Sermons for Sunday 14th June are now online

I can never go past a piece written by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Here's another on how we cope with crisis.

You find yourself in the midst of crisis. You lose your job, or miss the promotion you were expecting. You find yourself with a medical condition that requires a radical change of lifestyle. You make a bad investment that costs you dearly. You find an important relationship in your life under stress. Any of these, or the thousand other shocks that flesh is heir to, can plunge you, without warning, into crisis. What then do you do? How do you survive the trauma and the pain?

I have found one biblical passage deeply helpful. It is not an obvious one. It does not come from the Book of Psalms, that lexicon of the soul, or from Isaiah, the poet laureate of hope. Instead, it comes from the famous, enigmatic passage in Genesis 32 in which Jacob, far from home, wrestles with an unknown, unnamed adversary from night until the break of day.

The context is important: 22 years earlier Jacob had left home, fearing that his brother Esau, whose blessing he had taken, would kill him. Now he is returning, when he hears that Esau in on his way to meet him with a force of 400 men. Jacob, says the Bible, was “very afraid and distressed”, an unusually emphatic phrase in a book that often tells us little about people’s emotions. Click on read more to finish the article..