“I’m Not Letting Go”
Genesis 32:22-31
August 4, 2002
St. Paul United Methodist Church
Rev. John A. Fleming
I have a confession to make to you this morning that may
cause you to think a little less of me than you did before the sermon
began. But I believe in telling the whole truth and so here it goes; here
is what I want to admit to you. I am a wrestling fan. In fact, if
you know the lingo, I am a WWF wrestling fan. I am a fan of the World
Wrestling Federation. Now having made my confession, you need to know
that I am not as big a fan as I once was. It used to be that if you
wanted to talk to me on Monday evenings between the hours of eight and ten
o’clock or Thursday evenings between the hours of seven and nine o’clock, then
you would have to wait until wrestling was over because wrestling was so
important to me. And when I was out of town or at a meeting, our VCR was
set to record all two hours of the wrestling shows! I am not as big a fan
as I once was. In fact, I do not watch wrestling much
anymore. But every once and a while, on Monday and Thursday nights, when
I am flipping through the channels, sometimes I stop on channel sixty-three
just to see what the Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and the Undertaker are up
to. I had not planned to tell you this, but since I’m telling the whole
truth this morning, I might as well admit that I have even been to Alltel Arena
when the WWF was in town. I did not go a few weeks ago when they were in
town, but I have been. The last time that I went, I had ring side
seats. Susie did not go with me when I went, but it was not because she
is not a fan. She did not go because she was afraid that some of her
first graders from Lawson Elementary might see her in the crowd.
I want you to know that my habit of watching wrestling
started innocently. In fact, it started when I was doing something as a
pastor. It was about five years ago when a new family in the church that
we were serving in Camden, called and asked if we would like to have supper at
their house. At the time, Sheila and Randy were the newest members of the
church. We wanted to get to know them better and so naturally we accepted
their invitation. We ate dinner, helped them clear the dishes, and then
we went to their den. It was close to 8:00, the time that the Garretts
usually watched wrestling. Randy looked at his watch and then over at his
wife. Sheila look at me and said, “John, we usually watch wrestling at
eight o’clock on Monday nights. I wanted to say, “Are you kidding
me?” But I wanted to be a good pastor, so I said, “Turn it on; we would
love to watch it.” So on that Monday night, for the first time, we came
face to face with people like the Road Dogg and Billy Gun. I saw the
Heart Throb and Triple H battle it out for the championship. And I saw
The Dudley Boys fight, in tag team action, with Edge and Christian. I did
not know their names at first. I did not know their stories and their
moves, but after a few Monday nights at the Garretts, I did.
The other night, at one of our administrative meetings, one
of you asked me what I planned on preaching about on Sunday morning. I
simply said, “Wrestling.” Then I said, “I plan on admitting that I am a
closet wrestling fan.” This person looked at me and said, “Preacher, there
is not a bigger waste of film than wrestling and racing.” Lisa Burnside
was at that meeting. She said, “Don’t talk about racing like that!”
She is a Nascar fan. I wanted to say, “You know that the WWF is always a
top show on the Nielson Reports.” But I did not say that. I just
smiled. When Annie Grace is old enough to know about wrestling, I will
not watch it anymore. It is not good for children of any age, but still I
watch it.
I am not sure what attracts me to wrestling. I am not
sure if it is the trash talking. By the way, there is a lot more talking
than wrestling on the weekly show. I am not sure if it is the little boy
in me coming out, remembering what it was like as a child, wrestling. I
am not sure if for two hours on Monday and Thursday nights, all I have to do is
to be entertained. It is form of entertainment that does not require a
lot of thought. Or maybe it is this. Wrestling often mirrors my
life. Every once and a while I feel like picking up a chair and hitting
someone over the head with it! I would never do that, but the thought has
crossed my mind a time or two. Wrestling is a metaphor for thinking about
life. We all wrestle with things. We wrestle with decisions.
We wrestle with our conscience. We wrestle with our fears and our
emotions. Wrestling, of course, is a way of talking about the things with
which we struggle.
