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Jacob Part 7
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
And it's meant to be a confession. By just saying his own name, he confesses. I'm Jacob. I'm the one who stole what wasn't mine.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here, and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:So we are almost through our Jacob series. This is week seven of eight. And today, we arrive at the namesake story for the series, wrestling with God. And I get to preach it. I'm gonna pretend that I just heard an uproarious round of applause.
Speaker 1:So thank you very much. Oh, you're so sweet. Okay. Seriously. In today's story, Jacob is strangely alone.
Speaker 1:And I say strangely because we've mostly encountered Jacob through his story with others. Jacob is born the twin to his parents, Rebecca and Isaac. Jacob tricks his brother Esau to sell him his birth right. Jacob becomes the son-in-law of Laban, a man who drove a hard twenty year bargain for his two daughters and his share of wealth. Jacob marries a handful of women as was the custom, Rachel and Leah and also two handmaids, Bilha and Zilpa.
Speaker 1:And finally, Jacob fathers a bunch of sons who later have a lot of trouble getting along and one daughter, Dinah. And Jacob's story is a moving intersection with many characters. And Parker Palmer explains personal development like this. We are formed by the lives which intersect with ours. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1:There's another player here, the divine, the divine presence who encounters Jacob, shapes Jacob in the nighttime when he's alone and when there's a weight of worry on him. So Jacob becomes Jacob by being formed from the human and the holy. And our becoming is like this too. We know ourselves in the struggle and the story with others, but we also know ourselves in the struggle and the story of God. And for us, this means we too can wake up to the presence of God in all kinds of unlikely places and people.
Speaker 1:So don't just think that it's the good or the beautiful that can draw you to wholeness. Sometimes it's the terrible and the wretched, maybe even of your own doing, that can take you there. So don't you dare go thinking that God isn't in those pitch black places too. And last week, Jeremy prepared us for the climax of Jacob's final struggle by talking about fear and faces. And Jeremy walked us through Jacob's fear as he prepares to face his brother Esau.
Speaker 1:And Jacob is frozen with fear, but he manages enough courage to send gifts ahead of him and to pray, which is maybe not a bad way forward when we're facing down some demanding conflict, especially when we know how much of it might be of our own doing. So Jacob, he sent the gifts in front of his face. And if you missed it, go back and hear this great riff that Jared did with the Hebrew idiom standing face to face. It's really good. But as we dive in today, I want us to notice that God shows up where Jacob's freaked out.
Speaker 1:God will face Jacob so that Jacob can face his brother. And today, we meet Jacob after he sends all of his family and all of his possessions across the River Jabbok. Left alone, he wrestles with a mysterious opponent whose otherness comes to light only in the break of day. And Jacob is necessarily wounded in the fight before he is able to march on and to meet his brother. It's mysterious.
Speaker 1:It's painful, but it's also holy. So this is a story for anyone who has ever struggled in the night, both literal and figurative. It's a story for anyone who has recognized their missteps and is ready to deal with the conflict at hand. And it's a story for anyone who has ever felt empty and alone and surprised by all of that pain of being made whole. So let's pray and then carry on.
Speaker 1:Jesus, you said that you have come that we may have life and have it to the full. And life in the full includes hard stuff. Following you, this suffering servant, shows us how true that really is. Today, will you remind us with your ever present spirit that we are not alone? And as we wrestle with what's hard in our lives and in the world, as we face the tough places and pieces of what it means to be human and to be vulnerable and to be afraid, we trust that with you, the God of love, our wounding is for our healing.
Speaker 1:And if we don't trust that yet, will you just move us a little closer to this reality today? With curiosity and with care, we pray. Amen. So Genesis 32 beginning at verse 22 reads, that night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his 11 sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over his possessions.
Speaker 1:So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Pausing there. The fact that this story takes place in the night is more than just a backdrop. The author is sort of straining to see, like, what is going on here?
Speaker 1:And therefore, so do we. There's no streetlight. There's no lantern. There's no full moon. No fire.
Speaker 1:Just this disorientation of the dark. And the story of Jacob wrestling a stranger in the night is sudden and it's enigmatic. And I'll have you know that almost every detail of this story has multiple interpretations and no clear authority to decide on precise meanings. And with this, the text doesn't just tell us about the tussle. It draws us in so that we feel the darkness and the confusion.
