Genesis 32:22-32
The same night he arose and took
his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the
ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and
likewise everything that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man
wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that
he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh;
and Jacob's thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he
said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said,
"I will not let you go, unless you bless me." And he said to
him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then
he said, "Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but
Israel
,
for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed."
Then Jacob asked him, "Tell me, I pray, your name." But he
said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed
him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peni'el, saying, "For I
have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun
rose upon him as he passed Penu'el, limping because of his thigh.
Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip
which is upon the hollow of the thigh, because he touched the hollow of
Jacob's thigh on the sinew of the hip.
Sermon
THE
LIFELONG WRESTLING MATCH
At the memorial service for Tim O’Connor-Slater last Wednesday,
there were three different categories of people who were in attendance.
The first category was those who loved him, whom he loved; and
his loved ones were grief stricken; his family members, his dear
friends, his church members who connected with him through important
events in their lives, a calling to the ministry; all of these people
were there to grieve as people do when they gather at the time of a
death at a worship service. That
was one group.
Another group was people who knew him and respected him and were
familiar with him from having worked together with him for a long time.
Those people were feeling a different order of feeling, an
appropriate type of thing to feel, but different.
They were feeling the kind of shock that takes place when someone
familiar is unexpectedly taken from your life.
And you think very fondly of jokes you shared together and
experiences you shared together and you would like to have continued so
you have the feeling of regret and sadness, but not quite the sharp
grief that others were feeling.
And then there was a third category, actually a very small
category, I’m not sure if I was perhaps the only one who was in this
category. I doubt that,
because I’m familiar with the way a memorial service is organized and
that there are certain people who are there because of their office or
because of their position. So
I don’t think I’m the only one, but I did realize that most people
who were there knew Tim well and were grieving or were saddened.
I didn’t know Tim. I
had one phone conversation with him, and apparently our paths crossed
years and years ago when we attended the same seminary but it was not in
a way that gave us a long-lasting relationship with each other.
So, I regret that I didn’t know him.
I always thought that we would get to know each other in the
months and years ahead. So,
his death meant that would not happen now.
But there I was still in that third category and I was attending
because I needed to. I
needed to be a ministerial colleague in the conference.
That’s what United Methodist ministers do, we have a sibling
relationship; we’re brothers and sisters together.
In a sense the annual conference of ministers, that’s our
congregation, the one we belong to.
Technically speaking, that’s true; a minister is not a member
of the local church. His
family might be, but the minister himself, or herself, is not a member.
And my family joined whether that’s officially been entered in
the book or not, the reality is that.
And I am a member of this conference, those are my brothers and
sisters and so it was right that I would be there.
But then also, I was there for your sake, because, to the extent
that I did know Tim, and through the fact that I’ve inherited a
wonderful congregation from him, and also on ongoing work that he was
doing in your midst. I have
all kinds of papers in my file with his handwritten notes on them; and I
have all kinds of records indicating what his plans were and how he was
guiding the church and interacting with you in that process for the
years that you had each other. So
in all those ways, I have that tie with Tim because we share a tie with
you. And I was there to
express my support for the
Borodino
church.
Because I was there with less of an emotional engagement, because
I was not hurting and grieving as most people there were, I was able to
receive the elements of the worship service in a way that allowed me to
engage with them unimpeded by grief.
And the one that I want to talk about now is the final hymn that
we sang: Come O Thou Traveler
Unknown. That perhaps is my very favorite hymn.
It was written by Charles Wesley back in the 1700’s.
It’s a hymn that made his brother break down and grieve; John
Wesley wept openly the first time he sang that hymn after his
brother’s death. It’s
also a hymn that expresses something and touches me very deeply, and has
since childhood. “With
thee all night I mean to stay, and wrestle till the break of day.”
That line in the hymn is something that has moved me since before
I understood what it was about it that did move me.
I remember the hymn from early childhood because my family sang
hymns at home and this is one that I learned when I was young.
So to have this hymn sung at the service for Tim was a meaningful
moment for me, making it a connection with his life because, apparently,
this was a meaningful hymn for Tim as well.
Apparently, because of his Scottish/Celtic interest and that’s
my background too.
And the hymn was written by Charles Wesley who not only was a
Methodist leader but also a poet.
