Wrestling with God, Limping toward Home
Genesis 32:22-31; Matthew 14:13-21
Matthew 14:13-21
13 [Jesus withdrew] in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.”
19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
Genesis 32:22-31
22 Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had.
24 Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 25 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. 26 Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” 27 So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”
28 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.” 29 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.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” 31 The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
The Sermon
Who’s to say how or when a life changes after a life-changing experience?
Back when I was just out of college, I did a year of service for the PC(USA) as a Mission Volunteer in England.
In early October, when I had been there for just a few weeks, I was invited to visit some missionary friends in Edinburgh, which was an eight hour bus ride north of where I was living. So, on the appointed Friday night, I got one of the parishioners at my church to drop me off at the bus station, which was 20 miles from my home, in time for the midnight bus departure.
We got to a point that seemed to be out in the middle of nowhere, but off the main road, there was a giant platform where the buses would come for boarding. We got there a little after 11:00 P.M. and saw that it was empty, but having come early enough to wait for the bus to arrive, I told my driver to go on home; the bus would come to get me shortly. Off he went into the night.
By 11:30, I was beginning to get a little uncomfortable being the only person at the bus depot, in the middle of an otherwise completely uninhabited area. Finally, a bus pulled up. I asked the driver if he was going to Edinburgh, and he replied something that sounded very much like “achhueen rrrrrheeeuch hauuragghh o’ the gheearren tae deeuh!”
I said, “I beg your pardon?” (I'm from Bloomington, Illinois. Not a lot of Scottish brogues around there to get used to.)
Eventually I interpreted that the bus for Edinburgh left from a different station, but—if I hadn't missed it—I could catch a shuttle that would take me to the bus. All I had to do to catch the shuttle was walk about a mile up the highway. The empty, pitch-black highway.
By myself.
At night.
In the dark.
In a foreign country.
Five minutes later, I was walking out there, alone in that great, silent emptiness. I was 22—still bulletproof, so I didn’t know enough to be worried about some of the things that may have crossed Jacob’s mind in his somewhat similar circumstances.
One of which might have been, “What if somebody just jumped out of the darkness at me?”
It had now been twenty years since Jacob, on the move to get away from the place where he had done so much to disgrace himself—namely, home—had laid his amoral head down for the night, and had a spectacular dream of a ramp leading up and down from Heaven.
Now, he’s on the move again, twenty years older, and it’s debatable how much wiser.
He had worked seven years for a family patriarch named Laban so that he could marry Laban’s gorgeous daughter, Rachel. But it turned out that Laban was as much of a trickster as Jacob, and so at the end of seven years of indentured servitude, it was not Rachel who was brought forward as a bride for Jacob, but another daughter.
But Jacob wanted Rachel.
And so, Jacob married the daughter presented to him but worked another seven years so that he could also marry Rachel. (I love it when they say, “We need to return to Biblical family values.”)
Then, there was some more swindling and conniving between Jacob and his father-in-law, and eventually, they made an uneasy covenant with each other: an agreement not to come into the other’s territory to do harm. And Jacob, after twenty years, decided to head back home.
And one night, he got both his wives and his whole family and all his employees and all his animals, and sent them on their way, across a stream, while he waited behind.
By himself.
At night.
In the dark.
In a strange country, out in the middle of nowhere.
And this appears to be the Bible’s worst-written line of story-telling: “ Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” Does that normally happen? With no warning, and no explanation, someone has emerged from the darkness, and Jacob and the man wrestle.
Our lives are filled with surprises, questions and setbacks.
We’ll wrestle with our temptations, wrestle with our emotions, we’ll wrestle with our relationships and our vocations and our opinions and our sense of what’s right and wrong.
We’ll wrestle with questions of how much we should give to our capital campaign. We’ll wrestle with our decision on how to vote when we go into the booth in November. We’ll wrestle with whether or not to say what really ought to be said, or not to say what maybe doesn’t need to be said.
And sometimes, in every human life, we will find ourselves in the desolate darkness, on our way from one place to another, or just marking time where we are.