Speaker 1:And this is a good thing. First, if we could easily crack the stories like this one, we wouldn't really need them, would we? It's imperative that we wrestle with the meaning like those who wrestled before us. And second, in Christian spirituality, the darkness is not a place abandoned by God. It's created by God and made luminous.
Speaker 1:The dark night is the via negativa, the way of denial, the place for letting go. So the point of this story is not to illuminate the mystery and make it all just make sense and be super tidy so you can just brush your hands of it. The point of the story is to let it encounter you, to struggle with the interpretation, and to constantly ask, what kind of wrestling is this? This Jacob story is more like watching Stranger Things than a predictable sitcom like 30 Rock, iHeart, Tina Fey. It makes you ask, wait.
Speaker 1:What the heck is going on here? Is this the upside down? And stranger things reference aside, let's take a look at the wordplay that gets our attention. There are three words at the start of the story that sound almost identical in Hebrew. We catch two in our English translations because they are proper nouns, you Akov or Jacob, and Yabak or Jabak, the river.
Speaker 1:And the third is Hebrew for wrestle, abak. Now you are hearing me say these words with the vowels, but Hebrew is written in consonants, and it's the consonantal pattern that is almost identical. And we've been with Jacob for chapter after chapter and week after week now, so we know that this story is about Jacob. But all of a sudden, you hear that the river is also called Jacob, and the main verb is Jacob too. So in this playful way, the author is saying, Jacob is gonna get Jacob ed on the banks of the river Jacob.
Speaker 1:Meaning, everything that came before, the grasping and the scheming and the betrayals and the fear, it's all converging right here. So the first Jacob is about Jacob's old story coming to an end. Jacob isn't returning home the way that he left. He's no longer running from his brother. He's running straight for his brother.
Speaker 1:Yes. He was born grasping, but now he comes giving. It's an end, but it's also a beginning. But he's not there yet. He's got some business to take care of.
Speaker 1:He can't move forward any further until he deals with something that's, like, part fear and part character and part reminder. It's like God is saying, look, buddy, let's face what needs facing. You need to deal with this last bit of unchecked ego, this nagging guilt that you have about your brother, this fear that is flying in the face of my assurance that you are in fact going in the right direction. So God says, let's face that. Let's fight till that is settled.
Speaker 1:You're scrappy, and I can be scrappy too. Let's use the darkness by this river to sort out the shame that you carry. Let's baptize you in the struggle. This is nighttime work. Let's get you ready for the day.
Speaker 1:I won't quit until you quit. And I can just imagine Jacob pacing around, like, all worried about tomorrow, and then wham, he gets pile driven into the dirt, and it is on. And at this point in the narrative, we don't know if this is God or a being sent by God or some mysterious presence that is one in the same. This brings us to the second Jacob. The verb for wrestled is formed from the noun that means dust.
Speaker 1:So here, as a verb, it literally means to get dusty. Interestingly, it's also in the reflexive form, which means that they wrestled each other. It suggests that this being who hints at the divine is not remote or far off. The divine is willing to self limit in order to draw close. So let that just, like, stretch your brain and your heart a bit as we prepare for Advent, this self limiting God.
Speaker 1:Okay. The third Jacob. Here on the shore of the Jabbok River, we find a man who is vulnerable. It's his fear that makes him so. He's freaked out about coming face to face with his brother.
Speaker 1:And we know by now that this isn't the same Jacob returning home. He wouldn't, after all, have left Laban's land if he was really satisfied with all that life had given him. He knows that he's different, even called by God for more. But how will his brother know that he's a changed person? And the time has come for Jacob to stand sort of exposed, if you will, not hiding behind his mother or running for his life from his brother or negotiating the terms of wives and work with his father-in-law.
Speaker 1:He's just this empty handed man here standing by a river in the night trying to get back home. And in ancient storytelling, river scenes like this, they hold river demons who try to stop heroes after crossing into new places. And predictably, the hero would overpower the demon and walk away victorious. It's kind of like a scene from Wonder Woman where she, as the superhero, has this power to cross to the front of the war and come out victorious over her villain. Right?
