June 30, 2024
The Unwanted Name of Blessing
Genesis 32:22-31
Rev. Lea Brown
Glorious God, we thank you for this beautiful summer day. We thank you for this beautiful place in which to worship, God, which certainly is beautiful because of its design, its stone, and its decorations. But, oh God, how beautiful this place is because of the hearts of those who inhabit it. May we feel your heart beating among us today as we open to you, and by the power of your Holy Spirit, may we truly open to you and to what gifts, blessings, wisdom, and transformative healing power you would share with us this day. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts bring great delight to you now and always. Amen.
Today we are looking at what I think is an incredibly powerful story from the book of Genesis, all about someone named Jacob. You have probably heard of him before. If you have ever heard the song “Jacob’s Ladder,” it is about the same Jacob. He is ultimately chosen by God to be the father of Israel. But, wow, could there possibly be a more unlikely person to receive that title?
We are going to be racing through a lot of his life story here in just a minute to get us to the penultimate moment in the scripture that we read. But I want to just warn you to be ready. Be ready for a story of drama, intrigue, manipulation, dishonesty, and enough family neurosis for its own TV reality series. Are you ready? Alright, here we go.
Jacob was born a fraternal twin just slightly behind his older brother Esau. They were born to their parents, Rebecca and Isaac. Now, as Jacob grew up, he turned out to be a soft, kind of genteel young man who was the apple of his mother’s eye. Esau, on the other hand, was big and hairy, and he loved to hunt and fish. He grew up to be a man’s man and was the favorite of his father Isaac. It is unfortunate that Rebecca and Isaac played favorites with their children, and so Jacob and Esau grew up really not liking each other. By the time they were grown, it is probably fair to say they hated each other.
Maybe because Esau got all the brawn, it seems Jacob got some of the brains. He used his brains to manipulate, cheat, and get what he wanted. Early on in their lives, Jacob swindles Esau out of his birthright. Esau was born just seconds before Jacob, but because of that, he was supposed to get a double portion of his family’s inheritance. Jacob found a way to swindle him out of that. A little later, when their father Isaac is near death and blind, he is going to bestow his patriarchal blessing upon the oldest son. This was a major ritual, blessing, and gift. Jacob and Rebecca found a way to cheat Esau out of that blessing too. To say that Esau was upset would be quite an understatement. He threatens to murder Jacob, so Jacob says, “Hey, this is a good time to just get out of here. I’m going to hit the road and run to a land called Haran and hang out there with my uncle Laban.”
He gets there to be with his uncle Laban, and yet another long story that involves even more manipulation and deception—this time on the part of Uncle Laban—Jacob marries his cousins, both of them, Rachel and Leah. He eventually has a whole bunch of children with them and his two enslaved women, Zilpa and Bilha. Evidence perhaps that family values in the Bible are anything but traditional.
Eventually, Jacob comes to a pivotal moment in his life, the moment we heard about from the scripture passage. After many years and many challenges with Uncle Laban, Jacob decides to get away and strike out on his own. This decision brings him to a place where he has to now confront his angry and embittered brother, Esau. Basically, he has no choice left but to deal with his past.
On the night before the showdown with Esau, Jacob sends his wives, children, pretty much everything he owns, and a caravan of gifts to Esau, probably hoping to pacify him just a tiny bit before they meet the next day. Perhaps Jacob was hoping to get a good night’s rest before the big family reunion the next day. If that is what he was hoping for, he is sorely disappointed because the scripture says that Jacob spent the entire night wrestling with a man until dawn. Here’s the interesting thing: it is very hard to translate this word in Hebrew for man. The word is actually “ish” in Hebrew, and it is nearly impossible to translate. The Midrash, an ancient commentary on the first five books of Hebrew scripture, calls this “ish” an angel. Whatever it was, it was described in such a way that clearly the author did not really want us to know exactly what it was. It might have been something on the inside of Jacob, given his past. It may have been something on the outside, but whatever it was, it was strong. It had muscle. In this wrestling match that goes on all night long, the “ish” wounds Jacob, knocking his hip out of socket, and Jacob will limp for the rest of his life because of this experience.
They wrestle and wrestle all night long, and finally, the “ish” says, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” Jacob says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The “ish” says, “Okay, alright, I’ll bless you. You are no longer Jacob; you are now Israel, for you have wrestled with God and with humans, and you have prevailed.”
There Jacob is, in all of his terribly flawed humanness, at a point in his life when he desperately needs God because he cannot control this moment. He cannot manipulate his way out of it or whine his way out of it. It is a place where his own devices, his own desires, and his own plans mean nothing. What Jacob wants at this terrifying moment in his life is blessings of reassurance, encouragement, maybe hope, forgiveness, and healing. Maybe at least a sound night of sleep and the knowledge that God is with him. But that is not what he gets. What he gets instead is an exhausting struggle that seems endless, an unknown force that threatens to overpower him, something that seems to come out of nowhere that is very nearly stronger than he is. Anybody else ever been in this place?
