Genesis 32: 22-31 (links validated 7/1/26a)
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Sermon Starters (Proper 13A)(2026)
The dark night of the soul is a concept made popular by a book with that title, written by St. John of the Cross in the 16th century. It means something like a sense of soul weariness, helplessness, a persistent and stubborn dismay with self, with others and with God. Although the concept is expressed more openly in ancient documents, its prevalence is no less in our world today. People who’ve had it with easy answers, who are “deconstructing.” Maybe they feel that the God of Sunday School stories doesn’t match the God of their stories. When black and white blend into shades of grey. When “why?” isn’t just a bored or curious question but bears the weight of disappointment and grief. American novelist, Flannery O’Connor, wrote, “The experience of losing your faith, or of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith…’Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,’ is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the Gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.” Perhaps Ms. O’Connor would allow this as a friendly amendment: Jacob’s prayer “I will not let you go until you bless me” is another way of praying this same “foundation prayer of faith.”Wrestling With God
The August 7, 1995 issue of the New Yorker featured an article on the surprising results of a study of twins that had been going on for more than 30 years. The objective of the study was to help determine how much of human behavior develops from our genetic makeup and how much comes from our interactions with the our environment, particularly our family and friends. The study looked at identical twins raised in different settings and it seemed to suggest that genetics played a far larger role in determining behavior than had previously been imagined. One pair of twins who were studied were called the “Jim twins.” They were separated at birth and never reunited until they were 39 yers old. Each was exactly the same height and weight and looked completely identical to the other. When they were reunited, they discovered that each of them had been married twice, first to a woman named Linda, then to a woman named Betty. Each of them also named their firstborn son James Allen. When they were children, they each had a dog they named “Toy” and each family vacationed at the very same beach, although they apparently never met each other. Both had worked part-time in law enforcement. They even liked the exact same brands of beer and cigarettes. In case after case in this study, it seemed as if the differing parents and contrasting environments made very little difference. That conclusion was very different than what had previously been expected. It appeared that nature played a much larger role in determining behavior than nature. But then the author of the article pointed out that study researched only certain areas in the lives of their subjects — things like personality traits, mannerisms and temperament. However, it didn’t go into the deeper qualities of a person’s life such as their values and ethics, their religious beliefs or their understanding of the purpose of life. In other words, the author suggested that the study focused on superficial aspects of the subjects’ lives rather than what the author called “raw stuff of selfhood,” that is, the things that makes an individual who they are. So, for example, two of the twins who participated in the study were separated at birth and one was raised in Nazi Germany, where he became an active participant in the Hitler Youth movement. The other was raised by a devoted Jewish father. When that second twin grew up, he immigrated to Israel where he devoted his life to serving others. In addition, a deeper examination of the spouses selected by the participating twins revealed that their spouses had very little in common. That called for a complete reinterpretation of the study’s conclusions. They original conclusion suggested that human behavior was essentially determined in the womb by genetic makeup rather being largely or completely a function of free will. But if that were true, it would seemingly preclude the possibility of repentance, that is, a radical redirection in the way someone chooses to live their life...
