10-20-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Genesis.

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbak.

He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had.

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.

Then he said, Let me go, for the day is breaking.

But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.

So he said to him, What is your name?

And he said, Jacob.

Then the man said, You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.

Then Jacob asked him, Please tell me your name.

But he said, Why is it that you ask my name?

And there he blessed him.

So Jacob called the place, Penuel, saying, For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

The word of the Lord.

A reading from 2 Timothy.

As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you, proclaim the message, be persistent, whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.

Convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching.

For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but have itching ears.

They will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

As for you, always be sober.

Endure suffering.

Do the work of an evangelist.

Carry out your ministry fully.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Luke.

Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.

He said, In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.

In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, Grant me justice against my opponent.

For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, if because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.

And the Lord said, Listen to what the unjust judge says, and will not God grant justice to God's chosen ones who cry to God day and night?

Will God delay long in helping them?

I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them.

And yet when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

The Gospel of the Lord.

So I used to teach math at a Christian high school called Christian High School, and uh I started a wrestling team there because I belong to the cult of wrestling, and uh we were really, really pithy with our little shirt.

We said, Christian wrestling, God's only sport.

And today we get to hear that story, which is frankly one of the strangest things you're gonna read in the entire Bible.

It is absolutely bizarre.

And I'm gonna warn you in advance, if I seem uh even more bombastic than normal, it's because I have grappled with this one for a long time.

So maybe to tell you two things up front.

Remember, the lectionary presumes you know the story well before we hear the excerpt.

So in the story, Jacob, which means thief, trickster, literally it means heel grabber, but heel grabber like used car salesman.

Um, and that's who he is.

He has stolen from his brother, and he has recently just gone up and stolen from his uncle.

His brother said, I'm gonna kill you.

His brother, by the way, uh his name means Dirty Harry.

This is really important.

It does.

Dirty Harry, Esau is dirty and hairy.

So um, when Dirty Harry says, I'm gonna kill you, you run away.

And so he ran away.

He goes and lives with his uncle Laban and steals from his uncle Laban, and his uncle Laban says, I'm gonna kill you, and he decides in the story he's safer going back to Dirty Harry.

Can you imagine that, by the way, knowing the movie, than staying with Uncle Laban?

And this is the night before he goes home, not to be reconciled with his brother.

He's not interested in reconciliation, to try and survive.

He sends all of his family across this river.

And I'm really lucky, having just gone on a pilgrimage to Jordan with the parish, to show you what it looks like.

This is not at sunrise, but at sunset.

So here's the river Jabbak, and across the river is a little town called Pennial, which means face of God, interestingly enough.

So Jacob's by himself at night, thief.

The other thing that's important is not only has Jacob been a thief, but in the Bible your name is who you are.

We name our children after names we like or family names that have passed down.

But when Jacob is called thief, he is a thief.

That is exactly who he is.

He's gonna get a new name today, and this is really interesting.

So he goes on.

Here he is at night, and the text is really messy.

This part of the Bible is even messier than Hebrew than it comes out in English.

Jacob grapples with some man.

Now we don't know who started the fight, and that's really important.

We don't know who started the fight, and we don't know who the man is.

What we hear is that they wrestle all night and nobody has clearly won.

I will tell you, I have an older brother, and there's a couple of ways you can score wrestling.

One is who gets the most point, but we we all know as boys, the way you win is you incapacitate the other person.

So um somebody is neither one of them is incapacitated, and it's really, really important in the story that this ambiguous character gets away before the sun comes up.

Because if the sun comes up, Jacob will know who it is, and so will you, and that will ruin the ambiguity.

Is it an angel?

Is it God?

Is it Esau?

Is it some random traveler?

Is this meant to be some figurative story where Jacob is wrestling against the kind of person he wants to be?

I think all of the above are great options to hold on to at the same time, you see.

And part of the issue here is if the sun comes up and Jacob sees this man's face and this man is God, then what has to happen to Jacob?

Yeah, he'll die, right?

Because nobody can see God's face and live.

That's what we hear.

So this is then Jacob's self-interest, but he not sees who he's wrestling against.

I will tell you, having wrestled every single match was also ambiguous, at least for me.

I was wrestling the person on the mat, but I was also wrestling my own pain threshold and how much I was willing to endure to hold on or to let go.

I was often wrestling against my brother and his expectations of me.

I mean, this is this is, I think, a good text because, again, competitions are never just about something we do with other people.

