Putting yourself in God's way.

Sunday 20^th October – Trinity 18 – Proper 24

Genesis 32: 22-31. Jacob wrestles with God and neither prevails. But God blesses Jacob and says that from now on his name is “Israel” which means struggle with God. This enigmatic story has intrigued me from the instant I first heard it and of course theologically means that our relationship with God is characterised more by inward struggle than meek compliance.

2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5. The phrase “all scripture is inspired by God” has been misunderstood by many to mean that all scripture is dictated by God. Also, in context, when this piece was written what counted as “scripture” was the Old Testament and most of the Apocrypha. The new Testament gospels and letters were not yet counted as such. God breathed yes, but distilled through the culture, passions, personalities, prejudices, and wishful thinking perhaps of the writers and editors of the Bible and manifest in various genres that require different ways of reading and interpreting them. Luke 18: 1-8. The meaning of this parable is NOT that God is an unjust judge but the opposite is being posited. If even an unjust judge will do what is right by this vulnerable woman then how much more will God who IS just answer the prayers of his people.

One of the difficulties in reading and interpreting the Bible is that it is sometimes difficult to project oneself back into the culture and appreciate the context in which it was written. The genre of writing is also important. Whether a book is history, theology, prophesy, Apocalyptic, poetry, or wisdom literature obviously makes a difference to how a book is read and sometimes books are written in multiple genres just to confuse the issue.

There is a way of combining the twin themes of using God-breathed scripture and the practice of prayer together into a pleasing whole.

This method of prayer comes from the Ignatian tradition named after Ignatius Loyola which sidesteps the difficulty of trying to understand what the author or authors was trying to say.

You read a passage of scripture slowly a couple of times and prayerfully and ask God to reveal Himself through the text.

If all scripture is God breathed, the Spirit is there lying behind and circulating through the text. You are asking God to reveal Himself and to speak to you today, with a message or a word or an impulse that stands apart from the surface meaning of the words.

Prayer is after all about communication and God guides, comforts, teaches and admonishes us by his Holy Spirit.

This method of prayer seeks direct communication from His Spirit by using the Bible but isn’t concerned with the author’s stated message as far as we are able to understand it.  

Slowly rolling the words around in your mind, some words may stand out for some reason, some images or impressions may form in your mind. This is God communicating with you bypassing the actual surface meaning of the text.

This is a quiet meditative way of praying which gives greater emphasis to the theology of presence and listening and discerning than we normally engage in via discursive petitionary prayer.

In some parts of the Old Testament it can be hard to see the grace filled loving purposes of God in many pieces but the people who wrote it were inspired by God to do so. God can use any scripture through which to communicate and using this contemplative method it tries to connect God’s Spirit to our Spirit.

Finding the Spiritual meaning in a Bible story as enigmatic as Jacob wrestling with a man who turns out to be God himself is actually one of the more explainable ones.

The giving of a new name signifies a change of status in the Bible and the name is a clear indicator of the nature and identity of the community of Israel.

Human experiences are depicted in terms of a struggle with the divine, an element that is very much played down in the Christian tradition though Jesus struggling with his role in the passion narratives, sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane is surely some warrant if one were needed that servile unquestioning obedience wasn’t always easy.

As the most complete revelation of the nature of God that we have, it behoves us all to read the Hebrew scriptures through Jesus tinted spectacles. Things like genocides and massacres are directly attributed to God which we now realise, having the revelation of Jesus, God wouldn’t own.

The divine wants to communicate with you, using communication in the widest possible sense. Don’t box yourself in to thinking that God can only reach you in certain prescribed ways. His ways and thoughts are far above our ways and thoughts.

Placing yourself consciously in God’s way aids the communication process and you have to pray as you can, not as you can’t. But knowing of different ways gives you extra opportunity to experiment with prayer to find a style that suits you.

When you are trying to build a relationship - any communication is good no matter what outward form it takes or in whatever location you happen to be.