I
thought I was under a lot of pressure to say something wise before going on
sabbatical, but now I’m supposed to have found myself or something. Talk about
pressure!
It’s good to be back. Honestly, I
can say that. It was also good to be gone. Those things are not mutually
exclusive. One of the things I found to be very true over the course of a month
walking the Superior Hiking Trail was the futility of grand declarations and
defining experiences before you have them. There are lots of people hiking that
trail for lots of different reasons. Some people are out there to make some
definitive change in their lives. Something isn’t right back home and the trail
offers a kind of proving ground to test a new way of living. But that wasn’t
me.
For others, they were out in the
wilderness to find themselves. If
you’ve ever read the book Wild or the
seen the movie with Reese Witherspoon that’s the kind of mentality I’m talking
about—people walking a trail because they don’t know who they are and something
about it calls out to them. This is closer to an act of pilgrimage. You strip
away the daily rigor of life and replace it with a different, simpler rigor and
you may discover something about yourself you’ve never realized before, but
again, that wasn’t why I was out there.
I had the advantage of perspective.
I wasn’t a 20-something trying to find myself, and neither was I in a mid-life
crisis. But that’s not to say I knew what I was doing. There’s a tendency on
the trail (as in life) to make wide, sweeping declarations about why we are
doing what we are doing. Many of these declarations end up being impossible to
maintain.
How many of you know people who are
constantly talking about making 180 degree changes in life? They’ve been going
one way for so long, but now they’ve reached a point and decided, “Now’s the
moment! I’m going to change.” I’m guessing many of you have been there. I’ve
been there! Maybe you are there right now, thinking, “I just need to flip
things completely around!”
Some of you have grown past that
stage, perhaps. There were plenty of those folks on the trail, too. People
returning someplace meaningful… people just getting out to get out.
That’s the thing about the trail:
It’s a metaphor for life, because everyone has a different direction, pace, and
purpose. Everybody is out there for different reasons. Everybody is starting and
ending at different places. Everybody is looking for a different experience.
Everybody suffers differently. Everybody enjoys it differently. It’s a huge
mistake (whether on the trail or in life) to assume that everybody is in it for
the same reason that you are. They’re not. Your goals are not other peoples’
goals. Your deepest desires are not their desires. Sometimes they line up,
sure, but not always, not most of the time.
Do not go through life trying to make other
people have the same purpose as you, especially not your spouse and especially
(especially!) not your children. Even if you’re walking the same path, don’t
assume it’s for the same reason.
Everybody is also wrestling with
something different, which brings us finally to Jacob in Genesis 32. Don’t worry, a month in the woods didn’t
completely ruin my ability to preach on the scripture for the day. Jacob is
a cheater. His name means it, Ya-aqob in Hebrew, “heal-grabber” or “he cheats.”
He stole his brother’s birthright. He took a blessing that wasn’t his. He
devised a scheme to get the stronger goats from his father-in-law, Laban. But
Jacob is not one-dimensional; he’s not a bad
guy or a good guy. We might not
like that, but most people—most real people that is—are shades of grey. Jacob
is good and bad, sinner and saint, a hero and a villain.
This is the Jacob who wrestles with
the mysterious man at Peniel. We get no warning that this is going to happen, no
walk-up music or video montages or speeches. Jacob doesn’t go to Peniel to
declare a big change in his life or to rediscover some magic from time gone by.
Instead, he simply ends up in a seemingly unimportant place at a seemingly
meaningless time and meets God there. Strangely, God meets Jacob in a wrestling
match.
Which of us hasn’t been there?
Wrestling a mysterious divine figure through the night?
OK, maybe nothing like that has ever
happened to you in the flesh, but I guarantee you’ve wrestled. You’ve wrestled
with a difficult decision. Or with heartbreak. Or with uncertainty. Or with
anxiety, or depression, or another medical condition. The shadowy figure that
fights us all night long is real and personal and we can’t defeat it—the best
we can do is hole on.
The first step is to acknowledge that
we all have this fight, but it takes different forms for each of us. You are
all going to be so sick of the trail metaphors over the coming weeks (I’m just
going to warn you of that right now), but
if we imagine we are all walking a path through life—that we are all on the
same path, in fact, since our lives connect by living in the same place—then
there is a huge temptation to believe we are wrestling with the same masked
men—that we all have the same demons. It’s not true.
God does not promise that we will
have equal difficulties in life. That much is really obvious if you look at the
world for half a second. Some people have it much easier than others, and
others appear to have it much easier when they are screaming in pain underneath
the surface. Most of the time, we don’t know. We may not even know what our loved
ones are wrestling with. You may not even know what you yourself are wrestling
with. Our motivations usually go deeper than we realize.
