“God as Enemy, God as Friend
A Sermon by the Rev. Robert M. Hardies
All Souls Church, Unitarian
Washington, D.C.
Sunday 27 January 2008
Our reading this morning is a curious tale from the Book of Genesis. I think those of you who got here early might have gotten a copy in your order of service. Unfortunately, only the early service orders of service got the reading. So if you got here early, you might have a copy, or you might find one in your pew, or you might share with people around you. It’s just there for people to read along if you’d like to. This is a story about Jacob, the son of Isaac and Rebecca, the grandson of Abraham and Sarah, who is to become the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. So Jacob is a major player in the biblical story and we find him here, in the 32nd chapter of Genesis, engaged in a wrestling match with an unidentified adversary. There are a number of wrestling matches in the Bible; this is one of them and this is an interesting story:
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, [more about that later], his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the [river] Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 [Then] Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 27 The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered. 28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, [which means ‘the one who struggles with God’] because you have struggled with God and with men and you have overcome.” 29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed Jacob there. 30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, [which means ‘the face of God’] saying, For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is spared.” 31` The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. 32. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.
Now, most of the people that I know who attend All Souls Church, and I count myself among them, have what I consider to be a complicated relationship with God. Generally speaking, you don’t end up a Unitarian unless your faith has involved certain kinds of struggles. The path that has brought us to this place has, in many cases, been a long and complicated one, a journey through doubt, disbelief and even alienation. There may be, somewhere along 16th Street, this street of churches, a sanctuary whose pews are filled with those who have spent their whole lives secure in the knowledge and the love of God, who have never for a moment questioned God’s existence. But if that place does exist, it’s surely not here, at All Souls Church. Let’s face it, we are a people who have struggled with God. We’re the ones who grew up asking too many questions at Sunday school. Some of us have struggled to fit a scientific understanding of the world in with the possibility of God. Others of us have had God used as a bludgeon against us because of our gender, or our sexuality, or our race. And many of us, many of us, have taken measure of the suffering of this world and wondered how a loving God could possibly be at the helm.
Recently a woman here at the church lost her brother at a young age. She told me she’d been struggling to pray ever since his death, but that she was just too angry. “Rob,” she said, “I’m not talking to God and God’s not talking to me.” And who among us can’t identify with one or more of these struggles? Who among us hasn’t wrestled mightily at one time or another with our belief in God? Some of us may have even suspected that God, instead of being our friend, was indeed our enemy. Which is why I wanted to share with you all this morning this story from the Book of Genesis, the story of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious stranger, because I think it contains a special message for those of us who wrestle, who struggle mightily, with our faith.
Now, to understand the story before us this morning, we have to get a little bit of background, to better understand it. So Jacob, as I mentioned earlier, is the grandson of Abraham and therefore heir to Abraham’s covenant with God to be the father of God’s people. Which is all well and good, except for one little problem, one little detail about Jacob that complicates the story greatly, that puts a wrench potentially into God’s plan. And that little detail is this: Jacob, unfortunately, is something of a lout. He, in fact, is a n’er do well. You may have picked up on that when, in the first line of our reading, the Bible casually mentions Jacob’s two wives, and then his two maidservants. Feel free to read all the innuendo you want into that word, “maidservant,” because, indeed, Jacob’s eleven sons come from all four of those women. And his two wives are indeed his first cousins. And that’s not all. Jacob and his twin brother, Esau, have been fighting all of their lives. In fact the Bible says that when they were twins together in their mother, Rebecca’s, womb, they actually fought, coming down the birth canal, to see who would be first because the firstborn would be the heir to God’s promise to Abraham. Esau won that battle, but when they were adolescents, Jacob stole it back from him by playing a trick on their blind father, Isaac. So, you know, I could go on here and describe more of Jacob’s exploits, but let me just stop here and ask the obvious question, which is “Is this what all of those righteous Bible preachers mean when they talk about family values?” [Laughter]
So Jacob was a bit of a n’er do well, but we catch up with him right about the time when he may finally be growing up, when he may finally be having a change of heart. You see, he has decided to try to reconcile with his brother, Esau, after many years. And that’s why, at the beginning of our story, he sends away his family with all of his possessions, to offer them as gifts to his brother Esau, as a sign of his reconciliation. And he is about to follow along behind them but before he does he spends one pivotal night alone, by the waters of the river Jabbok. And that is where our story picks up. It says, “That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons, and crossed the river Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all of his possessions. Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.”
Now I want to invite us for a second to maybe try to put ourselves into Jacob’s shoes here so we can better understand what the story is trying to evoke for us. Just imagine Jacob now. He has sent his large family away, so he is completely alone. He sent all of his possessions forward, ahead of him, so he is literally stripped bare, devoid of any encumbrances or possessions. And it is nighttime. It was not smart to walk around alone at nighttime in the ancient Near East. There were marauders, there were beasts in the desert that were a danger to you, and there was Jacob, alone at night. And then a man comes along and wrestles with him. I don’t know about you, but if I kind of do a little creative thinking here, I can put myself into Jacob’s shoes. There have been nights when I have felt all alone, when I have felt stripped bare and I have wrestled with demons, struggled with myself. At least for me it seems that nighttime is when all those demons come out to play and to disturb my sleep. It’s often a time of spiritual struggle, of doubt and fear. So as I read the beginning of this story, what I think the Bible is trying to say here is that Jacob is really going through what we might call a dark night of the soul, a time of spiritual wrestling and struggle.
