Sermon by Fr Peter Wolton, Trinity 21, 16th October 2016, United Benefice of Holland Park
Sermon by Fr Peter Wolton, Trinity 21, 16th October 2016, United Benefice of Holland Park
When you look back on your life, can you remember those occasions, that night before you were set to return home? Perhaps after a long period away, maybe a foreign posting, or from university, or touring as an actor, or from school?
How did you sleep that night? What were your thoughts? Had you been reshaped while you were away? Did you have a restless night like Jacob, who was going home after twenty years?
Martin Luther once wrote that the Christian response to reading the Bible should be “This is about me.”
The story of Jacob wrestling with an angel made me think of occasions when I was going home. In the summer of 1998 we left Japan after being there for four and a half years. Joanna and I had arrived with one child of ten weeks old. We were leaving with three children. Our house at home was being enlarged to accommodate our larger family. At work I had a new boss, and this was the time of the dramatic rise of the internet. Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, had published a new best-selling book for business leaders: Only the Paranoid Survive. I had been reshaped while I was away. There was a lot to think about. But I was going home.
I see as a common theme in today’s three readings as Endurance – or in the case of the dishonest judge in the Gospel, the lack of endurance.
Today I want to reflect on two things.
First: Endurance, because that is what our journey of faith requires. And second, to conclude by returning to today’s wonderful Collect where we pray for the gifts of “pardon and peace”, which we receive from endurance and results in a “quiet mind,”
The “easy way out” is often appealing. In this week’s gospel, Jesus tells the parable of a lazy judge who is being badgered persistently by a widow for justice. “I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out by continuously coming” he resolves. The parable is a chilling harbinger of the trial of Jesus, when Pilate, seeing that he was accomplishing nothing, washes his hands, declaring “I am innocent of this man’s blood” and hands our Lord over to be crucified.
The parable is actually about the need to pray always and not lose heart. Endurance in prayer life, as in life generally, is one of the most important gifts we can obtain. For all of us , the past week will have had issues and matters of daily life that are inimical to the “quiet mind,” and that of course is part of being human. We find ourselves grappling with them, perhaps in the night, like the extraordinary tale in the first lesson from Genesis, of Jacob and a man wrestling until daybreak, analogous to the Churchillian spirit of “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never give in”
Wonderful sculpture of this in Tate, by Epstein –special interest in the subject as his first name was Jacob.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/epstein-jacob-and-the-angel-t07139
Also Rembrandt:
http://www.rembrandtdatabase.org/Rembrandt/painting/50803/jacob-wrestling-with-the-angel
Jacob is a fascinating figure, the twin of his hairy brother Esau. Isaac their father loves Esau more, because he is mad about hunting, whereas Jacob the quiet one, spurred on by his duplicitous mother Rebekah, is for ever scheming, particularly with regard to his elder twin. From their early days it did not look good between the two boys and so it turns out. It’s a terrific story. Jacob manipulates Esau into handing over his inheritance to Jacob, and steals a blessing from Isaac meant for Esau. When this is discovered their father compels Jacob to leave home and get a wife. The deceitful Jacob discovers his match in his Uncle Laban, father of two beautiful daughters. Twenty years of trickery by Laban come to an end when Jacob leaves Laban to return home, having married the two daughters, with twelve sons and a daughter and a large flock of livestock.
So at the start of today’s story he has a lot on his mind. He is going home but there is unfinished business with Esau. How is he going to be received by his twin brother who he learns is coming to meet him with 400 men?
No wonder he has a sleepless night.
We all have our “Jacob beside the Jabbok river” moments, when past behaviour or events or our current situation weighs us down. It maybe nursing a loved one, or how we have treated someone in the work place, or what we failed to do when support was needed. We wrestle with what to do but keep going, often leading what seems an ordinary life. A week, a year, a lifetime of prayer praying always, as Jesus says, but perhaps not seeing the result. But also as Jesus says, not losing heart.
As the day breaks Jacob, who endures and never gives up, is told by the man “Jacob you shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed” and the man blesses Jacob.
