WRESTLING WITH GOD

 Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8]

Experts who study the human brain tell us that the earliest autobiographical memories begin at the age of two or three years.  “Infantile amnesia” (as it is called) describes the fact that we cannot remember much about our earliest experiences.  This is so because the hippocampus (that part of the human brain that processes experience into memory) is undeveloped.  These early memories are also elusive because our ability to use language at such a young age is also under-developed, and experience that cannot be named is often lost.

One of the earliest memories I have as a young child of my parents involves that point in the day when my father would come home from work.  At that time, we were a family of three, plus my first dog.  Having worked as a secretary on Wall Street prior to marrying my Dad, my Mom was a stay-at-home mother.  Thinking back and trying hard to put several puzzle pieces together, I think the year was 1954.  I was four years old, which is the current age of our grandson, Hugh.

I say this because 1954 contained several life-focusing moments for young Michael.  First, my parents and I moved from an apartment into our very first house.  The house was in the country, which provided many other focusing stories for my Brooklyn, New York, born and raised parents: Things such as needing a well for drinking water and the harsh realization that turning a tap was not an automatic dispenser.  Another reason I think the time was 1954 is that for my July birthday my grandparents gave me a dog – a beagle, whom I named “George”.

Another memory focuser came when my Dad brought home our first television set.  And as 1954 waned, I learned that I would be having a spring brother.  But the source of the memory that still rings in my heart and leaves a lump in my throat is jogged from today’s Old Testament lesson – the one about Jacob wrestling with God.

Each night, when my father would come home from his first professional job (one he held within General Electric for the next four decades!), he would take off his hat.  (At that time, real men wore fedora hats; and my old man could wear a hat with the cocked, confident style that you can see in pictures of World War II men in uniform.)  He would take off his hat, hang up his coat, and in greeting kiss my mother – and then me.  This pattern was the day’s highlight for both my Mom and me.  I remember that so clearly.  After the greetings, my folks would sit for a bit and talk about “how was your day, dear?”, and then it was my turn.

Sitting down on the family couch, my father would call me to him, where we would “rough-house”.  We would “box” with one another.  That my father would howl in his mock effort to defend himself from me and wince in theatrically tortured pain at my “blows” filled me with a deep glee and a sacred connection.  Sigmond Freud notwithstanding, our “boxing” was the deep formational and loving play between a father and a son.  And truth to tell, that memory holds the fact that my life never could get enough of that sort of connection with my Dad.

This routine, however, had a short lifespan because my mother – ever the family referee --would come from the kitchen to break up the “fight”.  She would give voice to the round-ending bell, singing in her soprano: “ding, ding, ding!”  And that was the end of the day’s round.  All three of us had won!

All these years later, I remember this experience with great emotion and appreciation; and it causes me to connect meaningfully with our first reading from Genesis.  In particular, I wonder what it was like for Jacob to wrestle with God.  I wonder this because in my experience of God and trying to be faithful to the Holy One, I know that if we don’t personally wrestle with God at some memorable level, we will never know the reality that is God nor will we be able to receive the love of God.

The Genesis reading of Jacob’s bout with God is one of the seminal stories of the biblical witness.  And I acknowledge that the identity of Jacob’s nighttime opponent is intentionally left in ambiguity.  The nature of Jacob’s opponent fills the mind with so many compelling and confusing possibilities.  For instance, was Jacob’s opponent a demon of the night’s deep darkness?  Was it a demon from the darkness of Jacob’s own soul?  Was it an angel of God?  Was it -- could it have been -- the Maker of heaven and earth?  In a real manner of speaking and living, the answer is “all of the above”, but rest assured that whatever form this dark night battler took or was, at the center of it all stood God, which accounts for the match’s outcome: Jacob limped.

The setting that surrounds this Old Testament lesson resounds with serious drama that is not for the faint of heart.  For the truth is that despite our best efforts to domesticate God and control our life with God, the Holy One always rejects such a training leash.  This crucial point is made by C. S. Lewis in his first of the “Narnia” books: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  In hearing about the story’s Christ-figure, the lion, Aslan, Lewis has Sudan, his steady adolescent character, ask about Aslan.  She quite soberly and realistically wonders if he, a lion, is “safe”.  “No,” comes the immediate answer, “he is not safe, but he is good”.

