“WRESTLING THE DARK STRANGER”
Southminster Presbyterian Church
Dr. Charlie Durham
Genesis 32:9-12; 22-32 Romans 10:1-17
August 6, 2017
When a knee injury in high school ended my football career, I found myself lured into a new sports arena: college wrestling. Now this is to be distinguished from what you see on TV: Professional Wrassling! One of my coaches had been a professional wrestler. He taught us the fake moves. He told us about the 300 pounders doing a sort of Neanderthal ballet of body slams and benign chokeholds. This coach was blessed with cauliflower ears that when touched would bleed giving him an extra $50 to help excite the crowds who actually got to see what they came looking for!
I wish collegiate wrestling had been fake. Instead, it was the longest 9 minutes ever imaginable. As a newcomer to the sport, I was an easy mark for the experienced opponents. I got to know and respect them. One in particular from Sewanee beat me so many times that at the conference match I just felt like laying down in the center circle at the first whistle just to end my misery. But this particular fellow was a leg wrestler, one who loved to tie you in a knot and just pull tighter and tighter for the whole 9 minutes of misery.
I can’t begin to imagine Jacob’s match that must have lasted 9 hours. All night. No lights, no spectators cheering him on, no idea who the stranger was…at least when he was first jumped by the Jabbok river. Jacob was a born wrestler. At birth he had a hold on his twin brother’s heel. As a young boy he swindled the older out of his birthright and as an adult wrestled away Esau’s blessing. In a fair fight, though, Jacob knew he was no match for his angry brother Esau who had sworn to kill him on sight. So Jacob fled to Uncle Laban who pulled some fast moves of his own. As a result Jacob had two wives and double trouble. But through the whole experience Jacob found the blessing had become real: he did now have a personal relationship with God Almighty.
Where does such a relationship lead? To reconciliation! Jacob had another dream, confronted by a second experience of a will greater than his own. The message was to return to his home country and that the Lord would do good. Jacob was obedient. Things had indeed changed in this egocentric, selfish man who had only looked out for himself. Now he was following the Lord’s will toward a very uncertain meeting with his estranged brother.
Further proof of his spiritual growth was in Jacob’s prayer, the first we have heard. To this point the Lord has initiated everything, had to trip Jacob up in the wilderness, startle him in dream, confront him through the stranger he had become to his love Rachel. Now, after sending his family ahead, he is left alone on the bank of the Jabbok River as darkness begins to embrace him. He began his prayer to this distant God confessing that he was not worthy of the Lord’s steadfast love and faithfulness, thanking God for the wealth that he had amassed, begging for deliverance from the hand of Esau, and finally claiming God’s covenant promise that through him would come a chosen people.
Psychiatrist Scott Peck, in his book The Road Less Traveled, writes that we don’t begin to grow spiritually until we face death, our own or someone close to us. In such moments our whole life seems to go before us, we know better what is of value, and we yearn for those cherished relationships. But it was his lack of relationship with Esau that made Jacob face his fear of death and its real possibility at dawn’s first light.
The silence of the dark was suddenly shattered as Jacob was jumped from behind. Startled and fighting for his life, Jacob instinctively rolled and switched and reversed and broke one hold then another only to have this stranger counter his every move. This ish, this man the Hebrew Bible does not identify. But he was strong and violent and persistent. First it was a battle of skill, then of strength, and then endurance as sweaty flesh screaming in pain held on for dear life. It was so dark that Jacob couldn’t tell where heaven ended and earth began, which way was up and which down. They fought by feel, not by sight, until the sky lightened. Then fear gave the stranger new strength. The dark stranger dropped his weight and Jacob’s hip cracked but still Jacob would not turn him loose. The stranger spoke. Physical strength had failed to decide the contest so it was time to try words.