This is a battle he has no idea if he can win, a fight that leaves him wounded for the rest of his life. I am sure he thought throughout that long night, “Wow, with blessings like these, who needs curses?” Except then, in the end, everything is changed, including him. The struggle finally becomes the blessing that Jacob wanted, although it is a blessing that is so huge that nothing in Jacob’s brain could even begin to conceive of it. It is a blessing so huge that it is the kind that only God could give him.
This well-muscled representative of God gives Jacob a new name, Israel, which means something like “striving with God,” and he limps for the rest of his life. The next day, his brother Esau forgives him, and Jacob, now Israel, goes on to become the father of all the children of Israel. Never in his wildest imagination could he have come up with that blessing.
There’s an author from Appalachia named Dorothy Allison, and she wrote a book called “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.” And I don’t know about you, but most days I don’t really have two or three things I know for sure. I might have half of one thing I kind of think I know, but I’m pretty sure there is something I know about this story: that when the blessings we pray for don’t show up with the names that we thought they would have, we must not let our fears keep us from the struggle. Because it is in the struggle that God changes the names of the blessings, not only into the ones we hoped we would receive, but into ones we never, ever could have imagined.
It’s really hard to do this wrestling. We don’t always know the identity of the one we’re fighting. Sometimes it’s something inside of us, sometimes it’s something beyond our control—circumstances beyond our control, people beyond our control, world events like COVID beyond our control; whatever it is, it’s beyond our control. But sometimes it is something within us: our griefs, our perceived failures, our past mistakes, our self-doubts, our attempts to control and change what only God can transform.
I can scarcely imagine, given his checkered past, the demons that Jacob must have been wrestling within himself. But Jacob shows us that if we don’t engage with the struggles, throughout the long, shadowy nights of our lives when they come, it makes it very, very difficult to receive the blessings that God will bestow later on.
Think about it just for a moment: what if the ish had come along and Jacob had just ignored it? What if he had just said, “Oh no, can’t deal, got a big day tomorrow, going to go to sleep”? What if he had refused to wrestle and just walked away? He might have gotten a good night’s sleep, but in the morning he still would have been plain old Jacob, the liar and the cheat, with the same name who probably would have had to deceive Esau once again to save his own neck. He would live, but he would live a much, much smaller life than the one God had planned for him.
We must not run away from the struggle, especially when we’re afraid of it. You’ve probably heard of a poet by the name of Mary Oliver. One of her poems goes like this:
“You leap into the boat and begin rowing,
But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt:
I talk directly to your soul.
When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight,
The churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil,
Fretting around the sharp rocks,
When you hear the unmistakable pounding ,
When you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead
The embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming,
Then row, row, row for your life toward it, Row for your life toward it.”
Everything in our world says to do the opposite: row away from the falls, avoid the pain, the struggling, the confronting of our inner demons or angels. Go for the easy blessings. Oh, they may be small, but they won’t wear you out, they won’t threaten to prevail against you, and maybe you won’t limp the rest of your life.
It’s so much less scary, less demanding, but it’s so much less than the abundant life that Jesus came to teach us how to live. What is the name of your ish? My ish? What is the face of your ish or my ish? Maybe yours is shame or trauma you carry in your body because of past events you have survived. Or maybe because of something inherent about you that the world has told you God doesn’t approve of. Maybe your ish is some mistake you made or perceived failure you just can’t get over. Maybe your ish is addiction. It’s rampant in our society, and so is the silence around it. But you can do some of the best wrestling in the whole world in a 12-step group that is meeting at every hour of every day in every country around the world—24/7.
The big ish that I see most of all in my work as a chaplain is grief, especially two years after COVID. I truly believe that unprocessed, unfelt, unshared grief is hugely responsible for the national crisis we are in. The thing about grief is, it is a coin, and on one side is grief, and on the other side is joy. And if you squelch one, you kill the other. And if we are willing, willing to wrestle with our grief, to let it rise up and out of us in tears that are visible, and sobs that others see, and cries that we cannot contain, when we let it out, it becomes a blessing we cannot create on our own that only God can transform into joy and a depth of love we can know no other way.
We live in a nation, in a world desperate for nights of wrestling with grief. Whatever the name of your ish, whatever the face of your ish, God calls you and me to wrestle. Whatever it is, journal about it, talk about it, find somebody who knows how to listen—that part’s really important, maybe a chaplain, a pastor, a good friend. Talk about it, share it, cry it out, sob it out, paint it out, get a tennis racket and beat the living daylights out of your mattress about it, yell in the car—that’s my personal favorite. Whatever it is, wrestle with it, engage your vulnerability, because this is the way God takes that pain and transforms it and gives us new names of blessings we need so much we don’t even know how to ask for them.
Don’t walk away from the ish because it holds the key to everything. Row toward the falls, row toward the falls with everything you’ve got, and God will bestow blessings that we could never imagine any other way. Amen.