genesis

Genesis 32:22-31

This story raises many questions: Who exactly is Jacob’s attacker? Verse 24 tells us it’s a man but after the wrestling match, the man says, “… you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” (Genesis 32:28). Why would God bushwhack Jacob? Are we supposed to believe God couldn’t pin Jacob? Did Jacob want God’s blessing because he knew the blessing from his father Isaac was predicated on deceit, or was he just greedy for more blessings? And why does a deceitful and irreverent trickster end up with God’s blessing, anyway?

Jacob is Isaac’s son, Abraham’s grandson. His twin brother Esau was born first, but Jacob was his mother’s favorite, and together they plotted to steal Esau’s birthright and Isaac’s blessing, both due to Esau as the elder son (Genesis 27:1-29). Those plans were put on hold when Esau’s understandable homicidal rage sent Jacob running to his Uncle Laban (Genesis 27:41, 28:5). There, Jacob the trickster was tricked by his uncle into working an extra seven years for the right to marry his true love, Rachel (Genesis 29:15-30). Laban and his sons grew jealous of Jacob’s wealth and success, which he achieved by systematically stealing Laban’s sheep out from under him (Genesis 30:31-43). So one night while Laban was away, Jacob gathered everything he had and took off for Canaan, for home (Genesis 31:1-18).

In these verses, twenty years have passed since Jacob fled Esau’s wrath. Jacob receives word that his brother is coming to meet him with an army of 400 men (Genesis 32:6-8). Terrified, Jacob divides his entourage of wives, servants, livestock and possessions into two parts. That way, if Esau attacks, he won’t lose everything. He sends generous gifts to appease Esau (Genesis 32:13-18), and then he sends his family and belongings across the River Jabbok. Maybe he figures that even if Esau refuses his tribute, he may at least take pity at the sight of his defenseless wives and children. He sits down by the river, alone and a fugitive once again. And then in a few short words we’re told, “a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”

Jacob refuses to let his opponent go even after his own hip is put out of joint. The man, the angel, God, whomever it is, says, “Let me go; it’s almost daylight.” Jacob says he’ll only let go if the man blesses him. The man agrees and gives Jacob a new name. In Jacob’s culture, that means a new identity. No longer Jacob the usurper, the cheat; now he is Israel, a name that means, “You have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” That’s the big “reveal;” it was God all along. The scene concludes with Jacob carrying away God’s blessing along with his new identity. Not only will Jacob and Esau be reconciled in the chapters to come, but Jacob will sire a nation from his twelve sons, and they and their descendants proudly bear his name to this day, a people defined by wrestling with God.

A God who wrestles with us, and what’s more, God started it! This challenges any attempt to make God fit into some easy mold. Further, God blesses Jacob even though he isn’t deserving, holy, or righteous by any stretch of the imagination. So one lesson might be, “Don’t second guess God.”

But what can wrestling with God mean for us, today? What does it look like in our lives – in your life, in my life?

It’s likely a very personal thing. It’s probably ongoing, not once and for all. It may look like when you lost a loved one, lost your health, lost a job, or lost a dream, and you wondered where God was, how God could let it happen, or what’s even the point of a God who doesn’t fix everything. Maybe it’s when you figured out there’s something, some situation, you can’t change, fix, control, explain, or even understand. Maybe it looks like when you found your way to a therapist, a grief group, a twelve-step meeting, a church, or seminary.

It may be about coming to faith or keeping faith. Maybe you wrestle with God when you remember how you used to be able to recite the Apostles Creed without even thinking about it and now, you have to cross your fingers. Maybe it’s when the Dalai Lama makes a lot of sense, and you find yourself wondering, “If scripture isn’t either history or science, what is there to hold on to?” Maybe it’s when you haven’t lost your faith in God, exactly, but you’ve lost faith in the system that promised to help you grasp God by giving you the right language and answers – the Church, a denomination, a belief system.

Or maybe it’s that you can remember when you thought believing in God was stupid, or unsophisticated, and then something happened that shook you to your toes. Maybe you encountered people who trust that God wants the world, this world, here and now, to be more just. Maybe it’s when you figured out God is love, but it turns out love isn’t like unicorns and rainbows. Love is hard. Love is sacrifice. Love is eating with the sick. Love is trouble. Love is rebellious. Love doesn’t make the pain go away. Love sits with us in in the middle of it.[1]. Love inspires us to act.

