First Reading:
22The same night he got up and took his two wives, his
two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the
Jabbok. 23He took them and sent them across the stream,
and likewise everything that he had.
24Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him
until daybreak. 25When the man saw that he did not
prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's
hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26Then
he said, Let me go, for the day is breaking.
But Jacob said, I
will not let you go, unless you bless me.
27So he said
to him, What is your name?
And he said,
Jacob.
28Then the man said, You shall no longer be
called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with
humans, and have prevailed.
29Then Jacob asked him,
Please tell me your name.
But he said, Why is it that you
ask my name?
And there he blessed him. 30So Jacob
called the place Peniel, saying, For I have seen God face to
face, and yet my life is preserved.
31The sun rose
upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
Second Reading:
16 Then Jesus said to the
disciples, There was a rich man who had a manager,
and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his
property. 2So he summoned him and said to him,
‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of
your management, because you cannot be my manager any
longer.’ 3Then the manager said to himself,
‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position
away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to
beg. 4I have decided what to do so that, when I am
dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their
homes.’ 5So, summoning his master’s debtors
one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my
master?’ 6He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of
olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down
quickly, and make it fifty.’ 7Then he asked
another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied,
‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him,
‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ 8And
his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted
shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing
with their own generation than are the children of
light. 9And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by
means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome
you into the eternal homes.
10Whoever is faithful in a very little is
faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is
dishonest also in much. 11If then you have not been
faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the
true riches? 12And if you have not been faithful with
what belongs to another, who will give you what is your
own? 13No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will
either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one
and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
Today is the beginning of the stewardship season here at the United Parish. Three weeks from now, on Consecration Sunday, we'll ask you to make your financial commitment to the church for 2011. But the first thing I want you to understand about stewardship is that it's about so much more than money. I wrote in my weekly email this week that stewardship is defined as the responsible management of something that entrusted to one's care. And it got me thinking… the people in our lives who count on us and love us have been entrusted to our care… The health and well-being of our bodies is entrusted to our care… the environment and the world we share with 6 billion other people is entrusted to our care. Some of us are at a stage of life where there's lots of time that's entrusted to our care… some have financial resources entrusted to our care… Every day we're alive is a gift and we get to decide what to do with it. And that decision process often comes along with a whole lot of wrestling—with priorities, with limits, with spouses, with children— just about anything that's been entrusted to our care comes along with the possibility of conflict. And many of the great spiritual authors would say that we have a lot to learn from our first scripture reading today regarding Jacob's wrestling match.
You see Jacob's past was filled with all sorts of trickery and deceit… In the beginning of his story he tricked his father in order to be blessed and he tricked his brother out of his birthright… those things don't necessarily mean much to us, but at that time it was a serious enough deal that Jacob literally feared for his life, so much that he ran away… He went to a new town to find a new life and to make a long story short, he did. He found a girl he wanted to marry and settle down with… but there was more trickery… his father-in-law-to-be tricked him into working 14 years before he could marry his beloved. But Jacob used his own trickery and deceit to get rich at the expense of his father-in-law… it was a tense relationship… eventually he wanted to get out of dodge and head back to his homeland, and there was something in him that wanted to reconcile with the brother that he had cheated so many years before. So he went: with the whole family, which was pretty big by that time, and all of his possessions which were substantial. He was afraid that his brother wouldn't welcome him back… and it was a justifiable fear. While he was on the way he heard that his brother was coming out to meet him with 400 men.
And you have to realize that every time his brother remembered him, he would have remembered that Jacob was a deceiver and a trickster… that's what the name Jacob meant. In the bible, names held meaning… especially in the first testament they were a window into a person's character. So for the people who first heard the story every time they heard the name Jacob, they would be reminded that he was not an honest man… In Jacob's mind, there was no way, even after all these years that his brother would have forgiven and forgotten what had transpired between them. But Jacob was determined to make things right… or at least to try… so he split up his party and sent everything that he had ahead of him, as an offering to his brother, hoping that his brother would receive the gifts and then in turn receive him… and that's where our story picks up.
The night before he was going to meet his brother to ask forgiveness and reconciliation… he sent everyone ahead of him and he found himself alone. He was left to face what he had been and what he hoped to be… and it's funny to me how immediately after the text says he was alone, it says he wrestled until daybreak… verse 24 says he wrestled with a man, but then later in verse 28 and 30 it becomes clear that it was God who was wrestling with Jacob. And it strikes me how easy it is in our own lives to see at least a little bit of what this wrestling was like… all you have to do is start praying, listening for God in silence, inviting God to work in your life… It seems like the moment we begin to turn our attention toward God, everything else that's been bugging us, whether it's work or family or the lawn or the house or friendships or whatever… it all comes streaming in and demands our attention… I think that wrestling is a big part of why so many of us have a hard time praying…. And even if we can get through that first wave, it's not terribly long before we begin to face the things in our past we may not like to face or look toward things in our future we're hoping that we don't have to deal with.
