Wrestling with God
Sermon
Justin: Good morning everybody. Happy August. I can't believe it is August. That's crazy. Throughout the month of July, we were in a series called "Awe and Wonder" and we spent all month long taking in the beauty and the mystery of God's goodness. And on one of those Sundays, Debbie spoke about the transfiguration and that story is important for what we're going to be doing in August because in that story, the disciples, Peter, James, and John, they go up to the top of the mountain where Jesus reveals the fullness of His glory to them. And then they come back down the mountain and time they come down the mountain, they're met by a man who is in distress because his son is suffering from seizures. So they can only stay on that mountaintop for so long before they have to come back down and face the realities that are around them.
And while I am so grateful that we took the time in July to sit in the goodness and the awe and the wonder of who God is, we have mountain top experience too and face the realities that are around us. A lot of times, things are not always shining and wonderful, are they? Sometimes things don't always inspire us, the things that we're wrestling with and going through, they don't always inspire all at the goodness of God. Sometimes we feel like God is completely absent or sometimes we think, "Well, if God cared at all, then I wouldn't be wrestling with this. I wouldn't be going through this thing."
And so today, we are going to start a new series called Hills and Valleys and for the next month, we're going to be looking at some stories in the Old Testament and we're going to be wrestling with struggles and bold faith and unfair stances and forgiveness to see if God can meet us in some of those places.
And part of this series is not just listening to stories from the Old Testament, but actually listening to stories from our community as well. So every week, someone from our table community is going to share part of their story and our hope is that as they share their story, that it will resonate with you and it will help you navigate some of the hills and valleys of your life as well.
So this morning, we are looking at a pivotal moment in the life of Jacob. Jacob was born to Isaac and Rebecca and he had a twin brother named Esau and when they were born, Esau was born first and if you remember this story, Jacob comes out of the womb, latched on to Esau's hill. He's holding on and his parents name him Jacob because it means heel grabber and he lives up to that throughout his life. He convinces his brother Esau to sell his birthright to him for a bowl of stew and then he disguises himself as his brother because Esau is very hairy and Jacob is not so he puts up on all this stuff and disguises himself as his brother so that he can still Esau's from their father as he's dying. This guy is a real piece of work!
He eventually has to leave home because Esau is so angry with him he knows that he has to escape and it's over 20 years before Jacob tries to reach out and reconcile with Esau and when he does reach out, he hears that Esau is coming 400 men with him and so that freaks Jacob out and he says okay I've got to send my family away to try to spare their lives so he sends them away and he's left alone to kind of reckon with the fact that the deceptions that he's caused his entire life have finally caught up to him and so that's where we are picking up in the story. After Jacob has sent his family away and he's left alone.
So we're gonna be in Genesis 32:24-31 and it says this:
Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” 27 So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28 Then the man[a] said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,[b] for you have striven with God and with humans[c] and have prevailed.” 29 Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. 30 So Jacob called the place Peniel,[d] saying, “For I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” 31 The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
What a weird story. Jacob is all alone and out of nowhere, and he comes up and starts wrestling with him until daybreak. That is a long time to wrestle. I would have to tap out. And then as they're wrestling, this man touches his hip and knocks it out of socket. And it's so weird, as they're wrestling, Jacob can't see who this guy is. We don't know if it's because it's so dark or this guy has a veil on. He's in a John Cena situation. You can't see him. And then all of a sudden, the man says, "Let me go, the daybreak is coming." So now we've moved from a John Cena situation to an Edward Cullen situation. Like, why can't he be in the sunlight? That's kinda weird, right? Thanks.
But Jacob, in that moment, refuses to let him go, and he demands to be blessed. So this man names him Israel because he says he has wrestled with God. I think this is where Jacob probably recognizes who he's actually been wrestling with this entire time and is grateful that he walks away from this encounter with a blessing and only a limp.
This is one of those stories where I feel like we could get really bogged down and trying to make sense of all of these pieces. And while it may be fun to do some of that work, I think the not knowing of it all, like the mystery of this story, is part of the beauty of it. Because the foundation of a life of faith is not knowing, it's not certainty, it's trust. And trust is almost always forged through wrestling.
