The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
October 21, 2007

Proper 24-C
Genesis 32:3-8; 22-30
2 Timothy 3:14 –– 4:5
Luke 18:1-8a

“Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made,” said Archbishop Robert Runcie at Charles’ and Diana’s wedding, ”the prince and princess on their wedding day. But fairy tales usually end at this point with the simple phrase, ‘They lived happily ever after.’ This may be because fairy tales regard marriage as an anticlimax after the romance of courtship,” Runcie added. “This is not the Christian view. Our faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival, but the place where the adventure really begins.”

Charles and Diana may once have dreamed of fairy tale life, of life lived in a neat and tidy and rather upscale manner, life lived on an English manor in an orderly Anglican way with more than a touch of noblesse oblige, with God as absentee landlord and themselves as God’s faithful stewards riding around in tweeds inspecting the fields, the royal servants loyally at their labors.

And we dream, I suppose, if not of life on a royal manor, then at least of life lived in a neat and tidy manner, if not with loyal retainers, then at least with a sense of security, with steady incomes and well-groomed lawns, and two if not three garages, and three if not four bedrooms, and loads of “family values,” and obedient children who are good-looking and above average, with God at our beck and call, ready to provide a tidy theology to answer all our questions about life and eager to render prompt justice should anything go awry.

But which is nearer to reality – the fairy tale, or the stories we heard from the Bible this morning, the story of Jacob and the story of a lousy judge who is probably on the take and who has no time for a poor woman who needs a fair hearing?

Jacob’s story is just about as far as you can get from fairy tale life. This morning we find him on his way home after twenty years on the run in a foreign land, on his way home to face the brother from whom he had once stolen everything he had. You remember the story, how Jacob was, as they say in Yiddish, a macher, a man on the make. And you remember what “on the make” meant as Jacob saw it.1

“On the make” meant stealing his brother’s birthright by lying to their father. “One the make” meant running away, with his mother’s connivance, to live with her brother Laban when Esau threatened to kill him. “On the make” meant working for twenty years for Laban, all the while deceiving his uncle and stealing his sheep. “On the make” meant struggling the whole time with two jealous wives, two of Laban’s daughters, who nag him constantly for his attention and favor. “On the make” meant running away from his uncle as he had run away from his brother and, with Rachel's complicity, stealing Laban’s household gods as he left.

But through it all, “on the make” meant successful, a man who got what he wanted, as machers tend to do in the real world. It meant coming home triumphant, married and rich, on the verge, one supposes, of realizing his dream of the biblical equivalent of an English manor life.

And yet, Jacob came home also a man fearful of his brother and somehow haunted, haunted by a dark adversary he had been struggling with for years in all his schemes to get ahead.

Perhaps that was why Jacob decided to camp alone that night by the Jabbok ford, sending his wives and servants and cattle on ahead. “Left alone,” the Bible says, for a night of what he must have known would be uneasy sleep as he considered what a reunion with Esau would be like after twenty years away.

Those who struggle with life seldom rest well, for they know that what they have wrenched from life may just as soon be torn from them. And so, there in that night of struggling sleep “a man wrestled with Jacob until the break of day,” the Bible tells us.

But Jacob fought back, wrestling till dawn. Who, or what, was he wrestling with? Himself? Fear? His conscience? God? “A man,” the story says – “a man,” an unnamed adversary of the night.

Perhaps, in the end, Jacob struggled because he realized that the man in the night, whose name he asked, was the very one he had feared, pursued, loved, and struggled with all his life, the Judge of all life, the one whose blessing he sought even more than his father Isaac’s.

Which sounds more like a real family you know – the fairy tale family or the family of Jacob? Which sounds more like real life – “they lived happily ever after” or the night of fitful sleep at the ford of the Jabbok, where the adventure of God’s people really began?

Jacob wrestled, perhaps, because he had always wrestled. He struggled because he had always struggled since the day of his birth, when he clutched his brother’s heel and supplanted him, as he later tried to supplant everyone else.

