Wrestling With God

Rev. Charles Lewis Genesis 32:22-32

November 12, 2006 Mark 10:36-42

Snohomish P.C.

Introduction

Usually hear in sermon what we want to hear.

Everyone is broken by the world, but we become strong in those places where we are broken. Ernest Hemingway.

You came to worship today as I do each Sunday presumably to meet God. Normally expect those encounters to be edifying, uplifting, encouraging. I think that is the case today, but you’d never be able to tell it during most of the story I’m about to read. God is not the tame, loving, welcoming, affirming, supporting God we are use to finding, but a tough opponent in today’s wrestling match between Jacob and a stranger, who turns out to be his Lord.

Sermon

 Tomorrow wrestling season begins at Snohomish High School and other nearby schools. It marks the season with the longest days for our son, Andrew, and every kid who turns out for the team. Three grueling hours a day after school, the wrestlers will be hitting the mats, with push ups, sit ups, stomach crunches, practicing wrestling moves, running in place, bodies sweating, muscles straining, an exhausting sight. I played basketball just to avoid all the pain the wrestlers went through. Everyone knows they are the ones who had to work far harder than any other sport. “No pain, no gain” was the old wrestling slogan at my high school. And it is true. I have come to the conclusion that wrestling is like life. (No pain, no gain) Just look at the five ways you can score points in a match:

--- You get two points for a Takedown, by taking your opponent down to the mat and controlling him.

---You get one point for Escape --- managing to get away or getting into a neutral position when your opponent has you on the mat.

---You score two points (I think it should be three!) for Reversal --- that is, coming from underneath and gaining control of your opponent.

---In what is known as a Near Fall, two or three points are yours when you almost get your opponent pinned.

---Finally, there are the penalty points you get for your opponents' mistakes, like when he gets you in an illegal hold, is guilty of unnecessary roughness, leaves the mat without permission, or my favorite --- stalling --- which is defined as "failing to make a reasonable effort to wrestle aggressively."

In life, we seek to control others, or conversely, try to get out of situations in which others control us. Sometimes we manage to overcome odds and come from behind and gain control. And sometimes we get over, not through any particular skill on our part, but because we are victimized by others. And in the course of life's wrestling match, we are all guilty of stalling at one time or another. But we call it inaction. hesitation, procrastination or fence-sitting. And interestingly enough, wrestling rules not only
state that the offensive player is penalized for not trying to pin his opponent, but that the defensive player is penalized for not trying to escape --- for just lying there. (“No pain, no gain” was the old wrestling slogan at my high school. And it is true.)

But the difference between wrestling on a mat and wrestling in life is that in the former, there is a clear, identifiable opponent ---- the other guy in a singlet. In life, it's not always so obvious. We wrestle with our faith. We wrestle with decisions we have made or are trying to make. At this time of year, as we consider what constitutes good stewardship, we wrestle with what we will tithe to the church in terms of our skills, our finances, our free time. We wrestle with our uncertainties and doubts, our questions, and our sense of direction. We wrestle daily, in other words, with God.

The reason the Bible is the all-time best-seller is that we see ourselves in its pages, like in today’s story of Jacob, who engaged in what might be called the Quintessential Wrestling Match.

Jacob's grappling began, as you remember from last week’s story, long before the incident on the banks of the Jabbok River. Jacob was born a wrestler, emerging from the womb grabbing at the heel of his older twin brother, Esau. He’d been grappling with Esau ever since.

Twice Jacob cheats his lame-brained twin brother Esau out of what was coming to him. First he swindled him out of his birthrite for a mess of stew, then he conned him out of his father’s blessing, taking advantage of his elderly father to boot. When he high-tailed it out of town to beat Esau’s wrath, after ripping him off the second time, he camped out for the night and rather than falling to sleep with a guilty conscious tormenting him, he fell asleep like a baby in a cradle and dreamed a dream that had first come to his grandfather Abraham, about his descendents becoming a great nation and as countless as the stars in the sky. So rather than the dream bringing him down to earth, it lifted him to heaven, which is what he came to learn to expect. In the next twenty years living far enough outside Esau’s reach, he managed to out-do his double crossing father in law, Laban, conning him out of most of his livestock and sneaking off with both his daughters and a cart full of possessions when Laban was looking the other way. Jacob wasn’t satisfied with a birthrite and blessing. As FB says, “he wanted the moon, and if he could managed to bilk heaven out of it, he would have been back the next morning for the stars to go with it.” He would get stars too, twelve of them, twelve children each who would head one of the twelve tribes of Israel from which countless descendents would come.

But all his con jobs and duplicity was about to catch up with him. After twenty years on the run, his flight from Esau – and from his own self-deceit – was about to come to an end. It came as he was returning home again, home to face the music of what he’d done – the people in his won family he’d run over like Esau, Isaac, and Laban - that had kept him running away. The day of reckoning had come. The running would stop. Wrestling match with a stranger…

On Jacob’s behalf, he was willing to struggle. Ready to settle his matters. Jacob and God locked into a powerful struggle.

Who has not wrestled with God? “Make sense of this cancer that doesn’t seem fair?” we ask. How can you be good and allow the suffering right now in Darfur, in Congo, in Iraq?” Why didn’t you create a world where their would not be this extreme pain?” we beg. There are just so few answers sometimes, we blurt out in frustration and anger. Sometimes the struggle gets more harsh. Deciding God can be bested, some choose to deny God, trying to show God a thing or two by coming to their creed of atheism out of a fight against the Creator.

Jacob finally gets a blessing from God , but it costs him – a broken hip and a name change, his identity and his stature. Jacob walks away from the struggle, but not without a limp, all blessings seeing to come with being wounded. Maybe the greatest blessing of all not being the land or the descendents, but the blessing of recognizing that he was a broken man, a wounded soul, not a self-sufficient victor in life, but a man with a limp who needed God.

