This past Tuesday night we watched at my house what are surely two of the stupidest shows to ever hit television.  And the sad part is, we know they are stupid and we watched them anyway. No Masterpiece Theater at my house.  No CNN, Bravo or the NASA channel.  No Hallmark Hall of Fame. Heck, your IQ drops 10 points just by tuning in these shows.  Brain cells die as in little as five minutes worth of viewing.  Your brain on drugs is less scrambled than after a single episode of either of these shows.  So it is particularly overdosing that they are on back-to-back.  These shows make Gomer Pyle look like Charlton Heston, and Granny Clampett look like the Queen Mother.  These shows are so stupid that they give stupid a bad name.  They make Larry the Cable Guy look like Sir Lawrence Oliver. What are these intelligence assaulting shows?  One is called “Wipeout,” and the other is called “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.”  Have you seen either one?  The Wipeout show is my favorite, as contestants are involved in obstacle course like stunts that are almost impossible to complete without wiping out, knocking you brains out on national TV in the process.  It is a matter of time until someone on the show gets hurt enough to need the services of Peter Miller (a local fender chasing lawyer) or maybe Eric Wilson, J.D. (my lawyer son). 

            But they are mindless entertainment and I guess I do after all like watching people fall and run into stuff without actually getting hurt.  It also scratches an itch on some level as I figure my life is one big game of psychological wipeout, and I am prone to an assault of emotional or spiritual stupidity at any moment without notice.  And no, hopefully stupidity won’t exacerbate this morning during the sermon. I figure you didn’t come here for stupid simply because there are better choices in several other churches in Little Rock.  But you be the judge! 

            I like seeing people make fools of themselves, and I think it healthy (to a point) to be able to do so on occasion.  Hopefully I am not going to make a fool of myself today, but hey, the day is still young.  And if you can laugh at yourself, you will never run out of material. Now a few of these contestants push the envelope, but all in all it is great summertime TV.  When the heat zaps your strength and you can’t climb out of the Lazy Boy even if your house was on fire, or if the 7/11 was selling gasoline for 2 bucks a gallon, it is good to watch such shenanigans.  They are totally effortless TV viewing, and they are guilty pleasures.  You only have to move your eyeballs to watch this stuff, and you really don’t even have to pay attention to the story line.  Sure, I could turn the tube off and read War and Peace, but heck, I will just ask Eric if I want to know what War and Peace is about.  He knows nothing about the fine arts of Wipeout, I have to get that on my own.

            After two hours this past Tuesday, my brain was mush, but I was very relaxed.  It was then that the fun was over and a special came on with Diane Sawyers, “Primetime.”  I watched a few minutes of the show, but had to bail as my body went into anaphylactic shock as I was yanked back to reality faster than a cheap yo-yo.  I was the one who all of a sudden was wiped out. Maybe you saw the special, or maybe you have heard the story of one Randy Pausch.   Pausch’s video on YouTube and ABC.com has been seen by ten million people, which is way more than the 37 who read my blog last week.  If his name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe his video, “The Last Lecture” does.  Pausch was a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and gave a lecture to 400 in an annual series called “the Last Lecture,” based on the premise that if it was you last lecture ever, what would you say to your students?  As fate would have it, Pausch had Pancreatic Cancer and was terminally ill so the lecture’s title was appropriate.  The lecture is over an hour long, and is on the subject of “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Pausch was an amazing inspiration, who was not afraid of death but he confessed he was afraid of dying due to the difficult death that often accompanies pancreatic cancer.  He said the lecture was not for the students and colleagues in the room, but for his children.

            Randy was amazingly philosophical and upbeat.  What a motivational speech.  His content wasn’t revolutionary, but his diagnosis gave him an authority that said “listen to me.”  His lecture was really on tenacity and living life to the fullest, taking one day at a time.  He said don’t be afraid to be the risk taker, even if you fail spectacularly, to live like there is no tomorrow, to do what it takes to rediscover and realize your dreams.  He wanted no pity, and he showed no grief.  Randy was truly an inspiration. He died July 25th, and the Primetime special aired on the 29th. 

            I read a few blogs online about Pausch and one person suggested that Pausch could not have been a Christian because he didn’t mention God in the lecture and that he cussed in the lecture.  It doesn’t take much to get disqualified from the going to heaven club I guess.  Heck, I may do a sermon sometime where I don’t mention God at all. I mean it worked for the writers of Ruth and Ester.  The truth is, Pausch was a spiritual person, and he was a Unitarian Universalist.  But I guess his liberal religion made him suspect in some eyes as well.  It is easy to hate their views, all that unconditional love and acceptance, inclusiveness and tolerance, not to mention pushing a reasonable faith over a dogmatic one.  It can make you hoping mad, such values.

