One theme in today’s lessons is the question of discernment. How do we know God’s will? In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that we have to leave the wheat and weeds growing together in the field until harvest because if we try to pull out the weeds we may damage the wheat. In today’s Gospel, who is good and who evil, these kinds of judgments are left to God and the angels, its not our business. It is hard to really gauge our own best of intentions let alone those of others. Decisions we make are often able to be second guessed, and we struggle with what is the right thing to do in a world that often gives us choices between the lesser of two evils. And when we look inwardly we see that that line between good and evil runs right through the middle of all of us. Outwardly, life is at best ambiguous. It’s hard to tell if things are getting better or worse, and when we look inwardly at ourselves it is so easy to doubt our motivations. Are we really following God and some higher calling or are we really being somehow selfish, tragically misguided.
But there are moments of clarity that we put our faith in. That night in the desert Jacob had his future pretty clearly laid out for him. Well at least the broad brush strokes: He was going to get the land, have abundant off spring, and be a blessing to many etc. Maybe this vision was not so clear on the details of how this was going to happen. So it with us. “We pray, thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done.” We’ve got the broad brush strokes of the Kingdom of God as where we are headed, what we are anticipating. We know that Jesus is our example and we are called to follow him, even to the cross, and we have a whole list of the fruits of the Spirit and a sense of the kind of people we are called to be and the kind of community we are called to model together as the Body of Christ. But we don’t always get the details of exactly how that is going to come about, and we don’t have any certainty or guarantee of exactly what our role is going to be in the grand scheme of things.
What Jacob did know though when he woke up was, “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.” This little place in between Beer-sheba and Haran was non other than the house of God, the gateway to heaven. He got both a glimpse of the future, but also a glimpse of the present, the here and now in a new light. And it became now a past moment that he always wanted to remember. Jacob marked it with a stone, a pillar, and called the place Bethel: House of God. We mark holy places and set them aside because something important happened to us. How many of you have holy places, special moments where something deep and powerful happened to you? You may or may not think of them as Holy. But we all have places where you learned something important about yourself, where you confronted something, a danger inward or outward that you triumphed over, where you saw or felt something that transported you beyond ourselves or deeper into ourselves than you had ever gone before. We have moments in our family history, the birth of child, a marriage, a death which we mark and memorialize, maybe not with pillars of stone but at least with photo albums. These are moments that we know that we have to remember. And we spend a lot of time re-membering them. That is what we do every Sunday here at the altar, re- member, and bring forward again, make present the Last Supper, but also the many ways that Jesus fed us, the Wedding at Cana, the Feeding of the Five Thousand, all the ways that Jesus brought forth for us a taste of the heavenly banquet, a vision of the whole world sharing in the blessing, having a place at the table. This is an encounter with the Holy.
So this is a first step to discerning God’s will. We must know that everyone, at every moment, and in all places can encounter God and get a glimpse into heaven. All places are potentially holy places like sleeping out in the desert, or eating a meal together. We are in relationship to God’s through God’s creation and one another and the possibility of revelation is around us all the time, the world is constantly speaking to us.
I remember a moment in Heathrow Airport, in London, after I had taken my children around the world with Sheri’s ashes and I was thinking about how God has spoken to me on the trip and I suddenly realized as if for the first time that this was nothing unusual at all. God was speaking to people all the time. I looked around the airport. We were sitting at some tables is a coffee shop, people were browsing the newsstand nearby or sitting in chairs at their gates, and suddenly I realized that everyone was in some kind of relationship with God right at that moment. I began to imagine them all. That man over there just had a fight with his wife on the phone and in his anger he was having a hard time listening to God. This guy running to catch his flight was too busy to hear anything, though that doesn’t mean he wasn’t being called. That woman over there sitting quietly reading a book – you’d never know it to look at her - but she just had the most profound religious experience that will completely redefine her life, and she was utterly transported by it and maybe know one will ever know about it. That older man in the corner is confessing some deep pain that he is trying to let go of right there in front of me. This young man is dreaming of all the things he is going to do next in his life, he’s anxious and excited and scared all at once and he is trying to stay calm, praying for some peace. That woman also lost a loved one and is deep in thought about her grief grasping for some way to comfort herself and looking out into the darkness for some sense of a way to deal with her pain. That guy in the business suit with the lap top and the brief case, just made the biggest deal of his life, and he is awe struck by his good fortune and under his breath you can barely see his mouth move as he utters a silent thank you. And so on and so forth all around me people were in relationship to God, to some ultimate reality, a holiness beyond themselves that called them to respond to something deep within them, or to stretch beyond who they were, or to understand something new, or to able to receive a gift beyond measure.
