Let us pray:

O God, with whom we wrestle until the break of day, make us long to see your face beyond the limits of our strength B that in our wounds we may remember you, and in your blessing we may find ourselves.  Through Jesus Christ, Amen.  (From All Desires Known, by Janet Morley)

     This wonderful story that we heard from Genesis this morning is surely one of the richest and most evocative in all of scripture.  In it, we see Jacob alone on the banks of the river Jabbok, preparing with dread to meet the brother from whom he has been running for twenty years.  But there he has an encounter with another, even more mysterious adversary,  and that encounter changes him to the very core.

     But in order to understand what is happening there by the river crossing, we need to look at how it is that Jacob got to this point.  And the longer story of Jacob throughout the book of Genesis is again, one of the most densely crafted in all of scripture.  Themes re-echo and weave through it: themes of naming, of deception, of truth-telling, of blessing.

     Jacob is the son of Isaac, who is the son of Abraham.  Jacob is the second of twins born to Isaac=s wife Rebecca.  Rebecca says that in her very womb she feels the twins struggling with each other in mortal combat.  The first child is Esau, and he is born covered with hair, we are told B his very name means Arough and hairy.@  But Jacob comes immediately after him, grasping his brother=s heel.  And the name Jacob means Aheel-grasper,@ or perhaps Aheel-thief,@ or perhaps Ahe who supplants.@  Jacob turns out in more contemporary parlance to be Aa heel,@ and supplanting, is in fact, just what he does.

     When Isaac is old and blind, he says it is time for him to give the blessing to Esau, his eldest son.  He sends Esau, who is a mighty hunter, out to capture game and prepare it for him, and after that  to receive the blessing of his father.  But Rebecca, who favors the younger of the sons, calls to Jacob and says, AI will help you trick your father.  I will make the meal; take it in to him, and we will cover you with animal skins.  Isaac, who is blind, will feel your hands and think that it is Esau.@

     Indeed, that is what happens, and Isaac, uncertain because the voice is Jacob=s voice but the hands are Esau=s hands, at one point leans over to kiss his son, sniffs him and says, AYou smell like Esau, and now I know that you are true.@  The deception has worked.  Jacob is given the blessing that is Esau=s blessing. In this sense, a blessing is a living thing, a substantial thing.  It cannot be revoked once the deception is unmasked.  It is as if Jacob has stolen something of Esau=s power, his identity.  When he learns about this trick, Esau intends to kill his brother.

     And so it is that Jacob leaves home in a hurry with nothing, traveling towards Haran, which is a place where other members of his family dwell.  One the way, he has another experience for which he is known.  Alone in the desert, sleeping with a stone for a pillow, he has a dream and he sees a ladder up to heaven with angels ascending and descending, and God stands beside him and promises that Athe land you lie on will be given to you, (Jacob), and that all the families of the Earth will be blessed in you and your offspring@.  Jacob says, AThe Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.@

   He goes on from there to Haran, and there at a well, he sees a beautiful young woman with whom he falls in love.  (The patriarchs are always meeting women at wells, by the way.)  It turns out that she is Rachel, the younger daughter of Laban, the kinsman to whom Jacob is going.  Laban turns out to be a bit of a trickster himself.  They make an arrangement that Jacob will serve him for seven years and at the end, Rachel will be the reward.  Jacob keeps his part of the bargain, but Laban has an older daughter, Leah, and when the wedding comes, the heavily veiled bride is brought into Jacob, and in the morning, it turns out to be Leah not Rachel.

     Of course now the wedding is a done deal, and so the arrangement is made that Jacob will work seven more years in order to take his beloved as his wife.  And so, Jacob serves and he prospers B he gains flocks and herds and camels B his two wives bear eleven sons and a daughter, servants comeYand in time, it seems that Jacob has become a bit of a threat to Laban, and also he begins to feel that the time has come to return to his own country.

     So he leaves Laban=s household, taking with him his company of people and animals, and there is stealth and there is deception on both sides, and Laban and Jacob each try to trick the other out of goods and animals.  Laban pursues Jacob when he goes, but in the end they part in peace.

     And now, a much more threatening meeting is looming.