            I can tell you this, that as a bright, young, handsome man with a beautiful family, I might sling a cuss word or two at God (which he didn’t do) if I was smitten with such a prognosis.  I really don’t know whether or not Randy Pausch struggled with God or was mad at God in anyway.  I could find no evidence of such a tussle.  I might have liked him better had he done so; it would have made him a little less saintly and a little more human.

            There have been many who have struggled with God over such bad news, and rightfully so.  One wonders why Pausch did not struggle, but maybe he did privately, who knows.  I do think that our faith makes a difference in the way we die.  There was an oncologist here in Little Rock that converted to Christianity purportedly based on the observation that his terminal Christian patients died differently than his non-Christian patients.  But since he was the biggest jerk that I ever met in the medical profession, I sort of wish he had reverted to his former faith.  We don’t need anymore jerks in Christianity; we have long since met our quotas.

             So what about those of us who are Christian, who find ourselves a little more caught up in the thick of the struggle than those whose life and faith seems oh so simplistic?  I think I find a little relief from my burden to be perfect from our lectionary text today, and yes it is our man Jacob yet again.  I will have to confess that Jacob grows on you a bit, I am starting to like the slime ball.  I mean he is so human, so imperfect and so loved by God.  What a deal!

            Today’s text is a very mysterious text indeed, I never have really understood it as well as I would like.  It is like Dianna or Eric going to a movie and looking for logical fallacies in the story plot, and I always just reply “for heaven’s sake it is a movie, it doesn’t have to make sense.”  Its ducks don’t have to line up in a row.  Today’s text is just a story, you will go nuts trying to exegete every jot and tittle.  

            And in case you missed an episode, let me catch you up a bit.  Jacob was a man on the run and had been in one way or another most of his life.  I like Dan Clendenen’s summary:

Deep-seated family hostilities characterized Jacob’s entire life. Because Isaac and Rebekkah played favorites, he and his fraternal twin Esau grew up hating each other. Jacob also swindled Esau of his family birthright, which entitled him to a double share of the family inheritance. Later, he and Rebekkah lied and connived to swindle the family blessing from his blind and dying father. When Esau threatened to murder him, Jacob fled to his uncle Laban in Haran, the very place his grandfather Abraham had departed. Jacob married his cousins Rachel and Leah, and eventually fathered thirteen children with them and their two slaves, Zilpah and Bilhah.  Sick of his father-in-law’s manipulations, Jacob fled Laban, only to encounter his long lost and embittered brother Esau. The consummate deal-maker, Jacob concocted a bribe and sent a caravan of gifts along with his women and children across the river Jabbok. Perhaps that would pacify his brother’s murderous threats? Physically exhausted and deeply anxious about Esau, alone in the desert wilderness, shorn of all his considerable worldly possessions, powerless to control his fate, Jacob collapsed into a deep sleep on the banks of the Jabbok River. With Laban behind him and Esau before him, he was too spent to struggle any longer. Only then did his real struggle begin. Fleeing his family history had been bad enough; wrestling with God Himself was a different matter altogether. That long, lonesome night an angelic stranger visited Jacob. They wrestled throughout the night until daybreak, at which point the stranger crippled Jacob with a blow to his hip that disabled him with a limp for the rest of his life. By then Jacob knew what had happened: “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:30). In the process, Jacob the Deceiver, for such is the meaning of “Jacob,” received a new name, Israel, which likely means “He struggles with God.” Most important and unlikely of all, at the conclusion of that riverbank struggle, we read that God “blessed him there” (Genesis 32:29). (JourneywithJesus.net)

            So Jacob gets in a wrestling match with a stranger and it lasts longer than Wrestlemania XII and there is no pay per view for this epic match.   After an all night struggle, Jacob finally starts to whip the guy, and oddly enough when the other guy cries “uncle” Jacob demands a blessing from the one whose posterior he is successfully kicking.  Well, enough is enough, and the stranger touched Jacob on the hip which seems like a low blow and Jacob recoiled in pain.  Jacob now needs a hip replacement but does not let go until the stranger blesses him anyway.  It is at that point that Jacob realizes that he has done something incredible, that he was in fact wrestling with God Almighty and he lived to talk about it.  And God gives him a new name, “Israel” which means something like “I fought the law and the law won.” 

