On many occasions at the beginnings of sermons I have made reference to connecting what we read in the Bible with contemporary life. For me that is central to what a preacher does in Christian worship. I was very much aware of that as I lived with the story that is our second reading. The story is in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. Jacob is the protagonist, and he is the son of Isaac and Rebekah and the grandson of Abraham and Sarah.
For me and for a lot of people, Genesis is a rich tapestry, woven with strands from mythology, legend, and history. It is a compilation of at least four narratives put together by an editor or editors over a long period of time. It tells the story of people who lived close to four thousand years ago. It expresses a patriarchal view of the world, that is, a view in which men are preeminent and dominant. For that reason we need to understand that perspective without approving it, and we need to re-cast the message of Genesis in ways that can speak to modern women and men who recognize the negative aspects of patriarchy.
I believe we can do that while hearing the story as it is written in Genesis, the story of a person who happens to be a man. The message of the story goes beyond gender, as I hope you will see.
(Genesis 32:22-32)
The saga of Jacob begins with his mother Rebekah's giving birth to twin boys, Esau the one born first, and then Jacob. The boys were not at all alike. As they grew, Esau developed interests in the outdoors, in hunting and fishing. Jacob stayed close to the family compound, becoming a skilled cook among other things. As the first-born, Esau was entitled to what the Bible calls the "birthright," understood at the time as including a double share of the inheritance and the right to become the head of the family at the father's death.
Once when Esau and Jacob were young adults, Jacob was cooking some particularly aromatic food. Esau came in from the fields in a state of exhaustion. He smelled what Jacob was cooking and asked to have some of it to eat. He said he was at the point of death by starvation. Jacob said he would give Esau some food if Esau would give him, or sell him, the "birthright," that is, the right of the first-born. Esau said, "I'm dying of hunger, so what is a birthright to me? Sure, you can have it."
Jacob made his brother swear that he was giving up his birthright, and Esau did so. It was commonly understood that an oath once sworn or a blessing once pronounced could not be taken back. Words had a power of their own. Esau swore his oath renouncing the birthright, Jacob gave Esau some of what he had been cooking, Esau ate, and the deal was sealed.
Years later when the boys' father Isaac was nearing the end of his life, he made arrangements to bless Esau in a special way, still treating Esau as the first-born and his favorite. The boys' mother Rebekah heard what her husband Isaac was planning, and she schemed to have Jacob, her favorite, wear some of Esau's clothes that smelled of the fields and pretend to be Esau. Since Isaac was blind the deception worked, and Isaac blessed Jacob believing him to be Esau. In a matter of hours Esau discovered the treachery, and he swore he would kill Jacob in revenge. Rebekah arranged for Jacob to leave home immediately and go to his uncle's home some distance away.
It was when he was running away from home after deceiving his blind father and stealing the blessing from his twin brother that Jacob lay down to sleep as darkness fell. He was alone, possibly for the first time in his life. With a stone for a pillow, he dreamed. We might expect that he would have had a nightmare, but what entered his unconscious was anything but that. He dreamed of a ladder stretching between earth and heaven, with angels traveling up and down on the ladder. In Jacob's dream, God was standing beside him, promising to be with him always, to bless him richly as the bearer of the covenant God had made with Abraham two generations earlier.
Jacob awoke from the dream and knew he had been visited by God. Still a schemer, Jacob said to God that he would give God ten percent of everything he might gain if God would be with him and would bless him and the family he hoped to have. He longed for the continuing presence of God in his life.
Jacob's visit to his uncle Laban turned into a stay of many years, at least twenty. Jacob married two of Laban's daughters, Leah first and then Rachel, whom he really wanted and for whom he had to wait fourteen years because of Laban's trickery. It must have been a clan of connivers! In the course of time Jacob became rich as wealth was measured in those days—lots of children, wives, concubines, and assorted cattle.
After twenty years Jacob had another dream, a dream in which God told him to return to the place of his childhood and youth. God promised again to be with Jacob—relationship, the heart of the Covenant. So Jacob set out for home, still fearing the anger of his brother Esau, who had sworn to kill him twenty years earlier. As Jacob and his caravan got close to where Esau had settled, Jacob sent messengers ahead with gifts for Esau and with instructions to say that Jacob was hoping for a favorable reception from his brother. The messengers returned to Jacob and reported that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men.
In a panic Jacob divided his family and his flocks into two groups, and sent them across the stream separately, hoping that if Esau destroyed one group the other could escape. Then Jacob lay down to sleep, alone as years before. This time there was not a dream of a ladder between heaven and earth. This time someone, something—part river demon, part human, part deity—came to him, and they wrestled. The stranger was unable to subdue Jacob, even though they wrestled all night long. At daybreak the stranger begged Jacob to let him go, but Jacob held out for another blessing, not in the form of wealth which he already had, but in the form of God-relatedness. The stranger blessed him, and Jacob knew he had been visited by God once more.
I marvel at the power of the story. The characters are not cardboard saints unlike anyone you and I know. They are human beings, at the same time flawed and open to an encounter with God, or to what a lot of people are calling spirituality. A person like Jacob can be deeply disturbing to people who like life to be neat and orderly, to people who shrink from surging passions not easy to control or deny. What strikes me is that God self-discloses to people who are comfortable with their physicality, their sexuality, as well as their spirituality, to people who make mistakes, serious mistakes, and don't always get their act together before God decides to visit them.
Can we find a point of identity with Jacob at the crossing of the Jabok, knowing he will meet his brother the next day? All the thoughts he had been pushing out of his consciousness, all the fears that gnawed at him deep inside for twenty years came surging into his awareness as he lay down to sleep in a dark and lonely place. How hard we try to hide from our dark side, even though we grudgingly admit we aren't perfect. We work so hard at living up to other people's expectations of us that we hide from who we are and what we want. But we lie down to sleep, and our dreams tell us the truth. In the dark we wrestle with memories of past failures and with the phantoms of our deepest longing. We cling to demons of our own creation, even though they beg us to let them go.
I am encouraged by Jacob's persistence. When he was young he learned that there was more to life than what other people settled for. In the depths of his being he yearned for a blessedness, a connectedness he didn't fully understand but hungered for as his brother hungered for the aromatic food Jacob knew how to prepare. And so when God promised to be with him throughout all of life, Jacob was ready to believe God and trust God's promise. As the truth of that promise sank deeper into Jacob's soul, the scheming and the deal-making melted away, and Jacob became a source of blessing.
One of the books I read on vacation was Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, subtitled "a Father's Journey through His Son's Addiction." David Sheff has lived with the fear that his son would die from his addiction. I can identify with that. I lived with that fear for a long time. Some of the most poignant pages of the book are the father's lamentation that he had no faith to sustain himself or pass on to his children. In contrast, it is so powerful to hear recovering addicts, the ones who are making it one day at a time, speak of the role their Higher Power played and is playing in their journey toward wholeness.
Jacob reminds me that so much of life is about wrestling—not the wrestling you can see on television, staged and scripted—but the kind you and I experience when we are honest with ourselves, with other people, and with God. I think I will always carry in my heart a picture of Jacob after he wrestled with whoever or whatever it was at the Jabok. He was limping because his opponent wounded him, and God often comes to us through our wounds. But Jacob was moving toward the rising sun, ready to face whatever the day would contain for him. He was not at all arrogant. He was encouraged. He knew God was with him—the God who loved him, the God who loves you and me, and all the people who are dear to us—past, present, and future.
Thanks be to God.