October 16, 2022

Life is like riding a bicycle – to keep your balance, you must keep moving. I don’t know who officially said or wrote that, but it makes sense, right? I got my first two-wheeler when I was about 12 – a nice refurbished old bicycle. Can you remember that feeling of first riding a two-wheeler? At first, we’re quite shaky and uncertain, but soon enough we come to relish that exhilarating feeling of almost being in flight, right? So, let’s not be afraid to keep moving in life – staying balanced and moving forward. Perhaps riding a bicycle is our first experience of a liminal place – we’re in-between where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.

Our gospel today has traditionally been understood as encouraging us to persist in prayer – to keep nagging God, I guess, who is supposedly portrayed as this “unjust judge” who finally gives in just to get rid of the annoyance of the widow’s persistent nagging. This seems unbecoming to God and unlikely, so in recent years some Christians have wondered whether God might be better personified as the persistent widow – crying out for justice for the vulnerable and oppressed -- against evil systems of oppression and cruelty. To be honest I’m still confused, so instead I want to focus on the first reading – the story in Genesis about Jacob wrestling with an angel, or with God.

Poor Jacob had a pretty hard life from the moment he was born. He and his brother Esau are fraternal twins and children of Isaac and Rebekah, with Isaac being Abraham and Sarah’s son. These twins were born when their father was 60 years old – Esau came out first, with Jacob holding on to his heel as he emerged from the womb. You would think that two sons born touching like that would be seen as equal in their parent’s eyes; but the ancient and longstanding tradition in many cultures – of primogeniture – meant that the oldest was the father’s heir and the other might get nothing. So, from his earliest childhood memories, Jacob felt the sting of his father’s rejection in favour of Esau. As he grew older, he realized that his future was bleak because of the split-second accident of nature that put his brother ahead of him as they emerged from the womb.

Rebekah clearly tried to uphold and protect her ‘younger’ son from facing too bleak of a future. It seems that she perceived the unfairness of it all and did her best to compensate for Jacob’s lack of inheritance. She helps him pose as Esau to get his father’s main big blessing; and when this ruse is discovered, she sends Jacob to her brother Laban’s place, where Jacob quickly falls in love with his first cousin Rachel. Uncle Laban says he can marry her after he works for Laban for seven years. But then under the wedding veil, Laban sneaks in his older daughter Leah in first. When Jacob complains, Laban says okay you can marry Rachel too, so long as you promise to work for me for another seven years. It soon becomes clear that Laban’s treachery would have Jacob be his slave forever. So, Jacob and the four mothers of his eleven children end up running away – an attempt that is almost foiled; but eventually they get away again, and then we come to our first verse: “That same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbock.”

He sent them across and then he was left alone for the night but “a man wrestled with him until daybreak”. By daybreak, Jacob asks this angel for a blessing, which is given along with a name change, since the angel or God tell him that his name is Israel from now on, meaning the one who wrestles with God. Jacob leaves with a sore hip and limp from the wrestling; and he names the place for his having seen God’s face and surviving. Many will remember this story; and Bible scholar Rachel Wrenn asks us to first try and pinpoint the heart of the story for ourselves, so we can dive into the compelling nature of the narrative. Do we too at times feel like we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – looking both forwards and backwards and feeling stuck in the middle? Jacob could no longer stay where Laban was abusing him, so he faces up to going back to his homeland; and he soon hears that his brother Esau, whom he cheated out of his birthright, is coming to meet him with 400 men. A scary prospect!

Wrenn offers us more on this theme: “This beautiful story leaves its listeners hanging on every word. It offers a blessing in the midst of liminality, that terrible and wonderful in-between stage of limbo. Genesis 32 depicts liminality in all of its pain and all of its potential. Jacob stands squarely on the threshold to a blessed new existence characterized by a limp, a shifted reality and a changed body. … While liminality overwhelms Jacob’s night, it is difficult to pinpoint a time in Jacob’s life that is not marked by the touch of the liminal. Esau is born first, but Jacob emerges from the womb linked to his brother’s body. A man by birth, he lives in the women’s tents and cooks, eschewing traditional gender roles. He is the second-born child, but he acquires both his brother’s birthright and his brother’s blessing. He dreams of a conduit between heaven and earth, and stands beside the Maker of the Universe. He rises to success but in a foreign land. Even his marriages bear the mark of liminality, with one wife beloved but barren, the other unloved but powerful in birth. And the list goes on.” https://www.workingpreacher.org/.../commentary-on-genesis...

It's likely safe to say that we’ve all, at times, been stuck in liminal places or spaces – “places of tension where the past is gone, the future has not yet begun, and transformation can happen” (Wrenn). In a way we could say this is our current Two Saints experience, while we continue to wrestle with how to be as faithful as possible to whatever God’s intentions may be for our future presence as a church – the past is gone, the future has not yet begun, and transformation can happen, but for now we’re a bit confused. May we become as open as possible to what our unknown future may hold – keeping balanced on our bicycles of faith -- while trusting in God’s grace and blessings as we go, Amen.