Since Pentecost we have been reading a cycle of stories from the Old Testament that comes to a kind of high point with our story about Jacob and his wrestling this morning. When we began these readings in May, I talked about how pleased I was that these stories were now included in our revised lectionary in a consecutive way, so that they could be read as stories, because they are our stories, and we should know them. We should “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,” as the old collect puts it.

 

Abraham’s story took us way back to the origins of our monotheistic tradition. Abraham’s story carries with it a memory that the source of that tradition, the source of our faith, was in a kind of “coming out” from Babylon, a coming out from polytheism, a coming out from the city following a personal call, and having a personal relationship with that one, personal God, so that religion was no longer just some anonymous communal sort of thing, a performance of certain rites and certain festivals, the domain of a specialized priesthood, but a fully integrated part of the whole of human life. Somewhere in each of us is this Abrahamic faith, a naïve faith, and intuitive faith, a direct faith, an experiential faith. This faith is not the same as some “belief.” We don’t have to “believe” in the air, for example, in order to have a direct experience of it, and the same is true for the experience of God.

 

But, for me at least, that sort of experience only comes in moments, and then only rarely. We’ve lost, I’m afraid, our innocence in these matters in the modern world, and there’s really no going back. We may have times when we get caught up in church (at least I hope so), or we may have times when we’re struck with a spiritual coincidence or a meaningful dream. We may have times when we feel at our wits end and we just let go and let God and feel the power of grace. But most of the time we try to control and structure our lives, and do the best we can to stay safe and balanced. Abraham did not stay safe and balanced. He left his home and he wandered around. He had conversations with immaterial beings. He was the kind of person that we used to lock away, and now maybe provide a shelter and soup kitchen for if they’re lucky, and usually cross the street to avoid. We’ve become too sophisticated. We know too much to really live our life based on Abrahamic faith, most of us. And it’s really impossible to un-know what we know. You can’t choose to be naïve. You can’t choose to be innocent. When people do try to do that, they just end up separating their religious life from the rest of their life and become hypocritical. Their spirituality becomes an escape or a form of entertainment.

 

So we have to find another way. Let’s look at Isaac.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Isaac this summer, ever since we read the story about the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, and the story about the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. There’s really not much else in the Old Testament about Isaac. It goes from the sacrifice story to his marrying Rebekah, and then right to the birth of Jacob and Esau. The only story in which Isaac figures prominently after that is when he’s old and blind and gets tricked into giving his blessing to Jacob.

 

I think Isaac is traumatized. I’ve worked with victims of trauma, and he shows all the symptoms. First his brother disappears. And then his father ties him to some kindling wood and almost cuts him in half. I think that would have a pretty profound affect on someone growing up. Such traumatized people just try not to rock the boat. They follow the rules. “Just tell me the rules.” Don’t step on cracks. Always lock the door….maybe 27 times. People who are traumatized see the world as a very dangerous place. They become people-of-tradition (“people of the book”) in order to deal with that danger. Isaac is the first one who is born into the covenant. He is eight days old when he is circumcised (another trauma?), and he’s obedient (and manipulable) for the rest of his life. That’s the faith of Isaac.

 

That has also been the faith of the Church as well, at times of insecurity. The development of particularly dogmatic beliefs and the enforcement of traditions of behavior and ritual have most often come after times of great insecurity…during the early persecutions, after the fall of the Roman Empire, after the plague and the hundred-years-war, with the reconquest of Spain.  That’s true, as well, of what we call “fundamentalism.” It’s based on fear and insecurity, whether it’s Christian, Moslem, or Israeli. In times of such fear traditionalism seems like a lifeline. But it can also be a form of manipulation for those who want to keep us afraid, so that they can have the power.