            As you probably have figured out, when I preach I like to look for the not so obvious in the passage, more on a devotional level than an exegetical one, because I prefer inductive preaching instead of deductive preaching (you don’t need me to explain it to you, I believe in soul competency), and I try to avoid the conventional, within reason.   However, some passages are so powerful with the classic metaphor that they are worth revisiting.  I think of Jesus calming the storm at sea, and what is more basic or more important than the worn out truth that Jesus is able to calm the storms in our own lives? You shouldn’t screw with such an important message.  I feel a little bit that way today, another classic metaphor is contained in the story of Jacob, and for anyone who has ever “wrestled with God,” it is powerful metaphor indeed. 

            Life has a way of being very ugly at times, and it tries our sturdiest idealism with its cold hard realities.  When such inevitable crises disrupt our lives, one of a couple of things can happen:  you can retreat into a naiveté that would make Beaver Cleaver jealous, or you can experience a full blown episode of angst.  I generally find the later more satisfying in the long run, people like Randy Pausch cause me heartburn.  I know he was an inspiration on how to do a tough deal, but I reserve the right to raise hell if I ever look such a fate straight in the eye.

            So many Christians today live in an idealistic world where magical thinking permeates their faith and practice.  Listening to their testimonies one can understand why Marx called religion the “opiate of the masses,” or why Freud thought religion was an emotional crutch.  Of course I like Napoleon’s take, that religion was what kept the poor from murdering the rich.  God for many today in popular religious culture is there when we need him, ready to give a supernatural assist when we need to pass a test, get a job, find a date, or decide who should teach Sunday School.  God even helps our favorite team to win, finds us close parking spaces and wants us to be rich, happy and successful.  We believe that if we do what God wants us to then we have peace, and if we do not do it exactly like its diagramed (I have yet to figure out where God keeps all these blueprints), then he slaps us around until we conform, or we feel out of sorts (for our own good of course).  And even those amongst us who abhor the prosperity gospel have some of this thinking in our corpus of beliefs and practices– it can be very insidious.  The key to happiness is being on the same page as God we innately believe.  At least that is the world that many live in.  God is here for our convenience or comfort, God is our security blanket, our ace-in-the-hole, and when life gets tough, well, he is doing that to us to because he loves us, so in some sense our suffering is temporary or an illusion.  We believe that we will undoubtedly come out of our trials smelling like a rose, because God is deterministically behind all our difficulties.  There is no such thing as defeat or failure or evil in our lives, because they are all the products of a God who deals in low blows to get us to conform. 

            I am here today to say that you can do everything right and still suffer.  That you can follow Jehovah God the best you know how and still find peace elusive.  That you can dedicate your life to his principles and find life more of a struggle than not.  Otherwise every single one of us are in trouble, because we will all have bad things happen to us before all is said and done in life.  I see it every single day that I go to work, heck I can’t even escape this fact watching stupid TV. 

            I cannot help but think of my friend Eve this morning.  I read updates that are posted on her sister’s blog almost everyday now, and her life seems like hell.  She has been throwing up constantly for weeks on end, she cannot stop, she is in great pain, she is seriously malnourished, she hasn’t been able to eat a meal in weeks, she has been readmitted to the hospital (I am not sure if she is home by now) just to see if they can give her some relief of her symptoms.  Her quality of life seems to me to be zero, and yes all this living and she is 29 years old.  They are not sure she can tolerate the pain meds that she needs or the last chance chemo that she needs.  I don’t know if Eve is wrestling with God, she seems to have an indomitable spirit, and always manages a smile.  She covets our prayers and believes in God, but her life has been anything but peaceful.  I think that her friends and family will be the ones in an all nighter with God.  It certainly seems liked she has fought and fought and fought without letting go, even after one low blow after another.  Eve will hang on until God blesses her, I am convinced, I just hope he blesses her soon, and refrains from throwing anymore low blows.  And for all of you who think this view of God is a little too human, don’t blame me, blame that sleezeball Jacob, he started this mess.

            Jacob wrestled with God, but I think that is our lot too, if we are seekers of the truth who are trying to discover and live an authentic faith.  I have always said that someday I have a lot of questions to ask God, and I believe that in the end God welcomes them.  How small would a god be who was threatened by our finitude, who would say in effect “shut up” to our questions born out of our pain and suffering?  A God that we cannot question is not a very big God.  I also believe that when our life is spiraling down the chute, it is OK to put on the gloves and wrestle God to the ground. Yet, that seems contrary to today’s pop gospel.

