Psalm 17:1-7, 15            
Genesis 32:22-31            
“Wrestling at the River”
Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church
Mindy Douglas Adams
August 3, 2008

          About a decade ago a novel was written that stirred the hearts of many women and a number of men.  This novel, The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant quickly became a New York Times Bestseller and before long had made its way into the hands of book-club members and connoisseurs of fine fiction throughout the land. 

The book fell into my hands a number of years ago when a friend loaned it to me.  Within its pages unfolded a drama that was familiar and yet completely unfamiliar.  It was familiar in that it was based on the biblical story of the family of Jacob, primarily as seen through the eyes of his daughter, Dinah.  Yet the book was also unfamiliar in that it was a fictional account of the “story beyond the story.”  This bestseller is unashamedly a “novel” and does not claim to be accurate historically.  But much of the cultural history is accurate and it opened my eyes and my heart to a way of living for women that was completely different from any I could imagine.  In these pages I heard stories that I have known and loved for years and years as they were retold from a young girl’s perspective.  These were the Jacob stories - the stories of Jacob tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright and of Jacob tricking his father in order to receive his blessing.  In these pages were also retold the stories of Leah and Rachel and how Jacob worked seven years in order to marry each woman.  And today’s story can be found in these pages as well.  Only unlike scripture it’s not told from Jacob’s perspective.  It is told from the perspective of his small, insignificant daughter, Dinah.      

          Dinah recalls the story as it began the night before when all of the family and herds had crossed the river Jabbok – all of the family, that is, except Jacob.  He remained on the far bank.  Dinah remembers her father’s words:

          “See to the animals,” my father said [to his eldest son Reuben]. “Don’t bother with a tent.  The night is warm enough.  I will cross with the first light.  Be ready to leave.”

          My mother [Leah] was not pleased by Jacob’s plan and told Reuben to call back to our father and offer to cross the river and spend the night with him.  He would not permit it. 

          . . . The moon was still new, so the night was dark.  The water would have sweetened the air had not the wet coats of the animals muddied its perfume with musk.  They bleated in their sleep, unused to being wet in the chill of the night.  I tried to stay awake to listen to the music of the rushing water, but this time the splashing lulled me into a deep sleep. Everyone slept heavily.  If my father cried out, no one heard him.^[1] 
 

The next morning, when Jacob did not appear as he had said he would,

. . . Reuben, Simon, and Judah plunged into the water to seek their father.  They found him beaten and naked in the middle of a brushy clearing where the grass and bushes had been crushed and broken in a wide circle around him.  Reuben ran back to us shouting for a robe to cover our father, and then carried him back across the stream . . . his left leg hanging at an awkward angle as though it were no longer attached to his body.  . . . Reuben had no answers to [anyone’s] questions, and [all] fell silent^.[2]

Today’s scripture text from Genesis is no less mysterious than Dinah’s telling.  The Genesis story leaves us with just as many unanswered questions.  What we do learn from the text is this.  Jacob wrestled all night long with a “man” as the Hebrew text reads.  Neither seemed to be able to overcome the other.  But who was the mystery wrestler?  Why was he wrestling Jacob?  What really happened that long hot night of strife?  I suspect that though we may have ideas, no one would really claim to have answers.  The answers are not so clear.  Unless, of course, they were clear to Jacob.

          The rest of us are left asking, “What happened to Jacob that night by the Jabbok?”  Scripture tells us that a “man” wrestled with Jacob until daybreak.  Other translations call the wrestler an “angel.”  Old Testament scholar Klaus Westermann claims it was a “river demon.”^[3]  Jacob himself claims that it was “God.” 

Barbara Brown Taylor writes:

          Whoever he is, he is strong.  [Jacob] is a big man himself, but in this [“man”], this angel, this well-muscled God, he has found his rival.  There is no talking at first, just the dull slap of flesh against flesh, as one of them gains a hold and the other one breaks it, both of them sucking air between the low grunts that seem to come from somewhere deep in the earth beneath them.  That is how dark it is.  They might as well be wrestling in some underground chamber for all they can see of each other, an arm snaking around the neck with no warning, the knee planted behind the blind back.  Then fear gives the stranger new strength.  He drops his weight and Jacob’s hip cracks, . . . ^[4]

Who is the victor now?  It seems clear, but it is not.  For Jacob, through his pain, holds on to this unknown being for dear life.  He knows that something is different about him, so he holds on.  He will not allow his night of wrestling to be in vain. 

          The being in his grasp seems for some reason to fear the light of day.  “Let me go, for the day is breaking.”  Aha!  Jacob grimaces.  I’ve got you now!  He replies (perhaps this is an echo of another story in his past), “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

          What?  Why in the world would anyone think that a night of hard-fought muscle wrenching wrestling would lead first to a hip injury and then to a blessing?  Why would someone who had injured you turn and decide to bless you?  But Jacob knows he is not wrestling with just anyone.  He is wrestling with God -   Yahweh.  Elohim.  The Holy One.  God in the flesh.  So the rest of us can think whatever we want and call this being “man,” “angel,” “river demon.”  We can even surmise that Jacob was wrestling metaphorically with his own fear, guilt and anxiety about meeting face to face the next day with his brother Esau, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years and who had plenty of good reasons to be upset with him.  Think what you want.  To Jacob it is very clear.  “I will call this place Peniel, the face of God, for I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.”