The author, James Fowler, describes one of these nights in his book, Stages of Faith, and when I read it, I thought whoa, I have been there before. Let’s see if you have too. Fowler writes:
Four a.m., in the darkness of a cold, winter morning. Suddenly I am fully and frighteningly awake. I see it clearly: I am going to die. I am going to die. This body, this mind, this husband, father and son, will cease to be. The tide of life that propels me with such force will cease and I will no longer walk this earth. My wife, right beside me in bed, seems completely out of reach. In the strange aloneness of this moment, I seem to stand completely naked, a soul without body, raiment, relationships or roles, a soul alone with, with what, with whom?
Who, or what, do we struggle with during those dark nights of the soul? Who or what is Jacob struggling with in this story? It is a little unclear. We don’t know if the man represents Jacob’s own demons and fears, or if it represents the spirit of his estranged brother whom he’s preoccupied with and worried about his reconciliation with. We don’t know if, perhaps, the stranger is God. Later in the story, he seems to suggest that he is God. But the story allows for many interpretations and it’s perhaps deliberately ambiguous. After all, it’s hard, isn’t it, for us, to determine, to distinguish among all the voices in our heads, the demons, the voices of other people, the voice of God – they’re all mixed together, all bundled up in our spiritual wrestling. And they are too for Jacob during his dark night of the soul.
So here we find Jacob in a situation not unlike one in which we’ve found ourselves, locked in a spiritual struggle, when suddenly he does something that I find extraordinary. Let’s read on in the story: “When the man saw that he could not overpower Jacob, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said ‘Let me go for it is daybreak.’ But Jacob replied, and here is the remarkable thing, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” I will not let you go unless you bless me. Now I wish that I had thought of that, the last time I was going through one of my own spiritual struggles, one of my own wrestlings with God. Wish I’d thought to inquire, bothered to inquire, what the blessing of that struggle might be. I think sometimes we forget to ask that question. We can’t even imagine that there might be a blessing. But Jacob doesn’t merely imagine that it’s a possibility; he demands, he’s holding onto his partner, and he demands that he be blessed before the struggle is over. Has any of us had the audacity to do that? Has any of us had the audacity?
And it works for Jacob. It works for him. The man says, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, which means ‘struggles with God’ because you have struggled with God and with men and you have overcome. Then he blessed Jacob there. He blessed Jacob there. And this, I think friends, is the good news for us in this story; it is that to wrestle with God, to struggle mightily with our questions of faith is, indeed, a path to blessing, a path to relationship. And I think that somewhere along the way, we have been taught that that is not the case, that as people of faith, we’ve got to have all the answers, that certainty is a sign of faith, not doubt, that if you doubt that, somehow, your faith is less than, inadequate. But what I love about the Jacob story is that the story about how our wrestling can be a path to blessing, and even to relationship with God.
In fact, I would argue that this story suggests that the more we wrestle, the more we struggle with God, the more intimate our relationship becomes. We don’t really know God until we’ve wrestled like Jacob wrestles, or like we have wrestled during our dark nights of the soul. You know, over the years, the rabbis who have interpreted this story have noted how intimate it is to wrestle with someone. This isn’t a boxing match where the partners kind of dance around each other and just land a blow every now and then; wrestling is different. When you wrestle with someone, they are locked in your arms. You are locked in struggle with them. And in this story, that struggle continues the entire night. One body wrapped in another. Indeed, over the years, many famous paintings and pictures have been created to depict this biblical story and, whenever you look at them, you can never tell if Jacob and God are wrestling or embracing one another. Indeed, Arthur Woskow, the great progressive rabbi who has spoken here on a number of occasions over the years, once wrote a poem about this story. And it ended with this line: “Wrestling feels a lot like making love.” Wrestling feels a lot like making love.
In concentration camps during the holocaust, some Jewish prisoners literally put God on trial, accusing him of having abandoned his people. Some mistook this behavior as a sign of agnosticism or even atheism, a sign of a rejection and a repudiation of God. But Elie Wiesel has noted that, no, the anger and the arguing that the prisoners exhibited was an expression of their intimate relationship to God. Our biggest fights are with the people that we love and that we need the most. Wrestling feels a lot like making love.
The great mathematician and philosopher, Sir Alfred North Whitehead, once said this about religion, and I hope you’ll hear this well because I think it’s a path that many of us have been on. Whitehead said this: “Religion is the transition from God the void to God the enemy and from God the enemy to God the companion. And that’s kind of how I read this story about Jacob. Trapped in a dark night of the soul, alone, Jacob encounters God in the void. But initially, God appears not as a friend, but as an enemy, one who wrestles with Jacob, one who leaves him wounded and limping. Yet eventually, that wrestling turns into an embrace. A blessing is given and the story ends with the two partners reconciled. God and Jacob are companions and Jacob will, indeed, go on to be the father of God’s people.
Friends, I think that we are Jacob’s spiritual descendants, in a manner of speaking. We are descendants of the God-wrestler, heirs to a particular path of faith, a path that has taken us through struggle, through doubt, through disbelief and pain and alienation. And what I want to leave us with this morning is the assurance that that is a good and a spiritual, healthy path, that if we find ourselves lost in doubt or despair or alienation, that is not necessarily a sign that we are straying or even that we are lost, but that it is, in fact, a time-honored path toward God. Only when we have wrestled with God, really wrestled, can we come to know God intimately. Religion is the transition from God the void to God the enemy and from God the enemy to God the companion.
Jacob’s story ends as the sun is rising in the east. The bible says the sun rose above Jacob as he passed Peniel and he was limping because of his hip. Like Jacob, we still carry with us the wounds of our struggles with God. But if we claim it, if we demand it like Jacob does, we too can discover in that struggle, a blessing. Our doubt can be a path to faith. Wrestling can be a form of embrace. And sometimes, sometimes, seeing God as our enemy is the first step toward welcoming God as our friend. Amen