Walking Lightly

Now, before we get into the text — I feel we need to examine an assumption I made when I put this series together.

A couple of week ago when I said on a Sunday morning that we were wrapping up the series with the theme: We really want peace. My husband said that evening, “Do you really think that’s what we want?” Peace, that is.

“What do you mean? Of course we want peace,” I answered.

“I don’t think so. I think many of us like it being destabilized, in a state of turmoil, if it means we can win. Most of the people I know really just want to win.”

Now. He’s an attorney. A litigator. So at the time I thought he was just having a bad day. And I was getting ticked off because I didn’t want to have my assumption challenged. So we stopped talking about it.

But Terry’s right of course. The more I thought about the relationship of peace and power — the more I realized that is everywhere throughout the bible and everywhere throughout my experience. Yours too. We’re down for peace as long as we control it.

Look at much of government policy is formed around — Syria is a good example of the fight for peace (not all of the factions — but several (including President Assad’s) claim peace is their aim. Israel wants peace with Palestine; We want peace with countries throughout the middle east. Yet — — we continue to forge perpetuate settlements by violence, we seek peace through killing and security through hatred.

And closer to home too of course. We want some sort of peace with those around us.

On Thursday evening I got on an airplane to return home I got on the airplane where I had scored an exit row. (I was feeling that little happiness of personal satisfaction) when the guy behind me on this staggered seating (one seat in the middle, then two other staggered behind me) started invading my space. Leaning forward to stuff his briefcase and computer bag irritatingly close to my feet. MY FOOT SPACE.

I was steaming as I opened my Bible up to read about this scene in Gen. 33. And was struck — again — by how the story of Jacob is so relevant and so vital.

Quick recap:
Last week we were in Genesis 32 — Jacob has sensed God had told him to return home to his brother Esau. (Esau, the brother from whom Jacob had tricked earlier in his life — effectively stealing a birthright from him and deceiving his father into giving him the family blessing that was really to be given to Esau).

Genesis 32:24

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

It’s en route to meet his brother — for the first time in 21 years — that Jacob has this encounter with the stranger — an angel, a messenger of God, God himself?, — a stranger who Jacob refuses to let go until he has received a blessing from this being. One of the points from last week was that Jacob meets himself and meets God in that encounter.

SLIDE (Real Jacob +Real God = Real Blessing)

The significant thing is that these two meetings are connected. That God calls Jacob to meet his brother and in the midst of meeting his brother, he must also meet Yahweh himself. These two meetings are related to each other. Connected to each other.

There is a connection between my meeting God and my meeting the pompous business guy behind me. The most secular and the most holy overlap. Because how we’ve experienced one affects how we’re going to experience the other.

Jacob encounters God and is both blessed and wounded.

Genesis 32:24–26

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’

Blessed — with his new name — no longer Jacob but Israel; The blessing he had once tried to obtain by deceit, is now granted to him. He is alive with blessing.

But wounded. Deeply wounded. For Jacob this meeting with God cost him something few would be willing to lose. His physical manliness. He meets his brother crippled — and probably not just with his hip out of joint — as we teach it in Sunday School. I mentioned this a few years ago when I preached this text — it’s surprising to me that while you can find this in translations and commentaries, this point is not widely known.

Genesis 32:27–28

So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’

The Hebrew word there is YAREK — thigh, upper thigh, is an assault in his vital organs — his loins. In other passages, YAREK is translated loins — as in Exodus 1:5, the children who were of Jacob’s loins (Yarek) numbered 70.

Jacob is emasculated by this meeting with God. Like Abram becomes Abraham by being circumcised, Jacob receives a new identity as he is marked precisely in the spot where men most feel their power. He is crippled at the place of his virility. (or so I’ve been told)

Hum.

Now that puts a different light on what it means to meet your brother doesn’t it? All your brothers and sisters. Just as I was writing this yesterday I thought how interesting it is that the text tells us so demonstratively how Alpha Male Esau was. Esau’s a hunter, a man of large appetites, rugged and tough; independent minded who marries foreign women against his parents wishes. A man’s man.

