Here I am standing next to my big sister looking at my grandmother’s bird. I don’t remember the moment but it isn’t hard to know what is going through my toddler mind. I like the bird. I want to touch the bird, to hold the bird, to have the bird.

Having

We instinctively want to have. Having is not a bad thing. I am attracted to the beauty of the bird, to its glory and something within me wants to have the bird because of its glory. I didn’t fully know why then, and I don’t fully know why now, but somehow having the bird will satisfy something within me.

Something that is obvious now to me as an adult is that as a child I probably didn’t know how to have the bird. I wanted it. I knew I wanted to have it, but I didn’t know what having it would mean. My parent or grand parent standing near by watching us watch the bird knew that neither my sister nor myself were capable of having this bird. At this point all we could profitably do was behold its glory and experience its wonder at arm’s length. There would come a moment when we could have it in a closer way, once we begin to learn a bit about power and what it means. 

Having and Power

Already at this age already I knew something of power. I knew I had control of hands that can grab, and open, and take. I could reach out and grab the cage. I could reach out and open the cage and grab the bird and have it.

I also knew that my desire to have and my power to take were within an economy of other persons and powers. Why did Ruth and I stand obediently and look but not touch? We were standing within an invisible economy of parental power where we knew our small child powers were severely outmatched.

I knew not to reach out and grab because a stronger, firmer arm would grab mine. I might not have understood in the moment but that arm that would grab mine was actually withholding my arm so that I could have and enjoy the glory of the bird to the degree that I was able in that moment. That arm wanted me to have and enjoy the bird, but only in the ways I could. That arm knew that in the process of trying to have that bird without the wisdom to know how to use my power I would in fact destroy the possibility of having the bird at all or enjoying its glory. I was capable of losing the bird or killing the bird and never having it or experiencing its glory again.

Jacob and Having

In following our story of Jacob we’ve seen what Jacob wants to have and the power he’s willing to employ to get it.

Jacob too lives within an economy of powers and so far he, together with his mother, has been successful in having the things he has wanted. He manipulated his brother Esau into selling his birthright for a bowl of soup. He and his mother deceived blind Isaac into bestowing the blessing upon Jacob rather than Esau. Jacob has learned how to take with power.

Jacob and Rebekah, however, have also learned the limits of their power. Esau’s hand is currently stayed by the parental power of Isaac. Rebekah again decides to manipulate her husband into releasing Jacob to find a more suitable wife than Esau had chosen sending Jacob to her brother Laban.

Jacob and Rebekah have learned a lesson in having and power. They have secured what they wanted by their powers of manipulation and deceit, but they have not truly been able to have what it is they’ve wanted. Now Jacob because of what he’s wanted to possess and how he used power to try to secure it now finds himself an exile from his own home, estranged from the family and property he so jealously tried to secure with his power.

We Are Climbing Jacob’s Bargain

God interrupts Jacob in his exilic flight. God reveals himself to Jacob in power and promises him descendants, land, that he will bless the world, and that he’ll return him from exile.

Jacob receives this message in a strange way. He reduces a broad, global message of blessing into a bargain. Why? Because of having and power. A blessing is a free gift, one that you are not in control of, a bargain is one in which via an exchange you attempt to exercise control over the other in order to secure for yourself what you want.

My sister and I in the photo are enjoying the bird, and our enjoyment of this bird is a free gift from my grandmother. What commonly happens in the mind of a child, however, is that we wish to control the bird, to have the bird on a different level apart from my grandmother because we know that what my grandmother can give, she can also take away.

What Jacob does in this divine encounter is as instinctive as my wanting to have that little bird under my control. He hears a message of blessing and wishes to translate it into a means of securing power so that he can secure whatever else it is he wants, which is everything.

Election is God choosing to bless us. Bargaining religion is our attempt to keep control ourselves to secure God’s power for our own use to have and to hold that which we want. The story that follows is a story about trying to take within God’s economy of blessing.

Things seem to start well at a Well

Jacob, buoyed by the prospect of being able to leverage God’s promise into power for himself lifts his feet towards Haran, Laban’s home. After he lifts his feet he lifts his eyes to see fields, a well, flocks and a beautiful young woman. In a display of power he removes the stone cover from the well, he then proceeds to water her flock from the well and then waters her mouth with his kiss. She runs home to tell father Laban of the good fortune that has happened to her, and everything seems to be going well. God sure seems to be useful for a guy who wants to have it all.

An Economy of Takers

What we quickly learn is that Jacob isn’t alone in wanting to have and in having power to take. Like the home he left behind, this home too is full of people with ideas of having and holding and using power to take.

Laban like Jacob wants it all and is well advanced in the art of deception and manipulation. He was doubtlessly disappointed that unlike Abraham’s servant Jacob didn’t come with camels laden with treasure. Jacob’s value was in his labor to Laban and Laban knew he could use Jacob’s desire to have Rachel to secure Jacob’s labor.

