Sunday Worship 19 October | Lectionary Proper 24: Limping Away With a Blessing

Genesis 32:22-31 

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

It’s a striking image, Jacob limping into the sunset. We jumped to the alternate lectionary reading for the Old Testament this morning, because it is a passage that is really significant to me and so I didn’t want to pass up the chance to speak on it. It has been suggested that most preachers only really have two or three sermons, which they repeat in endless variations. If that is true, then wrestling a blessing out of suffering is probably one of mine. It is a story I see repeated in scripture, it is a story I have experienced in my own life, and it is a story that I hold on to because in it I find hope and meaning. 

But let's back up and start with some context, because even if you're familiar with Old Testament characters like Jacob, keeping their stories straight and remembering which part goes where is not easy. Jacob is the son of Isaac and Rebekah, and he has a twin brother called Esau. Rebekah had a difficult pregnancy as the babies jostled inside her, and was told by God that she carried two nations and the elder would serve the younger. When they were born, Esau came first with Jacob grasping at his heel. This sibling rivalry was only exacerbated by the fact that their parents played favourites, as we are told that Isaac loved Esau but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Esau grew to be a hunter, while Jacob stayed at home. One day Esau came back with an appetite and demanded some of the stew Jacob was making, to which Jacob replied that he could have a bowl if he gave up his birthright as the firstborn. Esau was more concerned with his immediate needs than his future inheritance and so he rashly agreed. 

Some years later Isaac called Esau to go out to the open country and hunt some wild game, so that he could eat a good meal and give him a blessing before he died. Rebekah overheard this and told Jacob to disguise himself as Esau and go to Issac to receive the blessing in his place. Isaac was blind at this point, so would not have seen that it was the wrong son before him, but Jacob feared that he would still be caught out because Esau was a hairy man and he was not, so his mother covered him in goatskins. It sounds ridiculous, but the trick works, and although Issac is suspicious that the son before him sounds like Jacob, when he takes hold of his hands they feel like Esau's, and so he gives him his blessing.

Esau returns, and is distraught to realise that Jacob has now taken his blessing as well as his birthright. Before I read the story again this week, I had assumed that the blessing was connected to the birthright, and this was Jacob and Rebekah making sure Esau did not go back on his oath to give up the latter by accepting the former, but that appears not to be the case. Esau knew his birthright was gone, and now Jacob has taken the last thing he could have received from his father, and he has done it in the most underhand way imaginable.

It is no wonder that Esau held a grudge against his brother. Word reached Rebekah that Esau had sworn to kill Jacob, and so she told him to flee to his uncle Laban. He did as his mother told him, and it was while he was travelling that he dreamed of a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and descending, and heard God tell him his descendants would be like the dust of the earth, and all people would be blessed through them.

He reached his uncle Laban, and there he found himself on the receiving end of a deception, as he worked seven years to marry Laban's daughter Rachel, only to find when her veil was taken off after the ceremony that he had actually been married to her elder sister Leah. He then worked another seven years to finally marry Rachel, setting up a family dynamic even more complicated than the one he had left behind. 

Leah knew Jacob loved Rachel more, and Rachel grieved that it was Leah that first gave him children, and so began a competition which involved the sisters giving Jacob their maidservants so that they could be the one to bear more children, even if by proxy. And because the dangers of favouritism still hadn't been made abundantly clear to Jacob, he had a favourite among his sons. This was Joseph, he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat fame, setting up a whole new cycle of heartbreak.

But that's jumping too far ahead. At the point at which we meet Jacob in this morning's reading, his family is still young and there is not a dreamcoat in sight. He is eager to leave his uncle and set out on his own, and so he convinces Laban to let him take all the streaked and spotted sheep and goats for his own flock, and then selectively breeds the animals so that he ends up with the stronger ones. He credits his success to God, claiming that it just happened that the animals kept being born streaked and spotted, which raises some interesting questions about the extent to which people use God to justify their morally questionable actions.

