Searching Questions (Part 5 of 9): "What's Your Name?"

So let's take a moment to clear our minds and quiet our hearts so we can listen to God's word.

Tonight's scripture reading comes from the book of Genesis, chapter 32.

Genesis 32 · chapter mention

Jacob got up during the night, took his two wives, his two women servants and his eleven sons and crossed the Jabbaq River's shallow water.

He then took them and everything that belonged to him and he helped them cross the river.

But Jacob stayed apart by himself and a man wrestled with him until dawn broke.

When the man saw that he couldn't defeat Jacob, he grabbed Jacob's thigh and tore a muscle in Jacob's thigh as he wrestled with him.

The man said let me go because the dawn is breaking.

But Jacob said I won't let you go until you bless me.

He said to Jacob what is your name?

And he said Jacob.

Then he said your name won't be Jacob any longer, but Israel, because you struggled with God and with men and won.

Jacob also asked and said tell me your name.

But he said why do you ask for my name?

And he blessed Jacob there.

Jacob named the place Peniel because I've seen God face to face and my life has been saved.

The sun rose as Jacob passed Peniel, limping because of his thigh.

Thanks, emma.

Oh, excuse me, sorry.

So my freshman year in high school was kind of a milestone year for me.

Before that I had been homeschooled.

My parents had homeschooled me through middle school.

So this, my high school, was my first time as a teenager being in like a school setting.

Not only did I also start my very short-lived basketball career playing for the six-man basketball team at my very small, private Christian high school, but I also got a new name.

My basketball coach decided that my name Charles, had too many syllables, so he shortened it to Chuck and Chuck just sort of stuck and soon everyone was calling me Chuck.

Now maybe you've heard me talk about my utter ignorance regarding sports before and you're like, wait, this doesn't quite compute.

And maybe you're wondering what position I played on the basketball team and I can't tell you.

That shows you how much I learned about basketball that year.

So during my junior year in high school, my AP history teacher she kind of had some opinions and she had an opinion about my name.

She felt that the name Charles was actually a more appropriate name for me for my mild-mannered personality.

Charles was more appropriate, not Chuck.

Now, the Lord of the Rings films were premiering at the time and my teacher started to refer to me by kind of two personas Charles, like the good, studious, obedient student, and Chuck, the sort of like split personality, golem-like creature from Tolkien's fantasy.

Chuck was the side of me, who would let his mind wander in class and forget his homework, and when my teacher's back was turned, kind of work to subvert her authority in the classroom.

Does it surprise you perhaps that Chuck is the name that remains with me today?

So in our scripture reading tonight, god asks a question of Jacob what is your name?

Author Trevor Hudson writes that names are important.

Think about it for a moment.

We come into this world without them.

They are the first gifts we receive.

More often than not, they are chosen with great thought and care.

They are the way in which we are recognized, loved and remembered.

Names are significant, and in the Bible, names have even greater significance.

Names spoke to your sense of identity, belonging and purpose.

How many of you know the meaning of your own name?

My name, charles, means strong man or, as Katie and I found as we were Googling this afternoon, depending on the source, it might also mean free man.

Now Katie and I named our oldest son Luke, which means light.

We named him after the author of one of the four gospels, the Gospel of Luke.

But when Katie was about six months pregnant, she had a crisis moment and she turned to me and she was like Chuck, we're not actually naming him after Star Wars, are we?

This is not like Luke Skywalker thing, right?

And I was like no, no, of course not.

Why would you even think that?

It's not even in my brain anywhere?

Names are significant, but looking at our story tonight, let's just say the name Jacob ain't so great.

The name Jacob means supplanter, one who works to undermine, one who grabs by the heel.

His name predicted Jacob's character.

He was a liar, a cheater, a trickster, jacob and his older brother, esau, slightly older brother.

They were twins and we are told in their birth narrative that the two brothers were actually wrestling in utero.

Esau was born first, but Jacob was born right after him, holding on to his heel, and Jacob spent all his life wrestling.

He's the sort of guy who was always working the angles, always jockeying for a better position, always trying to come out on top.

So he's the grandson of Abraham who Tina talked about last week.

And Jacob deceived his father, had this dysfunctional relationship with his mother and he cheated his older brother.

He made his older brother so angry that Jacob had to run away to escape being murdered.

And then, after Jacob escapes, he goes to live among his mother's family in a distant country and there he falls in love with a woman.

