George A. Mason 9 th Sunday after Pentecost Wilshire Baptist Church 6 August 2017 Dallas, Texas Who Are You? Genesis 32:22-31 Midway through the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, having lost my way. That s the way Dante Alighieri begins the fantastical tale of his Divine Comedy, arguably the most important poetic work in Western Civilization. If you aren t familiar with it, Dante s poem is an allegory and saga in three parts Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso; that is, hell, purgatory and heaven. He sees the spiritual journey of life as a movement of transformation that takes you through hell into order to deliver you at last to heaven. There s no going up without going down and going through. But notice again how it begins: midway through the journey of our life. Not just his mid-life, but all of ours. In other words, there s something of a pattern to all our lives that involves this descent into a dark wood, this getting lost along the way, before we can truly figure out who we are and where our hope lies. That isn t to say that the first half of life doesn t matter, or the last. Midlife is more a metaphor of meaning than a chronological midpoint. It s a way of talking about our human identity crisis that runs all our life long but tends to be most intense at midlife. There are hints before and echoes after. The girl or guy who breaks up with you. The team you don t make. The debilitating illness. The spouse who dies first. There may be one defining moment at the midway point or thereabouts, but there are many moments before and after that that moment defines. We all come at last to a camp at the River Jabbok and wrestle all night long with, well, I m getting ahead of myself. The story of Jacob in Old Testament is filled with intrigue. Jacob will become Israel in the episode we look at today, but not before he has lived a life of deception and cunning where he keeps succeeding at the expense of others. Remember, the name Jacob stems from his grasping at the heel of his minutes-older brother Esau. Being the younger brother didn t suit him. He was always reaching for first place in the family and everywhere else.
By the time we arrive at this story, Jacob has swindled his brother out of his inheritance, and deceived his father Isaac by pretending to be Esau to gain his father s blessing that was meant for the older son. After the hunter, Esau, promised to hunt down his younger brother and kill him, Jacob heads for the hills. He goes to his mother s home country and there spends seven years in his uncle Laban s household working for the hand of his cousin Rachel. He first has to take her older sister Leah, and then works seven more years for the one he wants. He works six more years caring for Laban s flocks, and when he is ready to leave and go home, hoping Esau s had enough time cool off, his wife Rachel steals her father s household goods. His life is one long con, a big act of grand larceny. But now the jig is up. Jacob sends messengers ahead to see if Esau is ready to make peace with him. Word comes back that Esau has 400 men with him, and he s heading toward him still bearing the grudge. So, Jacob sends everyone across the river and stays behind alone for the night. And it s a dark night of the soul. In the middle of his sleep, a man jumps him and wrestles with him all night long. Who is the man? We don t know. We don t know that Jacob knows. And the truth is, that s often the nature of nightmares, isn t it? They seem so real. And they are. We wake up and try to answer the question of whom we wrestled with in the dream. It isn t always clear at first. At early stages in our spiritual development, we tend to focus on how others are affecting our lives. We blame our father for not being more involved with us or being so involved that we felt like we could never please him. We look at our wife and wonder if she would just be more of this or less of that, everything would be great. We think the reason we haven t done better in our career is that we have always had someone holding us back immigrants took our jobs, the boss promoted his son, our teacher didn t understand our true brilliance. Whatever. Jacob may feel like he s on the cusp of getting everything he had hoped for, but one person is standing in his way and it could all fall apart right here. Esau. Is Esau the man he s wrestling with? 2
Pastors aren t immune from this. We don t like opposition. We like to be liked. Sometimes too much. Maybe we get into this work partly to feel the blessing of heaven through the people of earth. What group is better able to do that for us than the people we call the people of God? Then we come to a time when we feel like some are against us instead of for us. And we don t sleep well. We wrestle with them in the night. But the truth is, they you are not the problem. Never are. Our struggle is not with Esau, however conceived. Our struggle is with ourselves. And who wants to struggle with the self? Not I. If I struggle with myself, I have to take responsibility for my actions. I have to deal with my regret and mistakes. And I may not be sure I have it in me to prevail if the problem I have is me. Anyone else, or am I the only one confessing today? But in the midst of that long night of wrestling, we may find out