Sunday, September 24, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (readings start around 22:07; children’s sermon starts around 24:29; sermon starts around 34:24)
Reading: Genesis 32:9-13, 22-30
In today’s children’s sermon, we talked about siblings and why it’s so hard to get along with them. We talked about the story of Jacob and Esau – how Jacob tricks and cheats his brother and runs away when his brother gets angry, and how now he’s coming home after 20 years to face his brother again and beg for his forgiveness. Jacob is feeling guilty and afraid; I asked the kids if they’ve ever done something they later felt bad about, or that hurt someone, and they had to apologize. It’s a crummy feeling – it feels bad to have to admit that we are someone who is wrong and who made a mistake, or to own up that we hurt someone. But with God’s help, Jacob does it – and to his great surprise, Esau not only forgives him; he runs down the road to meet him, wraps him in a big bear hug, and literally starts crying because he’s so happy to see his long lost brother alive. We talked about how Jacob would never have experienced this beautiful moment of reconciliation if he hadn’t done the right thing like God called him to do, if he hadn’t faced his fears and taken accountability. Some of the best blessings we receive only come through the struggle of doing the hard thing to make things right.
One of the requirements for becoming a pastor in the ELCA is completing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). Broadly speaking, CPE is kind of like a cross between a hospital chaplaincy internship and group therapy. Most seminarians do it over the course of a summer as an intense, ten week program. You’re placed with a small cohort of other people who all mutually support and challenge one other. The whole purpose of CPE is to help candidates for ministry hone their pastoral care skills and to make them really dig in and figure out who they are as leaders in ministry.
I did my CPE through a program in Chicago called Urban CPE. In Urban CPE, instead of being all together at one hospital, each of us in my little cohort was placed at a different site around the city. That meant that after we applied and interviewed and were accepted into the program, we then also had to set up more interviews with multiple different sites in order to be placed. It was a long process.
I had applied to Urban CPE in hopes of working in a mostly Spanish-speaking or bilingual site – but sadly, after I got accepted, I found out that that particular summer, they didn’t have any. So I interviewed at a couple of places that seemed interesting, but then it was easy to kind of let it get pushed to the backburner as the semester got busy.
Now, something I know about myself now that I didn’t really know about myself back then is that I have ADHD. My brain is wired in a way that makes me struggle with things like: organization, memory and focus, punctuality, and just in general understanding how time works. Like, I seem to have this neverending, completely unfounded optimism about how many things I can cram into a given window of time. And it’s because my brain just perceives time differently. For me, there are essentially only two times: there is NOW, and there is NOT NOW.
So I saw on the schedule for my Urban CPE program that we had to do at least three interviews and that the deadline for doing them was May 18 – in other words, NOT NOW. What I failed to take into account was the start date of the program, which also happened to be: MAY 18.
So, in a panic, on literally the second to last day before the program started, I did my third site interview. It was at a hospital way out in the suburbs: definitely not one of my top picks on the list – I mean, I had signed up for Urban CPE after all – but, you know, desperate times!
It ended up being the single most terrifying interview I have done in my life. I interviewed with the site supervisor, Nancy (who is a lovely person); she oversaw the whole spiritual care department of the hospital; and to this day she is the most intimidatingly organized and meticulous person I have ever met. I mean, she had recorded absolutely every single detail of the department’s operations in a seventeen *volume* manual. And while she was an excellent chaplain, very caring and pastoral, outside of patient visits, she was all business.
So she and I sat down for the interview, and literally one of the first things she said to me was, “So, what kind of student are you?” In exactly that tone. 😅 I don’t remember what I managed to stammer out in response, but I do remember her basically grilling me about my habits with schoolwork and about whether I would be reliable and responsible enough to see this program through. She was very professional and fair about the whole thing, but it was very clear how thoroughly unimpressed she was with me, showing up to interview at the absolute last minute.
I was SO relieved to walk out of that hospital — thinking, “Thank God, that’s over with! I am *never* going back in there.” And then I got in my car to leave and immediately had one of those pit-of-the-stomach, Holy Spirit kind of feelings, like: “Oh no. Oh God, no, come on!” And sure enough, the very next day we all got our site assignments — and I got to start my CPE at the hospital, bright and early, on May 18.
It was mortifying to walk back into that place, knowing what a terrible first impression I had made. I feel like I ended up spending a lot of that summer just trying to make up for it, trying to prove to Nancy (and to myself) that I was better than that.
So, even before I visited a single patient, CPE was already beginning to challenge me. And, in classic CPE fashion, it specifically challenged me in a way that forced me to really reckon with my own shortcomings and failings and insecurities.