Like, I have a very anxious relationship with flying, and I've watched a ton of YouTube videos over the year on flights and the science behind it and all of the sensations that you feel when you're on a flight because it's crazy to me that you can just get in this metal bus with wings and just fly through the air. It fascinates me and it scares me to death. So over time, with experience of just getting on flights and leaning on the expertise of Captain Steve on YouTube, he's great if you're scared of a flight, I've learned to chill and relax. But for such a long time, trying to decide whether or not I even wanted to go to a place that required me to get on an airplane was a real wrestle for me. But the thing about this is that I could understand the science of it. And once I understood it, it became easier for me to trust it and I could actually enjoy the experience.
God, however, is not scientific in that way. And it's not always easy to understand what God is up to. Yes, we can absolutely learn about God by reading about Jesus and the gospels of God throughout life. But the life of faith is not one of simple answers or full understandings of things. It's a life of wrestling as we're changed and we're transformed. And so I think that we could easily isolate this text from the broader story of it all. And we could walk away thinking, wow, Jacob became Israel in this moment he took on a brand new life and a brand new purpose. And that just really is not true.
Jacob continues to do very Jacob things throughout his life. Even after he and Esau do reconcile, Esau says, "Hey, I'm willing to travel with you and your family "to Sier and we can all settle down there." And Jacob says, "That sounds great. "My family needs to move a little slower "so you go on to Sier and we'll meet you there." And he never does.
He goes and settles somewhere else and he doesn't see his brother again until their dad is getting ready to pass away. So Jacob does not become a brand new person. He doesn't take on a brand new identity here but what he does do is embrace a faith that he did not have before. He spent his entire life relying on his own devices and himself. He stole, he lied, he cheated and deceived to get what he wanted instead of stepping out of faith and trusting that God would be faithful to him. That's what defined him. He was the hill grabber. But this experience with God began to change him in powerful ways and to someone who was at least willing to wrestle with God for the blessings that he had.
I imagine Jacob kind of like I do my eight year old cousin. When I go to South Carolina for a visit, my cousin, Maxston, loves for me to come over and play. He thinks I'm a kid just like he is. And so when I go over there, I have to set up a city so that he can take his T-Rex and destroy the city. That's his favorite thing to do. And one time I was over there and I had to leave and he did not want me to go. So he latched onto my leg like right here and I was dragging him through the house. And he was like, "I am not letting go. "You have to stay and play more." That is the vibe that I get from Jacob.
He's got an audacity and a willingness to latch onto God and not let go even if that experience is gonna cause him to walk away from it with a limp. Now don't get me wrong, I think Jacob is a horrible person. He is not a hero of mine. But I can appreciate the audacity to wrestle. And I wonder how our lives would be different if we had that same audacity. In a world that seems to prize unwavering certainty around things, sometimes we need the reminder that it's okay to wrestle with God. Jacob isn't condemned or chastised because he wrestles with God. He's blessed for it.
So perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to see our wrestling as a negative thing. Maybe wrestling is the only way that we actually grow. As people of faith, I think it's important that we get comfortable being uncomfortable and knowing that as beautiful and as rich as a life of faith is, it is also sort of a wrestling match. And the beautiful thing about that is that our questions and our doubts and the things that we struggle with and trying to wrap our minds around the cost of following Jesus are not signs that we lack faith. They are evidence that we have faith. That tells me that you refuse to let God go. And so often we try to adhere to these very narrow visions of God. And we can't wrestle and we can't have doubts or ask questions because that God is not big enough to handle the scrutiny.
But friends, God is big enough. God invites us into a life of faith that is not always simple. It is full of paradoxes to wrestle with. It is full of implications for us to live out. But if we're willing to walk that path, I promise we will be changed. So I encourage you to have the audacity to wrestle with God. And I think that you'll discover that as you wrestle, you'll develop a much richer faith and a deeper trust in God. Please don't mistake your wrestling as a failure. It's not. It's actually the very place where God wants to meet you.
Jacob walked away from his wrestling with a limp, but he also walked away with a blessing. And so as you wrestle with God, may you be blessed as well. Let's pray. Lord, we love you and we wanna follow Jesus well, but it isn't always simple. There aren't easy answers to all of our doubts and questions. And we're so grateful that you invite us to wrestle with you. My prayer for each of us this morning is that our wrestling would lead us to more deeply trust you, Jesus. You had your own wrestling with God. Even in the garden before your crucifixion you wrestled, you begged God to take that cup from you if it'd be possible, but you chose trust. Not my will, but yours be done. You understand us, you know us. So may your presence be near us as we wrestle to. In Jesus name, amen.