that, being created in the image and likeness of God, we never struggle only with ourselves. Our struggle is not just with flesh and blood. And yet, we are flesh and blood, so when we struggle spiritually, it affects us physically. Which is why at the last, the man Jacob wrestles with, realizing Jacob is never going to give up finally wounds him. He touches him in a place that sets his hip out of joint, causing a wound Jacob will limp with from that day forward. Our spiritual struggles take a toll on us. We want them to be easy. We want to grow without being hurt, but there s no growth without pain. When we have tried our best and divorce leaves us wounded, it s not the end of our lives by any means, but we walk away with a limp. When we have felt betrayed by a friend or child or parent or employer, we are never the same again. But never being the same again can either lead to our spirally downward or falling upward, to use a lovely phrase by Richard Rohr. Jacob is wounded, but he won t give up. He is not willing for this night to end unresolved. He will not waste a crisis. The man asks Jacob to let him go. Jacob holds on for dear life literally. The man asks his name. Jacob, he answers. And that s true, of course. He s has been a Jacob, a deceiver and trickster all his life. It s served him well in the first 3
half of his life, but he knows living without integrity like that won t work forever. He admits it. I am a heel, he says. I am a sinner. That s what we all need to be able to say if we are ever to know life as grace. The man tells him he s getting a new name now. You will be called Israel. Israel. Meaning something like, the one who has striven with God and prevailed. Or maybe it means God has striven with you and will fight for you. It s hard to say what it means exactly from the Hebrew. What we do know is that somehow God is now in the picture. Jacob understands it s God he has been wrestling with after all. And it s a blessed standoff. God hasn t killed him and Jacob hasn t defeated God either. They ve been engaged in a contest of wills and they both come out of changed. The novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, tells a story of a young man who visited a monk at one of the Orthodox monasteries in the Aegean Sea. The monks had built their cells on the face of the rock and lived there alone. The young man climbed up to the cell of the monk and asked, Father, do you still wrestle with the devil? The monk answered, Not anymore. I have grown old, and the devil has grown old with me. He no longer has the strength. Now I wrestle with God. With God? the man asked. You wrestle with God? Do you hope to win? No, he said, I hope to lose. 1 Frederick Buechner calls this Jacob story the magnificent defeat. But losing to God is really winning. It is a blessing in disguise. Tell me your name, Jacob asks the man. Who are you? But God doesn t give away God s power like that. Instead, God blesses Jacob. God blesses him precisely because he hung on and wouldn t give up, because he wouldn t let God go no matter how painful the struggle. This is the kind of man God can use wounded but woke. Richard Rohr again: Mature 1 Cited by Mark Trotter, https://sermons.com/sermon/nightmoves/1352577 4
spirituality will always teach us to enter willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life, which is why we speak so much of faith or trust. Transformative power is discovered in the dark in questions and doubts, seldom in the answers. Yet this goes against our cultural instincts. We usually try to fix or change events in order to avoid changing ourselves. Wise people tell us we must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. Who are you? The man Jacob wrestled with asks him that question. Jacob asks the man that question, too. It s a question of identity, where we derive it. We find out that we only find out who we are through the struggle. The song Who Are You? is by the British rock band The Who. Seems apt, don t you know?! We hear it at the beginning of the reruns of CSI. Who are you? Who, who; who, who? But the last lines are seldom heard. They culminate a song where a man is waking up from a drunken night in SoHo only to find he isn t dead, but that maybe grace has found him. It sounds like a prayer: I know there's a place you walked/ Where love falls from the trees./ My heart is like a broken cup,/ I only feel right on my knees./ I spit out like a sewer hole,/ Yet still receive your kiss./ How can I measure up to anyone now/ After such a love as this? Well, that s really the point, isn t it? We don t have to measure up to anyone else after such a love as this. Once we are loved as we are, we are never the same again. We know who we are; or better, whose we are. I don t know all your stories in this room today, but here s what I believe. While each of our stories is different, all our stories are the same. If you haven t wrestled all night with God yet, you will. There will come a time in the struggle when you will think your life is over; but you will find it s only the life you have known that is over. There s another life waiting to be lived. Another you waiting to emerge by the grace of God. You can tell people who ve been through it already, I think, if you pay close attention. They ve all got the slightest hint of a limp 5