Jacob notices that Laban is less happy with him, and God tells him to return to the land of his family. Fearing Laban will try to stop him, he leaves in secret, but Laban follows and they are able to come to a truce. Jacob then sends word to Esau to say that he is coming. He says he hopes to find favour with him, although there is no word of an apology. The messenger returns to say that Esau is coming with four hundred men, and Jacob flies into a panic, dividing his group into two so one may flee if Esau attacks the other, and preparing a gift of animals to send on ahead. It is as he prepares to meet with his brother the next day that he spends the restless night we heard about in our passage.

It's hard to know what to make of Jacob. He is tricksy, but that is what he has learnt from the people around him so perhaps he cannot be held entirely to blame. Perhaps we should feel empathy rather than judgement, and wonder how different he might have been if his family had been a little less dysfunctional. He clearly has an openness to God, which becomes most apparent in the open spaces he enters when leaving one family for another. It's really interesting then that in the first part of Jacob's story we are repeatedly told that Esau goes out into the open country while Jacob stays at home. Perhaps Jacob needed more open country in his life, more space to encounter God. Maybe there's a lesson there to pay more attention to how much space we are creating for ourselves, and an invitation to set out into whatever open country looks like for us.

That was a lot of context, so let's come to this morning's reading now. Jacob has left home for the second time, and he knows that tomorrow he will face the brother who once threatened to kill him. He is terrified and so it is no wonder that sleep is elusive. There is no rest in which a comforting dream of ladders and angels can come. He wrestles with a physical being, but I'm sure that sense of wrestling in the small dark hours of the night is familiar to many of us, especially those of us who struggle with insomnia and anxiety. It is lonely and it is scary and we do not always know if we can survive it when day break feels so very far away.

This wrestling match lasts all night, and it seems a pretty even match until the mysterious figure dislocates Jacob's hip, although even then he has to ask Jacob to let him go. The cunning we have seen before kicks in now, and Jacob demands a blessing. The figure asks his name, and unlike when he approached his father dressed as his brother, he tells the truth so that he might receive this blessing in his own name. Except he is told that now he has a new name, for he has wrestled with God and humans and overcome. The figure blesses him, and although we were earlier told the exact words of Isaac’s blessing, we are not told the nature of this stranger's blessing. Some things are too precious and too personal to be shared.

It is at this point that Jacob realises he has been wrestling with God, and he names the place of his encounter, just as he had named the place where he had his dream. I don't know if he ever went back to them, but the act of naming feels profound, fixing them somehow so that he could return to them in memory at least. We'll be talking in our meeting later about how we take care of our own wellbeing in a world where horrible things happen, and I think marking these significant moments is one way we can do this. I have on my phone a picture of a stone stack I built on the beach with the caption “this is where I prayed and God heard the words I couldn't find”, and an Instagram post with the word “yes” in light up letters from the day I said yes to training for ministry. Those pictures somehow hold those moments in a way that keeps them real in times I might otherwise doubt them.

So Jacob has reached his lowest moment and he has wrestled with God and now he is limping away with a new name and a true blessing. He is changed by this experience, and not wholly for the better. I imagine he carried that limp as a weakness for the rest of his life. That may not sound very hopeful, but there is an honesty there that I actually find very helpful. Sometimes the things we experience leave us with a vulnerability, sometimes we carry scars even when we have healed. We learn to live with those things, to move more carefully and treat ourselves more tenderly. And none of that stops us from also limping away with a name and a blessing.

I have said this before and I will not apologise for repeating myself. Things do not always happen for a reason, or at least not always for a good reason. Sometimes things happen because the world is as strange and as terrible as it is beautiful. We do not suffer in order that we might be blessed, but we can wrestle a blessing out of that suffering. We can let it soften us instead of harden us, so that we are more compassionate to the sufferings of others. We can lean more heavily on God and on those around us, and open ourselves to the joy of those connections. We can remind ourselves that we have survived this far, and we can survive further still.

Jacob reconciles with Esau, and then he fosters enmity between his own sons, and then he is there when they are reconciled. Life is not straightforward even with his new name and his true blessing, but he limps on knowing that has overcome and he will overcome. As I think about Jacob, it seems to me that the details of our lives are very different, and yet somehow our stories are the same. I too have wrestled in darkness and in fear, and I too have limped away with a blessing. Sometimes that limp slows me down, and sometimes I doubt that blessing, but I keep going and the goodness of God remains.