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To modern ears - well, to any ears, really - this morning’s story of Jacob being slipped a decoy wife in place of his intended bride is more than a little startling. But being unexpectedly married to Leah instead of Rachel is just the beginning of a biblical soap opera that would have even today’s reality show celebrities blushing.

Reading on in Genesis 29, we get a window into Jacob’s turbulent domestic life.  Leah and Rachel, though sisters, are now marital competitors. Rachel can’t get pregnant; Leah bears son after son. Rachel is mad at Jacob, and Jacob is mad at Rachel. Rachel gives her servant to Jacob so the maid can bear a son on Rachel’s behalf. Leah, who has stopped having children by now, then does the same with her servant. More children are born. More drama ensues. At one point, Leah buys Jacob’s marital favours for the night by giving Rachel some of the mandrake plants Leah’s son has gathered that day. This is not a G-rated reading.

It was, however, the reading set for morning prayer on Friday, when some of us were gathered here at St. Clement’s for a daylong meeting. It’s one of those readings to which you might respond, "This is the word of the Lord….?" with a slight upward inflection at the end. You’ll note that the Sunday lectionary conveniently skips over all this and next week’s reading begins as Jacob is embarking upon the journey back to his homelands. When you hear "The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok," you can spare a thought for all the emotional baggage and burdens that must have been travelling along with them.

I am not going to unpack today’s Genesis story other than to note all the desires contained within it. The desire for love. For legacy. For recognition. For fulfilment. For security. For winning. For justice. All very human desires indeed.

But there is planted inside each of us a far deeper desire; a need, a hope, a longing, an itch that can never be quite satisfied. It’s something that is hard to put into words, because it’s hard to fully understand ourselves. In Paul’s letter to the Romans today, he says, "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words."

We don’t know how to pray as we ought, because our mortal selves can’t truly comprehend the fullness of God’s story, or our own place within it.

In the gospel reading, Jesus tries to paint a picture for us of what the Kingdom of God is like, but even he scrambles to do it justice. It’s like a mustard seed; well, it’s like a pearl; OK, how about you imagine a loaf of bread mysteriously expanding…?

We may not have words adequate to describe the utter beauty, goodness and completeness of God’s kingdom. But we have coined words for those somewhat rare occasions when we are transported out of our everyday lives and, for a moment or two, feel like we are catching a glimpse of God’s world - and I’ll get to those words in a moment.

The feeling I’m talking about might come upon us as a sudden sense of aching deja vu. It may visit us when our attention is caught in a particular way by the beauty of a scene in front of us. We can even experience it in our dreams. It can’t be planned for, and certainly can’t be forced; it is a moment of grace that often takes us when we least expect it.

C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia tales and many Christian classics, first remembers this feeling when as a child he first gazed into and was utterly entranced by the wonder of a miniature garden his brother had created from moss and twigs in the lid of a biscuit tin. In it, he got a glimpse of a Paradise that would never leave his imagination.

In his memoir, Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes about an experience he had many years later:

As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. […] It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but of desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss….

And that is the thing about this soul-deep longing. Unlike some of the human desires we heard about in the Genesis story, this desire can’t actually be satisfied by the attainment of the thing or the memory that has triggered it. We may experience it as similar to nostalgia for a childhood home or holiday place, but if we suddenly found ourselves transported to that place, our mysterious itch would remain unscratched. In The Weight of Glory, Lewis describes this maddeningly elusive desire as "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

Lewis called this feeling joy; perhaps knowing, though, that this was an incomplete description, he also borrowed the German word sehnsucht, loosely translated as the "ache of reaching toward something just beyond perception," something that seems to exist simultaneously in the past, present and future.

Other languages try to grasp this notion as well; the Welsh call it hiraeth, the Ethiopian tizitia, and the Portuguese saudade.

Author Rebecca K. Reynolds says it is like "wishing to talk to someone dear to you but not knowing who that is. It is desire, but what is desired can’t quite be defined." Amy Baik Lee, who has also written on the topic, calls it a "homeward longing."

For many people, this ache for something we can’t point to but that our soul somehow remembers is a sure and certain sign that our true home is not an earthly one. The flashes of sehnsucht we experience help break the spell of what Lewis calls "the evil enchantment of worldliness" - the mistaken belief that everything we need and everything we aspire to can be found on this material plane.

I wonder if this is ringing bells with you. Do you remember being transported by a feeling that transcends time and place? I wonder if we may accept these feelings as our birthright more readily when we are children, when the world they know is quite naturally home to glimpses of the supernatural. The best myths and fairy tales resonate with children because these stories speak a language with which they are familiar.

As we age, though, we often allow ourselves to get rusty in that language, as the enchantment of worldliness overtakes us without our notice. Perhaps, when or if our adult self is overcome with a moment of otherworldly joy, we shrug it off as mere nostalgia for the past, or an appreciation for the beautiful garden we happen to be in at the time. Perhaps we even experience it as melancholy … a feeling that we once believed in something mysterious and holy, but because we could never quite grasp it, we kind of gave up trying.

If that’s the case, take heart. This grace that comes to us isn’t meant to be grasped, nor even rationally understood. Our prayers can’t force it, our church life can’t guarantee it; our hearts can only invite it. And having done so, we must simply get on with the business of living — accepting that our five senses are inadequate to capture the invisible eternity in which we are held, but trusting that we will someday return to the place our soul dimly remembers now.

Jesus tried to paint a picture of God’s kingdom for us. But even Jesus couldn’t find the right words to translate God’s immense love and unending glory in way we could absorb it.

We may not have a crystal clear picture of our destination. But we can follow in the footsteps of good souls, past and present, whose inner compass clearly points them, and us, homeward. Along the way, may we be gifted with flashes of God’s heaven, and may those glimpses serve to strengthen our courage for our work here on Earth.

 

 

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(kids - mustard seed stole - funeral memories - important things built out of small things,(Lil Thirkell)  God gives us glimpses of what is really important)