Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

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Sermons

August 2002 (click here to return to "August 2002 Sermons" page)

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 4, 2002)

“Expect to Be Changed” Dr. Julie Adkins/Dr. Van Kemper

Text: Genesis 32:22-32

SERMON

You know, the Old Testament is full of strange stories,

but I’ve always thought this one about Jacob’s wrestling match

was one of the strangest!

Let me remind us of the context;

it’ll help a little, though not much.

Jacob, you remember, had a twin brother, Esau,

who was born just a few seconds ahead of Jacob.

Esau was his father’s favorite;

Jacob was the mama’s boy.

And when they were young men

–many, many years before this wrestling episode –

Jacob and Rebekah, his mother,

tricked Isaac, the father, who was dying,

into giving Jacob the blessing that should have gone to Esau.

The equivalent might be to say that

though Esau as first-born should have been his father’s rightful heir, Jacob managed to get the goods for himself.

Anyhow, needless to say,

Jacob and Esau’s relationship

took a downward turn after that!

In fact, Esau made plans to kill Jacob

after a suitable period of mourning for their father was over.

So Jacob hightailed it out of there,

and went to work for several years for his uncle Laban,

and married Laban’s daughters Leah and Rachel

(one accidentally, one on purpose),

and has eleven sons by the time

we get to this episode of the wrestling match.

(This is what you call making a long story short!)

Now, as an adult,

Jacob has determined to make peace with his brother.

So he sends messengers to Esau,

and they gladly bring a message back

that Esau is coming to meet them

with an army of four hundred.

Well, that doesn’t sound too promising.

So next Jacob sends a present to Esau:

goats and sheep and cows and camels and donkeys.

Then, as night falls,

he sends his wives and children on ahead across the stream,

and he is left alone.

And then the strange wrestling match takes place.

Jacob and a stranger,

who turns out to be God,

going at each other tooth and nail,

till dawn lights the sky.

And towards the end,

when it appears that the match is going to be a draw,

God seems to pull rank just a bit.

God touches Jacob on the thigh,

and puts it out of joint.

Only then does Jacob realize

he is not wrestling with any ordinary man.

So he insists on receiving a blessing before he lets go …

interesting, isn’t it, how fixated Jacob is

on getting himself blessed …

He insists on a blessing from this stranger,

because, as it turns out,

Jacob has been wrestling with God.

Now, as I said,

the story has always seemed a little strange to me.

There is so much that the text doesn’t tell us.

Why was God picking on Jacob?

Nowhere does the stranger give any reason

for his sudden appearance and aggressive action.

And how was Jacob strong enough to wrestle God all night long?

That doesn’t even make sense.

And why, only at the very end, did God cripple Jacob?

Makes God sound like sort of a sore loser.

And finally, perhaps most importantly,

why is the story here in the first place,

and what were we supposed to learn from this odd episode?

Well …the first thing I think we must recognize

is that it is appropriate, and perhaps even expected,

that we will wrestle with God.

Perhaps not in quite as literal a sense as Jacob did …

but wrestle we must.

Jacob’s grandfather Abraham, the grand patriarch of all Israel,

got into verbal sparring matches with God

with some frequency.

In fact, on a few occasions,

he even succeeded in changing God’s mind

about a particular plan of action.

For example, Abraham bargained God down to

a refusal to destroy the city of Sodom,

if only five righteous people can be found in it.

(God originally insisted on forty.

Not that it mattered anyway,

since apparently there weren’t even five.)

Later, the prophets of the Old Testament

wrangled with God rather often as well –

with God on the one side,

continually ready to punish Israel for its many sins,

and the prophets on the other,

pleading that God temper justice with mercy.

On numerous occasions in the books of different prophets,

we find the arguments and wrestling going on,

and then find language like

“God repented of the evil which [he intended to do].”

That is, the prophet changed God’s mind.

And in the New Testament, we find even Jesus –

at least, the human part of his nature –

wrestling with God on occasion.

