A Proper 13 18 BFC 2017
Genesis 32:22-32
August 6, 2017
My
sophomore year in high school, a rock band named Kansas released a song that
became revered by all the too-serious kids like me. “Now,
don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky. It slips away,
and all your money won't another minute buy.
Dust in the wind. All we are is
dust in the wind.” If I could only convince (name withheld to protect the innocent),
cheerleader captain, how truly deep I was as a high school sophomore, she might
even look my way. I just had to keep my
singing voice under wraps. Alas. (looking
wistfully into the distance) (name withheld to protect the innocent). Dust in the wind. (sigh)
“All
we are is dust in the wind,” the chorus goes, a truth we affirm every Ash
Wednesday in this church.
Following
on the popularity of the song, in the late 80s, there was a movie, titled “Bill
and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” Bill and Ted, slackers and surfer dudes from the
West Coast, show that they have an intelligence and depth of their own when
they travel back in time to round up historical figures and bring them back to
the present to ace their history exam. Bill
gains the respect of the wisdom teacher, Socrates, by quoting the Kansas
Wisdom
Literature is comfortable with double edges and double meanings, with paradox
and different intelligences, with two opposite sayings being true at the same
time. It is a depression-era
grandmother saying, “A nickel’s a lot of money if you don’t have it.” Or Yogi Berra saying, “It’s ain’t over until
it’s over.” My favorite Yogiism is, “I tell the kids, somebody's gotta win, somebody's gotta lose.
Just don't fight about it. Just try to get better.” There is
not necessarily a moral there, or a should or ought in that, but a truism about
life.
I
believe we have one of those Wisdom Literature stories before us in Genesis
today. Jacob has tricked his brother,
stolen Esau’s birthright, been tricked himself by his father-in-law, Laban,
into marrying both of his daughters, Leah and Rachel, Jacob then conspires with
Leah and Rachel to trick their father.
And so, Jacob, who has tricked others and been tricked himself, wonders
whether there will be some consequence to his behavior when he meets his
brother Esau. So to soften the heart of
Esau, in dreading the meeting with a brother he duped, Jacob sends gifts ahead
hoping to appease him. Just before this
upcoming meeting, Jacob falls asleep and dreams of divine presence--a ladder to
heaven, with angels ascending and descending.
Yes, life and places in life, may feel particularly charged with God’s
presence and blessing.
But
there are other times when life feels like a struggle with God, wrestling and
fighting until we receive the intended blessing, refusing to let go until we,
ourselves, are marked by the altercation.
I
think this story says very little about the character of God or what God asks
of us. But I do believe the story says
something about the nature of life, the times when everything in our life seems
like a struggle, a wrestling match with God.
Sometimes the reality of life is such that we just need to walk through
or wrestle with it in all of its messiness just to know we are blessed.
There is an interesting
twist in this Biblical story about Jacob wrestling with the Divine Being. One part of Biblical tradition suggests that
we cannot see the face of God and live.
You may remember that God did not allow Moses to see the divine face for
fear of the harm that it may cause Moses.
God showed Moses the divine backside—the first mooning, I call it. In this story, Jacob claims to have seen God
face to face and found out that God might be a whole lot more abrasive and not
so touchy-feely as portrayed in much of our modern spirituality. You think you want to meet God?
You think you want to
have a divine experience? The story
teaches that you do not walk from such an experience without a little rough and
tumble. The story teaches that the only
way any one walks away from such a divine experience is with a limp.
As I stated, this wisdom
story seems to run counter to the theology and spirituality of our time. Worship and faith are only considered worthy
of our time the more we feel comfortable and familiar with them. But that seems rather odd, doesn’t it, when
we also believe that faith should have something to do with growth, no matter
what our age? And most all growth
happens as a result of some painful experience that moves us off our dime to
take in some new reality. Who willingly
and knowingly embraces pain and struggle for growth? Who really wants to break a hip for an
encounter with the Divine?
Yet, we know the truism of
that in mountains climbed. Very few of
us get to look out from a mountain peak (maybe some of you could afford the
helicopter ride) but most of us will see a mountain peak only by the struggle
of the climb. Mission
trips teach that kind of wisdom.
Community becomes a powerful thing on mission trips because a small
group of people have the same kind of sleep deprivation, ride in the van
together long enough, call forth from themselves strength they never knew they
had, wait for sacred words spoken in a language they don’t understand on knees
that ache from the length of service together such that everyone in the group
knows that nobody in the world has the same experience as we have shared. One of the most meaningful mission trips I
have ever been on began with the airline losing all of my luggage. I became famous for the plastic underpants,
the only thing available to me, at one of the local stores. Even with all my preparation, I could not
imagine that such bad fortune would release me to an incredible experience of
God in a community of youth and young adults to whom I feel forever tied. We all walk with the same limp, forever
changed by a divine mutual experience that has transformed how we see one
corner of the world.