Illustrated Resources from the Archives
Proper 24C (2007)
Years ago, in a little book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard – herself, at that time, an Episcopalian – mused: “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a package tour of the Absolute? … On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? … It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church: we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life-preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to the pews.”...Proper 13A (2017)
‘In my neck of the Reformed woods, an English professor named Stanley Wiersma used to delight folks with his Garrison Keillor-like musings on life in Iowa and in the churches of Iowa in particular, all written under the nom de plume of Sietze Buining. In one of his more indelible portraits in the book Purpaleanie and other Permutations, we meet a man named “Benny” in a poem titled “Excommunication.” ‘Benny Ploegster is an alcoholic who regularly attended church. For three years Benny had been under discipline: first a silent censure, then a more public censure that initially left his name out of the matter. Later it was announced publicly that it was indeed Benny who was under scrutiny. Three years is a long time to work with someone, and so finally Benny’s persistent struggle with the bottle led the church (and God too, apparently) to run out of patience. So a deadline was set, and when Benny was unable to meet that deadline by cleaning up his act and repenting of his wicked, boozy ways, a date was set for the public excommunication. ‘[But] Benny attended his excommunication. ‘He even stood in the midst of the congregation while the pastor solemnly read the standard form that designated Benny a “Gentile and a publican” with whom the church was to have no further association. Benny stood there and heard it all. As Wiersma put it, “It was not in protest, although the dominie [pastor] thought so, and it was not in stupidity, although the congregation thought so, that Benny stood up for excommunication and until he died of cirrhosis attended as regularly as before. He did not partake of communion. ‘Like Jacob wrestling with God and saying, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me,’ our Benny was wrestling with us and with God. Though he lacked Jacob’s talent for articulation, his standing said as explicitly as its verbal equivalent: I will not be cut off as though I do not exist. I am God’s child, all right, God’s naughty child, but still God’s child: Benny. ‘And what of us who attended church regularly out of custom and superstition and without much desire and without any questioning that we had a right to be there? What of us who had never wrestled like Benny? Though he did not intend it, by standing up to be excommunicated, was Benny excommunicating us? The church is gone now, the lumber used for a cattle shed, but in memory the place where Benny stood is forever holy ground. Was Benny excommunicating me?”Non-Violent Persistence
Well anyway, John Stewart had an interview the other night that honestly brought me to tears. He had Malala Yousafzai on his show, the young girl who stood up to the Taliban; the teenager who was shot at point blank range in the head on her way to school because she has been such a strong advocate for girl's education. Some of you may have seen the interview too, (anyone?) or you may have caught this young woman on 20/20 talking to Diane Sawyer. You all know who she is, right? She's amazing. She's incredible; the youngest person ever to be nominated for a Nobel peace prize and I think she should have won. That would have been a headline worth reading, right?...Proper 13A (2014)
In the second series of the animated television show The Simpsons, there is an episode entitled “Bart Gets An F”. In this episode, Bart Simpson must pass a crucial history test, or face the prospect of having to repeat a year at school. However, try as he might, Bart can’t seem to focus on his studies; and on the evening before the test, in his desperation, he falls to his knees and begins to pray. Watching from his bedroom doorway, Bart’s sister Lisa shakes her head and sadly whispers: “Prayer – the last refuge of the scoundrel.”...Rescued Miner Says He Saw God, Devil During Captivity
("'I was with God, and I was with the devil. They fought, and God won,' Mario Sepulveda said. Sepulveda said he grabbed God's hand and never doubted that he would be rescued...")Wrestled Blessings: More to Us Than Meets the Eye
Paul makes me think of Kathleen Norris’ meditation on “Inheritance: Blessing and Curse.” She begins, “Human inheritance is both a blessing and curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. [Remember: we live no longer in the age of orthodoxy but of paradoxy!] For many of us religion is heavy baggage. [Can I get a witness?] Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family’s past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up?” Norris asks. “What can we hold onto as blessing?”...A Divine Wrestling Match