“Let me go, for the day is breaking,” he gasped. Spiritual beings must return before light comes. But Jacob would not yield to the pain in his hip nor the stranger in his grasp. He had come too far to go away empty handed. He had a hold of someone who smelled of heaven and he simply would not let him go. So Jacob did what he did best: tried to strike a deal: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”
The stranger offered an even stranger response asking, “What is your name?” About twenty years earlier, he had lied to his own father responding, “Esau” in order to steal the blessing, which was more than the family fortune, it was the spiritual legacy, the spiritual relationship with the Lord. This night he would display his changed life and honestly reply: “Jacob, my name is Jacob”. The stranger rejoined: “No longer shall you be called Jacob (cheater) but Israel for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” The blessing of a changed man and a promise fulfilled.
The stranger, however, would not return the favor, would not give Jacob his name. For to have one’s name was considered to have power over. This stranger could not be held as he vanished into the morning light. Jacob must have thought at first this was brother Esau on the surprise attack but finally called the place Peniel saying, “For I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.”
Have we seen something strange of God in this place? Isn’t our God a friend in frightening times and not a fierce foe? We think of God as bringing peace and not conflict. We want a God we can grasp and not one who grasps us. We yearn for a God who calms chaos not one who causes it. We look for a God to stroke us not strangle.
Paul makes it sound so simple, “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Do we call on such a dark stranger? Saul was struck down on the road to Damascus by this same stranger, blinded so as to see the saving light of Jesus Christ he had persecuted and given a new name, Paul.
What will it take to brake the grasp of greed on our lives? What tragedy will it take to bring us to our senses to return as prodigals to the Father? What unspeakable wrestling with right or wrong, with good and evil, with our will or God’s will does it take? What will break the hold of humanism’s claim that the human mind is the only authority has the only truth? What will free us from the rationalizations we use to justify our behavior as right and good and holy? What will give us a relationship with this God?
It is the God of Jacob whose name no Israelite would ever dare to say. It is the God who absurdly enters human live as a child, struggles with wilderness demons, shatters the silence of the synagogue with spirited teachings of liberation, slams social custom by eating with sinners, upsets the temple money changer’s tables, taunts that the first shall be last and the last first, rides triumphantly into the ring on a donkey, wrestles in the garden until he prays, Not my will by thine be done. Then the wrestling is over, much quicker than for Jacob. With God’s hard blessing this Jesus suffers upon a cruel cross to die for being such a stranger to our world…and to be called, Christ, messiah, savior.
Remember, it all started with an agonized prayer of Jacob to what seemed like a gentle and distant God for deliverance and covenant. As the morning broke, an exhausted Jacob limped with his reminder of God’s covenant to be his God and bless his people. Crossing the Jabbok, he received not a chop to the neck but an embrace… for this same stranger had done a number on brother Esau. The issues remained, the deeds could not be undone, but all was now transformed through encounter with this dark stranger.
The wrestling is so often over family. As I told before, my sister cut off communications with the rest of the family over some long standing issues. No communication at all for 7 years. Nothing. In some ways it was a relief. But as a family, we felt the painful estrangement. During this time of silence, we discovered she had faced cancer without her family. Her children had graduated as had ours – with not a word. But all that time the Lord was working on us…and on her. So finally after wrestling with the Lord’s word in Matthew, I picked up a phone, made the call, and she answered. We talked. Not about any of those long standing issues, but we talked. As our conversation ended, I called my three brothers and excitedly said, “She’s talking, give her a call!” The long nights of wrestling were now over…I had received a blessing and so had our reconciled family. We can’t resolve the past issues…we just limp along as the family of Jacob. Like Jacob, wrestling with God, God’s word, leads to unexpected, undeserved reconciliation, indeed, a blessing.
Episcopalian priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “Of course this is all just talk until you’ve got a stranger on your back, smelling of heaven and pummeling you for all he is worth. When it happens, do not let anyone tell you there is something wrong. Do not let anyone convince you that if it were really God it would not be so scary and it certainly would not hurt. Hang on with everything that is in you, even if it hurts. Insist on a blessing to go with your wound and do not let go until you have one. Then thank God for your life, limp and all, and tilt your way home.” With your blessing!