He was not in the first rank of English poets in the 1700’s,
but he was definitely in the second rank. He was like the “B Team”. He
was in a skilled and talented group of people.
He wrote only spiritual poetry; some satires, but mostly poetry
used for hymns. And this
poem was very much admired by his contemporaries, Christian and
non-Christian; people who loved his work.
Isaac Watts who wrote many powerful hymns that people recognize
and admire to this very day. Isaac
Watts said that he would give up all the other hymns if he could have
written that one. Its title
was Wrestling Jacob; that’s the story of Jacob: wrestling by
the fjord of the river all night long; and not letting go of his unseen
opponent until he finally gave him a blessing.
That moment was in some sense God.
The scripture says “a man” and yet this is a man who knows
Jacob, and could give him a name and give him a blessing. And when Jacob
asked him his name, he said “Why do you ask my name?”
So clearly even though the scripture begins the story by telling
us he was wrestling with a man; it is actually God, in some sort of
human form, wrestling with Jacob.
That title of the hymn that caption that should be over this
story in the Old Testament, the story in Genesis about Jacob wrestling.
And the wrestling in the story of course, was a physical act, but
an act of very spiritual significance and it relates to the story of
Jacob himself. Jacob was the
younger brother, a twin, but the younger one.
His older brother Esau was supposed to receive the blessing and
the birthright. The
birthright was the family inheritance, the blessing was the special
promise that God had made to his grandfather, Abraham.
Esau was supposed to receive that. But Jacob, conspiring with his
mother, arranged to have the blessing come his way, instead of Esau’s
way. They deceived Isaac
into thinking he was Esau, but really he was blessing Jacob.
And when Esau found out what Jacob had done, Esau was furious.
And Jacob’s life was in danger.
So, Jacob fled to another country, to the country of his mother,
to the country where all his ancestors had originally come from.
On the way, Jacob got a revelation in which he saw a ladder going
up to heaven; an angel going up and down on the ladder.
And he realized the Lord was in this place.
That he consecrated that place as a holy place; and God promised
him in that vision, in that dream, God promised him many, many
descendants; and much greatness about his people to come after him.
So God affirmed for Jacob, that the blessing that had mistakenly
come his way was actually the blessing that he was meant to have.
So Jacob seemed to be getting away from the odd egos of that far
country having received that confirmation of his blessing from God.
And there, over the course of twenty long years, he gets cheated
multiple times by his uncle. He
finally, with God’s help, is able to emerge with a large family –
many children, two wives – and a large number of domestic animals:
sheep and goats are what people lived on in that culture.
And so he emerged from that country and went on his way back home
a rich man. But his reason
for going home was, what was going on in his mind at the moment when he
wrestled all night long, he was going home because God had told him to
go home. God said you’re
never going to achieve your destiny unless you go back home.
And so Jacob left with all his belongings.
It took a lot of arguing to get away from Laban, his
father-in-law; but eventually he got out of Laban’s country.
But what was going on in the back of his mind was: What is Esau
going to do? When he left
Esau twenty years earlier, Esau, his cheated brother, was ready to kill
him. What was going to
happen now if he went back to his home country? Was Esau going to still
have the same rage, and desire for revenge, and thirst for righting the
wrong that Jacob had did him so long before?
And there by the fjord of the Jabbok, when his advance parties
told him that Esau was approaching with a few hundred men, and he knew
that this might be his last night on earth, not knowing how Esau was
going to receive him. Those
were the circumstances in which he wrestled.
So, he wrestled all night. He
asked again for a blessing, the blessing again was given, even though it
had already been given by the deceived father, had already been
confirmed by God in his dream. Now,
for a third time, he asked for a blessing.
And a third time the blessing was given; but it was given with a
limb out of joint and a limp that would stay with him for the rest of
his life. And the next day
he rose and he crossed the river and walked forward to meet his brother
Esau. And there, the two
embraced. Esau had forgiven
him; Esau was ready to receive Jacob back into his home country, and
allow Jacob and his family to live there.
That was the story up to and including this wrestling match.
Clearly the wrestling match had something to do with whether the
blessing was legitimate and how to make it legitimate.
It had something to do with whether Jacob’s life was authentic
or whether Jacob’s life was a mass of deception, woven webs of tangled
intentions; whether Jacob’s life was going to emerge, in some sense,
whole, out of his process of wrestling with God.