Jacob “prevails,” we are told, just as he always had before. But does he? Does he really? This is no “he-lived-happily-ever-after” ending to Jacob’s story, because, in the end, it is the stranger and not Jacob who is in control. During the struggle, the adversary touches the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and Jacob limps for the rest of his life.

Nor does the adversary satisfy Jacob’s desires. He does not tell Jacob his name. Instead, the stranger renames Jacob. Tells him he is no longer Jacob, but Israel.

In the Bible, you know, names are significant. Names are sacred. Names reveal truth. Names determine reality. They grant control. So when Jacob asks the stranger’s name, he is “on the make” again. He is asking the ultimate question. He is asking the name of life itself, the name of God, the name of truth and reality and meaning. Perhaps Jacob asks, as we all ask, why life is struggle, why life is persistence and suffering more than a secure and prosperous experience in suburbia.

The stranger – was it God? an angel? – the stranger, of course, doesn’t allow the final victory to Jacob. He doesn’t answer Jacob’s why. Nor does he tell Jacob his name, any more than God told his name to Moses at the burning bush. Instead, the stranger renames Jacob. In doing so he comes close to giving Jacob an answer. But it’s an enigmatic answer, enigmatic as real life is enigmatic. “Your name shall be Israel,” he says to Jacob. “Israel,” meaning “he who strives with God,” or “God strives.”

And that’s the truth the Bible gives us this morning, the truth of real life, not fairy tale life. Jacob, now Israel, stands alone by the Jabbok as the one “who strives with the one who strives,” lamed, renamed, changed, and blessed.

“When you read God’s Word,” Kierkegaard says, “you must constantly ask yourself, ‘Is the Bible talking to me, or about me?’” The story of Jacob, is it written to us, or about us? The answer is “yes.” Those who strive with the one who strives are lamed and named and blessed. Real life lames us and renames us for the future, and lets us know that we’d better get used to it. Or, as Martin Luther put it, “God rides the lame horse.” God takes what is imperfect, even dysfunctional or sinful, like Jacob, and struggles with us. And in our struggle with God, God blesses the future through us.

God is asking us this morning if the story of Jacob and his messed-up family isn’t nearer the truth about us than are the fairy tales of English manors and American suburbs. For it is our story, not Jacob’s, we hear this morning. It’s the story of the adventure of the marriage of God and man, the story of the persistent struggle with God that real life brings. And Jacob’s story suggests that wrestling with God for the name of truth and reality and goodness and meaning and blessing in life, struggling with the One who himself struggles in life, is the truth and reality and goodness and meaning and blessing of life we need.

“What would you like from me?” the teacher in ancient Greece asked his disciple. “I want to know truth,” the disciple replied. So the teacher led his disciple down to the river. He told him to lean down close to the water, and when the disciple obeyed, the teacher shoved his head under the water and held it there. After a time of mighty struggle the disciple freed himself so he could breathe again. “Why did you do that?” he demanded of his teacher. “That was your first lesson,” the teacher replied. “When you struggle to know truth as much as you struggled just then to breathe, then you will be prepared to find it.”

The dream of life lived in a neat and tidy and rather upscale manner is a pleasant but elusive dream. In the dream the rules are clear and decisions are easy. Justice prevails because the judges are honest and wise, and the good guys always win, and the living is clean and fun.

But real life is struggle. From the United States to Iraq, from Africa and Asia to Pakistan and Iran, real life is the struggle of peoples trying to decide what kind of world we want to live in. Real life, real life from Washington, D.C., to Colorado Springs, is the struggle of citizens, on the verge of voting, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. Real life is the struggle of the Church trying to decide what kind of Church we want to be. From Baptist to Episcopalian, from Muslim to Hindu to Jew, real life is the struggle of people trying to decide what kind of people we want to be. Real life is the life of black and white and rich and poor and winners and losers in Colorado Springs, where the rules are not always clear and the decisions are difficult, where the bad guys sometimes win and the living is messy, as Jacob’s living was messy. Real life is the widow’s struggle with the sleazy judge she has to pester in order to get him to give her a hearing and a response, whether he wants to or not. Real life is Jacob’s struggle that night on the Jabbok, and Jesus’ struggle that night in Gethsemane, and our struggles, restless night after restless night.

