After last week’s doozy, the thought occurred to me of just keeping on with the irreverent streak and making deep theological commentary nested in jokes that are bound to offend somebody somehow. I mean, hey, check out that Jacob demonstrating the Biblical principle of marriage being exclusively a union between a man, one or more women, and his slaves/concubines. But then I figured that I should return to form and offer a sermon with a little more light than heat. I hope.

Again we can look to the reading from Genesis to provide us with a historical allegory… An event that actually happened in history, but which is rich with spiritual resonance and symbolism. Jacob struggles with God, as we all do so often. In fact, it might even be said that it is in our striving and struggling that God moves in us and transforms us, drawing us closer to Him and even putting our hips (or noses) out of joint by what we discover. God doesn’t offer us comfort by comfort by confirming our opinions and congratulating our political, social or religious dogmas. He offers us the comfort of His Love, experienced all the more fully when we have seen Him face to face, without rules and masks getting in the way.

Of late, this striving and struggling has been in regards to the issue of inclusion. Inclusivity… That dreaded liberal buzz-word… Who is in? Who is out? Who is saved? Who is not saved? Who shall be in the right? And who shall be in the left – I mean, wrong. Who shall be in the wrong? In a recent debate on that issue, I heard a reverend pastor say with much chagrin that we are facing a war in the church between the “Gospel of Forgiveness” and the “Gospel of Inclusivity”. I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that, since people are forgiven their exclusivity all the time.

This supposed conflict has been going on in the Church – the Body of Christ, not simply the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada – for 2000 years. One of the greatest consciousness-expanding moments in all of human history was when the early Church realized that Gentiles didn’t need to become Jews to be saved. There’s your “Gospel of Inclusivity” right there. Since the very beginning we’ve grappled with this question of who is in and who is out, who has earned God’s grace and who has not.

As I noted last week, we are hard-pressed to take Biblical condemnations as a justification for exclusivity. Songs like today’s Psalm may come off as exclusionist, harsh and heavy, glorying in one’s own rightness and righteousness against whoever is on the outside. But they may only do so if we neglect the historical context.

Like the majority of Psalms, this was also written when the Hebrew people were being taken away by Babylon as slaves. When they cry out against the evildoer, it is not against people who are different from them: it is against people who are murdering them en masse. You can hear it in the Psalmist’s 2500-year old voice: “From You let my vindication come!.. As for what others do, I have avoided the ways of the violent, by the word of your lips.” The Psalmist is even aware of his own impending doom. When he praises “when I awake I shall be satisfied”, he is speaking of his awakening from death. When he speaks of those who seek refuge at God’s right hand, it is a hope for future generations.

When faced with such grave human reality, we especially as comfortable Westerners have no right to claim these passages for our own judgements. These are the cries of the people we bomb and funnel into sweatshops, in order to give us the luxury of debating the morality of harmless consensual acts.

Human reality… The reality of life lived by actual, real human beings, divorced from the ivory tower – or pastel suburban – world of abstract, academic theological debate. The reality of people who have names and faces, dreams and fears, joys and sufferings, who aren’t simply “those people”. This is the world we encounter when we dare to confront ourselves, when we step up, when we face facts, when we no longer hide behind our rules and dogmas and whatever way we try to make sense of it all. Human reality is, at least in one form, where we wrestle with God and have our hips disjointed.

Human reality confronted Saint Paul when he sorrowed for his own people. Despite the suffering that the Jews of the time were setting up the early Christians for, Paul wept for the sake of them. At that point, the Jews certainly were “them”… The “other” group, “those people” who were bringing oppression upon those small bands of Christians and handing them over to crucifixion, beheading and the Coliseum at the hands of the Romans. Even in the sense of today’s Psalm, Paul would have been justified in outrage and condemnation.

But instead, Paul sorrows. And more than that, he anguishes that he cannot give up his own salvation for the sake of his ethnic people. Now THAT is true love for your enemy: to actually sorrow for being saved instead of them, and for wanting to give up one’s own salvation for them if given a chance. Would you be willing to spend eternity in Hell if it meant that someone else – especially someone of a group you don’t like and don’t approve of, who had a different religion or different lifestyle – could spend their eternity in Heaven?

A lot of us say we love our enemy, but I would wager that few of us love them quite that much. We would certainly like it if they stopped being different from us, which is the same as being saved, but there’s the rub… Being us, being in our group, means we are by definition saved, and who would want to give that up? People different from us are, at best, sort of “potentially saved”… They might even be kinda’ Christian, but they aren’t “Really Christian”, or “Really Saved” until they start adhering to certain cultural norms. We’d be willing to give up a lot in this world to help others realize their potential, but to give up my salvation for them would be to miss the whole point of me being saved and them being not, right?

Paul’s getting close… Getting awfully close… Human reality, the fact that these Jews oppressing the Christians at home and abroad are actual living breathing human beings, is touching him deeply, disjointing his proverbial hip. Where it comes to a real impasse is with Christ.

So Jesus fed 5000 men plus their two or more wives and assorted children on fives loaves and two fish. Neat! But there are so many layers of meaning and symbolism to this historical miracle, pointing us to where the real miracle lies. I mean, the act itself is incredibly impressive, but without a purpose and a meaning, it’s a pretty pointless display.

One of these layers of meaning is quite relevant for us today. Note that Jesus feeds everyone, satisfying the needs and longings of all the assembled people, and does so with such generousity that there are a full 12 baskets left over. The Gospel has come to the in-crowd, the people who came out (excuse the term) to hear Christ. They have been filled. They have been saved.

But there is more! To whom are these extra 12 baskets going? Why would Jesus need to create leftovers? He would have been able to make just enough for the people who were there, who were in the in-crowd, who deserved it. But He chose to make leftovers.

God is so generous. He made more because there are more people than the in-crowd. More people matter to God than just our group. Other people need to be fed… Not just “potentially fed”, but actually fed with God’s grace. And She is so extravagant with it. So they weren’t there. So they aren’t a part of the crowd. So they aren’t one of “us”. So what?!? God still loves them, 12 baskets full. 12 baskets, 12 Disciples, corresponding to the 12 tribes of Israel… Through Christ, God established a new covenant, fulfilling the old and overflowing with so much Love and grace that there is enough for everybody else.

You see, salvation isn’t precious because it is scarce. It isn’t a jewel or a metal or a baseball card that has value because it is so rare. We aren’t special in God’s eyes because we’ve done the right things or wore the right clothes or slept with the right people to earn Her grace. Salvation is precious because of Who gives it. It is precious and valuable exactly because it is so generous, more generous than we could even imagine. It is wonderful and beautiful because it has been rained upon so many, neighbours and enemies alike. We are special in God’s eyes not because of anything we have done or are, but because of Who God is. He created all of us, and Loves all of us, so extravagantly. 12 baskets full.

The only way to be true to that, to be righteous, is to imitate that. We’re supposed to imitate Christ, right? Not to earn God’s grace, but to be honest to it, to recognize that it is all Him, not us. We gain nothing, and impress no one, by retreating from human reality and from letting ourselves be emotionally and spiritually taken with this Love for others. It is not for the tenacity of our dogma that we will be remembered at the final trumpet, but the generousity of our Love. And so we encounter human reality, the lives of other people created and loved by the same God, with the Truth of that Love.

Amen.