This morning for our very first Hills and Valley story, we've invited Chelsea Bodie to come and share with us. Chelsea and her husband Nathan have been members here since March, I think. And if you don't know Chelsea and Nathan, their story includes music. So you've probably seen them in the band if you haven't met Chelsea. So I will turn it over to Chelsea and we're so grateful that you came to share with us this morning.
Hills & Valleys Story
Chelsea: Hello. Put that down, I'm a little shorter than Justin. Hi, I'm Chelsea. Some of you may know me from our grocery delivery project during Operation Metro Surge. My husband and I have been coming to the table for a little over a year now and that was our first foray into really getting involved here. While that might not seem like a super cautious timeline to you, that is absolutely my version of slow rolling my engagement at a church.
I was raised in a family that did church and just for happenstance, though I did not tell them that today I was sharing, this is actually my parents' first Sunday here! so I think how fitting and I think God's timing is so cool in that way.
So yeah, we did not attend. We did church, we got involved. My parents hosted and taught and served in kitchens. I joined my mother on worship team when I was 12 and I didn't really take a break from that for 20 years. We were often the last people in the lobby after service and that still tends to be my tendency. So yeah, you could say I usually get involved. Overall though, my journey of faith has been is marked by moments of wrestling, of participating in my faith in a system that I have a hard time reconciling with. And I consider myself an eternal optimist. A let's change the system from within type of person, which let me tell you can and has been quite exhausting.
When I was in sixth grade, I went to a private Christian school where everyone's favorite teacher and local pastor who taught biblical studies at our school made national news for child molestation.
His son was in my sixth grade class at the time and that was hard to wrestle with. In middle school, neck deep in depression and untreated unrecognized mental health struggles, I was faithfully involved in church all in and I still was labeled as a bad influence by some of the church moms for my interest in screamo music and Christian hardcore.
In high school, I remember an adult volunteer youth leader talking about how he could see manipulation in girls' eyes. He had a lot of problematic takes, but that's one of the ones I vividly remember because of how I internalized that as a young female.
I have story after story of the no hate like Christian love message. I saw the church's response to my sibling's queer identity. I have seen plenty of other Christian leaders fall from grace, whether celebrity pastors or a different local youth pastor that I looked up to as a youth pastor at the time get arrested for, again, child molestation.
I've been told by a lead pastor as a mid-20s woman volunteering in the church office that I was throwing away my vote if I didn't vote for Trump in the 2016 election.
I have been asked by a different lead pastor as a staff member at a church to not post pictures of myself at protests on social media. Maybe you could just text it to your friends instead.
This is after I deconstructed my views about female leadership in the church enough to get credentialed in ministry and become a pastor. I spent many, many hours crying at my steering wheel, trying to untangle the messages I was taught and believed about female leadership, hell, queerness, what it means to be a Christian.
I have been told many times that there is a right way and a wrong way to do Christianity. I have been the pastor who has said that there is a right way and wrong way to do it.
And a younger version of myself might be horrified by this, but I find myself saying more and more as I get older hopefully wiser that it's a red flag when someone tells me they have all the answers. Believe me, I would love it if somebody had all of the answers, I would love to have all of the answers. But there's something beautiful about the way God finds us in all sorts of different scenarios.
I recently revisited my old home church for a family wedding in June. I was doing makeup there on the morning of telling stories about how I have experienced the presence of God in that building and I just didn't see it coming, I just started crying. It is amazing to me that even through human imperfection and misinterpretation, I look back and see the clear hand of God.
That even though I've experienced deep hurt and confusion and identity crisis, I can still walk into my old home church when I don't doctrinally align with anymore and remember the goodness of God in meeting me in an imperfect place through imperfect individuals while I am an imperfect person.
And it's always been that that has kept me grounded through all of it, the goodness, kindness, and presence of God that meets me where I'm at in each chapter of my life, in the seasons that I feel sure, and in the seasons that I am wrestling.
