Wrestling with Reconciliation August 17, 2008

When last we were together, we had been reading the story of Jacob, the younger twin to Esau, the sons of Rebekkah and Isaac, the son of Abraham. In these intervening weeks, we have the stories of what happened to Jacob wrestling with Laban, acquiring Wives and children, servants, sheep, goats, camels and oxen. We had Rev. Anderson share communion and Don Cross preach about the meaning of mission. But now the story returns to Jacob & Esau.

When they had parted, Jacob ran away, with nothing tangible, yet with everything. He had all their family's blessings. Jacob's birthname had meant THE HEEL, not only because he had held the heel of his twin in birth, but because he had been a heel of a man, a scoundrel, only concerned with getting his share. Jacob had cheated his brother, decieved their father, and abandoned everyone. On his own, Jacob had grown up, he had found a relationship with God, he had been successful as a breeder, herder and trader, he had a large family who were healthy and strong. NOW, as he recognized he possessed all of this tangible wealth, Jacob recognized he would never be free, would never be happy, until he had reconciled with his brother.

There are those broken relationships that we never get over. Often, as has happened in nation after nation in recent years, are heanded down from generation to generation of hatred.

Reconciliation does not have a quick fix, popping in/ stopping by, to get forgiven.
Jacob sends messengers to explain to Esau, he is coming and why.
Recognizing he has done wrong, stolen from his brother, Jacob devises a gift to make amends, and not a triffling thing. Jacob chooses 200 Ewe sheep and 20 Rams, 200 Goats and 20 Males, 30 Female Camels, 40 Cows and 10 Bulls, 20 Donkeys and 10 males.
Then Jacob sends his wives and children and servants all to a safe place, while he spends the night alone, worrying and preparing to reconcile with his brother. The wrong he had done to his brother has gnawed away at him, and grown in proportion, until this confrontation seems insurmountable. And Jacob is alone.

Over the years, interpreters have had a lot of fun with the ambiguities of this passage.
In it's original form, we are uncertain who comes to Jacob at night...
Perhaps it is Esau, who followed the messengers back, and now comes to settle with his brother in the dark. This is the confrontation Jacob wanted, one on one, to settle the score, give away nothing. Coming at night to ambush is how Jacob would have greeted Esau if the sides were reversed.
Perhaps it is Jacob wrestling with himself, with his shadow, his conscience. Wrestling with all he has done over the course of his life, set in motion by cheating his brother.
Part of me has always wondered if the stranger was not a man at all, but was a woman, Jacob's unloved wife Leah, or one of her sons, who finally sees the opportunity to hold him accountable for all he has done without love.
But the natural conclusion, is that the Stranger, the One who comes during the dark night of the soul for Jacob, is God.

As much as we try to make this a Rational Emipical World, based only on the reality we see and know, there are other realities, Emotional, Psychological, Relational and Theological, as well. Everything we do, all of our relationships and decisions can be interpreted symbolically for what they might mean... When we rebuilt the Church, regardless of Historic Commissions and Planning Boards, theoretically we could have built the Church of wood, or of the latest space age polymer, or recycled biodegradable compost; but here, as well as with the clinic in Sudan, we built for permanence in brick and mortar and steel. We built the Church to be used, to be shared with others, and often that is inconvenient, but we recognize and claim our Church is not our possession, we are hosts in this house of God, welcoming others.
There are those who believe that all our relationships go back to the ones we had with our family of origin... As a third child, my role was to unsettle the ones who had gone before; in that my mother died in my infancy, I was the baby of the family, so could manipulate to get win; in that my father remarried, I became an elder brother; and these roles get replayed in business and marriage and community and the raising of next generations.
But what happened to Jacob that dark night was that, as much as he had been afraid of facing his brother, going home Jacob also had to face himself, and to face God. Not an intellectual reasoning, but a knock down grappling, wrestling, life and death struggle.

