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| Detail of "Vision after the Sermon" by Paul Gauguin |
There has been a lot of action between last week’s reading and this week’s and that is a shame because the story is a good one. Jacob throughout his life was cunning and crafty, living by his wits. He was skilled in exploiting the weaknesses of those around him. Thus he found Esau’s weaknesses (hunger and impulsivity) and stole from him his birthright; with the help of his mother he stole the blessing that should also rightly fully have been Esau’s from his father by exploiting his father’s weakness (blindness).
He then leaves in a hurry to escape Esau’s anger—and to get a wife for himself from among his mother’s kin and ends up abiding with Laban, working for him for 14 years. Laban matches Jacob for trickery and dishonesty, substituting his elder, possibly less-marriageable daughter after making a bargain with Jacob, and then extracting another 7 years of labor from Jacob in order for him to get the daughter he loved as his wife. With each daughter, he received a maidservant, who also bore him children.
Thus he ends up with 11 sons and a daughter by the time his additional 7 years of service are completed. And in that time, Jacob has made Laban even more prosperous, with magnificent flocks and herds. Jacob and his father in law then work out a deal to give Jacob wages in kind, from among Laban’s flocks, with both of them again resorting to trickery and cheating to try to get the better end of the deal. This results in six more years of service with Laban, during which time, Jacob has eleven sons and one daughter by his two wives and by their maidservants.
Jacob prospers, despite every trick Laban can throw at him. This then causes jealous grumbling and resentment by Laban’s sons, which then spreads to Laban. Jacob and his growing family have worn out their welcome through their rivalry with Laban. So the whole family agrees with Jacob to leave without telling Laban. Laban is off conveniently shearing his sheep, and so it takes him three days to realize that Jacob and his extended family is gone. Although Laban chases Jacob down, in the end, they part with a truce declared between them.
As Jacob returns to the land of his father Isaac, Jacob realizes he will have to meet Esau, since he has to pass through Edom, Esau’s home, to return to Isaac’s lands. He sends messengers to send peaceful greetings, only to find that Esau is approaching with 400 men, Jacob rightfully panics, divides up his caravan so that hopefully some might survive if attacked, He then prays to God—the first prayer to be quoted in the Torah-- and acknowledges God’s aid in his life thus far, asking to be delivered from the hand of his brother. For his own part, he sends servants ahead to Esau with three caravans of livestock to Esau as “presents” or bribes to help ingratiate himself. Just in case this doesn’t work, Jacob also sends his wives and children across the Jabbok river, which flows into the Jordan and helps mark the boundary of Israel and spends the night alone, hoping to once again save his family by offering up himself. It is during the night that the events we have in our reading take place.
This encounter in the night with the mysterious man who wordlessly wrestles with him all night is one of the most puzzling and yet famous stories in the Torah. In Hebrew, there is wordplay here that we lose: the Hebrew verb ye’abeq mean to wrestle, and also sounds like the names of both Jacob and the river. Who is the man? Some have speculated it is Esau, or Esau’s guardian angel, or a river demon, or an angel, or God Godself, the last two of which are the most common understanding.
At the end of the night, Jacob himself has no doubt. After he has time to catch his breath, he knows has wrestled with God. And in so doing, he has also wrestled with himself. His story reminds us of this truth—that in wrestling with God, we also wrestle with ourselves, that in seeking to learn about God, we learn about ourselves and who we are as God’s children.
As his outward story has shown us, Jacob’s outstanding positive quality is tenacity—perseverance. Maybe also punching above his weight class. His outstanding negative quality is deception and double-dealing. And that has gotten him into loads of trouble—so much that twice in his life he has had to flee to escape the consequences the danger his treachery naturally has placed him in. But whoever that stranger is, they are locked in a tie throughout the night. His double-dealing against both Esau and Laban have brought him to this moment.
If you have ever studied wrestling or judo, or played any contact sport, you know that there are two forces with which to contend: the force from your opponent, and the force you yourself generate. That is why the metaphor of Jacob wrestling with God is such a illuminating metaphor for the life of faith. In our journey through faith and understanding, we struggle with our understanding of ourselves as much as we struggle with our understanding of God.
It is especially in these kinds of basic struggles within ourselves that the willingness to persevere also serves us well. In Jacob’s case, even as the wrestling match rages silently through the night, and Jacob is matched at every turn by his opponent, still he does not give up. Even when the stranger moves from Greco-Roman wrestling to a little WWE and adds in a cheap shot to Jacob’s hip, still he will not quit or surrender.