It’s exactly the kind of challenge that Jacob is facing in our bible story for today. Jacob has been a trickster and a schemer pretty much his whole life, always ambitious, always fighting to get ahead. He basically conned his older brother Esau out of his birthright when they were younger. Then he tricked their father Isaac into giving him the blessing meant for his brother, which made Esau so furious that Jacob fled from home in fear. From before they were born, Jacob struggled with Esau – he came out of the womb still grabbing onto Esau’s heel. In fact, it’s because of this that he was given the name “Jacob,” which means something like “grabbing by the heel,” or “supplanter.” It’s a name that indicates struggle.
When we catch up with Jacob today, he is coming fresh off a 20 year stint of working for his uncle Laban. In classic Jacob fashion, he managed to stir up drama by tricking his uncle into giving him the best and strongest animals of all his flocks. So now we find Jacob fleeing into the wilderness from yet another angry relative.
But a lifetime of trickery is starting to catch up with Jacob. He has started to feel remorse for some of the shady things he’s done, especially to his brother Esau. And as he prepares to leave with all his family and his flocks, he hears the voice of God, who says to him, “Return to the land of your ancestors and to your kindred, and I will be with you.”
So Jacob does. He gathers up his whole entourage and they hit the road. And you can tell by what he prays just how Jacob is feeling about this journey. He’s feeling guilty and unworthy of the grace that God has shown him. He’s probably wondering how his parents will receive him – especially after tricking his father. And, of course, he is absolutely terrified of facing Esau again.
So on the last night of the journey, Jacob decides to take some alone time apart from his family in order to pray and prepare himself. And then the story takes a weird twist, in a way that only the bible can. Out of nowhere, we read that “a man wrestled with [Jacob] until daybreak.” I mean… ok… what?? Like, we’ve seen Jacob have crazy dreams before – like that whole business with the ladder or the stairway or whatever – so maybe the writer of Genesis just forgot to mention that Jacob was dreaming? Who knows.
Whatever the case, Jacob wrestles all night with this mysterious, unnamed stranger. And in a weird way, this impromptu wrestling match ends up being an embodiment of Jacob’s whole struggle. He is wrestling with his feelings of fear and guilt and uncertainty and regret, just as he once wrestled with Esau. The physical encounter may or may not be real, but the struggle certainly is.
And though it’s not clear exactly how, God is somehow all up in this encounter. Jacob himself experiences this wrestling as a struggle with God – which is pretty incredible! God has not only called Jacob on this journey and been present with him all along the way; it seems like God is actively supporting him by challenging him to wrestle with what this journey means for him, challenging him to grow into the fullness of the person he could be.
It’s a hard-fought match, and as daybreak starts to approach, Jacob refuses to let go without a blessing (because that’s how wrestling matches always end, right? Like, the Rock blesses Stone Cold Steve Austin, or whatever? 😜). So the stranger asks Jacob his name. And then, he gives him a new name: Israel – one who struggles with God.
This is what Jacob needed to become whole. Even before he is forgiven and reconciled with Esau, God has helped Jacob make peace with his past. God has helped him move through the struggle to find blessing and grace. And now, Israel is the name that will become an entire nation, just as God promised.
And what I find most fascinating and amazing about this is that it’s still all about the struggle! Jacob has graduated from being one who wrestles with his brother to being one who wrestles with God. Fundamentally, he is still the same person he has always been – but he comes to see that his gifts can be used in ways that honor other people and that give glory to God, instead of just enriching himself. And this time around, instead of receiving a blessing through trickery and deceit, Jacob’s blessing comes through honesty and persistence and accountability.
In a similar way, my summer of CPE ended up being an incredible season of growth for me – largely because of the way my supervisor challenged me. I learned SO much from her. And in all honesty, I’m still continuing to work on many of those areas of struggle. But I have also come to appreciate the many gifts that come with being wired the way I am – gifts like creativity and empathy and the ability to be fully present with people in the ‘NOW.’
I think all of us can probably relate to Jacob’s struggle on some level. We all have shortcomings and regrets that we generally prefer not to dwell on any more than we have to. And just like Jacob, God often calls us into journeys that challenge us – typically, that doesn’t take the form of midnight wrestling matches, but still – God calls us into challenges that force us to reckon with the sometimes uncomfortable truth about who we really are. And it’s often through that struggle that we find grace. It’s through that struggle that we come to see our gifts and ourselves in a whole new light.
The struggle is real. But God is with us; and God will always leave us with a blessing.
This is the Day 