Good morning. It is good to be with you today. This is my second time here at Vine Street, in a way. The first time was, I think, 24 years ago—maybe 23 years ago—when I was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and one of my good friends, Brian Frederick, was your intern. Brian, who is now the Reverend Brian Frederick Gray, said he knew where there was a basketball hoop where we could play. So, a bunch of us came over here, and we played basketball in your parking lot one day, and it was great. So, thank you for that.
But in the time I lived here, I never did make it to Vine Street for church. I was not, as far as Divinity School students go, very churchgoing. And while I was in school, my wife worked at Woodmont, actually, in the front office. So, when we did go to church, we would go there. But over the years, I have heard—as Paul would often say of congregations—I have heard of the good things and the vitality that happens in this congregation, and I have known about the faithfulness of this community. So, it is a real honor and privilege to be here with you today among all of you, and I’m grateful for the invitation.
Would you pray with me for a moment?
God who travels with us always, be with us here and now, and be in our words, and be in our thoughts, and be in our spirits. Amen.
Here’s a little glimpse into my biography. When I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to begin divinity school in the fall of the year 2000, the moving truck that I unloaded at Disciples Divinity House in Nashville I had loaded at an evangelical summer camp in North Carolina. I had been on staff all that summer, as I had for six summers before that, at a camp run by a famous evangelist you have definitely heard of before—or maybe you even once went to one of his crusades. And I moved out of staff housing at that camp, and later that same day, I ended up at Vanderbilt.
And if you know anything about the evangelical world, and if you know Vanderbilt Divinity School, then you know that that was quite a transition. And maybe some of you have lived through a transition like that one. Maybe you grew up in a conservative Christian setting. Or maybe, like me, you were swept up in the evangelical fervor of the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe, like me, you just grew up in the South, where everyone is at least a little bit Southern Baptist whether they say so or not. At least that was my experience.
So, that transition—from the evangelical summer camp to Divinity School, that movement from the heart of conservative American Christianity to the progressive edge of mainline Protestantism—for me, that was a pretty dramatic ride. Although I have ended up in a very different place in my life, there are many things I appreciated about my time in the evangelical world. Although it is not my spiritual or religious home anymore, I still appreciate many of the ways I was invited into faithfulness in that place and time.
I felt invited into having a personal relationship with God, and often that was good. I felt invited into an emotional connection to worship with praise songs and altar calls, and there were times when I really appreciated that way of connecting with God. I often felt invited to think of myself as a servant of God—as someone who was called and sent to do God’s work—and I saw a lot of value in thinking and feeling that way.
But there was one thing that I never felt very much of in those evangelical days. There was one thing that I never felt myself invited to do, and it’s connected to our scripture for today. In those evangelical days, I never felt invited to wrestle with God.
Now, if you are a close reader of scripture, you may be objecting just now to the idea that this passage from Genesis is a story about wrestling with God. After all, in verse 24, it says quite plainly that “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” But later in the passage, in verse 30, Jacob says, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” And actually, in a different part of the Bible, in Hosea 12, it says there that Jacob wrestled with God that night. And it also says that he wrestled with an angel. So, it might have been a man, and it might have been an angel, but I think it was God in one form or another.
I think it was God that Jacob wrestled with there by the banks of the Jabbok River. And Jacob wrestled God to a draw, which is, I think, some pretty good wrestling.
I think one of the reasons I never felt very welcome to wrestle with God when I was an evangelical is that we had this model of God as a totally other kind of being. We had this notion of God as a wholly different thing than us—as unapproachable and totally perfect. We had this idea of God as a kind of flawless repository of all the unimpeachable morality of the universe, and that God’s role was to demand that same flawlessness of the rest of us and to punish us when we somehow did not manage to be perfect.
You cannot wrestle with someone like that. You cannot contend with a perfect and flawless being. If you ever find yourselves at odds with a God like that, we thought—if you ever find yourselves at odds with God—you are wrong. And you’d better admit it as quickly as you can and hope that God will forgive you of your wrongness. If you ever find yourself sideways with that kind of God, there’s nothing you can do except acknowledge your own fallen depravity and beg that perfect God for mercy.
I did feel invited to do that. I did feel invited to name my own sinfulness and acknowledge my inadequacy before God. And I did feel invited to understand that only the blood and sacrifice of Jesus could ever make me right with God. But I never felt like I was allowed to wrestle.
It turns out, though, I think that God likes to wrestle. That’s what I wish someone had told me back then. That’s what I wish I’d known. That’s what I wish someone had given me permission to do. I wish I had understood that our God is a wrestling kind of God.