At sunrise, at the very point when Jacob should have been most tired, Jacob was changed. Isn’t that when change is most possible – when we realize our own woundedness, brokenness, weakness. Where does that happen for us – in a hospital room, at the grave side? In a closest of depression? When screaming questions have left our voices silent and our throats hoarse? Just when Jacob had given up, he got up . No longer was he on his own. No longer would he continue deceiving others because his own self-deception of a self-made man had been pinned to the mat at Jabbock.

But the intrigue of this dysfunctional family doesn't end there. Near the end of the life of their father Isaac, the blind patriarch sends his firstborn and favorite son off to bring him a dish of venison. Rebecca overhears the conversation, prepares the delicacy herself, and tells Jacob (her favorite) to go in to get his father's blessing. But Jacob told his mother that this would be problematic. He tells his mother, "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man." [Gen. 27:11] He knows that Isaac, although
blind, could nevertheless feel, and when he touched Jacob, he would know that something was up. So Jacob covers himself with animal skins, so that his father would believe him to be the more hirsute Esau. Thus the younger Jacob, thanks some maternal intervention, tricks his brother out of both his birthright and his father's blessing (a blessing which he had actually forfeited in the first place). Anyhow, Esau becomes "exceeding wroth," and vows to kill his brother Jacob. Rebecca, afraid for Jacob's life, calls her favorite son to him, and says, "Listen, I have called your uncle Laban. Go to his farm and stay there until Esau cools off." So Jacob is packed off to his uncle's place. And you thought the soap opera plots were complicated?

So today's episode opens as Jacob is returning home. He's been on the lam for twenty years, and is at long last returning to face the music. He has all the outward and visible signs of success. He has assembled a small fortune. He has wives and children and livestock. To butter up his brother, who, he learns, has come to meet him with four hundred men, he sends gifts --- male and female goats, ewes and rams, even camels. Finally, after shipping the menagerie, he sends his own family and his personal
possessions. And it is there, at the river's edge, stripped of his possessions, bereft of his family, as Jacob breaks into a chorus of "Just as I am without one plea," that a mysterious visitor enters the picture.

The wrestling match begins, and Jacob's opponent could well have been penalized for stalling. Jacob is wrestling with God, who could have pinned Jacob down in an instant. But God does not apply more pressure than Jacob could bear. The sweaty all-night battle and the injury inflicted are parts of Jacob's penance. For Jacob, despite his apparent prosperity, is wallowing in guilt and self-pity. He had everything he could possibly want, except a clear conscience. And now on the eve of his reunion with
his brother Esau, he knew that he was not the masterful person he had convinced himself that he was; now that he would have to face people who knew him "when," he had to come to grips with the fact that he was a liar and a coward. In this wrestling match, he didn't want to pin down his opponent; he didn't even want his opponent to be penalized. He just wanted a blessing, ironic, considering that he was guilty of depriving
his brother of one. Jacob received his blessing.

When he met his brother the next day, Esau had buried the hatchet, and gave Jacob a warm embrace. Jacob said to Esau: "For to see your face is like seeing the
face of God, now that you have received me favorably" [Gen. 33:10]. Jacob received a new name. He became Israel, and was able to pass that blessing onto his twelve sons, who founded the twelve tribes of Israel.

But what about Jacob's limp? It was, in medical terms, caused by a neurological injury to his sciatic nerve, combined with some musculoskeletal damage to his hip. He probably sustained a neurapraxia of the sciatic nerve, which resulted in a limping gait. Jacob, it could be said, was almost literally knocked down a peg, and unfortunately, hip replacement surgery was not an option. Jacob would forever walk with a limp as a constant reminder that the days that he stood tall were days of self-deception. But Jacob as a lame man was actually an improved version of the physically whole Jacob. Despite evidence today that some people in high places find it impossible to admit having made mistakes, most great personages believe that a humbling experience improved their character. The zealous Saul was struck blind and thrown from his horse before he became Paul the apostle. The brash and impetuous Peter wept bitterly at his betrayal
of Jesus before he could be a worthy disciple.

It is the phenomenon addressed by the theologian Henri Nouwen in his famous book, The Wounded Healer. In a perfect world, the United States would have
been knocked down a peg, become limp on 9/11, the day we learned of our vulnerability in no uncertain terms.

Walter Brueggemann, in commenting on this story, says that this same theology of weakness in power and power in weakness turns this text toward the New Testament and the gospel of the cross. In Jesus' encounter with two of his disciples, [Mark 10:35-37] you will remember, they express a desire to sit at Jesus' right hand and at his left (in another version of the story [Matt. 20:21-22] it is their pushy mother who intercedes on their behalf). But Jesus counters by telling them that they must pick up a cross.
Like Jacob, they are invited to be persons of faith who prevail, but to do so with a limp."

Perhaps you will remember a scene from The Lion in Winter. Katharine Hepburn, as Eleanor of Aquitaine, stands overlooking a bluff. She awaits, if I remember correctly, the barge that will take her to the Tower for her execution. Her husband, Henry II (Peter O'Toole) is wracked with syphilis. One son has died in the war, another is totally debauched, and he and his two surviving brothers, are fighting to succeed their
father, and will stop at nothing. Miss Hepburn's comment is: Every family has its ups and downs." We all do indeed have our ups and downs, but God uses us, limps, warts, shortcomings and all. He takes us, whom somehow he sees as "treasures in earthen vessels" (II Cor. 4:7) and uses us, works through us, to build up his Kingdom.

Let us pray:

O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.
Gilbert Chesterton, The Hymnal 1940, 591