What in the story of Jacob catches your attention? How do you see yourself in this story? Are you a wrestler? Wrestling with God, people, yourself? Wrestling with mistakes and failings? With burdens and shame? Wrestling to belong, wrestling for a blessing, wrestling through injury and pain,wrestling to be transformed and named anew?
I found myself taking this story somewhat literally. I’m the oldest of three siblings. When we were little I could easily best my brothers in wrestling matches. I never actually hurt them (at least that I remember), just consistently overpowered them. Honestly, I loved that feeling of being the strongest. And they love to complain about how mean I was back then. They insist that I scarred them for life. These days I’m still wrestling with myself, wrestling to get stronger.
I started going to strength training classes a couple of years ago because I was experiencing a lot of new aches and pains, and random injuries kept cropping up. For the first several months I was sore all the time. I had to keep on showing up and moving through the discomfort. The workouts combine strength with agility and balance. I find them taxing to my brain as well as my body. When the instructor demonstrates the moves, I am often be thinking, “You want me to do what?” Still, I could say that, like Jacob in our story today, I have struggled and prevailed, struggled and prevailed. Recently a new student in the class said to me, “You look like you’ve been doing this for a while!” That was fun to hear!
Strength training involves pushing myself through fears and fatigue. As Randee put it a while back when she told her story at the story slam, to succeed in strength training you have to fail! There’s something about accepting the challenge of a physical contest week after week that is incredibly grounding for me, that has always been an integral part of my spiritual practice. Without it, I become anxious, disconnected and consumed by the stress that is more and more pervasive in all of our lives. This is the practice, the physical/ spiritual training, that I need. What is yours? The title of a recent opinion piece by Bill McKibben caught my eye the other day: “I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.”
McKibben writes: “I think if we had some way of surveying Americans at 3 a.m., we’d find huge numbers of people awake, wondering what new strain might be in store come morning. I don’t think it’s fragility at work—how are we supposed to respond to the now almost daily news that roving bands of A.I. agents are up to mayhem, or that the onrushing El Niño will take temperatures to heights no human has ever experienced?” McKibben argues, “If human survival and economic resilience are important goals, so is a world calm enough to meet the needs of the human nervous system. We can’t keep on like this—it’s simply inhuman. We’re creating a world that’s only fit for something artificial.”
As an activist, McKibben is also clear that we can’t withdraw from the world’s problems. As we approach the midterm elections, I think we’re all feeling that intensely, the responsibility to be active, to engage, to do our part, to wrestle. We are wrestling against those pressing to institute authoritarian rule those who do not care what happens to humanity or this amazing planet that is our home. And we are wrestling for a democracy that is multi-racial and multi-faith, diverse, vibrant and participatory, capable of bringing together the best of each of us to wrestle with these challenging times. And we are wrestling for our own sanity in this exhausting, overwhelming, de-stabilizing whirlwind.
The nighttime wrestling of Jacob is a key moment that shapes the identity of God’s people in Genesis. God told Abraham and Sarah (Jacob’s grandparents) that their descendants would be blessed to be a blessing, chosen not only for their own sake but for the sake of the whole world. And as we’ve noted in previous weeks, this family was not chosen because they were especially good or capable. They were very ordinary people, prone to error and moral failings, sometimes even perpetrating great harm. Jacob’s name means “heel.” Though his twin brother Esau was born first, Jacob came out of the womb grasping his sibling’s heel. Their father Isaac favored Esau while Jacob was closer to his mother, Rebekah. Jacob and Rebekah schemed together to steal Esau’s birthright and blessing.
When Esau found out what Jacob had done, he threatened to kill him. So Jacob ran to his mother’s family far away. He stayed there for many years, marrying twice and acquiring wealth. However, he was in continual conflict with his uncle, Laban, who was a trickster just like Jacob. When this struggle reached the point of crisis, Jacob again ran, this time toward home. Jacob learned that his brother was on his way to meet him with an army of 400 men. The story we heard today happened at this moment of peak fear and suspense.
Out of Jacob’s struggle with the stranger who in some way a represents God comes the gift of a new name, a new identity, and a new future. The Book of Belonging sums up Jacob’s past: “Jacob had always grasped for good gifts, but it hadn’t made him feel happy or safe. He was always running, always restless. Striving and struggling, desperate to belong.” And then the storyteller takes some creative license, imagining Jacob’s own thought process, imagining how he grew and evolved in response to God’s offering of a new name: “God […] had invited him to take his restless, striving ways and spend a lifetime wrestling together. Just hold on to me. He considered the brother he had tricked, the father he had lied to, and the people he had used and escaped. He decided to make things right. To wrestle for goodness instead of running away.”
I love how the story of Jacob wrestling portrays faith as an embodied struggle. We wrestle to the point of failure, and hurt, in order to become stronger and wiser. We wrestle to be more at home in our bodies and minds, in our families and communities. We wrestle to belong on this earth. We wrestle not for perfection but for “incarnation.” Incarnation is when God’s unconditional love and inexhaustible newness finds flesh in our mortal bodies. Incarnation describes God’s giving life to creation and forming a great family to bless the whole world and sending Jesus as our teacher, healer, and bearer of saving wholeness. So let us wrestle, like the athletes we are. Let us wrestle for goodness instead of running away. Amen.