Keep Your eye on Jesus.

A few years ago, I was struggling with my faith. I went and talked to a friend who was a chaplain and asked him if it was silly to have faith in these ancient stories that seem far too much like fairy tales to be helpful in this modern scientific world.  He said to me very seriously and straight-faced that there are no atheists in foxholes.  Despite all our technology and know-how, when it gets scary and dangerous, everyone he knew, even tough guys who were prepared for violent stuff in the name of keeping us safe, turned to prayer in hopes that someone or something would hear them.

Joseph was in a foxhole of his own making.  His father Jacob was passing on the family history of bad choices, of playing favorites, and of the twelve brothers, he was the favorite.  It didn’t help that he had three step moms who had all competed for their husband’s affections, and that competition had been passed on to the sons.  If you read the whole story of Jacob and his children, even the boys’ names were reflective of the squabbles and fights between the women.  Sterility was a real issue of faith for Jacob’s wives, like Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebecca.  Having a baby was a sign of God’s favor so the children were named things like “surely my husband will love me now”, or “God comforts me because I am hated” or “I have wrestled with my sister and have won”.  Can you imagine growing up in such a family?  Talk about ugly dynamics!

So, Joseph, which by the way means either “God has taken away my shame” or “May God give me another son” has grown up in a family of competitiveness and anger.  It must have been ugly and embarrassing .  His mother died giving birth to his full brother, so he had no mother to take care of him.  And Jacob, not remembering, or maybe not thinking of the damage done by his father and mother’s playing favorites with him and Esau, plays favorites again.

How many times do we fall into the unhealthy patterns of our families, saying things that we swore we would never say, hearing ourselves talking like the people who parented us.  Children copy what they see their parents doing.  We know that people who grew up in addicted or violent homes or who are bounced through the foster care system have a much higher chance of being addicted or in jail because of the childhood trauma of a toxic family experience. 

Dr. Gabor Mate, when he gave his talk at the Nancy Applebee theatre last fall, talked about being born during the Second World War to a Jewish mother.  Even though neither of them ended up in a concentration camp, the trauma of having a mother living in a constant state of fear caused Mate to live with a high degree of anxiety that led to some strongly addictive behaviours that while they didn’t revolve around drugs, affected his professionalism and his finances.  Childhood stress like Joseph and his brothers experienced led them into angry confrontations.

Joseph was a bragger and a tattle tale.  He paraded around in his long robe and would tell them of his dreams of glory when the older ones would no longer have the power to bully him.  The brothers had no ‘shalom’ for him and so decided that murder was a perfect solution to the arrogant brat.  That’s chilling to say the least.  They sold him off to become a slave in Egypt.  I wonder what he was thinking when he realized that his spying and tattling had made them that hostile to him.  There’s no record of him being repentant or afraid or ashamed or anything.  But he is in a foxhole and there is no one who will help rescue him from going into slavery in a foreign land.

Peter, in his way, is also in a foxhole.  The sea of Galilee is not terribly wide, but it is chaotic.  Storms come up without warning, and back then there was no such thing as a swimming lesson at the pool in the summer.  Drowning for all the disciples is a real possibility. 

I remember someone in the Maritimes telling me that some sailors deliberately decided not to learn to swim so that if they did get caught in a storm, they would drown more quickly and peacefully.  Fishing was a dreadful job, and water was the most chaotic and dangerous place to be.  This story points to Jesus as the one who can still the chaos and make it possible to get through the most difficult things.  But when Peter takes his eyes off Jesus, he begins to drown.

I meet a lot of people who are in foxholes.  Some of those foxholes are of their own making, some are full of the family toxic stories and experiences that they had witnessed as children.  What is interesting are the folks who are climbing out of the foxholes.  I am starting to see patterns that suggest the ones who will make it out, and the ones who will stay stuck or get even deeper into their foxholes.

The number one factor is humbleness.  Peter doesn’t say, “If you can walk on water, I can too just watch me”.  There’s also a level of trust, “If you tell me to walk to you, I will do what you tell me.” And when he keeps his eyes on Jesus, he can make it.  He needs to remember to trust and watch Jesus.  When tragedy strikes, how many of us think we will go it alone, tough it out, pull ourselves out by our own bootstraps? But again and again, we find that its when we reach out for help, asking Jesus to be present in the midst of our foxholes, that we find new hope, new beginnings and a more godly, more shalom-filled way of life that fills, sustains and supports us on this journey we call life.

