Wrestling With God

This coming Sunday as our journey through Genesis continues, we will get to a really important text in the thirty-second chapter. We know it is important because at daybreak, after all of that wrestling with God through the night, Jacob will have a new name: Israel.

Jacob is on his way home, crossing the ford at the Jabbok River. He’s been away for twenty years. If he left in his late teens or early twenties, then we are probably in the ballpark to assume he is now around forty or so. You might even say this experience at the Jabbok is the ultimate mid-life crisis!  Abraham may be the father of faith, but Jacob becomes Israel. Oh yeah..and after that, he walks with a limp.

Like Jacob/Israel, God's people are called to wrestle with God, to be blessed, and to walk with a limp. That wrestling changes and defines us. 

Recall once more what the narrator has told us about Jacob and the stories his family tells again and again at every family gathering. The second of two twins born to Isaac and Rebecca; “the heel-grabber” they called him, because the midwife said he came right on the heels of his brother, Esau, and it almost seemed like his was trying to hold his brother in the womb and get out first! What happens in the birthing room foreshadows what has since unfolded.

Of course like so many photos taken in the birthing room or in those early years of life such stories take on meaning as life is lived. In other words they get told for a reason. “That kid never seemed to cry,” a mother tells her friend—“she was the best baby.” And that story is told for one of two reasons: either that kid has continued along that path and has always just been easy, or somehow, out of nowhere she is currently out of control and the storyteller is trying to make sense of these changed circumstances. Another parent says, “I knew this wasn’t going to be easy from the moment that boy came home from the hospital and kept us up all night for months on end…”

So Jacob was a heel-grabber, born just a few minutes after his brother and apparently not happy at all about it from day one. In their teens there is that lentil soup story and again it makes it clear that Jacob is ambitious, even if the second-born son. And then the heel-grabber/soup maker all grown up, tricks his father by serving up the stew at the old man’s deathbed with those animal skins taped on his own hands. Last week, though, we got to see that "what goes around comes around" when he wakes up on the morning after his marriage to "Rachel" and discovers it is Leah. Seven more years of work to follow...

So, over the course of twenty years, Jacob has been able to make a new life for himself in the land of his mother’s people. He is now surrounded by two wives and two maids and a bunch of kids. His hard work has paid off and he is financially successful.  Now he is heading home to face not only his own demons, but his family, and particularly his brother, Esau. This experience at the Jabbok takes place on the eve before that reunion.  

Can you imagine two decades passing and brothers who shared the same womb not speaking for that entire length of time? As a pastor I am sad to tell you I can imagine it all too well, because I see it more than I wish to admit, and too often at funerals or weddings. Siblings or parents and their children who have fought over an inheritance (as Jacob and Esau did) or numerous other reasons.  It seems to me that after so much time has passed there is really never any way forward other than for someone to pick up the phone, or start out on a journey as Jacob did. Or to be able to finally utter the two most difficult words in the entire English language: “I’m sorry.” We can spend our whole lives, or decades at least, waiting for someone else to pick up that phone if we aren’t careful.

So as Jacob is heading home, he has a lot on his mind. He is not only coming to grips with his past but facing a very uncertain future. All he knows is that he has to try. He has to try to find his way back home. He has to try to make peace with his brother.

When we see him in this scene from the 32^nd chapter of Genesis he is utterly alone—the wives and kids are all on the other side of the river. On top of that it’s nighttime, the bewitching hour; the time when his internal dragons threaten to undo him. It is there, and then, that he wrestles until daybreak. I wonder if we did have a camera available what kind of photo we would take. Is the "man" he wrestles real or imagined? Is it God, or an angel in disguise, or a man of flesh and blood? Is this an internal or external struggle or some mixture of both?

The text is ambiguous as good stories always are. But one thing is certain: Jacob is left at the end with a limp. And at least in Jacob’s own mind, it was real enough. He feels he has wrestled with God and lived to tell about it. He calls the place, Peniel: for he has seen God face to face and lived to tell about it.

