Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's October 9, 2005 Sunday worship service.

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Jacob’s Limp

Hebrews 4:12-16, Genesis 32:22-32

Bethel 10/9/05

The Reverend Marc Sherrod, ThD

Perhaps you took a little self-test, courtesy of the Knoxville News Sentinel, yesterday when you opened the Faith and Family Section. There is a new high school textbook, published through the Bible Literacy Project and funded by the John Templeton Foundation, that just might make it through the culture wars unscathed. The modestly titled book, The Bible and Its Influence, was designed to satisfy all parties involved in the always heated debate about the Bible in public schools, and has, apparently, received the endorsement of such diverse groups as first Amendment experts, the American Jewish Congress and the National Association of Evangelicals. Although I confess I haven’t seen the book yet, it may, indeed, model a non-sectarian methodology for teaching the Bible in public schools. Which, I believe, would be a good thing. But now, to the two questions: “Who asked, ‘ Am I my brother’s keeper?’” And, “What happened on the road to Damascus?” Apparently, a third of teenagers in a Gallup poll got the questions right (although not necessarily the same third), a percentage I must confess is higher than my cynical self would have imagined.

It would have been interesting to have posed those two questions on the first day of my introductory class on the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible, to be politically correct) that I am teaching at Maryville College this term, or even to pose the test to you, to see how well both audiences might score and if, indeed you could beat the 1/3 poll rate testing biblical literacy. Since I think the multiple choice question is far too easy, I almost never give my Maryville students this kind of quiz as the News-Sentinel article did, but I’ll give you the choices: Cain, Noah, Abel, or King David, and for the second question, Jesus was crucified, Mary met an angel of the Lord, St. Paul was blinded by a vision from God, and Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. And if you got the right answer, could you take it a step further and name the book of the Bible, even the chapter, where that verse is recorded?

I am certain that one of the assumptions that drives the Bible Literacy Project is the belief that the Bible is supposed to be a book for everyone. But in truth, much of the Bible is notoriously difficult to follow and comprehend. So far in my class at Maryville, we have read the entirety of the Books of Genesis and Exodus, large chunks of Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges. Besides shocking them with the news that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are basically mythological stories purporting to describe universal human origins, that Moses did not actually write the first five books of the Bible, and that there’s a good chance the earliest Hebrew people were polytheists, not monotheists, as most people assume – besides all of that, many of the Christian students have been forced to try and reconcile their vision of Jesus with some pretty awful stuff God ordered his people to do.

Just last Thursday, for instance, we looked in the Book of Joshua at the story of a hapless Israelite named Achan (now there’s someone you probably never heard of) who, when the Israelites supposedly conquered the city of Jericho after their purported 40 years of wilderness wanderings, Achan took a little plunder for himself. But, God, in a kind of holy jihad, had ordered everyone who lived in Jericho (men, women, children) and every bit of the city, including all the animals, everyone and everything to be utterly and completely destroyed, so when Achan tucked away a shawl and some jewelry as booty, he violated the divine mandate and thus prevented the Israelites from military success with the next city they were supposed to conquer. When God realized what had happened, Joshua took Achan and his whole family and all of his cattle and sheep out into a field and had them all stoned to death. Now, that’s a side of God we don’t usually associate with Jesus or the church. But, there it is, in holy writ.

If we stop and think about it, it can be quite shocking to read about the behavior of the people of God, not to mention what God sometimes commands his people to do.

One of the first stories I mentioned this year in class is an episode from the collection of ancestral sagas about Jacob. In Genesis 32, Jacob has a quite strange encounter down by the Jabbock River: is it a man, an angel or the deity himself who appears to Jacob in the night? The end result of what I take to be an appearance of the divine presence is that Jacob is given a new name, the name Israel. Whether this event really happened, we’ll never know for sure, but it is there and is important in the biblical narratives, I tell my students, because it is a story that provided the origin of Israel’s name as a nation, (Jacob called Israel), the one who supplies the 12 sons who become the 12 tribes, thus serving a critical purpose in national memory and religious consciousness and self-identity. The story even includes the little detail from the night’s wrestling match that Jacob’s hip was struck and put out of joint and, apparently, would never completely heal. The reader is to understand that Jacob spent the rest of his life walking with a limp.

Now, if the classroom were a homiletic and less of an academic opportunity, I would tell my students, what is to most of them, the shocking news, that far from a holy text filled with saints and heroes and do-gooders, the Bible is actually full of people who make mistakes a’plenty, who limp their way through life.

Perhaps the story of Jacob’s limp is the best known, but so many in holy writ, of all ages and of all circumstances, had their legs taken out from under them because God got mad and even, or a family member sought revenge, or they had to pass a cruel test like the time Jacob’s father Isaac, when Isaac was a boy, was almost burned alive on the sacrificial altar by Abraham, his father. Child sacrifice is not something a society usually condones, but there it is in scripture, and one wonders if Abraham, after almost cutting his young son’s throat, possibly staggered his way through what was left of his old age.

And even more than individuals who can’t seem to walk straight, the Bible is populated with veritable scoundrels. Which takes us right back to Jacob. He heads the list of scoundrels. His name, in case you’ve forgotten, in Hebrew, means “trickster.” Jacob, you’ll recall, was the fair-skinned guy who, disguised beneath a goatskin, slyly swipes his elder brother’s rightful inheritance. Esau, his hunter-brother, has been out dutifully fetching some fresh meat for their aged Father Isaac, who is on his deathbed, now ready to give the all-important ritual blessing to the oldest son. But Jacob, with a little help from his mother, Rebekah, slips one past the old man and steals the blessing meant for Esau. An angry Esau hears about it and plans to kill his uppity brother, but Rebekah intervenes and sends Jacob north to her people in the land of Haran, away from the land of Canaan where Jacob has lived all of his life.