I've always loved the story of Jacob or Israel. It's been my favorite maybe for different reasons. Maybe I relate to him as the youngest of three with an absolute eldest complex. But I think I've been drawn to the up and down narrative of it and to God blessing someone so truly and obviously flawed. When Justin told me this was the passage he was preaching on, I felt a bit like God saying like, yeah, I see you.
I immediately thought of a kind of spoken word poem that I had written a number of years ago that references Jacob wrestling with the angel, which sure enough I found in my notes app. I have the quintessential woman with ADHD notes app where it switches from a grocery list to an uninterpretable string of numbers to a half written poem. These poems are the closest thing to, you'll get to a diary entry so be nice.
This is from April 17, sorry, April 2017 when I was about to take my first pastoral job. And I have definitely never shared it before:
Stupid optimism
I look at some of these Old Testament stories, the ones that mom and dad read us when we were too young to understand the gravity and the history of it.
I read the old prophets and kings and heroes and I see this stupid optimism, naivete. They're asking for the sun to stop moving, for the rain to stop coming, for the lions not to eat them and their leprosy to leave them. And it worked.
So I'm standing on this field of dingy beige and kind of green with so much boldness and so little armor. I stare Goliath in the eye, five foot two to nine foot easy. But now I wonder why these blessed stones that I am holding aren't working. Why I poured out all that water on the altar and it isn't burning. Why I'm looking down at dry sheepskin and dry ground. I don't know if you heard me here, but what I asked for was a miracle. For an answer. For something.
I know, I get it. That's not how all the stories went. I know we're meant to show patience. Adam and Eve waiting for the promised seed. Israelites in the desert for generations. Sarah sitting with hair gray and crib empty.
But where do you find that stupid optimism? When you're five years in on a 40 year desert sentence and you look to your wife saying your kids will still make it, the promised land is coming.
When you spend the whole night fighting the angel of the Lord, a simple touch breaks you and yet you still demand a blessing. That stupid optimism. That stuff of legends. But what if my desert is too dry? What if I can't do another 40 years of waiting and wishing and wanting? What if my midnight passes and the sun rises and I don't have it in me to demand a blessing? What if I walk away wanting but not asking, labored breath and limping would just defeat and not a benediction?
I never went back and finished that. But I kind of think that's perfect for this. Because I think that uncertainty is part of the process. That God, the creator of the universe, can love us and meet us where we're at. Even when we are wrestling with what that means. And since I don't think I'll ever have all the answers, I am very grateful that God still meets me in that with love and healing and truth. Thank you.
Words of Institution
Debbie: Hello. It has a red light. Oh, there we go. Thank you, Chelsea. It was beautiful and honest. And you're a very gifted speaker. Thank you for sharing with us today.
Gosh, so much going through my head. I think if we all look at our own lives, we look at our world.
And if we're honest, the life of faith is wrestling. It is uncertainty. Long ago, I was at a conference that Greg Boyd did, and it was all on the sin of certainty. It's something that's really stuck with me throughout the decades since I've been there.
And there is a reality in being, getting comfortable in those places of wrestling. Of actually embracing those places because we heard from Justin and clearly in Chelsea's story that it's in those places, that not only we continue to grow and be transformed, but it's in those places.
Every Sunday, every Sunday when we gather together in this space, what I know is that each of us have our own stories and that we're often in a place that we're struggling or questioning or wrestling. And one of the things I love about this time when we share in this table together is that we can come forward and we can trust and love that God meets us, that God never leaves us.
And so as we get ready today to share in the bread and the cup, my hope and prayer for this community is that we can take in Chelsea's story and Justin's words and we can be reminded that we are loved, that God never leaves us.
As you come forward, if you're in front of the tape, come this way and circle around, our bread is gluten-free and the cup is juice. You can come forward and you'll take that and dip it into the cup.
The night before Jesus died, he sat at a table with his friends, his disciples, and he took bread and he broke that bread. And when he broke that bread, he said, "Is my body broken for you? "When you eat this, remember me."
He took the cup and after pouring wine into the cup, he said, "This is my blood, the blood of the new covenant. "And when you drink from this cup, remember me."
So we'll do that together as we come forward. If you'd like some prayer with someone from our prayer team, Nikki will be in the back and would love to pray for you. If you're able, please stand as together, we pray the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray: Our God, who art in heaven…