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‘C’ // Pentecost 22 // 10-21-07 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian
Scriptures Genesis 32:22-31 Psalm 121 Luke 18:1-8
Never Give Up!
“Hurt people hurt people.” So observes Sandra Wilson in her book by that title.1 Fewer words have rarely conveyed a more profound insight.
“Hurt people … hurt people.”
Hurt people … who seldom seem to know when to surrender. When … to just give up.
Case-in-point: Jacob.
His name says it all. It means “heel grabber”, or “supplanter.”
The biblical narrative has it that he emerged from the womb, grabbing his twin brother Esau’s heel. And the biblical narrative continues that he would grab Esau’s birthright away from him, by trading food with his famished brother for it. A birthright sold for “a mess of pottage”, as the King James Version so memorably puts it.
From birthright to blessing: Jacob’s trickery continued. Through his sleight-of-hand – so to speak – his blind and dying father Isaac mistook him and the rough lambskin on those hands for his more hirsute brother and granted him the blessing and inheritance of the firstborn. As with the birthright, the blessing could not be retracted.
Jacob: Heel-grabber. Supplanter. Trickster. Thief.
He just wouldn’t give up. And, he just wouldn’t let go.
Including – it turned out – of our one true God.
Was this man Jacob, like the Apostle Paul, a fool for his faith, or just a damned fool? He thought – he really, really thought – he could, as our scriptures put it, “find favor in (the) sight” of his estranged, birthright-less, blessing-less brother Esau. Thought he could buy him off with goats and sheep and cows and donkeys – sending his servants and even his family entire ahead of him as a buffer for the wrath that he feared would come.
Alone. All alone was Jacob. All others had been sent forward to do his bidding for him. And yet, his rear guard was left undefended. The back door of his soul was left ajar. He could not face Esau – not yet, anyway. But he found himself forced to face his God.
And Jacob emerged, wounded from his all-night wrestling match, proclaiming he had seen God’s face – and lived. Better still, he was transformed. Who wouldn’t be? Jacob – heel-grabber – he was named, no more. Israel – people of God – he was renamed, forevermore.
Wrestling with God. My pastoral ears delight when I hear folk share their struggles with their beliefs about God because they find themselves struggling to behold God. Alas, I don’t hear of these struggles enough. For sometimes I wonder, with Barbara Brown Taylor, if we church folk would rather be bored than scared.2 For sometimes I wonder, if we church folk would seek to substitute the fortified wine of a life that is bearable for the heady elixir of the God who is irresistible.
Sometimes, I wonder.
And then a hurting soul steps forward and pours forth their cup of involuntary suffering – with their awful, transformative nights of grappling with the Spirit – and I listen with the words of Walter Brueggemann rolling around in my heart: “The world for which you have been carefully prepared is being taken away from you by the grace of God.”3
Several of you may know what has come to be known as The Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
It’s no accident that acceptance precedes courage in this prayer – particularly in a triumphalistic culture such as ours. Oftentimes, though, I wonder if we more unassuming church folk accept too much in our “respectable” little world. Oftentimes, I wonder if we treat the institutions in which we serve and live as external and constraining – as somehow separate from us and alien – as subject to “systems analysis” rather than compassionate transformation – as autonomously controlling and hence of ultimate power in our lives.4 Oftentimes, I wonder if our “acceptance” of “life in the big city” (as my Pentecostal brother resignedly calls it) is but our apathy cloaked, and therefore – as Martin Luther King, Jr. once put it – “Our lives begin to end (because) we become silent about things that matter.”5
(Even our so-called pacifist sisters and brothers in the Society of Friends – the Quakers – know how to wrestle with God in the world. Ever hear the fight songs of Earlham College, until recently known as the Fighting Quakers? Aside from “The Battle Hymn of the Quakers”, “Theme of the Quaker Army”, and “How Can We Keep From Scoring?” my favorite one goes like this: “Fight, fight/Inner Light/Kill, Quakers, Kill!/Knock ‘em down,/Beat ‘em senseless,/Do it ‘til we reach consensus!”6)
Oftentimes, I wonder: Can we drink the cup of courage that Jesus drank, when the cheap vessel of propriety that passes for acceptance begs us to imbibe of it, instead? Why give up out of what we may call charitably call “letting go” or “surrender”, when all we’re really doing is giving in out of our despair? Might we dare, instead, heed the words inscribed on the wall of the National Holocaust Museum in our nation’s capital: “Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. And above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”7
Perhaps the renewed stress on “spiritual growth” in our churches today – a rightful emphasis, for the most part – sells us short, sometimes. This newfound devoutness can easily render us milquetoasts for Jesus. Acting prayerful versus prayerfully acting can disconnect us from risk-taking discipleship. We find ourselves extolling the spiritual virtues of our powerlessness when all along God wishes to engage and wrestle with us out of a place of divine powerlessness. Lest we falsely submit to the perceived will of an alleged God Almighty, persisting in prayer while resisting the institutionally omnipotent may prove the real order of our day.
