Sermon for October 16

Pentecost 19-C

10/16/22 St. John’s

 

Genesis 32:22-31; Luke 18:8-1

 

Jacob was trouble from the start and he came from a sketchy family. His grandfather Abraham for example passed his own wife off  to the Egyptian pharaoh as his sister, and she became part of his harem so Abraham win favor – but just one of many in Jacob’s family history. Jacob’s father, Isaac, tried to pull the same trick with his wife Rebecca, who was no angel herself. She favored Jacob over his twin brother Esau so much that she helped Jacob steal Esau’s blessing from their father.

 

Jacob and Esau had their own issues – they had fought even in Rebecca’s womb – apparently the pregnancy was a tough one – and when it came time for their birth Esau was first but Jacob came out holding on to Esau’s heel as if he was trying to climb over him to get born first. Instead he cheated Esau out of his inheritance as first born and with his mom’s help, his father’s blessing and ran away. Otherwise Esau was going to kill him.

 

So, now, in today’s reading, Jacob in the desert, he has been away for a long time, working for his uncle, cheating him too, but now he has decided to come home and face the music. And he has heard that Esau is coming for him with an army of 400 men. Jacob has tried to make peace but he is not hopeful, so and he’s sent his two wives and his eleven children and all his livestock and servants across the river to safety. Now he is alone. Night has fallen, he all alone in the darkness, literally at the bottom of a deep gorge.” Some of us may know that feeling, when all seems lost, and maybe we have ourselves to thank.

 

Then the weirdest thing happens to Jacob. The text says, “A man wrestled with him until daybreak.” A man, a specter, this angel, the spirit of the river or his own conscience. He comes to understand that it is actually God who wrestles with him in the figure of this strange man.

 

This sounds to me like one of those nighttime attacks. Where we’re supposed to be sleeping but end up struggling. Usually it starts out with a trip to the bathroom, then it’s the tossing, the turning, the thinking, the groaning. The wrestling with God. What’s going to happen tomorrow, what is God’s idea about next week, where is the church going, where is the world going?

 

It’s real, we can’t pretend it away, but yet, we can’t get dragged down by it, bogged down and depressed and stressed out.  At some point we have to find a way let it go, to wherever it came from. Let go and let God as the 12 steppers say.

 

If you can’t relate to this experience, more power to you. But I think it’s pretty common, it happens to a lot of folks..

 

Remember good old Jimmy Bakker and his ministry? Tammy, PTL Club? He was a piece of work himself – he went to jail for fraud, and some other stuff going on, his theology was a little iffy but the guy could preach. The only time I ever watched him was stuck in a strange town in the middle of the night and there he was on TV preaching to all the lonely people who were up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep; all the other people who were wrestling with their consciences or a decision they had to make or something they felt guilty about and his message was go ahead and wrestle, it’s good but then you have to let it go. You have to give it to God. “Say to God, God you’ve got a problem. I don’t have a problem. I can’t fix this. You got to. It was a great message. It was a great message. Let go.

 

After a lifetime of sin and mischief Jacob wrestled with God that night at the bottom of that dark gorge. Apparently God had a plan to use him to make him the father of a nation. But Jacob wrestled with God about it for a whole night can you imagine – not even just turning the light on for an hour and trying to read – the whole night. Neither of them could get the best of the other. With God, can you imagine. How is it that he, or any of us, is not destroyed, when we wrestle with God, when we talk back, push back to the God, but God seems to want to wrestle, God was the one who started it in the first place. Just like Jesus didn’t mind wrestling with the Pharisees and the scribes and even his own disciples.

 

Jacob and God talk while they’re wrestling, Jacob is praying. What’s your name? Jacob. Now it’s Israel. What’s yours? Let me go. I will not let you go. The wrestler puts Jacob’s hip out of joint.  Bless me and I’ll let you go.  OK, he blessed Jacob. Jacob let’s go, gives it to God. And with the new day, the man is gone. The wrestling match is done for now.

 

As the sun rises that morning Jacob away limps along the ridge in the dawn, he’s a changed man, marked by the encounter, even has a new name. And he is ready to accept what God has for him. When he meets Esau, instead of killing him, Esau embraces him. Forgives him. Loves him. Jacob has let go of his life, put it in God’s hands and God has given him a new direction. Surely, it wouldn’t be the last time he wrestles with God in the night. When he learns that his beloved son Joseph had been killed by a lion. When famine struck and he had to go begging back to Egypt for help. When he found out his other boys had lied to him and that Joseph is alive.

 

To me the miracle of this story is not so much that Jacob or any of us persist and doesn’t give up when we wrestle with God. It’s that God wants to wrestle with us God doesn’t give up on us. That no matter what we’ve done, who we’ve hurt or who our family might be, God wrestles on and won’t let us go.  And that at the end of every match with God, we limp away changed and we are made new as well. Or we may not limp, maybe we walk fine, but we are changed, and even better yet, we’ve been blessed.