In our scripture lesson for this morning, taken from the
thirty-second chapter of the book of Genesis, we meet another person who
wrestles. I want you to know that there are four instances where the word
wrestle, wrestling, or wrestled, appears in our Bible. A form of the word
appears three times in the book of Genesis, twice in the passage that we
read. It happens a previous time in Genesis where Rachael and Leah
wrestle over something. And there is a beautiful passage in Paul’s letter
to the Colossian church. There Paul writes about a man and his
prayers. The apostle writes, “He is always wrestling in his prayers on
your behalf.”
Our lesson, this morning, tells us that Jacob wrestled with
a man until daybreak. Knowing the story of Jacob like I do, I suspect
that he has done a lot of wrestling. Some of the wrestling, Jacob has
done, with himself. You might recall this rascal’s story. From the
very beginning of his life, he tried to get the best of his brother, Esau, and
most of the time, he succeeded. Jacob and his brother were twins.
Esau was the first born which gave him special family rights. If it were
up to Jacob, he would have been born first. In fact he tried to be the first
born. While his brother was being born, the Bible tells us, Jacob,
gripped his brother’s heal and tried to pull him back in. That was not
the end of the grabbing. When his brother came in from working, famished
and wanting something to eat, Jacob had stew in front of him. Esau wanted
the stew and so Jacob said that he would give him a bowl for the price of his
birth right. Esau agreed. After all, he thought, what good would
his birth right be if he starved to death. Esau, in my opinion, is not
the sharpest knife in the drawer! Later, with his mother’s help, Jacob
tricked his father into giving him the family’s blessing. Isaac’s
eyesight was fading and when he blessed Jacob, he thought that he was blessing
his older son, Esau. Esau was angry and threatened to kill his
brother. I will have to say that I do not blame him for his angry
feelings. That was not the end of Jacob’s deception. He also
tricked his father in law, who by the way had also tricked him, and when no one
was looking he took his family, his stuff, his cattle, and he skedaddled. For
Jacob doing what he had to do to get ahead was what is was all about. His heart
was just calloused enough so that he could sleep at night and his feet were
fast enough to keep him away from the consequences.
That is, until the night at the River Jabbok. That is where word came to him that his brother was coming to see him. Twenty years had passed since he threatened to kill his brother. And Jacob, the trickster, had no more tricks up his sleeve. Jacob was coming home, the Bible tells us. Maybe you can imagine the thoughts that were going through his mind. So Jacob divided his cattle and his family and sent them across the river to his brother, Esau. It was as if he was trying to buy his forgiveness. And if Esau killed one group of them, then half of his family would live.
That is where we pick up the story this morning. The
writer of Genesis tells us that Jacob was alone. We also know that the sun
had set. I do not know how it is for you, but when I wrestle with things,
I am almost always alone. And, a lot of times, it is at night. That
is when I am quiet perhaps for the first time all day. That is when I
wrestle with things. I think that I’ve told you that I am a worrier. In
my bed, tossing and turning, I wrestle with things I should have done or things
that I did do. I worry and I wrestle about whether a word I said was
hurtful. I worry about and I wrestle with decisions and problems and I wrestle
with my mind. I wrestle with memories I wish I’d never gathered and fears
I don’t like to talk about. I wrestle with sin, or at least the affects
of it. I have wrestled with the feeling of being overwhelmed and
tired. Am I alone today? Have any of you wrestled with these kinds
of things? In the margin of my favorite Bible, next to the words of this
passage, I have written, “There is nothing more painful than wrestling with who
and what you are.”
That is one kind of wrestling. That is the kind of
wrestling that most of us have done. But I don’t want you to miss this,
this morning. In our passage, Jacob is wrestling with something and
someone quite different. Jacob is not wrestling with his past. He
will do that when he meets his brother in the morning. On this night, on
the banks of the Jabbok River, Jacob wrestles with God. There has
been a lot of ink used and there have been a lot of great minds who have tried
to determine who this man is that wrestled with Jacob. Some have thought that
it was Esau, coming incognito, in the middle of the night. Some have said
that the man is an angel. Jacob himself knows who it is when he writes,
“For I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.” There is
something else that I want you to see in this story, in this text. Jacob
refuses to let go of God until he blesses him. That is interesting, don’t
you think?
