going to war with Iran. This was followed by the impeachment hearing in the senate, followed by one of the royal couples breaking ties with the royal family, followed by Kobe Bryant’s death and Harvey Weinstein’s guilty conviction, during all of that there was a presidential primary and during all of that there was this weird pneumonia-like illness that was first reported on the 6th of January and it slowly began to grow until it was the only news and it affected everything from the economy to school to vacations to TV shows and movies to why we are doing virtual church.
And in the middle of that pandemic, on day two, videos were released… the first was this everyday evil where a white woman threatened to call the cops on a black man in Central Park… the second video was an even more evil, a cop murdering a black man in broad daylight… and these two videos began a revolution that is way too late but is our only way forward…
That is 2020, and we still have 5 months to go, including a Presidential election, God help us. That is a lot for one year.
2020 feels very much like a dark year of the soul, to steal a phrase from one of our spiritual classics by St. John of the Cross. His poem begins with these words:
In an obscure night
Fevered with love's anxiety
(O hapless, happy plight!)
I went, none seeing me
Forth from my house, where all things quiet be
This work describes the journey from our soul into a space of union with God. It is the journey which is difficult but quite significant, for this journey calls us deeper into life, deeper into God and deeper into love. Think about one of the central teachings of Richard Rohr: the great teachers, transformers in life, are always love and suffering. The dark night is about that work.
And what one would think a guide would do is to tell us all the ways we can run from the dark nights, after all the dark nights are full of pains and fears. Which just makes sense… I mean, when do your fevers always spike? At night. When do your nightmares arrive? At night. When can you fail to calm your mind and anxiety and they seem 1,000 times worse? At night. So it would just make sense that any guidebook would be about how to avoid that.
But John of the Cross tells us that the dark night is actually a gift and we need to embrace it and walk into it.
John of the Cross would have fit in really well right now, he would have understood that transformation involves pain but that transformation was always necessary… that what’s in the way is the way. You see John caught a vision for what the monastery should be at a time that the monastery had become very, very corrupt and he worked to transform it and that got him in quite a bit of trouble, so much so that he was thrown into a monastic prison and solitary confinement, it was there he created "Dark Night of the Soul."
John of the Cross tells us that the dark night can be God’s best gift to us. The dark night can give us the opportunity to ask ourselves what powers we most rely on and what is the hope that gives meaning to our hearts and lives. The dark night can free us from our fears about God, from doing and believing all the “right” things about God and from our manipulating and grasping after God. The dark night, if we allow it, can be a place of transformation.
2020 must be a dark year of the soul… This year gives us the opportunity to ask what powers we rely on and what hope gives meaning to our life. This year can free us from fears, power, control and a whole host of other evils we need to be freed from. If you are not asking yourself all those questions, start now because this Pause is the time to be doing that work.
Use John of the Cross as your guide, use Jacob as your guide.
Our text today is really something… Jacob has just about done it all at this point, he has a blessing and a birthright and a bride that should not belong to him. He has created quite a list of enemies, all of whom seem to be coming at him at the same time and he is on the run, once again. Jacob spends a lot of his life running, physically running and mentally running.
Which is really all you can do when it comes to the dark nights, you can stop and face it or you can run from it… and let me give you a valuable piece of wisdom that you are going to learn sooner than later, you can’t run from the dark night, the dark night will always catch you. Sometimes in spectacular fashion -- welcome to 2020.
And Jacob runs as fast as he can but the night catches up. And in the darkness he finds himself fighting for his very life, wrestling with someone -- something -- the text never really makes that clear, so maybe it’s wrestling with everything. And it’s a fight to the very end until Jacob is broken and it’s in the breaking that Jacob finally realizes everything.
And in the breaking and the knowing, Jacob changes… Jacob no longer holds on for control and power, Jacob holds on now for a blessing. Notice the difference: I am holding on for power and control, to be in charge, to be certain, to be the Man, or I am holding on because I need a blessing from you because I am not going through this without letting it change me for the better.
Jacob reminds us of the horrible truth that we will face again and again in Scripture that sometimes being saved hurts like hell, that salvation is not an easy, comfortable process, that God often comes to us in the place we least want to be and in fact which we did not want to see and in the questions we don’t want to finally face, the truth that God is often found in the messy, scary wrestling matches of life.
And Jacob ends this story with a blessing, one that he could not steal but had to earn by simply surviving the night. And in surviving the night he learned all the lessons he needed to learn and maybe all the lessons that we need to learn…
He learned that one of the best prayers in life is to stop and ask, what am I running from right now?
He learned that power was not his to hold, that control and power never belonged to him no matter how much he fooled himself into thinking they did.
He learned that night won’t last forever, daybreak always comes and with daybreak, transformation.
He learned that God is good and the God who is good is willing to enter all of this mess with us to try and use all of it for good because that is what God wants. God knows what is best and wants to help us create that and get that.
He learned that often the very thing you are fighting is the very thing that can save you.
He learned that even the very darkest nights of the soul can bring blessings if we learn to surrender to them.
He learned that our job is to hang around, to hang on.
It’s the same lessons we should be learning today in the midst of our dark year of the soul.
That one of our best prayers is to stop and ask what are we running from right now, what is in the way we finally need to deal with in our own lives and our own worlds (and make sure right now that you don’t let all the world stuff keep you from doing the soul work you need to do… becoming a better person helps create a better world).
This power that we have had so long, this control, this whiteness, this toxic patriarchy… It’s not real power or control and it won’t last. It’s evil. It’s chasing after false gods and idols. And power and control don’t ever belong to us, no matter how much we have fooled ourselves into thinking they do.
That this won’t last forever… that daybreak will come… There have been days in all of this where I was down and lonely and just done with it all and the only truth that got me through that was the truth that this won’t last forever. Daybreak and transformation always come.
We have been reminded that God is good and God is going to be present in all of our messes with us.
We have learned that the thing we are fighting is the thing which will save us, that salvation comes in surrender.
We learn that it is our job to be faithful, to hang around because in that we will learn that God too is faithful.
Here is a way to look at this year that is giving me hope.
In her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor tells about visiting an island close to the Florida border. Taylor and her husband were out hiking in the middle of the day when they came upon a huge loggerhead turtle that had exhausted itself trying to make it through the dunes. Obviously, the turtle had mistaken some light on the mainland for the moon over the water and after dropping and burying her eggs, took off in the wrong direction. It was midday and the turtle was barely alive. Her shell was hot. Taylor scooped sand over the turtle to cool its shell while her husband ran back to the ranger’s station. Soon, he returned with a ranger in a jeep. They turned the turtle over on her back and attached chains to her legs. Using the jeep, they dragged the turtle to the water’s edge, where they righted the turtle. With each wave, the turtle revived a bit and soon pushed off and swam out into the deep. Reflecting on all this, Taylor writes, “It is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.”
Again to Richard Rohr who writes, “We do not so much try to change reality, as allow ourselves to be changed so that we can be useable to God. It is not so important what we do now -- as the who that is doing it.”
I deeply believe that 2020 will save us, will transform us, will better us, we just have to let it. We have to stop fighting it and surrender to it demanding a blessing, demanding that we end this dark night better than we began it, ready to join God in the co-creation of the world God has been dreaming of for a long time.
Can you pray and surrender to that with me?
Amen and Amen.
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