A Meditation on Genesis
32:22-31
1.
You are Jacob, and Esau’s out there
in the night. You are Jacob, and the
most challenging moment in your life, the most puzzling relationship in your
life, is unavoidably at hand. You are
Jacob, and how you meet this challenge, how you face your brother, after all
these years—will affect not only your future, but the future of everyone you
love and the covenant you share, in faith, with God. You are Jacob, and I want to know what you’re
going to do with yourself tonight, how you’re going to pass the time, whether
you’re ready to wrestle with God.
Because everyone you love has gone
ahead and crossed the River Jabbok. They’ve
cleared out as you suggested. And
likewise, says the text, everything that you have. You’re alone tonight. You and your fears. You and your doubts. You and the stars above and the stones at
your feet. Tonight’s what Saint John of
the Cross might have called a ‘dark night of the soul.’ Because Esau’s coming tomorrow. And it’s been many years since you saw him
last. And you’ve hurt one another badly. And you care about how this goes.
So you are Jacob. And tonight you’re alone. And I want to know how you’re going to pass
the time. Whether you’re ready to wrestle
with God.
Because here’s the thing. You and I are made to wrestle with God. We’re not conceived as little robots, born
for perfection, hard-wired with some kind of flawless spiritual GPS. We’re not built like those buffed up
superheroes in the movies, caped in certainty and standing on moral high ground
that never shakes. You and I are made to
wrestle with God, to question God, to struggle with our conscience and our
choices. This is what it means to be
made in the image of God: we live, in so many ways, in this ‘dark night of the
soul.’ We’re made to wrestle with
God.
You know what I mean. You’re groping for direction during a season
of confusion and distress. Where will
you go? Who will you trust? Who will you become? Or you’re aching in anticipation of a difficult
conversation with an estranged friend or loved one. What will you say? Do you have it in you to speak your own
precious truth? Or you’re searching for
a faithful response to a troubling moral conundrum. Or you’re grieving the madness that is war
and longing for an honest, effective response.
We question God. We struggle with
our values, our faith, our conscience.
We wrestle with angels, and with one another, and with our beliefs, and
with God. You are Jacob, and I am Jacob,
and we are Jacob together. And Esau’s
out there in the night.
So how? How do we wrestle with God in the middle of
the night? How do we struggle for
clarity when nothing is clear? How do we
listen for the difficult word, the important and liberating and difficult word,
through the long, dark night of the soul?
I guess that’s the question this text raises for me today. I guess that’s the challenge it throws our
way. How do we wrestle?
Across Turkey this spring, in
cities like Istanbul and Izmir and Selçuk and
Konya, I noticed men and women fingering beads like these. One was sitting quietly, with a cup of coffee
in a coffee shop. Working the beads in her
hands. Others were gathered in a park,
on a bench, engaged in lively conversation.
Working the beads in their hands.
And another was praying in a huge Istanbul mosque, praying like
something was riding on the prayer, something huge, something important. And he too was working the beads in his
hands.
In Konya, outside the crowded tomb
of Jelaluddin Rumi, I found a little shop that sold these beads to tourists
like me. The Turkish shopkeeper
explained to me that Muslim men and women use them to pray—sometimes saying the
99 names of God, sometimes whispering prayers and supplications to God. And sometimes they just finger these beads as
a way of staying in touch, keeping the conversation going, remembering God’s
presence in every ordinary moment.
Hanging with friends in the park.
Sipping coffee in a café.
There are, of course, any number of
ways to answer the question of how we wrestle with God. But this morning I want to focus on just this
one: prayer. Prayer is one of the
practices, one of the spiritual practices, through which you and I learn to
wrestle with God. There are a thousand
different ways to pray, and all kinds of lively traditions to help and
encourage and make prayer relevant and meaningful. I slip these beads in my pocket now—and take
them everywhere I go. I pull them out
between meetings, even find them and pass them through my fingers during
meetings. There are a thousand different
ways to pray. So however you do it,
whatever shape you give it, I want to encourage you this morning to make prayer
a priority in your life. To make prayer
a daily spiritual practice. Use beads if
you want to. Sing “Wade in the Water”
when you shower every morning. But keep
the conversation going.
Jacob’s story reminds us that it’s
not easy, that it often involves struggle and effort and even a kind of
wounding. But prayer prepares Jacob for
the day ahead, for the challenges to come, for the face-to-face encounter with
Esau. Prayer puts his hip out of joint, sure,
but opens his heart to the possibilities of reconciliation and grace. Prayer is indeed a kind of wrestling. A kind of wrestling with God. So Jacob calls the place Peniel: “For I have
seen God face to face,” he says. “For I
have seen God face to face.”
Now, as we think about a daily
practice, as we imagine prayer as a daily priority, there are all kinds of ways
to do that, all kinds of ways to get started.
There’s meditation, which itself comes in a thousand different
varieties. There’s singing hymns, chanting
psalms, reading sacred texts in a slow and mindful way. For some, there’s writing poetry. The act of writing itself is a kind of
deliberate encounter with the holy, with the unknown, with the strange and
loving presence of God. I don’t think it
matters so much how you pray: it does matter, very much, that you pray.
