Wrestling with God (Ash Wednesday Sermon)

We're talking about wrestling with God tonight.

Like I said earlier, Jesus wrestled with God in the garden

and prayer and the struggle was so great that he was literally

sweating blood. It's a scientific phenomenon.

It's been observed before under extreme stress, capillaries in

the skin can burst and blood comes out with the sweat.

And that's the degree of stress and strain and struggle that

Jesus was engaging in in the garden before he was ever

arrested. Knowing what was coming.

Knowing the pain he was about to suffer, The physical pain, the

emotional and relational pain of being betrayed and abandoned by

those whom he had known and loved.

And the spiritual pain of knowing that He was about to

bear not just the sin of all humanity, but God's wrath

against the sin of all humanity. The cup that He spoke of when he

said, let this cup be passed from me is a cup that is

referred to in multiple places in the Old Testament.

And it is the cup of God's wrath that God had said He would make

His people drink to the dregs when He poured out his wrath

upon them. And that was the cup that His

Father was asking him to drink. And Jesus said, if this cup can

pass from me, Father, let it pass from me.

Your will not mine be done. Before we get into any more of

the wrestling, though, oh, I want to talk about this business

of being faithful in a system stacked against you.

I, I, I think that it doesn't take too much looking at the

world around us to see that we live within systems that are

vast and powerful. Political systems, economic

systems, philosophical systems, educational systems, religious

systems that are far beyond our power to influence in any

meaningful way. I'm all for voting.

I vote often. But as good as it is to vote and

is is the blessing that is that we live in a society where we

have a vote to cast in elections for our leaders and for policies

and and laws and those sorts of things.

As good as that is, a single vote in the United States in a

national election, even a single vote in a statewide election is

not a lot of power, is not a lot of power.

And, and, and every year almost 50% of the people in the country

have someone and gets elected that they didn't want elected.

Well, every four years for the president and different times

for other offices. But there's a lot of a lot of

things in this world that are simply beyond our control.

Economic forces, again, political forces, military

forces. There are things that happen

that we think, my goodness, I, this shouldn't be happening.

But what can we do about it? We see women and others rising

up for freedom in Iran. What can we do about it?

We heard of Christian brothers and sisters in various places in

Africa being slaughtered simply because they're Christian.

And what can we do about it? We look at the world around us

and, and it, it's kind of goes in waves.

I'm in one of those points in, in, in the wave and in my life

where I'm meeting a lot of drug addicts.

Don't know why that happens, but it goes in waves in my life that

I find myself encountering and meeting a lot of folks that are

either recently given up or are actively engaged in, in, you

know, chemical abuse. And, and there's, there's so

little to do about the drug crisis in the United States, the

human trafficking problems, you know, as as the Epstein files

continue to make the news and and they become political to a

political tool for one side to beat up the other side with we

should not forget that the children were abused for profit

and pleasure. And what can we do about it?

What can we do about it? There are so many

extraordinarily difficult and challenging things in this world

and and sometimes the best we can do is just tread water.

How do we stay faithful in those kinds of systems?

How do we live faithfully in a world where you can't buy a

phone or a wireless electric drill or tool or a laptop

without participating in the slave trade?

Because that's where some of the stuff comes that go to make the

batteries, particularly the cobalt, 70% of it comes from the

Congo. Good portion of that is mined by

slaves. What do we do?

How do we live by faith when the clothes that we buy.

Thank you Walmart and Timu. When the clothes that we buy are

almost all at some level of the manufacturing process made by

folks that are slaves or in near slave labor conditions and these

systems that are overwhelmingly large and powerful and beyond

us, how do we live by faith in those?

I've been reminded again here recently of, of the words and

writings of a, of a gentleman that I've, I have not ever met

face to face. I, I actually got a chance to

interview him on a back during COVID.

I was doing a sort of podcasty thing and I interviewed him on

that. His name's Emmanuel Katangale.

He's a a native ethnically, a native of Uganda.

His parents fled Uganda before the genocide and he was raised

most of his life in a neighboring country in Africa.

And now he's a professor in the United States, was a professor

at at the seminary at Duke, which is a United Methodist

seminary. But I think he's moved to a

different university since then. And and so having grown up in

the shadow of the genocide of Uganda and the horrors of that,

those particular political and religious systems that led to

that awful destruction that so few could do anything about, he

had these things to say. He said, as we're well before I

read the quote, he said as as we're trying to be faithful in

these systems, as we're trying to live out the values and and

the principles of the Kingdom of God, as we're trying to follow

Jesus. What is essential is that we do

these things according to God's ways, not according to the

world's ways that we really cannot do the work of the

Kingdom of God using the world's tools.