Maybe God wrestles us into loving our neighbors as ourselves. Maybe God wrestles us into opening our hearts to let God in. Those are life-long wrestling matches from where I sit. In the closing verse of the lesson, Jacob limps away, transformed. When he finally sees his brother Esau, Jacob says, “For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God” (Genesis 33:11). Jacob looks at the face of his enemy, and he sees the face of God. This is hard. And hopeful. This takes wrestling with God, and not letting go.

Barbara Brown Taylor says it’s times like this that Jacob’s story says to us, “Don’t be so sure that’s an enemy you’re wrestling. Don’t be so sure you can’t find God in the dark. Don’t be so sure you know how this story ends. Above all, don’t be so sure you can’t make it through the night. Faith has a lot more to do with hanging on than with being sure.”[2]

[1] “Brené Brown on Church as Midwife,” posted April 11, 2014, on David Lose, “In the Meantime,” http://www.davidlose.net/2014/04/brene-brown-on-church-as-midwife/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+davidlose%2FIsqE+%28…In+the+Meantime%29

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Jacob Wrestles,” https://www.fapc.org/sermon/twenty-fifth-sunday-after-pentecost.

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Why were these verses in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 selected for the Hebrew Scripture lectionary on the First Sunday in Lent?

Many people would answer this question from the perspective of church history and tradition: these verses describe “the Fall;” they describe how “Original Sin” became a part of the human condition. For those of you from traditions that do not emphasize “Original Sin,” it’s the Christian doctrine that describes the state of sinfulness “inherited,” literally and physically, by all humans from Adam and Eve because of their disobedience to God in this very story. This doctrine insists that all people are born with a tendency to sin; we can’t help it any more than we can help the fact that we have blue eyes or curly hair. The connection with Lent is that, in many traditions, Lent is a “penitential season,” a time for renewed focus on our sins and our sinful nature, and therefore our need for remission of those sins through Christ’s death and resurrection. (Don’t get me started on atonement theory.)

Instead, notice that neither the word “fall,” nor the word “sin,” original or otherwise, appears in these verses. What we are dealing with are many layers of interpretation by men (yes, I do mean men) over many centuries, from the Apostle Paul to Tertullian to Augustine to Ambrose and on through the ages to Luther and Calvin; men who recognized their own inability to conform their behavior to God’s will for the world (i.e., love, justice, mercy, fairness, peace, generosity), and needed an explanation for it. Or perhaps an excuse. Certainly, there are snippets of scripture implying that we just can’t help sinning. The psalmist laments, “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). But as Cameron B. R. Howard writes, “The Bible is not the place to go if you want, like Joe Friday in the old TV show ‘Dragnet,’ ‘just the facts, ma’am.’ The Bible is not a collection of facts. It is a collection of stories, poems, songs, prayers, and remembrances.” The poetry of Psalm 51 describes the sorrow and regret of recognizing your faults and limits – which we all have. The etiological story of Adam and Eve helps to explain important questions about certain realities in life – why there is pain in childbirth, why the ground is hard to work, why snakes crawl upon the earth. Neither Psalm 51 nor Genesis 2 was intended to provide us with facts, either historical or biological.

As Marci Glass puts it, “We’ve been telling this story poorly for a long time.” Recent biblical scholarship has reframed the Genesis 2-3 creation story:

• The human has work and responsibility from the very beginning. God places the man in the garden “to till it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Eden wasn’t a work-free vacation.

• The traditional reading of the story assumes the first couple was perfect, without sin. The text doesn’t say that. The creation story in Genesis 1 describes the world as “good,” and an ancient Israelite wouldn’t have assumed that meant either perfect or sinless.

• The scene is usually portrayed with the woman alone as she’s tempted by the serpent, but a careful reading suggests that the man was present. The scene is of one piece: the serpent and the woman engage in conversation, she takes and eats the fruit, and she gives the fruit to “her husband, who was with her” all along! (Genesis 3:6). Why does this matter? Historically, Eve – and through her, all women – have been blamed for bringing sin into the world. This has been used as an excuse to keep women silent and prevent them from leadership in the Christian church (1 Timothy 2 :11-14). Dennis Olson writes, “The man failed to speak up, to speak out, and to join the woman in an alliance against the serpent’s attempt to appeal to the suspicions and yearnings that somehow were already within the humans’ heart” (emphasis added).