Wrestling with God isn't easy. Most of the time in our churches and definitely in our culture at large, we celebrate things like wealth, power, strength, confidence, prestige, victory. We're afraid of a lot of the stuff that comes along with the kind of wrestling I'm talking about and we avoid it at all costs: fear, weakness, doubt, the possibility of loss. Of course we all know that we can't completely avoid vulnerability and discouragement, sometimes depression and frailty are going to come into our lives. But too often we interpret those kinds of feelings as a failure or a lack of faith, and they're not… all of those kinds of questions comes into play when we wrestle with God. So we shy away from prayer and we shy away from wrestling.
But not Jacob. According to the text, he wrestled all night. Joan Chittister identified 8 elements of the struggle that Jacob went through that night and she said that we'll all go through them if and when we wrestle with God: isolation, darkness, fear, powerlessness, vulnerability, exhaustion, scarring and change. If you look through the text, they're all right there… and reading that list I can't help but wonder why would we ever subject ourselves to that? Especially when we realize that the first lasting consequences to this wrestling match was that Jacob's hip was scarred for life.
But when we see the second consequence… we just may begin to
understand why it might be worth it to wrestle. Again in Chittister's
words, in every struggle, there is a corresponding divine gift
that's made available to us: conversion, faith, courage, endurance,
transformation…
and that's just the beginning. Jacob
received a blessing in the form of a name change. And again, a name
change may not seem like a terribly big deal to us, but in the context
of our scriptures where your name revealed your character, it is
incredibly significant, especially when we take into account that
throughout the rest of the bible, God's people would be named with the
same name Jacob would receive. He was no longer to be deceit…
but instead he was to be strives with God. He wouldn't be Jacob, he
would be Israel! He wasn't afraid to struggle… he wasn't
afraid to wrestle. And because of that God changed him.
It may not have been his goal when he set out… he probably didn't want to walk with a limp, he may not have cared about his name, but he did want to make things right between him and his brother and he did want to make things right between him and God, so he wrestled. No longer would deceit or fear stop him from being who he wanted to be and who God wanted him to be. He was to be Israel, the patriarch of a nation and the namesake of a people.
Collectively the nation of Israel lived up to the name… they struggled, they strived and they wrestled. They rejected God and came back over and over and over again. The path they followed was not smooth even though it may have been clearly marked… just read some of the first testament to see what they went through. Slavery, wandering, lostness, military defeat, exile… it wasn't all bad but they certainly had their share of stuff to deal with. And frankly, we would be crazy to expect that our path would be any more clearly marked and smoother than theirs was. Life doesn't work that way. As long as we're in relationships with other people, there will always be differences between worldviews and priorities. There will always be opportunities to wrestle with goals and actions. We live in a world where we have to make decisions every single day about how we're going to spend our time, how we're going to spend our money, and where we're going to invest our energy. It's simply not possible to do everything we might want to do. Occasionally the choices are clear. But most of the time the important ones involve some wrestling… At our best, our decisions are driven by our deep desires, our authentic hopes and our best intentions, but when I look around, I can't help but think that at least as often they seem to be driven by our fear of failure, fear of being hurt and feelings of insignificance. Both sides of that discussion are always at work within us and so we wrestle… and when we find ourselves wrestling, it's helpful to remember the example of Jacob. He didn't give up. He started the struggle alone in the midst of his fear and doubt and he continued it through until he knew God's blessing, and was transformed into the person God was inviting him to be.
We have many potential wrestling points… just about everything that has been entrusted to our care can be managed in different ways. And there's not necessarily an easy answer to the question of what should I do, what should we do? But rather than deny, or ignore, or postpone the question, I'd invite you to enter the wrestling match… whether it's wrestling to know what God's desires are, or whether it's wrestling to actually do what we believe God's desire to be, it's an important part of our faith because it shows us who God is and it shows us who we are. And even if it takes us through the darkness of night, we have to remember that God is for us. We'll emerge from the struggle transformed into the people God's inviting us to be. Through it all, there is blessing in the morning.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
The foregoing sermon was given by Rev. Dan Holland at the United Parish of Bowie on October 17, 2010.
© 2010 Daniel Holland