But then the tables are turned and the deceiver is deceived His future father-in-law tricks him into sleeping with the woman's older sister instead and I know this sounds like a soap opera, but it is in the Bible Jacob ends up marrying both sisters and he loves the younger one and just sort of tolerates the older one, that is until the older sister starts making babies.

And then there's this weird competition between the sisters over who can produce the most kids for Jacob, which is how he ends up having kids with his two female servants as well.

As Tina pointed out last week, this was a common practice but also deeply dehumanizing and abusive.

So in this way Jacob is behaving in all the ways that you would expect a typical patriarch of the ancient Near East to be behaving, and it's important that we point out and name that.

Genesis is not presenting Jacob as this example to emulate.

Jacob, like most people you meet in the Bible, was pretty messed up.

In the biblical story.

There's actually not a lot of heroes.

There might actually only be one God himself.

In all God's chosen people in Genesis turn out to be a deeply dysfunctional group with a capacity for incredible cruelty and inhumanity Sort of like us in our world today.

And of course that's the point.

God isn't waiting for us to get cleaned up and figure everything out.

No, god is already at work in the mess of our ordinary lives, bringing about renewal in our world.

So all this brings us up to date with where our scripture reading began.

Jacob is in this moment where his past is catching up to him.

He's gotten word that his brother, esau, that he hasn't seen for decades, is coming to meet him, and he's bringing 400 armed men, you know, like little welcoming committee, I suppose.

After all these years, jacob is going to have to face his brother.

All this build up to this moment of confrontation.

It all comes down to this there's no escaping.

So Jacob starts to make preparations.

He helps his family cross this shallow river.

He sends all his possessions, his livestock, everything across the river, but he stays behind on the shore.

It's this moment of reckoning, all the life that he has built up around himself to give him a sense of identity and security.

All of that is stripped away and he's just him alone.

The poet Wendell Berry wrote this it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey.

We ever faced a moment like this in your life before, A moment when everything that you've learned to rely on, everything that you've hidden behind everything seems to be stripped away and it's just you, alone and vulnerable, and there's nowhere to run.

It was time for Jacob to face his past, but this is where things get really weird.

It says a man wrestled with Jacob until dawn broke.

Now wrestling in various forms is a common sport the world over.

My buddy Nathan spent some time in Mongolia a few years ago, and the men in Mongolia basically spend their spare time wrestling with each other, and Nathan naturally joined in, and he just had to say that after two or three days with them he was physically exhausted.

Imagine wrestling from sun up, from sun down to sun up, with this mystery man.

The narrator lets us sit in that mystery, but Jacob does know who it was he was contending with through the night.

Jacob says I saw God face to face and yet my life was spared.

Jacob was wrestling with God and, even more bizarre, it sounds like it was almost an even match.

In fact, it seems like God tried to tap out at one point.

Isn't that weird?

Good Jacob wouldn't let him go.

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

Jacob was wrestling all his life.

I wonder, have you ever felt like that, like whatever you do isn't enough, that you're constantly struggling, looking for leverage, not feeling like you've done enough, not able to rest?

Maybe you feel like you're constantly hiding or concealing, or maybe just barely keeping your head above water, barely staying one step ahead of whatever it might be Not able to be yourself, not able to just be?

I wonder, have you ever felt this way?

Jacob always had an opponent, someone he was facing down with.

First it was Esau, then it was his father-in-law.

He was always trying to outwit and outmaneuver and subdue someone else.

But underneath all that wrestling, the true opponent that Jacob was sparring with was God.

And in that night of wrestling, god asked him this one question what is your name?

Another way of saying that is what is true about you.

What is most true about you?

Is it your past, your mistakes, the shame that rises in your chest and burns within you?

What is your name?

This question invites us to look into ourselves.

It's not just a statement of fact when God asks Jacob what is your name.

It's an invitation to stop hiding, to stop pretending to own the truth about yourself.

Trevor Hudson writes this God's question invites us to face up to ourselves.

This is seldom easy.

It usually takes a great deal of rigorous self-examination, a radical self-honesty and much reflection on the way we have been living.

Telling the truth about ourselves to God can be one of the hardest things we ever do.

If it sounds too difficult, may offer a simple word of encouragement.

Being honest with ourselves and wrestling with these things with God opens our lives like few other things can, to the incredible depths of God's grace and acceptance and power.

We actually begin to experience in a deeper way our belovedness when we approach God with this utter honesty, when we own our names, who we are and who we've become.

This opens us up to a deep transformation.

When Jacob answers God's question, god didn't just say okay, great, I was just kind of curious what's your name?

No, it was in this moment.