That is apparently what was at stake in this moment of this
story; wrestling with God, wrestling all night with God.
Seeking to reconcile all those contradictions and compromises,
all those difficulties, all those things he’d done to other people,
all things other people had done to him, seeking to make some kind of
beauty and some kind of order, some kind of peace out of all that.
That was the all night wrestling match.
We, too, speak of wrestling with God.
We, too, speak of wrestling with God as a fact of our lives.
I think sometimes we use that as kind of a cliché form, where
we’re saying that we’re wrestling with God as a way of making it
sound good, when what we’re really doing is neglecting God or making
God a low priority on our list. When
we feel guilty about that we say “oh, we’re wrestling with God.”
We have questions and doubts because we’re wrestling with God.
Well, many times, we don’t seriously engage those doubts, so
what we’re really doing is not wrestling.
But I think most of us have had those moments in our lives when
we’ve had to wrestle, really; and I know that caught in the midst of
all those other moments when I’ve been deceiving myself, saying that
it was a wrestling match, there have been some moments when I was in a
wrestling match. And as I
look at those wrestling matches, I sometimes look back at them and
think, I wasn’t really wrestling because my life isn’t much changed
from the way it was before.
That’s what I want to focus on right now.
The part of the story I want to unfold for you, for all of us,
right now. Whether it really
is a wrestling match or not, if we come out of it and discover our life
hasn’t been completely turned around.
Jacob’s life wasn’t completely turned around.
In a sense, he already had the blessing; in a sense, it was
already going to come to him. And
maybe Esau would have received him with friendship even if he hadn’t
wrestled with God that night. And
Jacob had not been all bad before. And
Jacob was not all good after. So
in sense, this wrestling match which is such a vivid story in the Bible
is not like a conversion story where you can say from that point on,
Jacob was a different man. Not
necessarily, at least not completely different.
The old man was still present, even though the new man had a
different understanding. And
there would be further wrestling matches for Jacob, I think.
So, if Jacob’s wrestling match is the model that I’m talking
about for all of us, maybe I should be more accepting of my moments, and
thinking they are real, even if they don’t make my life totally
different from what it was before. What
I want is to have a turning point in my relationship with God.
I’m always seeking some moment in which there’ll be a
breakthrough, in which I’m no longer living a sort of linear life of
alternating between compromising and being bored and being unhappy and
then suddenly having a moment of exultation so I’m feeling okay again
and that gets me back on track. That’s
the kind of way my life is going, it’s a chronological life, it’s a
linear life, it’s a life that doesn’t move upward; I’d like to
move upward in my relationship with God.
But maybe the point I should get out of the story is that the
wrestling match itself doesn’t produce those complete changes.
It’s not a turning point, but a returning point.
It’s a lifelong wrestling match with many returning points; we
come back to it again and again and again.
But as we do, we are living out our years; as we do, we are
spending the time we are allotted here on earth; as we do, we are moving
toward whatever our eternal destiny, (which will be totally different,
but also I believe totally joyful) is going to be.
And as we keep on returning to this returning point, we are going
to find ourselves moving in the direction that God wants us to move.
Charles Wesley wrote the wrestling match as if it were a contest
between the sinner and God; specifically God and Jesus Christ.
He said – I need not tell you who I am, you already know.
Look at your hand and you can see who I am.
But, who are you? That’s
what the sinner says. Later
on he says – Tell me, is your name Love?
And then that final verse, when he realizes – Yes, the love
that died for me is the love that’s wrestling with me right here and
right now.
My friends, I think we do have wrestling matches; and we should
not be writing them off because they weren’t authentic enough, they
didn’t change our lives enough. We
have a lifelong schedule of wrestling matches ahead of us; and in that
we are returning again and again and again to the struggle with God that
marks the difficulty of human life on earth.
But that struggle with God is the struggle with the one that is
Love. And not just the bunny
rabbits and flowers love, but the love that stretched out his arms on
the wooden cross and died. That’s
the one with whom we wrestle now. His
hands bear the marks of our identity.
But the wrestling match we do with him, which might even cripple
us in terms of this world; that wrestling match that we return to with
him our whole life long, is the way in which we move to the point where
he wants us to be - when finally all is love, love is all and we are in
the midst of it, rejoicing. Amen.
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