From Fate to Blessing
| Rod Frohman |
Third Presbyterian Church |
| August 3, 2008 |
Genesis 32:22 – 30 |
The excitement over the 2008 Olympics from Beijing is beginning
to build. I love the Olympics. It is one of the true level political
or athletic playing fields in the world. I am proud that my
first cousin, Ivar Sholin, was the silver medal winner in the
flyweight division of wrestling in the 1948 Olympics in London.
He wrestled for Sweden. In order to win the silver medal he
had to defeat many contestants, but in the end he lost to a
wrestler from Turkey. So did he lose the gold or win the silver?
I like to believe that he won the Silver. I wonder if Ivar,
who died in 1992, ever knew about Vince Lombardi the famous
Green Bay Packers football coach who said, “Winning is
not everything, it's the only thing.”
And it is wrestling to win at all costs which is the entry
point into the Old Testament lesson this morning, the story
of Jacob wrestling with an unknown assailant.
So, today we return to the Jacob cycle, those wonderful series
of sagas, or quasi-historical accounts of the exploits of the
patriarchs of the Hebrew people. You may recall a couple weeks
ago that we talked about Jacob and Esau and their sibling rivalry
to get the inheritance from their father Isaac. You recall that
the name “Jacob” is literally the word, “heel”
in Hebrew because, as the story is told, when Jacob was born,
he emerged from his mother's womb grabbing his elder Brother
Esau's heel. And from that origin we learned that Jacob was
grabby. He grabbed his brother's inheritance. You recall that
Esau sold it to Jacob for a bowl of soup one day when Esau was
hungry. Jacob grabbed his aged blind fathers blessing, the blessing
intended for the firstborn. He actually conspired with his mother
to trick his blind father by wearing animal skins to simulate
his brother Esau’s hairy arms. So enraged was Esau with
this trick, that Jacob had to flee for his life and go into
exile with his uncle Laban in another country because Esau had
sworn to kill him. It was on the way to live with his uncle
that he had that famous dream of the ladder to the heavens about
which we spoke a couple of weeks ago.
There in a distant country, Jacob fell in love with his first
cousin whom he finally married after being tricked into marrying
her sister first. There in the clan-household of his uncle,
also known as his father-in-law, Jacob built a rather large
family from two wives and two slave concubines. (So much for
“biblical sexuality,”eh.) After about 20 years in
exile, 20 years of tricking his father-in-law and being tricked
by him, Jacob wanted to go back to his homeland. He is driven
to return by that promise from God in the vision of the ladder
to heaven, and by the desire to be reconciled with his family
of origin. He finally made amends with his father in law, Laban,
and realized that if he was going to go back home he also needed
to make amends with his estranged brother.
Our Old Testament lesson in the morning takes place on the
night before the intended sibling reconciliation. Jacob had
finally realized that his victory-at- any-cost lifestyle has
led to many hollow victories. So there he stands at the ford
of a creek, ready to cross into his brother's territory and
he just can't do it.
"In the ancient near East, the ford of a river was thought
to be an especially dangerous place since a “jinn,”
or demon, might lurk there to do harm to passersby (Proclamation
3 Pentecost 3, 1974, Fortress press, p.13) The
“jinn” functioned like the bridge troll in European
folklore.
Notice the courageous Jacob sends his two wives, his two concubines
and 11 children over the brook first, and then all his livestock
as a buffer between he and the brother whom he feared. Jacob
stayed behind on the other side, alone and found himself in
quite a pressure cooker. Psychologically speaking, “He
had to pass through a process of maturation in a much accelerated
rate. It was now time to accept responsibility for his past
actions.” (Mortimer Adler, Literary Guide
to the Bible, p. 51)
But notice that Jacob hasn't forgotten his old over-reaching,
win-at-any-cost, Vince Lombardi method. In the ensuing wrestling
match he tries to get an unfair advantage over his opponent
by asking the opponent's name. He doesn't ask the opponent's
name to be friendly; he’s trying to beat him by learning
his name. Hebrews, and other Semites, believed that if you call
someone by name you had power and control over them.
So Jacob is still trying to cheat to win because he fears that
brother Esau is about to clean his clock. He needs all the advantage
he can get. But this time Jacob comes away from the fight with
a physical handicap and a new identity. He walks away with a
limp and his name is changed to “Israel” instead
of Jacob. In the midst of deceit and new limitations, Jacob
gets a new identity, much more than he could have received by
cheating and winning. He became the patriarch and the namesake
of the Hebrew people.
So, who was Jacob wrestling with? God? Self? Past? The future?