The Psalmist says, Lord, "You know my sitting and my rising, you discern my thoughts, you trace my journeys and my resting places, acquainted with all my ways.” God knows you and you are in a relationship with the holy in all you do, everywhere you are, in all your relationships. You are surrounded by this holiness, in God you live and move and have your being. God knows you. The Psalm goes on, “You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me it is so high that I cannot attain it. . . I climb up to heaven and you are there, I make the grave my bed and you are there, I take wings, and dwell in the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.”
This awareness that God is guiding behind and before us, coaxing and calling us, and surrounding us on all sides – this may be the first step and the last step in discerning God’s will. All we really get to know. But this does not mean that we can know exactly what God is up to in our lives, in fact it is quite the opposite. This lead the Psalmist to exclaim, “How deep I find your thoughts, O God, how great the sum of them. To count them all, my life span would need to be like yours." Exactly. It turns out that it is enough, the beginning and end, just to have this wonderful knowledge that God is there, which is itself unattainable but through God’s revelation to us.
Nor does this great vision of being surrounded by God and upheld by God mean that we are immune to suffering. We are not guaranteed our personal safety just because God is watching out for us, or calling us to some grand purpose. In fact, again quite the opposite. More suffering, more pain, more risk, that might just be what lies ahead of us the more we follow Jesus. We follow him into uncertainty, risk, and what we can expect if anything at all is a cross, which we are called to take up. We like to think that if God has given us a particular ministry, God will take care of us and it. This may be true, but we have no idea about what “taking care of” means. What happens to each of us individually or how it is that our lives together play out to bring about the kingdom, all the details of how we get from here to there are not worked out really, for us to know at least. We have no idea exactly what our part in the grand scheme of things will be. We are a just a small part of cosmic story of the whole creation being made new again.
The passage from Romans speaks of “All of creation groaning in travail, waiting for the revelation of the children of God. We are apart of this cosmic context of what God is up to. In the words of Julian of Norwich, the 14th Century Mystic who who had an incredible vision of all of creation like a hazelnut in the hand of God, “All shall be and all manner of thing shall be well.” She had this vision while contemplating the suffering of Christ on the cross. We are all suffering, groaning as in labor pains, waiting for a new creation to be born, in which the vision of the Just and Peaceable Kingdom of God will indeed come and God’s Will will indeed be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is what we wait for, no matter what, and it is this that transforms all of our lives now into glimpse of the holy, knowing that this God is not some far off God, in the future, but comes to us out of the future and surrounds us now with Love and Joy and Peace beyond measure….. We have the potential to encounter this God now in every moment of our lives no matter what. It is this reality that allows us to endure everything and anything for the sake of the Gospel.
I know that we are facing many decisions as a congregation. God is calling us all the time and in all places to follow him. God has said to us as surely as he said it to Jacob that we are a part of cosmic, universal grand work of God bringing about the healing of all of creation. This is God’s will. We pray for guidance as we should, even though we are not always clear about which way to turn, which particular fork in the road to take. Not always clear what it means to be faithful in any particular moment. Knowing that even if we chose wisely we will not be immune from risk or danger, or disaster even, there are no guarantees. But nevertheless, we can risk all because we know that no matter what we do, where we go, God is with us. And this wonderful amazing knowledge gives us one certainty and one certainty alone. One thing we believe, no matter what: “All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Brothers and Sisters, find your holy place, know that God is with you and make this your prayer, “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is heaven.”
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