Sermon for October 19, 2025

Readings:

Genesis 32:22-31
Psalm 121
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

I think that it is only fitting that our first scripture reading this morning should be about wrestling, as I am sure that I am not the only one here that woke up feeling like I had just been body-slammed by Macho-Man Randy Savage. Everything hurts. I have sympathy for our biblical patriarch Jacob this morning as he limps away at the end of that Old Testament story. He’s victorious, he has been blessed, but it is a victory and a blessing that comes with tremendous effort and some pain. Some of us know what that feels like right now. If you are a visitor today and weren’t around this weekend, or are watching from home, we have had a big church fair for the past two days and a lot of us are pretty tired. So, we know how Jacob feels.

But I’m not letting you go home today without a sermon, and the passage that you heard from the Book of Genesis a moment ago is a mysterious one that needs some exploration. Jacob and his family are on the move for reasons that I can’t fully get into this morning because nobody wants to hear a long sermon, I will at least spare you that, but I will just say it is a lot of family drama. Jacob has a brother that hates him, a father-in-law that tricks him, not to mention two wives and eleven children, so drama is to be expected. And Jacob is not a faultless character either. He is not simply some great example of primitive virtue. He is as complicated and as crooked as any of us. But that is something that should give us hope, because even as a person who is kind-of messed up, he still has encounters with God. And that is what that first scripture reading really is all about. It’s what all of our scripture readings this morning are about. An ordinary person has an encounter with God. God interacts with people that aren’t always good; God still cares loves people who are complicated. God does not remain distant from the mess of everyday human lives, but gets right down into the midst of it and grapples with us. God is in the midst of the drama with us. If you get nothing else from the scriptures or my sermon this morning, please remember that. God has encounters with ordinary, sinful human beings in the midst of real life. Jacob doesn’t just wrestle with God, God wrestles with him.

One night when Jacob sends his wives and children on ahead of him, he is left alone and has an encounter with a mysterious man. Our tradition sometimes identifies this man as an angel, but the text doesn’t say that. It just calls him a man. Eventually we learn that he is not just a man. We are not told why Jacob is wrestling with him though; we are just told that this mysterious man could not, or would not, subdue and overpower Jacob. He says “let me go” and Jacob replies “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” Jacob is stubborn and bold, which I like to think of as qualities, though I personally probably exhibit more of one than the other. Anyways, in this moment the mysterious man confers upon Jacob a new name. He calls him Israel, a name which we means wrestled or striven with God, for as the man says, “you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Jacob then asks the mysterious man his name, because obviously he wasn’t wearing his name tag, and the man makes no reply. He just blessed Jacob, renamed him Israel, and disappears. But Jacob knows that something miraculous has happened. He knew that this was not just any man. This was God. He knows that his encounter with this man was actually an encounter with God, because he names the place Peniel, which means face of God. 

There is much that can, and has, been said about that mysterious Genesis passage, but in the end Jacob has an encounter with God and realizes it, because he is stubborn. He doesn’t give up easily. Jacob gets his blessing because he knows that a blessing is worth fighting for. Encounters with God are precious and they are worth a little pain and suffering. God is worth holding on to, even if it involves a bit of wrestling.

Now I must admit that everything I know about actual wrestling comes from watching professional wrestling as a child with my grandfather and uncle. Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, Junkyard Dog, Ravishing Rick Rude, and Jake the snake Roberts…these were all names that I knew well as a child, so everything I know about wrestling comes from watching their crazy antics. If you don’t know who those guys are…well you have missed out on some high-class American culture. You can look them up. But the one thing I learned from watching all that is that wrestlers are constantly having to adjust and change their grips. Your opponent moves one way, you move another. You try this, you try that. Sometimes you are up, sometimes you are down. There are some predictable, standard moves, but then there are wild cards. It isn’t always the same exact thing. You have to be willing to adjust and change your grip. 

Now I am probably one of the most traditional people you are likely to meet, in the sense that I love tradition and traditions and I think that they are worth fighting for. Traditions are a blessing and blessings are worth a good struggle. Traditions are worth stubbornly holding on to, but how you hold on to them…THAT is what has to constantly change. You have to be willing to adjust your grip, move and change your position and even try something new now and then if you hope to prevail. The tradition of the Friendship Fair, for all of the pain that it is, is a tradition that I think is worth holding on to, because I think in many ways divine encounters happen because of it, not just in the two days of the fair, but in so much of the work that happens leading up to it. There are elements of the fair that really do produce joy and build relationships. These are the parts of the fair that we need to stubbornly hold on to; but then there are aspects of the fair that can and must change over time. We need to be mindful of that. We can maintain the tradition of the fair, but also change our grip here and there. Trying new things and sometimes letting go of old things that we just can’t do anymore. I’m not the sort of person who loves change, but it can be very good now and then. It was only a couple fairs ago that we started taking credit cards, and what a change that has made. We haven’t always had a beer tent or apple cider donuts, but those have both proved to be popular additions as well. Incidentally, in the beer tent on Friday, Michael Coyne challenged me that if I mentioned apple cider donuts in my sermon on Sunday that he would double his weekly pledge. Michael, you may consider that challenge accepted. Now, if all of you would do the same, we wouldn’t have to worry about the financial side of the fair at all; we could simply focus on the things that bring us joy. But we can talk about that more another day.

