Twenty First Sunday After Pentecost

Year C, Proper 24

All Saints’ Bentonville

October 21, 2007

Old Testament Reading:

Genesis (32:22-31)

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

Gospel:

Luke (18:1-8)

Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

I want to turn our attention away, slightly, from the Gospel reading about the persistent widow who kept haranguing the unjust judge and demanding justice, and focus our interest on the lesson from Genesis: The story of Jacob wrestling with God. 

If you read this story in it’s entirety you would find that Jacob’s night long wrestling match, is sandwiched in between a larger story of fear.  You may recall that Jacob had cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright by pretending to be the eldest son and receiving their father Isaac’s blessing.   Now camped with his family on the Ford of the River Jabboc, Jacob is preparing for an encounter with the brother he cheated, fearing his retribution – fearing the reunion the next day with the brother he had wronged 20 years earlier.  And so Jacob sent everything and everyone that he loved across the river and prepared for a dreadful night alone.

How many of us have spent just such a fitful night, unable to sleep because we fear what the morning holds for us?  It is amazing how frightening the prospect of morning can seem in the heart of a dark night. 

But what is there, really, to fear?  And what was it that Jacob feared as he lies sleeping on the desert floor?  I think it is change, change of the most radical kind. It’s change that strikes terror in our hearts in the dark of night – accompanied by fear that God might be asking us to become something different.

In the midst of his battle with the angel of the Lord, Jacob asked for a blessing.  The angel ignored Jacob’s request that he be given what he wanted.  Instead of a blessing, the angel first gave Jacob a new name, a name better suited for the father of a new people.

The exact nature of the blessing that Jacob ultimately received in his midnight wresting match is not revealed, but we are told that he received a new identity; he became the father of the children of Israel. 

We come to God seeking what we want – asking for the particular blessing we think we need. But God frequently has something else in mind.

There's a Sufi story about a seeker who was tramping around the world looking to find the true God. She was examining all religions and all communities and all manifestations of religion in order to discover that perfect manifestation of God in life. In one of her trips, she stopped at a monastery and said to the monastic, "Tell me, does your God work miracles?" And the elder said, "Well, it all depends on how you define a miracle. Some people think that it is a miracle if God does the will of people. But here in this community, we think a miracle is when people do the will of God."  Recounted by Joan Chittister.

Sometimes the encounter with God that we usually experience, that we participate in, here in the secure red brick walls of this church, seems far too tame.  In fact, it seems almost incomprehensible to imagine an encounter with God that would leave us all bruised and limping as we walk out these doors.  I love the beautiful prayers we pray, but what if our prayers, our interaction with God, were so real that we emerged from prayer completely transformed by the experience?

Imagine if all of us stumbled out those doors and into the parking lot, bruised, mangled, with broken teeth, hips out of joint, but transformed, made new, holding on tightly to God’s blessing, but more importantly, armed with the realization of who we are meant to be.

I wonder how many of us are looking for something that real from our religion, an encounter with the divine that leaves us, like Jacob, limping into the morning sun.  Have you seen the movie Fight Club? 

In this 1999 film, the protagonist, played by Edward Norton is a successful executive with an automobile company.  The auto manufacturer is aware that a defect in one of their automobiles will result in the death of a significant number of passengers over the life of the car’s production.  Mr. Norton’s job is to determine the relative cost of future insurance claims versus the profits that continued production will bring the company.  Norton’s creative use of his business model has brought him all the personal wealth he could hope for.  A visit to his Manhattan apartment is a tour of consumerism – the latest home entertainment system, a gadget filled kitchen, tasteful furnishings, fabulous artwork, all that money can buy.  Having at such a young age, the possessions that most strive their entire lives to accumulate, Norton finds himself dissatisfied with all the “stuff” that surrounds him.  We hear him ask, “''I… wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person”.

Like Jacob, Mr. Norton encounters “a man”.  While this man isn’t the angel of God that Jacob spends the night wrestling, he is a man that wants to fight.  Introducing Norton to a new way of being in the world with the phrase that this cult film has made famous, “Hit me as hard as you can.”  Entering a world of brutal bare-fisted, one on one, testosterone infused savagery,  “Fight Club” offers the young man something horrible, but something real.  Something that is an escape from a meaningless quest to accumulate the latest and finest stuff that surrounds us.

Maybe a real encounter with God would leave us primed for a fight  - willing to engage a world that would have us believe that all that counts is the stuff we accumulate.

Like Jacob, many of us are awakened at night by our fear – our fear that we might lose what we have acquired; we fear the loss of what we are now. 

Our fear, what should really keep us awake at night, a fear that should leave us wide eyed with terror, is that we never become what we are meant to be.  We should be scared to death that we are trading our birthright in the pursuit of what passes for an American dream. 

Jacob feared that upon awakening he would be called to justice.  Instead he was called into new life.

Before beginning his midnight wrestling match, he left behind, on the banks of the River Jabboc, all that he possessed.  Every camel and goat and donkey  - even his wives and children.  And he emerged the next morning broken and limping, but he also emerged a new man, with a new name. 

I’d like to think that each of can become new without the bruising, bone crushing struggle that Jacob knew, but I’m not so sure.  I fear that most of us are so stubborn, so resistant to letting go of the false self, that it will almost certainly require a mighty struggle. 

Each change we experience in our lives presents an opportunity for transformation of the self.  Every new job, every move, every new relationship, birth, death… is a chance to be made over, to live into what God has in store for us.  God wants to bless us – every bit as much as he wanted Jacob to receive his blessing. But if we are to receive that blessing in the fullness with which it is intended, we can’t ignore God’s presence among us.  Praise God, sing hallelujahs, pray persistent prayers, or wrestle your God to the ground, but engage God with your entire body, mind, spirit; and you, like Jacob, will be blessed.