Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·July 31, 2005

Prayer of the Day

Dear God, we love you and we want to know you even more.  Help us discover our lives in you, and may we tell others the good news of our experience.  Amen.

Scripture
Genesis 32:22-31

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.  He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had.  Then Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.  When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.  Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.”

But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

So he said to him, “What’s your name?”

And he said, “Jacob.”

Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”

Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.”

But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?”  And there he blessed him.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life was preserved.”

The sun rose upon him as he passed Peniel, limping because of his hip.

Message
Chugging Faith
Ryan Motter, Summer Intern

In 1999, I was in Minneapolis, Kansas, and we had just stopped to get a drink at a Quick Stop.  This guy in bibs, without an undershirt on, just his overalls, walked up to me and started following me around the store.  He looked at me.  Finally I stopped somewhere, and he came up to me and put his hand on my back and said, “You play football, boy?”

I said, “No.”  Then I sort of ran away as quickly as I could. 

In high school, I was never much of a jock.  In fact, the only sport I ever participated in was swimming.  After a season’s worth of last place finishes and every day wrestling with a Speedo, I decided that swimming was not quite the sport for me.

Before I totally gave up hope on athletics, I checked out everything else.  Wrestling was one of those sports I checked out.  Just to tell you in advance, I did not decide to wrestle.  I figured my tenure with Spandex was over.  So I took up the practice of being an observer, for the most part. 

Now, please forgive me all you wrestling experts in the audience.  This is how I perceive the process to go overall for wrestlers.  Wrestlers would start as far as a week in advance and would eat practically next to nothing.  They would eat only what they had to eat only to have the energy to do what they had to do.  Then they would work out incessantly, so they could bulk up for their match.  On Friday, they weigh in at the point where they are.  They try to weigh in as light as they can.  Then after that, these guys, who haven’t eaten in a week, will eat anything they can get their hands on.  So they come out of the locker room all very hungry.

I was talking to Terry Overfelt, and I was telling her what my high school wrestling guys did to bulk up.  She told me that I was weird.  If Terry says it is weird, then it is very certifiable, overall.

What our wrestling guys would do is get in a circle of 20 to 30 people.  The team captain would raise his arm, and then he would drop it and say, “Go!”  Each guy had a Hy-Vee bag with three or four bottles of maple syrup.  The guys would rip into the Hy-Vee bag, grab the bottle, tear off the lid as fast as he could, and chug that syrup as fast as he could. 

Within five to ten minutes, there were 60 to 70 empty shells of bottles lying on the floor.  Guys are no longer sweating salt water.  They are now sweating sugar water, and they are sticking to everything they touch.  Lightning is flying from their fingertips as they step on the mat.

But once you get to the mat, I really think wrestling is a very noble thing.  When you really look at it, a wrestler, crouching and ready on the mat, can only have a plethora of things on his mind.  But I see one most specifically.  That is the fire in the eyes of his opponent.  It is the fire he is hoping his opponent is looking back at.

Jacob’s wrestling has to be one of my all-time top five favorite Bible stories.  What may disturb some of you more, however, is that I find Jacob one of my top five most admirable Bible characters.

Now Jacob’s life achievements, if you were to list them, go something like this:  He cheats his brother Esau out of his birthright for a bowl of soup.  He disguises himself as his brother and steals his brother’s blessing from their father.  Then he runs away from home.  He marries a girl, because he wants to marry her sister.  Then eventually he does marry her sister in addition to her.

At the point where we find him, he’s what some might call a winner overall.  He is doing a fairly noble thing when we find him.  He is on his way to go see his brother Esau, who he has cheated, lied, betrayed to.  Who knows?  Esau probably might kill him.  But even at that, Jacob is still a little flawed.  Did you notice the part where he sends his wives, and his maidservants and his kids in front of him?  They are to go see his brother whom he has cheated, and lied, and stole from.  Yea!  Real brave.  I mean… he’s a smart guy.  But Jacob is not expecting danger where he is.  He is left alone.  He finds himself in a spot unexpectedly in that a man comes and attacks him and wrestles with him all night.

