This morning we have two stories about faith and the importance of persistence, questioning and challenging in a life of faith. We begin with the story of Jacob wrestling with the man at night. The interpretation of this story about wrestling is actually a really great example of one of the ways we wrestle with God and our faith -- wrestling with what the text means. For thousands of years, faithful people have wrestled with this text -- with who the man is, with what he means when he said Jacob has striven with God and humans and prevailed.
In modern Christianity, we generally interpret the man as God because he says that Jacob has striven with God and man and prevailed, and because of Jacob's naming of the place. But Jewish interpretation is so much more varied. There are those who have written convincingly that the man is a demon, that the man is the spirit of Esau, or that Jacob is wrestling with himself, with the side of him that is selfish and conniving before he makes amends with his brother. Other interpretations are that the man is an angel of God, not God God's self.
According to these readings, the man says that Jacob has striven with God and man and won as a reflection on his life, how he has spend to much of his time fighting with and against his fellow humans and with God, but now he is going to be the father of a nation. None of these interpretations are wrong, none of them are faithless, none of them prove anything about the interpreter other than the lens through which they interpret scripture -- their knowledge, their context, what they believe about God and scripture. For thousands of years people have wrestled with this segment of scripture that so many of us might believe means and says one and only one thing.
One of the things I grieve losing as Christianity moved further and further from its roots (and as a consequence of a desire for a singular doctrine and the involvement of empire in the church), is this apparently loss of the value of arguing about what scripture means. The ability to freely -- and at times vehemently -- disagree about scripture and not only not get excommunicated but eat dinner together -- is all too rare in American Christianity.
When I was in Campus Ministry, a Jewish Student I knew through the Jewish Campus Ministry, Hillel, was invited to a Bible study by one of their Christian friends. They figured they liked the Bible and could maybe learn something new, so what the heck. Afterwards, they came to me deeply confused. The student experienced the Bible in a totally new way -- sitting around in a room, reading scripture, with one person telling everyone else what they should think it meant. No one was arguing! Few people even asked questions, at least not any questions that challenged the person leading the study and definitely not scripture itself. The student was absolutely flummoxed.
Being raised Jewish, the culture they experienced around scripture was a culture of intense debate, of disagreement, of pulling the words and sentences apart to come to a greater understanding. When you read the commentaries of the Rabbis, there were debates written in. The student didn't understand how Christians learned anything if they just sat and listened to what one person thought about scripture (she says, ironically, as she stands in front of people telling them what she thinks about scripture, in a format that doesn't allow for questions). I told the student that I knew people who had been kicked out of Sunday school or confirmation for asking questions. That in some corners of Christianity, questions were akin to doubt, and in those same spaces doubt was something to cause deep shame. That questions and doubt and thoughts that don't conform could cause a person to be kicked out of their religious community. None of this made any sense to the student. Jesus was a rabbi! The rabbi! Rabbis are, generally, argumentative and encourage questions. Not only that, but the naming of the Jewish people, the ancestors of Jacob, came about from an evening of wrestling with an angel of God (there are many interpretations of this story in Judaism, one being Jacob wrestled with an angel of God).
This lack of a tolerance for dissent in so many spaces, this belief that there is one right way to interpret scripture, that "scripture is clear," leads to people being taught that they simply must assent to whatever the leader of their church or denomination says. It teaches that Christinaity teaches subordinance to the loudest voice in the room, subordinance to power. In this way, Christianity loses its inherently subversive nature. It also leaves no room for doubt, which creates a brittle faith. a faith that falls apart when things that don't fit into that particular interpretation happen.
A healthy life of faith is one that allows for wrestling with God, for yelling at God, for being persistent and demanding things from God, for asking again and again and again. There are so many stories in scripture in which someone talks back to God, questions God, and sometimes God changes God's mind as a result. Our faith lives only grow richer when we are able to ask these questions in community, to hold one another as we wrestle with God. Struggling with God and the meaning of it all together strengthens our bonds to one another and our faith -- even if we may come out with different conclusions about who God is and what God is doing in our lives. Let us wrestle with God together. Let us ask hard questions as we figure out what is next for Abiding Savior as a community. In our wrestling and persistence, we will be change.