Grace Ji-Sun Kim offers a poignant reflection on this story, which takes note of the situation that Jacob has not only placed himself in, but his wives, maids, and children as well. His family is, a collection of pawns, whose safety Jacob is willing to sacrifice in the hope of achieving détente with his brother (who apparently was approaching with several-hundred-armed men). Grace writes: This passage challenges us to reflect on what we must wrestle with, our lack of concern for the well-being of others, and even our willingness to make others pay for our wrongdoing and selfishness. Without a thought, we exploit others who are weaker than ourselves, purchasing clothes made by child laborers or others who do not receive a living wage, exploiting and devaluing others for the sake of our own desires...Struggling to Be Healed
At the beginning of the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis lectures confidently on the problem of evil. "Suffering is the megaphone through which God gets our attention," he tells his students. Lewis speaks as one who has all the answers, because he’s never struggled with the questions. At the close of the movie, Lewis’ wife has died of cancer. Lewis knows that he needs to talk to her son, Douglas, to try to offer a comforting word. He decides to tell the boy about his own mother’s death. Lewis says, "When I was about your age my mother got sick and I prayed so hard for her to get well." Douglas interrupts, "It doesn’t work. Does it?" For what looks like the first time Lewis isn’t sure how to answer. Finally he begins to cry, "No. It doesn’t work." Out of a grief, a struggle, a wrestling match, beyond anything that he imagined, Lewis finds his way to a faith that has been through the fire...Wrestle Mania
Consider Jacob’s guilty reflections. I can imagine Jacob thrashing back and forth until he bid God to help him in his worried sleeplessness. And God came, not as a host of angels or a menacing thundercloud on the mountain, but in a form unbidden, as a man who would wrestle with him until together they had made peace for Jacob. One writer asked, “How could Jacob even stay in the ring with God?”[4] But this was not God in all God’s glory. Here God took human form to encounter Jacob at his own level. The man who wrestled with Jacob – whom Jacob was entirely convinced was God – could not defeat Jacob any more than Jesus sets out to defeat us when we encounter him. It is not his purpose. God’s purpose is transformation, which is why God could transform Jacob’s name into “Israel,” while Jacob could not fathom the name of God. Staying perfectly in character, Jacob demanded a blessing from those he engaged. As he demanded a blessing from his brother, his father, his father-in-law, so here he demanded a blessing from God. But a blessing from God never leaves us unchanged. God’s blessings are the very stuff of change, and Jacob discovered as dawn broke that the stiffness in his leg wasn’t his arthritis acting up. He was going to be sporting a limp in his walk from that day forward. Each step of the rest of his life would serve as a reminder of the One who, in blessing him, also transformed him into someone more human than he had been before...Face Time...Out of Joint
There is a scene in the movie, Forrest Gump, in which “Lieutenant Dan” wrestles with God. Years earlier, he had been leader of a platoon in Vietnam in which this simple man named Forrest was a private. Lieutenant Dan’s family had a long history of valor in battle, many of whom fell bravely. Dan’s legs are blown off in a firefight, and Forrest carries him to safety, despite Dan’s protest to leave him there to die with honor. Later on, Lieutenant Dan is an angry man with no legs, hating the one who saved him. And yet, he joins Forrest in his shrimp business. And there, on Forrest’s boat at sea during a hurricane, Lieutenant Dan climbs the mast and faces the wind of God and rails against his Creator... After the storm, it seems like Dan has wrestled a blessing from God, for he is finally at peace with himself…Pain at Peniel
Chronic pain afflicts millions of Americans, and costs billions of dollars in disability and lost productivity. It transforms lives, just as it jolted Jacob and linked him to the Lord and Esau in a way he never dreamed possible. Lee Burke is a delicately featured Massachusetts woman in her 50s. She was married and working as an executive at a real-estate company. But after the abuse began, she left her husband, her job, her money --everything. She found it easier to suffer alone. "It's like being slammed into a wall and totally destroyed. It makes you want to pull every hair out of your head. There's nothing I can do to defend myself." And the attacks just keep coming, day after day after day. But her assailant is not an abusive spouse. Not a violent criminal. Not a street punk or a rogue cop. Instead, it's pain. Chronic pain. Lee Burke underwent surgery for a brain tumor eight years ago, and awoke with an unforeseen and inexplicable problem -- lightning-hot headaches that knock her out for periods ranging from four hours to four days. "It's like knives are going through my eyes," she groans to her doctor. The word "pain" comes from the Latin word for punishment, poena, and the link makes perfect sense -- pain can feel like the work of a sadistic torturer applying thumbscrews or the cat-o'nine-tails...A Little East of Eden