Now I have always been really bothered by this guy, mainly because it is just a man in the Scripture.  Jacob wrestles with some faceless guy.  So I looked into it a little bit.  Everybody disagrees on who this is.  Your Scriptures are probably going to suggest it is God.  Other people are going to say it is an angel.  A lot of people say it could be Esau coming back to get his own.  Some people are even going to say it is Jacob wrestling with his conscience.  Whoever it is, Jacob and his opponent wrestle all night.  When the man is afraid to be seen in the light, he says that it is time for him to go.  But Jacob won’t stop.  In fact, he is so selfish that he asks for the man’s blessing.

One of the buzz phrases within our church today is “questioning your faith.”  Some people say you have to question who you are to understand who you are better.  Some people may even go as far as to say that if you don’t question, you are not a true Christian.  I have one major problem with all this, other than the fact that I think questioning is hard.  My problem is I think we have really fallen into a trap where questioning is the only way in which we can grow into our faith.  It is the only way we often recognize.  Most people, so often, see the questioning coming at a life-changing experience at a mountaintop – a death in the family, an accident – at which they see these questions popping up.  But do we recognize the faith we have when we are not at the mountaintop?  Do we recognize the faith we have when we are not in the midst of a life-changing experience?

I want to tell you another story.  I have a confession to make to you.  I really haven’t been to church regularly in about two years.  I would go to church when I was at home.  I’ve been to church here all summer.  Occasionally I would go when I was at school.  But as far as my faith vocabulary goes, it has dwindled significantly.

At the beginning of this summer I was not sure that Columbia was the place that I suppose to be.  In fact, I left early from work one Tuesday so that I could go home on my day off and start my day off early.  As I was driving out of Columbia, I was right past the bridge on the interstate.  Now I must tell you, I am an anal-retentive driver.  I have my hands at “ten” and “two” the whole time I drive, and I go 70 miles per hour straight down that road.  As I am on the bridge, this Lincoln Navigator just whips up right behind me.  I’m crouched down over the wheel, handling the car properly, as the Navigator just zips past me.  About ten feet in front of me, its left back tire blows out completely.  It starts swerving all over the road.  I’m swerving all over the road to try to avoid the debris.  Eventually the Navigator driver pulls off to the side of the road.  I pull off behind him.  I run up, “Is everybody OK?  Is everybody all right?”

The lady and the man assure me, “We’re all right.  Would you just take us to the next rest stop?”

I let them hop in, and we drive off.  When we get to the rest stop, they pile out, and I reach for a pen and paper to write down my name for insurance purposes.  The lady grabs my hand, at which point I think, “I’m dead.  These people are going to kill me.”  She looks at me and says, “Listen, my son has a baseball game he must be at in 45 minutes in Marshall.  Can you take him there?”

I was in the middle of saying yes when she says, “I’ll give you Forty Bucks.”

I said, “Oh, sure, I’ll take him.”  (For Forty Bucks I’d take him wherever she wanted me to take him.)

I take the $40, and the kid hops in the car.  I just sort of sit there waiting for his Mom to jump him.  She says to me, “Well, are you going?  Go, for gosh sakes!”

I’m thinking who in their right mind would send their son alone with me?  I started to take off with my Forty Bucks and her kid.  As we are taking off down the road, we sit in this awkward silence for ten or fifteen minutes.  I can tell this kid is thinking that I’m going to pull off at the next exit and show him my favorite axe or something like that.

Eventually this kid asks, “How old are you?”

“I’m 20.”

He says, “Oh, do you go to school?”

“Yea,” I said.  “I go to Texas Christian University.  Where do you go?”

“Oh, I’m 17.  My name is Miles.  I go to Fulton High School, like it says on my baseball uniform, right here.”

I said, “Oh, cool.”  Then we sat in some more silence.

Finally he asked me a question, and I had absolutely no idea where he was coming from.  He said, “So, you are a man of faith, then?”

I thought to myself.  “I don’t have any Jesus stickers on my car.  I don’t have any crosses at all.  There is nothing to denote I am a Christian.  I don’t even have a Bible in the back seat.” 

I said, “Well, what gives you that idea?”