Jacob worked seven years to secure Rachel but as the famous story relates Laban switched daughters tricking Jacob into marrying Leah and thus securing an additional seven years of labor from Jacob.

Leah, who had fewer options than Jacob and Laban just wanted to be loved. Imagine what it does to one’s sense of their own worth to be deceptively slipped into a marriage bed in place of her hotter sister only to be rejected the morning after. She quickly settled on a strategy of using her womb, rather than her looks, to be loved. She had son after son either from her womb or her slave girl’s womb to try to win Jacob’s love and validation, always without success.

Sister Rachel’s problem was quite the opposite. She had Jacob’s love but she wanted cultural validation by having sons. She, like Sarah placed her slave girl into Jacob’s bed to try to have sons through her, but sons through the slave girl’s womb didn’t meet her need for validation. She is locked in conflict with her sister over Jacob’s love and value in the community acquired through sons.

Jacob, Laban, Leah, Rachel are all trying to use power to have different things. The behavior we find with all four is understood in Christian terms as idolatry. Whether its wives, children, flocks, status, vindication, validation, each attempts to locate their identity in the circumstances they desire. They imagine that through things they can have glory and their through and lives begin to orbit around the things that they imagine will give them glory. Like my grandmother’s bird, it is often not the thing itself but the glory of the thing that we try to possess through the thing.

• Jacob imagines he will have Rachel’s glory by having Rachel. It doesn’t last long. 
• Leah imagines she will have the glory of Jacob’s love by receiving it. It doesn’t last long. 
• Rachel imagines she will have the glory of being a mother by having sons, she finds frustration even and eventually death here. 
• Laban thinks he can possess Jacob and his labor by manipulatively controlling him, Laban will lose Jacob, his flocks, his daughters and grandchildren by his grasping.

Idolatry is grabbing at the bird hoping to possess its glory and in the end only holding a dead bird and some broken feathers.

Each one their own turn will try to use Yhwh or their other gods to give them an advantage to get what they want. It’s noteworthy that religion in each case seems to be failing in service of their idols.

The Problem of Having

There was a relationship between myself, having the bird and its glory that was far beyond my understanding as a toddler.

Wise adults in the room knew that if I used even my toddler power to try to have the bird I would rob the bird of its glory and rob myself of even partially enjoying the glory of the bird. My wise parents kept me from losing the bird or destroying the bird. They kept me from experiencing the trauma of destroying the glory of the bird by my own hand. My parents knew I couldn’t have the bird the way I wanted it, but they wanted me to learn something about the bird, its glory, myself and my power.

Jacob’s life has been a story of power and having and how trying to have by power destroys the having and brings trauma to the shalom we should know. Jacob’s exercise of his power has helped to destroy his family of origin, his relationship with his father and his brother all in the hopes of having birthright and blessing.

Jacob, like all of us in our insanity, imagines that the answer to his problem of having is more power and that somehow the election of God as received in his promise of blessing affords him the increase of power necessary to secure what he wants. If circumstances stand in the way of my quest for glory the solution I implicitly embrace is more power.

The scene of toddler me and the bird illustrates the futility of this nicely. If I were a bigger, stronger toddler, one capable of defying the stronger parental arms that kept me from the cage, would it increase my joy or simply give me larger hands to hold a lifeless bird with broken feathers?

The Failure of Religion to Secure

One of the things I love about my atheist and post-Christian friends is their honesty about the failure of religion. Religious people so often promise SO much, and deliver SO little. People leave religion every day because of it, the difficulty is that they can leave what we recognize as religion but if they don’t leave idolatry religion simply takes another non-religious form.

When we see Jacob at Haran, neck deep in dueling wives and a swindling uncle we might find him ruminating on his bargain with the LORD. “Well at the rate this thing is going, all mouths to feed and women to impregnate 10% of nothing is nothing!”

He might be ready to leave his bargaining religion behind because it simply isn’t panning out. Jacob at this point, wanting the glory of the bird seems to have a hand full of dead animal and broken feathers.

And the Subtly of Blessing

While Jacob seems at a loss to control the God he turned blessing into with, mysteriously, subtly, God was in fact blessing him. Through the feuding of unhappy wives and bedded slaves Jacob now has a quiver full of sons. Grabby Laban now rather than sending Jacob packing has noticed that somehow a blessing stalks Jacob, a blessing beyond the bargain.

Why Blessing Wins, Not Bargain-Religion

Jacob will cut a deal with Laban for the spotted and speckled sheep and goats. Laban will again try to swindle Jacob but you can’t cheat blessing. God will bless Jacob rather than Laban until Laban’s own son’s protest and try to blame Jacob.

It will all reach a climax when Laban’s daughters ally with their husband and decide to make for Canaan without Laban’s blessing (because he wouldn’t give it anyway). Rachel will steal Laban’s household gods, still holding tight to her religion, and together they will flee. Laban will pursue them with a contingent of men in order to take back daughters and flocks by force but the LORD will now reveal himself in power to Laban, the only language Laban probably knows, and warn him not to harm Jacob. Blessing will not be denied.