            Our church culture today is one of strength, one of power, one of growth, one of riches.  We idolize the powerful in this country; the superhero, it is who we are as Americans.  As Clendenin says, “We celebrate wealth, power, strength, bravado, confidence, prestige and victory, beginning with Little League baseball for our kids and continuing right on through to their SAT scores, college admissions, first job, and first address. We abhor and fear weakness, failure, struggle, and doubt. Even though we know that a measure of vulnerability, fear, discouragement and depression accompany most normal lives, we construe these as signs of failure or even a lack of faith. In real life, naive optimism and the rosy rhetoric  . . . is a recipe for disappointment and discouragement. Sooner or later reality catches up with most of us.”  Jacob jerks us back to reality this morning, big time.

            You see, one of the greatest characters in the history of salvation is one of the crookedist, sleaziest, cheatingist, shysters that ever graced the pages of the Holy Writ, but he was also something else:  A child of promise.  One who wrestled with God, one for whom life was never easy, and maybe one who was never happy, he was certainly never peaceful, he was always on the run.  But he was unquestionably one who was also blessed mightily, you cannot debate that.

            I remember a person who wrestled with God some years ago.  She was in a bereavement support group I was leading, and once she found out I was a minister she was off to the races.  It seems that her mother died 8 months earlier at the ripe old age of 92 after a ten year battle with cancer that for the most part was more chronic than acute.  Her mother had lived a long life, had a lot of quality time and good care by her loving daughter right up to the end.  She led a relatively pain free life and her symptoms were managed well by hospice.  She had what we might call a “good death” in the business.  But the 40 something year old daughter was wrestling with God mightily.  She could not understand why her mother had to die.  “What have I done that God would punish me so by taking my mother?” she asked.  In fact, that question became a broken record for her the first three sessions.  Her grief was raw.  I wanted to say, “I am sorry lady, but your mom was 92, she had been sick forever, did you not prepare yourself for the fact that she was supposed to die?  Nobody else in here had a loved one who lived as long as your mother so be thankful and get over it.”  Of course, I did not say that, I did not have to.  A man in the room who had not said a word for three sessions spoke up.  He said, “My 13 and 16 year old daughters were killed in a car wreck three weeks ago when they were hit by a drunk driver.  Who do you think you are lady, that you are so important that God would hurt another human being to punish you or to get your attention?”  The room was silent.  The first lady spoke up, “you are right—I am not that important.  My mother was supposed to die, it was her time.” to bless us.  Because as painful as wrestling with the divine can be, it brings with it the satisfaction of knowing that God is there and that he cares.  Such a match with the Almighty always changes us forever, the very essence of our lives are transformed into something new.  If you stay engaged, you can out wrestle God and when you do, you are always blest.  I have seen it myself on more than one occasion. It doesn’t have to be a draw and you don’t have to lose.  It is in the tussle that faith is born.  A faith that sticks with us no matter what.  You just have to settle for being wounded and you have to be ready to be blessed in a way that is not otherwise possible.

You see, we are always transformed when we fight with God.  And I might go one step further and say that if we never wrestle with God, we will never be changed and maybe never be truly blessed.  Because when the match is over, we are a little worse for the wear, but maybe we are also something else: greatly blessed.  And perhaps our faith is strengthened enough to bless others as they fight their own fights, and run their own good races.  Regardless, I am convinced that when we wrestle with God, we have the opportunity to birth something of consequence—faith.  And just maybe we out run whatever is chasing us, if but for another day.  And for the one who has fought all night a time or two that sounds like some very Good News indeed.  Thanks be to God! Amen.

            I tell this story for two reasons: one, it is unpleasant business wrestling with the Almighty; we always come out lame from such a match. But secondly, you can out wrestle God, as this lady did.  You heard me right, you can win.  Jacob did.  He fought and fought and fought, but in the end he got the upper hand in the wrestling match until God hit him with a low blow, something ironically that was Jacob’s specialty.  And it didn’t feel so good to be cheated when you had Jehovah God on the ropes.

Jacob did something—he not only wrestled with God, but in a sense he won. It is a winnable fight, even though he was crippled for life, he was blessed.  He hung on to God until God had to bless him.  That my friends seems like the essence of faith.  Don’t let go of God until God has