I believe that this accounts for the fact that “our” God, needs (in an important manner of speaking) to “rough-house” with us so that we can know what true partnership requires – not a competition to conquer and control but a time to experience the reality of Communion’s transforming connection.  This is not done virtually but with the sweat and blood of God and us.

If you know the biblical story, you remember that Jacob is in a serious jam.  Not only is he the biblical prototype of a “schemer”, but a life also entangled with moral ambiguities, Jacob’s twin, the first-born Esau, has spent his entire life trying to get even with Jacob for stealing his birthright.  Moreover, Laban, Jacob’s uncle, out-schemes Jacob by leveraging Jacob’s love of Laban’s second daughter, Rachel.  Laban agrees to allow Jacob to marry Rachel, but first Jacob must serve his conspiring uncle for 14 years. Oh yes, in the fine print, Jacob had to marry the first daughter, which subsequently made for tense Thanksgiving dinners together.

Our reading starts in high gear with the report that Jacob’s twin, Esau, is coming with his personal militia, to meet his scurrilous brother to settle the score between them.  Jacob, in turn, secures the defense of his family and his holdings by sending them across the river and out of the blast area of Esau’s wrath.

Physically exhausted, emotionally terrified, and all alone in spite of his accomplishments, at night fall Jacob collapses in the wilderness in a furtive attempt to gain some sleep – even on a stone pillow.  And so as the story tells us, Jacob dreams a most memorable, life-changing dream.

Dreams are special.  Whatever their interpreted meaning is or is not, one revealing fact remains constant: namely, we do not control our dreams.  While we may defend ourselves from their impact by not remembering them in the morning, nonetheless, bidden or not bidden, dreams do come.  And so does God.

His head against the smooth, stone pillow, his life in the proverbial sling, Jacob dreamed of wrestling with God or something of God.  And from the sound of it, it was a fight to the death, and it lasted all night.

Yet, with the imminent rising of the sun, the God-antagonist needed to return to his place of origin and, thereby, demanded to be released from Jacob’s fierce grip.  In all his previous dealings, Jacob’s scheming had always won out, but in the case of the dream, Jacob’s winning against the mysterious stranger tellingly consists of fighting to a draw.  The enigmatic adversary has not been able to best Jacob, and though Jacob is wounded in the battle, neither can the unnamed figure break loose from Jacob’s grip.  And, I think, herein lies the point of the battle.

For Jacob, the dream indicated that he was the inheritor of the Covenant that his grandfather, Abraham, and his father, Isaac, established with God.  Yet, this inheritance needed to be grasped, not simply inherited.  Jacob had to own his part, own his place in the Covenanted inheritance.  In this regard, he could not be a “trust-fund baby”.  In his willingness to engage in the wrestling, Jacob revealed (to God but mostly to himself) that he was capable and (in the end) willing to be God’s companion, God’s partner.  In this sense, the struggle with God was a fight to the death: Jacob’s death: Israel’s birth.

And for God’s part in this battle, if God were the adversary, how was it that Jacob was not vaporized by “God the Almighty” for such mortal impudence?  Surely, if anyone fit the hellfire and brimstone notion of sinners being held “in the hands of an angry God”, Jacob was the poster boy.  Yet, I believe that God, like my own father, engaged Jacob in a “rough-housing” opportunity as a beloved son and covenanted participant to prepare the schemer for something greater.

Consequently, Jacob was blessed by the divine stranger.  God wrestled with Jacob so that Jacob could discover that God was more than just a worthy, haunting opponent but a willing life-giving partner.

So, God gained a tested son of the Covenant.  Jacob wrestled with God and lived to talk about it.  But neither God nor Jacob remained the same.  God latched on to a redeemable “schemer”, and for his part Jacob limped into a new life.

Like Jacob, you and I need to wrestle with God and limp visibly, “marked as Christ’s own forever.”  Amen.