Speaker 1:It's predictable. That's the genre. But the first heroes of this story, they would have been caught by surprise as we should that it's our hero who gets injured. But, of course, the bible, it doesn't offer ordinary stories in ordinary ways. This is no ordinary deity.
Speaker 1:This is the holy one who comes so close to Jacob that he can feel the sacred breath on his sweaty skin. This is the divine who while while fighting with us is also always fighting for us. So whoever God is, God is more interested in stepping down into the dust to initiate and participate in our transformation. This is the one who gets us ready so that we can humbly face rather than fight those who might oppose us. Whatever Jacob knew and didn't know, he leaned in and he fought for his life.
Speaker 1:And I've got to say, there is something about this wrestling, this breaking to be made whole that reaches so deeply into a chapter of my own story. Just over five years ago, at the age of 34, I had a total hip replacement. Yes. You heard me right. A surgery, often super helpful for older bodies, was super helpful for mine.
Speaker 1:I had a total hip replacement to deal with a hip issue that I had limped around with since I could walk. Sidebar. Our teaching team didn't even plan the schedule this way. Of all the Jacob stories to teach here at Commons, I got the one about the bummed out hip, which I think means God loves me more. Just kidding.
Speaker 1:But it's still pretty cool. Right? So back to the hip. You see, to be Bobby was to always have a bummed out hip. I was born with a version of congenital hip dysplasia, and there was something about mine that standard double diapering didn't fix.
Speaker 1:So at the age of one, I had a pin temporarily put in my left hip, which meant that it grew to be oblong and compromised right from its rough beginning. So by the time of my second surgery, I was a 34 year old single woman living in Vancouver who felt quite defined by this broken hip. I mean, my name doesn't mean broken hip, but it was really central to who I was and how I saw myself. As my hip got worse, it affected everything, from how I got around in the city to how I felt in my body to even how I slept at night. And it got so bad that I couldn't move forward until I had a major surgery.
Speaker 1:And in some ways, my story feels like this Jacob got Jacob ed at Jacob story. We could say that Bobby got Bobbied at Bobby. This was healing that I had to fight for. After my hip replacement, I had to manage the pain. I had to learn to walk again.
Speaker 1:I had to carry around a big okay. I mean, maybe it wasn't quite that big, but a big square cushion in public so that when I sat, I wouldn't break this 90 degree rule for the first three months. And I had to do all of that alone. Sure, I had some amazing friends and family who came by to help, but mostly, I had to face this transformative moment in my body and in my life alone. I even had my own nighttime visitor.
Speaker 1:Well, I kinda thought I did. You see, in the early days of my recovery, my friend Wendy, she brought me DVDs to watch, and I got really into Friday Night Lights. Any fans? Some? Great.
Speaker 1:One night, my friends Dan and Karen were over, and I was telling them about the characters, Tim Riggins, in particular. And I don't know how long I was talking about Tim Riggins, but Dan eventually very gently interrupted and asked, Bobby, you're talking about a fictional TV character. Right? So thanks to some heavy painkillers, Tim Riggins felt really real to me. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.
Speaker 1:So even though I didn't know for sure that this hip replacement would fix what was broken, I clutched at hope. That in all the wounding, from the staples in my skin to the titanium in my bone to the throbbing and stretched out muscles, I would find healing. I literally had to be broken to be made whole. But it's not like I was healed overnight. Now that I was so close to fixing something so broken, it felt unbearably brutal and really hard.
Speaker 1:And maybe you remember Jeremy saying that sometimes when we get closer to God, that's when things feel harder. And maybe you know exactly what we're talking about. Maybe your life really is so far from what you imagined for yourself, and you're starting to think, really? Like, what is the point? Or maybe you've encountered such a debilitating loss that you aren't even sure that you can wake up to another day again.
Speaker 1:And maybe something has happened in you and to you, and you're not to blame. But it has broken you, and you're not sure how to mend or to feel whole again. I'm so sorry that it's so hard sometimes. Life is full of nighttime wrestling matches, places where we are left alone to struggle. Sometimes these nights, they feel so long and they feel so exhausting.
Speaker 1:And while Jacob is slowly, like, waking up to the fact that he's wrestling with a supernatural and maybe divine being, we get to wake up to that too. The human struggle is made holy because God draws close when we're afraid. God draws close. And I don't know why God works this way. None of us really do.