They always have a lot of layers to them.

So Jacob's wrestling with this guy, whoever it is.

And again, Jacob, for whatever reason, is not incapacitated.

The other guy decides to cheat, and this is really important.

And I want you to know there's two ways this shows up in the text.

Hebrew is a really word-poor language, it has fewer than 10,000 words.

English has more than 600,000 words.

Consider, right?

The text says that the man touches Jacob in the hip, and his hip is put out a socket.

Now, you know this is the strongest joint in your body.

The amount of force it takes to dislocate your hip surely makes this an angel or God, right?

That's the literal read.

In Hebrew, it's not really clear what this other guy puts out of joint.

Um, because having wrestled, there are some dirty players out there.

And uh, while they cannot dislocate my hip, they are able to hit other things in that area and try to work that to their advantage.

I will tell you, we learned really early on not to do that, because when someone plays dirty with you on the mat, usually it releases the revenge adrenaline.

And if you were close to bending before that, they have now uh really, really hurt their own game by hitting you where they should not.

That is very possible in the story that Jacob has hit there.

Now, the guy's got to get away.

It could be the guy has just been pummeling Jacob all night, and Jacob remains conscious and is just holding on to his heel, as his name suggests.

He's a heel grabber, and the guy's got to get away.

So what does he say?

He says, I won't let you go until you bless me.

This is really interesting.

I told you Hebrew's word poor.

It has two words for bless.

One means always bless.

The other word means bless, or it can mean curse.

It can be a euphemism.

Maybe you've heard the famous Chinese curse.

May your children have interesting lives.

Interesting.

This story in Genesis does not use the unilateral word bless.

It uses the ambiguous one.

Does Jacob get a blessing or does he get a curse?

This is a really good question.

His new name, Israel, does not mean strives against God.

It means tries to grab God's heel.

Jacob means a crook thief.

Israel means steals from God.

This becomes the name our Jewish brothers and sisters adopt for themselves.

Your name is who you are.

And I want to suggest to you there's a really interesting spirituality, a real opportunity to reflect on our own relationship with God in this story.

What the text never says is what, again, like I said, who starts the match, who starts the fight, and what would happen if Jacob let go.

He's clearly afraid he won't get anything out of the relationship.

The God will run away.

So what he does is he spends arguably his entire life wrestling with God and trying to extort things out of God.

How interesting we get to hear this parable in Luke.

It's about an unjust judge who cares about nobody.

And there's a widow who pleads for justice.

Did you notice though Jesus doesn't say her cause is right?

She may not be the innocent one at all.

What she does is she keeps pestering this guy.

He says here in our translation, I'm going to just give her what she wants so she doesn't wear me out.

In Greek, it actually says, she's going to give me a black eye.

So it's hard to know if that's figurative, like I'll look bad because here's this poor person who keeps coming and I'm not making a decision for them.

Or it means she's going to hit me.

And Jesus says, God is actually not like that.

God does not have to be approached day after day after day after day.

Prayer is not where you prove to God your perseverance, and when you finally do, God will give you what you want.

You see, in that same sense, Jesus is telling a story, at least about the spirituality I grew up with and have engaged in with most of my life.

But our relationship with God does not have to be a struggle where we try to extract things from the Lord through prayer or through wrestling.

So, what did I grew up hearing?

I grew up hearing that I needed to pray for certain people every single day because God rewards those who have perseverance.

So I got up, especially in college, an hour before I had to, and I went through my laundry list of people and the outcomes that they needed.

Like they needed to heal from hip surgery and they needed to this or that.

And to be honest with you, most of my spirituality with God was a wrestling match, and if I got thrown out of the ring, I was going to hell forever.

I hope you didn't grow up with that spirituality.

But when hell's on the table, let me tell you, you're in a wrestling match with God.

One day I was walking along, this was about five or six years ago, when I was living in San Diego, and there was a dear, dear woman who had just been diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer.

And if you don't know what that means, I'll tell you it means imminent death.

She was very clear she was going to fight that cancer so that she could keep taking her grandkids to church.

That was her reason for fighting.

Now I'll tell you to become priest, we have to do something called clinical pastoral education.

And I lived in the hospital several days a week as a chaplain intern, and I would get calls in the middle of the night and I would go and I would see person after person die from chemotherapy.

They died from the chemo, not the cancer.

And so here was this lady with something that was not curable.

