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August 3, 2008
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Genesis 32:22-31, Romans 9:1-5, Matthew 14:13-21
Wrestling for a Blessing, Blessing for a Wrestling
We wrestle a lot – you and I, congregation and preacher -- for each other’s blessing.
I never was good at it. I used to be a wrestling equivalent to sparring partner
in high school. The best I could hope for was not to be pinned! I’m
still not hard to beat, but at least I last to the end! The bottom line for
Jacob wrestling this angel is like that of Ela Weissberger, Holocaust Survivor,
with us two Sundays ago – They both lived to tell the stories of their ordeals!
It is very much on Ela’s heart that -- as Holocaust deniers begin to outnumber Holocaust
survivors -- ideological accounts replace those of eyewitnesses. Same with
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who lives on to tell about them?
Each one of us has something to live to tell about. Something makes us unrepeatable
and unforgettable. Each is some kind of survivor, enduring to the end.
Let us encourage and empower one another in the telling and joining together of
all our stories.
Okay, now ‘fess up! Who else is into “professional wrestling?” Or kick-boxing?
Or what is it they do locked in a cage? Or whatever passes for wrestling today?
What a hoot! What a hoax! What a hustle! What a huge industry!
On the one hand, what a harmless and humorous way to project and sublimate all of
our rages and hatreds! On the other hand, what a dopey and dangerous metaphor
for the “good guys/bad guys,” “us/ them” ways we persist in seeing our complex and
crucified world. My Aunt Jessie and I used to get up together late at night
at my grandmother’s house to watch “good-guy” Verne Gagne always prevail against
Dick the Bruiser!
Here our faith-fool ancestor Jacob wrestles with God, wrestles for the very soul
of the world, the soul of his people, and his own soul. Here Jacob offers
us legitimate alternative to the banal and bloodless, casual and costless, insipid
and illicit, pallid and pedestrian relations with God we so often settle for.
Jacob, literally, wrestles all night for this blessing, as if his life depends upon
it! And his life does. And our lives do, too! Faithfulness to
our God, discipleship to our Christ, to the vital alternative vision our God in
Christ offers the world, -- These are not spectator sports! These are not
consumable entertainments. These are not fun- or fantasy-filled diversions.
With our brother Jacob -- whose given name literally means, “one who acts crookedly,”
one who deceives, one who hustles and “gets over” on others – we are coming to points,
to crossings, of real crisis in our lives and our life together. We have to
choose how much longer we can get away with trying to see the world as our plaything!
With trying to see the peoples of the world as pawns in our power games. And
the resources of the earth as weapons at our command.
Jacob’s whole world-wrestling way of life begins in the womb, from which he springs
forth with a foothold on his brother! Never heard of a foothold winning a
wrestling match, but it gets the job done for Jacob. He is announced as a
serious player. He hustles his brother out of a birthright, his father out of a
blessing. He rustles his father-in-law out of two daughters, plus all these
servants and animals! All of this merely prepares him for this moment to cross
the river again, to reenter the land of God’s promise -- where Jacob, understandably,
rightfully, expects his brother to wait to attack him! Jacob acts, as we do,
as if there is nothing our money, our wealth, cannot buy us - even our very lives!
As if all our acts of procuring also are acts of securing. For Jacob sends
word to Esau of all that he, Jacob, possesses! What a strong position Jacob
wants to imagine he is in to bargain for his life. For Esau’s forgiveness
and “forgetfulness” of him.
But the word comes back that Esau is advancing with four hundred men -- the standard
number for a regiment or raiding party of Jacob’s time! Jacob is reduced to
even greater fear and distress. He resorts to strategies cutting his losses
-- including the “set aside” of a portion of servants and animals to send on ahead
like a bribe to Esau. Jacob does not miss a trick! Then Jacob prays.
When all else fails, we pray. Jacob prays that God will remember the promise
of God’s future, to him and through him, glorious destiny and countless progeny,
a people about to be named “Israel!” That is, a people who strive, a people
who struggle with God, to be blessed, and to be a blessing for all the world.
“Israel,” following from Jacob, becomes those who never give up – those who
endure to the end. Though ever so deeply wounded, they refuse to be defeated.
Israel means, to encounter all the mysterious grace and power of God, the creation
itself, face to face -- and yet to survive! This is the “Israel” for
whom the world is still waiting, still aching, still longing, today -- an Israel
true to the Jacob who, in this painful, prayerful moment, deeply knows himself.
All of his years of hard work and sacrifice, all of his time in exile, his reckless
inventiveness and creative evasiveness, - - Jacob knows in this perilous and
pivotal moment, he remains no less fearful, no less fugitive!
Is this to be the very nature and calling of Jacob? Of Israel? Of us?
That Jacob remains stranger and refugee in his own land? Stranger and refugee
to his own brother? Faced with the desperate decision to empty himself completely
of every pretense, every illusion -- that safety and security, self-protection and
self-preservation, finally issues for any of us from any source other
than right relationship? What else is Israel all about? Why else
the prophetic tradition?