Speaker 1:But maybe the struggle isn't a sign that God has left you. Maybe it's a sign that God is closer than you ever thought in doing more with your story than you ever imagined. This climax in the Jacob story, it meets us right in the place of our pain, right when we are wiped out from the struggle. And Jacob's about to demand a blessing before daybreak. So what does it mean to wrestle and to be blessed?
Speaker 1:And what does it mean if that blessing leaves you bruised? Let's take a look at the second half of the story told in dialogue. Then the man said, let me go for it is daybreak. But Jacob replied, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And the man asked him, what is your name?
Speaker 1:Jacob, he answered. Then the man said, your name will no longer be Jacob but Israel because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome. And Jacob said, please tell me your name. And he replied, why do you ask my name? Then he blessed him there.
Speaker 1:So Jacob called the place Peniel saying, it is because I saw God face to face and yet my life was spared. The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel and he was limping because of his hip. So as the dark night draws to a close, we've got something happening with names to reveal the blessing. But why would a being who either represents God or is God and knows this name, ask for it. Well, it's a device.
Speaker 1:By asking for his name, the man is getting Jacob to say so much more. It's about how Jacob was has fulfilled the meaning of his name. He's like filled it out. And it's meant to be a confession. By just saying his own name, he confesses.
Speaker 1:I'm Jacob. I'm the one who stole what wasn't mine. I know it was a long time ago, but I cheated my brother, and I've never gotten over it. Even my years of serving another man in a place that was not my home, it didn't serve as penance for what I did to my brother. If Esau kills me tomorrow, I deserve to die.
Speaker 1:And can you just imagine, like, carrying around the weight of that with you for twenty years? Actually, you probably can. We tend to carry regret with us for far too long. And maybe you hold some real guilt about being sometimes a crummy spouse or a petty partner or a disappointing daughter or a son. And maybe you hardly remember the thing that made you so mad to begin with, but it's really hard to let it go because it has defined you.
Speaker 1:And maybe you've taken something that was not yours to have and certainly is not good for you, but you don't wanna give it up yet. Your story, it doesn't stop there. When you speak it out loud, when you say, I've behaved poorly, That's a part of me, but it's not all of me. Then you finally get to step into that fuller picture of who God is inviting you to be. So this man, this angel, this God says, yes, you're Jacob.
Speaker 1:You'll always be Jacob, but you're not just Jacob anymore. You know it, and I know it. You're changed. And if you want, you can keep on changing. You don't have to be a liar or a cheat because you are also one who knows patience and who works to do what's right.
Speaker 1:So God says, let's be really clear about this. So clear that we give you a new name. You used to be Jacob, but now I'm calling you Israel because you have struggled with God and with men you have succeeded. So what is with this name Israel? Well, surprisingly, for such a loaded name, we're not totally sure.
Speaker 1:Israel is formed out of two words, Sarah, which means to persist or to exert oneself or to persevere, and El, which means God. In the construction of a title that contains the name of God, God is the subject and the people are the object. Therefore, it's God who strives, or some interpret it as it's God who rules or God who preserves or protects or even God who heals. And we have a bunch of variations and ancient texts to thank us for all this ambiguity. And again, I think that's okay.
Speaker 1:Maybe Israel means all of those options, but maybe it means even more. Maybe it means that Jacob struggles, or maybe somewhere in the ambiguity, it means that we wrestle, and we wrestle with each other. And that's what faith is about. Because first, the presence is named as a man. And Hosea later says it's an angel, but Jacob eventually says it's God.
Speaker 1:Walter Brueggemann says this, whatever the etymology, a new being has been called forth. He is now a man and a community linked not only to this nemesis of the night, but to this promise keeper of the day. In other words, God makes Jacob's life matter most in the struggle. So what kind of blessing is this? To be Jacob, to be the people of God is to be formed in the struggle.
Speaker 1:That is what it means to be blessed. It's not our wealth. It's not our blamelessness. It's not our goodness or our beauty that marks us as blessed. It's our struggle.
Speaker 1:And Jacob starts the new day with a new name and a very sore body, but he's finally ready to go on. And what does he do? He names the place. He names it Peniel, which means face of God. And it means that Jacob had a divine encounter.
