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"SOMETIMES
YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOU'RE MESSING WITH"
TEXT: Genesis 32:22-31; Romans 8:35,37-39; Matthew 14:13-21 Genesis
32:22-31
TEXT: GENESIS 32:22-31 For most of my Junior and Senior High School years I played the violin in the school orchestras. I say most because by the time I reached the 11th grade I had decided that I was too masculine to play a violin. You see to be macho, a word that I did not know at the time, meant that you had to engage in "manly pursuits" and manly pursuits meant sports and cars and such. Well, I couldn't make a team beyond fencing (and for that you had to wear tights!) and I could not afford a car and I needed some form of extra-curricular so I just stuck with the violin that I had begun to play with my parent's encouragement (manipulation by guilt). We couldn't afford a new ¾ size violin which was what I needed--so macho me got to learn on a full size hand me down from my father. This is it! Anyway, I carted this case to school several times a week bearing the taunts of other boys along the way (yes, I really did walk over a mile to school). The taunts at first bothered me but I overcame them with mind power. My mind powered my innocent sissy violin case into a means of hiding my Thompson submachine gun like the Al Capone gangsters used. Sticks and stones and words may hurt me, but my violin could destroy them if they ever pushed me too far. You have to remember that that was the late fifties and early sixties and folk didn't really carry such weapons into their school or office buildings like they seem to do now-fantasy has become gross reality far too often in these past few months. By the 8th grade I no longer could pretend that this innocent violin was a transformer which morphed into a weapon. However, I was stuck in the orchestra and the chorus and looking desperately for some way to be more macho. Then in the 11th grade the opportunity came. The String Bass player moved and the orchestra teacher asked me to learn to play the bass. Now that was the instrument to play if you didn't play the guitar or trumpet or drums, because all the cool bands needed bass players. So I moved to bass and never looked back. After all, I had only been first chair of the second violin section and on bass I was not only first chair, I was only chair! I played that bass through college before I moved on to other things. I was quite conflicted during those years over this violin. It represented an ongoing inner tension between being like my parents saw me and desired me to be, and the way that I wanted to see myself and others to see me. Outgoing and outdoorsy, ruddy, macho, cool, adventurer-- or sweet, gentle, pastoral, refined, goody-two-shoes, following the path as chosen by someone else. The fellow who was first chair first violin section all those years had a decidedly different means of dealing with those issues. He decided early on that he was going to be a professional wrestler after high school. (He was a punk rocker, a skateboarder, a gothic freak before folk even got used to the Beetles long hair.) The only way he planned to use a violin in the future he said was to buy a bunch of cheap ones as his trademark wrestling hook. He would break one on the head of each of his opponents. Don't know that he ever did that part of it but he did become a professional wrestler. "Rocky" hit the rings before there was ever a WWF and whatever that other organization is called. Saw him on TV once. Smashed a violin and then went through all the choreographed violence of the big ring. Lost the "fight" that particular night but lived to wrestle again. It amazes me as I channel surf to see how much time and money is invested in the farce that's called professional wrestling. Jesse Ventura calls pro wrestling "ballet with violence," and never has a ballet packed in so many fans and made so much money. In a recent week, eight of the top 15 TV programs on basic cable were wrestling matches, with each show airing in about 3 million homes. Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling and the rival World Wrestling Federation boast $1 billion in annual sales of everything from T-shirts to action figures to pay-per-view matches. --Jeffrey Zazlow, "A question we'll NEVER ask again," USA, January 8-10, 1999, 5. The fog machines layer the coliseum with clouds, the fans chant, the rock music builds to a crescendo (if it were ever soft enough to build to anything discernable) and high out of the stands the lights flash across the space finally coming to rest on a raised platform from which a man in tights or less surrounded by babes, his muscles and hers bulging, begins to strut toward center ring for a fight so staged that you wonder what all the threats were for. It is like a surrealistic dream and people pay big time to watch it up close and in the flesh. The clowns in devil's suits thrash about and we enter into the conflict. There is always a bad one and while the opponent may not be rightly labeled as "good" at least he or she is not as "bad." I wonder if perhaps the lure of such extravagant theatrics is rooted in what my sometime therapists speak of as "dream work." Several years ago a popular book for men who were trying to sort through life issues was "Iron John." In that seminal work, Robert Bly makes a strong connection between what happens in our dreams and classic folk tales of coming of