The answer-- all of the above. It seems that fate had caught
up with him. And the interesting thing is he's wounded for life
and he's positively changed. He didn't win but then again he
didn't lose. He didn't get the gold medal. I'm not too sure
he even got the silver medal, maybe the bronze. He didn't win
but he didn't lose either. Vince Lombardi would have been very
dissatisfied.
Have you ever wrestled with God in the dark night of your soul?
What happened? Please note that Jacob is not a young person
wrestling with a bright future ahead of him. This is a midlife
crisis. This is someone who is wrestling with the consequences
of a series of poor choices? This is somebody wrestling with
a fate that he didn't necessarily want. There are forces beyond
Jacob's own control in this dark night of the soul.
This is the time of wrestling with the implications of the
diagnosis of a debilitating disease. This is a Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) wrestling with whether or not to ordain gays
and lesbians as ministers of the Gospel. This is a presbytery
of Genesee Valley struggling to match money and program structure.
But also notice, as Jacob wrestles with the unknown assailant
it is clear that this is not a good versus evil story. Rather
it is a story of playing the cards one has been dealt. It is
risking a new life. It is making the best of a very difficult
situation.
And yet it is more than that. It is also important to note
that wounds and bad decisions, suffering and pain, do not mean
that they are deserved. Wrestling with God is ultimately, not
an act of f-a-t-e but f-a-i-t-h.
Wrestling with God is the faith that somehow in all things
God works for good. This doesn't mean that the bad things that
happen to us are good, but in them God works for good. And so
we wrestle through the meaning of the disease. We wrestle through
the meaning of a layoff, a divorce, and cuts in Kodak retiree
benefits. We wrestle through the meaning of the suicide of a
loved one. We wrestle through the sadness of a dream deferred.
And when we are done wrestling, life will be different because
we will have been wounded by life, but life will take on a whole
new range of possibilities.
There was a prisoner of war camp in Scotland which housed German
prisoners until 1948. One of the prisoners was a young German
named Jurgen Moltmann. There in Scotland, Jurgen and others
were confronted with pictures of Auschwitz and Belsen. And he
reported "slowly and inexorably the truth filtered into
our awareness, and we saw ourselves mirrored in the eyes of
the Nazi victims. Was this what we had fought for? Had my generation,
at the last, been driven to our deaths so that concentration
camp murderers could go on killing and Hitler to live a few
months longer? The depression over the wartime destruction and
captivity without any apparent end, was exacerbated by a feeling
of profound shame at having to share in this disgrace."
(Christian Century August 13 –
20, 1997 page 727)
"In that mass camp, where we just sat around and had nothing
to do, one was especially at the mercy of those tormenting memories.
In those nights one was alone like Jacob and fought with the
principalities and powers that seemed dark and dangerous. It
was only afterwards and later that it became clear with whom
I had been wrestling." (Ibid)
There in the re-education camp, young Jurgen came under the
influence of two chaplains who supplied him with theological
books obtained through the YMCA including Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s,
The Cost of Discipleship and Reinhold
Neibuhr’s, The Nature and Destiny of Man,
now great classics, but then, brand-new end-of-the-war theology.
In the middle of this “night,” that went on for
several years, the prisoners sat up until the wee hours of the
morning talking intensely by the light of a potbellied stove.
Jurgen reported, "Never again have I lived the life of
the mind as intensely as I did that last semester of the theological
school in the Norton prisoner of war camp. For us, what looked
like a grim fate when it began turned into an undeserved rich
blessing. It began in the night of war and when we came to the
Norton [POW] Camp, the sun rose for us. We came with wounded
souls. when we left my soul was healed." (Ibid)
And healed it was. Jurgen Moltmann was released from prison
in 1948 and returned to Germany and became a Professor of systematic
theology at the University of Tübingen. When America entered
its dark night of the soul in 1968 with the assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr., the escalation of the Vietnam War, and
the penetrating influence of the “death of God”
theology, this book, (hold up) The Theology of Hope,
which had just been printed in the United States a year earlier,
and was then being taught around the United States by the author.
It was really only this kind of a person who had been through
the despair of Nazism, who had wrestled with God, who had any
credibility to speak to the despair of those years. And Moltmann
spoke to me. And he signed this book.
As Jacob wrestled with God, himself, his past, his present,
his future, with the unknown assailant, so we all so from time
to time must wrestle with the principalities and powers, with
what seems to be fate, but in fact, may turn into an undeserved
and rich blessing. But the only way fate is translated into
blessing is by having the courage, indeed the audacity, to wrestle
with God.