          So Jacob limps away with a badly injured hip, a new name, and a blessing from God.  All in all, that’s not bad for a night’s work.  His old name was Jacob, which means “heel,” or “he takes by the heel” or “he supplants” and the new name is Israel, which means “the one who strives with God,” and he knows that it is nothing short of a miracle that he has looked upon the face of God and been allowed to survive.

          “Why Jacob?” we might ask.  We already know he wasn’t the most upright of characters.  He has just escaped from his kinsman Laban under circumstances that were a bit shady and he is preparing to meet his brother Esau, a meeting that he is pretty sure will be conflictual because of the way he treated his brother so many years ago.  He was a trickster, a liar and a cheat.  But he was also chosen by God, from before his birth, to be a part of a long line of God’s people.  He’s been a rebel for all his thirty-something years, but  this encounter was the one which would force him (physically, spiritually, and literally) to come face to face with God and to confront every part of himself and to radically change the way he lived as a chosen man of God.  No more trickery, no more deceit, no more lying and cheating.  It took the wrestling match to make him understand, but after that long dark night of striving, he had seen himself face to face and he had seen God face to face and with all the strength he had left he held on to God and asked for his blessing.

          Maybe, just maybe, Jacob didn’t understand the power of God’s blessing until he had been through that long dark night of strife.  Maybe, just maybe, Jacob hadn’t been ready for the blessing until he had grappled in the grip of the Holy One.  He held on for dear life until he heard the blessing, was given the new name, the second chance, the new opportunity to live his life for God.  Then he let go, collapsed upon the river bank, and was never the same again.

          Have you ever had a night such as this one?  The shadows of evening grow and grow until you are in complete darkness and alone and, though most nights you can fall asleep rather easily, this night you are tormented.  This night you call upon God in anger or confusion or fear.  This night you yell at God, accuse God, question God, despise God.  This night perhaps you are tormented by your own choices of the past and how they have come to affect you and your family.  Or this night you are tormented by the choices of someone else.  Or this night you are tormented by the knowledge that you are out of control – in situations of disease or death or injury.  On this night you fight with God, wrestling this way and that, still blaming, still angry, still hurt.  And this goes on all night.  And the darkness makes it scarier and lonelier and we get tired from all the fighting and from all the emotion, until finally we collapse exhausted, beaten and instead of turning away from God, we find ourselves clinging even more tightly, even more tightly.  And maybe then is when we ask to be changed.  Because we can’t be saviors on our own anymore – we’ve tried it and it didn’t work.  We can’t make it apart from God.  So we asked to be changed – to be renamed by grace – to be broken and then healed by love – to be broken and then healed by love.

          That’s what happened to Jacob and in the end, it was transformative.  What happens to us when we encounter God is not always comforting, or peaceful, or affirming even, but it is, if we stay with it, transformative.  At times it can be almost violent, and we are jerked up and thrown down and we lay panting and exhausted on the ground,  but we have been named . . . blessed . . . changed forever.   

          Television journalist Bill Moyers knows exactly what this transformative wrestling match with God feels like.  Years ago he had a heart attack and came very close to dying.  Shortly after that experience, he was working with a colleague on a Genesis series for TV and when they came to today’s passage he told her,  

 I know that struggle, because in my dark night I found myself wresting and wondering, “Is God’s purpose for me good?  Can I trust God?  Can I count on God for whatever the future holds?”  And I found myself crying out, and in the days that followed I knew that deep inside of my being in that encounter with God in the darkness and in the aloneness, something had changed in me.  And I had found new strength and new hope and new comfort, but something else had changed.  In my woundedness I realized that all my life I’d been wounding other people.  I’d been competitive, I’d wanted to succeed, and so in doing that, in seeking that success I’d wounded my wife, my colleagues, my children.  In my own night of struggle and wounding I discovered that I did not want to wound anymore, that I wanted not to be a wounder, but a wounded healer.^[5]

          As Jacob limped out to see his brother Esau, he did so as a man with a new name “Israel.”  He did so as a man who had chosen to depend upon God, rather than upon himself.  He came to Esau his brother without pride and without trickery and without deceit.   Knowing he had wronged his brother, he came humbly, seeking forgiveness, bowing seven times to the ground as he approached his brother.  And Esau?  He ran to him, embraced, fell upon his neck and kissed him and together they wept. 

          Jacob, Israel, wounded and broken himself, now became a healer, now became the man of God God had always intended for him to be.

          Thanks be to God for those long, dark, scary, life-changing nights.  May we all be so wounded . . . and so transformed.

Amen.