So what are we supposed to do with these words from Genesis
this morning? Here is what I think. I think that it is a lot easier
to wrestle with others and I think that it is much easier to struggle with
ourselves than it is for us to struggle with God. I think that we avoid
such a match. I think that we would rather run from God than to wrestle
with Him. I can remember that in 1993 a good friend of mine suddenly
died. He was a young man by today’s standards. He was only
forty-seven years old. His wife said to me, “John, I know that I am not
supposed to question God.” I said to her, “Who told you that?”
Because we do question God, especially at difficult times.
I ran across a great story. I have been waiting to
tell it you. It is the story of a preacher who went to the hospital to
see a few of his church members. He walked in the door and made his way over to
the elevator that would take him to the floors that he needed. That is when he
saw a woman banging on the doors of the chapel. She just keep pounding
and saying, “Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!” The preacher went
over to her and found that the doors of the chapel were locked. He looked
around for someone with a key and soon he and her were down near the altar. The
preacher tells that it was hard to understand what the woman was saying.
She was trying to say things in between her tears. The preacher tells that
she looked desperate. He says that there was no way that she had come to
the hospital prepared to stay. Her clothes were old and torn, she was not
wearing any shoes. There was no make up on her face, and her hair had not
been combed. The preacher tried to understand what she was trying to say.
She kept saying over and over again, “I just know that he is going to
die! I just know that he is going to die!” The preacher asked, “Who
is going to die?” She said, “My husband.” The preacher asked, Why? What
happened?” She answered, “He had a heart attack.” The preacher did
not know what to do or what to say and so he did what came naturally. He
offered to pray for her. She accepted his invitation and so he
began. He prayed, “Lord, I know this woman is having a hard time this
morning and I pray your blessings upon her and her husband who has had an
attack.” The preacher said that he was only a few lines into the prayer
when she took over. He didn’t know if he was too quiet or if the words
were not sufficient. What he did know was that she took over. She
prayed, “Lord, this is not the time to take my husband. You know that
better than I do. He’s not ready. Never prays, never goes to
church. He’s not ready, not a good time to take him. Don’t take him
now. If I have to raise these kids all by myself, what am I going to do.
They’re as wild as bucks now. What will happen if he’s not around?
And I don’t have any skills. I quit school to marry him. If I’d
know that he was going to die, I’d stayed in school” The preacher tells
that she was arguing with God, making sure that God understood her point of
view. You might even say that she was wrestling with God.
The
preacher tells that he stayed as long as he felt useful and then he slipped
away. He was back at the hospital the next morning; he was just outside
the Intensive Care Unit waiting room when he saw her again. This morning
she looked a little different. Her clothes were nicer. Her hair was
combed and she was wearing shoes.
Before he
had the chance to ask her, she said, “He’s better this morning. I’m
sorry about that crazy woman yesterday.” The preacher said, “You weren’t
crazy.” She said, “ “I guess that the Lord heard one of us
yesterday.” The preacher said, “He heard you.” It was as if she had
God by the lapels, both hands clenched, and saying, “God listen to me!
You have to listen to me!” She was wrestling with God.
Somewhere we have been taught that it is not all right to
question God. I want to say this morning that I think that it is all
right to wrestle with God. Jacob had run from God most of his life.
Now he met God face to face. And he would not let go until God blessed
him. God, friends, had already promised in an earlier scripture that he
would be with Jacob. God had promised that he would bless Jacob and that
he would have a promised land. But now facing with what Jacob was facing,
he would not let go until he heard the words of blessing again.
Later today, we will celebrate communion. I invite you
to wrestle with God at this rail. It is all right. You have my
permission. Today, if there is something that separates you from God, I
hope that you will grab God by the lapels and say, “Lord, listen to me!”
Let us pray.
(Special
thanks to Randy and Sheila Garrett who introduced us to wrestling on Monday and
Thursday nights. Ironically, neither of us watch wrestling much
anymore. More thanks to them for their friendship. The closing
story can be found in Fred Craddock’s book Craddock Stories. It is
available at Cokesbury Book Stores and published by Chalice Press, St.
Louis. I dedicate this sermon to the memory of Jimmy Calhoun, my 47
friend who died in 1993).