What does it mean to wrestle with God? As a young boy, I wrestled a lot with my two brothers, despite them having a blood condition of hemophilia, much to my parents’ chagrin. At first, each of these wrestling matches were fun wrestling until one of us got hurt and then suddenly the whole tone of our wrestling changed. “If you are going to hurt me, I am going to hurt you.” And our wrestling intensified. Tempers flared. Until someone got really hurt or one of my parents intervened. This story suggests that there are two types of wrestling: fun wrestling and intense wrestling due to getting hurt. When we are wrestling with God, what type of wrestling are we doing? I have not met anybody yet who fun wrestles with God. No, when we wrestle with God, it is because we believe that God or life has hurt us in some way, that life is too painful, that life should not be this way, that this should not be happening. And yet it is. It is this disconnect between what is, our painful life experience, and what we believe it should be, life should not be this painful or hard, that creates this experience of hurt. Or maybe a better word would be broken trust. We feel God has let us down, so much so that our trust in God, or the Divine reality that shapes life, has been broken. There seems to be a connection between broken trust and our experience of hurt and our need to wrestle with God. If we are wrestling with God, that also tells us that our trust of God is not totally gone. If our trust was totally broken, we would simply walk away from God and our Christian faith. We might write God off as no longer real, a fairy tale. Or we might come to see God as no longer trustworthy, undependable, even dangerous, someone to avoid at all costs. These people who are wrestling with God are not quite like that. These people still have a relationship to God, maybe a very fragile relationship filled with a lot of hurt or anger, but a relationship nonetheless. That is really important to realize. The very fact that we are wrestling with God tells us that we still have or want to have a better, deeper relationship with God. We are still connected to God, even though that connection maybe be very fragile. There is a Bible story where we read about Jacob wrestling with a mysterious person, an unknown entity that Jacob came to believe was God in some form. But why was Jacob wrestling with God? That is a good question. Let me provide some context. Twenty plus years before, Jacob, with the help of his mother, fooled his father into giving him the family blessing, the blessing that was supposed to go to Esau, Isaac’s oldest son. This father blessing made Jacob the head of the Isaac’s extended family, and the receiver of God’s abundant blessings. Esau was furious when Jacob stole his blessing and was determined to kill Jacob. So Jacob fled for his life and lived with his uncle Laban, an uncle on his mother’s side in a neighbouring territory. For twenty years, Jacob lived there with Uncle Laban who tricked Jacob many times causing him to marry not one but two of Laban’s daughters. It seem that trickery ran in the family. However, every thing Jacob touched, God blessed. Jacob’s holdings and herds grew abundantly causing eventually much conflict within Laban’s family. Due to the increasing tensions within Laban’s household, Jacob felt led to return to his homeland where his father and Esau still lived. Jacob headed home with all his abundant herds and holdings along with his two wives, children, and many servants. However, despite how God had blessed him many times in the past, Jacob is petrified of meeting Esau. We read that Jacob sends ahead of him a ton of gifts to Esau---gifts of goats and sheep and camels and cows and donkeys. When Esau meets these herds, Jacob’s servants are instructed to say, “These gifts are from your servant, Jacob, to you Master, Esau…and Jacob is actually right behind us.” Upon receiving these gifts, Esau essentially ignores them and rushes to see Jacob. Upon hearing this, Jacob is petrified. He fears the worst, that Esau wants to kill him now just as he did 20 years before. It is at this place in the story that Jacob has this experience of wrestling with God. Jacob knows he will see Esau, his brother, the very next day. As I noted earlier, when people wrestle with God, it is a sign that they feel hurt by God in some way, that life should not be this painful, this difficult, that one should not have to experience this. For Jacob, he is filled with fear, a fear that is beyond what he can live with. This is why he is wrestling with God. This Bible story states that Jacob wrestled with this mysterious person all night, and this person, realizing that it could not defeat Jacob, injures him. But even then, Jacob would not let go of the person until he received a blessing from God. Isn’t that interesting? It is apparent that God had blessed Jacob continually throughout these 20 years, but somehow these blessings were not experienced by Jacob as authentic blessings from God. If you looked at how Jacob was blessed by God, through abundant crops and animal herds and becoming a powerful leader, you soon realize that Jacob would understand these blessings as the fulfillment of his father’s blessing, a blessing he stole from his brother Esau. In fact, all of this abundance and prosperity would aggravate the guilt and shame he felt from his trickery when he was a young. The more God blessed him in this way, the more Jacob would feel cursed with guilt. No wonder Jacob wanted God to blessed him…in a different way. The injured Jacob says to the mysterious person, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” In the end, God gives Jacob a new name, Israel which means that “I have wrestled with God and humans and have prevailed.” Something