Most notably, in the garden of Gethsemane,

pleading that God find a different way for the story to end

than with his own suffering and death.

If so many of the heroes and heroines of the Bible

wrestled with God in some way,

then why should we be afraid to join the fray?

Especially when things are not going well with us or with a loved one,

we want to get face-to-face with God,

and ask hard, even angry questions,

like “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

or

“Why won’t you heal me from this illness?”

Sometimes, it seems that wrestling with God makes a difference –

from the human point of view, anyway.

But this also raises some sticky theological questions!

- Can human beings really change God’s mind about anything?

(And even if we can, should we?)

- If God’s mind is changed about something,

does that mean that God was wrong before?

From a human vantage point,

there are no certain answers to those questions.

They are a mystery.

And I don’t say that just to avoid them,

but because there truly are some things

that we, at this point in our lives with God,

cannot know or understand.

What we do know, though, is this:

for whatever reason,

God has chosen to be in and to remain in relationship

with us human critters,

and this means not only

that we must take God seriously,

but also that God takes us very seriously.

We do have the privilege and the responsibility

to question, to argue, to challenge, to wrestle with, God,

when we feel we must.

Or perhaps, as in Jacob’s case,

when God feels that we must!

Of course, Jacob’s story raises another question

that we don’t dare try to dodge.

The story ends with Jacob

limping off to meet his brother, Esau.

It might seem, thus, that God has punished Jacob

for his presumption in wrestling with the Almighty

and demanding a blessing.

And if so, then,

even if God does supposedly want us to engage / wrestle / challenge,

who among us would be dumb enough to do it

if God is just going to get mad and punish us?

But I don’t think that punishment

is the point of what happened to Jacob.

His limping is more symbolic,

although for him I’m sure it was real.

It reflects the truth we all know:

that when we have encountered God,

and been encountered by God

in any serious kind of way,

we do become out of step with the rest of the world.

That picture of Jacob,

limping away from his confrontation with the divine,

is a marvelous image.

Whether or not we’re comfortable believing

that our wrestling might change God …

what is certain is that those confrontations change us.

At times it may indeed seem that we are wounded,

and that God has won the battle …

Jacob apparently limped for the rest of his life …

Yet God said to Jacob,

“You have striven with God and with mortals,

and you have prevailed.”

God does not punish us

for faithfully wrestling with tough questions,

even when that turns out to mean wrestling with God also.

But God does change us.

And change is painful, at least at first.

So go ahead, wrestle with God if you need to.

And if you come away limping, rejoice …

because it means that God has touched you.

As God touched Jacob …

As we go forward into this new season of the church year

-- with Rally Day just two weeks away --

and as we go forward with planning for new efforts to be

a “Welcoming Congregation” to our Oak Cliff neighborhood --

now is an excellent time to reconsider our future in the light of Jacob’s story.

Looking into the future is rather like wrestling with God in the dark:

we cannot control the future,

although we can try to anticipate

and plan for what may happen.

Part of the challenge of dealing with the future

is being willing to give up our grip on the past

and urge the past to give up its grip on us!

Only if we let go of the past – and the past will let go of us –

can we turn our attention to the future.

Just as Jacob had to come to terms with his past –

and his struggles with his brother Esau –

so we need to give up our grip on the past,

literally, to let it go –

so that the past no longer holds us back

from becoming what God would have us become.

Otherwise, the future will just sneak up on us like a shadow in the night

and we will have no hands free to deal with it.

Struggling with our future can be painful, too.

Looking the future in the eye,

really seeing what our future holds,

can be a blow to our self-image.

Just as Jacob limped away from his wrestling match with God,

never able to walk about in the old way,

so we – in letting go of the past and in encountering our future – will never be the same again.

We become more like the heroes of the faith

when we take God seriously enough to wrestle.

May we have the courage to fight when we must,

and the grace to bear our scars with joy.

And in whatever happens, we can count on one thing in this encounter:

we can expect to be changed.

Amen.