Scripture: Genesis 32:22-32.
The first sermon I ever gave at Sojourners was last November, and I didn’t know at the time whether it was going to be my first sermon or my only sermon at Sojourners. It was my candidacy sermon, and although I knew that usually when things have reached that point, it’s likely that the church will ratify the work of its search committee. But not always, and I also had heard that Sojourners people were not generally inclined to let other people do their thinking for them, so they weren’t likely to just rubber stamp the search committee’s work. I had already told the congregation in Illinois that I was leaving, so I was glad you decided to extend the call!
I remember very clearly that one of the scriptures I chose to preach on that day was this story we have heard this morning. I thought it might be appropriate to come back to that story to close out the series of sermons I have been doing this summer on passages from the book of Genesis.
What I focused on, when I was talking about the passage in November, was just the central image of Jacob wrestling with God, and I talked some about how that image was important to me because I felt that I had always had to struggle some with my faith, that my belief in God did not arrive whole—all put together and in place—and it did not come to me naturally or easily. I had to struggle with it, and I have continued to struggle with it as I continually revise my relationship to God, struggle with what a Biblical text says to me or what I am going to say about it, struggle with how we speak to each other about God or about Jesus. But then that image has also been important to me because I have realized as I look back that being sort of involved in wrestling with God all these years has also meant that I have in a way been held in the arms of God all those years too. So this image of Jacob wrestling with God will always be there for me as something I identify with very much.
But there’s another image in this story which grabbed hold of me this time, and that’s the one I want to talk about today. It’s the image of Jacob limping away from his encounter with God. It’s a little bit of a strange image maybe. We expect our encounters with God to produce healing, strength, inner peace, maybe even resurrection. Or maybe we do. I shouldn’t say we as though I could speak for all of us, but it would be an understandable feeling, I think, to expect that out of our encounters with God would come some new strength or energy or hope, some renewal of our spirit. In the New Testament when people encountered Jesus, they often left healed—outside and inside. John the Baptist once sent a message from his camp to Jesus’ camp and asked basically what was going on over there. And Jesus said, go tell John what you see: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the dead are raised. Those are real images too and I’m not trying to deny their truth, but the image of Jacob limping away after he spends the night with God speaks very strongly to me too. It tells another part of my truth, and God’s truth.
I need to come at this though in what may be a bit of a roundabout way. Somewhere I remember reading a comment by a Biblical scholar who was talking about these two major stories involving Jacob—the one last week about Jacob’s ladder, and the one this week about the wrestling—and this man noted that both of these encounters with God that Jacob had took place at night and in dreams, times when he was (a) vulnerable and (b) not in control. This person went on to say that Jacob really needed these nighttime experiences to remind him that he was not in control and that what he wanted was not all that mattered. Jacob was lying and scheming and succeeding his way through life, and these nighttime events were there to remind him that maybe, just maybe, there was another way to look at things.
Then this person who was commenting went on to say that he identified with all this because he felt that although he wasn’t lying and scheming his way through life, he had his daytime life pretty well in hand. He could manage things in his daytime life. He said he had his daytime life pretty well figured out.
Well, my first reaction to this was, “I’m glad you do.” I wondered how many people I knew would say that they had their daytime life pretty well figured out. I know I wouldn’t say that—even though I have been working in the same occupation, same profession for thirty years, twenty years of that in one place, and am not thinking of switching. It’s not that I’m unsettled vocationally, and it’s certainly not that I’m clueless as to what I should be doing when I get up in the morning. So I guess in one sense I have my daytime life figured out. But that is not for the most part how I feel. I feel more like the card I picked up off one of those racks in stores that have little sayings on them. This one said, “My dreams are subject to a variety of interpretations. But then so is the rest of my life.” I bought it because it pretty well described how I feel about it. So I was thinking that I don’t know about this business of having our daytime lives figured out and under control.
But then I thought that, well, yes, I do sort of know what he’s talking about, even if most of us don’t really think we have it all figured out. There is probably a daytime self that most of us have. The public side of us. The face we wear when we go out to meet the world. Even if we don’t wear make-up which is a sort of symbol of how we prepare ourselves to meet the world, we get ourselves together and get our game face on before we step through that front door—and even if we don’t step through the door, when we sit down at the computer or somehow set out to meet the day. We become our competent self, our confident self, our going-somewhere self, our protective self, our got-at-least-some-of-this-under-control self, or whatever that public self can be or needs to be for us—we put it on, just like putting on clothes in the morning. There is a daytime self we wear.
And then there’s the nighttime. When we no longer have to be somebody, no longer have to be doing something, no longer have to be going somewhere. Where we’re no longer managing things, being competent, figuring it out or having it figured out. When we can drop the mask and become the person that only God really knows, or God and only a very few other people in the world, including those parts that are scared or uncertain or hurting. Nighttime is when Jacob met God.
And nighttime is when we meet God, if we understand that we’re not supposed to take nighttime too literally here. We can carry our game face and our daytime selves well into the nighttime hours, and we can find a place for our more real and vulnerable selves in the broad light of day. But this nighttime-daytime stuff I’m talking about is symbolized for me in the act of going to sleep, when we take our clothes off, unprotect ourselves, and give ourselves over to sleep, where we are definitely not in control and where literally anything can happen.
