God Blesses Our Wrestling
Pentecost + 15 – September
22, 2019
Jacob Wrestles God
Intro: Kids wrestling with a
parent who is clearly the stronger person
· My kids wanting to wrestle with their dad (or sometimes me)
·
Physical contact,
joy, maybe getting something out of their system
·
Clearly not going
to win, and yet, persistent in the wrestling
TT: Jacob wrestled a mightier
opponent
·
Thought about this in light of this story from Genesis
·
We hear about Jacob, whose name means “heel” because he came out of the
womb grasping his twin brother Esau’s heel.
o Even in utero the 2 wrestled
with one another, trying to best each other, and this continued throughout life
into adulthood
o Sibling rivalry, each one a
favorite of one of their parents (Esau – Isaac; Jacob – Rebekah)
·
The name Jacob also has the sense of supplanter or trickster
o He is one who uses moments
of weakness in others to his advantage – getting Esau to sell his birthright
for a bowl of stew
o Deceiving an old, nearly
blind Isaac into giving him the blessing that was supposed to be for the first
born son (at mother Rebekah’s urging)
o And has to flee to his
uncle’s in a distant land in order to escape Esau’s murderous thoughts of
revenge
·
Jacob is older now, perhaps wiser – sent back on his way to his
father’s land by God
o And still concerned, many
years later (20ish?) about how Esau will respond – so sends messengers ahead,
who return to tell him that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men!
o So Jacob sends a series of
gifts ahead of him – cattle, camels, sheep, goats, donkeys, in hopes of
appeasing him
o Splits camp into 2 – and
finally sends family across the river and spends
the night alone
·
Jacob is left alone, the
reading says – and a man wrestled him
until daybreak
TW: We wrestle with God
sometimes too
·
Oh, we can relate to Jacob’s wrestling, can’t we?
·
Not the physical, but the mental, emotional times when we find
ourselves alone, often at night
o And the struggle and the
doubts and the questions come and attack us – or at least that’s how it feels
o Not usually just one night
·
When uncertainty of life is just so present and so raw
o And anxiety and fear just
won’t leave us alone and let us get some much needed sleep
o Sooo very many reasons;
sometimes rational, sometimes not so much
·
And we wrestle in those moments, not just with worry and stress, but if
we are people of faith, we find we are wrestling with God too
o Asking the deep, hard,
unanswerable questions of why bad things happen to good people
o Wondering if God has the power
to fix everything that is going wrong, or might go wrong, why God doesn’t just
fix them already; why God lets such awful and traumatic things happen to us and
the people we love
·
We want to pin God down, get an answer, get some resolution, find some
peace
·
Don’t tend to enjoy it in the ways that kids enjoy wrestling with their
parents, and yet…
GT: God Blessed Jacob in the
Wrestling
·
This story from Genesis is a great reminder that wrestling with God is
not a bad thing
·
In fact, even though Jacob walks away limping, he walks away blessed
o Through his persistence and
willingness to hold on to this being who had taken hold of him, Jacob finds
himself given a new name – Israel – “the one who strives with God”
o A new identity that doesn’t
ignore or forget what he has been in the past, but that opens the way for him
to grow into someone different going forward
o And who becomes the father
of a nation that will continue to wrestle with God through all of the ups and
downs, rebellion and faithfulness that will be a part of their lives and
relationship with God
o A nation, a people, who are
blessed to be a blessing to the world, ever since God called Abraham – this is
the covenant made; and some of that blessing comes through the wrestling
GW: Wrestling with God is
part of our spiritual inheritance – and God blesses us in the wrestling
·
God is a mightier opponent than we are, just like kids with grown-ups
·
But just as a parent will engage the wrestling, even though they could
“win” almost immediately, b/c they know that the wrestling is about connection
and contact and a need to work things out – God honors our need to wrestle with
someone bigger than ourselves – even though God too could beat us in a second
·
God enters into the wrestling with us, holding on to us in the midst of
our struggles and our grappling for as long as the wrestling takes, knowing
that sometimes that what we need to do in order to feel and experience God’s
love, in the blessing that comes after the struggle
·
Because God isn’t in this great wrestling match to win by besting us,
God is in it to win by drawing us to God’s self – we see that in the death of
Jesus, who allowed himself to get pinned to a cross so that we might see the
depth of God’s love
·
And so, we too, are given a new name through the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus – joined to him in the waters of baptism (water is a big
thing in the Bible and in our lives!) – we are given the name “beloved child of
God”, no matter what else our given names may be, no matter what others (or
even we ourselves) may call us
·
God wrestles with us as a parent with beloved children, holding on to
us until our wrestling is done. No matter how long that takes, God will never
let us go.
·
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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