Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
Blessed Intruder
Genesis 32:22-31
August 10, 2014
John M. Buchanan
There was an editorial in the Chicago Tribune a while ago about the abysmal lack of biblical literacy in the United States. People don’t know as much about the bible, familiar Bible stories, biblical personalities, as they used to. And it’s getting worse. You cannot assume that people know who King David was, or what the Exodus means, or the Babylonian Exile, or the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The editorial went on to describe an effort to reverse the decline: the National Bible Bowl Tournament: the 41st Tournament was happening at the Chicago Hilton that very week. Two hundred teams from thirty states gathered to do battle, which began with a 400 question quiz on basic biblical content. There was a “Bible Quoting Bee.” The main event, round-robin, double-elimination competition held in the huge International Ballroom, modeled after the GE College Bowl, produced the winner, the team from the First Christian Church of Xenia, Ohio. It occurred to me that maybe it was a regional, Midwest event, and that surely a national Bible contest would be won by a team from Texas.
There were three sample questions. My wife, who was reading this with me, threw down the gauntlet – “Let’s see how you do.” Never one to turn down a little competition, I agreed, unfortunately. I flunked: missed two out of three.
The sad aspect of biblical illiteracy is that so much of the Bible has shaped our culture, our art and music, and certainly our literature. Bible stories play the same role in the church as family stories do in all of our families. The stories ground us: tell us who we are and what we are about. In a new book, Bishop Desmond Tutu cites research by an Emory University psychologist that suggests that children who have heard and know their family stories are more resilient, mentally healthy and happy, than children who do not know their family stories. When our family gathers, they want to hear about Uncle Frank, Uncle Jack, Aunt Inez, Grandma McCormick. And so when church gathers, part of what we do together is hear the stories. This morning one of the very best of them and one of the most important: the story of Jacob wrestling all night long with a stranger. It is a story equally important and formative for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians.
Jacob, grandson of Abraham and Sarah, progenitos of us all – son of Isaac and Rachel, twin brother to Esau – Jacob, with his mother’s connivance has deceived his now aged and blind father and cheated his brother, Esau, out of his birthright, his inheritance. Esau is so angry at what happened to him that he threatens to kill Jacob on the very day old Isaac dies. Rachel comes to the rescue and helps Jacob escape. Out in the wilderness, on the run, alone and frightened, Jacob has a dream: angels ascending and descending a ladder: and the voice of God promising to bless and keep Jacob wherever he goes.
Now it is twenty years later. Jacob is coming home. He has done very well for himself. It is a long and fascinating story. (Genesis 25-35) He has gone to work for his mother’s brother, falls in love and marries into the family. Business is good. Jacob becomes a wealthy man. But now he’s on the run again. This time he has cheated his business partner, literally stealing sheep out from under him. After his new wealth becomes conspicuous he decides that it’s time to leave again. So while Laban is away, Jacob gathers everything, all his ill-gotten livestock, his growing family, servants, and heads back into the wilderness, this time headed for home. For good measure, at the last moment, Rebekah runs back and steals her family’s valuables.
They arrive finally at a stream. The Jabbock. Behind him is a huge caravan of livestock and camels carrying all his belongings, his wife and children, stretching across the desert. In front of him the stream and on the other side, somewhere in the Land of Canaan, Esau. Jacob divides the entourage in half. In case Esau is out there and decides to attack he won’t lose everything. He sends generous and elaborate gifts to appease Esau, just in case. Then he sends everybody across the Jabbock, all his livestock, his belongings, his family – everything he has. And he sits down, alone, as he did twenty years before on the night he had the dream and heard God’s promise to be with him and keep him. It’s dark; he’s still a fugitive, still guilty and frightened, waiting for dawn.
During that night Jacob is assaulted – not by Esau, but by a stranger, a man who will not be identified but with whom Jacob wrestles all night long, until dawn. He is wounded in his thigh, not mortally, but enough the he will limp the rest of his life and so that he will never forget that night. The stranger will not divulge his name, but he does bless Jacob and give him a new name, Israel, and then leaves him to limp into the future and a reunion with Esau.
What a story!
Frederich Buechner observes: “The Book of Genesis makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Jacob is a ‘crook.’” Buechner muses over the fact that instead of the “chewing out” by God that he so richly deserves, Jacob receives another blessing. [Peculiar Treasures, p. 56]
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann advises us to pay attention to Jacob’s emotional state: a combination of fear, guilt and remorse as he sits in the dark. And everyone who has thought about this story knows that the fact that the intruder never reveals his name is critical. And furthermore, that the anonymous intruder has something to do with the God who promised to be with and keep Jacob and to never let him go. Think about that: to know the name of something is to exercise a kind of control, it is to define and know. What is going on here in this strange encounter is actually a founding concept, a literal foundation of a new religious tradition that at its very center has a mystery, not named, not controlled. Think of how radical that is. Ancient religions were created to define God with certainty, and to provide human being with ways to control, or at least influence the gods. Idols are a way to envision God, and to limit God. A name is a way to know and control.
But Jacob wrestles all night and cannot pin down his opponent. That is the goal of wrestling: to pin down, to control your opponent. Jacob cannot do it: can only struggle with, wrestle, ultimately hold on for dear life.