age. It is the tale of inner conflict projected outward onto ancestral heroes as they struggle with the conflicting poles within themselves. Much like whether my violin was a violin or a Tommy gun. But more like the classic story of Jacob's betrayal of his brother Esau and the night that Jacob was headed home. A night in which a wrestling match of mythic proportions takes place and Jacob becomes transformed. After that fateful wrestling match, Jacob becomes more fully human than he has ever been. Elie Wiesel compares the story of Jacob and the wrestling match by the river Jabbok to a mystical poem, mysterious from beginning to end, in which every question brings forth another. So here is Jacob, alone yet not alone at night in the wilderness, running from Esau, yet destined to meet him on the morrow after all the years. Here he is after the Bethel experience-the dream of heavenly messengers-a time of wonderful and frightful dialogue with God-a time of covenant making, promise and presence. Perhaps you have had such an experience. O maybe the angels and stairs were missing. Yet, it was a time of special closeness with God and a time when you experienced what you could refer to as "God's call on your life." However, memory of one's covenant with God can weaken with time. Now we see Jacob up against it. Esau is coming with four hundred men and Jacob has sent his possessions, his children and his wives ahead of him in hopes that Esau will be softened. But will his gifts be enough to appease his deeply wronged brother? From the time of his earliest memories he had heard his mother recall the promise of how it would be through him-Jacob-that God would carry out the promise to Abraham. But it had seemed that God's promise was to be thwarted by Isaac's love of Esau and so Jacob had taken matters into his own hands-conniver that he had become-and then he had had to run for it. Now twenty years later he was on the way home to face the music. Alone by the river Jabbok, he lies down to a fitful rest. This time there are no opening heavens, no stairways reaching to earth, no angels traveling between heaven and earth to minister to him, no God standing at his head with promises. This time there is a life or death wrestling match with a stranger. The match continues through the night and Jacob demands from his opponent his name. The opponent answers with a question, "Why do you want my name?" As if to say, "What is it to you?" The struggle continues, the identity of the nameless one seems to shift. Is it a man, an angel, or God? Jacob, who should know as well as anyone, continues to name his antagonist to the point that he states, "I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved." Earlier in the text, the wrestling partner confirmed Jacob's appraisal by asserting, "…you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed." Later when Jacob meets up with Esau, he exclaims, "for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God, with such favor you have received me." To wrestle with our own identity is to wrestle with human relationships and, in turn, is to wrestle with God-- and vice versa. Yet what else does the match disclose? Do we find a gift of grace in such an experience-a saving reality-and if so, saving us for what? At times it seems that the "church is saying that the word of faith will remove trials and tribulations, that grace will protect you from failure and hardship, and that we were meant to be what William McElvaney has called the "Society for the Promotion and Preservation of the Privileged and Prosperous, at Ease in Zion." While we may cast stones at televangelists who make much of such a smug approach, we had better confess that the desire for such grace lurks in all of us. I yearn for simple answers to share with you as I prepare sermons, but there are none. If we live with impending sorrow or tragedy, do not all of us desire simplicity and swiftness of sure solution? Do we not yearn for simple once and for all solutions to the wars which are waged in our world, for the hunger that besets millions, for the brokenness within our own lives? Give me a simple, one-two-three process which by following I can become the success that I dreamed that I would be. Instead, we wrestle with life; life wrestles with us. We yearn for the grace of quick solutions, and when none comes, we are just as quick to conclude that there is no grace. Our story offers another option-a more biblical one I might add than that which we would attribute to the gospel. The story is "that grace is often wrapped around a wrestling match with life, around ambiguity, complexity, and uncertain outcomes." God meets us in the wilderness, in our aloneness, at the river Jabbok as we prepare to face the mess that we have made of our past. There God wrestles with us in as real a way as God did when we had been stirred by the presence of God by our head with staircases and promises. There God wrestles with us to bring us from our fear to blessing. Our God who promised not to forsake us will not let us alone until we have faced fear. Our God loves us enough to encounter us, to engage us, to wrestle with us until we do not want to let go and until we have a new name. As we wrestle with the ambiguities of life-both within and without us-grace is present. We serve a wrestling God. A wrestling God of grace who follows us in our fleeing. Not a convenient grace, but a confronting grace. Jacob was ready to quit and God