Sermon by Guest Preacher, Robert Stephenson - July 29, 2026
Sermons
What does it mean to wrestle with God?
I want to talk with you about Jacob today. I also want to talk to you about Israel.
Israel is the “third Patriarch”, the namesake of a nation, a noble, bearded face, haloed in a fresco or the cramped landscape of some Medieval illumination. Israel is listed among that “great cloud of witnesses” in the book of Hebrews, the man who “by faith… as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph [his grandchildren] and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.” (Heb. 11:21). Israel is thoughtful, Israel is sensitive, Israel cares for others. He weeps over the torn and bloody garments of his missing son, he silently sets up the gravestone for his beloved Rachel, who after years of struggling with infertility, finally dies bringing little Benjamin into the world, – as a refugee in Egypt – Israel prays his sons will carry his bones to rest in Canaan – with Leah, so long unnoticed by him.
Jacob is a pit-bull. A sun-browned son of immigrants, perhaps not much unlike the Palestinian kid you see taking on a tank with a hand-sized chunk of what used to be his family’s apartment building in the Gaza Strip. He’s born losing and yet refusing to lose – smaller, weaker, younger, but still grasping to snatch away what nature has denied him. Jacob is a hustler, independent, resourceful, the model of the “self-made man”, making a place for himself in this world – by any means necessary. Jacob lies to his father, steals from his brother, cheats his uncle.
And of course, both these men are one man. How is this possible? What does this mean? How is this one, forgotten, lonely child also this man, known and venerated by millions across at least three religions? How is Jacob Israel? How does Jacob become Israel, and in so doing, does he somehow cease to be Jacob?
What I would offer to you today is that Jacob is Israel and Israel is Jacob because he is a saint of God’s church. This duality, this tension, this paradox is at the very center of what it means to be a Christian, to encounter an eternal, immutable, omnipotent God in a world of time, and change, and of what one anonymous Middle-English writing called “unknowing.”
On the one hand we know that God comes to man first. Had God never appeared to Jacob, he would not have become Israel. St. Paul said that “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8). While we were NOT saintly, God showed up and offered us sainthood – for free. sainthood is not so much a matter of individual moral behavior or effort. The saints of God are decidedly not just the individuals who most perfectly performed “saintliness” and then God came and blessed them. They are not people congenitally unfamiliar with human infirmity and sin. The saints are the saints because they are the people with whom (in a particular instance of time and for reasons not entirely comprehensible to them or to us) God has chosen to speak. They are the holy ones, and holy in Hebrew (kah-dosh) literally just means “set apart”, consecrated or given a special purpose. These weren’t particularly bad people, they weren’t always exceptionally good people – they were mostly just people. They were (and are) special, holy, set apart – but it is God who sets them apart, not their own behavior.
On the other hand, if this is true, doesn’t it set up what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace… the deadly enemy of our Church”, in which nothing is ever really asked of Jacob (or of us for that matter) at all. He just needs to be chosen, and it doesn’t matter so much whether he extorts Esau or is cold to Leah, cause God will make it all right in the end. Cheap grace say we likewise are justified in Christ, so it doesn’t matter so much what we do – God, in His predestined wisdom will set it all right. But James the brother of Jesus says “faith without works is dead” and John the beloved disciple says that anyone who “says ‘I love God’ and yet he hates his brother or sister… is a liar” – surely there is something more here.
Now, if anyone wants to talk about how you can reconcile a righteous and omnipotent God with human free-will catch me after church and I’ll introduce you to another Jacob – Jacob Arminius. But my point here is actually not to make a detailed argument about predestination. My point is our question – what does it mean to wrestle with God? Does it mean we’re justified and don’t need to worry about trying to further transform our lives? Does it mean we need to change, perform, do something good so that God will love us and give us His attention?
It means neither of these things of course. Wrestling with God means we believe in God’s goodness, of the truth of His whole story. That He is both righteous and omnipotent, that He does cause “all things to work together for good” to those that love Him (Rom. 8:38), and that He will reconcile all things to Himself at the end of time. It also means affirming that it’s not ok that Esau was robbed by his brother and it’s not ok that Isaac was tricked by his son. That it was wrong for Jacob to deceive Laban, even though Laban tried to deceive him, that it was wrong for Jacob to ignore Leah, even though he never agreed to marry her. It means affirming that Jacob is a saint of God AND that the man who became Israel was not above the sin and brokenness of this world.
God affirms Jacob in his very brokenness – in his constant “striving” with God, but also with man – as the text makes clear even in his new name of “Israel.” God takes Jacob’s broken story and transfigures it through His own holy Presence – not to justify Jacob’s life or allow him to continue to sin, but to set him free for something else. Maybe it’s precisely because Jacob hasn’t done anything to deserve this new name and this new calling that it has the radical power to transform him.
What I would offer to you today is that if you ever find yourself wrestling with the Presence of God in a world that has grown cold and distant from Him, just know that God is wrestling too. If we believe our text today, then we believe that the eternal, immutable, omnipotent Creator of the universe itself, who has devoured armies, and kingdoms, and whole ages of the world, the One who will roll up the heavens like a scroll and put an end to time itself – couldn’t manage to pin a middle-aged shepherd in twelve hours. We say and rightly so, for God Himself says it, that Jacob “contented” with God and that he “prevailed.” God was somehow overcome, you might even say defeated. But the only way this is even remotely possible, is if God allowed Himself to be overcome – as we know Him to have done (at least) one other time.
So let’s go back real quick to that passage from Hebrews, where Jacob worships “leaning on the top of his staff.” Now I don’t know why this part about leaning on his staff is included here – there’s nothing about a staff in the account in Genesis 48. But I like to think that that staff supports an old wound – a limp in Jacob’s hip. A wound, an experience, a memory of something witnessed, that changed his life so that he was able to change his life. Jacob strives, Jacob contends, Jacob is wounded but overcomes. And so too does God (in some way we can’t even imagine) strive and contend with this world’s brokenness. God allows the world to wound him – even mortally – but take heart, in the very act of being overcome by it, He has overcome the world.