Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 31, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Do you wrestle with God? I do. I wrestle with God all the time. Maybe that’s why I so identify with Jacob in the story we just heard from Genesis. It’s a pretty strange story when you think about it. Jacob is on a journey of some sort with his two wives and eleven children. Yeah. Two wives, who happen to be sisters. So much for the supposed biblical conception of marriage that we hear so much about from people who oppose the right of same gender couples to marry. Jacob separates himself from his family and lies down for the night. A character first identified only as a man wrestles with Jacob all night as Jacob is trying to sleep. There are some strange lines about blessings and names. The man tells Jacob that he will no longer be called Jacob but will be called Israel, a name that means “strives with God.” We are given to understand that the figure who wrestled all night with Jacob who is first identified as a man is actually no one less than God.

Now, of course no one can literally wrestle with God. This story is very, very ancient, and it has a pretty primitive image of God as a particular being who looks like a man and with whom a human being can wrestle and prevail. But of course we don’t generally understand Bible stories literally around here, so what we’re given in this story is an image of Jacob, for all his personal shortcomings one of the great ancestors of the Jewish and Christian faiths, figuratively wrestling with God. The story tells us that even Jacob, a patriarch of our spiritual tradition, had to wrestle with God. So it shouldn’t surprise us too much that we too often wrestle with God.

What do I mean when I say we wrestle with God. A lot of people, after all, want religion to be simple. They want the life of faith to be easy. They want firm and simple answers to life’s many questions. They want God presented to them all wrapped up in a pretty box with a big colorful bow so that all they have to do is take God out of the box and enjoy their present. Well, that might be nice; but it just isn’t how faith works. The simple fact is that God isn’t simple, God isn’t confined in a box, God isn’t plain and obvious to us mortals. After all, when we talk about God what we are talking about is something we can never fully understand. We are talking about the creative power behind the entire universe. We are talking about the ultimate source of ethics, of what is right and what is wrong. We are talking about a reality that we do experience as real but that isn’t at all like anything else that we experience as real. We can’t see God. We can’t touch God. We experience God but in a way that is essentially impossible to put into words. Our words can never capture God, can never define God.

We want answers to life’s big questions. Why is there anything at all? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my life? How do I know how to live? What is right and what is wrong? Why is there so much suffering in the world? Why do we die? What happens to us when we die? These and many other questions are questions to which faith provides answers, but the annoying fact is that every answer that faith gives just raises more questions. Or at least those answers raise more questions if we really look at them seriously and critically. Let me give you one example using an issue about which I wrestle with God all the time and that I know some of you wrestle with as well.

It is the issue of the afterlife. Christianity has long taught that our souls live on after we die. Most Christians believe that after we die we are judged by God, or by someone God as deputized to do the job like St. Peter, and that our souls go on either to eternal bliss or eternal torment. Now, I don’t think the eternal torment part of that teaching is every worth talking about. It just isn’t consistent with a God of love and forgiveness, but the more basic question of whether there is an afterlife at all is one that we, or many of us at least, wrestle with. Is there such a thing? if so, what does it look like? What form does it take? Where does it take place? More basically, how do we know the answers to any of those questions? We want to believe that it is true, but how can we really know? The answer is that we can’t. So rather than have solid answers we continue to wrestle with God just like our ancestor Jacob wrestled with God by that stream so long ago. That, I think, is why that story is important. It tells us that wrestling with God is precisely what God calls us to do.

That bit in the story about Jacob’s dislocated hip is important too. You see, wrestling with God is dangerous. It’s dangerous because while we may never find final answers, the struggle has an effect on us. When we wrestle with God we’re going to be changed. We may not be physically injured, but we will be changed. And we may be changed in ways that are risky and that involve loss as well as gain. When I was in seminary I heard a man talk with real anguish about how his wrestling with God had led him to discern a call to ordained ministry that the rest of his family didn’t understand and wouldn’t accept. That rejection caused him real pain, but he had wrestled with God and discerned something that he could not ignore. So he went ahead despite the pain, just as Jacob continued his journey despite his painful hip. That sort of thing can happen when you wrestle with God.

I know that some of you have other questions about God that you wrestle with. Some of you have shared your struggle with me. Others of you have just said a sentence or two up there at the head of the center aisle at the close of service about how a sermon somehow touched something that you wrestle with. I don’t know all of the issues about God and the Christian faith that all of you struggle with, but I know that many of you have them. The odd story of Jacob wrestling all night tells us that the life of faith properly understood is precisely a life of wrestling with God and with the big questions, not a life of living comfortably with pat answers to those questions. That I think is why the story of Jacob wrestling with God is such an important one in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Faith isn’t having all the answers, it is staying engaged in the wrestling match with God. Faith isn’t believing some final, absolute truth, it is about staying connected with God as we struggle with the questions that the faith raises, as we struggle with the questions that life raises.

So if you’re wrestling with God about some big existential question or about something that’s going on in your life, good for you. That’s faith. That’s the life of faith. In our story about Jacob wrestling with God in the end God blesses Jacob. I think that God blesses Jacob in the story not because Jacob was some paragon of virtue, which he most certainly was not. I think God blesses Jacob in the story because Jacob engaged in the struggle. Because Jacob wrestled with God. God blesses you, God blesses us in our wrestling with God too. Thanks be to God. Amen.