 

Now I really love the tradition of the Episcopal Church. I’ve got it in my bones. When I celebrate the Eucharist I engage in hand movements and body symbolism that has been passed on for centuries, some of which I don’t know what it means, (which drives Martha, my deacon, really nuts).  But I just do it. The same is true with our theology. My wife Molly is a Unitarian-Universalist, which is a non-creedal church. What Unitarians believe, they believe, needs to come from each person’s mind and heart, and is inherently unique. But we Episcopalians say the Nicene Creed every week, some of which I bet we don’t’ really understand, and some of it that we may even disagree with.  But it’s part of our heritage, part of our tradition, and we are concerned that if we just abandon it we’ll be left floating adrift to gaze at a dogmatic mirror. That doesn’t mean we don’t “interpret,” but it does mean that we seek some continuity with the past in order to guard against religion becoming just a “thought for the day.”

 

I don’t think, however, that we’re really traumatized enough for that sort of faith to work for us anymore, not in this country at least, maybe in Africa, but not here, not for American Episcopalians. And without the edge, without the desperation that trauma brings with it, an obsessive adherence to theological and ritual tradition just degenerates into a kind of aesthetic hobby, a little museum of antiquated nostalgia that, again, is divorced from any real person’s real life in the real world.

 

And so we come to Jacob.

 

My favorite model and what I’ve found to be the most useful model, in understanding Jacob comes fro John Sanford, and his book The Man Who Wrestled with God. He was the son of Agnes Sanford, who was an early proponent of charismatic healing in the church. He was a fairly conservative Episcopal priest from the San Diego area. He used a psychological approach to spiritual teaching and biblical interpretation that I find very important. Sanford saw biblical figures as archetypal models of our own, inner spiritual lives. And I think this is the best approach that we can use to reinvigorate spirituality and religion in our time, and make it relevant and redemptive of life as we live it. (That’s why I pursued my advanced degree in depth psychology, rather than theology or seminary-based pastoral care.)

 

Three things stand out in the life of Jacob when looked at in this way.

 

First of all, Jacob came to a focus on spirituality in the second half of life. Both Martha and I have pointed out the moral ambiguity of Jacob’s early life…his cheating his brother, his deceiving his father and uncle, his living by his wits and his cunning intelligence. He’s mostly concerned with getting what he wants, becoming a wealthy herdsman, marrying his two cousins, and having children by then and their maids as well. He’s a rich tribal sheik with a big extended family. It’s only when he faces an existential crisis in middle age that he turns to God and begins “wrestling” with things spiritual.

 

We too have stages in life. First we’re children and students, then we’re householders, maybe parents and/or career people. But at some time we need to realize that such life in-the-world is not enough to fill out the precious, incredibly rare gift of human being. And then we begin to search for meaning. Then we begin to wrestle with God.

 

The second thing about Jacob has to do with the onset of this search, this wrestling, which comes with his need to confront his brother Esau. Sanford consistently sees Esau as a symbol for Jacob’s “darker,” wilder half. Carl Jung would call their meeting a “confrontation with the shadow,” which is the point when we realize that there is more to us than the nice story that we tell everyone, the nice story that we even tell ourselves, and that some of that story is not very pretty. Only by an acknowledgement and an acceptance (although not necessarily an approval) of our own capacity for evil, our own instinctual unconscious, our own physicality and animality can we hope to become whole. This involves us in a sort of spiral of psycho-spiritual development. We need to face our shadow in order to have a full relationship with God and we need to have a relationship with God in order to completely face our shadow.

 

So if we engage (and we are called to engage) it will necessitate a struggle... a struggle with ourselves, a struggle with our world, but mostly a struggle with God. (The word “Israel” means “he who struggles with God.” And you are the new Israel.) 

 

There will also be a wounding. That’s the third thing we know from Jacob. Jacob was wounded. Jesus was wounded. Jesus was killed. We can expect nothing less. None of us gets through life safely. None of us gets out of life alive. None of us goes through this easily or comfortably, not if we can see the truth, not if we have the courage of our convictions. It’s not only in our successes and accomplishments that the meaning of our life is to be found, but in our failures and disgrace as well, like Jacob, like Jesus. It’s through these wounds, through these holes in our lives that the Holy Spirit flows in. And if we hang in there, true to ourselves, true to our soul, we’ll gain a new name; our eternal identity, and we’ll gain a blessing as well; a blessing that can’t be purchased or gained by deception, a blessing that raises us up, like Jacob, like Jesus, into the everlasting life of the Kingdom of God.

 

Thanks be to God.