And we may not be looking for a fight; we may not be looking for anything at all. But suddenly, it happens.
The successful stock broker suddenly finds he can’t shake the feeling that he’s supposed to be in seminary. (I knew that guy.)
The lady with the bruises and the scars and the burn marks that she keeps hidden under her clothes feels an undeniable realization that she does not have to smile broadly in public and tolerate the abuse in private anymore.
The multi-billionaire reassesses the world of which he owns such a large share and says, “There’s got to be a way to feed, educate and get medical treatment to all those people.”
The minister is overwhelmed with the sense that after listening to herself preach for 20 years, she can’t think of the last time she did anything to put food in front of a hungry person.
The angry daughter opens up her cell phone for no apparent reason and starts rehearsing ways to say, “Mom, I need to talk to you.”
An unseen stranger has found them in the middle of their darkness, and begun the wrestling match.
The element of surprise must have made Jacob’s adrenaline kick into high gear; the animal terror of being jumped and wrestled in the complete darkness must have provided a quick burst of energy.
It doesn’t say what time it was when the man came at him, so I wonder... After about half an hour, the adrenaline has worn off. After an hour of wrestling, your muscles ache and you’re sick of this ridiculous situation; after 90 minutes you'd almost rather the other person just win already and get it over with.
That’s how it happens sometimes, in the hospital, the nursing home, the home of the person who’s no longer able to get out of bed, let alone get out of the house. You get tired of wrestling.
It’s what happens with the teenager who’s been told to just say no in a landscape filled with drugs and alcohol and all kinds of temptations and pressures. You get tired of the wrestling. It’s easy for an adult to tell a teenager to just say no. A teenager knows there’s no “just” about it. It’s a constant, ongoing wrestling match, and sometimes, you’d rather just give up than have to fight it any more.
Jacob is an excellent representative of the human race: strong-willed, supremely self-interested, willing to be dishonest if it will help him get to where he wants to be; able to cheat even those closest to him time and time again and, for the most part, to get away with it. He is, in a way, human being at its most raw.
And he proves to be a worthy opponent: for most of the night, they fight to a draw. The advantage changes hands a couple of times, and during those exchanges, words are exchanged also. The result is that Jacob will come away from this all-night duel with a new identity, a second chance, that could only come through the encounter with God.
Jacob’s new name, Israel, has a meaning that is a little more obscure, a little more mysterious. A rough translation would be, “God preserves” or “God protects.” At the end of the long night’s encounter, as the sun is just about to come over the horizon, Walter Brueggemann says, “Jacob will not release his grip, only now it is a grip not of violence but of need, like the grip of a drowning man.”
Who’s to say how or when a life changes after a life-changing experience?
Sometimes God comes into the dark emptiness of a human life straggling out in the middle of nowhere, not with sweetness and light, but to wrestle. God loves you enough to interfere with your life and your intentions, pushing you to become something better than you are, to find your identity only after you have stayed up all night wrestling to exhaustion.
Sometimes, like Jacob, we aren't even sure who or what it is that we're wrestling with. And even when daylight breaks, the result is often as murky as it is profound, as mysterious as it is undeniable. And although may be able to walk away from a wrestling match with God on our own two feet, for a while anyway, we usually end up limping.
Sometimes, that limp comes in the form of the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” Humility, patience, generosity, a truer discipleship: these are not usually had without some cost.
But of this we can be sure: God wins the wrestling match by breaking into places that we have meant to keep secure. We can all be as formidable an opponent as Jacob: we’ll wrestle all night to keep our hearts from becoming vulnerable to real love, to keep our made-up minds from being changed from the absolute certainty of our convictions to the overriding call of compassion.
God wins by creating light in dark places; by manufacturing hope when the human mind has exhausted its reasons to try to find hope. God wins by providing bread when there is no bread to be had from any of the sources on which we have come to rely.
The disciples came to Jesus and said, “This is a deserted place, and it’s late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” And Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” And they said, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.”
“You’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight,” said Bruce Cockburn.
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.
Keith Grogg
Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church
Carolina Beach, NC
August 3, 2008
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