Wrestling

Genesis 32:22-31

August 6, 2023

 

            Phoebe and I saw the Barbie movie yesterday. When I first began to prep for this sermon, I had a completely different beginning in mind, but then Phoebe and I saw the Barbie movie, and I felt compelled to share a little bit of what I gleaned.

            Now, I don’t want to wade into the controversy that apparently is swirling around this movie. I will say that both Phoebe and I loved it. This was Phoebe’s second time seeing it and my first, but I would like to see it again. It was fun and silly and unexpectedly poignant. I won’t give away the plot, but essentially Barbie and Ken experience the real world outside of Barbie Land. Going into the real world causes Barbie, and Ken too, to have an existential crisis.

            They find themselves questioning who they are and why they are and what really matters. And if there are two characters who you would never expect to have an existential crisis, it’s these two. But that’s what makes the movie so compelling and thought-provoking. And I realized as I watched it that in this existential crisis Barbie was wrestling with herself. She was wrestling with what she thought life was supposed to be. She was wrestling with her previous expectations and understanding. If you have ever experienced that kind of wrestling in your life, than you know a little of what Barbie was going through.

            And if you add God and faith and call into the mix, then we also can get a glimpse of understanding into the wrestling that Jacob experiences in our story from Genesis this morning.

Jacob, our trickster, our grasper, our scoundrel, has done well for himself. He met his match in his father-in-law, Laban, who tricked him into marrying first his oldest daughter, Leah, then the true desire of Jacob’s heart, Rachel. Jacob has had children with both women, and their maidservants. There are eleven offspring at this point. But Jacob has made the decision to leave his father-in-law’s home and try to make peace with his brother Esau. While this sounds as though Jacob has mellowed some, the old trickster still had some tricks up his sleeves.

When he and Laban agreed to part company, Laban told him he could take some of the livestock that bore certain physical traits. Jacob engaged in what might be understood as an example of the earliest genetic engineering and manipulated quite a few of the animals that would eventually be taken by him. Rachel must have learned from her husband, because before they left her father, she stole some of her father’s household gods.

Laban, realizing they were gone, took after them. Jacob did not know any of this, so he encouraged Laban and his men to search the tents. But Rachel had hid them in such a clever and such a sneaky way, that she proved herself to be just as cunning as Jacob.

But now we come to our part in the story. Through messengers, Jacob let Esau know that they were coming. The messengers have reported back that Esau is advancing toward them with 400 of his men. Jacob fears the worst, so he divides his group into two, and works out a plan to make Esau think that he is better equipped for a fight than he truly was. And now, he has sent his wives and his children across the Jabbok, and he is alone. Without any pause in the narrative, without any hesitation or explanation, a man begins to wrestle Jacob in the darkness.

The wrestling that Barbie went through was emotional rather than physical. But the wrestling we read about in our story is very physical and deadly serious. The unknown person and Jacob wrestle until daybreak. They seem to be an even match, because neither one can overcome the other. Finally, as the light of the new morning begins to creep out from its bedclothes, the man realized that he could not stop Jacob. So he strikes Jacob on his hip socket. Jacob’s hip is immediately dislocated, and I would suspect the pain would have been excruciating. But Jacob was not named for his grasping tendencies for nothing. He holds onto his opponent. The man demands to be let go because the day is breaking. But Jacob won’t release him until he receives a blessing. The man asks Jacob his name.

The man asks Jacob his name. You would think that the man would throw some tricky move into the mix and release himself from Jacob’s grasp, but instead he asks Jacob his name.

This was not a moment of introduction. In the near Eastern culture, names were not just designations or unique identifications. To know someone’s name was to have a power over that person. It was as if knowing someone’s name was to hold that person’s soul, that person’s innermost being, in your grip. Asking for Jacob’s name was not just a getting to know you kind of question. To know Jacob’s name was to make Jacob vulnerable. But Jacob responds. He tells this man, this man with whom he has wrestled and struggled and grasped, he tells him his name.

“Jacob.”

The man says,

“You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.”

The man gave Jacob a new name, and then this person blessed Jacob and the wrestling match was over. Jacob did the same as when he had the dream of the angels and the ladder, he named the place where he stood. He named it Peniel, which in Hebrew translates to seeing God face to face but not losing his life in the process.

Jacob wrestled with God. He wrestled and received both a blessing and a limp. Jacob wrestled and although he did not prevail, the person he wrestled did not either. Jacob wrestled and came out of the encounter transformed, with a new name and a thigh that would never fully heal. He left his encounter with God with a blessing and a limp.

Now, I have never physically wrestled in my life, unless you count the wrestling that occurs when you’re trying to get a squirmy toddler into clothes. But I have wrestled with myself, with who I think I’m supposed to be. And I have definitely wrestled with my call and with my faith. I have spent long nights wrestling with God, demanding both to be left alone and to be blessed. In that way, I have done more than my share of wrestling.

Maybe that’s why this story of Jacob wrestling with this unnamed person, with God as it turns out, all night long resonates with me so deeply. I get it. Some people seem to find their way into themselves easier than others. Some people seem to walk their life of faith easier than others. But some of us have to wrestle. I have often looked at my friends and colleagues who seem so easy and solid in their faith, who seem to just accept without question what they read and hear and understand about God. But I don’t do that. I question and struggle and wrestle. Figuring out who I am has never been easy. It wasn’t made any easier when I discerned my particular call. In fact, it got harder. Part of my call, it seems, is to wrestle even more than I did before. I understand the wrestling that Jacob experienced in this story, and I suspect throughout his whole life.

I am not alone in my resonating feelings with this story either. Theologian and essayist, Debie Thomas, writes that she is deeply indebted to this story. It allowed her, as she writes, to “bring my whole turbulent self before God, and to engage with the Divine in ways that feel contentious before they become consoling.” Jacob is alone and vulnerable and in a desolate dark place. And it is in that state that this stranger comes to him and wrestles with him. How many long, dark nights have I spent wrestling with … self-doubt, fear, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, anger, shame. But even if my wrestling was not directly linked to God, in those long nights of the soul, God has always been there too.

Maybe that is where the blessing lies in this story. Yes, there is wrestling. Yes, there is struggle, but maybe it’s not about winning and losing, but about refusing to let go. God doesn’t let Jacob go, no matter how hard Jacob fights. Perhaps the dislocation of Jacob’s thigh was not to defeat Jacob but to end the struggle, to end Jacob’s relentless pushing back against God. We don’t get through our lives without scars, and having faith does not change that. Jacob walked with a limp the rest of his life. We may walk with scars unseen. But God refused to let Jacob go. God refuses to let us go as well.

In those long nights of wrestling, God has never not been there. Maybe in those long nights of the soul that I’ve experienced the only one who was doing the wrestling was me. Maybe God’s arms were around me not to contend with me, but to hold me as I wrestled with my demons, my very self.

Perhaps my take on this passage is all wrong, and if so, I hope grace abounds. But whether or not I have or haven’t, I know that God calls us to be who we are, not who we think we should be. God calls us as we are and works through us so that we are transformed and that others are too. God worked through Jacob, trickster and heel grasper that he was. God worked through Jacob to bring blessing to the whole world. God transformed Jacob, yes that lifelong limp, was part of the transformation, and gave him a new name. God refused to let Jacob go. God refuses to let us go as well. So, if you wrestle, keep wrestling, and trust that God is right there with you, contending, consoling, transforming. Thanks be to God.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

Amen.