We need to use God's tools and Kitangale, he pushes against the

stream of of every major church growth, church leader, large

church pastor, all of the folks that that that have the the

large growing, thriving churches.

He pushes directly against what they teach and what they say,

which is strategic planning, strategic planning, strategic

planning. And Katangale says strategic

planning is for the powerful. Strategic planning is for for

boards to gather or politicians to gather or, or economic

leaders to gather. And they sit down and they set

clear achievable goals. They might be ambitious goals,

but they're achievable goals. And they do all of their

research and they do all of their planning so that they can

have as few variables as possible and, and as few things

happen that are not predicted and not predictable.

And that's how strategy works. It's from position of power,

when you can, when you can control the variables or have at

least a larger degree of control of the variables, where you can

predict, where you can plan and you can, you know, get results

that you plan and predict. Strategy is the posture of the

powerful, says Katangale. It sets goals and commits to

measurable outcomes. It is not comfortable with

uncertainties but always accounts for them as a

predictable variable. Strategy is always realistic,

even when it's ambitious. It lays out a step by step

process for moving with predictable results from where

we are to where we want to be. On the other hand, he says

tactics are the tools of the week.

They are the wisdom of the week about how to survive in a world

they do not own. I love that phrase.

How to survive in a world they do not own.

Tactics assume that the system we live under cannot be reformed

or reorganized. It's an in its entirety.

Instead, the tactics plot to subvert the reigning system of

those at those places where it is weak.

Tactics are worked out on the fly and passed on in the jungle

under the cover of night. Like strategy, they are

realistic, but tactics do not pretend to know for certain what

will happen in the future. Tactics depend on the art of

improvisation. When situations change, tactics

change with them. So over the course of Lent, as

we're talking about being faithful in a system stacked

against you, we're going to be looking at tactics.

Tactics for being faithful in worlds and in systems that are

designed not to help us be faithful to God, that are in a

very real sense designed to help us not be faithful to God, to

discourage that. And that's the kind of systems

we live in. We, we live in that kind of

system. And, and when we decide that we

want to be faithful, when we want to give generously, when we

want to care for others, we want to love sacrificially, when we

want to make faith a priority, it, it, it's, it's then when we

make those decisions that we discover just how much of the

inertia of the world around us pushes US against that and

pushes against us as we try to do that, Whether it's, hey,

don't give too much, you need to save and prepare for your

future. Hey, hey, we know faith is a

priority, but you've got this thing to do at work and that

thing to do at school and that thing to do with sports and this

thing to do with clubs and these things to do with this.

And, and all of these forces and factors come and push and push

and push. And we want to reach out to the

person who is alone and, and not accept it and not welcome, But

we know when we reach out to them that the folks that are

going to reject them might end up rejecting us.

And, and all of these things are happening around us and it's, it

can be a grind. It can be just to survive as

housing prices go up and rental prices go up and cost of living

goes up and all of that is increasing at a higher rate than

salaries and wages are increasing.

And, and, and kids in their 20s and 30s today going, I don't

know if I can ever own a home. Even with both of us working in

the family, These systems are a challenge to be faithful in, but

that's what we're called to do. That's what we are not called to

follow Jesus and be faithful to Jesus when it's easy and

convenient, but all the time, all of the time.

So the tactic we're talking about tonight then is wrestling

with God, wrestling with God. The first thing in being

faithful is is to is to commit to being willing to wrestle with

God. You see, wrestling with God is

not a sin. Jacob is not condemned for

wrestling with God. Jesus certainly was not

condemned for wrestling with God.

They both did. Jacob who was told by God time

to go back home and Jacob knowing that is it was far as he

know his brother still wants to kill him.

He's not heard any news from home to suggest anything else.

And he is about to cross back, cross the river back into

Canaan, go back to his his where his brother's been living and,

and, and he has sent word ahead to his brother.

He sent servants out to tell his brother, hey, I'm coming and I'm

bringing my family with me. And the servants come back and

report, hey, your brother Esau is coming and he's bringing 400

men with him. And the last thing Jacob heard

from Esau was I will kill you. But God told him, go back home.

And so Jacob sends everything he owns and all of his family

across the river ahead of him. He's alone by himself, and he's

wrestling with God. There's a lot of different takes

on this from Jewish and and Christian scholars and

theologians and writers. Some see this as the the Jacob

had a literal wrestling match with a physical person that was

either an Angel sent by God or some people will say a, a Jesus

himself taking bodily form before being born as as the

Savior hundreds of years later. Others say that it's a spiritual

wrestling match, that there wasn't a real physical

encounter, but it was a spiritual encounter, a vision of

wrestling with God that Jacob has.

It's we don't know for sure, but we know he was wrestling.

We know that God was calling him to do something and to go

somewhere and to be someone that he didn't want to go, he didn't

want to be. He didn't.

