Transformed in Blessing

The most important thing we miss from our sanitized view of God is what is described in our story of Jacob this morning. We meet Jacob, the great deceiver, preparing to go back home after originally running away over 20 years ago because he stole his father’s blessing from his brother Esau. Jacob fled for his life when Esau found out and last week we read about how he had occupied most of his time while he was on the lam. When we meet back up with Jacob in this week’s reading, he has eleven children from four different wives as well as a large portion of his Uncle’s livestock and possessions. He is traveling by night, worried about meeting his brother again; whom he has heard is bringing 400 men to meet him on the way home. After he first gets his livestock and then possessions across the river Jabbok, Jacob is left alone in the night to commune with God. Alone in the wilderness, he enters into a struggle with a divine figure and wrestles with him the entire night. As morning approaches, the divine figure wishes to depart so he touches Jacob’s leg and causes some sort of injury. Not giving up, Jacob demands a blessing from the figure and it isn’t until Jacob receives that blessing and has his name changed that Jacob lets him leave.

The picture the Bible paints is one of Jacob, sitting alone, afraid in the dark in a deserted desert wilderness. Jacob does not know what will happen next and the anxiety of this cross-rode in his life is almost too much to bear. Jacob groans in an agony too deep for words to God to keep him safe and keep his covenant with him. The response is not something that Jacob had expected. This is the clearest part of the bible that reveals that our relationship with God is not merely some passive acceptance of Love and Grace but also a struggle and continual battle negotiating with God to keep God’s promises. Just as Jacob struggles hand-to-hand, body-to-body with this divine figure, so too are we in an intimate relationship with God in which God comes down to our level and treats us as equals. God gets messy with us in our daily lives and it is in this struggle for blessing that we are transformed. Life is scary and seemingly chaotic at times, it is painful and sometimes filled with a suffering that cannot be simply wished away or gotten rid of through positive thinking. In this summer alone we have seen the shocking massacre of children in Norway, an eight year old Hasidic boy dismembered in Brooklyn, our country on the verge on economic collapse because of defaulting on debt, storms and wild-fires, earthquakes and tsunamis and on and on. It is the messiness and dirtiness of the created world around us in all of its infinite possibilities that we walk with God, wrestle with God, sing and dance with God and struggle to find a way.

It is in the midst of the messiness of life that we find Jesus in our Gospel reading today. Jesus has just gotten news of the slaughter of John the Baptist at the hands of the Roman authorities. In his despair and anxiety he, much like Jacob, retreats to a secluded wilderness location to commune with God. Out in the middle of this no-mans-land Jesus and the disciples discover that a large crowd has followed them. We all know what happens next, the disciples get concerned about the hungry crowd and Jesus preforms a miracle and feeds them all. What I think we miss in this story because we might focus too much on the miracle itself and how it may or may not have happened within the bounds of physical reality, what I think we miss is the fact that Jesus doesn’t enact this miracle. It is the disciples and the people that make this miracle happen. Once Jesus blesses and breaks the bread and fishes, it are the people in the crowd and the disciples that continue to break the bread and make it increase. It is by the work of human hands that all these people are fed.

Jesus in his despair over John the Baptist’s death struggles with God and himself about what it means to be in relationship with humanity. The response that we get is not a formulaic, impersonal, and transcendent response were a deity sees that people are hungry so this deity provides food. No, the miracle happens not because the people are hungry but because Jesus has compassion for the people and the people respond to that compassion by working together in community to enact it with those around them. Jesus desires to be in an intimate relationship with all of humanity even during the times of suffering and struggle.

It is this intimate relationship with God and the deep connectedness and struggle that we experience as we negotiate this life of ours with God that we miss if try to sanitize our view of God too much. Paul himself struggles with the seeming dichotomy we see between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel as revealed in Jesus Christ. In our epistle reading today, we see how much Paul struggles trying to put together the fact that God has made a promise to the ethnic group known as the Israelites and the fact that God as revealed through Christ seems to be breaking all ethnic covenantal boundaries. Paul asks himself if God’s promises have failed because not the entire nation of Israel has accepted the messiah as Jesus of Nazareth. Paul goes so far in his struggle to reconcile his tradition as a Jew and a Christian to say he would rather burn in hell that to follow a God who’s promises have failed. Paul right there is negotiating with God, demanding of God to keep God’s promises.

While many Christians throughout history have misinterpreted what Paul is saying and enacted anti-Semitic programs and even killed many Jews based on their false belief that the Gospel and covenant setup by Christ had somehow replaced God’s original covenant with the people is Israel, Paul himself finally comes to the conclusion that we Christians have not replaced the vine that God has planted but rather been grafted into the vine as a new off-shoot and a new covenant part of an already thriving and flourishing covenant.

It is this covenant, this intimate relationship that we struggle with and negotiate with God each day. The struggle will not leave us unchanged. Like Jacob we may limp for the rest of our lives because of the struggle but in the end what we have is a blessing and promise of God to be in an intimate relationship with us and to keep God’s promises of loving-kindness and salvation with us. Once we realize that we are blessed, we must be like the disciples and the crowd and enact that blessing in the world. For us, our blessing is the salvation we receive through the covenant of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus that is able to calm our fears, to bid our sorrows to end through that struggle and intimate relationship with God. So, changed by this miracle that we can only but go out into the world singing God’s praise and changing it to be a world modeled after God’s justice and infinite, unbounded love and compassion for all of creation.