     Jacob nears the land where his brother Esau lives, and he sends messengers with a conciliatory word, saying, AI am coming, I am at your service, and I=ve done very well for myself.@  But the messengers return and say that Esau is already on his way and with him, four hundred men.  As one commentator said, AYou really don=t need four hundred men if what you have in mind is a family reunion.@

  And so, our text for today tells us that Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed.   He divided his household into two companies, and sent them ahead separately across the Jabbok River, hoping that if his brother=s intentions are violent and the worst happens, at least part of his family will survive.  And so we come to our passage where Jacob finds himself alone on the riverbank.  The commentators mention that the Jabbok cuts a deep gorge, so we may imagine him down at the bottom of the gorge by the river with steep walls on either side, hemmed in, in the canyon B alone, with his fears of what the next day will bring.

     I don=t know about you, but I recognize that place- at least psychically, spiritually, if not literally: the deep gorge.  I recognize the fear that keeps one up at night when the thing that I have most wanted to avoid looks like it=s about to come crashing in.  It may be caused by unfinished business.  It may be the realization that you just can=t keep going in the way that you always have.  Often it is, to borrow a contemporary word, some inconvenient truth that is breaking through.  It may come from an unwelcome diagnosis, from the sudden ending of a relationship, from an undeniable and seemingly unfufillable longing, from the sudden awareness that you must get sober or die, from the awareness of injustice and abuse, or one=s own responsibility and guilt.

     Sometimes it=s even caused by a happy event, like falling in love, that nevertheless shatters the world as you=ve known it.  In any case, that moment is a crisis, a place of waiting and worrying and wondering: will my wits pull me out of this, or is the jig really and finally up?

     What happens next, though, dwarfs all that Jacob has been fearing and thinking about, dwarfs the relationship with Esau, the meeting that is to come.  For a mysterious stranger appears; a man wrestles with Jacob until daybreak.  His arrival is not announced.  We may wonder if it is a surprise attack that comes out of the darkness.  There is no explanation or introduction; this wrestler just IS.  With hindsight, Jacob, and of course many others, see that the adversary is a holy one, perhaps the angel of God=s presence, perhaps God, God=s self.

     Also, there are traces of a very old folkloric tradition that suggests that this adversary is a night demon who has to vanish before the dawn, and we know that in the night B in those long, long hours before dawn B we are often not clear whether the one we wrestle with is angel or demon, or how this adversary can bring us blessing.

     So the two wrestle in a mortal struggle throughout the night.  In the images of this story, I love best the ones in sculpture, for their physicality, their three dimensions; I love the straining muscles and the bodies pressing against each other.  You can almost feel the sweat and hear the grunting and groaning as they are locked in a fierce embrace.

     I have, I have to say, rather limited experience of wrestling personally, but I have wrestled a few times.  And I know that there is a sense of giving your utmost effort, of pushing up against another physically, entirely, and of being met physically, entirely, with that one=s effort.  Those few experiences have given me a sense of my own presence and power and limits, as well as of the force of the adversary, that I don=t think that I could ever think my way into.

     These wrestlers, Jacob and the mysterious stranger, seem to be evenly matched until at daybreak, the other strikes Jacob in the hip socket and throws his hip permanently out of joint.  And then the stranger says, @Let me go!  The day is breaking.@  But Jacob holds on.  He is wounded permanently, but he says, AI will not let you go until you bless me.@

   Is this faith?  Stubbornness?  Need?  Desire?  Probably all of those things.  In any case, the stranger takes Jacob seriously and there is a further cost.  AWhat is your name?@ says the stranger.  Remember that in the biblical sense, to tell another one=s name gives that one the power over the teller.  The stranger will know Jacob=s very being, his identity, his essence.  AJacob,@ he says.  AI am the heel, the sneak, the supplanter.  I am the one who has lived by deception and who took another=s birthright by trickery.@  And the adversary says, AYou will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, which means you have striven with God and humans and you have prevailed.@  And Jacob, now Israel, responds: APlease, tell me your name.@  But there is not a chance that this adversary will let himself be known in that way.

     No, the knowing has been in the wrestling, and will be in the blessing.  So this holy adversary blesses Jacob and disappears.  The one who lied and cheated and stole a blessing, the Aheel thief,@ has confronted mystery and truth in all their fearful force.  He has been marked and he will limp for the rest of his life, and he has received a new name B his true name B and the blessing that belongs to him.  He says, AI have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.@

   So Jacob crosses over the Jabbok with the new day.  He is ready now, to meet his brother.  The wrestling on the riverbank has put something, some old guilt or shame or uncertainty to rest.  It seems as if he is able to face whatever comes, and here comes Esau in the very next verse of the passage.  Something has changed in Esau too, and we never get to hear Esau=s part of the story, but B and there are echoes here of the latter parable of the prodigal son B except this is the older brother, running to meet Jacob, embracing him and kissing him.  And the two of them weep together.

