(Preached on Sunday, October 17, 2010)
But Jacob stayed behind by himself, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. -Genesis 32:24
After twenty years in exile, spent living with his mother’s brother, Jacob was returning home. He had hastily fled because his brother wanted to kill him, having been cheated out of his rightful inheritance by his younger brother. How would he be received now? Had twenty years mellowed Esau? Would he let bygones be bygones? Or would he rip his heart out and slaughter his wives and children?
Despite the difficult years filled with deceit and hard work and one scam after another; some perpetrated on him and some by him, Jacob had prospered. But he had grown homesick and he longed to return. No longer a scared, scheming teen, he was now returning as a prosperous tribal chief, with two wives, two maids, eleven sons, a host of servants, and large sturdy flocks of animals.
Even so, this was the most dangerous mission of his life. He must meet his brother Esau, whom he had deeply wronged, and he had no idea how he would be received. Never one to leave things to chance, Jacob developed a plan. He was a careful, prudent man. In his fearfulness, he plans and manages to prepare himself for this dangerous meeting. He uses all his guile and cunning to put himself in the most advantageous position he can. He sends a series of messengers with a series of gifts to make a good appearance. He is utterly preoccupied and consumed with this meeting. He does everything in his power to prepare himself, his family, even Esau, for their reunion in an attempt to keep it under control.
We do that all the time, don’t we? We strive to maintain control in our lives. We work extremely hard to micro-manage crisis situations. We seek to manipulate meetings and other people so that the outcome is favorable to us. But the truth is: control in our lives is only an illusion. Life is something to be experienced, not controlled. People are meant to be related to, not manipulated.
All life is actually out of our control, and try as we might to orchestrate it in the daytime, eventually each of us comes to that moment in the night, with its fatigue, exhaustion, and tremendous restlessness, when we are confronted with this truth. Those moments always come. It might be sitting outside an intensive care unit in the middle of the night. It might be sitting beside the bed of a loved one, listening to them as they slowly take their last breath. It might be when you realize you just can’t meet all the expectations: your boss at work, your spouse at home, your children, your best friends, your parents, your in-laws, it is all just too much and your running so fast your feet never touch the ground, how can you do it all?!? That is where Jacob is in this story. He has done all he can to prepare for meeting his brother the next day. He has one more thing to do, which is prepare himself, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. He must do that alone, so he sends his family across the river. He remains on the near side, listening to the raging waters, reflecting on his life, on himself, on his actions.
There on the other side of the river, by himself late at night, Jacob wrestles with God. Oh, I know the text says he wrestled with a man, but it also says that by the end of the night Jacob realizes that his actual struggle has been with God. He names the place “peniel” which is Hebrew for “the face of God.” He marked the place as the location he had a face-to-face encounter with God, and survived! It doesn’t really matter who the unknown assailant actually was. Some say an angel; some a demon; some suggest it was his brother Esau. Perhaps it was actually Jacob himself. In the end Jacob realized that his ultimate struggle was with God.
That is the struggle of faith. It is the ultimate struggle for each and every one of us. It is the struggle over whether we are going to trust God with our lives or not; whether we are going to keep grasping for control of the uncontrollable situation of life in which we find ourselves, or whether we are going to let go, relax into God’s loving embrace, and trust God to bear us up.
This is the way Jesus scholar Marcus Borg describes faith. He says it is much more than just believing the correct things in our head. As he says, “you can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.”
Instead, Borg speaks of faith as having to do with relationship. With giving your heart and your trust, your radical trust, to God. He draws on the work of Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, who says that “faith as trust is like floating on a deep ocean. Faith is like floating in seventy thousand fathoms of water. If you struggle, if you tense up and thrash about, you will eventually sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float.” He even uses the example of teaching a child to swim and trying to get the child to relax in the water. You keep saying, “It’s okay, just relax. You’ll float, its okay,” don’t you? “Faith as trust,” Borg says, “is trusting in the buoyancy of God. Faith is trusting in the sea of being in which we live and move and have our being.”