Perhaps we can learn of this persistence and resistance both from the widow before the unjust judge in Jesus’ parable today. She stood, as the British chaplain and theologian Maggi Dawn puts it, “in a situation similar to that of a present-day single parent who’s been left in the lurch to raise the kids, except that in Luke’s time no single parent received maintenance payments or support from a welfare system.” The widow stood, before a judge “too busy, too lazy, or too corrupt to do his job properly.”
Jesus teases out the experience of the widow as an example of persistence in prayer. Not that the persistence will necessarily rectify the injustice – though in the widow’s case, it certainly did. But that the persistence may rectify and shape ourselves, becoming – as the Rev. Dawn puts it – “like grit in an oyster – something that worries you and annoys you until you are determined not to take no for an answer.”
And that determination, the aggrieved widow shows us, includes resistance to the institutions that would otherwise shape us. It’s persistence and resistance. Again, the Rev. Dawn: “We aren’t called to pray passively, hoping that God will change the world on our behalf. Prayer may be the wind at our backs, but sometimes we need to track down the answer in person.”8
Take a look again at our bulletin illustration today: the erstwhile doomed frog with its clutches around the throat of its predator, the stork. Take a look again at the caption: “Don’t Ever Give Up!”
Don’t ever give up?
Look no further than our journey with Jesus at Northside Presbyterian Church.
When it comes to our so-called “will of God” budgets with which we annually wrestle and the ways we have always met them: We’ve never given up.
When it comes to prevailing with the power of love of an inclusive marriage policy over the thrice-exercised love of power of a church institutional: We’ve never given up.
When it comes to wrestling with God and persisting and resisting in the face of injustice that says, “You – you belong” while also saying “You – you don’t”: We’ve never given up.
We never have. And, our many a-wrestling have brought us many a blessing. For when Friday arrives, we can always trust that Sunday is a-comin’.
As Bruce Cockburn sings in his song “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”, let us, my friends, continue to “kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.”9
For the Spirit-power that makes that possible …
Thanks be to God! Amen.
1Sandra D. Wilson, Hurt People Hurt People: Hope and Healing for Yourself & Your Relationships (Discovery House, 2001).
2Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent (Cowley, 1998), p. 66.
3Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), p. 122.
4Parker Palmer, “Heart at work: Professionals who care”, The Christian Century, October 2, 2007, 124:20, pp. 29-30.
5As quoted by Sr. Dianna Ortiz, OSU of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International in a speech in Buffalo, NY, April 9, 2005. Quote cross-checked with other secondary sources; primary source unknown.
7As quoted by Sr. Dianna Ortiz, op.cit. Quote cross-checked.
8Maggi Dawn, “Prayer acts”, “Living by the Word”, in The Christian Century, October 2, 2007, 124:20, p. 19.
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