And the text is
unclear. Jacob gets renamed as “Israel”
which could mean “one who wrestles with God” but the text might be more clear
in meaning that “God wrestles.”[1] So maybe it is that when we wrestle with life
we do not imitate Jacob so much as we imitate God’s work in the world. Blessing and growth only occur when we are
willing to get involved with the messiness of life and wrestle as God wrestles.
Hebrew Scripture scholar,
Walter Brueggemann, believes that to be true to our faith in this time and
place, we must indeed embrace pain and struggle to undercut a royal
consciousness within our present culture.[2] The Egyptian Pharaohs embraced a royal
consciousness. King Solomon, the ruler
of the United Monarchy in Israel
Brueggemann believes the
royal consciousness, as embraced by the Pharaohs and King Solomon and our
present-day spirituality is marked by three characteristics. First, many of us live in an economics of
affluence such that we are so well off that pain is not noticed. Whenever the hint of pain or struggle is at
our doorstep, we or our national leaders deflect, numb, or engorge ourselves to
avoid the pain or struggle. Second, we
live in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the suffering are sent
further and further to the edge. Those
who would provide megaphones to the suffering are laughed at or ridiculed as
kooks or traitors. Third, the royal
consciousness supports a religion that makes God so present that God’s
abrasiveness, absence, presence in the wilderness or the desert, rough around
the edges character and work in other parts of the world are not noticed. The problem is reduced to a psychological
problem.[3]
As in the time of Pharaohs
and King Solomon, I think Brueggemann’s observations suggest that we are not
asking ourselves deep, painful, struggling questions like: What if the problems in not only Syria but
also in our country, are based on our inability to weep over the tragedy that
continues? What if the inward
barrenness we might experience is based on our numbness to the incredible
barrenness and famine experienced in so many places in the world? What if our loss of meaning is based on an
inability to struggle with the problems within our own Christian faith where we
cannot imagine that the words “Christian” and “terrorist” could go in the same
sentence? Even when Anders
Behring Breivik and Timothy McVeigh so strongly identified themselves as
Christian. fundamentalists? What if God
feels so absent because we are unwilling to wrestle with God, to suffer the
pain found deep within the heart of God, to hear the cry that comes deep within
the being of God?
On a personal level, to know life as
struggle means that we do not see others with perfect health and wealth as
blessed by God. It may be just chance or
circumstance. To know life as struggle
means that we do not expect our marriages to be all roses and lemonade but
understand the necessary painful choices we need to make for growth and
commitment. To know life as struggle is
to make choices that are for the healing of ourselves, our communities, and the
world that might lead us, personally, into greater suffering. To know life as struggle means that doubt and
difficult discernment are a part of life of faith, and that certainty is
sometimes a tool of something that makes us comfortable but creates pain in the
world.
This wisdom story teaches that only
when we are willing to enter into struggle and pain with God do we receive
blessing. Jacob, sign and symbol of a
whole nation, crosses over to a new reality, emerges with a new name, and
becomes forever the people who struggle with God. May we, remembering our story, have the
wisdom, the courage, to embrace that kind of faith, that kind of life. And in return, may we know God’s blessing. So that even though we know crossing over into
a new reality might create suffering, we are willing to cross over to a new
reality, emerge with a new name, and grow and flourish as God struggles and as
we struggle. For if our life is absent
of struggle, are we choosing a royal theology that runs counter to the
narrative of God? Are we choosing to
avoid the necessary pain that would bring about our growth? Faith is not always about “ought” and
“should” but about a willingness to struggle with the life God has given us,
however imperfect, so that we might receive intended blessings. May we live into that. For,
all we are is dust in the wind but, at the same time, so much more than that as
God wrestles with us. Amen.
[1] Sara Koenig, “Commentary
on Genesis 32:22-31,” Working Preacher,
October 17, 2010, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=710.
[2] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, second
edition (Minneapolis
[3] Ibid, p. 36. Brueggemann goes on to write that the royal
consciousness has a royal program of achievable satiation marked by: 1) a management mentality that believes there
are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. 2) the
program legitimated by an “official religion of optimism” which has no business
but to maintain our standard of living, ensuring God’s place in the palace 3) a
requirement to annul the neighbor as life-giver; it imagines that we can live
outside history as self-made men and women.
(p. 37).
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