Proper 24: 21 Oct

Proper 24: 21 Oct. 2007: “Wrestling with God”

Genesis 32.22-31

Today’s first lesson from Genesis is one of my very favorite texts in all Scripture—Jacob wrestling. It is also may be the Biblical story most popular with artists. One depiction is on the cover of the liturgy bulletin this morning, with the title “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.”

But actually, the Bible is ambiguous about the being with whom he struggles. Genesis simply calls him “a man; it is a reference to the story in the book of Hosea that calls him an angel. But both references strongly hint that Jacob was really wrestling God. That is why the story holds such fascination for us. We like to think of Christian faith as a comforting thing, something which, as Paul writes to Timothy, we learn from childhood, and then continue and firmly believe. But many of discover that there’s more to it than that. Jacob wrestling is the rest of the story. Knowing God can be a struggle, a wrestling match. Sometimes that childhood faith gives great comfort; but there are other times, when we sit like Jacob by the Jabbock River, and find ourselves locked in a struggle with God; times when the childhood faith doesn’t seem to be quite all it’s cracked up to be.

This morning let’s talk about the struggle, the wrestling. What does it mean to wrestle with God? It is first of all a struggle to find grace. We Christians say we live by grace—grace alone, Luther said. Sola gratia, grace alone. But it is a struggle for us to accept that. We human beings want to be in charge of our lives. We want to be in control, whether it is of our bodies, or of our material goods, or our time, or our families. We want to be the boss.

Jacob is such a good example. In our story, he has left home under a cloud, frightened of his own brother—and with good reason, since he has cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright and his blessing. He has gone to a far land, gotten himself into several kinds of trouble, but finally he has married and had children. Now he is on the way back home, thinking fast and furious about how he can deal with Esau. He has all the scenarios down pat: what he will say, how he will manipulate his brother into welcoming him home. If ever there was an operator, it is Jacob.

But in wrestling at the Jabbock, Jacob learns something new. His wrestling match teaches him that God is the one in control. Oh, the text says that Jacob pins his assailant. But it is God who wins the wrestling match. Jacob realizes that before God, he has no choice but to ask for God’s blessing. All his schemes, all his plans—all are for naught. In this wrestling match, Jacob is the supplicant, the one who must beg for mercy. And God is the one who gives it.

Our wrestling with God can only have the same result, and that is to teach us how much we need God. Our schemes and plans also come to nothing without God. He alone is Lord. That’s what grace means, you see—that we are totally and completely dependent on him. God created us, God sustains us, God keeps us going—not we ourselves. And all this God does, Luther says, out of fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, though we do not deserve it. It takes us time to learn that—time, and often a struggle.

Then our wrestling match with God is a struggle to keep faith. I had a friend in college who was Jewish. His older brother had once planned to be a rabbi, but he had given up not only his plans, but his faith. Once I asked him how that happened. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “One day I just stopped believing.” I’ve always found that so sad, and yet it is not an unusual story. We all know that plenty of young people who grow up in the church just one day also stop believing. We joke about it—“I guess their confirmation didn’t take.” We have to joke, so that we don’t weep. We want our children to have faith, to have our faith, but sometimes it doesn’t happen that way.

I can’t begin to explain why that is, but I suspect it has to do with this idea of struggle. I suspect many young people somehow get the idea that faith means not struggling, not asking questions, not doubting. And then when the inevitable challenges and troubles of life come, their faith seems to have deserted them, and so they cast it off, like a broken alarm clock or a pair of shoes with unpatchable soles. Well, let’s be honest. It isn’t just young people. It happens to people of all ages. A spouse dies, a child is killed, a job is lost, disappointment is great, and we throw in the towel. If everything can’t be just the way we want it, then God must be a lie.

The truth of the matter is that childlike faith isn’t always good enough. Most grown-ups need a good dose of grown-up faith, faith that has been through struggles, faith that has wrestled with God. If your faith can’t take you through the struggles, then it isn’t grown-up faith. And you get there by hanging on, by questioning, by wrestling, even maybe by doubting, maybe by rebelling but still not giving up. Your faith matures and strengthens as it goes through times of struggle. Until you’ve wrestled God, like Jacob did, until then your faith is not mature.

Maybe you’ve seen some of the press commentary on a recent book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. It publishes a number of letters and journal entries from the late saint of Calcutta—many of which reveal her own very difficult struggles with faith and doubt. Some commentators who are hostile to Christianity have portrayed her as a hypocrite, putting on a happy face when her heart was filled with deep, sometimes despairing doubt. They obviously do not understand this dimension of faith, nor the mysterious truth that those whose faith is strongest are often the ones who wrestle the most intensely with God. Mother Teresa’s struggle was a struggle of faith. “I do not know how deeper will this trial go,” she wrote, “or how much pain and suffering it will bring to me. This does not worry me any more. I leave this to Him as I leave everything else.” Leaving it all to God—the joys and the sorrows, the successes and the failures, the doubts and the struggles—leaving it all to God. That is the sign of faith.

Then finally our wrestling match with God is a struggle to know love. We all want to be loved, and need to be loved. Most of us understand that need. We spend our life looking for love—sometimes in all the wrong places, as the old song has it, and sometimes in the right places. We love one another, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But there is one who loves us unconditionally, every day of our lives, one who has loved us since long before we saw the light of day. That one is God. He claimed us in Holy Baptism, called us his own, chose us, said that we are precious in his sight. He promised us that nothing would ever separate us from his love.

And yet we human beings have a way of dealing with God’s love just as clumsily as with our love for one another. We make God into something he isn’t—a list of rules and laws, a cosmic bellhop, a warm fuzzy feeling inside. But God is none of those things. Jacob, in our story today, had pretty much dismissed God as being something for old people to talk about. But he missed the point, too—until he wrestled with God. Then he began to see, he began to know, just who God is.

That’s how it is with our struggles. When they come, we sometimes think that God must have abandoned us. We think he must, if he exists, be out to lunch. But God, you see, is there—there in the struggles, there in the wrestling, God is there. Perhaps he lurks in the shadows of the night, and we cannot see him. Perhaps we, like Jacob, demand to know his name, demand to understand him, demand to get a hold on him. And he will not allow it. He will not tell us his name. But we learn it in the struggle, we learn that his name is love—that all that he is, and all that he does, arises out of his love for us. We learn that we cannot know it all, but that we can trust him. We discover that in wrestling all the night long, until day is breaking, we finally come to know him and he blesses us.