He said, “Well, you go to Texas Christian University.”

I said, “Oh, I got ya’.  I got ya.’”

He said, “Well, are you?”

I said, “Yea, I go to church, and I’m working in a church this summer.”

He said, “Well, what church?”

I said, “The Christian Church – Disciples of Christ.”

He said, “Well, what do they believe?”

Like I said, I was not one much for a vocabulary of faith.  “Oh… Well, how do you want me to answer that?”

He said, “Well, what do you believe?”

I couldn’t give him an answer that I was happy with at all.

As people sitting together in this room today, we go beyond ourselves to proclaim ourselves as people of faith, people bearing the Word of Christ, speaking the truth in love with the love and power of God and the Holy Spirit, but do you really understand what those things are?  Have you ever thought about them?  The faith within us is so vast and expanding and unending and unexplored for a people who claim that we need to know everything empirically, it is surprising we don’t implode from the frustration of not being to answer these questions.

It seems as though our faith enjoys a pristine position at the end of our fingertips, right out of our reach.  This is where I find my admiration for Jacob.  As strangely immoral and misled as Jacob’s life is, he is facing that which he doesn’t know.  But could it be that faceless man that he wrestles is all of those things I mentioned earlier?  Could it be that Jacob is wrestling with the experiences in his life both personal and spiritual?  Jacob’s wrestle embodies not only his entire life but his entire spiritual life as well.  It is as though Jacob is face to face with faith – the faith of himself.  And this isn’t planned.  This is not a mountaintop.  This is a spot beside a spring.  When it comes down to that, Jacob doesn’t treat his faith at the end of his fingers.  He grabs it, and he throws it down.

A wrestler crouching and ready for the whistle has only what I can imagine as a plethora of things on his mind.  But I can see one most specifically, the fire in the eyes of his opponent that he hopes his opponent is looking back at.  A wrestler of faith has only what I can imagine as a plethora of things on his/her mind, one of which is that vast unending sea of questions.  As people of faith, we claim that our faith is as concrete as a man standing in front of us wrestling us through a long, dark night of doubt, fear, ignorance. If we are to wrestle our faith, we are going to have to be true wrestlers.  We are going to take it by the hands.  We are going to have to meet it at the mat.  When are going to have to wrestle with it, not only on the mountaintops.  We are also going to have to identify those weak places and those strong places.

So you don’t pray.  So you don’t read Scripture.  So you don’t go to church enough.  I don’t know your extenuating circumstances, but from what I hear, these are good spiritual practices.  Try to do them.  We must also find ways in which we can share our strengths more.  Those things in which we feel strong, we must share them.  But most of all, we must seek to know our faith better. 

What do you believe?  We see it as such a basic question, but more than basic, it is very complex.  You have to pin it down.

I want to give you one more thing.  Did you hear the part about where Jacob gets hit in the hip socket?  I have to tell you something.  It loses a little bit from the Hebrew to the English translation.  When they say “hip socket,” the Hebrew word for that isn’t “hip.”  It’s something more important to a man.  It is something a bit more vital to whom he is, his life and his line.

I can remember second grade, and I can remember those playgrounds as being harrowing places, not fun places.  I can tell you this experience would not be a good one.

I’m talking about the most intense kick to the groin you’ve ever had.  It is only those things which Jacob wrestles with that grab him in a place that means his life and his line, and Jacob is not going to be the same.  The wrestle we have with our faith is one which grips us by the very essence of who we are, by that which is vitally important to us and leaves us permanently changed because of it.

The Jacob wrestler within each of us is to be a changed, transformed life, empowered by wrestling with the faith we have, by identifying our strengths and our weaknesses, and by passionately staring into the eyes of faith and seeing a blazing fire roaring within.  So chug your syrup.  Electrify your fingertips.  Reach on to your faith, and discover it in only a way which you can by throwing it down to the mat and wrestling with it.  And you will be blessed by God, because you have wrestled with it.

Amen.

Benediction

Wrestle with us, God; wrestle with us as we question and doubt.  Wrestle with us as we find the answers.  Match us up, as we wrestle together.  Then, pin us and make us yours.  Amen.