Pentecost 7 Year A

(Genesis 25.19-34; Romans 8.1-11; Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23)

In a famous essay published in 1981, entitled ‘A Story-formed Community’, the American theologian, Stanley Hauerwas, offered some thoughts on the nature and purpose of church, through reflections on the book Watership Down. Many of you will be familiar with that tale of rabbits fleeing from their warren. One of their number, the rabbit Fiver, has a mysterious premonition that their warren is about to be destroyed, and the book tells of the adventures of the rabbits, among them Fiver’s brother Hazel, who learn to trust Fiver’s intuition, and escape to search for a new warren which might be home.

In his essay, Hauerwas draws attention to ways in which, during the various twists and turns of the rabbits’ journeying, they either tell, or are told, stories about the Prince of rabbits, El-ahrairah. These stories underpin, and illuminate, the various warrens the rabbits encounter, and also help fortify the rabbits with the virtues – particularly hope, courage and wisdom – that they will need as they navigate a dangerous world, where not all is as it first seems. The warren that the rabbits flee tells stories of El-ahrairah as a form of entertainment, not education in its deepest sense: the warren has lost the reason why these stories matter. This is revealed in the inability of the leadership to attend to Fiver’s warning of imminent destruction: they view his shrill prophetic foreboding as an unwelcome intrusion on a pleasant and self-satisfied status quo. And so they miss the opportunity to take the costly means necessary to save themselves.

Hazel and Fiver, however, do escape, and their journeyings with others, bring them to other warrens, set up on very different foundations. One warren, which has no name, no longer tells stories of El-ahrairah – the rabbits discover it has grown fat and flabby through entering a dangerous, secret pact with the local farmer, who is allowed to catch and kill a certain number of rabbits in exchange for leaving the others undisturbed. The warren is founded not on stories that form character, but on lies. Another warren they meet is set up along highly militaristic lines. Here the old stories have been distorted to idolise the current chief rabbit, and promote total loyalty to his dictatorship that promises to keep them safe.

I haven’t time to outline the ways that Hauerwas shows us the connection between the stories that the rabbits tell, and the forms of societies that they inhabit, or form. His basic argument is, however, that the stories we tell not only help us to make sense of the world but are fundamental in shaping that world. He argues that tradition – the re-telling of stories – rather than being an exercise in the preservation of the status quo, is the means for societies to remain self-critical, and to develop the virtues of listening to the prophetic, forming community, practising hope. Stories are how we understand ourselves and each other and how we develop the virtues that, as Hauerwas puts it in a famous quote, enable us to ‘transform fate into destiny.’ Stories help us to not just accept the future as given – as our fate - but help us develop the character to respond to the unexpected and shape a different future. Especially when the unexpected comes in the form of strangers, stories help us to see that the unexpected can be welcomed as gift. Fate is transformed into destiny through the virtue of hope.

I’m offering you a small taste of Hauerwas’ provocative thought because these last few Sundays we have been listening to, responding, inhabiting, and I hope, being shaped by some of the fundamental stories of our tradition – the stories of our three great forebears: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Today we have embarked on the story of Jacob, who will later be named Israel, the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. This story is one that has been picked up and woven into many people’s story, a fundamental means to how the whole people of God understand themselves. And so this Sunday, as on previous Sundays, we are asked how we might not just hear these stories as entertainment, but inhabit them, be shaped and formed by them; helped by them to grow in understanding, wisdom, courage, hope and love.

It’s important to understand that these stories can’t be reduced to simply making a point, a life lesson that can be summarised separate from the story. On one level, the story we heard as our Old Testament reading this morning, is the story of Israel’s relations with its neighbour, Edom. Rebekah, Isaac’s wife, is pregnant with twins, who struggle within her, and we are invited to see the twins as fathers of rival nations, Edom (which means red, ruddy) and Israel. Esau, red and hairy, is born first; Jacob swiftly follows, his hand already gripping Esau’s heel. As the boys grow up, we are invited to see contrasts: the hunter and the gatherer; the man of action and the quieter reflective one; the one loved by the father, the other preferred by the mother. The final vignette reveals Esau as governed by his belly – willing to sell his birthright, the right belonging to the elder, for a bowl of lentils that meet the immediate need of hunger; and Jacob, we gather, is altogether different - clever, a trickster who is happy to exploit his brother’s need to reverse the usual power relations. That hand gripping the heel of the other echoes through the story – these two, a study in contrasts, are nevertheless intertwined.

We might find in that intertwining and contrast, echoes of the story of Scotland and England, or many other neighbouring nations. The story of Scotland, and of what it is to be Scottish, is intertwined with the story of England. It’s a story often of contrast, but also about that intertwining, a rivalry and a need of each other. Our Old Testament story, told principally from the perspective of Jacob and his descendants, is both a laughing at their neighbour – the Edomite, so named for their forebear who sold his birth right for a pot of red stew - but also an admission that they are indeed bound together.

It’s a story that delights in Jacob’s cunning, as it goes on to tell of his tricking of his now old blind and needy father, Isaac, to further rob Esau of their father’s blessing. Jacob’s cunning has a dark, uncomfortable side, even as he dances through life. He too will be tricked in his turn (but that’s the story for a future week), and this is not the last we hear of Esau either. Jacob and Esau’s intertwined stories continue, toward one of the most devastating and moving moments of reconciliation in the bible. Through it all we are invited both to recognise and rejoice in Jacob’s cunning, but also sense that things are more complicated than we like to admit. There is both dark and light to Jacob, and to us.

The parable of the sower, told by Jesus in our Gospel, is in many ways more straightforward. The story of the sower who goes out to sow, with the seed falling on very different ground and soil, is almost simplistic in its directness, and it appears not to have that element of surprise that is often seen in the best of Jesus’ parables, when the twist in the story is what draws us in. I think that is due to the ‘interpretation’ of the parable that the disciples ask Jesus to provide. Many scholars argue that this explanation reflects the interpretation that the story gained in the early days of the church, rather than being one original to Jesus. The explanation emphasises the seed that does not reach full harvest and the different types of ground that it falls on. We become tempted, in this telling, to identify ourselves, or others, with a particular ground - well-trodden or rocky or thorny. Focusing on that interpretation, we miss the surprise of the story: the hearers of the story, very familiar with peasant farming of the time, would instead have been astonished at the profligate practice of the farmer, throwing his seed around, willy-nilly. Any good subsistence farmer would have been much more careful than that, and ensured that the seed landed in good soil. In that context, the parable becomes about the mysterious activity of God’s grace, dispersing seed in all directions, rather than through careful planting. God’s purposes of an abundant harvest are achieved through waste and destruction and generous, indiscriminate sowing, so that the good soil might be also be seeded. That’s a surprising way of imagining the activity of God in our lives and world. What does it mean to inhabit that understanding of the activity of God’s grace: God as the one who achieves God’s ultimate purpose through waste and destruction and indiscriminate sowing, as well as abundant harvest?

Following Hauerwas, we can perhaps see that it is the questions that stories provoke that are at the heart of what they, and their repeated contemplation, enable. Whose stories are intertwined with ours? Where within us and between us might the seed be growing, waiting to be harvested? How are we being formed as a church community to respond in courage and hope to the prophetic warning voices of our time, prepared to live out faith in God’s overflowing grace? The stories we heard this morning ask sharp questions to form us and shape us. How do we answer?