(next in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, August 28, 2005
Genesis 33: 1-20; Matthew 5: 43-48
I met a bright, open boy yesterday named Jacob. I told him I am a minister and that for some weeks, my church and I have been reading and learning from the stories of Jacob in the Bible. I wondered whether he knew them. He thought not. His mother thought not. I told him he would enjoy them, and he seemed eager to take up the suggestion. Now, if he does read, he will almost certainly read them as things that happened to the first man that bore his name. This is how children think: very concretely. Developmental psychologists explain that the physical nature of a young human brain requires this manner of processing information. But you are not a child. In these sermons from Genesis, we are persistently asking you to leave the child’s way of reading behind and accept the upward call of God encoded in these stories. For they are not about some people who lived in tents a long time ago; they are guides to who you are deep down, both as individuals and as a society. The people of Israel did indeed become a great nation by telling these stories about itself, for they reveal a pattern for spiritual development. To tell the stories now as if they were about things long ago and far away is to speak like a child and think like a child, and to turn from the call of God to put away childish things.
In the story of Jacob’s all-night wrestling at the river, Jacob’s mysterious opponent blessed him at the breaking of the day with a new name, Israel, to call upon a new identity. “He strives with God” was the folk-meaning given for this name of the nation. Jacob named the place of that great fight Peniel–the face of God. And lest he fail to grow into his new skin–and lest you fail to desire to grow into a new being, the old being past and gone–the hero is immediately faced with the conflict that he has avoided for half his life. He must meet the brother whom he lied to and cheated so long ago. He arranges his family for the confrontation in the order of his need, the least first, the loved last, that she and baby Joseph might perhaps be spared rape and violence from Esau’s four hundred men. Spiritual transformation does not suddenly remove every flaw and attachment. Nevertheless, “Jacob himself went on ahead of them, bowing seven times, until he came to Esau.” He is changed; no longer Jacob/Sneak-from-behind, he goes first and forward.
“But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed him, and they wept.” And Esau was amazed to see the huge family his brother had with him. “Who are all these!” Any American who has family at a great distance, with but infrequent visits, can relate to this meeting. Any child whose cheek has been grasped by a glad, strange uncle gets this story. But you know that is not the heart of the matter. Rather: hatred, guilt, envy, disdain, anger, fear and judgment–suddenly at an end. This is the roaring fire in the story which kept the tellers telling it for centuries. Consider: Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau at birth and at twenty, and stories yet to come from this series–all have at heart the question, how peace may come to the bitter enmity of tribes who are fundamentally brothers, sisters. We could not grow, say the stories, and cannot grow unless we learn the lesson of love for the enemy.
So is that the lesson: Don’t hate; love? A child could get that and set it down in his mind with all the like lessons he has from his parents–share, don’t hit, don’t talk with your mouth full. But you are not a child. You know full well that the commandment to love means almost nothing in this world, so far as changing our arrangements is concerned. We love to love whom we love, and we love to feel the elixir of compassion course through our veins from time to time, but we do not love to hear Jesus’ commandment to love our enemy, to hear and to obey. We don’t know where to begin. This is natural. Israel was already struggling with this word of Christ three thousand years ago, for this word is in the beginning. The story has something very plain to say about becoming mature in spirit: If you want to be fully human, if you want to put away childish things, you must–no, not love your enemy; such love is the outcome, the fruit of the Spirit, not the planted seed. To grow up, you must undergo a wrestling, a death, a radical change, a challenge, a threat, a confrontation with God within, with Christ in you. The lesson is not “Love, don’t hate”; it is: If you love your self truly and deeply, then put your old self in harm’s way. Risk a love that is beyond you, so that you may meet God and learn who you really are again, and again. How?
“Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed him, and they wept.” Have you been there? Jacob says to his brother, “Truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” That is, like Peniel. The experience of God’s reversal of our old, fearful, selfish nature is like the experience of love for, and forgiveness from, our enemy. Peniel. Have you been there?
I used to counsel couples regularly; for many, the issue was broken trust–from a sexual infidelity or another kind of lie. Usually, both assumed that the cheater, the liar, had all the work to do. “She’s going to have to earn my trust,” a husband or wife would say with a knife-sharp edge, and the partner would stare out into the future, stupefied by the struggle coming. Now, if a cheater, a Jacob, accepts grace, she or he will indeed come into a great silence alone and lose decisively in a wrestling with the Spirit of God within, and grow. But the other, the wronged one, strangely enough, has also to undergo a subversion, a fight to the death, with some part of the old self, or else the relationship itself must die. For finally trust cannot be earned; but given, only; not a reward, but a grace as free as God’s. Esau came through this. His sole account for the peace in his soul was, “I have enough.” This is how forgiveness heals the forgiver, who sees “I have enough; I can give you, and forgive you, all you need.” This is the sign of mended enmity: to know you have enough. Have you been there, at Peniel?
