Sermon Archive
Readings for 21 October 2007
Proper 24
Year C
Jacob sent messengers before him to his brother Esau in the land of Seir, the country of Edom, instructing them, "Thus you shall say to my lord Esau: Thus says your servant Jacob, `I have lived with Laban as an alien, and stayed until now; and I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, male and female slaves; and I have sent to tell my lord, in order that I may find favor in your sight.'"
The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, "We came to your brother Esau, and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him." Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed; and he divided the people that were with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two companies, thinking, "If Esau comes to the one company and destroys it, then the company that is left will escape."
The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved."
[Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving in the army gets entangled in everyday affairs; the soldier's aim is to please the enlisting officer. And in the case of an athlete, no one is crowned without competing according to the rules. It is the farmer who does the work who ought to have the first share of the crops. Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in all things.]
As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.
Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them."
Sermon
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me."
When I was in junior high school gym class more years ago now than I’d like to admit, one of the sports the guys spent some time on each winter was wrestling. Now this wasn’t the crazy stuff called “Professional Wrestling” that is on TV these days. There were actually a very clear set of rules to this sport --rules that, among other things prohibited hitting your opponent; rules which also required ongoing contact with your opponent: if you escaped from his hold, you had to reengage quickly, or you’d be penalized.
The sport was all about holding onto your opponent, rather than being held down by him; trying to gain and maintain the upper position, and it was always done at very close quarters. For Junior High guys would likely be physically closer to a wrestling opponent than you ever would be to a male friend. There was something very intimate about this wrestling.
In today’s story from Genesis, Jacob finds himself an intimate wrestling match with a mysterious opponent. Jacob is at a crisis, a cross-roads in his life. He’s on his way back home from years away in which he has acquired two wives, two concubines, a bunch of children and lots of wealth in the form of livestock. He gets word that his twin brother Esau, whom he’d tricked out of his birthright and their father’s blessing years ago, is on his way to meet him -- with 400 armed men. Jacob sends his family and possessions away to protect them from the revenge he fears.
Then, alone at night by the river’s edge, he wrestles with an unknown stranger. Jacob’s wrestling is much more intense than was mine back in junior high, where points and the coach saying, “You won, Jack” was all that was at issue. Jacob senses that his very future is at stake somehow in this wrestling. So the struggle goes on all night. Jacob’s hip is dislocated by his opponent.
But he holds on for dear life with desperate intensity, demanding that he be given a blessing for his future before he will let go – and he prevails. And as he limps away in the dim dawn light, Jacob realizes with awe who his mysterious opponent has been -- in the intimacy of his wrestling, he has been face to face with God. In wrestling with God, Jacob has been praying.
Usually, we think of prayer as being a kind of conversation with God; a conversation made up of speech and listening; of words, music and silence. Jacob’s story tells us that prayer is also wrestling with God -- and from thinking of prayer as wrestling, we can learn much. We learn that prayer can be an intense encounter in which we try to hold on to a wily opponent, striving to wrest a blessing from the one we grasp; an earthy, intimate struggle in which – to our surprise -- we find ourselves face to face with God.
To think of prayer as a wrestling match with God speaks to the necessity of persistence in prayer; of the need to hold on at all costs as Jacob does, to come back again and as the widow does to the judge in this morning’s Gospel. Why be so persistent? Because we so much desire the blessing we rightly believe God has to offer us. When we wrestle with God, we refuse to let go or to be silenced until the blessing has been received. Jacob’s story also tells us that prayer means being vulnerable to God. Jacob is marked by his wrestling match – he limps away a changed man, his hip socket out of joint. He has been wounded. The Latin word for wound is vulneris, which is the source of the English word, “vulnerable” To be vulnerable is to be undefended, open to being touched and changed in deep ways. When we wrestle with God in persistent prayer, by that very act we make ourselves vulnerable. We are close enough to God to be touched, to be changed – and we usually are. Maybe that is one reason why we resist the persistent prayer of wrestling with God -- we’re not at all sure we want to be that vulnerable, that open, that intimate with the God who changes us in unexpected ways. Yet that very openness, that vulnerability is where real intimacy with God is to be found.