There is no substitute anywhere, of any kind, for right relationship, for
righteousness, for justice, (for tsedeq, for mishpat)
in our lives! Might does not make right! Only right can,
and does, make right. And only justice can, and does, make peace!
We are not just talking faraway global terms and international relationships here.
There cannot be peace in our personal relationships, peace in our families, peace
in our homes, unless and until there is justice and right relationship between
and among all persons there – including all ages, all conditions. There cannot
be peace in our places of work, our places of worship, in our cities and larger
communities, in our nations, much less in our world -- unless and until there is
justice for everyone there.
This is God’s vision for Jacob! This is God’s vision for Israel! This
is God’s vision for us. This is God’s vision for all the world. And
our God, thank God, is not too proud to struggle with us for the vision of God --
to do whatever it takes to get God’s eventual way with us! God is not even
too needy, too power-hungry, to accept some defeats from us. Elie Wiesel says,
in fact, the God of Hebrew scripture loves to be shown new things, to be moved in
new ways, by the children of God! Wiesel says of this particular story, “Both
were wounded: Jacob at the hip, the angel in his vanity. Yet they parted
friends, or was it accomplices? Jacob accepted his aggressor’s departure willingly;
the latter, as if to thank him, made him a gift: a new name which for generations
to come would symbolize eternal struggle and endurance, in more than one land, during
more than one night.” May he mean our land and these dark nights of our soul?
Our God does of course deal from positions of power and postures of strength.
But God does so only in ways that build up, ways that redeem -- and never
in ways that tear down, ways that condemn. How big is our God?
God is big enough to lose a few in God’s struggle with us -- that we might be engaged,
enabled, empowered to grow into our full partnership with God, our fullest responsibility
for the vision of God, the intention of God in creation, for all of this world!
I have never been the same for one night of my Clinical Pastoral Education part
of seminary in Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago. I was supposed to be
in the Intensive Care waiting room all night. But a 10 year-old girl was not
recovering from “routine” heart surgery. The longer I stayed with the family,
the less I could find to say – the less I could bear to stay there at all!
Some time around three I slipped out for good. The hospital called me at six to
say “my patient” had died. That night shattered my every assumption that I
always knew what God was doing – or even that God always knows what God is doing!
God, too, wins some, loses some.
Our God asks us in this moment of wrestling Jacob to a draw, to a no-decision at
best, not to be afraid of our weaknesses! Not to be afraid to sublimate our
need to dominate! Not to be afraid to grow beyond every need to control.
Every need to be “Number One” in the world. We come again to this river Jabbok,
this river of reckoning for our world today. How do we move from dominion
to communion? How do we “come out” this wilderness of the world’s warring
madness and into the promised land? Where repentance and right relations may
lead us?
For our Jesus is a Jew. Our Christ, we claim, is the Jewish Messiah.
I keep saying to colleagues, the challenge is not to bring Jews to Jesus.
It is to bring Christians to Jesus! For the Jewish Messiah, the Christ,
not only, if we are honest and true, bears lonely, suffering witness in each generation.
The Jewish Messiah also brings a whole new way of life! A way of living in
right relationship for the whole world!! Where are we so-called “Christians”
to be found in regard to that claim? Really?! How are we seeing, and
making, that claim happen? Paul here states what an agony and an urgency,
huge sorrow and enormous pain, it is for us to know ourselves as “new Israel” --
extended family pf Israel. We both have so much going for us – family, glory,
covenants, revelation, worship, promises, the very lineage of the Messiah – says
Paul. And yet we deny, betray, abandon, desert the very One trying to relate
us as one!
Somehow we must find the courage, the utter audacity, to help hold the states of
Israel and the United States accountable -- in so far as states can be accountable
-- to the vision of “Israel” for the whole world. Beginning with those brother
and sister Semites, the Palestinians, with whom all Israelites, all Israelis, share
destiny and even progeny. We must find ways to join up, with many citizens
within the state of Israel, with many Jews around the world -- who struggle to stand
for the vision of an “Israel” just and joyful, as well as safe and secure, for all
the world!
Such courage, such audacity -- to struggle for the soul of the world, the soul of
our people, the soul of our nation, and our very own souls -- will be just as costly,
dangerous and injurious, to us as it was, and is, to any “Jacob” anywhere becoming
the promise of “Israel” for all the world. Believe me, with my many replacement
parts, and my occasional dislocations, I know a hip-socket wrenched out of joint
is only exemplary in the most excruciating kind of way! For we must always
begin right where we are, here and now-- thinking globally, while acting locally.
We are an Abrahamic people, a people of Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition -- the
equally shared and biblical faith of all three peoples. How do we face our
own anti-Semitism? The historic theology of superiority taught by our Church
-- not only against Jews, though against them most blatantly and blasphemously.