Jacob is in a liminal space—between one life and another, between one family and another, between one home and another, facing a come-uppance with the brother he mocked and wronged with his cleverness and manipulation. He’s in the middle of nowhere. He’s in the middle of the night, and suddenly, the circle completes, and the baby who has born grasping his brother’s heel is seized and confronted by an unknown person or force in the night.
Finally, the stranger demands Jacob’s name—but the question goes deeper. His name, Jacob, means “supplanter” one who unjustly takes the place of another. But WHO is Jacob, really? Is he ONLY a supplanter? Apparently God doesn’t think so. And so during this wrestling match, Jacob is going to be led to taking on a new name, a new identity. And when we are engaged in our own wrestlings with God, that is the question demanded from us as well. Who are we? What do we stand for? By our actions in the world, not by our words, but by our actions, what do we show that we believe?
Because the problem for many of us, especially in American popular Christianity today, is that we say we believe in God on Sundays, and we tie “going to church” with being all that is demanded of us. And some people conversely get the wrong idea—that we must physically be together in church to worship God. That ONLY through gathering together in person can God be found. That’s actually not at all what the scriptures say, though.
If you look in the Biblical witness, if you look at this story, God is almost NEVER found in a building, in both the Torah, those first five books of the Hebrew scriptures that we are reading from right now, as well as in the gospels. God is almost always found out where people are in their lives—on a mountain, or on a journey, or in a burning bush, or like in our gospel, out on the seashore.
God is found alongside us in the in-between places in our lives. God is found when we search for direction. God is found when we are oppressed and seeking freedom. God is found when we look deep inside ourselves for our purpose. God is found when we are hungry, like in our gospel. That doesn’t mean that organized worship isn’t important, and that the communities that gather for organized worship and liturgy aren’t important, because they ARE. We can’t turn worship of God into entertainment for ourselves. If you come to church for entertainment only, you might as well just stay home and watch wrestling.
In the end, worshiping God is just a small part of our relationship with God and our willingness to let God rule in our hearts and in our lives. Jacob emerges from his wrestling match with God with a new name, a new understanding of himself, and a new identity. This didn’t come about through worship, but through a deep struggle within himself to learn more deeply who he is, and to deal forthrightly with the places in his life where he had depended upon his own talent for trickery rather than depend upon God. Perhaps he sees that in all his double-dealings and maneuverings, he has actually made his life more chaotic than it needed to be.
Jacob symbolizes all of us in our struggles and wrestlings with God --and ourselves as we go through, in the words of Prince, this thing called life. And even though he emerges with a temporary limp from his struggle, which literally requires him to walk in a new, more vulnerable way, he also emerges with a new name, and a new understanding of himself. He is now Israel—the one who struggles and wrestles with God. Just like his grandfather, Jacob will have a new name bestowed upon him in adulthood. But more importantly, this new name will become the name for an entire nation of people. A people who will struggle with God as the core part of their identity. That is literally what the name Israel means. And taking a step back from this wrestling story for a second, think about how absolutely honest it is for a people to name themselves in this way. They—and we, since we are grafted into their family tree through Jesus—are admitting that they will struggle with God. They will struggle and wrestle with obedience and bending their will with God throughout the rest of time.
And yet there is a promise in this story. God will always engage with those of us who are honest enough and open enough to wrestle with God. God will always ask us to examine ourselves and who we are, and encourage us to lean deeper into God’s guidance. God will always meet us, especially in the in-between, uncertain times in our lives, and never let us go.
We are together as a community to support each other in our wrestling with God—and our wrestling with the world around us, a world that denies the power of God in human lives and throughout history. A God who demands that we work for justice. A God that calls us to see the needs of the world and place them above our own self-centered concerns so that all may be free and brought to an awareness of the presence of God in their own lives. As our gospel today reminds us, our wrestling with God is meant to aware of the strength and resources we have to answer the hungers and needs that surround us.
In this time of COVID-19, we as a faith community are also being called to wrestle with who we are and how we can best serve God. And it is here that Jesus, God made human flesh, shows us the way: by encouraging us to look around us, to see the hunger and need around us, and, very practically, to meet those needs. To claim our power and identity as disciples, even when our wrestling may still be ongoing.
May we all find the courage to wrestle with God, to wrestle with ourselves, as we seek to live deeper into the challenge of living in this in-between time.
Amen.
Preached at the 10:30 online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on August 2, 2020 during rising levels of COVID19 infection.
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