And as already mentioned, he gets a new name: Israel. So if we Christians are part of this story, part of the new Israel that has been grafted in to the old Israel, then this story is important to us. The story seems to be suggesting that the journey of faith is not about moral certitude or dogmatic clarity or blind obedience, but about wrestling. It’s also about that willingness to step forward into the unknown, even if we have to limp toward it. In fact, maybe faith itself is born when we recognize that we can’t go back, and that the only way forward is by grace. I will not let you go unless you bless me...

Next weekend we’ll turn our attention to the sons of Jacob—the original “cheaper by the dozen” gang. Our gaze will turn toward Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat.

But before we get there, I want to remind you of one of the most beautiful episodes in the Old Testament and perhaps in all of Scripture. It's right up there with that image of the father who runs out to welcome his "prodigal" son home. It comes to us from the 33^rd chapter of Genesis—the very next chapter beyond where today’s reading comes from.  After his divine encounter at the Jabbok River, Jacob continues his journey toward home. And suddenly he looks up and there he sees his brother, Esau, coming toward him, accompanied by four hundred men. And surely Jacob must be thinking, “this is it…my life is over…he has every right to kill me and that is what he is going to do after all these years.”

Only that isn’t what happens. Amazingly, Esau runs out to embrace his brother. He gives Jacob/Israel a big bear hug and kisses him. And these two middle-aged men begin to cry tears of reconciling love. It is an amazing image and it always saddens me a little that the lectionary overlooks it because its omission helps to feed the mistaken biases so many people have about the Old Testament. It’s truly an image of grace and healing no less powerful than the story of the prodigal son. Like that more familiar story it, too, insists that you can go home because the ties that bind family together are far more powerful the divisions and fears that threaten to tear us asunder.

This story brings us near to the end of this generation of the patriarchs. We’ll see Jacob again as an old man who grieves when he is given the news that his favorite son, Joseph, is dead. That of course, will turn out to be a lie. But all of that in due time. By the time we get there the story-line will have shifted toward Joseph - the fourth generation. But we don't speak of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. The Joseph narrative will take us on a new trajectory and into Egypt and into Exodus. So our summer story isn't yet ended. But this is the last we see of Jacob, now known as Israel.

Taken together, if the preacher dares to extend beyond where the lectionary committee has chosen to stop, Genesis 32 and 33 remind us of both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of our faith. We are called into relationship with a God who is not warm and cuddly, but a wrestler who may leave us walking with a limp. Yet that wrestling is in and of itself a blessing. Our encounters with the living God also leave us with a new sense of identity and purpose.

That claim on us leads us toward our true home, and opens us up to the horizontal relationships of life. It calls us into community where we are commanded to love our neighbor., including the family members we have hurt (or who have hurt us) along the way. People who walk with a limp are prepared for embrace and reconciliation, and the tears that healing old wounds can bring. Love of God and love of neighbor—two sides to one coin. And it’s all there in Genesis 32 and 33.

Karma

I've been reflecting on the Old Testament readings offered on Track 1 of the Revised Common Lectionary this summer, from Genesis. The reading for next Sunday can be found here.

The story of God’s people (and particularly the story of God’s encounters with Abraham, Rebecca, and Jacob and their families) is a story not so different from our own lives. It unfolds in chapters about birth and marriage and death and all the stuff in between. Sometimes it reads like a soap opera or reality show because sometimes life is like a soap opera or a reality show. Truth is often stranger than fiction. The Bible doesn't sugar coat much. It's not interested in a sanitized version, even if preachers are tempted to move the narratives in that directions. Rather, it's interested in the very real challenges of being human and that includes being "family." I've joked more than once when a parish describes themselves as "just like a family" to assign them to a year-long Bible study in Genesis and then report back!

This first scroll of the Torah includes the sibling rivalries and generational conflicts that all families must navigate. It lays it all out there. We have been reading and hearing about this crazy family since the first Sunday in June, so perhaps it's time for a quick review...

It all began with Abraham and Sarah, back on the weekend of June 7. Previously (in readings we did not get this summer because of the timing of Easter, and therefore Pentecost) God had called them to leave behind their old country and set out for a new land, a Promised Land. God also promised Abraham a heritage, that he will be the father of many nations. We picked it up at the oaks of Mamre in chapter eighteen.