     Jacob says to his former mortal enemy, ATruly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God.@

     And he should know.

     What are we to make of this story?  Remarkable in its many layers, its many possibilities and resonances, surely it is a snapshot of our relationship with God.  Jacob is a kind of an every person; he is so flawed, so human, and he is confronted by the mysterious holy Other in a moment of crisis, of fear, a turning point, a once-in-a-lifetime moment, or any moment B a moment that might arrive only once or many times.  And in that moment, he is invited to engage with his whole being, to wrestle, to demand that this mean something.  That process of struggle, of wounding, of being known, of being blessed and changed and finding a new identity, feels so deeply true to me, so deeply what we are invited to as people of faith.

     The part about the lasting wound strikes me particularly, the mark in Jacob=s thigh, the cost, the losses.  It seems that blessing only comes with honesty and willingness to give something up of what has been, only comes with exposure and going beyond the limits of our strength.

     Now, this story surely speaks to many of our deeply personal struggles and experiences, but this morning I can=t help thinking of two more public examples of where we may be invited to struggle with God.  I am put in mind of how we have been wrestling, both with each other and inside ourselves in response to the recent House of Bishops meeting, especially wrestling in response to our own Bishop=s participation, and most especially to the coming visit of Bishop Cathy Roskom here on All Saints.

     We have struggled with the question of our own integrity, of our identity as people of justice and people of hospitality, struggled with questions of inclusion and of truth telling.  Last week in the forum that we had about these issues, surely we struggled together.  Surely there was a sense of the holy adversary who can bless.  Surely there is a sense of faithfulness to that struggle wherein we can be made new.

     The other example is the 25^th anniversary of the soup kitchen.  You all may have been wondering about this banner through the whole sermon.  In fact, Bill told me beforehand that Athey=ll fidget though the whole time you=re talking.@  You=ll be relieved that this is not our answer to what should go on the east wall!  It will be here for several weeks, and tomorrow is the actual anniversary date of the opening of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, 25 years ago.  The banner is here because there will be an event for press and politicians in the morning, then our guests will of course be served and they need to see it, there will be a reception for major donors in the evening, and the banner will stay up through our own observance on All Saints, and then until November 11, when we will have a more home-grown observation of the day in which we will have a chance to share our stories of the soup kitchen.

     We=re calling this not a celebration, but a marking, because, of course, it=s shameful that we still need to be here doing this work.  This occasion is surely an occasion of gratitude that we have been able to serve our hungry neighbors for 25 years, surely an occasion for reflection.  But perhaps it is also an occasion for wrestling, for asking how in fact we are to engage hunger and poverty and injustice.  As our numbers get ever-bigger, as emergency food programs all over the city are out of food, as funding seems harder and harder to come by.  It is a moment to cry out to God and to say, AI will not let go until you bless me and all those in need,@ a moment to seek to see God=s face as we come to the limit of our own power.

     Of all the art inspired by this story, and with this I will close, perhaps my very favorite is a poem of Rainer Maria Rilke.  In it there is that invitation to engagement with the holy adversary, who alone can bless us with our true names.

     It goes like this:

     The Man Watching

     I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
     so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
     that a storm is coming,
     and I hear the far-off fields say things
     I can=t bear without a friend,
     I can=t love without a sister

     The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
     across the woods and across time,
     and the world looks as if it had no age:
     the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
     the seriousness and weight and eternity.

     What we choose to fight is so tiny!
     What fights us is so great!
     If only we would let ourselves be dominated
     as things do by some immense storm,
     we would become strong too, and not need names.
 

     When we win, it=s with small things,
     and the triumph itself makes us small.
     What is extraordinary and eternal
     does not want to be bent by us.
     I mean the Angel who appeared
     to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
     when the wrestlers= sinews
     grew long like metal strings,
     he felt them under his fingers
     like chords of deep music.
 

     Whoever was beaten by this Angel
     (who often simply declined the fight)
     went away proud and strengthened
     and great from that harsh hand,
     that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
     Winning does not tempt that man.
     This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively
     by constantly greater beings.