Patience of a Saint

Ever hear the phrase, ‘you must have the patience of a saint’?  I often hear it when I knit in public.  Now I confess, I like knitting in public.  One never knows when I might get to teach a child how to knit or crochet, or encourage a mom or dad to learn something new.  Yesterday, I had a great chat with some people who wanted to learn, some who used to knit, or who stated out loud that they were too stupid to learn.  Or even saying, “it must take so much patience in order to knit.”

There are times when knitting takes patience.  When dealing with a new pattern or learning a new technique, when using super fine or super slippery yarn, when on the last few rows of a big prayer shawl that is almost done, but the worst is when there is a knot.  There are the simple knots, but then there are the big huge tangled knots that look like they’ve been in the bottom of a drawer too long and gotten stubbornly convoluted out of sheer stubbornness.  If you don’t knit or sew, just imagine a pile of coathangers that have been in a box and travelled from one province to another.  Or fishing line that has come unwound.  Or remember cassette tapes when they got eaten by the tape player and you had to fish them out and you wondered if this was the last straw for that Oakridge Boys or Boney M tape?  That last one really dates us, doesn’t it?

We want things neat and tidy, we want to have a tangle-free life.  But all too often, we get knotted up and feel like we don’t know why the rest of the world is so messy.  Or we get tangled up in a pile of mistakes or even lies that leave us in an emotional mess.

That’s what happened to Jacob.  He was a dreadful con artist, the worst kind.  Last week we heard the story of how he cheated his older brother out of his brother’s potential inheritance.  Jacob didn’t stop at that. 

He stooped so low that he conned and cheated his own father as the poor man lay dying.  Now I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty disgusting.  It’s one thing to phone up total strangers like what’s been happening frequently at my house and being told that I’m going to go to jail for not paying Canada Revenue Agency enough taxes.  Or pretending to be a boyfriend who always needs money but never has any to help me out, or any of the numerous other scams that are out there.  But cheating your dad on the last day you will ever see him alive, that’s pretty low.  That’s nasty and mean and downright despicable. 

And so he runs for his life to get away from his brother who is more than a little steamed at him.  And when we least expect it, and certainly when Jacob least expects it, Jacob has a dream of God’s ladder and hears a promise for the future not just for him, but for his children and his children’s children.  Why Jacob?  Why not his father Isaac or his older brother Esau?  There’s no explaining God’s choice.

I think it’s a perfect counterpoint to the wheat and the weeds parable that Jesus told.  For those of us who grew up on the King James bible, this was the wheat and the tares.  And ‘tares’ is an old name for the bearded darnel that looks very much like wheat.  It’s a nasty weed.  Its roots will surround the roots of real wheat, stealing their moisture and nutrients.  Its seeds even look like wheat too, but can cause hallucinations and even death.  It’s one poisonous plant.

So Jesus told a story of why there are evil, nasty and cheating people like Jacob in the world.  But then he throws a caution into the story.  While the servants see the weeds and want to pull them to prevent them from ruining thecrop, the landowner, in this case God, says to be patient and wait until everything is ready to harvest.  That’s when the sorting will take place.

Not by the servants, but by the harvest experts, the angels going up and down the ladder who see humans from above, from a bigger perspective than we do.

It’s very tempting and human to decide which people are the weeds and which aren’t, to sort people into the bad guys and the good guys.  There’s something very primeval and satisfactory in doing so.  All we have to do is look at the debate around Omar Kadr, or the fear-mongering about Syrian refugees.  People wave the ‘terrorist’ label around and they feel good that they aren’t the bad guys, not like those blankety blank people who are different.  And yet, God doesn’t work that way.

God doesn’t jump to conclusions.  God has patience, the patience even stronger than that of a saint.  God can see the goodness in a con man who cheats his dying father, who lies to his brother and sides with his mother who seems determined to treat her own husband with terrible disrespect, and doesn’t care how hurtful or destructive this will be to the whole family.

God picks this man to inherit Abraham’s promise?  Not the eldest who has been cheated and stolen from?  God has patience, and sees from up high what we can’t see.  God sees the potential in human hearts that we can’t see ourselves.  God is ready to work miracles that we can’t imagine, and God is willing to be patient enough to unravel our twisted, complex knotty lives until we see how God has been with us even when we thought we were all alone in our tangled mess.  Thanks be to God for that wonderful love and grace that has such patience!