A sermon on Genesis 32: 22-31 by Alison Sampson

How often have you been there? Everything is ticking along when, boom! you find yourself flat on your face. The longed-for pregnancy miscarries. The relationship falls apart. The job becomes a nightmare. You’re made redundant. The lump you tried to ignore turns out to be cancer. Your friend moves away, your father dies, the street changes, the kids leave home…

Things were going so well when it happened. The change is unlooked-for. It is unwanted, a burden, a disruption to real life. And you struggle.

***

In tonight’s story from the Hebrew Bible, we meet someone else in this position. Things are going pretty well for Jacob. He’s married. His wives and their servants have given him eleven sons, and even a daughter. He has finally found a way out from under the thumb of his father-in-law and he’s left that place, taking his family, his servants, and his great flocks of striped, speckled and mottled livestock with him. He is on his way home after many years away, and he’s ready to take up his position as head of the family. Married, rich, blessed with children and goats and sheep and oxen, about to come into his own – what could go wrong?

But word comes to Jacob that his estranged brother, Esau, is heading his way. Worse, Esau is travelling with four hundred men. In fear, Jacob decides to split his assets. He sends half his entourage in one direction and half in the other, so that if Esau is coming to take revenge, some of Jacob’s family might survive.

The wives and the servants, the children and the livestock all leave, and Jacob is left alone in the night. And a stranger appears, and tackles him.

***

One of the most insidious ideas about God is that life should be easy for those who are faithful. In our minority world context, where health is assumed and wealth is abundant and lives are so insular that people can grow into adulthood without ever encountering deep suffering, this idea is everywhere. Do the right thing by God, and God will do the right thing by you. Place your faith in God, and you will be rewarded with prosperity and health. We are told to hand our cares over to Jesus, and some of us have so few cares that we find ourselves praying for a parking spot.

When suffering does come, we are bewildered. ‘Why, Lord,’ we ask, ‘Why?’ We are surprised that life can be difficult, and taken aback that suffering might affect us. We become angry at God, and reluctant to engage with whatever the difficult times might offer us.

Many years ago, I had an intense few months. In a short space of time my mother died, Paul and I married, we moved house, I quit my job, and Paul took on a new, significant role at work. Getting married was good; even so, it was a pretty rough time. Time and again, doctors and others suggested that I might be depressed. Time and again, they suggested that I should think about going on medication to help ease me through this difficult period. Stubborn as I am, each time I’d say ‘No. My mother has died, there’s a lot going on. I’m just sad.’

***

Jacob didn’t have to wrestle. He could have kept his entourage with him, and surrounded himself with his women and children and servants. There is safety in numbers.

Jacob could have sedated himself with wine or some ancient Palestinian Prozac, and allowed his encounter with the stranger to remain a blur.

Jacob could have yielded to the stranger at the beginning, crying ‘Leave me alone! I give up!’

But he didn’t. He placed himself there, he stayed awake, and he wrestled.

***

The years that followed my mother’s death weren’t pretty. Wrestling rarely is. Often I was angry and weepy and a mess. I read a lot: Genesis and Job and the Psalms, and books on spirituality. I raged at God. Often, I wondered if I was, in fact, depressed. I wondered if I should be on medication. Life might feel easier. It certainly had its attractions.

But each time, I came back to my reality. I didn’t have a medical condition that required treatment. Instead, my mother had died. No one would replace her. I hated my work. I didn’t have a direction in life. I found church very difficult. Of course I was a mess, of course I felt sad, of course I was struggling. These weren’t signs of depression. Instead, they were normal responses to the events of my life.

So I struggled on. I struggled with sadness and the sick feeling I got every time I saw three generations of women out for a walk. I struggled with impotence in the face of my mother’s illness, and at my inability to fix anything. I grieved for the past and everything we had failed to say and do. I grieved for the future and all that would now never happen. I raged at her peers who were coming into their powerful middle age. I envied my friends whose parents both lived. I hated women who complained about their mothers. I raged at a God who allowed suffering to happen. I ripped shreds off a medical system which prolonged people’s pain, and I wrestled with our lousy way of doing funerals.

