11 Penetcost Year A
July 30, 31, 2005
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

Wrestling with God.  What a concept.  When my son was young, he and my husband would wrestle, and it would always bother me.  It would be laughs and fun until someone got hurt and then it would be tears and unhappiness.  Somehow it was always the little guy who would be unhappy.  I would hold my breath and wait.

I never had brothers and had no idea if this rough housing, as I called it, was a good thing or not. Jacob—yes, that is our son’s name—was never seriously hurt, but it always worried me because it didn’t seem they ever had a good way to end other than tears. 

But a father/son struggle seems to be part of growing up for a guy.  It is as important as something I understand about raising a daughter: the fun of getting dressed up in mother’s clothes and shoes and having a tea party with good china. 

Yes, I think there are some differences between little girls and little boys, and in the ways we raise them.

Today’s lesson from the book of our ancestors gives us a great insight into the way God finished the raising of Jacob.   

We have been hearing about this man and his dysfunctional family for the last several weeks in the readings and the sermons.  Just a quick review:  Rebekah was that strong minded young woman who went with a man she had just met to become the husband of a man she did not know.  This man, Isaac, was no match for his wife.  Perhaps we can understand this; the trauma of being tied onto an altar to be sacrificed by your father when you are twelve years old; to have the knife over you and then to have a reprieve at the last minute might make any young man a bit weak-kneed.   But Rebekah filled whatever gap there might have been in the transmission of the promise of Abraham to the generation that would come after.

Her two boys, Esau and Jacob, were twins.  One was born seconds before the other, who came out holding onto his brother’s heel.  But in the practice of the time, that order made all the difference in the world.  Jacob might as well have been ten years younger.  Isaac and Rebekah sized up the situation differently, however.  Isaac favored the first born more rugged Esau and Rebekah favored the more sensitive and shrewd Jacob. 

I think it was her belief that Jacob was the son who was to have God’s favor to carry the promise made to Abraham.  Perhaps she told him about this; perhaps this is why he thought it would be in his favor to get Esau to sell his birthright for a bowl of soup.  The fact that Esau did this does make you wonder about how bright his bulbs were, doesn’t it?  So then when it came time for the blessing from Isaac, the blessing belonged to Jacob.  It was just a matter of tricking Isaac into playing his part.  And so that happened with deception. 

The price that was paid was high.  Rebekah, smart, calculating woman that she was, must have realized that it would no longer be safe for Jacob to remain at home, but she was willing to do her part in salvation history.  And indeed, when she got wind of Esau’s intention to kill Jacob, she sent him away.  She would never see him again.  That is a high price to pay for one’s belief that Jacob was the best one to carry the blessing.  She is often denigrated as scheming and calculating, but I believe she was simply wise and faithful to God, seeing a bigger picture than her husband.

And, on his way to her brother, his Uncle Laban’s, Jacob has a dream.  With his head on a stone for a pillow he sees angels ascending and descending between earth and heaven.  And God told him that indeed he was the one that was to carry the blessing—to all the families of the earth.  So Rebekah was right.

Jacob was crafty, his mother’s son, don’t we know.  The next morning after the dream he puts some conditions on his acceptance of God’s choice of him.  “If,” he says, God will be with me and take care of me and bring me home again, then, God shall be my God, this stone shall be his house and one tenth of all he gives me I will give back to God.

And we know what comes next.  Deception seems to run in the family; Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah after working seven years to earn Rachel’s hand, but he gets to marry her after one more week provided he stays and works seven more years, and he does.  In fact, he stays six more years beyond that to grow his own herds instead of just taking care of Laban’s and then it is time to return home and face his brother.

That is where we are now.  Esau hears that Jacob is coming and comes to meet him with four hundred men.  Is this a war party or welcome home party?  Jacob can’t be sure.  But the night before they are to meet, he sends his family and flocks across the river Jabbok to have a quiet night alone.  Surprise!

This is the moment God has waited for.  This is the final testing of this shrewd man, capable of deception and cunning.  We are told that a man wrestled with him until daybreak but could not prevail against Jacob.  But then he puts Jacob’s hip joint out, which means Jacob could not win, only hold on.  But Jacob will not let go until the man blesses him.  Having received a blessing by deception he now wants one he has earned.  And this time when he is asked his name, he does not lie as he did to his father; he says, “Jacob.”  But his opponent will not tell him his own name; and Jacob realizes, or perhaps he has figured it out at some wee hour of the night, that he is wrestling with none other than God.  God tells him,  “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel , for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.  And Jacob, now realizes that he has looked upon the face of God and lived.  Yet he would never be the same, in body, mind or spirit.  In his body, he would always have a limp, and in his mind, he would know the blessing of the God of his ancestors was still his, and in his spirit he would know God was with him, that in the process of wrestling, his very flesh had been contoured to God’s own mold.

A powerful story.  We named our son Jacob because of the transformative power of this story.  Sometimes I wonder how his name has influenced his journey.

Let’s contrast this story of receiving the blessing of God with that of the Gospel for today; the feeding of the 5,000, where all that was required for them to receive God was to sit down and put out their hands.  Jesus did the work that we do every Sunday morning—he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them. 

Every Sunday we receive the grace of God by simply showing up and putting out our hands.  How easy that is.  How humdrum that can become.  How lightly we can receive it.  Would it make a difference to you if you had to wrestle all night, if you came up to the altar with a new physical affliction in order to get it?  How many of us would show up at all?!

Yet, even if we faithfully show up every Sunday of our lives, we will not be spared from our own time or times of wrestling with God.  I don’t mean physical wrestling.  I mean the hard struggles that come upon us in the course of living our lives.  The hard times when we struggle with illness, loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of meaning, depression, arrogance and the ego, and the list could go on and on. 

And it is in these times, as we struggle, as we work to prevail, as we persevere, that we are given the opportunity for seeing God face to face and being transformed forever.

When I struggled with breast cancer nearly seven years ago now, I knew I was grappling with an adversary; I felt its grip.  For awhile I wondered where God was, until I realized that God was in the struggle with me and was both my affliction and my teacher, one and the same.  I realized that I was to learn something, to be different, to persevere and to come out on the otherside, forever changed.

And I did prevail, and I was changed, and I bear the marks on my body of that struggle just as surely as Jacob bore his.  And all the Sundays that I have put out my hands to receive the bread given by God have not transformed me as this experience did.  But every time I receive that bread of life, I know where my life has come from; and I am grateful.  I take in that bread and receive the strength that I need for each day, and for the next time the angel of God comes to wrestle with me, in whatever form.

Think of your life.  How have you learned your big lessons?  How have you changed the most?  Through easy grace or hard times?  Both are provided.  We know that we receive God in our hands here; we do not always recognize that it is God we are struggling with for our wholeness when life puts itself hard against us.  Yet, Jacob’s story and the offering of the bread of Christ prepare us for recognizing that, at some point in the struggle, God is not only with us but for us and using the adversity to teach us.

Perhaps you or a loved one are going through a time of struggle, a dark night of angst, the Dark Night of the Soul as St. John of the Cross called it, right now.  And it feels like you may well be overwhelmed.  Persevere; you will prevail; God is with you and is in the struggle. There will be a blessing for you on the other side, at the dawn.