Maybe your practice is as simple as
kneeling at your bedside before turning out the light, praying aloud, speaking
from the heart, doing it that way. Maybe
you use the Maori Version of the Jesus Prayer, the one we pray together each
Sunday here in worship. It’s the daily
commitment that matters, I think, the conversation that’s stimulated between
you and God, the evolving and sometimes unsettling relationship built on daily
discipline and practice.
You know, something else we could
do, right now, is ask who among us has such a practice, a daily practice of
some kind of prayer or meditation. Raise
your hand if you do. Raise your hand if
you pray every day. In whatever way you
do. Keep them up for a minute. If you’re thinking about getting started, if
you’re thinking about a daily practice, maybe you want to reach out to one of
these folks. Have a conversation. See what works for him, for her. Be curious.
Explore the possibilities. Maybe
you decide to check in from time to time: see how your new practice is going, be
accountable to one another, encourage one another on the way.
3.
In Greece and Turkey this spring, I
spent a number of days and many hours sitting in old churches and meditating on
ancient orthodox icons. Iconography adds
a rich dimension to eastern orthodox devotional life. And it’s unlike most of our western
traditions, unlike the cerebral, book-based traditions of Protestantism and the
like. In Thessaloniki, for example, in
Northern Greece, I discovered an old church, just a block from my hotel, where
icons hovered everywhere: icons of Jesus and Mary, icons of the prophets and
the saints, covering just about every wall, every column, even the dome above
the apse. And every hour or so, during a
three hour Sunday service, acolytes processed up and down the aisles with
incense, shaking their censors at these icons, as if to bring them to life
again, as if to include them in the hymns and prayers, as if to remind us all
that there were spirits among us we ought not take for granted.
I’m so intrigued now by these icons
that I’ve added a couple to my own daily meditation practice. Here are two that I’m praying with now, as
many as four times a day. One is old
Abraham, the Father of Many Nations. And
the other is an icon of Jesus, but one in which the radiant face of Jesus seems
to hover above the bloom of a pink lotus.
The artist here says that the lotus is rooted in mud and climbs through
murky water toward light at its surface to bloom. And that’s why the lotus is a Buddhist symbol
for spiritual enlightenment. The icon
itself seems to wed eastern and western traditions in a single vision.
What happens for me, in praying
with this icon, in sitting in meditation before this icon, is that I begin to
accept and appreciate the mud, the murky water, the unsettled regions in my own
heart. I accept and appreciate darkness
and light, playing and dancing and moving together, across the fields of my
heart. And I begin to recognize Jesus,
the face of God, blooming in the compassion I have for myself, for all the
others in my life, for the big broken world I call home. Like the beads, these icons open doors and
windows in my heart. If I sit with them. If I commit to them. If I commit to my practice every day.
Interestingly, the artist of this
Jesus icon has titled the piece “SOPHIA”—and not Jesus. Sophia, of course, is Wisdom, even Wisdom
personified in ancient Hebrew and Christian traditions. And the more I sit with this particular icon,
the more I appreciate that Jesus is so much more than a name, that Jesus is so
much more than a gender. This icon
humbles me. It calls into question all
the details I think I know: about Jesus, about Christianity, even about
myself. Jesus is no doctrine; Jesus is
no superhero. This icon humbles me, and
it breaks me open.
I begin to see that Jesus is Wisdom,
emerging out of prayer and struggle and the long, dark night of my soul. I begin to see that Jesus is the darkness
itself, the mud, the murky waters within, the places where nothing makes
sense. And I begin to appreciate, to
recognize Jesus as the compassionate presence who brings light to that
darkness, who shines on me and on you and on the divided world we love. Jesus is Sophia. Jesus is Love. Jesus is God.
So much more than a name. So much
more than a gender. So much more than
even a religion.
I think we get prayer wrong a good
bit of the time. We assume that prayer
fixes things, that prayer fixes us, that prayer settles all that’s unsettled
and cleans up all that’s messy in our lives.
But I find that prayer dives in: that prayer dives into the mud and the
murky waters; that prayer dives into the places where nothing makes sense; that
prayer dives in to the broken world and finds Jesus, Wisdom, Sophia, God
there—in the sometimes maddening, but wildly entertaining midst of it all.
Prayer helps us tune in to the
turning, turning, turning that is life itself.
Air becomes breath, and breath becomes gratitude, and gratitude fills
our lungs with new possibility. We are turning,
turning, turning. Confession becomes
forgiveness, and forgiveness becomes grace, and grace becomes courage. We are turning, turning, turning. You and I are made to wrestle with God, to
question God, to struggle with our conscience and our choices. We are turning, turning, turning. You and I are made to pray.
4.
So you are Jacob and Esau’s out
there in the night. And it’s been many
years since you saw him last. And you’ve
hurt one another badly. And you hope,
you dream, you ache for something else.
Something like forgiveness.
Something like reconciliation.
Something like peace. You are
Jacob and the most challenging moment in your life, the most puzzling
relationship in your life, is unavoidably at hand. You are Jacob and how you meet this
challenge, how you face your brother, after all these years—will affect not
only your future, but the future of everyone you love and the covenant you
share, in faith, with God.
You are Jacob. And the stars are bright in the velvet sky;
and the stones are many beneath your feet; and the air is cool and clean and it
feels good in your lungs. You are Jacob;
and it’s time to wrestle; it’s time to get serious about your spiritual life;
it’s time to pray.
Amen.