And the name of God eludes us, as it eluded Jacob. We have only hints of who God is. We know only what Jacob knew, that our name is “he who strives with a striving God.” And yet, curiously, that is enough, for we are enabled to wake at dawn and find that in our striving with God we have prevailed and are blessed, for God does, indeed, ride the horse he lames and names.

Tranquil life in the suburbs is a pleasant but elusive dream. We grow old, friends and loved ones die, others fall ill, jobs are lost or moved, the villain often wins, and the good suffer. Stability eludes us, not only in the Middle East, but also in Colorado Springs, where murder and hunger happen. Theological and ethical quarrels shatter our Anglican orderliness, and we are left with the only two rules the Bible finally permits: Love God, love the One you are striving with. And love your neighbor as yourself. After that, as Augustine adds, do what you want to.

Love is a decision. “Love is a conversion to humanity,” Carter Heyward says. Love is “a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, as a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world and apart from human flesh.”

Love, in other words, is the marriage of God and man, a choice we make, a decision for God and for the others we struggle with, not in the tidy abstract world of theology, but in the sleepless nights and anxious days of the messy world of families and other difficult people, the place where the adventure really begins.

So St. Paul’s urges us to keep the tradition. But the tradition is not just a matter of keeping the rules of those strugglers who lived in Paul’s day. Like the English manor, Timothy’s community now exists only in our minds, only in our memory. Keeping the tradition is a matter of keeping the living tradition that reaches back beyond the community of Timothy and Paul, back as far as Jacob that night on the Jabbok, the tradition of real life that is more persistence and struggle than it is riding about in SUVs, or refraining from eating a calf boiled in his mother’s milk, or keeping one’s head covered in church.

The struggle with God is also part of the tradition, the tradition for us as individuals, the tradition for us as families, the tradition for us as God’s Church.

It is fall, the air is crisp, and it’s stewardship time again. It’s the time when, again this year, we struggle with our personal commitments to that tradition as we find it in the Church. It’s that time every year when I dream of a three-month sabbatical on a beach in Mexico, so I might wake up in the spring after a tidy budget has finally been settled on by the vestry.

But stewardship life is real life, not fairy tale life. There are no clearer rules for giving than there are for living. There are only two rules: Love God. And love those you struggle with in real life as you love yourself. Stewardship is persistence and struggle through the use of our talents, time, and money to gain the things that really matter in life – things like peace, joy, love, service to God and others, goodness and meaning, things like knowing the name of God.

We need to understand that God does bless persistence and struggle, not only Jacob’s and the widow’s, but our own. Indeed, God even requires struggle. For the Church – Jacob, now named the new Israel – is not only “those who strive with God.” The Church, the new Israel, is God himself striving with the ones God is married to.

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Billy and his brother Boyd are in Mexico looking for some horses that had been stolen from their family. Without any resistance from the horse thieves, they just sort of stumble upon the horses one day, and as they round them up and start them toward home, Boyd keeps looking over his shoulder to see who might be coming on the road behind them. “You worry about everthing,” Billy says to his brother. “I was thinkin it was just too easy, [the way it happened],” Boyd answers. “[Somethin else might happen yet.]” “You don’t trust nothin,” says Billy. “You worry about everthing. But that don’t change nothin. Does it?” But Boyd shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know how it would of turned out if I hadn’t worried.”

This may be what Karl Barth was getting at when he said that “prayer exerts an influence upon God’s actions, even upon God’s existence.” Jacob doesn’t know how life would have turned out if he hadn’t struggled with God that night by the Jabbok. The widow doesn’t know how life would have turned out if she hadn’t worn out the judge with her persistent petitions. Perhaps God comes into being for us, perhaps God becomes real for us, only when, like Jacob and the widow, we struggle with God, only when we cry out to him day and night and do not lose heart. Perhaps God does not reveal his name, perhaps God does not give us his reality, his blessing, until we give our struggle, our lives.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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1 I am indebted to a friend, The Rev. John McCausland, for much of this retelling of the story of Jacob.