The point of the OLYMPIC GAMES, and the Political Conventions, are not that these make good television. In the case of Beijing, there are far too many characters, in the Presidential elections, it seems there are more plot twists than a soap opera. But rather, that competition, especially after you have qualified, so it is only the best among equals, calls forth something from the depths of the person, a greatness that otherwise might never be seen. Different from the Marathon runner, who suddenly drops out and quits half way through the race, this is the competitor who is the only person in his entire nation that swims, struggling to finish. This is what the Stranger wrestled Jacob for that night, a testing and tempering, to transform what had been into something else, something different and new. Jacob had lusted after blessings that had not been his, now what was demanded of him was to find the true limits of his character and faith.

Over this vacation, I came to realize much of what we do, is directlty opposite what we were taught decades ago in Seminary. Not only about Hebrew and Greek and Preaching, but 5 years ago we celebrated a marriage for a couple...This week we received a call from the bride's younger sister, asking if she too could be married. It was my vacation, but I was available and they were in need. This morning, we have a couple who were married here years ago, and now have a child, and asked that the child be baptized. In each of these cases, the couples had not been members of a church, we were here when they needed us. But being the Church when they needed, the couple presenting teir child for baptism also join this community of faith. The questions of membership and of baptism, even of marriage are simple and easy to accept. But living into these, being tested in the dark nights, that is where faith becomes real, and our priorities change.

That night, in his struggle, Jacob wrestled face to face with God. He could not win, but neither did he give up or lose. He wrestled with God all through the night. He wrestled until the stranger struck him in a place to cripple him and make him release, still he would not let go. As dawn was breaking, there is this brief exchange of words. The Stranger asks his name, and Jacob responds: “My name is Jacob, the one who has grasped for blessings that were outside his reach.” And the Stranger responds, “No more shall you be called Jacob. You wrestled at the shores of the Jabbok, You are ISRAEL, one who wrestled with God and with every person in your life. You have stayed faithful, but at a cost.” Always seeking the advantage, seeking to know the identity of the Stranger, Jacob/Israel asks “And what is your Name?”
There is a wonderful juxtaposition set up here, compared to generations later with Moses' struggle with God at the Burning Bush and Exodus, where God reveals a name to Moses, but will not allow Moses to see God's face.
The Stranger does not answer Jacob's request for a Name for God, but instead, offers him a blessing. Having struggled all night and remained faithful to the struggle with God, Jacob now called Israel, goes to reconcile with his brother, with far less anxiety, because he has already reconciled with God.
Genesis 32:22-31
Matthew 15:21-28
There is a great deal of similarity in the story of Jacob and Esau, to Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Son, and the joy of that, is that it makes us rethink what we thought we knew. In the Prodigal Son parable, the Father comes running out to greet the returning one... In the story of Jacob, it is not Isaac who comes to receive his son, but Esau. Yet, in the Prodigal Son, the Parable began as description of Heaven and the love of God, so the father who rushed to greet the Prodigal was God. And the one who greeted Jacob in the night was God, empowering Jacob to come to his brother Esau not as one struggling to grasp blessings, but as one changed, who sees in the face of Compassion the sacrifice that is there, and in the face of Sacrifice, the compassion.

The story of the Canaanite Woman gives most of us great pause and frustration, not only, as in earlier generations that there would be such racism and prejudice, we accept that this has been the case between peoples, but we do more than give our dogs crumbs that fall from the table, some of us have trouble here because we treat our dogs better than our children. But, the point of the story is that if she had greeted Jesus, as Simon Peter had done, saying “If you are the Son of God, then heal my child” the child would have remained ill. Instead, she not only a Gentile but a Canaanite, greeted him as “LORD, Son of David”, and was willing to humble herself in order to struggle with him for the life of her child.

So we ask ourselves, are we willing to go only so far, only as long as it is convenient? Or are we willing to umble and degrade ourselves, abandon everything we were taught was true, because others are in need? In order to reconcile with One another, in order to be reconciled with God, how high will you go? To the point of sacrifice?