The Bible is full of stories of people contending with God, grappling with God. And more often than you might think, the Bible is full of stories of people wrestling with God to a draw, at least metaphorically. Abraham wrestles with God over the fate of Sodom. Abraham talks God down in a long negotiation, and in the end, Abraham convinces God to at least spare his nephew Lot. Moses wrestles with God over the fate of Israel and convinces God not to destroy them. Another time, when God promised destruction, a king named Ahab was able to convince God to postpone the disaster by his demonstrations of repentance.
And of course, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was wrestling with God and with his own fate. And there are stories of others—others like Paul and Elijah and Jonah—others who went a few rounds with God on the way to accepting and carrying out their callings. Taken as a whole, the stories from the Bible suggest to me that God not only tolerates wrestling but that God actually appreciates it when we engage—that God actually likes the feeling of contending and grappling with human beings. That God might actually prefer a good wrestling match from time to time.
What does it mean to wrestle with God? Most of us do not get an experience like the one Jacob had. Most of us are not ambushed by a divine figure looking for a late-night scrap. Most of us do not meet God face to face. Instead, most of us encounter God through the Bible, and we encounter God through our traditions and through our communities and through God’s wide world. For most of us, the wrestling does not happen by a river at night, but instead, it happens in the living of our lives and the ways we find ourselves confronted by the hard realities of the world.
For most of us, the wrestling happens in the ways we live through the easy times and the hard times. We look to the Bible, and we find beautiful things there, and we find hard things there too. And I think we are called to wrestle with them both—to grapple with the ways God speaks through scripture. We look to our churches, and we find the intense joys of common purpose and shared community, and we also find hurt and pain and disillusionment. And I think we are called to wrestle with our institutions and the way God shows up in them—or doesn’t.
We wrestle with God while we are stuck in traffic and while we’re sitting in hospital waiting rooms. We wrestle with God when we see the day’s headlines. And we wrestle with God in relationships we share with other people. Most of us never get a moment of clarity like the moment that Jacob must have had alone there by the Jabbok River, striving all night with divinity in the dark. But most of us do get our share of long nights. Most of us do find ourselves locking arms with God at one point or another and trying to wrestle with the biggest thing we know how to name.
This morning in the Sunday School hour, we talked about another passage from this week’s lectionary—not this passage from Genesis, but one from Second Timothy. Some of you were there for that, but if you weren’t there, you might recognize the passage anyway. It’s the one that says, in most translations, that all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
That passage—and that verse in particular—has been cited as evidence that we should not wrestle with God. That verse has been quoted as a way to shut down any attempt to wrestle with the God we find in scripture. After all, if all scripture is inspired by God and useful, then anything we might have to say about it would be irrelevant anyway, wouldn’t it? That’s what they told me anyway in my evangelical days: any response or interpretation we might have of scripture would be beside the point, because it has already been decided for us. In that way of seeing things, all scripture is inspired by God, and wrestling with scripture can only take you in the wrong direction.
But this morning in the Sunday School hour, we talked about another translation of that verse. We talked about another possible way to understand that passage, and that way reads that “every scripture that is inspired by God is useful.” Every scripture that is inspired by God is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training. And when you put it that way—when you say that every scripture that is inspired is useful, instead of all scripture is inspired by God—the verse no longer reads like it’s scolding you for asking a question. Instead, the verse becomes an invitation to wrestle.
When you translate it that way, that part of Second Timothy turns into an invitation to grapple with the Bible and with the God who is known in the Bible. And it becomes an invitation to the faithful discernment of how God has inspired the writings that have come down to us today.
Jacob wrestled with God through a long night, all the way until the first streaks of light began to show over the river to the east—until neither of them could prevail. Jacob wrestled with God all the way to a daybreak draw. And as the sun began to rise, God asked Jacob to release his grip. God asked Jacob to let God go. And audaciously, Jacob would not do it until God blessed him.
This is, by the way, one of the reasons scholars think that Jacob was wrestling with God in the story and not just a man—because there are many stories from that time and place of divine beings that only appear at night and cannot be caught out in the daylight. So, God gives Jacob a blessing, and God gives Jacob a name. God gives Jacob a new name to mark his time of wrestling because, God says, Jacob had striven with God and with humans and prevailed. And two verses later, Jacob says of the experience, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.”
That, I think, is the lesson here. That is the thing we are meant to understand. And that is the thing I was never invited to know in my evangelical days: that wrestling with God is not only permitted but invited. That grappling with God is not only survivable but it is life-changing.
Our God is not a God of power trips and punishments for questions. Our God is not some perfect and changeless being off on a cloud somewhere. Our God is a wrestling God. Our God welcomes your most strenuous striving. Our God greets your questions and your contention. And our God respects your wrestling at daybreak when the long night is through. And our God, perhaps, even rewards you for all your struggle—with a new way to call yourself and with a renewed life to live.
So, friends, do not be afraid of wrestling, and do not be afraid of God. But when those long nights come, meet God in the darkness and wrestle there until the soft dawn breaks again. Amen.