July 31, 2005
Houston, TX
Theme: To wrestle with God is to wrestle with each other. To wrestle with
each other is to wrestle with God.
This past fall Sylvia and I led a small workshop on how to continue
becoming a healthier congregation, something that I think is an
intentional and difficult work for every congregation, including every one I
have ever served as a pastor or have ever been involved in as a
congregant. One of the pieces of advice someone like Peter Steinke
and other thinkers like him who specialize in church dynamics and
systems give is that we ought to only say the stuff about folks that we
would say directly to them if they were in the same room with us. Now, I
don’t know a lot of people, including myself, that follow that advice much,
but its still good advice, but I’m going to go ahead and break that rule
right now. Claire Carson, our summer SALT worker, is teaching the
children right now in the children’s’ room, for the last time, at least for this
summer, and I want to talk about her behind her back, just to share with
you what a great gift she has been for those of us who have worked with
her this summer—I think I can speak for La Verne, Sylvia, and Tracy in
saying that she has contributed a lot to this church these past few
months, including helping to pull off a creative Vacation Bible School as
well as helping me to plan the fall Children’s Sunday School program. I
know I couldn’t have remained sane this summer without her presence
and her help with the Christian Education programs, so she is much
appreciated and will be greatly missed, as she goes back to Sweet Briar
College to begin her second year of school.
But more than what she contributed to the programming of our church,
what I really appreciate about Claire is what she brought to me in terms
of seeing ourselves, the church, with her fresh, particular set of eyes. Or
maybe I should say, in seeing the church through her eyes, it reminded
me of what a human place this, with all the humanity of it, the fragileness,
the politics of this place, as she said in her note of farewell to us in the
bulletin. I was a little surprised to see in print something we had talked
about a few times, to see her name her surprise about how complex this
place is, as complex as any place or group she has ever experienced.
We expect more from church, don’t we? We always do, don’t we? And I
know a few cynics in the room will say they don’t expect that the church
to be less full of political and human intrigue as say, their work office, but
still…the office doesn’t claim to be a place where the practice of love is
the work at hand—the goal of the office to deliver profits, or deliver
services; I mean, not even non-profits claims to deliver love, just much-
needed services to help with a human need! Some of you have heard
me say this before, but the last thing I used to tell folks in the
membership classes I conducted was that the place they were about to
join was going to break their hearts—count on it. Of course, it wasn’t
particular to that church—it was particular to the church down the street,
and the one across town, and one on the other side of the world—every
church is like that, every church breaks the hearts of its members and I
have few, if any, that are better than the rest. Too much is claimed, too
much is called for from this pulpit, and every pulpit in Christendom, for
every church not to fail its own words, for the church not to fail its own
call to its members to do the work of love, and to not turn this sacred
place into yet another office with all of the politics that accompany it. To
see the human struggle in this church, or any church, and every church,
its almost always a disappointment—such a failure, it seems, on our part,
to live out what we preach and say, what we hope to live out and model
in our quest to follow the way of this Jesus of Nazareth.
And yet this human struggle, this wrestling with each other, to take a
queue from our text today, I’m not sure we should be all that
disappointed with it or even ourselves for that matter. And I think some
of the reason why we ought to give ourselves a break on this matter, this
disappointment in the humanity of this place and every place that is the
church, is rooted in the story we just heard a few moments ago. In a
second, I’ll share the reason why I think there is some wisdom from this
ancient, mysterious, even beguiling little text, which might help us wrap
our minds around the reality that Claire saw this summer, in her working
in her home church for a summer. I want to look at the story for a
second to remind ourselves of where we are in the story, in the divine
soap opera that David Lewallen shared with us last week. If you
remember, Esau has had his rightful blessing from his father stolen by
his brother Esau, and the rift in the family, not surprisingly, has been
deep and now long in years. Jacob, in an attempt to mend the rift, sends
Esau gifts and treasures, hoping, I think, to ease the reconciliation with a
little bit of cash, so to speak. In response, Jacob hears only that Esau is
coming towards him with 400 men—he doesn’t know whether or not
these men are to be a welcoming party or whether they are there to
exact Esau’s revenge upon Jacob. All Jacob knows is that a small army
of men are coming towards him and the intentions of these men are
unclear to him—he does not know what they want from him or what they
will do to him.
And then this moment happens: alone, in the desert, a man appears
before Jacob, and he and this stranger begin a night of wrestling, a night
of struggling with each other. Out of nowhere, comes this one whose
name we do not know, who purpose is never given, whose strength is
more than human, but still very human. The painting on the front of your
bulletin today captures some of this struggle, though the faces of Jacob
and the man are more serene than you would expect in a wrestling
match, and like many painters and commentators, the man Jacob is
wresting with is given wings, as if he were an angel, though the text
never actually says that Jacob is wrestling with an angelic being. I think
these sorts of additions to the text are understandable—what does one
do with this kind of text, really, this story of a mysterious man who begins
a wrestling match with Jacob in the desert, and who, at the end of that
same texts, is named as none other than God? All we know is that this
Stranger is the ultimate Stranger, the divine one given flesh and blood
for the moment, and for purpose of, seemingly, simply wrestling with
Jacob. And so many unanswered questions—why must the man leave
before daybreak? If he is a divine being, an angel, or even God, why
cannot he seem to beat Jacob, or even disentangle himself from Jacob’s
grasp? And why is a blessing demanded by Jacob from this man, and
why does he demand the name of this stranger, and yet why does this
man never give his name, and, instead, actually re-names Jacob as
Israel—instead of giving his own name, he gives Jacob a new name?