God responded to Jacob owning his name.

He responded to him by giving him a new name, the name Israel, which, in the story, means one who wrestles with God.

Have you ever felt like you're wrestling with God, like you're discontent with shallow answers and trite sayings, like some of the things that you've been taught about God just don't seem to ring true anymore?

So you find yourself wrestling with a mystery?

Well, friends, you are in good company if that's the case, because the people of God have long carried this name the ones who wrestle with God.

So, friends, what is your name?

As I was growing up, there were some voices in my extended family that gave me some names, some labels that have haunted me Because I'm an only child.

My uncles said that I would grow up to be selfish, and I heard this, and I determined in myself that I would not be selfish.

I willed myself.

I'm not going to be selfish.

I worked hard to prove them wrong, by learning, though, to ignore my heart and my desire.

I was a precocious kid, so my grandfather said that I was loud and wild and annoying.

His actions told me that I was too much for him.

And so I tried relentlessly to be a good boy and I learned to shrink myself, to get smaller, to do my best to go unnoticed and not draw attention to myself and friends.

I still carry around the weight of those names, those identities, formed habits that I'm still trying to shake the compulsion to be quiet, even when I know that I should speak.

The compulsion to be passive even when I know I should act.

The compulsion to keep people happy, no matter the cost.

This impulse towards people pleasing Friends.

I'm still trying to let go of those identities and receive the new identity that Christ has for me.

God wants to give each of us a new name.

Each of us have to own our old names, who we've been and what we've become, but our old names don't have to determine our futures more, because God wants to give us our new name.

Friends, the God who knows you thoroughly and utterly, the one who knows you best, is the one who loves you most.

Friends, god's love for you is the truest, deepest thing about you.

Your name, the name that God wants to speak over you, friends, is beloved.

Friends.

Do you believe this At the core of your being?

Do you believe that the most true thing about you is that you are loved by God.

Right now, I want to just offer you a few moments to reflect on the question of the night.

What is your name?

Who are you and what have you become?

Where is your identity rooted?

Are there any old names that you need to reject?

What new name does Jesus want to speak to you?

So, holy Spirit, I invite you right now to speak to us in this time.

Lead us, open our hearts to you, teach us our true names, amen.

This is the only where it eigentlich should come to light the mammon and Christ on earth.

Incrisis is where the same vìner explains you Friends, what is your true name?

Do you believe that the truest thing about you is God's unending love for you?

At the end of this month, we come to Good Friday, the day when Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross.

Friends, the cross reveals God's heart of love for you, for me, for our whole world.

God, in the person of Jesus Christ, was pinned to that wooden cross, and there God wrestled until the daylight turned to darkness, and there he wrestled with the weight of the world's sin and evil.

And, friends, our sin prevailed.

God died on that cross.

He bore the weight of our sin and our shame.

But, friends, god's weakness is stronger than our strength.

God allowed himself to lose because that was the only way that he could win us back and defeat the power of death In this great mystery of life.

This was the way that he chose to win the dying God nailed to a tree, giving us, he's given to us in weakness, his body broken, his blood poured out for our rescue.

Friends, if you ever wonder whether the truest thing about you is God's love, I want you to remember the cross.

That is how much you are worth.

That is the price that God paid for your rescue.

That is how much God loves you.

So, as we come to this table tonight, I pray for each of us that our true name would be sealed upon our hearts, that each of us would remember that we are beloved.

Would you pray with me right now?

Almighty God, we thank you.

We thank you for your great love for us, your love that was poured out on the cross through your son, jesus Christ, and we pray that, as we share these simple things, this bread and this cup, that you would remind us of this truth that changes everything that we are deeply, unendingly loved by you.

Thank you for the extent that you would go.

Thank you for the cross.

We thank you, jesus, and we worship your name.

Come and meet us in this moment.

Amen, friends of the Lord Jesus.

On the night he was betrayed, he took bread and, after giving thanks, he broke it and said this is my body, which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

And in the same way, jesus took the cup and he said this cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you for the forgiveness of your sins.

The apostle Paul, this early follower of Jesus, looking back on that night, said that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we are showing forth for the world to see Christ's death until he comes again in glory.

So, friends, in a moment I'll invite you to come forward.

Just simply tear a piece of the bread off, dip it in the cup and take both together.

There's also individually wrapped elements and they're gluten free.

If you need that, kelsey will serve those.

But, friends, jesus has prepared a place for you at his table.

He invites you to come and he wants to remind you of your true name.

Friends, let's feast together.