The night was long, the night was very dark, and I struggled.

***

The stranger is strong. But Jacob is determined. The stranger persists. But Jacob will not give up. All through the night they grapple and twist and grab and roll, neither Jacob nor the stranger prevailing. In the first light of dawn, the stranger finally slips under Jacob’s guard, and, with a low blow, dislocates his hip. The stranger tries to leave. But in agony, gasping, Jacob holds on tight. He asks the stranger’s name, and demands a blessing.

***

Grief wounds. Your heart aches in your chest. It’s fragile, fragmented, knotted together by bits of fraying string. Any sudden movement could jolt the pieces apart, never to be made whole again. Grief is an icicle lodged in your torso. It’s too big for the space, too cold, too hard. It makes it difficult to breathe deeply, difficult to move easily, impossible to laugh. Every sudden shift causes pain. Grief is a sick lurching in the pit of your stomach; a ringing in your ears; a cloud obscuring your sight; a dull fog in the brain. You can’t eat. You sleep in the day; you wake in the night. Grief leaves its marks on the face, on the body: the lines around the mouth, the sadness in the eyes, the drooping of the shoulders, the general turning in. You move slowly, carefully, like an old woman fearing the treachery of every step.

You limp.

Grieving and wounded, still I held on. Again and again through that long and dark night, I clutched at faith. I looked for beauty. I grabbed at bread and wine around dinner tables and, after a time, at church. I seized onto new life and gardens and babies; I became pregnant. I learned to sing.

My mother’s death left a gaping absence in my life, but in the absence I found more room for me. I began to study theology. I learned to parent. I started to write. In leaving one church, we found our way here. In letting go of a magical God who rewards the just with an easy life, I came to recognise the God who engages with our difficult questions and never shies away, a God who sits with the grieving, comforts the afflicted, and shows us the path to fullness of life.

***

We can run away from struggle. Thanks to television and alcohol and busy-ness and any number of escape mechanisms, we can avoid engaging with the mysterious stranger who comes to us in the night and pins us, terrified, to the ground. Or we can put up a token fight, then throw up our hands in defeat and stop asking questions. We can choose to compromise our integrity and our faith and all of us do this, in ways big and small, time and time again.

Because wrestling with the stranger changed Jacob, and who wants that? Life may not be great, but it’s comfortable, and familiar, and safe. We don’t want change; we don’t want to be different from how we were; we don’t want to be different from the crowd; we don’t want to be marked as wounded. We can gloss over struggle. We can ignore the change that is thrust upon us. We can live in denial. It feels easier to keep being the scallywag Jacob, or the angry youth, or the wounded lover, or the bereaved one. We can ignore our responsibilities and instead become the victim whose life is thrown about by the fates.

But we are not invited into little lives in which we gain credit for being childish. Instead, we are called to life in abundance. We are called to maturity. We are invited into the love dance of creation and, out of our very woundedness, offer healing to others.

And while faith is a gift, blessings come to those who are prepared to wrestle with their faith. For it is when we are alone and vulnerable, limited in strength, shaking with fear, forced to leave the old ways behind us, that we are finally open to God’s presence with us, and can surrender to God’s refining work within us.

For in struggle, we discover new depths of endurance, and courage, and independence of thought. In struggle, we find wisdom and patience, compassion and insight, vision and strength. Through struggle, we are transformed. Through struggle, we grow up.

So the next time you are assailed in the night by a terrifying stranger, don’t turn your back. Don’t pour yourself a drink. Leave the television off. Instead, engage. Wrestle, and try to catch a glimpse of the stranger’s face. Use every dirty trick you know, and hold on tight. Whatever you do, don’t give up. Because, whether that same night or many months down the track, the dawn will come. And then like Jacob you will find yourself in pain and gasping, but with new self-knowledge and a new name, and a new awareness of the presence of God. You might come away limping, but that’s a small price to pay for this wisdom, these gifts, this blessing.