But also against Arabs and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians? Theologian
Dorothee Soelle grew up in Nazi Germany. She says the victims of our atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- in the context of organized atrocities against
any and all civilians and non-combatants – flow from victims of the Holocaust and
of our Church history of pogrom and persecution of Jews. She warns we dare
say nothing of our God, nothing of our Savior, whom we name Jewish Messiah,
Jesus Christ, that we would not say in the presence of all the victims, all the
survivors of all the devastations we and so many others have done!
For that is where Jesus stands, this day and every day – in the gallows with God
who suffers and is wounded by all the world and in all the earth. Elie Wiesel
writes of his boyhood in Auschwitz, attending an execution -- when someone behind
him wondered aloud, “Where is God? Where is He?” “And I heard a voice
within me answer him: ‘Where is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this
gallows.’”
No one requires us to observe this day of remembrance in this way. (See liturgy
attached.) Nobody else may be doing it with us. It is not pleasant.
We probably do not “get it right.” We do it that God may feel a little less
lonely, a little less helpless and hopeless about us all. We say with this
Jesus – whose ministry follows from the arrest and execution of his cousin John
-- and in the words of Eugene Debs, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and
while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison,
I am not free.” Then he took bread, blessed it and broke it and gave it to
them. They ate and were filled beyond measure. Amen.
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Liturgy
TIME OF HOLOCAUST &
HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI REMEMBRANCE:
Please proceed deeply, slowly, deliberately
Invocation: (A Woman: written in pencil
in the sealed railway car)
Leader: Here in this carload
People: I am Eve
Leader: With Abel my son
People: If you see my other son
Leader: Cain son of all
ALL: Tell him I
Candlelighting and Confession:
Leader: We begin – with silence
People: The silence of death, the
silence of life.
Leader: The silence after destruction.
People: The silence before creation.
Leader: In silence we light six candles in
memory of the six million Jews.
We commit ourselves to dignity and to
responsibility of and for one another,
to build upon this earth a world that
has no room for hatred,
no place for violence. Together we
pray for the strength to fulfill
this vocation.
(Volunteers please come forward to light six
of the candles.)
In the names of the camps --
Amersfoort, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec,
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Chelmo,
Cracow, Dacahu, Flossenberg, Majdanek, Mauthausen and Gusen, Mittelbau Dora,
Natzwiller-Struthof, Ohrdruf, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Sobibor, Terezin,
Treblinka, Vught, Westerbork, . . .
Leader: We light five more candles in
memory of the slaughtered from among
the many other nations of Europe –
communists and other political dissidents,
Gypsies, Slavic peoples, homosexual
persons, persons with different
challenges, different needs.
(Volunteers please come forward to light the
other five candles.)
Leader: First they came for the Jews.
People: And I did not speak out because
I was not a Jew.
Leader: Then they came for the Communists.
People: And I did not speak out because
I was not a Communist.
Leader: Then they came for the trade
unionists.
People:
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Leader: Then they came for me.
ALL: And there was no one left to
speak out for me.
Leader: We light one last large candle for
the awesome creative/destructive powers
that hang in the balance of the lives of all places and peoples today.
(As many volunteers as will come forward to
light the last candle.)
This fire represents the power of the
sun, the power of light and heat, the energy that holds the universe
together, the energy that knits together the nucleus of the atom itself, the
basis of all matter. For billions of years these great matrices of energy
have upheld all existing things, the sun bringing light and warmth to our
planet, causing all things to grow, the energy locked in the nucleus of the
atom, holding together the foundation of matter itself. In 1945 this great
cosmic energy of the universe of life was unleashed and turned into an
instrument of war. . . . A new era of human history began at that moment. .
. .
Leader: We remember over 200,000 men,
women, and children who were killed in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
People: God, forgive us for wanting to
forget, for wanting to ignore the gruesome details of what happened in 1945.
Leader: We know much about the consequences
of nuclear war;
People: Help us to learn the
consequences of peace.
Leader: Teach us to choose peace where we
can,
People: To be aware of the possibilities
in each moment to foster peace and compassion.
Leader: Even the small tasks, like changing
a diaper or a tire,
People: Preparing a meal or a field.
Leader: Offer us opportunities to choose
peace.
People: As we hope to protect our loved
ones from a nuclear war,
Leader: Let us remember that families the
world around desire the same,
People: And that our desire for peace is
a connection with all mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, aunts and
uncles in our global community.
Leader: Help us to remember that the Holy
Spirit will take our work for peace
People: And expand it, multiply it, and
move beyond it.
Leader: When we feel ourselves powerless in
our combat with nuclear powers, remind us that the power of the Spirit of
God is greater than they are,
People: And that prayer is the most
powerful source of strength and hope for turning our world around.
Leader: We are told that delicate lavender
and yellow flowers soon grew from the blasted, pounded earth in Hiroshima.
People: Let us also rise from the ashes
of remembrance to create beauty in your world.
Leader: Help us live by the words of the
prophet, Isaiah:
People: “Integrity will give peace,
justice will give lasting security, my people will live in a peaceful
country.”
Leader: In the name of your messenger of
peace, Jesus,
ALL: Amen.
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