The people of my former pastorate underwent a wrestling and overturning of their nature. This came through the presence of just a few gay men and women in the congregation. The pace of the ordeal of deep change may have been hastened by the angel of death, for AIDS hobbled and killed three, while a ruinous cancer caught and killed another of these lights. It is hard to hate people who are dying, and fear of them flies away even sooner. But those who were alert to the God-wrestling within them– there were more than a few–received a grace unique and powerful. I saw it cross their lined and wrinkled cheeks with smiles and embraces. I saw this joy they had at dying to old certainties, to their old selves. I saw–anybody saw–their surprise at the easy, ready welcome from gay and lesbian friends in Christ; the forgiveness, in a word, from people long lied to and cheated. I saw–anybody saw–Peniel. Have you been there?
America keeps putting off its encounter with Peniel. We resemble Jacob in his youth and young adulthood. We have lied and cheated and stormed and violated the world for our wealth. We have betrayed and slaughtered the civilization of the Indian, and stolen Africa and forced it under history’s most brutal chains, and grown fat from the profits, and numerous beyond any accounting; and have lately gone to war to immolate and scar hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Iraquis. And still we run a daily headline that we are the one truly wonderful people on earth. We elect one national leader after another to tell us this lie. And sadly, it is a lie only because it is half true! We have a great story to tell the nations, but the individuals who make us up refuse in great numbers to undergo their spiritual overturning, their match with God. Like young Jacob, we insist on winning, always, and so we never quite begin to grow up. And we never quite get to head homeward, to meet our enemy at Peniel. To see the face of God.
Jacob Needleman eloquently describes what it is like to make contact with the divine through consciousness of the evil in one’s own past.
To look at slavery in America and its continuing echo of racial hatred and injustice is to see more than a condition that we are obliged to repair with all the moral and social energy that we can bring; it is also to see the inner human condition. It is to see that America, too–we, too, no less than the slave-masters of Egypt and Rome, no less than the blind, murdering armies of every nation in history, no less than all those millions who have pulled deadly levers and triggers, lashed and beaten innocent bodies and even scientifically engineered the destruction and degradation of millions– we too are asleep to conscience. The story of America, the very story that can bring hope to the world, must include the truth of the human condition, not only as it can be, but as it is now. And when it accepts this truth about itself . . . something entirely new and necessary will fill every limb and cell of the story of America . . . : humility and the need to experience the taste of genuine remorse. . . . (p. 240)
To be awakened in one’s heart and mind to the depths of the crime of slavery is, inwardly, suddenly to stop, suddenly to come to an inner silence–even while outwardly one rightly senses the call to help, to act, to make things right in the civic and social sphere–[to be awakened in one’s heart and mind to the depths of the crime is to be brought to] the silence of remorse, a remorse completely beyond any plan of action, completely beyond any possibility of doing something. And yet it is there in that condition of the encounter with conscience that something beyond ourselves can appear, something that, were it to be more enduring, could transform the life of man far beyond any immediate but superficial remedy. Without the experience of genuine remorse, and without the intentional effort to return again and again to that experience, injustice and barbarism change only their name and form . . . So wisdom teaches, and so history shows. America cannot be the hope of the world until it returns to that lesson. (The American Soul, p. 265)
This was already the lesson at Peniel, a lesson in the beginning. Of course, America cannot take any lesson en masse; no people can. That is why the transformation of the world’s violence begins with you. That is why the lessons of Jacob show an individual undergoing his reversal but result in the birth of a nation. The change you and I need to undergo is the same as the one the world needs to undergo–only: the world can’t hear; you . . . have! I have been very moved to learn from Donald Shriver’s Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds in how many places across America small groups of people have moved into that silence of remorse to encounter “the scope of mourning”–and then, and only then, like Jacob, to offer symbols for “the scope of apology.” And not seldom to meet in the eye of the hated other, the once-enemy brother and sister, a welcome so abundant it must be like the face of God.
To start this divine fire burning, you have to do something. Wake from your sleep in the night, get up, stand in the silence of remorse for an act of your life or of your people. Time to go. Don’t wait. God, God, God awaits.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, August 2005
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