Now back to Jacob’s limp. What I want to suggest is that Jacob’s limp was not so much the result of his encounter with God, but the condition of it. What the scripture actually says is that it was in the course of this all night wrestling match that the mysterious stranger wounded Jacob in the leg, and then that when it was all over the sun rose and shone on Jacob, who was limping.
The way I interpret this, and I admit that I may be taking some liberties with the text since it isn’t entirely clear on everything,–the way I interpret it is that what God had done was not so much to wound Jacob but to make Jacob’s limp visible, to make visible the wound that was already there. Most of our limps are not visible. And most of us are very much aware that we are limping along from day to day, even though no one can tell it just from looking at us. My read on Jacob is that his limps were invisible even to himself. He was so well defended that he didn’t even know he was wounded. He was so into his daytime life, that he wouldn’t even acknowledge the pain. He was so set on getting somewhere that he had no time for limps within himself and no use for limping in others. What God did was turn Jacob inside out, and show Jacob the other side of himself, the nighttime side, the side Jacob had refused so far to see.
So then when the sun rose the next morning and shined on this limping Jacob, it was almost as though God arranged for a spotlight so that Jacob could see himself. God gave Jacob a blessing by wounding him. When the night is almost over, Jacob asks, demands, that God bless him. But by the time Jacob demanded the blessing, I believe it had already been given. I don’t think you can demand blessing from God anyway. Nor can you wrestle God for a blessing. God had already blessed Jacob as a gift by showing Jacob a part of himself he had lost. God gave Jacob back himself.
And what a gift that is, to know that you don’t have to be all those things that your daytime self tries to be or says we’re supposed to be. What a gift it is, for instance, to know that you don’t have to be strong, to have, in a situation that requires someone to be strong, to have someone come along who will say: you don’t have to be strong right now. I’ll take over for a while. I’ll be strong for a while. You don’t have to be strong any more. You can just be.
What a gift it is not to have to be competent…all the time. It’s always good to be competent some of the time, but to be relieved of that responsibility some of the time is a gift. What a gift it is not to have to be happy or energetic or self-sufficient or upbeat or responsible all the time. What a gift it is to be given permission to be all those good things, but to also be able to not hide the vulnerable, wounded, hurting parts of ourselves. It is a gift when we don’t have to wear our game face right now. I think we all know what a gift that can be to us. It can also be a gift to others.
An example: There was a time—it’s a number of years ago now, but I remember it pretty well because it was a pretty unhappy time in my life, and not only was it an unhappy time, I wasn’t coping very well with the unhappiness. I had this sense—even though I knew in my head it wasn’t true—I had this sense that everyone else in the world was either pretty happy or at least coping pretty well with whatever problems they had to deal with. I on the other hand was scarcely coping at all and was feeling pretty detached, as though I was living in a kind of glass case and watching the world go about its business. Sometime during this period I happened to read a book called The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford. There was a scene in this book where the main character stepped off a train in a pretty and prosperous suburb in New Jersey, and as the train pulled away, he felt this intense sense of loneliness. Everything around him had the face of niceness. Bikers biked, and joggers jogged, smiling and waving to people as they went by. Parents walked with their kids to the little league field. Train riders walked off holding hands with the people who had been there to meet them. Neighbors chatted. And as this man looked around at all this it was like everything he saw was taking place in some other country, some other solar system maybe where he didn’t live and that he seemed completely separated from.
When I read that passage in the book it described so well the way I felt at that time that I knew there was someone else in the universe who had at least imagined what I was feeling at that time. And although I couldn’t tell you exactly how it happened, I know that book—even though it was in this thing made out of paper, it was still a human voice—and it played a role in my healing.
What a great gift it is, or least what a great gift it can be, for God to touch us in some way that helps us to see ourselves in Jacob. What a great gift for God to touch us so that we see ourselves as vulnerable, as wounded. Many of us, I’m sure, know the phrase: wounded healers. I know there are at least some people here who have read the book by that name written by Henri Nouwen. The phrase has come to be used quite a bit, but often when it is used, I get the feeling that it is just in the sense that we can be wounded and be healers at the same time. To seek the healing of others does not imply that we don’t need healing ourselves, and to confess our own woundedness does not mean there is nothing we can do for the healing of others and our world. All of which is absolutely true.
But there’s more. It’s not just that we can be both at the same time. It’s that our own woundedness is the very means we have, the only real means we have, to carry healing to another person.
I titled this sermon “Faith with a Limp”. Actually I don’t think there is any other kind of faith than faith with a limp. Faith has no life except as it resides in you and me, and we do all have our limps, whether they are visible or not, whether we admit them or not. Faith has no way to be in the world except with a limp. I will even go so far as to say that anyone who pretends not to have a limp on the inside, like Jacob once did, is not ready to meet God. Jacob is wounded by God, is shown his woundedness by God, early on in this story. When that happens, Jacob is finally ready to meet God.
At the end of the passage, as Jacob limps away in the early morning hours, as dawn is breaking, Jacob is ready to begin his walk with God. Finally he is ready for a life of faith. He will carry his wounds with him. His limp won’t go away just because he has faith. Instead his faith will help him to live with and through his pain. But his faith will also ask him a question: will his wounds just hurt and he will just go on in spite of them, or will he make his wounds available, maybe even those parts of him that hurt the most, will he make them available to other people and thus turn them to the work of healing. I hear God calling Jacob to do that. I hear God calling me in the same way. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 27, 2000