He was afraid. He was afraid for himself.

He was afraid for his family. He was afraid for his future.

And worse yet, he knew that he was afraid because he'd screwed

up. This was all his fault.

He's the one that conned his brother out of his birthright.

He's the one that stole his blessing from his father away

from his brother. It wasn't an accident.

It was 100% deliberate, 100% intentional.

And after 20 years of being lied to and deceived and manipulated

by someone else, Jacob I think was going OK.

Or maybe I get why he's also mad.

I understand. But he's been told by God to go

back and he's afraid of what will happen to him and what will

happen to his family, and so he's wrestling with God about

this decision. And he refuses to let go when

he's wrestling with God. Before we get to that though,

it's wrestling with God. It we and I, the one of the

things I preach and teach so much and I've I've heard it a

lot and I firmly believe in it, is surrendering to God that

Jesus's prayer, thy will not mine be done.

Is is so important that that I forget how important it is to

wrestle with God. This is a part of our

relationship with God too. It's not only not sin to wrestle

with God, it's part of the way God forms us and shapes us as we

push back against God. God forms and shapes us into the

people that God wants us to be, the people we would not become

if we didn't wrestle with God. Think about literal wrestling

in, in, in, in, in high school or at other levels.

College, Olympics, maybe WWE, who knows?

You know you get better by doing it, right?

You can't learn to wrestle by reading a book.

You can't learn to wrestle by watching a video.

You might be able to learn some of the basic maneuvers and

stances and those kinds of things, but you'll never be good

at it until you do it. And it's the act of doing it

that allows you to become better at it.

You gain strength, you gain understanding, you gain muscle

memory, you gain confidence, you gain hope, you gain skills, You

gain tactics by wrestling. You get shaped and formed into a

wrestler, and this is part of how God shapes us as we struggle

and wrestle with God. And, and in that struggling and

in that wrestling, Jacob refused to let go.

He refused to submit. He refused to tap out.

Even after God, the Angel, whoever was you who had knocked

his hip out of socket, Jacob still refused to tap out.

He refused to yield. I don't know if anyone's been

watching the Night of the Seven Kingdoms.

It's not a kid friendly show, but it's, you know, there's

there's there's combat in there in an arena trial by combat.

And I'm not going to spoil if you're watching, I won't spoil

anything. In the lattice episode, the hero

and the villain, we're fighting each other and and one of them

forced the other into a position where they either needed to

yield or they would be killed. I won't tell you who it was.

You'll have to find that out yourself.

Jacob refused to yield. He refused to surrender even

after God knocked his hip out of joint, even after God wounded

him in that struggle, Jacob refused to yield.

That seems strange as an act of faith if faith is just

surrendering to God. But faith isn't just

surrendering to God. Part of the process of

surrendering to God is struggling.

Ultimately, Jacob did what God wanted him to do.

He went back home and he faced his brother.

And we'll look at that on Sunday.

But the struggle is part of it. It's part of the faith.

Faithlessness would have been walking away.

Faithlessness would have been like Jonah, You want me to go

there? I'm going to go there instead.

The willingness to struggle with God and wrestle with God is part

of faith. Richard Foster is is another

wonderful writer and he's written a lot of books about

spirituality and spiritual growth and spiritual

disciplines. And in one of those, and I can't

remember which one, he talked about gathering in prayer some

folks from church and there was a a child that was sick, that

was very sick, bordering on death.

And, and Foster got there and they were getting ready to pray

and there were other people that were already praying.

Well, God, you know, and you know, we would like him to be

healed, but your will be done. And Foster said to that group of

people, no, no, we will pray for God to heal this child.

Foster, I refuse to believe it's God's will for this child to

die. We will pray for this child's

healing. We will pray for the parents,

we'll pray for the doctors, we'll pray for the nurses, and

we will insist that God heal. Foster was willing to wrestle

with God in prayer on that occasion.

The child was healed. It doesn't always turn out that

way, but there are people in situations in our life.

Where where we need to grab hold of God's coattails and say I'm

not letting go, God, until you make this right, I'm not letting

go. I love this person.

I love those folks. I love this community, I love

this country. I'm not going to stop praying

for these people. I'm not going to give up on

them. My grandmother was like that for

my uncle. Both of them are past now and I

can talk about him, but one of my uncles had again, drugs and

alcohol. You know, he, he got enough Duis

that he was eventually sent to prison, not jail, but prison for

DUI. And he was sent to, I can't

remember which one it was, but you might know the name of it.

It's the, it's the prison in West Virginia you don't want to

get sent to. And, and that's where he was

sent. By this point, his mother, my

grandmother had passed. She had died and she prayed for

my uncle every day, even after he would lie to her, even after

he had cheated her, even after he tried to steal from her, even

after he done all of these awful things.