happened in this divine experience of blessing for Jacob, now called Israel. The next morning Israel created a sacred marker and named that place where he had wrestled God “Peniel” which means “I have seen God face to face, and my life has been saved.” Later that day, Esau finally finds him, rounds to meet him, throws his arms around his neck, kisses him, and they weep. The wrestling was over---with God, with Esau, with oneself, with life. I think all of us have found ourselves, like Jacob, wrestling with God at times in our lives, sometimes more than others, especially when life have been very tough, tougher then we wish or even can tolerate sometimes. I have friends right now in my life who are wrestling with life due to health issues, physical health, mental health, some even facing death. And I don’t think I am unique, especially at my age. I remember a few weeks before my brother Jamie (seen above) died that I had to preached a sermon at First Mennonite Church in Kitchener. It was the summer of 1992. It was my last sermon there as part of my internship year. My sermon was all being angry at God. I could really relate to Jacob wrestling with God back then, wanting God to bless my family by healing my brother Jamie. I didn’t know then that he would die within five or six weeks of preaching that sermon. I still remember a member of First Mennonite Church taking me out for coffee that following week and scolding me for being angry at God, especially expressing my anger over the pulpit. He told me that I was a pastor, a man of God, that I should never have spoken such words publicly. I was quite taken back by his scolding. Thankfully, my supervisor then reassured me that I was in good company, that there were many holy people in the Bible who expressed publicly their anger at God. Phew! That was reassuring. I remember another time as a pastor really wrestling with God. It was during my time as interim pastor at East Zorra Mennonite Church (seen below) 10 years ago. A young teen boy had surgery around a health condition, a surgery designed to correct blood circulation to his brain. The surgery went fine but then a couple of days later he had a stroke which meant more surgery, then another stroke, and more complications. The elders within the congregation along with the other pastors organized a prayer vigil one evening, and many people came out. I still remember, as a pastor, sitting with the extended family of this young teen boy: parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, etc. We were all gathered together in a private room. The young boy was going into another surgery but the outlook looked very grim. The doctors were not convinced they could help him or that he would survive another surgery. There I was…wrestling with God…as a pastor. How do I pray? Do I pray for God to heal the young boy through getting physically better or do I pray for healing through the process of death, through the boy being freed of his painful physical body? I know, as a pastor, that I could have played it safe, to just pray for healing without specifying what type of healing, but on that day, I could not do that. My wrestling with God would not allow it. I was too upset by the injustice that was happening to this boy and his family. I was led that day to pray for physical healing, almost demanding God to bring it about. Thankfully, this young teenager came through surgery and recovered but not fully. Like Jacob, he has some side effects physically from his wrestling experience with God but I learned that this youth graduated from university this past year. Ten years later, looking back on that time, I am not sure if I would do anything differently, except maybe word my prayer differently. Maybe instead of demanding God to heal this young boy, I would demand what Jacob demanded. Jacob wanted to be truly blessed by God, a blessing that would totally change him forever, total changed how he saw himself, totally changed his identity. That is the significance of the name change in our Bible story. God’s blessing upon Jacob was so profound that he no longer saw himself as “Jacob”, the one who tricked his brother of his blessing and birthright. This is what the name “Jacob” means, "trickster." His old identity was gone. He now had a new identity as Israel, “one who had wrestled with God and had prevailed.” With that new identity, Israel was now open to experiencing his brother Esau differently, one that allowed him to receive the grace and love his brother wanted to give him. I am very much aware of how negative life experiences like persistent illnesses or trials can cause us to develop a certain negative self identity, a certain unhelpful way of understanding and seeing ourselves. Like Jacob, because of our past difficult experiences, we can come to believe that God no longer blesses us, that God’s spirit or presence is no longer with us, that we are cursed in a certain way for bad things keep happening to us. This is why two weeks ago at Mannheim Mennonite Church we had a service of anointing. One of church members has been struggling with illness for a long time. In fact, this October she almost died due to an infectious cyst rupturing inside of her. So, our congregation gathered around her and her family and asked God to bless her and her family. We asked God to bless them so much that they would begin to experience and discover a new identity for themselves, an identity built on how much God is blessing them in the midst of their everyday life. It was a special sacred moment for her and her family. If you are wrestling with God, it is my prayer that God will bless you with a new name too, a new way of experiencing life that allows you to feel blessed by God, life, and others around you.
Questions to Ponder:
0 Comments
|