Now Jacob is upset. He’s ready to tell Laban off and he can do so because the LORD has protected him and everyone knows it. Finally Jacob says something worth listening to, even though he’s still not up to his own words.

42 If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been on my side, surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed. God saw my affliction and the labor of my hands, and rebuked you last night.”

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989 (Ge 31:42). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

For the first time we see Jacob exhibiting the ability to have. Jacob recognizes that all he has comes from the LORD, not from his power. Jacob’s power was insufficient to have what he desired and to keep it. It was only the LORD’s blessing that provided him anything.

Grabby Religion

A local yoga studio sent out the following missive…

Just Fix Me

How often do we hope someone will come into our lives and tell us the steps we need to take in order to heal? Whatever ails you — your body, your soul or a broken spirit — we often turn to a doctor, psychic, yoga teacher or mom to stop the suffering.

And when we’re not looking for ways to fix ourselves, we spend time thinking about how to fix the lives of the people we love. We want to stop their suffering, too.

Churches have been playing this tune a long time. Will Willimon notes this in a recent blog post of his.

North American parishes are in a bad neighborhood for care-giving.  Most of our people (at least those we are willing to include in mainline churches) solve biblically legitimate need (food, clothing, housing) with their check books.  Now, in the little free time they have for religion, they seek a purpose-driven life, deeper spirituality, reason to get out of bed in the morning, or inner well-being – matters of unconcern to Jesus.  In this narcissistic environment, the gospel is presented as a technique, a vaguely spiritual response to free-floating, ill-defined omnivorous human desire.

A consumptive society perverts the church’s ministry into another commodity which the clergy dole out to self-centered consumers who enlist us in their attempt to cure their emptiness.  Exclusively therapeutic ministry is the result.  I saw fatigue and depression among many clergy whom I served as bishop.  Debilitation is predictable for a cleros with no higher purpose for ministry than servitude to the voracious personal needs of the laos. 

The 12 million dollar Duke Clergy Health study implies that our biggest challenge is to drop a few pounds and take a day off.  If you can’t be faithful, be healthy and happy.  I believe that our toughest task is to love the Truth who is Jesus Christ more than we love our people who are so skillful in conning us into their idolatries.

The yoga studio together with the doctor, the psychic and the preachers are all imagined to be in the same business, helping people find the spiritual power in order to possess that which they wish to have and think they can acquire with one sort of power or another. Our problem is not lack of power which we imagine can be fixed by bargaining our way into control of spiritual power, but rather the fact that we cannot have these things in the way that we think we want to or need to and that ability to have isn’t a function of power, it’s a function of maturity and capacity. Idolatry is seeing the glory of the thing and orienting your life around having it. Idols always leave us either empty handed or with dead birds and broken feathers.

Election, Blessing and Receiving

Idolatry so captivates us that all we see is the thing and the glory it seems to promise. We imagine that without the thing or the power to secure it we will be left empty, void of glory, empty of promise. Jacob’s story invites us into something different.

First we are to recognize that we are chosen for blessing. This came long before we were born and it will not be something that can be denied. My grandmother was under no obligation to show my sister and I the bird. Why did she do it? Out of joy. She enjoyed the bird and its glory and wanted good things for us. I as a child was vaguely aware of her generosity, her name was Grace after all, but I couldn’t see the larger picture. Neither could Jacob.

At some point I hope we realize that blessing is not bargain and that religion does not work. We cannot bargain or control God into giving us what we think we need, the glories of how many birds we wish to have.

Will we open our eyes to see that while we were attempting to bargain with religion God was in fact blessing us in subtle ways, the kind even the Labans of the world cannot disrupt. Will we then recognize that God has indeed seen our affliction and has acted on our behalf.

The Christian story is one of resurrection after crucifixion. The despair the disciples felt in seeing their master hanging naked on a cross was the death of their religion. They imagined if they tagged behind Jesus they could have the money and the power that they imagined would come with a man who had wonder working power and crowd enthralling words. They saw the bird and imagined they could have it by the power their feet and service could offer.

When they saw Jesus on the cross their bargain-religion crumbled. All their efforts were lost. They would have no political position in the Jerusalem palace run by Jesus. They instead would use their feet to flee Roman soldiers they imagined. Resurrection changed all that.

In the resurrection they saw that God had seen Jesus’ affliction and raised him into a life that could not be taken away by sword or prison or famine. They would receive a blessing and a glory that could not be gotten through power.

Receiving from the Hand of Grace

My grandmother’s name was Grace. She wanted us to enjoy the glory of the small bird. We did not have to bargain with her. We did not have to coerce her. It was her generosity and her desire to share a good thing that gave us chance to see this small bit of glory. Would we receive it?