SERMON 26 July 2026 “Still Rising”

“When morning came, it was Leah!” What happened? Over the past few weeks, we have been walking together through the story of Jacob in Genesis, alongside Jesus’ parables in Matthew. We saw the blessing unexpectedly pass from Esau to Jacob. Then, the sower who scattered seed everywhere without first checking the condition of the soil. Through all these stories, one truth has kept coming back to us: the kingdom of Heaven is far bigger and far deeper than we imagine.

Jacob has fled from his brother Esau and arrived at the home of his uncle Laban. This is where Jacob’s long journey through hardship really begins. He cannot just live there for free, so Laban asks him, ‘What shall your wages be?’ Jacob says he will work for Rachel, one of Laban’s two daughters. His wages are not money. They are not livestock. His wages are a person. Seven years. Seven long years.

Yet those seven years pass as though they were only a few days because Jacob is deeply in love with Rachel.

Finally, after seven years, the wedding feast for Rachel was held. People gathered to celebrate. They ate and drank together. As evening came, Laban brought his daughter to Jacob. It was dark. There had been wine. And then morning came. What had happened? Jacob realised that the person lying beside him was Leah. He confronted Laban, “Why have you deceived me?” Laban’s answer was short. “It’s not our custom here to give the younger before the older.”

To Jacob, it had happened before, once. Isaac had reached out and felt his hands. They felt like Esau’s. He had his doubts. And yet he was deceived. Surely, he thought, no son would deceive his own father. But that day, the deceiver was Jacob.

Looking back, the agreement itself was strange. Once a person could be wages, one person could be substituted for another. Leah and Rachel had both become part of that transaction. And it was Laban who decided which daughter went first, which daughter would enter the tent. Not Leah, not Rachel.

Laban had deceived Jacob, and yet he is not presented as a villain. Instead, he hid behind custom. “It’s our custom here,” he said, and used it to his advantage. Even so, Jacob agreed to work another seven years for Rachel. And he did.

So what do you make of Jacob?

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells several parables: the mustard seed, the pearl, the hidden treasure. But today we focus on just two of them: the yeast and the net full of fish.

When we bake bread or cookies, we buy yeast in a small packet. It’s clean, dry, and almost like fine sand. But in Jesus’ day, it was different. People made their own leaven by fermenting old pieces of dough. It was sticky, damp, and had the sour smell of sourdough, beer, or aged cheese. Can you imagine that smell?

Now, in today’s Gospel, a woman takes this lump of leaven and mixes it into a huge amount of fresh flour. Three measures of flour were enough to make bread for around a hundred people. Perhaps Jesus wanted his listeners to imagine her baking for the whole village, or for a wedding feast. This smelly little lump disappears into the dough, yet it causes the whole batch to rise, feeding everyone gathered at God’s feast.

The kingdom of God is like that. It grows in the untidy, messy, and unfinished places of our lives. Before long, it works its way through the whole dough. That smell is the sign that something is alive and growing.

Laban’s household was that kind of place for Jacob. Day after day, he worked under the hot sun, tending the flocks, adding seven years to another seven. Yet even there, the leaven was quietly at work. Jacob did not know it, but something was already at work in his life.

We began by asking, “What do you make of Jacob?” Now Jesus gives us another image. A fishing net.

Fishermen cast their net into the sea. The net makes no distinctions. Good fish and bad fish are all caught together. Inside the net, no one is separated from anyone else.

Then the net is pulled ashore. Only then do the fishermen sit down. They gather the good fish into baskets and throw the bad away.

But Jesus does not stop there. He says that this is what it will be like at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw the wicked into the fiery furnace. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

That’s frightening, isn’t it? What kind of judgement is this? Maybe somewhere in your heart, there’s already a thought sitting there, “someone got exactly what was coming to them.” Serves them right. That’s just how it goes.

So let’s bring Jacob back into this net for a moment. Think of those years in Laban’s house as the net. Jacob, who worked for Rachel. Leah, sent into the tent first because she was the older sister. Laban, who treated his own daughters as Jacob’s wages. Which one of these is the good fish, and which is the bad?

Laban used his daughters. Yet from those daughters came the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob deceived and was deceived. Yet in the midst of that life of deceiving and being deceived, something was still growing, maturing, and rising. Leah was the unloved wife. Yet from Leah came Judah and from the line of Judah came the Christ.

This is the good news. The kingdom of God does not begin where we have already separated people. It begins where nothing has yet been sorted out. Where good and bad are still mixed together. Where the loved and the unloved are still caught in the same net. That is where God is at work. But if we cannot sort it out, if even we ourselves are still tangled in that net, then what are we to do? What would you do? … Pray, right? How do we even pray?

So, Paul speaks of the same place in Romans 8. He says that we do not know how we ought to pray. Yet in the midst of that not knowing, the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.

Jacob did not know either. He had no idea where those long years were leading him. Just as the leaven cannot be seen once it is mixed into the dough, so we often do not know how we ought to pray. And yet, the Holy Spirit intercedes.

Paul ends that chapter with these words: “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Jacob had his morning too. The morning he woke to find Leah lying beside him. On that morning, he had no idea what was already at work in his life.

Today, you have your morning too. Your own dough is still rising. And within it, what is already at work?