To our younger parishioners that are here and helping to lead this service today I would say this: the future of this fair is really going to be in your hands, not ours. I hope that some of the things we are doing now will be things that you see value in and will want to maintain, but I also know you won’t always do everything the way we do it and that’s OK. I hope that you will hold on to many things that you experience here in church: prayer, scripture, mystery, joy, encounters with God, and meaningful relationships. I hope that you hold on to the tradition of the friendship Fair, but how you hold on to it, may be a little different than how we have held on to it. And that is as it should be. I can tell you that it won’t always be easy, but there are blessings that come from all these mysterious divine encounters that happen in church, even in church fairs, and blessings are worth fighting for.

Sermon for October 5, 2025

Readings:

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 37:1-10
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, To Timothy, my beloved child:
Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. 

I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. 

I wanted you to hear those words from Saint Paul’s epistle to Timothy again this morning, because sometimes I think we are so fixated on the big picture or the major names or themes in a scripture passage that we often miss smaller details and characters that have a story all their own to tell. So, let’s talk for a moment this morning about Lois and Eunice. They are mentioned in passing in Paul’s letter. “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.” Who are Lois and Eunice? They don’t get much press in church history. Their names are not widely known or celebrated. Churches aren’t dedicated to them. I have been to plenty of churches named after Saint Paul, and I have heard of plenty of churches named after Saint Timothy. But I have never seen a church called Saint Lois. I have never seen a church dedicated to Saint Eunice. And it’s a shame really. Someone needs to go and start a church and call it Saint Lois or Saint Eunice. We don’t really know who Lois and Eunice are. All we know is that Lois was a woman of faith who passed her faith on to her daughter Eunice. And Eunice herself would become a woman of faith who would pass her faith on to her son Timothy. It’s a boring little detail and hardly worth mentioning, right? Insignificant?

Except, maybe it isn’t an insignificant detail. Because if it weren’t for Lois and Eunice, there would be no Saint Timothy. This faith that Timothy has, this faith that Paul praises and celebrates, it didn’t just materialize out of the air. It has a genealogy. It was handed down to him. Timothy’s faith came from his mother Eunice. And Eunice’s faith came from her mother Lois. This is a faith that Paul is willing to die for. He describes it as a treasure that needs to be guarded. But it is also a treasure that gets handed down from one generation to the next. It is a gift that we receive and it is a gift that we give. Sometimes, like with Timothy, we get it from our parents or grandparents. Sometimes we get it from other people in our lives: distant relatives, friends, neighbors, or even strangers, but none of us, not one of us, came to faith entirely on our own. We all had someone who shared the gospel with us, or shared their faith in God, in some way. Maybe it wasn’t some great sermon. Maybe it was through their actions or their prayers or their hope or their perseverance, but somehow, someway, if you are here today then someone has planted a seed of faith within you. Someone shared their faith with you. Who was it? Maybe there are multiple people in your life that you can think of that shared their faith with you. If so, then you are blest. You are blest because you have been given a treasure. Don’t forget that. You have been given a treasure. The treasure is this living hope inside of you that keeps reminding you that the struggles of this world are not all that there is. The treasure is the conviction that there is a God that is worth trusting in, more than we trust in anything else in this world. The treasure is the belief that love is worth fighting for. The treasure is the promise that death is not the end for us. That treasure is a powerful thing that even in the tiniest amount can transform our lives and change the way we look at the world. Think about how the belief in the Resurrection must have given Lois and Eunice strength. Think about the troubles that those women must have seen in their lives. They would have known Psalm 37 very well. They would have know of God’s promise to deal with evildoers and set the world right, but in the Resurrection that would have seen God in action. They would have seen God keeping his promises to his children and that was a treasure to them that they had to pass on. You have been given a treasure too, and the treasure is not this building, it’s not a place or an inanimate object. It is a living thing inside of you. I think it is important to note that Paul says the faith lived within Timothy, and lived within Eunice, and lived within Lois. The faith is a living thing. Living things grow when you feed them and nurture them; they wilt and dwindle and may eventually die when you neglect them. That is why Paul challenged Timothy to rekindle that gift, that treasure that was withing him. We have been given a precious and powerful thing, but it needs guarding, it needs regular rekindling and it needs to be handed on. 

Today is not Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. It isn’t All Souls’ day or All Saints’ day. It isn’t even Grandparent’s day. But a couple names in a single verse of one of Paul’s letters is a good enough reminder that we need to take time now and then to give thanks to God for the Loises and Eunices in our own life. Without them and their witness and their sacrifices we wouldn’t have the faith that we have. They have surely given us a treasure. 

They only get a passing mention this morning and we know nothing else about them, but if it wasn’t for Lois and Eunice, Timothy would not have had the faith and Paul wouldn’t have had anyone to write to.