Year C
October 20, 2019
Genesis 32:22-31
Our first reading from this morning contains, for me, one of the most powerful images in scripture. Jacob had been avoiding his brother Esau after stealing a blessing and the birthright from their father, a few chapters earlier in the narrative. Esau vows to kill Jacob, once their father dies, so their mother, Rebecca, urges Jacob to flee to a distant land so that he might live. Jacob and Esau are about to meet after something like twenty years apart, as Jacob is returning home. Jacob is “greatly afraid and distressed,” fearing that Esau was going to finally make good on that earlier vow.
Then, we get this text from Genesis. It is a bizarre story: an unknown assailant and Jacob wrestle throughout the night. There was no warning. No description of the man. All the text tells us is that a man wrestled with Jacob until daybreak. In this wrestling match Jacob senses that this man is something more than a man – and demands a blessing, refusing to let the man go before he gets it. Jacob – whose name meant “heal-grabber” a permanent reminder of his deceitfulness and his desire to take what wasn’t his own – is renamed Israel – “God wrestler,” “for he had striven with God and humans and have prevailed.” He receives a blessing and the being goes away, but Jacob – now called Israel - is left with a permanent limp. As often happens with texts, there are a multitude of angles and interpretations to take with the text. The text is *just* open enough to yield a number of interpretive possibilities. Yet this text – and the image of wresting with God - has become so formational and foundational for me as I encounter faith, how I encounter Scripture, and how I encounter our God – to the point that my blog is called “Wrestling with the Word.”
Throughout my life in various ways and in various places, I’ve heard this myth. Faith is about certainty. A strong faith doesn’t ask questions. A strong faith is a passive life – one that just trusts in God and lets, as the saying and the country song go – Jesus take the wheel. My first encounter with biblical studies – as an academic pursuit – was in my second semester of undergrad. It was in a class with my soon-to-be academic advisor, Dr. Frank Eakin, around Jewish/ Christian dialogue. To talk about Jewish/ Christian dialogue, we had to talk about Scripture – and the ways it had been used and interpreted by Jews and by Christians. I don’t remember much of the content of the class anymore, but I certainly remember the struggles of the class. It was a first-year seminar, a class with students ranging from theologically conservative “Bible-believing” Christians to politically and socially liberal atheists – and everyone in between.
Dr. Eakin encouraged wrestling with the material. We dug into texts; we asked questions of texts; we learned what we could about the contexts around texts. From some of the Christians in the class, there was frequently push-back. If the Bible says X, then it says x, no questions asked. Questions were an indication that faith was just not strong enough. I frequently found myself frustrated because I was confronted, in almost every class, with a God that I didn’t recognize. A God that was distant. A God that was all-demanding. A God that was easily offended by the easiest of questions. A God that was easily angered and threatened to turn one’s back with one wrong move. A God that couldn’t handle my questions. I saw a Christian interpretation of God that was so foreign to me. Throughout my life, I’ve always had a lot of questions. About everything. I was “that kid” in school that had just one more question, after everyone else was ready to move on. And questions are what drew me to the Bible and Biblical studies in the first place (and the questions still draw me there). Questions woo me into relationship with God. A God that couldn’t handle them was so foreign to me. Perhaps that interpretation of God isn’t foreign to you (and that’s okay); it is a common view on God – especially in American Christianity. American Christianity, in general, I think, is uncomfortable with the wrestling because wrestling has the potential to upend the status quo or to push us outside of our comfort zones.
