Nowhere to Run

Propers: The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 29), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our Old Testament reading this morning is taken from the tale of Jacob, the great trickster of the Bible, whose name literally means leg-puller. Jacob spends his whole life getting ahead by cunning, by swindling older, stronger relatives out of their inheritances, and then taking to his heels when the debt comes due. He fools people, then runs away—the consummate con artist.

His first big score is against his brother Esau, who is everything Jacob is not. Esau is huge and hairy, covered in red fur like a wild man. He is also strong and swift and deadly accurate, a born hunter, the favorite of their father. Yet Jacob, with the connivance of his mother, manages to cheat Esau out of both his birthright and their father’s blessing, which cannot be revoked. And so when Esau finds out—and is ready to spear his little brother like a deer—their mother offers Jacob the best advice she could give him under the circumstances: “Run!”

And he does. Jacob flees to a far country, where he marries, settles down, raises a family, and eventually comes into conflict with his father-in-law. Long story short, Jacob flees once again, this time with an abundance of wives and children, servants and flocks, all in tow, heading back the way he’d come, back toward the home he’d fled so many years ago when he was still young.

But of course thereby lies a problem: a large, hairy, red problem named Esau. Jacob is afraid that his brother will still want to kill him, even after all this time. If nothing else, the Middle East knows how to keep a grudge. So he separates his forces and sends bribe after bribe towards his estranged brother, fearful of those powerful arms, that accurate bow. Even at night he camps out in a defensive position, afraid of assaults from the dark.

Lo and behold, alone in the night, a man indeed attacks him. And they wrestle and struggle and fight until dawn begins to break. And the assailant lands a devastating blow upon Jacob’s hip, knocking it out of joint. But Jacob persists: “I will not let you go until you bless me!” he cries. He has the wolf by the ears, you see, and he’s afraid that if he lets go, his brother will kill him.

And the attacker then proclaims to him, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel”—one who wrestles with God—“for you have struggled against God and against man, and you have prevailed.” Then suddenly he’s gone, vanished in the light. And Jacob realizes that the man with whom he’d fought all night was not his brother after all but something far more wondrous. “I have seen the face of God,” he whispers, “and I have lived!”

But not for long, he fears. Esau is still coming. He appears now on the horizon, flanked by mighty men. He has not accepted any of the bribes. He has not turned aside to let his brother pass. And now Jacob cannot run, for his hip is out of joint. In but a moment Esau is upon him, flinging his arms around him—and kisses him! Esau weeps for joy! The old anger, the old wounds, the old wrongs have been forgotten, and Jacob, to his utter shock, finds himself embraced by the brother whose retribution he has feared for his whole life long right up to this point.

It is a moment of astonishing grace, a beautiful reversal, one of my favorites in the Bible. And Jacob only experiences it because he cannot any longer run away.

This, my dear Christians, is what prayer is for us. Prayer is wrestling with God, struggling with God and with human beings and prevailing, persevering. We are to be tenacious in prayer. That’s the message found in all of our readings this morning: tenacity. For indeed, why do we pray? What good does it do?

Clearly, God is not a genie, showing up and saying, “Poof! What do you need?”—as though if we were simply to say the magic words, or say them with enough feeling and vigor, then God wound bend to our wills and do our bidding. This is the sort of prayer we find in people looking for a parking space or about to take a test for which they haven’t studied.

And obviously that can’t be what prayer is about. Maybe the old pagans could bargain with their gods, but our God is not a god. There isn’t anything that He lacks or needs or even desires for Himself. We simply have nothing to offer Him that He does not first give freely and abundantly to us.

On the other hand, if we take things to the opposite extreme, we end up with a deist conception of God: the notion that God knows everything, and God’s going to do what God’s going to do, so there’s no point even in praying. And clearly this goes against the teachings of Christ, who taught us how to pray and commanded us to pray in everything that we do. So what’s the deal here? What’s going on?

As Christians we trust two rather amazing things. First we trust that the way the world is, is not the way it’s intended to be; that evil and injustice and suffering and death are not things created by God, not things willed by God. Moreover, we trust that in the end God’s will shall be done, so that eventually there cannot be suffering and evil and death and brokenness; that the world will be restored to its intended goodness, and that somehow the ending of the story will make sense of all the godawful tragedy that’s gone before.

This is the real power of God: not to destroy things and burn cities and tumble walls to the ground, but to extract goodness out of evil, to extract life out of death, to somehow take something that can never be set right in this world and to make it right—that is redemption; that is resurrection; that’s what makes God God.

When we pray, we trust that the evil, the suffering around us, is not the will of God and therefore cannot ultimately last. We trust that God will set all things right through the victory won by Jesus Christ on the Cross. And so we are praying, basically, to endure to the end, to the revelation that will make sense of everything that has come before. And moreover—being specifically Lutheran here—we pray that “God’s will be done,” knowing full well that God’s will shall be done, in the end, with or without us.

So when we pray that, as Jesus taught us, what we are praying is that we know God’s will is coming; may it come in us. May we be part of the healing, part of the solution, part of the life; part of the Resurrection. May we as Christians be a foretaste for all the world of the feast to come at the End of the Age, the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb that knows no end, in the City of our God whose gates shall never be shut.

May we not be the last opposition holding the line against the life-giving will of God, because of course that way lies defeat.

So wrestle with God in the night. Struggle with Him, fight with Him, persevere with tenacity in prayer. Never let Him go until He blesses you. For sooner or later, the dawn will rise. Sooner or later, there shall be no place left to run. And on that day we shall be gathered up in arms we have often feared, and we shall be forgiven, and we shall be embraced, and we shall be home.

Things will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end. And we pray that we maintain faith in this promise every day of our lives, until the end of time, and all that lies beyond.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.