It is also where the blessings we desire are to be found. To receive the many blessings God wishes to give us, we need to vulnerable, to be open. Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen tells a story of working in a ministry with homeless street people in his native Netherlands many years ago. 1 A man came in to the center with his fists clenched shut. The staff wanted to give him the food he so obviously needed, but for the longest time, he would not open his hands so that he could receive the food. He was hungry, but he struggled to be vulnerable enough to receive the blessing of food they offered him. When he finally opened his hands, closed within his fists were found the few remaining coins he had – and he feared the little that he had would be taken away. In fact, he received more – and got to keep the coins, too. But he needed to open his hands to receive the blessing.
So, too, with us. To receive the blessings that we seek and that God wants to give, we will have to be open, vulnerable, ready to be changed as well as to be blessed by the one with whom we wrestle. And the change and the blessing may be one and the same.
Jacob’s night of wrestling with God is markedly solitary. It fits with our sense that such prayer is often a very private and individual matter. But we Christians live in relationship with God in community, too. And just as individuals need to wrestle with God in prayer at times, so, too, do congregations. Like individuals, congregations need to engage in intimate face to face, body to body contact with God; praying with persistence; holding God in their grasp ; being vulnerable to God’s power and open to receive God’s blessing. Christian congregations need not simply to talk about God but to engage with God; not simply to be an organization that does churchy things, but a community lets itself be in intimate contact with God in how it lives and in what it does.
I’ve recently been reading a book recommended to me and our Vestry by Father David Stout, rector of Trinity Church in Asbury Park, who will be leading our vestry in a retreat on evangelism next month. The book is called Becoming a Blessed Church. 2 N. Graham Standish, the author, writes that if a church is to be blessed with God’s presence, purpose and power it must be “open to God at its core”3 -- or in the words I’ve been using in this sermon, vulnerable to God, intimate with God in the wrestling match of a congregation’s spiritual life. The life of such congregations are formed in worship and steeped in prayer; such congregations trust God’s care for their life and seeks to give themselves to God’s purposes.
Standish, a Presbyterian pastor, thinks that most congregations in the so-called mainline churches -- Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and so on – are not as open to God at their core as they could be, and I think he’s probably right. The reasons for that are many. For decades, if not centuries in this country, these churches have been able to function quite successfully as institutions because of the important place they held within the culture. They were the place to go on Sunday morning and the community around which social life was built.
At the same time, these established churches have been a wee bit suspicious of what seems to us the overly intense, heart on your sleeve spirituality of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Talk of being “open to God at the core of congregational life” was likely to smack of more spiritual enthusiasm than we’d be quite comfortable with. We could get along very nicely with the institutional success that our place in society gave, and leave being “open to God” to those other folks.
Well, my friends, things have changed. We in the mainline churches can no longer count on the cultural supports that once guaranteed our institutional success. As Bishop Councell said to those at the Trenton Convocation meeting Tuesday night, numerically, the Episcopal Church, along with the other mainline churches, is a church in decline.
But oddly enough, there is good news in our present situation. Since we can no longer count on our place in society to guarantee our denominational and congregational life, we are being forced to re-discover what the true source of the Church’s life has always been -- the God who in Jesus Christ called the Church into being and who through the Holy Spirit empowers it for ministry.
We are learning, slowly, that we need to live not institutionally, but spiritually; not programmatically, but faithfully; not by trying to keep control of our life, but by being open to God at our core; vulnerable to God, wrestling intimately with God as we seek God’s blessing. That means holding onto God at every twist and turn of congregational life; trusting our community to Jesus at every moment of challenge; relying on the Spirit to empower our ministries.
I don’t know what shape this will take in the life of this congregation in the months and years to come. But I do know that if this congregation is to be blessed by God in its life and ministry, it will need to wrestle intimately with God, hold on to God, trust in God, be vulnerable to God and open at its core to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who is the source of every blessing.
For past week's readings and sermons, please visit the archive of sermons
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1 With Open Hands by Henri Nouwen, (Ave Maria Press, 2006)
2 Becoming a Blessed Church: Forming a Church of Spiritual Purpose, Presence and Power by N. Graham Standish (The Alban Institute, Herndon Virginia, 2005)
3 Ibid. p. 8