And so the story has continued to unfold, week after week as we have moved from generation to generation, like looking through an old photo album and telling the stories that go with those snapshots. After the miraculous birth of Isaac in Abraham and Sarah’s old age, the casting away of Hagar and Ishmael, the testing of Abraham on Mount Moriah, Isaac's marriage to Rebecca, and the birth of their twin sons, Esau and Jacob we get to where we are today.

If we hear today's portion of the story in isolation, as if nothing has happened before and nothing will happen afterwards, then we might find ourselves saying, “poor Jacob.” He falls in love with a beautiful girl and agrees to work seven years for her hand in marriage. He shakes hands on it with the father-of-the-bride (who also happens to be his mother’s brother.) But Uncle Laban tricks him. His uncle makes a last minute switch on the wedding day and instead of Rachel, Jacob finds himself married to Leah. The narrator is ridiculously direct: the marriage feast happens, there is apparently lots of drinking involved as often happens at weddings, the marriage is consummated and then this simple declarative statement: “when morning came, it was Leah!”

The best thing the narrator can think to tell us about this older sister is…well, she had nice eyes.

Jacob has been tricked! Poor Jacob! Unless you’ve been paying attention to the narrative. Then you will recall how he came to be at his uncle’s house looking for love in the first place. His old man, Isaac, was on his deathbed. Jacob the heel grabber (born just after his brother, Esau) who tricked his hungry older brother to give up his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup gets his father to bless him while Esau is out hunting to fulfill his dying father's last request.

Yes, that Jacob is now tricked by his mother's brother. Isn't karma a bitch? 

 Jacob has reaped what he previously sowed and I think we are meant to have a good laugh about that. "What goes around, comes around.” He’s really not a bad guy. In fact, I think he’s quite likable because he is so real, so imperfect, so human. So much like us. Even so, the trickster has been tricked. If we were encouraged to laugh more in church when we hear these old stories read we'd have a good laugh over this one. It’s as if the narrator is winking at us and saying, “you see…you can’t run away forever. Sooner or later your past catches up with you. And the only real question is this: what will you do when it does?”

Ironically, maybe it is precisely in having an uncle like Laban that Jacob’s salvation lies. Because Jacob and his uncle really are two peas in a pod. (Remember that Jacob was and is his mother's favorite. He clearly takes after her side of the family.) Rebecca's brother and son deserve each other and there is a certain kind of grace in all of this because in spite of it all these are God’s people, just as we are God’s people. The stuff of their lives and ours—the good, the bad, and the ugly—that is where God will hunt us down. And that is where we will find God. Not in some distant heaven far away but taking on flesh, Incarnate; among and in and through us.

So in today’s Old Testament reading, Jacob gets a glimpse of how his father and barely-older brother must have felt when they got tricked, because now he is on the other side of all that. When morning came, it was Leah.

Here is the thing: Jacob can now choose how to react to that. He can become bitter or resentful, seek revenge or turn to alcohol to numb the pain. Or he can take that experience as an opportunity for growth and self-realization that brings healing and new life. We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see where this is all going (just as in our own lives we have to wait to see how it turns out after the wedding or the baptism or dropping our kid off at college, or the kid dropping out of college, or celebrating a retirement or gathering with aunts and uncles and cousins we haven’t seen in years for a funeral.) We should simply notice that time has marched on in this narrative for Jacob and there will be more to come. Fourteen years, and two wives later, he's had a lot of time to think about home. And the family he's left behind. 

As the rest of the summer continues to unfold, we will continue to attention to this crazy family because we profess that in so doing we may catch a glimpse of ourselves. And that when that happens there is good news not too far away, good news about the God of this whole lot: Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Rebecca, Esau and Jacob and Leah and Rachel. This God who has promised us a heritage as well, the God who has claimed us and marked us and loves us into new and abundant life.

Jacob's Ladder

Just for fun, as a warm-up, cling on the link above. You won't be disappointed and it'll set the mood. I'll wait...

OK, a quick rant.  Let me get it out of my system! The Lectionary Committee has skipped over two full chapters and those chapters matter. Last week's reading was from Genesis 25. I wrote about those verses here. Today's reading comes from Genesis 28. So what happened in between?

It matters. First there is the stuff of life. Isaac plants and reaps and becomes a rich man. He goes up to Beer-sheba and settles down. Esau gets married, for the first time. The text isn't quite explicit but it's very implicit; Rebecca doesn't approve. She just doesn't like the local Canaanite women. 