said, "Come out and wrestle." We are ready to throw up our hands at the ambiguities between what should be and what is and God says, "Come out, come forth, and wrestle with me that I might give you a new look on life and a new blessing, perhaps the very blessing for which you have been striving all of your life or maybe one for which you had not even considered to look. Come, wrestle and live." Jacob refused to let go until he had a blessing. How like our vintage Jacob. Looking for leverage, for an advantage over an opponent, always on the make for a blessing. Instead of getting a blessing, he got a new name. You see, Not only is God a wrestling God; God is a renaming God. Jacob, the Grasper, the Supplanter, becomes Israel, the one who will forever strive and wrestle with God. The meaning of the blessing and birthright is turned upside down. Jacob becomes the father of the twelve tribes of Israel and is signed up almost against his will for a larger story and journey by initiative from elsewhere. The plot of the blessing is not what Jacob had in mind. Isn't that just like God? "You want a blessing do you? Well, it's yours! You will have the blessing, the birthright of my Covenant. You will have the promise of my faithfulness and affirmation-and you will have the confronting, demanding and often ambiguous relationship of my claim and purpose that always attends the promise of the Covenant. This is the blessing!" Isn't this the mystery of what we have come to call as Christians justifying and sanctifying grace, a grace for us, yet in us and through us? A grace that frees us to be servants? A grace that renames us for a new destiny in the larger vision of God? What happened to Jacob is fundamental. For what God is doing-wrestling and renaming-is found from Genesis to the last line of history. What God is doing is wrestling us into a larger vision, an eternal history, a never-ending story, an ultimate promise and claim. Every biography and autobiography of those who claim faith in God is the story of the initiative of God restoring folk from an alternative or altered script. Moses, Jonah, Mary, Zacchaeus, Paul, you, me. The story is always different in its particulars but the same in intent. In the wrestling and renaming, God is asking us, "Is life finally only our story, or is life a larger story of the broadest of connections?" Then along comes God. Not that God had taken a walk away from us, but now God wants to wrestle us beyond our self-centered Camelots to a new dimension of life with in covenant with God. God seeks to save us to become our deepest and truest selves for God and for others, to restore us to our intended purpose in community. God wrestles with us and renames us as we prepare to move into a greater reality-to covenant-a more life-giving and more freeing relationship than our imagined blueprints could offer. Finally, our wrestling and renaming God is also a wounding God. Jacob's thigh was put out of joint and he limped from that day forward. This image certainly does not fit our image of God as comforter, as balm of Gilead or as healer. The wound could be the wound that offers wholeness to us all by offering us security in God's purpose. The wound reminds us that we share in the world's pain, and yet offer healing through the vulnerability of self-giving love. The Wounding, the dis-location, serves to remind us that our assumptions, our professional pride, our self-serving ways have been put out of place and freedom is to be found in the limp. The wounding could be the channel through which the life of God pours. In our weakness the strength of God becomes more evident to us and to others. Perhaps our woundedness becomes our Achilles heel in reverse. Our wound of vulnerability is the occasion of life and the deepest of joy. It becomes the indelible mark of the fact that we have wrestled with God and prevailed-not to defeat God, but to the getting of a new name and the grace which comes as we walk in covenant with God. I rejoice that we serve a wrestling God who invites us to enter into a place of blessing and woundedness, as people who have been given new names, and who share covenant as a new family, a people who were not a people but now are a kingdom. That's the kind of person I always wanted to become, I just didn't realize that a wrestling match would be needed to get my attention. An article in this past January's Sojourners Magazine by Vincent Harding described the spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr. as a "spirituality of wrestling with the angels, the angels within and the angels around. The demonic angels and the divine angels. No spirituality without wrestling -- that's where King was coming from." (--Vincent Harding, "Dangerous Spirituality," Sojourners, January-February 1999, 30-31.) We, too, have wrestled and now we know -- because we were there and it happened to us -- that God does not despise us for our supplanting and deceit, but forever ambushes our lives with new chances; that God does not renege on promises made even under duress; that God may slip away at daybreak, but never abandons us; that God can render us vulnerable to all our fast-approaching Esaus, the siblings we robbed of birthrights with whom we must make peace; that the gracious reunion of sinners and sinned-against is the blessing of God." (--J. Mary Luti, "You Are Israel," Christian Century, October 7, 1998, 897.)
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