Homily for Trinity 18 2025 Year C
Sermon
for the 18th Sunday after Trinity (readings at end)
If you had
to choose one overused Christian catchphrase to sum up your relationship with
God, I wonder what you would choose. Mine might be ‘honest to God’? Or the altogether more dangerous ‘I walk by faith and not by sight’.
I want to
offer one piece of disillusionment for you to ponder as we explore the
passages we’ve just heard, and that is this:
The word ‘faith’
does not exist in the original languages of the bible. In fact the English word
‘faith’ simply appeared in the C13th, when we nicked it from the Latin,
‘fidere’. The words we usually translate as faith, and certainly have in the Gospel
reading today, are the word ‘pistis’, in Greek, or Aman, in Hebrew, from which
we get the word ‘Amen’, both of which mean ‘trust’. And these words are not about an
internal feeling, they are active, energetic, engaged, two-party interactions.
A fun exercise you might want to engage in, if you need to nod off for the rest
of this sermon, is to consider all the bible passages that pop into your head
with the word ‘faith’, replace it for the word ‘trust’, and see how they sound.
The modern depiction
of faith, the one that is often misunderstood as a sort of unquestioning form of passive belief, the ‘just have
faith and all shall be well’, is something that is, at surface level,
absolutely lovely, until all is not well. ‘Just have faith’, sometimes 'just have more faith' has been used as a
weapon against people being persecuted by the church, against women who have,
repeatedly, been prohibited from reading holy writ for themselves, and against
those held captive in religious cults and dictatorships. Where is our benevolent God when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we are being told to 'have more faith'?
The greatest
antidote for this sort of shallow, unquestioning faith, is, I think, our lesson today from Genesis. The expression ‘honest to God’ is
something that tends to spring to mind when I hear this story. Here is a
picture of a man, separated from his family, the father of many nations which
are yet to come, who finds himself alone, in the middle of the night, wrestling
with a stranger, and through that wrestling comes to recognise the man as
God-incarnate, and refuses to let go until the man has blessed him.
The story is a bit of a play on words, the river, ‘yabok’ comes from the verb Aboq, meaning ‘I wrestle/am wrestling’, it’s also a phonetic inversion of ‘ya-akov’, Jacob, so the Hebrew is just the most incredible tongue twister of descriptive language, and I’ll bore you with a recitation some other time. But in essence the entire story is a struggle, a wrestling match, between Jacob, the father of nations, and God, and Jacob, encountering God, or the mystery man, isn’t just sitting back and saying ‘oh it’s ok, I trust you’, Jacob is clinging on for dear life and demanding a blessing.
Faith, for Jacob, trust for Jacob, is stubbornly
refusing to let go until he is transformed by God’s presence. So Jacob
wrestles, Jacob recognises, Jacob makes a demand of God, Jacob is changed
forever, as God strikes Jacobs thigh, and Jacob addresses this change in
himself by naming the place where it happened Peniel, and saying’ because I
have seen God face-to-face’ and lived. He has lived, but he comes through that
encounter with God with a limp, and with a new name, Israel, which means, ‘one
who struggles with God’. Jacob's encounter haunts him for the rest of his life –
this is his moment of change, this is when he become known as Israel, the God-wrestler.
Our parable
in Luke’s gospel also touches on a form of struggle as an expression of ‘faith’,
or ‘trust’. Jesus didn’t speak Greek, he spoke a form of
Gallilean Aramaic, but the word in the Greek, pistis, meaning ‘to trust’ comes
from the root ‘to persuade or be persuaded’, again, not a feeling but an active
encounter. The parable of the
widow isn't a physical wrestling match, but it is a battle of persistence as she seeks Justice from a grumpy old
Judge, and we enter into an almost fairy-tale-esque story. An old judge, the evil villain, because he has no fear of God or care for his fellow people, grants a
widow justice, not because he feels honour bound to do what is right, but
because she’s annoying him and he wants to get rid of her!
This isn’t a
parable about God, it's an anti-parable, or a comparison with God. Jesus says “if that grumpy old sod
did what was right just because he was fed up of being asked, then obviously
God, who is good and cares for us, will grant as what we persist in crying out
for day and night.” All of us will know someone that the stubbornly persistent widow reminds us of, perhaps they're even sitting next to us, and rather than laughing off their persuasion, or referring to them as 'bossy', or 'nagging', perhaps there is a bit of a challenge in here about mirroring them, about persisting
in prayer, rather than just rattling off what we think we should pray for.
We all have
spiritual midnights, like Jacob, where we find ourselves alone and accosted
with something that dislocates our simple faith, but being honest to God isn’t
sitting back on our heels and saying ‘ah well I’ll just have faith’. No, being
honest to God is struggling, wrestling, petitioning, allowing ourselves to be those
who embrace the difficulties thrown our way, and grapple with them, because as
we grapple, we are transformed, and so is our faith, or trust, or
persuadedness, in God.
So if there’s
one encouragement and one challenge I could offer you, particularly as we start
to head faster and faster towards advent, it’s this:
If you have
doubts, if you struggle with faith, if you feel closer to God one day and
further away the next, then rejoice, because it means that your faith is living
and active and working hard, and you are being transformed as your grapple with
God.
But likewise, don’t ignore the stuff that we’re tempted to bottle away from our faith, the doubts, the stuff that hurts, or makes us uncomfortable, or challenges our beliefs. Bring it to God and wrestle over it. Allow God to transform you through that honest, open, encounter that could, honestly, be painful, but will ultimately result in a stronger, grittier, faith, a renewed trust, and a deeper relationship with God, and when we look back, just like Jacob, that is where we will be able to see God most clearly at work in our lives.
Amen.
Genesis
32:22-31
The same
night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven
children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across
the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone, and a
man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail
against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of
joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is
breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he
said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You
shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and
with humans and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your
name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face,
yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping
because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh
muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at
the thigh muscle.
Luke
18:1-8
Then Jesus
told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He
said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had
respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and
saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ For a while he refused, but
later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for
anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so
that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust
judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him
day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly
grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find
faith on earth?”