The old Jacob dies that night. In that meeting of God — the struggle with himself in the night, the wrestling with the unnamable force in the darkness, Jacob the trickster dies. Jacob will no longer swagger with the confidence of a man in full — he will be sized up and discounted for far away as he lives a cripple in the desert.

“When daylight comes the stranger is gone. And so is Jacob. There remains only Israel. Israel, blessed and named. Israel crippled but blessed who, “looks up and sees Esau coming and four hundred men with him.”

That “Real Jacob, Real God, Real Blessing” was now tied up with “Real Risk. And Real Weakness.

400 men coming his way and Jacob is armed with a blessing and wound.

Do we want peace or do we want to win? Shalom or personal victory? Some days it’s a toss up.

The 20th C. Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, famously wrote that

On the flight home Thursday night.

I stared at the man’s computer bags. And instead of just making sure I was kicking them on occasion — just so he could realize it’s a big inconvenience — I intentionally met God. (In other words — I started to pray)!

And I started to see some things I hadn’t seen before. First I realized there were a couple of ways one could see that foot space in front of me. It appears that might have actually have been shared space.

Okay. That changes a few things a few things. I hadn’t seen the situation from other angles — my view was limited. I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.

(2) Then secondly, and more deeply, I thought about why I was focused on my space in the first place, and I realized that I had worried there was not going to be enough space for his stuff — my stuff (computer bag and purse) — and my feet. There was a risk we were going to run out of room and I had registered that risk as a threat. I was fearful of the risk and so viewed him and his stuff as a threat.

At this point you may think, Dang. She has a little too much time of her hands….

Silly? Yeah. Commonplace? You bet.

This is the stuff of life. This is where peace happens. This is where the encounter of the sacred task of meeting God and the sacred moment of meeting our sister is connected.

SLIDE

As Jacob says so beautifully: Truly to see your face is to see the face of God.

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in our pursuit of peace.

Here’s what I’m leaning — peace starts really small. Peace isn’t the destination. It’s also the way. It’s not where you are walking but the way you are walking to get there. Peace begins in both blessing and humility.

The organizers of this conference put me up at the home of a couple from

Solomon’s Porch — the church hosting this event. Amber and Ben are in their late 30’s or so, who until recently had spent the married life doing aid and relief in Syria for the Mennonite Central Committee. They left in 2012 when it was no longer safe for them.

Their home in Damascus has been destroyed. The schools they helped have been leveled to dust; the families scattered.

“We have watched our life’s work disappear,” Ben said. “We’ve realized that all of the big accomplishments wasn’t what it was all about. Amber helped a man on the bus one day — he needed to get somewhere and buy some supplies and she spent a few hours assisting him. He thanked her saying, “I never thought Americans — Christians — were like this.” So perhaps that one guy changed his mind about us and Christ.

When we left we came back to Minneapolis, and decided that for right now we are going to live locally. That peace is made right here — as we do life with our neighbors and get involved in our kids schools and invest ourselves in our church community.”

This isn’t an announcement about Foreign Ministry Efforts –don’t misunderstand — it’s a call that the things that make for peace are right here. In front of us — where we live, who are neighbors are, who is sitting behind you — in class, at work, even on the airplane.

Jacob and his brother Esau leave their encounter peacefully. Respectfully.

They will reside in different places and at least in the text, they will have no real interaction again until they come together to bury their father Isaac. This is also true isn’t it? To live in peace doesn’t mean you have to set up house next to the other — or feign a relationship that is not there — it simply means you walk lightly from a place of blessedness and humility.

The image of the wounded Israel limping out in weakness to meet his brother becomes the defining face of a nation. This weakness that brands a life with the power of God will come into full view generations later. When another man will walk out to reconcile with the enemies of God.

The very Son of God, who “had no form or majesty that we should look at him. Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity. One from whom others hid their faces, he was despised and we held him of no account,” This man will be the one who will change the history of the world.

He will create peace without violence; he will win without dominating and he will show the world the greatest demonstration of power by willingly going to the cross to show us the reach of God’s love.