Proper 13A 2020
Genesis 32:22-31
Matthew 14:13-21
The Rev. Dr. Kathy Kelly
This is awkward.
Here we are still trying to “do church” through a screen, YouTube, a Zoom meeting, or by sitting outside with the bugs and heat behind masks - 6 feet apart. It’s awkward. And this awkwardness puts us in a difficult place of feeling off balance. We want our balance back. We want normal back. We want to at least know when this will end.
So, my word for the day is ambivalence. I think that we are being called to live into that in-between place, that liminal space of unknowing and uncertainty. I want to look at that thought in reflection with these readings for this Ordinary Sunday. How does the Jacob story and the feeding of the 5000 shine light on our experience of ambivalence?
Like Jacob, we’ve been resilient and we’ve been resourceful. And, though unlike Jacob, we’ve been patient. But we get tired of waiting for this pandemic to pass. We get tired of being resilient and resourceful. We are being forced to face the fact that we will never go back to that normal. We may end up with a new normal but we can’t go back. We are becoming the church all over again. We are being called to new ways of caring for the poor, new ways os loving our neighbor, new ways of standing up for social justice, new ways of worship, fellowship, prayer.
I truly believe that God is leading us through this plague in the same way God led the people through the red sea, the wilderness and the struggles and conflict at the foot of Mt. Sinai before leading them to the promised land. God did not cause this plague, but God is leading us through this crisis and there is much to learn here.
The story of Jacob is an older story - before all that. The Bible is full of struggle stories when the people of God wallow in our fear of scarcity. But God always brings us to that place of abundance, over and over again.
The Jacob story is full of ambivalence.
Jacob and his twin brother Esau were born into strife with each other. Scholars say that the Jacob story, the story of the father of the Israelites, is representative of two different grades of social order, Jacob being a shepherd and Esau, the ancestor of the Edomites, a nomadic hunter. These stories of the two sides of this social order are also said to be “a thinly veiled apology for the relation between Edom (Esau) and Israel in Davidic times.”[1] Esau was the ancestor of the Edomites, Jacob the ancestor of the Israelites. The Edomites were made subject to Israel by David (2 Samuel 8:8ff.). So when these stories were told later, they were told as a larger story of reconciliation.
Ambivalence is key to reconciliation. Ambivalence is the opposite of certainty. We think of ambivalence as a weakness, as wrong. We think it is an attitude of confusion or lack of direction. We thin that uncertainty is always the losers stance.
But ambivalence is actually a strong word. Ambivalence at root means “both-strong.” Valence is a chemistry word that indicates the power of two elements in reaction. “Ambi” is a suffix meaning “both.”
Ambivalence is a psychological word based on chemistry which was first coined in 1910 by the same psychoanalyst (Eugen Bleuler) who came up with the words schizoid and schizophrenia. The psychological theories of ambivalence have evolved over these hundred years from ambivalence being a bad thing of uncertainty to a good thing. Ambivalence has come to be understood as the strength of living with cognitive dissonance.
In other words, we have come to realize that living into ambivalence, holding the tension of opposing attitudes is more powerful than certainty of one or the other.
The story of the feeding of the five thousand is a counterpoint to Jacob’s struggle. Where Jacob, motivated by a fear of scarcity, lies, and cheats and steals and struggles to make his way in a world that seems full of scarcity, Jesus takes what seems like scarcity and models the miracle of abundance.
I’ve shared before the story of the time I counseled a man who told me that he was “raised in a church in which the fathers of the church told him that the foundational key to faith is to be able to claim, on a personal level of faith the phrase “I know, that I know, that I know.” These elders from this young man’s past church pressured him to speak these words aloud and wouldn’t stop hounding him about this until he sounded convincing when saying them. “I know, that I know, that I know.” My counseling client then told me that he left that church and had come to believe, in his nearly thirty years, that he more valued the mystery of Grace than a theology of certainty and that he was struggling to learn how not to “know” so much.
I imagine for those first followers of Jesus, who actually witnessed the Resurrected Lord and the Ascension of our Lord, those men and women who were present at that Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit blew the Spirit of God on them, these who were so blessed, who didn’t have televisions, iPads, laptops, Google, or the nightly news, I imagine for them it was merely a memory they carried for the rest of their journeys. They knew that they knew that they knew because they had stood there and watched Jesus feed five thousand from two fish and five loaves.
People of certainty start doing math here. How does five loaves divide into five thousand mouths? How large were the loaves? How big the fish? Did they measure and weigh each portion to be fair?
People of ambivalence are able to not worry about these irrelevant details. The abundance of the Lord just is. We don’t worry about certainties. The only thing we need be certain of is that the Love of God is abundant. We’ve forgotten about our fear of scarcity when we can live into our ambivalence - when we can live with uncertainty in our faith.
We think that those early disciples knew-that-they-knew-that-they-knew because they were first witnesses but I don’t think they were keeping score or measuring portions. I think their knowledge of God through their encounter with the miracles of Christ was one of wonder, not certainty.
I wonder if most of the Church feels that we have wandered so far from that sort of certainly that we must at all cost recreate it. Like we have to be certain of what fits inside the box in which we keep God and we must live according to the rules and conventions that hang on that box.
Those who want that certainty work hard to believe that they know, that they know, that they know.
But we don’t know. We don’t know a lot. We don’t know when we will be able to see each other again. We don’t know when we will be able to laugh, hug and sing together without masks. We don’t know if we might accidentally infect each other with this horrible illness if we embrace or stand too close to each other, masked or not. We worry about the economy. We don’t know when it will end.
So what do we know? What are we certain of? Doom? Gloom? Joy? Faith?
Paul tells the Romans, in this section of his letter, just before today’s reading:
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)
That is all we need be certain of - that nothing can separate us from God.
But many of us are acting like Jacob lately. We are on the run, fearful of scarcity, we’re anxious, looking over our shoulders. Only it’s not because of our bad behavior like Jacob, it’s just because the world seems scary and chaotic and we feel the need to regain our sense of control. These are the thoughts and behaviors of scarcity thinkers. When it seems there is not enough we turn into fighters, we cheat our brothers, we skip town with the loot, we work for decades to amass wealth only to end up wrestling with God in the dark. We end up realizing it is reconciliation we are called to seek, not wealth and ownership. Jacob finally came to peace with this after many blessings from God and then he sought out reconciliation with his brother Esau.
It is ambivalence, that learning to live into the both-and of life, learning to simply trust in the abundance of God’s love for us, that is the key. Not certainty. Not absolutism. Not tribalism. Not gold, nor death, “nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth . . .
We need only rely on the abundance of a God who feeds everyone out of what seems a scarce amount. We need not be certain of our portion, we need only trust the miracle that is the Christ.
Here is a poem by Mary Oliver.
Logos
Why worry about the loaves and fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.
I think that God is calling us into the un-balance of our current circumstances. God does not want us in this place of fear and pain, but God is leading us to learn from it. From this place of feeling off balance we will have a new perspective of the church, we will see how much we need God, we will grow by necessity.
It takes living into ambivalence to benefit from this un-balance. Certainty of our purpose, certainty of our interpretation of scripture, certainty of the economy, the bottom line, these all seem the stronger thing. But the practice of faith through uncertainty is actually stronger.
Thanks be to God who is our strength, who guides us through the wilderness, who sustains us through the Holy Spirit to live into that uncertain path which it turns out is the Way of the Lord.
Amen.
[1] Gloria Lotha, Jacob, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacob-Hebrew-patriarch
.