And sure enough, I was walking along doing my prayer list, and I said, God, just help this woman to let this go so she can die peaceably.

That was my prayer.

This doesn't always happen to me, but this is probably one of the more powerful experiences.

There I was holding on to God's heel, day after day after day.

Do this, do this, do this.

And one day there was this, it wasn't audible, of course it wasn't audible, but in my mind I got this answer and it said, Why do you get to decide what's best for her?

Well, let me tell you, I answered.

Because I have seen what happens with chemotherapy and the hair loss and the energy and the pain.

So God help this lady to accept peace.

And I got the same response.

But why do you get to decide what's best for her?

It was as if for the first time God wrestled back with me.

And it became this really interesting moment where instead of me telling God what God needed to do, I got to think about people I genuinely cared about in God's presence.

It has transformed the way I pray ever since.

I don't know that you need to adopt that.

I will tell you this I have lived most of my life afraid of letting God go.

Because if I let go, God will run away.

And I'm pretty sure if we let God go and stop trying to fight God, God does exactly what God does that we are not always good at.

God says, it's about time.

Now come here.

Now I want you to know, we got to hear this bit in Timothy about preach the word, right?

And we also got to hear to beware of false doctrine.

And so uh last week, this was like an hour before I was going to go do this marriage for Courtney McAllister.

I'd just gone running in the neighborhood and I'd noticed there were these people in the neighborhood who did not belong.

This is not a big neighborhood.

They were kind of going door to door.

And I got back and I thought, this is strange, and sure enough, they knocked at my door.

So there I was, all sweaty and shirtless and in a hurry to get to this wedding.

And there were these two teenage boys, and I guess their dad, and they said, We're looking for canned food to get to this particular cause.

And I said, I was really glad that we collect food here.

I said, you know, I've actually gone through recently, which was true, and given all the canned food I don't have to my church.

And then they said, Well, while we're here, we want to talk to you about what you think about Jesus.

And there I was experiencing PTSD.

Because I used to do that.

And I did the really the dumbest thing I could say.

I said, Oh, I'm an Episcopal priest.

And you know what they said was, well, you know, not all Episcopalians are like that.

So they asked me, What are you going to do?

Do you think that Jesus died for everybody in the world?

And what are you going to tell Jesus about whether you get to go into heaven?

And you know what?

I've been kicking myself for not saying, listen, I gotta go to a wedding, grateful for your intentions, gotta go bye.

No, I sat there and I talked and I realized there was, you always think of like really clever things you'd say later?

Because what they said was, I want to hear what you think about these questions, and they did not care what I thought.

They wanted to judge and condemn what I thought.

They did not want to listen to me at all.

And I wish I'd said, friends, you asked me to listen to what I thought, and you're not doing a very good job listening, so I think you should think twice about asking people before you represent that God is this way.

I thought of that later.

In the meantime, I just felt really flustered because I knew what answer they wanted, and I refused to give it to them, and they judged me.

And I want to tell you, I don't blame them for listening to this verse about spreading the word.

But what I'm afraid of is if the word we spread is false doctrine.

Doctrine that says you are in a wrestling match with God and hell is at stake, so you'd better do it right.

You'd better hold on to God by doing this and this and this.

To be honest with you, they wanted me to bless them.

They wanted me to bless them by telling them the answer that they wanted to hear, or by them saving some episcopal priest, they were going to get a jewel in their heavenly crown.

I don't know them, and I know exactly that that's what they wanted.

So we're being asked today, I think, by Timothy and by these scriptures to think through, frankly, whether our own spirituality is that ambiguous kind of blessing.

Whether it is, in fact, a blessing or a curse for us and the rest of the world.

I think we're asked to consider whether or not that ambiguous kind of blessing is false doctrine, frankly.

I am positive we are being asked to consider how God actually is and share some life with the world.

We're not meant to keep life to ourselves.

But boy, if we just going around passing out some sick spirituality like it's the flu, it might be better if we said nothing at all.

Wrestling with God.

Again, I wonder what would happen if we would just let God go.

Every week, sometimes every day, we pray that thy will be done.

And of course you know what we mean.

God do what I want.

Isn't that your will?

I mean what we really mean is my will be done.

And I wonder if we're not asked to consider a new What if we just stopped fighting God?

What if we stopped fighting other people so they would bless our spirituality?

What if instead of saying to our common folk, I won't let you go until you bless me, we just said, I won't let you go.

And I'll be a blessing to you.