In our text today, as Jacob wrestles with this divine being, scripture provides a different framework and image for what faith looks like, for what engaging with God and Word looks like. Here, we meet a God that is close, that is not only willing to wrestle, but that wrestling brings that God closer. Next to God’s incarnation in Jesus, Jacob’s wrestling with the divine at the Jabbok is one of the clearest examples of God’s closeness to God’s beloved humanity. This is not a God that turns away – even from the seemingly most undeserving of people – but this is a God that chases down Jacob, confronts him, and brings him into this wrestling match, transforming him, leaving him with a blessing. God doesn’t just invite wrestling, but God sometimes demands it. Debie Thomas puts it this way,
“Stories like Jacob's excite and inspire me now, because they point to a God who is infinitely more interesting than the one I feared in childhood. A God who wants to engage? A God I can come at with the whole weight of my thoughts, questions, ideas, and feelings? A God who invites my rigor, my persistence, my intensity? That's a God worth pursuing. That's a God I won't let go of. Wrestling, as it turns out, is not a bad or even a scary thing, because it's the opposite of apathy, the opposite of resignation. It's even the opposite of loneliness. To fight is to stay close, to keep my arms wrapped tight around my opponent. Fighting means I haven't walked away--I still have skin in the game.”[1]
To take it one step further, a God that is willing to wrestle is a God that keeps God’s arms wrapped tight around us. A God that refuses to walk away. A God that has skin in the game. And that gives me intense comfort. In the best and in especially in the worst moments of life, before God, I am not “too much” to handle. I’m not “too intense.” I’m not “too persistent.” I’m not a burden. No, this is a God a God that refuses to remain distant and comes close. This is a God that has skin in the game and is committed to the wrestling match. This is a God that pursues us and is committed to doing whatever it takes to bring us into relationship with Godself – even if it means wrestling, even if it means going to the cross. This is a God that can hold whatever I bring before the divine, and this is a God that can hold me – fully and completely for who I am. This is a God that can hold whatever you bring before the divine, and this is a God that can hold you – fully and completely for who you are. If God, in Christ, is willing to even go to the cross, if God, in Christ can handle death, God can hold us and all we bring – our questions, our doubts, our wresting, our wounds. We are free to be ourselves before this God. And God frees us to have an active, persistent faith that refuses to let go.
This week, I read an article, entitled “Bruised and Blessed by Scripture” in the Christian Century by the Rev. Emmy Kegler – an ELCA pastor in Minneapolis.[2] In the article, she describes her way of encountering and wrestling with Scripture as reading “the hermeneutic of the hip.” I love that phrase. Hermeneutic is a fancy word that refers to the lens or the method for interpreting literature. Most Pastors and Biblical scholars are familiar with a “hermeneutic of suspicion” – approaching a text with the expectation that there’s more to it than what the text actually says. An obvious example: as the Israelites enter the land of Cana, God seems to actually endorse genocide – with the extermination of all the original inhabitants of the land. A hermeneutic of suspicion says: that doesn’t sound like God, so what’s going on here? So the lens that Pastor Kegler takes – the hermeneutic of the hip – goes further than that hermeneutic of suspicion. She is seeing the Scripture through the lens of the hip. The lens of the hip recognizes that – in wrestling with God and with Scripture – we bring with us the pains of life, the pains of the text being used in ways that harm us or the ones we love, the pains of being pushed to places of discomfort and growth, and the pains of the wrestling with Scripture or God in and of itself. It acknowledges the scars and the limps that we all carry. We come before God – as we are – with our wounds and our trauma. Yet the lens of the hip trusts that in the wrestling with Scripture, in the wrestling with God, in coming face to face with the Divine, God meets us in suffering and sends us away blessed.
Encountering God face to face, we walk away changed. Jacob’s struggle with God results in a new, transformed identity. He’s no longer the trickster, the heel grabber. He’s one who strives with God. In our encounters with the divine, we find a new, transformed identity. While we experience encounters with God in our own ways and in our own places, God promises to encounter us in water and in bread and wine. In water, we are named and claimed as God’s beloved children. In bread and wine, we are called forgiven. In the Sacraments, we go from being called sinner to being called saint. And we are promised that nothing – not our wrestling, not our scars, not our limps – can separate us from the love of God we’ve found in Jesus; we have a God that won’t let go. We’re freed to wrestle, to be pushed outside of our comfort zones, to upend the status quo to demand God’s blessing, not just for us, but for all people – especially those on the margins – in this world here and now.
Amen.
[1] Debie Thomas, "Fighting God (Genesis 32:22-31)," in The Christian Century, https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2016-10/fighting-god-genesis-3222-31
[2] Emmy Kegler, "Bruised and Blessed by Scripture," in The Christian Century, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/bruised-and-blessed-scripture
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