In Chapter 27 we see the real result of that bowl of lentil soup as Isaac lies on his death bed and is ready to offer a blessing to his eldest. (That would be Esau.) You really have to read that chapter if you don't know the story, or even if you do. It's significant. Short version? Rebecca and Jacob collude and pull a fast one over the old man - and Esau. Jacob gets the blessing. Esau, the guy with the guns, is not amused. 

So two important lines of Rebecca's that really matter. First, in 27:43, she tells Jacob to run for his life. "Flee to my brother Laban in Haran." (By the way, Haran is in modern-day Turkey- about 500 miles or so north of Beer-sheba.) Second, Rebecca tells her dying husband that she is so sick and tired of Canaanite women and that it would kill her if Jacob married any one of them. She says he needs to go to Haran to find a wife. So notice what's happened here and who is in charge. 

That brings us to today's reading. "Mama's boy" has gone about thirty miles on his first day away from home, to Beth-el, literally "house of God." My work here is practically done. Context matters. Now we get what Jacob is up to. He's left home and as we'll soon see it's going to be a while before he comes back home. Years. He may be the one with the blessing but he's just embarked on a long journey, alone. I'll resist the urge to jump ahead; we'll get there. 

But anyone with a little imagination can see what has happened and why Beth-el would be a "thin place" for him. He's alone with an unknown future ahead of him. It's like that first night away at camp, or college, or moving from the east coast to the west coast. It's exciting and scary and confusing and liberating all at the same time. 

Jacob has a mystical experience. Again I don't want to spoil the ending but, I will: this won't be the last time. He will wrestle with the living God many years later on his way back home at the Jabbok River. However we want to interpret these two events, in Beth-el and at the Jabbok, they seem to suggest that Jacob had real life-changing encounters with God, that clearly affirm he is the one who should inherit the Promise - however imperfect he may be. He finds himself  in a thin place between heaven and earth; both times. And in his own words, "it's totally awesome!"

I think if I were preaching on this text, which I am not doing this year, I'd do it in much the way that this blog post has unfolded - with a lot of "set up" and filling in the blanks and re-telling the story. But the goal is to get to that place where he sees the ladder and then I'd insist on including the last two verses. (For the love of God, did they really have to divide a verse in half and stop at 28:19a? His response matters, and it goes like this: 

Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.”

God blesses Jacob at Beth-el. But a covenant always requires a response. Jacob gets it. And we know that he will come again, to his father's house in peace. And we know that he will be a faithful steward of his many blessings, giving back his first tithe to God.  But get ready. We are about to meet Uncle Laban! Stay tuned!

Lentil Soup

My homemade lentil soup which is quite good, but I've not
yet been sold anyone's birthright for a bowl of it

One of the critical skills I try to teach (and try to practice) in reading the Bible is to slow down and pay attention to detail. Whether the context has been teaching undergraduates or leading a Bible Study or offering an interfaith class with a rabbi friend for senior learners, I've found this to be a necessary  and learnable skill. But it takes practice. Most of us read too fast. We scan. But reading the Bible is more like reading a poem; we need to hear it (with our ears) whenever possible, even if others wonder why we are reading out loud. I was blessed to have good teachers myself who said that a close reading of the text is more important than how many commentaries one consults. Amen. 

There is a little detail in the reading from Genesis 25 appointed for this coming Sunday that the narrative itself seems not to explore much, but that I think invites our curiosity and our imagination and our experience before we rush headfirst into this text. This is simply that the narrator tells us that Isaac was forty when he married Rebecca and that he was sixty when the twins were born. 

Two decades pass during these few verses, between marriage to parenthood. That's a fairly long time. (In identifying Rebecca as "the sister of Laban" we also get introduced to an uncle we'll encounter again...but I'll save that for another post.) So when the narrator says that "Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebecca conceived" we need to remember that even when it seems this happens fast in the Bible (because it took no time to read it!) that one little verse covers the span of two decades. Twenty years. Two hundred and forty months. One thousand and forty weeks. You get the point. 

That little verse invites us to linger a bit as we remember all who have struggled with infertility, and prayed. And prayed. And prayed. Prayed because they so desperately wanted a child. 