Dominic de Grande was one of six composers selected from an applicant pool of about a hundred to write a choral piece approximately three minutes in length that would be performable by a good amateur choir. He was assigned Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling match and was partnered with theologian Marian Kelsey, who oriented him to the ambiguity of the Genesis 32 narrative, the Hebrew wordplay, and the narrative’s appropriations in liturgy, literature, and visual art. De Grande chose to set Emily Dickinson’s poem on the subject, “A little East of Jordan”: A little East of Jordan, Evangelists record, A Gymnast and an Angel Did wrestle long and hard— Till morning touching mountain— And Jacob, waxing strong, The Angel begged permission To Breakfast—to return— Not so, said cunning Jacob! “I will not let thee go Except thou bless me”—Stranger! The which acceded to— Light swung the silver fleeces “Peniel” Hills beyond, And the bewildered Gymnast Found he had worsted God!...Wrestling Jacob
In “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown,” Charles Wesley merges his own faith struggle with the story of Jacob’s literal wrestling with God at the Jabbok river. Holding on with a fierce resolve, the speaker demands to know the name and nature of the elusive being with whom he grapples, and midway through the poem, both are revealed to him as Love...Sermon Starters (Proper 13A)(2020)
In the midst of the racial tensions of this summer, the police chief of Grand Rapids spent much time talking with protesters who were angry about racial injustice. All the talk did not satisfy the protesters, until he took a knee in solidarity with them. That was a turning point in dealing with the complex and painful issue of racism in our town. But the ultimate solution to that and other vexing problems facing us today is to take a knee before our sovereign and gracious God. Or maybe it’s better to say that human ills cannot be solved until we all take a knee with the Son of God who knelt in solidarity with sinners.Fighting God
Last Christmas, a friend sent me a gift. It's a framed black-and-white cartoon of a grown man and a little girl. The man's arm is extended, and his long fingers press gently against the child's forehead. There's a look on his face of supreme... acceptance? patience? amusement? The girl, meanwhile, is fury personified. Her pigtails are flying, her fists and teeth are clenched, and her feet look like they're moving so fast they'll never hit the ground again. She's headed for the man with all the spitfire intensity of a bull aimed at a red cape, and though her arms are too short to reach him, it's clear she wants to knock him to the ground. "It's you," my friend explained in the note accompanying the gift. "It's you, fighting God."The Limp and the Blessing
We live in a culture that celebrates success and scorns defeat. But sometimes, defeat is a mercy. Defeat is what saves us. What I carry away from the story of Jacob’s wounding is the troubling but rock solid truth that blessing and bruising are not mutually exclusive in the realm of God. We can limp and prevail at the same time. We can experience healing in brokenness. If I want to engage with God, then I must expect that I will be changed in the process — and not always in ways that are painless or comfortable or easy. I can’t dictate the terms of blessing. I can’t say, “I want the blessing but not the limp.” Sometimes, the blessing is the limp. As dawn breaks, the stranger asks Jacob to disengage, and Jacob, tenacious as ever, says no: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” I love this line. I adore it. I want to make it my life’s mantra, because it assures me that sometimes, “winning” involves nothing more sophisticated than not giving up...
Other Resources from 2023 to 2025
Sermon Starters (Proper 13A)(2023)
The story is told of a small child who finds a caterpillar, brings it home, sets in up in a mason jar condo and watches as the caterpillar builds its cocoon. The child watches every day for the butterfly to emerge. One day a small hole appears in the cocoon and the butterfly starts to struggle to come out. As the butterfly continues its struggle, it looked like it’d never make it! So, the child decides to help by cutting the cocoon with scissors, making the hole bigger. Sure enough, the butterfly tumbles out, with a swollen body and shriveled up wings. It never learns to fly and spent the rest of its admittedly short insect life crawling along the bottom of the mason jar condo. Butterflies, it turns out, need the struggle of emerging from their cocoons. The butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly stays earthbound. Which is to say, sometimes the struggle itself is a grace.