Speaker 1:To say he has seen God face to face is to once again cast ambiguity on the encounter. Human and divine encounters can mean both this adversary confrontation or an experience of extraordinary intimacy. How's that for a party? A Torah commentator says, the deliberate ambiguity simultaneously portrays the perilous and the auspicious nature of the furious struggle. Have you ever described your faith like that?
Speaker 1:Oh, you know, I follow Jesus, and it's a fun and furious struggle. I mean, maybe we should. I don't know. So what does any of that mean? Well, let's go back to Teresa.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. I haven't actually told you about her yet. On the day that I got my new hip, I woke up with a new name. Well, not exactly, but I woke up with a name for my new hip. It was All Saints Day twenty twelve, and this thought just floated into my head in the hospital room.
Speaker 1:She shall be called Teresa. And I know that that sounds super strange. I thought a lot about not telling you about it this week. But I woke up with this hope. My titanium saint had arrived, Saint Teresa.
Speaker 1:I had work to do, but I was changed. I was on the other side of all that brokenness, But I still had a ways to go. Within three months, I was walking fairly normally, though I will say that getting a new hip didn't change my clumsiness. At exactly the three month mark, something remarkable happened. I went to concert.
Speaker 1:But it wasn't just any concert. There was this one album that I listened to on repeat during my recovery, and that's a whole story in and of itself. But let me just say that Cody Chestnut's album Landing on a 100 got me through some dark nights, and it got me dancing again. For a hip replacement, the three month mark is a pillar, and it was at that exact time that Cody Chestnut came to Vancouver where I was living. So some of my friends came with me to the show, and remember my good friend Dan?
Speaker 1:Well, he insisted that I tell mister Chestnut how much this album had meant to me, and I thought that was totally silly, and we just headed out after the show. But within moments of leaving the venue, I heard Dan call my name, and I turned around, and he was yelling, hey, Bobby. He wants to meet you. Cody Chestnut wants to meet you. And here's the photo of me and Cody Chestnut.
Speaker 1:It makes me so happy, and I'm telling you, he was happy too. He was a very nice man. But here's what I know about change like this. Blessing that comes in the morning after a holy fight. Healing that comes after some very serious wounding.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you have to go through a brutal time to get to a way better time. And Gregory of Nyssa, a true ecumenical saint of the church and Cappadocian father from the March, he wrote this piece called, Why is Purification Painful? And in it, he says that our lives, our souls are like rope. And as we live in the world, we take on this sticky mud and it gets plastered around the rope, but God is always drawing us near. And as God draws us, it's like we have to fit the rope through a small hole.
Speaker 1:And on the other side is all glory and beauty and power and healing and wholeness. And purification is the mud falling off of the rope. And God is the one doing the tugging. And Gregory writes, what is alien to God has to be scraped off forcibly because it has somehow grown into the soul. This is the cause of the sharp and unbearable pains which the soul must endure.
Speaker 1:In other words, when we really face the truth about ourselves, we welcome a holy struggle that is bound to kick up some dust in our lives as God purifies us and draws us close. And Jacob went through so much and some of it on his own doing before he got what he wanted. In fact, he got so much more than what he wanted. He'd be reconciled with his brother, and he'd become a nation that was meant to bless the world. And in some ways, his story is our story too.
Speaker 1:God meets us, names us, and sends us out to bless the world. And right now, you or someone you love might feel pretty broken or beat down. And you might feel like you wanna give up, but please, please, don't give up. Fight on. The break of day is coming.
Speaker 1:And when it arrives, you might have to walk with a bit of a limp, but you're gonna walk, and the morning light of a new day is gonna be all around you. Let us pray. Jesus, your way is a breaking to be made whole way, and we know it in our bodies, and we know it in our relationships, and in our world. Oh, won't you come and make us whole? Will you meet us in the struggle as you met Jacob?
Speaker 1:Will you bring challenge and comfort and truth and trust and such profound and particular meaning to all of us as we struggle, as we wrestle in the night? So for those in need of strength today, will you empower? For those in need of comfort, will you wrap yourself around them? And for those in need of confidence, will you fill up what is lacking? To draw near to you is to be loved.
Speaker 1:And for this, give you thanks. Amen.