Israel wants nothing to do with idols because idols limit God. Israel does not even want to name God, because to name is to limit. In Hebrew God’s name is a list of consonants and is unpronounceable: JHWH, which we something call Yahweh. Some orthodox Jews today do not say or even write the word God. Instead, in print, it appears: G-d.
At the heart of this religious tradition is an uneasiness with the tendency of religion to claim to know too much, to eliminate mystery by claiming to know all the truth, to define God with such precision that those who question or doubt or differ are kicked out, excommunicated, called heretic, infidel and, ultimately, when you buy into their way of thinking – enemies of God, enemies who should be eliminated. History is replete with the tragedy of that: Crusades and Inquisitions, witch burnings, Holy Wars, Jihad and terrorist bombings. It’s most vivid current expression is ISIS: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which has seized control of a large swath of geography and is in the process of driving out and executing any but adherents of its brand of Islamic Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism in every religion — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — is an expression of the human need for certainty, a way to divide the world between us and them, believers and infidels, saved and damned, and with tragic frequency becomes the rational for violence.
God will not be pinned down. God will not be controlled or restricted by human religion, or the paraphernalia of human religion, including the theologies and creeds and confessions of religion. The God revealed here is a living God, free, sovereign, mysterious, much, much more than human thinking and imagining, capable of surprise, unpredictable.
This God will choose and bless people, not as religion prescribes – on the basis of goodness, moral purity, theological orthodoxy – not at all. God uses and blesses because of something in the heart of God that we call grace. God’s promise and blessing comes to Jacob, not as reward for morality, right belief, but in spite of opportunistic dishonesty and deceit. This God simply refuses to act the way we prefer and instead startles us, over and over, with love and grace beyond our imagining.
This God invites us to struggle and wrestle.
Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine, in her book Called to Question, describes her growing uneasiness with the pat certainties of her religious tradition and recalls the day when she decided to begin her own journey, venturing outside the safe certainty. She describes “the day I began the perilous journey from religion to spirituality, from the certainties of dogma to the long, slow, personal journey into God. That day I began my own wrestling match with God, which no catechism, no creed, could mediate.” (p. 4)
In his fine biography of martin Luther, Martin Marty says that Luther, a complex figure, makes most sense as a wrestler with God. “Luther struggled with guilt, anxiety and doubt all his life. One time he traveled across the Alps from Germany to Rome to find the certainty that eluded him. He visited every holy site, struggling with the tradition every step of the way.” At the Lateran Palace, on his knees climbing the Santa Scala, believed to be the very stairs, brought from Jerusalem to Rome, that Jesus climbed to appear before Pontius Pilate, saying a prayer on each step, as pilgrims still do today. At the very stop step, questions still nagged him, “Who knows whether any of this is true?”
Luther is helpful and pivotal for us, Marty points out, because of his experience that when he could not conjure up faith and intellectual certainty, “faith grasped him” like the unnamed intruder grasping Jacob. (Preface xiii).
God, we believe, is the blessed intruder, who comes to human life at its most human, into your life and mine, at the extremes, the edges, in birth and death, but also in the everyday, the common, the disappointments and betrayals, but also in occasions of deep gladness. God will not, does not, let us go.
One of the most profound insights of the great twentieth century theologian, Paul Tillich, was that human beings try to escape God. He wrote, “From time to time we may be able to hurl God out of our consciousness, to reject God, to refute – to argue convincingly for his non-existence and live comfortably without God.” But then, the great theologians wrote, and I suspect it was out of his own experience, “God’s hand falls upon us.” [The Shaking of the Foundations, p. 40]
God, I believe, accosts us, intrudes in our lives, intellectually, spiritually. God comes to disturb our consciences when we turn too easily from suffering and injustice. God makes us uncomfortable with the moral immigration crisis at our border, God disturbs us with the death of little children in Gaza. God, I believe, comes to disturb and agitate our spirits when we are tempted to stop searching and seeking and wrestling.
Forgive me for a personal anecdote. After two quarters of my first year of Divinity School, I had about decided that I had made a mistake. I understand now that I signed up, not so much because I wanted to be a minister – that was not at all clear – I signed up to find a little certainty, a little absolute truth to base the rest of my life on. Not only didn’t it work that way, but the more I studied, and plowed through theology and philosophy and history, the more questions I had. I began to explore other educational and vocational options. And, to make matters worse, all my friends had real jobs and were making real money. At just that moment, for some reason, my mother sent me a poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” by Francis Thompson. It’s not great poetry, but it stopped me in my tracks.
“I fled him, down the night and down the days;
 I fled him, down the arches of the years;
I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways
 Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from him…
From those strong feed that followed, followed after…”
the poem ends:
“Ah, fondest, blondest, weakest,
 I am He whom thou seekest!”
God intrudes, comes to Jacob as an anonymous stranger, forces Jacob to struggle and wrestle – doesn’t overwhelm, doesn’t defeat. God, this amazing old story suggests, does something unimaginable: comes into human life at its most human and there risks pain, suffering, defeat in order to make good the promise to love and hold and keep forever…the God who will do just that in an eloquently final way when one we know as Christ, Emmanuel, God with us, will be born like us, struggle like us, be wounded, and crucified, will die like us, and for us.
Blessed Intruder.
Thanks be to God