Once safely in Haran, however, Jacob gets his comeuppance a bit when, after falling in love with his first cousin, Rachel, and working seven years for permission to have her as his wife, his devious father-in-law Laban delivers the wrong woman, his beloved Rachel’s older sister, Leah, to the marriage bed. Although he duly protested the deception, Jacob, had to work another seven years until he finally secures Rachel as his second wife.

Jacob, as one author puts it, “twice cheated his lame-brained brother Esau out of what was coming to him. At least once he took advantage of his old father . . . . He out-did his double-crossing father-in-law, Laban, by conning him out of most of his livestock, and later on, when Laban was looking the other way, by sneaking off with not only the man’s daughters but just about everything else that wasn’t nailed down including Laban’s household gods. Jacob was never satisfied. He wanted the moon, and if he’d ever managed to bilk heaven out of that, he would have been back the next morning for the stars to go with it” (Peculiar Treasures, 56).

How can it be that Jacob should serve as a model for how God wants people to behave and live?

Forced to flee from Haran and the wrath of his Uncle Laban, Jacob must head back toward home, which, of course, is the place where Esau lived. Jacob, all alone, and sweating bullets knows that the next day is the day he must face the music, even though it has been many years since he first pulled the rug out from under Esau.

Jacob finally beds down for the night by the Jabbok River. And, in the course of that fitful night, a night with sundown dreams of past transgressions and nightmares of Esau’s revenge at sunrise, Jacob grapples through the darkness with a phantom – a man or an angel, perhaps, or even God – a wrestling match that leaves him with a bum leg.

It was a long night, there on the bank of the Jabbok. At sunrise, if you know the rest of the story, you know that Jacob was grateful to discover that Esau didn’t bear a grudge and hate him, after all. Nonetheless, having been singed by the fiery presence of the deity, Jacob’s swagger now had a decidedly less confidant gate. And although he did wrestle a blessing from that unknown presence just before the sun came up, the stranger had put his thigh out of joint, and Jacob’s limp was to last a lifetime.

What Jacob and all of his kin, which is to say Jacob and all the people of the Bible, which is to say Jacob and all of us, have in common is that, we, too, have our nights of testing, nights of bargaining -- begging God for a second chance.

Like Jacob, we all are running from something, and the great truth when we read the Bible -- if we read enough of it, if read closely enough, if read with enough imagination and conviction – the truth for all of us is that we will eventually see ourselves mirrored on the pages of that old, old story.

That is what I believe happened to Jacob that night by the Jabbock. He finally, for once, came to terms with the limits of his own humanity.

We can call it religion, call it spirituality, call it seeking meaning and value, but at its essence, whatever we call it, it is our own autobiography. With each turn of the page, we face anew that strange paradox of divine election and human freedom, the wrestling match that neither Jacob nor the rest of us can finally win.

Open the opening pages of holy writ, for instance, and see for yourself that our story is the story of that first garden. Like Adam and Eve, we hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the cool of the day, and we hide because we are ashamed of what we have done, or in some cases, what we have not done. We, too, know the foolishness of pride and the sorry state of our naked shame.

Flip a few pages more and we see disbelieving barren old women who end up laughing in God’s face; we see a mother and child who for no good reason get banished into the desert to die but who are not forgotten by God; we see jealous and vengeful brothers who will do anything to hide their mistakes, and that’s only the first handful of pages of book shot full of similar stories.

If the Bible is to be our story, then our story is the story of every scoundrel, every cheater, every fickle follower who populates the pages of the Good Book.

And if our story sounds hopeless, that’s because it is. Almost. But there is one other story. We heard it also today. The great high priest who sympathizes with every human weakness, and what’s more, the one has been tested in every way, and not found wanting.

What you do with that story is, of course, up to you. But when the deity comes and wrestles you to the ground, know that another has already passed the test and knows what it is you’re going through.

If religion, at bottom is autobiography, and I believe that is so, then we each have to decide what story it is that we’re going to tell, if not tell to anyone else, at least tell to ourselves, or tell to that strange presence who comes at us in the night.

There was an old TV public service automobile safety commercial that encouraged the public to “buckle up.” The line at the end of the commercial that has always stayed with me is this: THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN. A recent book that takes that line, The Life you Save May be your Own as its title, looks at the world of four 20^th century American Christian Catholic writers, the social activist Dorothy Day, the novelist Walker Percy, the trappist monk Thomas Merton, and the southern fiction writer Flannery O’Connor and traces how spiritual autobiography and the nature of Christian pilgrimage mingle in their literary world. Each, in their own way, wrestled with the God who makes us all limp, and lived to write about it. The author of The Life you Save May be your Own closes his book with these thoughts: “As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs. . . . .Like it or not, we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours. . . . The life you save may be your own” (p.472).

Like Jacob and his kin, perhaps you too are a pilgrim, on a journey to find God, trying as best you can to save your own life. Rest assured, you have a great high priest who knows what you’re going through and who can sympathize with all of your weaknesses. I, too, am a pilgrim. If you look for me, check somewhere toward the back of the pack. Like Jacob, I’m the guy with a limp. Amen.