God answers prayer. But almost never on our timelines. And sometimes it's the answer we didn't really want to hear. But in this case we are, once again, dealing with the promise delayed. Abraham and Sarah had to deal with that too. But we got into all the details of what they went through; prayer, surrogacy, and finally Laughter at the tent. But here we only get half a sentence. 

We should linger on it nevertheless. Isaac prayed. And prayed. And waited. And prayed. And waited...because they were unable to conceive a child. In lingering we begin to see that these characters in Genesis were not so different from us. Whether or not we have faced that particular challenge we have waited and prayed and worried and had sleepless nights. At least I assume most of us have. 

And then, finally, after much heartache and maybe when they thought it was never going to happen, suddenly there is not one, but two, fighting from the start. That happens too, in "real life" sometimes, doesn't it? 

There is a second point I want to make about reading the Bible that it took me even longer to internalize than slowing down. In fact it wasn't really until I had been ordained for fifteen years or so and preaching all that time, upon entering into a doctorate in ministry program where I had the good fortune to study with Walter Brueggemann, that I heard this second point so clearly emphasized. 

In addition to a close rhetorical reading of texts, Walter also emphasized repeatedly that every narrative is told "from a slant." That it has a narrative perspective. That it takes sides. That there is no such thing as a "fair and balanced" Biblical text. There is only ever telling the story from the slant. 

This is so ridiculously true, and so obvious, that it makes me blush to say it took me that long,. And yet, I don't think I'm alone. Many of us come to Holy Scripture assuming it's "true" and that we are getting the whole story. That the narrator is omniscient. Or, at the every least, is trying to be fair. But in order to uncover a "word of the Lord" there, it is also quite clear that every text has a context and a perspective. Or as Walter puts it, "who is grinding what ax in this text?" (One example may suffice and that is First and Second Samuel which so clearly comes to us from an anti-Saul and pro-David perspective.) Even Bathsheba-gate isn't the end of the story for David; although even this pro-David narrator cannot ignore that scandal. 

In writing about the text for this Sunday, Julianna Claassens, who is Professor of Old Testament at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, puts it this way:   

One should keep in mind that these narratives are told from a pro-Jacob/pro-Israel perspective. (emphasis mine) The portrayal of a God who sides with the powerless, the weak, the younger brother, the barren woman is moreover a theological perspective that reveals something of Israel's self-understanding as a tiny, powerless people who lived in the midst of much stronger nations - a reality that became even more evident in the run-up to the exile with superpowers who were quite able to crush a people like Israel without blinking.Working Preacher

Again, this is so obvious. We will meet Esau again in what I consider to be one of the most poignant moments in all of the Old Testament, right up there with the reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers, who tried to kill him, near the very end of Genesis. But here, again, the preacher and the student of this text does well to linger on this notion. 

Why? Because this idea that Jacob (the trickster) had every right to take the birthright because Esau was a barbarian who did not care less about such things and sold his birthright when he was hungry for some lentil soup is so clearly told from the slant, or as Dr. Claassens puts it, from a pro-Jacob perspective. We do well to remember that if the two brothers were sitting together in a therapist's office that perhaps Esau would remember that day quite differently. (Maybe that would be a way to come at this sermon, to give Esau a voice as to what happened that day, as he remembers it. Because here is the thing: if it didn't happen exactly that way, then Jacob (and Rebecca) really had no right to steal Esau's birthright in the more famous story that this foreshadows.)

Even so, as Claassens goes on to point out, while the narrative no doubt has "an ax to grind" (Brueggemann's language, not hers) it is nevertheless pretty honest about Jacob, who will come to be called Israel. He is not portrayed in the best light. He's a heel-grabber. He's a trickster, like his Uncle Laban. Nothing seems to merit him being the one to whom The Promise will pass. 

Except that it does. As Claassen puts it, " this line of interpretation makes a strong case for God's grace - a God who already is involved with people in their mother's womb - within the very messiness and conflict of relationships." 

That'll preach! Jacob/Israel/Followers of Jesus may make bad choices along the way, but there is no reason to keep those secrets. God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God is merciful. In the midst of life, our lives, God is faithful.