I guess all families get a kick out of sharing childhood
stories. My brother in law, Rodney, has a favorite story about Doug, his older
brother by two years. One day Rod and Doug’s father caught them arguing
and as arguments are want to do with 7 and 9 year old boys, it turned physical.
Their father’s way of dealing with such altercations was to insist that
they put on the heavy boxing gloves and try to beat each other to exhaustion
and settle the matter without hurting each other. Rod, the younger brother had
Doug cornered and was pounding away at him, insisting that he say “uncle”,
clearly having the upper hand. Doug seriously looked at him and said, “Rod,
it’s not fair to corner someone, you have to let me go.” Rod not wanting
to be “unfair” dutifully let him go, only to be cornered and pummeled
by a tricky older brother.
Stories of fairness and brothers fighting remind
me of today’s Old Testament lesson in which Jacob the old trickster wrestles
in the night with the form of a man. It’s hard to tell who’s winning.
It’s not uncle that’s being fought for but a blessing.
We need to listen in this story not just for the strange and macabre events
of a dark night. We need to listen for more than a moralistic teaching or a
maxim to live by. No, I think we need to listen as the Hebrew storytellers audience
would listen. We must listen to the feelings, with ears open to the tone and
the flow of the story. We listen with understanding encompassing all we already
know about Jacob.
We’ve met Jacob many times in the lessons
of the last few weeks. We saw him tricking his brother by stealing his birthright
for a pot of stew. We saw Jacob succumbing to his mother’s advice and donning
patches of goat skin to trick his blind and aging father into giving him the
blessing. We see him fearfully and guiltily running away to his uncle Laban.
Under the crafty and lazy Laban he gets a dose of his own medicine as he gets
tricked into working 14 years for the hand of the woman he loves. Honor and
trickery are the battles that are fought in his youthful soul. But then he matures.
Clearly he wants something of his own in life, something he can claim as safe
and real, earned not cheated for. Through careful but smart conniving he claims
his due from Laban and begins a nomadic trek that will lead him to settle the
score with his brother. And so we come to the moment of our story.
Esau is on the other side of the river. Jacob has no way of knowing how he will
be received by this brother whom he cheated years before. Knowing Jacob he probably
considers how he would react in Esau’s place. He assumes Esau will still
hold a grudge, that the anger he once had will blaze anew at the coming of his
brother. So he divides his tribe sending one half over the river in action of
submission but the other half away in case Esau doesn’t accept his apologies.
And there he is alone, alone, on the banks of the river. Alone with all his
thoughts and his fears and his regrets. His course determined, his mind set
but the time now to think, to assess, and to worry. This, I think, is not so
far from us. How many times have we had a sleepless night turning a particular
course of action over in our minds? Are we doing the right thing? What will
happen next? How have I brought this particular set of circumstances upon myself?
How could I have been so wrong? What might I have done differently to have lived
more fully, more honorably, more in sync with the will of god? Now that I see
clearly what I must do and how might I do it?
And so a man wrestles with him until daybreak.
It was almost an even match neither wrestler has his way. Near dawn, gasping
for breath, exhausted in conflict, they are reduced to speech. “Let me
go, day is breaking,” says the man.
“Bless me first,” says Jacob
“Well what’s your name?” says the stranger. “Jacob”
“You are no longer Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and
with humans, and have prevailed.” “So what’s your name?”
There is no reply. Jacob did not get a victory that night. He did not get an
answer to his questions. What he got was a new name, a new identity through
the assault of God. Jacob, known as “trickster”, “Grabber”
now becomes ”Israel” which means “God preserves”. Jacob,
now Israel is convinced he has seen God; he has struggled with God and he bears
the injuries to prove it. Forever after he will walk with the limp that God
has given him to remind him that God preserves.
“ Just so” Elizabeth Achtemeier says, “Just so, God engages us
in battle in Jesus Christ because he wants to make us new men and women, just
as he fought with Jacob to make him a new and different man. Jacob was a scoundrel
and a schemer all his life long, but by the grace of God he also had to become
Israel—the father of the twelve tribes of the chosen people, the bearer
of God’s promise of blessing…And God wrestled with Jacob to give him
that blessing and to lock him into his purpose…So too, God in Christ wrestles
with us to rule over our lives, to pull us into good purpose that he is working
out on earth…It is not always a pleasant experience. God can grab us and
fight us and jerk us all the way around, to walk a new path that we had not
dreamed of taking. It costs us something to wrestle with
God, to have him hammer away at us until we reflect his will and can be worthy
vessels of his blessing.”
Probably the definitive spiritual book written
in the last 30 years is a book BY Henri Nouwen called The Wounded Healer. In
it, he brings to awareness how it is our life trials and our response to them
that make us receptive to others in the midst of their life trials. And so rather
than try to repress the broken, negative, guilty or hurtful past we embrace
it and allow God to use it to reach out to others who are caught in a broken,
hurtful or guilty present. Just so most addictions counselors have themselves
lived with addiction. Every once in a while the newspaper highlights a beautiful
story of a doctor treating or researching a disease that they themselves suffer
with. The limp reminds us of our frailty and in being reminded we are strengthened
in compassion.
This Jacob story is, I believe, a story of grace.
Not sweet amazing grace as it is usually imagined. It’s tough, real assaulting
grace. The God who encounters Jacob is not a soft, kind old gentleman in the
sky but a challenging and worthy adversary. When daylight comes, the adversary
is gone, but so is Jacob. Now, only Israel remains, walking with a permanent
limp.
Amen.