Sermon Notes July 30 gen. 29, Mt. 13

Gen. 29,7 years seemed like seven days-and the fury of Esau-inversion of the order-Laban gets years of free work Another theme that emerges from the story of Jacob has to do with the relationship between God and Jacob. Though the text does not say this explicitly, it seems that God is working with this flawed man to re-make him. Jacob, after stealing Esau's blessing, is caught in a net of his own making. The deceiver is deceived, and the one who broke the law of the firstborn is caught by another version of it. He gets a taste of his own medicine. Jacob lives in exile from his homeland, and has to work for fourteen years without wages for love of Rachel. All these experiences will help to re-make the shallow young man we first met in Genesis 25 into the father of the nation Israel. That re-shaping will take a dramatic turn, of course, in next week's lesson, the story of Jacob's wrestling with God at the River Jabbok.(Schifferdecker-WP Menn) Many in the congregation will identify with the intense emotions in this family tale of inexplicable preference, deception, competition, and jealousy. Women in particular may resonate with the feeling of being judged by their appearance, the despair due to infertility, or the ecstasy over a baby’s birth, all so poignantly depicted. Leah and Rachel’s central roles in the emergence of the people of Israel highlights women’s agency as an important means through which God continues to work today.Link with kingdom of heaven

Zilpah, her maid, would give Jacob childfren.How many of us doubt we love properly-how many of us doubt if we are loved properly by god or humans? Are we willing to settle/ Are we the ones settled for?

Ps. 105 or 128, Rom. 8:26-39, God reweaves/works toward the good

Mt. 13:31-33.44-52 see Long Our two parables are expressions of the conviction that meaning resides principally in God and in the world to come, and they encourage us to understand everything else in their light. This is consistent with what we find throughout the gospels, wherein Jesus views earth from the vantage point of heaven and interprets the present by projecting himself into the future and then looking back. The world's chief values are not intrinsic but extrinsic; they reside in the God who is above the world and within the world and waiting at its end.Persuaded that the true nature of things is not obvious, Jesus sets out, in word and deed, to fracture the hypnotic hold of life-as-it-has-always-been. r. Because he sanctions not the world as it is (where the kingdom is obscure) but only the world as it should be, when the kingdom will be all in all, he dislikes the default setting of our ordinary consciousness, whose defect is precisely that it accepts the present world as the real world. He is disconcerted that we see without seeing and fail to strive to enter through the narrow gate and that we are so wedded to everyday life and find so much comfort in material trinkets and the unstable circumstances of fleeting lives. (Allison) The dominion of God may not always appear to be succeeding in the world, and even the Church itself is a mixed bag of good and evil, but in the end, God will sort things out. One day The evil will perish, and the righteous will be part of God's bountiful and glorious harvest.Hoffman Pres outlook-

If the kingdom of heaven, the rule and reign of God right here and now, is like a mustard seed -  tiny, easily overlooked, hidden away in the deep soil, but eventually will invasively explode -  perhaps I might say that the kingdom of heaven is like a computer virus: unknown until it blows up your hard drive and your day-to-day routines are upended as a result. Or how about this? If the kingdom of heaven is like a massive amount of yeast - unseen, but powerful - that eventually produces enough bread to feed a huge crowd, then I might say the kingdom of heaven, God's presence and will, is like an antibiotic: silent and unseen, but active, life-saving and history-altering. God's presence and power at work in the world even when people fail to notice it until that time it is unmistakable and transformative. The kingdom of heaven is here even when we fail to perceive it. These first two parables remind us to trust the salvific, exponential expanse of God's reign even, especially, when it appears that nothing at all is happening and there are no places for the birds to nest and no bread to feed the hungry crowds. The kingdom of heaven is already present and coming. When we happen upon the presence of God or search and find God, we give up anything and everything for the sake of that relationship. Nothing is more precious or valuable to us than participating in the kingdom of heaven that's been revealed to us, whether we were looking for it or not. There is a great deal of variety in the kingdom of heaven, not so much about the one correct answer, as many paths to the right relationship to the one true God. We may discover God, we may look for God, we may get accidentally caught up in God's broad net; no matter, for we are still part of the kingdom of heaven, the one we can be certain is present and powerful and growing and sure to provide home and sustenance for more of creation that we can imagine.