• The serpent is a very clever and talkative animal “that the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). In other words, the serpent is one of God’s own creatures, not a satanic being from outside of creation. At any point, the humans could have told the serpent he was wasting his time, but as Olson noted (supra), there was something already in the human – before the bite of the apple – that was drawn to the alternative explanations the serpent offered them.

• If we decide to read this story as a “Fall,” we must see human curiosity and knowledge as a problem. Frank Yamada writes that the idiom, “good and evil,” which describes the forbidden fruit, means that the tree contains complete knowledge or knowledge from A to Z. Wouldn’t full knowledge be essential for human life? Isn’t curiosity not only desirable, but necessary for human thriving? Feminist biblical scholars have emphasized the theme of maturity in these verses. Even if acquired through disobedience, this exciting, if potentially dangerous, maturity is vital for human flourishing.

Following that line of thought – that what we see in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is not the introduction of sin into the world but a necessary if painful maturing to the realities of the human existence, Marci Glass compares the Adam and Eve story to the recent movie, “Barbie” (2023). After reading Glass’s insightful sermon, I wonder whether filmmaker Greta Gerwig had Adam and Eve in mind.

Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land, although in this tale, the women – the Barbies – run everything. Ken, on the other hand, is a helper, the secondary creation, an accessory to the main creation.

Things begin to sour for Barbie. Besides thoughts of mortality, her feet are no longer permanently curved for those tiny Barbie high heels. She faces a crisis similar to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Does she choose to stay ignorant of complex emotions and the reality of death by staying in Barbie Land? Or does she choose to step into the real world, with all its nuances, pain, beauty, and death? At first, she wants to return to the Eden of ignorance and bliss, but she recognizes that Reality is where she’ll figure out what’s happening to her.

Barbie encounters the person who invented her, played by Rhea Perlman. Glass writes that her creator “doesn’t control Barbie. She’s curious and even surprised to see the choices Barbie is making as she grows up and decides to become fully human, complex emotions and thoughts of death included.” She also warns Barbie of the consequences of the choice to become human: “Being a human can be uncomfortable. Humans only have one ending,” says the creator. Barbie weighs the consequences. Writes Glass, “She’s realized that she wants the complexities, and even the thoughts of death, that come with being fully alive. Because the real world is also where the magic happens. Where humans surprise us with kindness and beauty. Where we find community and love. And Barbie also wants creativity, which is a gift of the complexity of human existence. She wants to be ‘part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.’”

We have indeed been telling the Adam and Eve story poorly for a long time. Perhaps it is less about the origins of sin than the reality of what it means to be human, including our tendencies to rebel, explore, question, and yearn for more than what we currently see and experience, some of which leads to pain and destruction, but some of which leads us to wonder, fulfillment, beauty, and truth. The serpent is simply one of God’s creatures; the yearnings and suspicions of the humans about God’s motivations are somehow already embedded within the human heart from the beginning – from the moment of creation. They simply needed the encouragement of the serpent to bring them out and convert them into action.

Humans continue to rebel against God, to resist the gracious boundaries that God has set for us, often to our own peril or to the peril of others. I’m not arguing there is no such thing as sin. However, I am arguing that this story doesn’t explain how sin entered the world. I don’t believe humans ever existed in a state of perfection. What this means is that Lent is not a path back to some mythic perfection. Rather, it is a reset, yet again. It is starting over, again and again, as we reflect on our relationship and our responsibilities to God’s boundaries, trusting, as Anne Lamott put it, that God loves all of us more than we can possibly imagine, exactly the way we are. And God loves us too much to let us stay like this.

Resources:
Valerie Bridgeman, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-7
Justin Michael Reed, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-6
Cameron B.R. Howard, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-3
Dennis Olson, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7
Frank M. Yamada, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-2
Marci Glass, “Leaving the Garden,” September 10, 2023, ttps://marciglass.com/2023/09/10/leaving-the-garden/
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

Wrestling with God

We’ve Been Telling This Story Poorly