She prayed for him and prayed for him and prayed for him and

prayed for him and refused to stop praying for him.

And she died with him still an active addict.

But it first night in prison, another inmate got in his face

and said you're going to be dead by morning.

My uncle stayed up all night praying and he never took a

drink again. Fear can help sometimes too.

I'm all wouldn't give up on him. She wouldn't surrender.

She wouldn't let go. She kept hold of God and it hurt

her. It's painful.

And that's what happened to Jacob.

God wounded. Jacob, God wounded.

When we hold on to God like that, when we wrestle with God

and say God, I am not giving up on this.

I am not giving up on this person.

I am not giving up on this situation.

When we hold on to God like that, it's like grabbing a tiger

by a tail or the bull by the horns.

We will get hurt. We will get hurt, but that's

part of the struggle and that's part of life too.

And that's part of faith too. And I heard an old preacher once

say years ago, Jacob walked differently after he met God.

And he did. He walked with a limp the rest

of his life from that wound in his hip given to him by God as

he wrestled with him there. And I think Jacob's a beautiful

example of a strategy, a tactic when we're wrestling with God.

God's blessing comes through your strengths and your

weaknesses came through Jacob's strength.

He refused to let go. It's very interesting.

The Bible says that the man he was wrestling with couldn't

overpower him. All commentators, Jewish and

Christians, say this is hyperbole, that that God

certainly could have overpowered Jacob, but God willingly

restrained himself. What it speaks to is Jacob's

persistence. There was a strength in Jacob

and that I will not submit even to God without a struggle.

I won't do it. I'm holding on until God gives

me this blessing that I need. And in that strength, Jacob

received that blessing, but it was also in his weakness and God

hid him in his strength to turn it into a weakness.

And, and, and that's, you know, that spot in the hip where we're

strong place in our body, our abdomen, our, our, our thighs,

our upper legs, our quads, right there in the middle of that

strength is where God hit Jacob, where God wounded Jacob, where

God weakened Jacob. And in his weakness he was

blessed. It's our strengths and our

weaknesses, not our strengths or our weaknesses, but it's in our

strengths and our weaknesses that God's blessing comes

through. So as we're struggling with

things in this life, in this world that are beyond our

control, one of the one of the tactics we can have is wrestle

with God with these things in prayer and do not submit, do not

yield, do not surrender, do not tap out.

But there's another tactic we can have when wrestling with

God. And that other tactic, well, I'm

going to skip that one. That other tactic is to yield

because that's what Jesus did. Certainly Jesus is a good

example to follow, right? All agree on that.

And Jesus there in the garden saying, God, if there is any

way, let this cup of your wrath pass from me.

I do not want to drink this. God, I do not want to go through

this. I do not want to be publicly

rejected, disgraced and humiliated.

I do not want to feel the weight of this sin in my soul.

I do not want to experience your rejection and your wrath.

I do not want that. But Jesus tapped out.

I surrender God Your will not mine be done what you want, God

I will do. I wish there were an easy guide

for when to tap out and when to not tap out, when to yield and

when to hold on. But there is no easy or simple

guide for that. There just isn't.

We just have these two tactics presented to us both in the

scripture of one person who refused to let go and was

wounded in the process, and one who surrendered all and died in

the process but got his life back again.

And part of our walk as followers of Jesus is to kind of

have to figure that out as we go.

It's the struggle, it's the journey, it's the process by

which God is forming us, by which God is teaching us to

depend upon Him. Whether we struggle, whether we

hold on and refuse to let go, or whether we tap out and yield to

depend on God and put our hope and our faith and our trust in

Him. This is the question that we

have before us. To yield or not to yield?

Father, if you're willing, take this cup from me, yet not my

will, but yours be done. And being in anguish, he prayed

more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling

to the ground. Sometimes in the struggle with

forces beyond our control in this world, the best thing we

could do is to yield. Yield to God and let happen what

will happen. Sometimes the best thing to do

is to refuse to submit. Refuse to yield.

Hold on to God in prayer and say God, I will go to my grave

without surrendering this and God will show us.

God will show us. Either way there's pain, either

way there's suffering. Either way, there's wounding and

either way, God is faithful and our our task day in and day out

is to sort out what can I hold on to in prayer?

What do I need to surrender and let go of?

And God will guide us through that whole thing, wrestling with

God, being faithful to God and a system stacked against you and a

system stacked against you. The first I think and most

important thing we can do is to is to be willing to wrestle with

God as we pray our way and walk our way and work and worship our

way through these systems in life that we encounter, that we

wrestle with God. And sometimes when we wrestle,

we'll submit, sometimes we won't.

But God will form us either way in Jesus name, Amen.