You Never Leave The Past Behind

Check out Mara O’Kelly & Jody Sinkway’s version of Give Me Jesus. Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland to follow on Genesis 32: 22 – 31.  The Focus is on Jacob wrestling with God and how our past never completely remains the past.

The name Jacob means “one who usurps the place of another.” And that’s exactly what he did, at his mother’s urging; he tricked his father Isaac into blessing him instead of his older brother Esau. And when you read his life story you quickly see that his whole life is based on deceiving or being deceived by others.

Our text picks up twenty years after he stole his brother’s birthright. And this is to be his first meeting since he had to flee for his life. And no doubt ringing loud and clear in his memory were the last words his mother said to him as he fled from home. “Behold, your brother Esau comforts himself by planning to kill you.” (Genesis 27: 42b)

So on the eve of this momentous meeting with his brother, who has become a mighty warrior and tribal leader in his own right, realizing that there is nowhere else to run he does what he has always done. He tries to usurp his brother’s anger with three waves of presents, “for he thought, ‘I may appease him with the present that goes before me, and afterwards I shall see his face; perhaps (then) he will accept me.”

Now after all the material presents have gone on toward Esau the last gift he sends Esau’s way are his two wives Leah & Rachel and his eleven children. And after all of that he was left all alone on the banks of the Jabok River.

After twenty years on the run, Jacob is finally alone with the one adversary that he can’t usurp or run from and that is God. Up to this point Jacob had heard God speak to him on many occasions, but he had not accepted the God of his ancestors as his own. For Jacob it was always the God of my father and grandfather, but not my God. And for Jacob it was always, if you do this for me then I’ll consider having you as my God.

Well that was all about to change, because Jacob was about to have what we would call a mid-life crisis. And this would mark and change Jacob in certain ways for the second half of his life.

Whether it was fear or guilt that brought Jacob into this wrestling match there was nothing he could do to avoid it. At some point we all have to face our fears, our remorse and look at who we really are. And there is no one who can do it for us so we are left alone, like Jacob, to do business with ourselves and to wrestle with God.

From the Biblical perspective conflict and struggle are what make life – life. Struggle is not only normal; it is meaningful, because in it God shapes us.

An old Chinese proverb speaks of life crises as dangerous opportunities. Dangerous, because such crises never leave us as they found us. But from the perspective of this story, they can be seen as the occasion by which God forges our new identity on the anvil of struggle. Like Jacob, we have little choice over the hand that life deals us, but we do have a choice as to how we play it. So Jacob does what he has to, he wrestle’s this man/god to a stalemate and gets and receives something from his encounter. He receives a new name.

No longer is his name to be Jacob the usurper, it is now to be Israel which means, “He who strives with God.” And this name increasingly becomes who he is in relation to God and his family in the second half of his life.

After this wrestling match Jacob no longer takes what he wants by deceit. And after seeing God face to face he finally takes the God of his forefathers as his own. But even after he receives this new blessing he still carries his past into his present.

After receiving this new name and identity from God you’d expect that he’d be called by that name from this point on, but that’s not what happens God calls him Jacob, his old name, rarely referring to him as Israel until the day he dies.

When God renames a person in the Bible it’s a big deal. After Abram was renamed Abraham God never called him Abram again. After Saul’s conversion God renamed him Paul and God never called him Saul again. So it’s no accident that God rarely refers to Jacob as Israel.

Why do think that is?

Think about conversion experiences. They are real, but what we always assume is that they change a person so completely as to be totally unrecognizable to us, but for the vast majority of us, conversion usually comes as the German theologian Jurgen Moltman said of Jacob’s crisis and others like it.

No lifestyle is valid for all times and all generations. Every lifestyle has its own time and its own term. Every life crisis is always also a crisis of lifestyle. During such crises we note that our (way) of life up to this point in time can no longer assimilate and express the new experiences, which we are having, but neither can we completely leave behind what we’ve experienced.

In Jacob’s case how he had lived the first half of his life still had influence on how he viewed life. After the conversion he no longer lived his life by trickery and deceit, but that way of living life still influenced how he viewed life.

For example, in the next scene Jacob is reunited with Esau who completely forgives his brother and is overjoyed to be with him after all these years. This of course is not what Jacob expects, Jacob has lived his whole life until this moment by tricking and being tricked by family members. As a result when Esau asks Jacob to journey with him Jacob sees it as a potential trick and tells Esau to go on ahead and meet him in the city of Seir. But Jacob never shows up in Seir. Instead Jacob goes off to the city of Shechem. And the two will not meet again until their mother Rebecca dies and they join their father Isaac to bury her.

And even though God has renamed him Israel, God still calls him Jacob because he still sees the world as a deceitful place. He has lived so long with deceit that he has no room for trust and still relies on his own wits to get by. And if you live life long enough in this manner you create an outlook on life that you cannot break out of.

And just as his mother – Rebecca, had helped Jacob trick Esau out of his birthright, Jacob’s sons will sell their youngest brother into slavery and tell Jacob that he was killed by wild animals. It won’t be until Jacob is laying on death bed that he will learn that his favorite son Joseph is not only alive but is also the Prime Minister of Egypt.

If there is anything to learn from this story it’s that God does not erase our past. How we’ve lived our lives will have an influence on how we view life and on how life will tend to treat us. But its also true that God will not divorce us.

It seems that the God of our ancestors tends to extend the divine blessing to those bold enough to wrestle with God and with themselves. Maybe that’s why Luther said, “Sin boldly, but believe more boldly still.” There may be a price to pay for our actions, but then again, God has already paid the final bill. Amen