Having been blessed, Jacob is transformed. God’s choice of the leader in Jacob, given his formative years, is interesting. But perhaps God was looking for qualities of endurance, someone who would never give in – qualities that Andy Grove had in abundance to create Intel which powers the internet and became one of the world’s biggest companies, whose products impacted our lives.
Jacob leaves Peniel, and I love this detail, limping, to shortly meet his brother who weeps at his return and peace is made between them.
Some of you here will know Charles Wesley's hymn "Come O thou traveller unknown" which we are not singing today – Andrew and James, Why not? - which takes the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel and uses it as the model of Christian life, Christian struggle and discovery ending with this verse:
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise,
I fall, and yet by faith I stand:
I stand, and will not let thee go,
'Till I thy name, thy nature know.
Persistence in prayer life and the rhythm of receiving absolution in church enable us to live with difficulties and to receive the gifts of “pardon and peace”, all which we pray for the collect, resulting in a “quiet mind” – our personal transformation and reshaping, which helps us in our mission to go forth to love and serve the Lord.
An antidote to the unquiet mind comes from The Order for Night Prayer or Compline as we also call it.
It begins with these words:
“The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end” and continues:
“Our help is in the name of the Lord”
I’ll finish contrasting the unquiet and the quiet mind with an extract from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables where Valjean the ultimate hero is about to rob the house of his benefactor Monsieur Bienvenu, who I am sure, as you will see, always said Compline every night.
As Valjean creeps through the Bishop’s bedroom to the dining room where the silver is, he passes the sleeping figure of his patron. What he sees is this;
“A face lit up with a vague expression of contentment, hope and happiness. It was almost a radiance, a luminous transparency, for this heaven was within him: it was his conscience.
Jan Valjean stood in the shadow, erect, motionless, and terrified. He had never seen anything like it. The moral world has no spectacle more powerful than this:
a troubled, restless conscience on the verge of committing a crime, contemplating the sleep of a just man.”
We pray that God almighty may grant each of us a quiet mind.
Amen
Fr. Peter Wolton
When you look back on your life, can you remember those occasions, that night before you were set to return home? Perhaps after a long period away, maybe a foreign posting, or from university, or touring as an actor, or from school?
How did you sleep that night? What were your thoughts? Had you been reshaped while you were away? Did you have a restless night like Jacob, who was going home after twenty years?
Martin Luther once wrote that the Christian response to reading the Bible should be “This is about me.”
The story of Jacob wrestling with an angel made me think of occasions when I was going home. In the summer of 1998 we left Japan after being there for four and a half years. Joanna and I had arrived with one child of ten weeks old. We were leaving with three children. Our house at home was being enlarged to accommodate our larger family. At work I had a new boss, and this was the time of the dramatic rise of the internet. Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, had published a new best-selling book for business leaders: Only the Paranoid Survive. I had been reshaped while I was away. There was a lot to think about. But I was going home.
I see as a common theme in today’s three readings as Endurance – or in the case of the dishonest judge in the Gospel, the lack of endurance.
Today I want to reflect on two things.
First: Endurance, because that is what our journey of faith requires. And second, to conclude by returning to today’s wonderful Collect where we pray for the gifts of “pardon and peace”, which we receive from endurance and results in a “quiet mind,”
The “easy way out” is often appealing. In this week’s gospel, Jesus tells the parable of a lazy judge who is being badgered persistently by a widow for justice. “I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out by continuously coming” he resolves. The parable is a chilling harbinger of the trial of Jesus, when Pilate, seeing that he was accomplishing nothing, washes his hands, declaring “I am innocent of this man’s blood” and hands our Lord over to be crucified.
