Proper 24
October 16, 2016 Roger Ray,
pastor
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
“A Fearless and Searching
Inventory”
Genesis
32:22-28 22The same
night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children,
and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise
everything that he had.
24Jacob was left alone; and a man
wrestled with him until daybreak.25When 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. 26Then he said, “Let me go, for the
day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless
me.” 27So he said to him, “What is your
name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for
you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”
New seminary students
often struggle with the use of the word “myth” in religious studies. In common
parlance, we call something a myth when it simply isn’t true, when it is
apocryphal, or just straight up a lie. People use the term disparagingly, like
when we say that the “American dream is a myth.” Or, it is a synonym for a lie,
like when a reasonable person recognizes that everything Dr. Oz says about the
weight loss wonders of his diet products is a myth.
But that is not how
we use the word in religious circles. We are aware that there are stories that
are repeated in religious books and communities that are not necessarily
historical or even factual but the story expresses a truth, an awareness, an
insight, that helps the religious community to understand life and to define
themselves.
Marcus Borg liked to
use the illustration of a Native American story teller who began his story
saying: "Now I don’t know if it happened this way or
not, but I know this story is true."
The matriarchal and patriarchal
stories in the Old Testament about Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel,
are not historical but they are myths that helped the ancient Hebrews to
understand themselves.
The same was true of other
cultures. The myths of ancient Greece and Rome, though they were not
historically or factually true, conveyed so much truth about life that we often
use the names of characters in these myths to describe psychological
conditions. The stories of Oedipus and Electra, give us our Oedipal and Electra
complex diagnoses. The story of Narcissus gives us the word Narcissism, and
there are several medical terms also drawn from the same body of ancient
literature.
You find a lot of psychological
insight buried in literature that predates any actual science of psychology by
hundreds of years. Five hundred years ago William Shakespeare was indisputably
brilliant for describing characters whose flaws and mental defects we all could
recognize in the people who used to bug us in school.
The passage we read this morning
from Genesis chapter 32, the story of Jacob wrestling through the night with
some mysterious figure is one of my favorite myths. I won’t bore you with all
of the Sunday School details of how Jacob had gotten sideways with his father,
his brother, his father-in-law, and had given him perfectly good reason to
believe that many people close to him might just be mad enough at him to kill
him on sight, but suffice it to say that he was a fairly bright guy who had
done some dumb things and he was, after many years, going home to face the
music.
Traveling in a large caravan, he
sent his wives, children, servants, and flocks ahead of him and he spent the
night before returning home himself all alone in the wilderness. This could be
called “the dark night of the soul” in another century but the ancient authors
who composed this myth created a mythic alter ego character.
In fact, it appears that the myth
was passed along in several different forms.
On the one hand, the text says that he wrestled with a man. But then the
man demands that he let him go before the sun comes up, which would imply that
it was a demon. But in the final analysis, his refusal to say his while giving
Jacob a new name, implies that Jacob has been wrestling with God.
Ironically, artists often depict
this battle as Jacob wrestling with a winged angel. Elements of all of these different versions
are echoed in the redacted version we have in our modern Bibles. I suspect that the most ancient version would
have said that he was wrestling a demon since the ancient Canaanites believed
that demons lived in the wilderness, but later editors were not happy with
Israel getting its name from a demon so that spruced up the final version a
bit.
But, as I said, this is a myth.
Jacob is probably an invented literary character but even if Jacob is
historical, he certainly didn’t wrestle all night with a demon, an angel, or a
god. But the story becomes important to later generations because it does
embody our own experience of having to come to terms with ourselves. Jacob was
literally wrestling with his conscience, his mortality, the meaning of his own
existence. Was he a good man or a bad man? Had he been a good husband and
father?
Could he be forgiven for cheating
his brother out of their shared estate? Could he be excused for stealing from
his father-in-law since his father-in-law had tricked and exploited him?
All of those other myths I
mentioned, all of Shakespeare’s dramas, we use to diagnose other people, to
categorize their mental issues or character flaws. This story about Jacob
having to come to terms with his own flaws is different and powerful. He walks
away from this dark night with two things, a limp and a new name.
The permanent limp symbolizes the
fact that not only are we all flawed but we can’t entirely escape the things we
have done wrong. The wounds become the scars that travel with us. The new name
represents the fact that we can change, we can grow and become something new.
One of the things I love the most
about the Alcoholics Anonymous program is the spiritual insight of the 12
steps… and those insights are not much loved by a lot of the people who really
really need the program. That’s why you see TV ads for very expensive recovery
programs that say that they are not 12 step programs because a whole lot of
folks are way too narcissistic to ever go through what the steps require of a
person who wants to regain their sanity and their health along with their
sobriety.
You will hear people in A.A.
talking about making their 4th step and to the uninitiated that may
sound like a rank or a reference to a period of sobriety, but, in fact, the 4th
step is after you had admitted that you have a problem and decided to seek the
spiritual strength to regain your sobriety, then you are asked to make a
fearless and searching inventory of yourself.
I’ve sat through lots of meetings
with church members as they began their journey of recovery and listened as the
old heads in the meeting would guide a newcomer back onto path by reminding
them that they are to take a fearless and searching inventory of themselves….
They give one another fairly little latitude to take anyone else’s inventory.
They don’t let people talk about their wicked spouse, their unfeeling or
violent parents, their mean boss, or the stupid government.
That doesn’t mean that no one
ever had abusive parents, or a really deranged spouse, or unfair employers,
siblings, nor is it to deny that the government, the economy, the university,
or the universe itself is not unfair. It is just that cataloging all of those
things usually makes us sicker and if we want to get well we have to take a
fearless and searching inventory of our own part in the melodrama that is our
lives.
Gandhi once said, “No one can
hurt me without my permission.” Now I know that you can immediately start to
come up with objections to that saying and you and I both can list any number
of times that we were blindsided and hurt by someone we trusted that we had
never given permission to do us harm. But this is one of those proverbs you need
to sit with for a while, like watching your teabag turn a cup of hot water into
a cup of tea…. Let it simmer, be still, and let it seep in…. no one can really
hurt you, not in a way that really counts, unless you are somehow helping them
to hurt you.
You may need to just dismiss what
I’m saying today and I’m OK with that. But let me ask this of you. The next
time you are lying awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to go to sleep,
mulling over some past hurt, some life crisis, would you take just a moment to
remember what I said today about the dark night of the soul… that no one can
really hurt you unless you have somehow given them your permission to do so….
Take a stab at making a fearless and searching inventory of your own failings.
Don’t feel like you have to call
me at that hour to tell me how it’s going…. I’ve been there; I know what it
feels like. The ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus, a contemporary of Plato
and Sophocles, wrote: “Even
in our sleep, pain we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until,
in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
You might be the best and smartest judge in the
world but you will not find the happiness you seek through judging others. You
may be the only one who really knows what all is wrong with government,
religion, banking, the economy, the environment, and you might have a bead on
all of the faults of other races, genders, and nations but there is only one
person you can wrestle until daybreak who will actually bless you and that is
the person you have been the least likely to judge, the one that is the hardest
to be honest with, and the one most likely to make you limp after the
encounter.
And my most sincere apologies to those who
thought religion was supposed to just be comforting.
