Blessed, But Limping
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
August 3, 2008

Genesis 32;22-31
Psalm 17:1-7, 15
Matthew 14:13-21

In one class in seminary, we did a lot of small group work and I was frequently paired with a classmate who happened to be Lutheran. This classmate and I discovered there were definite differences in our two approaches to theology, and the most striking was – and I forget exactly how we got on this subject one day – I said something about arguing with God and he was appalled that one would ever want to argue with God.

I have since learned that Lutherans tend to emphasize the sovereignty of God and the human response of submitting to that sovereignty. This is different than my own free church understanding that places a higher value on human freedom and autonomy, though still within the sovereignty of God. I placed free will more highly than my Lutheran friend.

So in seminary, as I learned more about the Jewish Scripture, I was drawn to the way some of the patriarchs would bargain and debate with God. Here in this story of Jacob, he doesn’t just argue with God. He wrestles with God! There is something in this story that pulls me in. Perhaps because the story speaks of a deep existential and archetypal truth of how we so often find ourselves wrestling with life, with fate, with ourselves—wrestling with God, and being transformed in the process.

In the story, Jacob has done well for himself in terms of worldly possessions. He has many servants, livestock and wives. He is blessed with a large progeny: 12 sons and 1 daughter, the sons representing the 12 tribes of Israel. All that came at a cost, though. To achieve much of this, Jacob had been a trickster, a deceiver. Jacob then has to face the wrath of both the brother he deceived and his uncle’s sons who felt that much of Jacob’s wealth came at their expense. So he had a lot of things, but he has used others in the getting of them. It is in today’s story that he faces the truth of his life.

In a vision God tells him to go home and it is on that journey home, where he hopes to reconcile with his brother, that this strange man wrestles with him all night long.

This is the meeting of a man and God, and notice that Jacob gives the angel a real run for his money. The angel, the text says, at first cannot prevail against Jacob as the dawn approaches. This Jacob is made of some pretty tough stuff.

But in this divine/human stalemate, divinity eventually wins out. The angel says, essentially, okay, I’ll bless you, but it will cost you. Then the angel wrenches Jacob’s hip out of joint, so he is left limping. This angel means serious business.

So Jacob is blessed and he gets a new name. No longer merely the trickster, he is the one who has prevailed—wrestled with God and survived.

I daresay that all of us here of a certain age know something of prevailing in life; know something of struggle. I look back at my own life to this point and I can honestly and without too much drama say that I have prevailed in some situations and that I have the battle scars to show for it. No doubt you have your own list of struggles you could tell me about.

But the trouble is, sometimes we’re in the wrong struggle. So often we struggle with humans and not God. We’re not really engaged in what is important. This is what Jacob did initially. We are well acquainted in our culture about the self-made man or woman, a person who perseveres in life and becomes successful—individuals who rise up, sometimes out of common circumstances, to command industry, business or nation. And this is all well and good. We live in a land that encourages such success and honors such success.

But so often these successes, these fortunes, these little empires that we create for ourselves begin to show signs of wear and tear, for such is the fate of all earthly things. They are temporal, not eternal. We begin to realize that they do not hold the essentials of life. Sometimes these successes become diversions from what is really important.

I recently came across a reading excerpted from Thoreau’s Walden: It was a reading I had used in what turned out to be my very first sermon of sorts, before I sent to seminary: a brief talk along with several other dads in a Father’s Day service. For this first little mini-sermon of mine, I choose this text from Thoreau’s Walden:

“I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived. I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear…I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world. Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.”

Thoreau was talking about reducing life to the core essentials in his experience at Walden Pond. I understood it as a call to confront the essentials of my own life and in that Father’s Day talk about 15 or so years ago, I spoke of my struggles with divorce and parenting and my wrestling with being who I really was in the world—my struggles for authenticity.

This is what I read also into the story of Jacob: Jacob’s struggle for authenticity, at a deeply existential level, which invites me to consider my own authenticity. This is perhaps one of the core religious tasks facing all of us, as one scholar said, “Discovering our true identity in God often involves struggle—a life-long struggle to peel back the layers of a false self in order to expose who we are authentically in the image of God.”

And in that struggle for authenticity Jacob was injured and left limping. Sometimes in that struggle we are injured. It is not easy peeling back the false layers, wrestling with what it really ultimately true. And the more experience we have in life, the more we are prone to limping. But—and this is the whole point of the Jacob story—in that encounter we are blessed. And transformed. And renamed.

Jacob, the trickster; Jacob, the heel-grabber, or the second-hander, needing to use another person to achieve good for himself; this Jacob become Israel—Is-ra-El, one who has struggled with God and prevailed. The limp is a sign that we have had a serious encounter with that which and with that whom is of ultimate, enduring and eternal reality—an encounter with God.

To wrestle with God means moving beyond the comfortable lives we have prepared for ourselves, the comfortable ideas, all the upholstery we surround ourselves with. To wrestle with God means questioning what we think are the certainties of our lives and discovering the real certainties of our life in God. To wrestle with God leaves us open to injury, even—but an injury which can ultimately bless.

I want to be careful here and say I do not suggest that God sends illness, injury or tragedy for us to learn. I do not believe that. This gets into the area of what the theologian calls “theodicy” – figuring out how God works in the world. How, if God is all good and God is all powerful, why evil exists.

It’s a big question. I can’t claim to have the answer, but I do think there is a random quality to life that is necessary in the large picture if there’s going to be human free will. I think we need to evolve our understanding of God to more than this idea of a God who sits in the heavens and controls everything on earth. This is a child’s conception of God and it is normal for a child. But as we mature into adulthood, so does our faith need to mature.

I don’t mean to suggest that God sends illness or accident to teach us, but I do maintain that when those things happen to us, that there are things to learn, there are ways to grow from that, and that in that encounter, God is present.

This is to say we need to wrestle with things of ultimate concern. That when we leave the comfort of our easy answers, when we enter into the mystery of life and of holiness, when we leave ourselves open to struggle—we leave ourselves open to deep blessing, we leave ourselves open to a new name, we leave ourselves open to discover our authentic selves, created in the image of God.

And, as the Gospel lesson from Matthew so wonderfully expresses it, God is there and God will feed our hungers. Both our physical hungers, as the disciples found there was enough bread and fish to feed the 5,000, and our spiritual hungers.

But just as the people had to be hungry to know the blessing of the bread, so Jacob was willing to wrestle to get the blessing of who he really was: Israel. So sometimes we have to be willing to lose, we have to be willing to be injured, for in learning to limp at times, we open our lives to God’s presence. This opens us to the paradox of life that in brokenness we become whole. And that is the core idea of our Christian faith.

Frederick Buechner calls this struggle with God “The Magnificent Defeat” and he was speaking directly of the Jacob story when he said:

“Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, are his who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy, are only from God. And God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another we all of us fight — God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because, before giving us everything, he demands of us everything; before giving us life, he demands our lives, our selves, our wills, our treasure.

“Will we give them, you and I? I do not know. Only remember the last glimpse that we have of Jacob, limping home against the great conflagration of the dawn. Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.”

Wherever are the struggles of your life—

wherever you are avoiding the struggles that you should be in—

whatever the outcome of those struggles—

may you and I be blessed in this encounter with the holy stranger

as the night wears on and dawn approaches.

Amen.