The parable is actually about the need to pray always and not lose heart. Endurance in prayer life, as in life generally, is one of the most important gifts we can obtain. For all of us , the past week will have had issues and matters of daily life that are inimical to the “quiet mind,” and that of course is part of being human. We find ourselves grappling with them, perhaps in the night, like the extraordinary tale in the first lesson from Genesis, of Jacob and a man wrestling until daybreak, analogous to the Churchillian spirit of “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never give in”
Wonderful sculpture of this in Tate, by Epstein –special interest in the subject as his first name was Jacob.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/epstein-jacob-and-the-angel-t07139
Also Rembrandt:
http://www.rembrandtdatabase.org/Rembrandt/painting/50803/jacob-wrestling-with-the-angel
Jacob is a fascinating figure, the twin of his hairy brother Esau. Isaac their father loves Esau more, because he is mad about hunting, whereas Jacob the quiet one, spurred on by his duplicitous mother Rebekah, is for ever scheming, particularly with regard to his elder twin. From their early days it did not look good between the two boys and so it turns out. It’s a terrific story. Jacob manipulates Esau into handing over his inheritance to Jacob, and steals a blessing from Isaac meant for Esau. When this is discovered their father compels Jacob to leave home and get a wife. The deceitful Jacob discovers his match in his Uncle Laban, father of two beautiful daughters. Twenty years of trickery by Laban come to an end when Jacob leaves Laban to return home, having married the two daughters, with twelve sons and a daughter and a large flock of livestock.
So at the start of today’s story he has a lot on his mind. He is going home but there is unfinished business with Esau. How is he going to be received by his twin brother who he learns is coming to meet him with 400 men?
No wonder he has a sleepless night.
We all have our “Jacob beside the Jabbok river” moments, when past behaviour or events or our current situation weighs us down. It maybe nursing a loved one, or how we have treated someone in the work place, or what we failed to do when support was needed. We wrestle with what to do but keep going, often leading what seems an ordinary life. A week, a year, a lifetime of prayer praying always, as Jesus says, but perhaps not seeing the result. But also as Jesus says, not losing heart.
As the day breaks Jacob, who endures and never gives up, is told by the man “Jacob you shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed” and the man blesses Jacob.
Having been blessed, Jacob is transformed. God’s choice of the leader in Jacob, given his formative years, is interesting. But perhaps God was looking for qualities of endurance, someone who would never give in – qualities that Andy Grove had in abundance to create Intel which powers the internet and became one of the world’s biggest companies, whose products impacted our lives.
Jacob leaves Peniel, and I love this detail, limping, to shortly meet his brother who weeps at his return and peace is made between them.
Some of you here will know Charles Wesley's hymn "Come O thou traveller unknown" which we are not singing today – Andrew and James, Why not? - which takes the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel and uses it as the model of Christian life, Christian struggle and discovery ending with this verse:
My strength is gone, my nature dies,
I sink beneath thy weighty hand,
Faint to revive, and fall to rise,
I fall, and yet by faith I stand:
I stand, and will not let thee go,
'Till I thy name, thy nature know.
Persistence in prayer life and the rhythm of receiving absolution in church enable us to live with difficulties and to receive the gifts of “pardon and peace”, all which we pray for the collect, resulting in a “quiet mind” – our personal transformation and reshaping, which helps us in our mission to go forth to love and serve the Lord.
An antidote to the unquiet mind comes from The Order for Night Prayer or Compline as we also call it.
It begins with these words:
“The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end” and continues:
“Our help is in the name of the Lord”
I’ll finish contrasting the unquiet and the quiet mind with an extract from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables where Valjean the ultimate hero is about to rob the house of his benefactor Monsieur Bienvenu, who I am sure, as you will see, always said Compline every night.
As Valjean creeps through the Bishop’s bedroom to the dining room where the silver is, he passes the sleeping figure of his patron. What he sees is this;
“A face lit up with a vague expression of contentment, hope and happiness. It was almost a radiance, a luminous transparency, for this heaven was within him: it was his conscience.
Jan Valjean stood in the shadow, erect, motionless, and terrified. He had never seen anything like it. The moral world has no spectacle more powerful than this:
a troubled, restless conscience on the verge of committing a crime, contemplating the sleep of a just man.”
We pray that God almighty may grant each of us a quiet mind.
Amen
Fr. Peter Wolton