All of these questions have been the topic of centuries of discussion by
Jewish and Christian commentators of this text, and there all sorts of
explanations, and attempts to explain—the power and importance of
names in ancient cultures, and even our own experience of intimacy
when names are shared; and maybe the attempt by the stranger to
wrestle free of Jacob before daybreak has to do with the idea of the face
of God being like the morning sun, and if we were to ever look fully into
that divine face, we humans we would be destroyed by it (think of the
story of Moses seeing God, but God not allowing God’s own face to be
seen, Moses only sees God’s backside). And there are some
explanations of sorts in the text itself—the reason why a particular place
in Israel is named what it is name; why certain things are not eaten, and
even why a nation will be called what it is called.
You could preach a dozen sermons on this text and still come up with a
different take on it each and every time, but David’s sermon of last week
really set into motion a question I had not really explored in preaching on
this text twice before today, and that is the question of “why now,” why
this moment arises in the text, right after Esau has sent gifts of
reconciliation to his brother, and yet right before the moment he finds out
whether or not his estranged brother is coming with 400 men to greet
him or to murder him. Of all places in the biblical narrative, in God’s
soap opera, in the story of God’s engagement with Israel and eventually
all humanity, why does this moment happens between these two markers
in the narrative—Jacob attempts to reach out, to reconcile himself with
his brother and the deceit that has ripped his family apart, and the other
marker—the moment when it will be revealed whether or not Esau exacts
his revenge on Jacob for robbing him of his birthright, or whether or not
Esau will greet him with joy and tears. Between the Esau coming towards
him and the moment when Jacob finds out WHY Esau is coming towards
him, stands this story of a night when Jacob wrestles with a stranger in
the desert, a stranger the text names as his Creator.
I can’t keep from thinking that unlocking some of the meaning of the text
is right there in the context of the greater story, the larger narrative, of
where this night is placed within the story. Jacob and Esau have been
wrestling with each other their whole lives, in all the drama of that family,
the politics of who will be first, who will get the most, and the culmination
of a lifetime of wrestling with each other is about to find itself in a moment
when Esau and Jacob will meet with each other for the first time in years
at daybreak, at place that has just been now re-named Penuel, a name
that the text says means “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my
life is preserved.” The night before Esau and Jacob finish their life-long
wrestling match, and we find out who the winner will be, if there is to be a
winner at all, we have this moment: Jacob wrestles with yet another, with
the stranger who is God. Of course, out of this night of struggle with
God, we find out that there is no real winner, no real revelations from
God, not even the name of this stranger, only a blessings by the One
who has gotten away from Jacob’s grasp, from the One who has finally
wrestled himself free from Jacob. I can’t help but think that this wrestling
match between Jacob and God, right before the completion of Jacob and
Esau’s lifelong wrestling match, is a sign to us of what our work in this
world is, this wrestling with each other, this struggle to find common
ground, to find reconciliation with each other in the midst of this
community, and every community of Christian faith. I mean, if God
chooses to wrestle with Jacob, and thus I think, wrestles with us, because
who can’t identify with Jacob here, who has not wrestle with God in their
own lives—if God chooses to wrestle with Jacob, with us, why does it
surprise us and maybe even disturb us when we so obviously wrestle
with each other with the same kind of passion that God would choose to
wrestle with us? If it’s good enough for God, if God wrestles with each of
us, and we, in turn, wrestle with God, we struggle with God in our own
deserts in life, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised that we humans
wrestle with each other with same passion that God has chosen to
wrestle with us.
I wonder about this as well: the divine wrestling match between Jacob
and God comes before the completion of the one between Jacob and
Esau—I just wonder if it is not a sign to us that to wrestle with each other,
to struggle with each other, in all of our humanity and politics and
sometimes stupidity, I wonder if our wrestling with each other is not also
our own wrestling with God. I mean, after all, the way God wrestles with
Jacob is as a man, a human being, not some spirit, not some ethereal,
bodiless being, but as a man, flesh and blood, something Jacob was
familiar struggling with, something he was familiar wrestling with his whole
life. Maybe the choice in the story to have God wrestle as a being that
was all too familiar, maybe that choice was the narrator trying to tell us
something. Maybe to wrestle with each other is to wrestle with God.
And maybe to wrestle with God is to wrestle with each other. Maybe to
struggle with each other, with our humanity, the joy and certainly
heartbreak of a place and a people, maybe that struggle is our struggle
with God. And the struggle with each other leads to the possibility of
daybreak, that which greets Jacob on the other side of that difficult night
of struggling with God, of walking out of that desert, wounded, but now
blessed, now given good in the midst of what seemed like an endless,
endless night. I think it is what Esau says to Jacob, in what becomes a
moment of reconciliation, not revenge, when they greet each other at
daybreak—“Let us journey on our way, and I will go alongside you.”
Or maybe all of this is me justifying the humanity of the church, the petty
human politics of this place and every other place that gathers together
the followers of this Jesus of Nazareth, to someone like Claire, who now
sees her own community of faith for what it is, as human as any other
place. Still, I can’t keep thinking that it’s the humanity of the place that
will save us, the wrestling with each other that will make all the difference
in our relationship with God, and with each other. Maybe the difference
between the church and, let’s say, the Kiwanis Club is that the church
knows that the whole point of it all is the wrestling itself, with each other,
and with God. To wrestle with God and to wrestle with each other, which
are probably the one and the same moment, and to hope that the
daybreak brings with it reconciliation, maybe that is the point of it all, why
the church exists. Jacob, with his broken hip and his new name, facing
Esau across the long desert, the sun beginning to dissolve what seemed
like an endless night, the possibility of that moment, the results of the
struggle with each other, and with God, maybe that is why we are
gathered here, doing the work of living of our lives together as a people
of faith. It is what I would offer Claire, if she were in the room, and if I
wasn’t breaking that rule I mentioned earlier, if I wasn’t failing my own
words at this moment. Amen and amen.
