It's been a while since I've posted a sermon because our church has had a discussion series over the past few months and I haven't had to write one since April. But I'm back in the saddle again.
The image to the left is a picture I took at the Tate Gallery in London a few years ago. It is Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein and is based in the scripture reading.
Blessings,
Gerry
Genesis 32:22-31
I remember a conversation I had that goes back to high school, which is a very long time ago now, as you know. I was talking with my usual group of friends, four of us who hung out together a lot, and Barb Lynch, in response to who-knows-what, said “Whenever I’m angry, I yell at God. I know he’ll understand.”
Now my little quartet of friends was a somewhat religious group I do admit. All of us were active in church and we were at the edge of that era when faith was an unstated assumption. Of the four of us though, I was the only Protestant. The other three, Barb, Maureen and Bill, were all active in the local Roman Catholic parish, singing in the folk group that was going at the time and sundry other churchy pursuits. I must admit that this young Presbyterian (at the time) was a little jealous of all that these friends of mine were doing in their church. This was small-town Pennsylvania and I had few, if any, Presbyterian friends at my church.
I don’t recall a lot of religious or faith conversations among Barb, Maureen, Bill and me in high school. So this memorable statement on Barb’s part seems a little surprising, but maybe that’s why I remember it so clearly. Or perhaps, she hit on a theme that speaks a truth; a truth that goes back for centuries, even through the ages to the time of our Genesis reading this morning. Maybe it’s that truth that has haunted humanity from Jacob right up to Barb Lynch and beyond that stays with me.
Barb’s words shocked me that day. I never thought, as a good, half-German, grandson of a minister, Protestant boy that you should or could yell at God. Ever. That was a preposterous notion! God was to be revered. God was to be prayed to. God was worshipped. God was…well, God simply was. God was out there somewhere. We had a nice polite relationship, God and me. I would no more yell at God than I would yell at my grandmother, for crying out loud! It just wasn’t done.
But here’s this friend of mine, someone I like and respect and spend lots of time with, saying she does just that. Now there was the fact that to me at the time, her religious practices, as well as Bill’s and Maureen’s, were somewhat exotic. She was Catholic. My goodness. In a school system that had one, that I recall, Jewish family, to me Catholics were indeed exotic and mysterious.
Did that explain this “yelling at God” business—her exotic faith? Perhaps that was a part of it, but I doubt that it was the whole of it to me at the time. Because something about her statement stuck with me, obviously, across the decades since we all were sent out into the world by the Dallas School District. It remained in my accessible memory, dredged up every few years as my own faith grew and changed and matured; remembered when something inside me clicked just right.
You don’t yell at God, I thought at the time. And neither do you wrestle with God. You just accept God as God is. Right? Again, I would no more wrestle with God than I would with either of my grandmothers. But now….? Well, I still wouldn’t wrestle or yell at either of my grandmothers, neither of whom are with us any longer. But God, well, God is definitely a different story now.
I’d say that in the years that have passed from my high school days, our relationship, God’s and mine, has changed, helped, no doubt, by Barb’s insight. But I changed too and part of that process of changing opened me up to the possibilities of not treating God as a porcelain cup on a shelf or a likeable but distant acquaintance.
Because I did, as you know, eventually leave the safe confines of Northeastern Pennsylvania and ventured out into the world. And little by little, I started noticing things around me. Some of it, like we explored in our worship service last week, was beautiful. I knew where God was in all of that; God created beauty. God was in the flowers and the trees and the birds and all of that.
But I began noticing other things too. The Vietnam War, which took the life of one of my cousins, had ended while I was in high school and the questions about it, and war in general, still swirled around and in me. People you cared about could be addicted, I found out. As I grew, society changed. Suddenly, it seems, the fact that everyone had a home and a place to live was not a given anymore. Difference in race in our culture did make a difference, not just a difference, but a discrepancy and racism not only existed, it affected and infected everything. (Beside the one Jewish family that I remember, my school district, at that time, had one African-American family. I did indeed have much to learn and discover.)
So where, I began to ponder, is God in all of that? If God is all-knowing (if I can see these things, certainly God must be able to do so) and all-powerful (if God can create the universe, certainly God could do something about the state of affairs I found around me), why doesn’t God do something? “Why don’t you do something???!!!”
Indeed, Barb had unknowingly provided that chink in the faith armor, which I had built up, that allowed me finally to yell at and wrestle with God. There was no moment that I can recall in which a light bulb went on and I thought, “hey, I can yell;” “I can wrestle.” But it was more like a realization of a memory that that’s exactly what I had been doing.
Jacob, you know, was no paragon of virtue. He scammed his brother Esau and plotted with his mother against his father and brother. He was such a lowlife that he had to hightail it out of the homeland to his mother’s kin for fear of his life at one point. There he acquired two wives (granted, the account of that happening makes Jacob the victim) and had kids with the two maidservants mentioned in today’s reading. But he too evidently grew up some along the way. Because when we find him today, he’s on his way back home; back with his wives and concubines, with his kids and with all that he’s accumulated; back to face his brother who has really gotten a bad deal over the years from Jacob. He’s in, what one might call, transition and he’s nervous about this little family reunion that’s going to happen, with good reason. That’s where we find him in today’s account: on the road, wondering not if but how hard Esau is going to slug him on first sight.
The story is a little odd, I admit. It’s like there are details that we’re supposed to know already; some things that our culture doesn’t get that the original hearers of this tale would supply on their own. It might even be two separate tales smushed together. Who knows? But the lasting impression is indeed that Jacob, all alone, removed from the safety of family, wrestles. And the account leaves us feeling that it is God with whom Jacob wrestles.
Now, unless you’re a high school athlete or a professional actor, I mean, wrestler, you probably haven’t wrestled, physically wrestled, lately. But I bet that if each of us here thinks about it, we’ll all realize that we have done some wrestling in our time. We’ve struggled and twisted and turned and fought against some unknown opponent and then all of a sudden, it turns out to be God, we realize. We all know Jacob’s story, because, in many ways, we’ve lived it too. I bet each of us can think of a time that we have mightily wrestled with God. And you know what? That’s all right. We each can wrestle, in whatever way is necessary, wrestle with this God of ours. We can yell and question and challenge God. God can take it.
Now, I do admit, it can be scary, this wrestling-with-God thing. And it happens when we’re alone often. In fact, that may be what brings it on. But, like Jacob, we can face this elusive opponent and we can hold on; hold on for dear life and extract a blessing for all our struggles.
It’s somewhat unfortunate, but I’m no longer in touch with Barb Lynch. Like many friendships from the past eras of our lives, we move on and lose touch. Last I heard she was in North Carolina with a family. I wonder, though, from time to time, if indeed she is still yelling at God. I sure hope so.
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