That is what Jacob had to learn. That he couldn’t control the situation of his life and the only way he could face his brother was to trust in God’s care and trust that God could bring the reconciliation and healing that was needed. It was a big risk. Did God care about him enough to intercede for him with Esau? Could God bring healing to Esau’s heart so Esau would not seek revenge upon Jacob? Was God even still there with Jacob? And so Jacob wrestled with God all through the night, and neither one of them let go, until daybreak when Jacob had to either move forward to meet his brother or turn around and run the other direction. But he did move forward for the encounter with God had changed him. He was wounded, now disabled. Now his weakness was visible for all to see. Now he knew he had to trust in God. And so he went to meet Esau, but not hiding behind his family and wealth as he had planned, but at their head, the first to meet his brother, placing himself totally at Esau’s mercy and totally trusting God.
That same faith struggle is what Jesus is teaching about in the story of the persistent widow and the unjust judge. This story is not really about the judge or the widow, but about God. It is about the ultimate character of God. When your child suffers from a great injustice, receives some great blow from life, what do you do? You attempt to comfort the child. “There, there,” you say. “It’s all right.” What do you mean when you do that? You don’t mean that the child’s pain is silly, for why else would you comfort the child if the child were not in real pain? You do not mean that everything is going to be all right in this moment, or that fate will be reversed and everything will work out in this particular circumstance. You know enough about life to know that often things don’t work out all right.
What you mean is that finally, ultimately, in the larger picture, the world is structured in such a way that things will be all right. The pain will not last forever. Even the worst setbacks can be integrated into life and you will be able to go on. In other words, when you say, “There, there, everything will be alright,” you are making the statement of faith about the ultimate character of the world. This parable is a story about the character of God, the trustworthiness of God.
The “It Gets Better” video campaign on YouTube begun in response to the recent epidemic of suicides by young gay men and to the bullying of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and questioning youth in our schools, colleges, and communities is making just such a faith statement. It is not a solution to the problem. In many respects it is just a band-aid; it is the equivalent to the parent saying, “there, there, it’s all right.” But it is a necessary step to reach out to these youth being bullied, feeling isolated and alone in the world, like they don’t fit in, and who begin to despair that life will never be any better. This campaign is bringing a faith statement about the character of life and the world to these youth.
But there needs to be more. We need to wrestle with God about what our response and role needs to be in this matter. Our children are hurting. Our children are dying. Studies continue to tell us that anti-gay harassment and bullying are far too prevalent to ignore. Nine out of 10 LGBT youth report being verbally harassed at school; 44 percent say they have been physically harassed; 22 percent report having been assaulted; and 60 percent say that when they report abuse, no one does anything to help or protect them. For the sake of our children, and for the sake of our own souls, we must condemn bullying against LGBT persons – many who every single day live with the real threat of violence at expected and unexpected moments. We must continue to proclaim that love is stronger than hate and seek to find ways to end the violence that this particular community faces. We must stand up and challenge our neighbors and friends when they say hateful things or tell jokes or demean individuals because they feel superior to the ones that they are making fun of or using stereotypes to diminish another human being – a child of God’s own creation. Love conquers hate – and we must actively love and speak out against acts of hate against any person – it is our calling and our responsibility to do so.
Such action will not come easily. Action for justice never does. That is why we must wrestle with God and why Jesus wanted his followers to do more than pray as a habit or requirement. “Then as now,” theologian Barbara Brown Taylor says, “most people prayed like they brushed their teeth – once in the morning and once at night, as part of their spiritual hygiene program.” Does that ring true for you? Jesus wants much more from his followers. Our prayer life shapes us and helps us remember who, and whose we are. It helps to align with the intentions of God.
Our prayer life sustains us in the worst of times, and it keeps us close to God: Barbara Brown Taylor again writes, “You are going to trust the process regardless of what comes of it, because the process itself gives you life. The process keeps you engaged with what matters most to you, so you do not lose heart. … Prayer keeps our hearts chasing after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers us back. There’s nothing that works any better than that.”