“1-2-3-WRESTLE”

GENESIS 32: 22 – 33:4

22  That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.

23  After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.

24  So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

25  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.

26  Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

27  The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered.

28  Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."

29  Jacob said, "Please tell me your name." But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.

30  So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."

31  The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

32  Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon.

33:1  Jacob looked up and there was Esau, coming with his four hundred men; so he divided the children among Leah, Rachel and the two maidservants.

2  He put the maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph in the rear.

3  He himself went on ahead and bowed down to the ground seven times as he approached his brother.

4  But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept.

            I was able to have some fun at work this week. I kept thinking about Jacob wrestling with God and couldn’t get the image out of my mind. So what I decided to do was to walk around and ask people the first thing that came to mind when I said the word wrestling. What image comes to mind for you when you hear that word?  The fist response I received was a strange look, something like this…. but then the majority of the people said the same thing. WWF, the World Wrestling Federation. If they didn’t say that specifically then they named one of the wrestlers. The more I got that response the more I began thinking about my grandmother. My grandmother was Italian, spoke very little English and lived to be in her 90’s. I can remember going to visit her when she was alive and it seemed like every time I went she was watching professional wrestling on TV. For whatever reason she just loved it and the funny thing is that she thought it was real. How she thought people could survive getting thrown out of the wring or getting hit over the head with a chair I will never know. Oh no, I hope I just didn’t spoil that for anyone.

            As I continued to think about this whole idea of wrestling I began to think of my brothers. I am the oldest of three boys and we used to love to wrestle. We used to drive my mother crazy. We would be upstairs in the living room hanging out and joking around. One of us would start antagonizing the other and before you knew it we were on the floor putting each other in head locks and pinning each other to the ground. It wouldn’t take long for my mother to come running into the room telling us to stop. She was afraid that we would get hurt or break something. Looking back I think she really thought that we were fighting. She saw wrestling as a bad thing, as something that brothers shouldn’t do. What she didn’t see was the bonding that was taking place during these matches. Sure one of us eventually ended up getting physically hurt but in the end it ended up bring us closer together. Through the physical struggle we bonded and became closer. It was even fun to look back and say, hey, remember that time….. To this day at Christmas or Thanksgiving it is always inevitable that some sort of ruff housing is going to break out! And yes, my mother still tells us to stop!.

            There is physical wrestling but there is another kind of wrestling isn’t there. The kind of internal wrestling that we do with ourselves when we are trying to make decisions, working through difficult situations, trying to deal with various life issues or even just trying to understand something better. I wonder, do you look at this as something bad? As something we shouldn’t do? Maybe you see it as a sign of weakness because you can’t make an instant decision about something, or think you should have all the answers.  Let’s wrestle with this concept a little more.

       Can you think of a time that you really had to wrestle with something internally? I can think of a few in my life. The time that sticks out in my mind the most was the time I was trying to decide if I was going to attend seminary or not. I could list a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t. It would be expensive, my family would have to make sacrifices, I never did like school, when would I find the time, who do I think I am that I should attend seminary? I was scared to death. Yet amongst all the doubts and all the reasons why, I knew that it was something I had to do. I wanted to let go of the idea but I just couldn’t. As I found out later, that wrestling was only round one of the match.

After taking several classes I began to questions and wrestle with my beliefs. My beliefs about my faith and about God. At first that was very scary. Later I found out that this was very common amongst people attending seminary. That wresting hasn’t changed but the way I view that wrestling has.

            There was an interesting and surprising article about Mother Teresa of Calcutta that was published in Time Magazine in September. The article was called Her Agony. In it the author talked about Mother Teresa and personnel letters that she sent to various spiritual advisers during her lifetime. The article caption reads, A decade after Mother Teresa’s death, her secret letters show that she spent almost 50 years without sensing the presence of God in her life. The article surprised me as it may have a lot of other readers. Mother Teresa? She was and is an icon for many who saw her as doing God’s work on the earth. She struggled and wrestled to know God? That is a wrestling match that I would never had imagined. In one of her letters to her spiritual adviser she wrote, and I quote, “Please pray especially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself – for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.” The article tells us that during her life time Mother Teresa never gave up, never let go of wanting to know God’s presence again. Maybe some of us have experienced such times in our faith journeys.

            In this mornings reading we meet Jacob at Jabbok. Jabbok is a tributary for the Jordan River. The Jabbok was known as a frontier point for the Promised Land. Jacob is at a cross roads. He is fleeing his Uncle Laban who had been exploiting him and is preparing to meet his brother Esau who he had betrayed years ago by steeling the family blessing. Jacob is deathly afraid that Esau will kill him to exact revenge.

Jacob sends his caravan and family ahead and is prepared to spend the night alone. A man (God), appears out of no where in the middle of the night and wrestles with him until daybreak. Put yourselves in Jacob’s shoes for a minute. Can you imagine wrestling with God? Maybe you have?  I am sure that Jacob had a lot on his mind that night as he prepared to meet his brother in the morning. He had just fled one bad situation and was preparing to enter another. Could God’s timing have been any worse? Or could it have been any better!

            Jacob wrestles with God but notice who initiates the match, God. God is the one who first chooses to engage. God wants Jacob to wrestle and struggle with Him.

            God and Jacob remained entangled wrestling through the night, neither of them letting go. Surely God could have won the struggle. God could have let go and fled at any time yet He didn’t. Why? Is it because God wanted to win, to come out on top? Surely he could have done that before the match had even started. Or did he want Jacob to know that he was in the struggle with him? That he was not alone as he had first perceived early in the night.

            During that night, during that wrestling match, Jacobs’s relationship with God had changed. God held fast to Jacob and Jacob held fast to God, neither letting go, both committed. Both God and Jacob were involved in an active relationship, not a passive one. This mornings reading shows us that God wants us to be engaged, to hang on, to role around on the ground with Him and not let go.

            That engagement is one of the things that I have come to love about our faith. It encourages us to wrestle with our belief and with God. We are encouraged to enter the wring rather than to look on from the sidelines. It encourages us to struggle to know God for ourselves and to know God deeper. God isn’t a WWF wrestling star that is putting on a show for us. God is the real deal. Is it scary to get into that wring? To challenge your beliefs and to wrestle with God? It sure can be. But the good news is that this is what God wants. God wants an intimate relationship with us. God wants to be with us in our struggles, God wants to be part of the struggle and wants us to struggle to know Him more deeply.

            It took me a long time to understand wrestling and it took me a long time to realize that it isn’t always a bad thing. Yes, you can get roughed up and like Jacob you may come out with a limp but that limp isn’t a bad thing. That limp is transformation. That limp means that you have entered into a relationship with God and He with. Are you ready to wrestle!  Amen

Mike Gelsomini, Student Minister

October 21, 2007