As I walked the trail I would often
ask people why they were out there. I mean, I said “Hi” or “Good morning”
first; I wasn’t a completely crazy person. But if I got the chance, I was
curious to know what other people would say. Their answers were as varied as they
were incomplete. It’s easy to answer a difficult question with clichés. “I just
love to get away!” they would say, or “It’s my happy place.” We don’t often
step back and ask ourselves why we are doing things that we enjoy. That’s for
the philosophers and theologians. For most of us, it’s just enough to do things
that are enjoyable. Of course, I was often asked the same question, and I, too,
had no idea how I should be answering, especially at first. It took wrestling
with it. Struggling with it. It took time. I wrote some things in my sabbatical
proposal and more still to get a start on the devotional before I ever walked a
step, but the more I tried to define the experience before I had it the
slipperier it became.
I have noticed this a lot, actually.
We like to define the reasons we are having an experience before we have it.
This is especially true of young people who feel obligated to do things in a
certain way and are forever explaining why they are doing something before they
even do it. It’s called planning, we say. Meanwhile, if we’re honest, there’s
no way to know why we are doing a new thing until we’ve actually done it.
Some of this comes from a good place. We
are taught to have goals to give us direction, but what if what we are lacking
is not direction but space to discover who we really are? Space to wrestle! And
who are we wrestling with? Ourselves, sure, but more fundamentally, we are
wrestling with God and the reason we were put on this earth.
You wrestle first. The answers come much,
much later. Your wide, sweeping declarations are cute, but they won’t hold in
an encounter with the true God who meets us when we least expect it. You can
come to God with a list of reasons why you are there, but the wrestling match
that ensues will quickly put you in your place. It’s better to come empty, come
open, come believing that because you are a creature created by God you have
purpose and a reason for being on this earth, and it’s folly to define it until
you’ve gone deeper. How can you possibly know why you are the way you are until
you’ve actually met God and wrestled through the long night of uncertainty?
So, why was I on the trail? To rest.
To slow down. To not just notice things, but to see things. That’s it,
actually—the best reason I could come up with after a month on the trail: I was
out there to pay attention to nature, to people, and to myself.
Now, you might notice something was
missing from that list. Man, the pastor
really forgot he was supposed to be paying attention to God! What a
failure!
Well, not exactly. I didn’t forget. But
something changed along the way. There was this funny moment as I was sitting beside
a river one day chatting with a group of four young women who had stopped to
have lunch. We started talking about the reasons we were out there, and they
had some really good insights. Then, something really fascinating happened.
When they learned I was a pastor on sabbatical, one of them gave me the
look—you know, the twisted up face, side-eye look—and said, “So, when you’re a
pastor on sabbatical are you supposed to not think about God?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, it’s just that when you go on
sabbatical you’re supposed to not be working, right? And your work is thinking
about God, so…” she trailed off.
We all laughed. Pretty quickly the
subject changed, and I didn’t think about this again for some time. Then, one
day as I was walking along the trail it hit me. She was right. When I went started
my hike, I intended to have profound thoughts about God, but I found that the
thoughts I was having were forced. It was only when I stripped away all my
pre-conceived notions of what I was doing that I began to see new things, and I
began to understand my own motivations for being out there. I saw the bits of
selfishness, leaving behind my family; I saw the bits of gratitude, pushing myself
away from comfort; I saw the bits of curiosity, wanting to explore and find
something new; I saw the bits of determination, eager to push my boundaries. I
saw it all when I stopped trying to tell God what experience I was going to
have.
The same was true with Jacob
wrestling with God on the river bank. The same is true for all of us. Don’t
claim to have overcome an obstacle you haven’t actually wrestled with yet.
Don’t decide the solution before experiencing the problem. Even worse, don’t
assume other people have the same problem.
We don’t need to fix one another.
Instead, we need to support one another in our own wrestling as we struggle
with God and with ourselves. That’s what Jacob’s new name, Israel, literally
means, “One who struggles with God.” It is the name given to the people who
come after Jacob, the Israelites. We are called to struggle with God.
It won’t be easy, because it is
meaningful, and meaningful things are hard. This path we walk means resisting
the easy answers and the quick fixes. It means that when you experience
somebody suffering you don’t try to gloss over it and get out of there as fast
as possible. It means the hard work of accompaniment, which is sitting with
somebody who has not healed yet. It means the harder work of acknowledging our
own faults and our own pains. It means going deeper into yourself, even though
you know it’s dark down there sometimes. It means seeing things, being aware of
little things, cultivating curiosity.
Jacob was all sorts of grey—a sinner
and saint—but he did one thing extraordinarily well. He was persistent. Oh man,
was he persistent! He didn’t let God go. He wrestled until the morning light.
God will hold us regardless. Jacob’s
feat wasn’t saving his soul; God had that taken care of. Rather, Jacob’s
persistence was the response we have to grace that is ours freely. Jacob held
on to that hope without fear. This is something we don’t talk about enough as
Lutherans. We understand we are saved by grace through faith apart from works,
so we zonk out, knowing we are good with God. And it’s true! But it’s kind of a
sad life to do nothing with that grace. Since God will never let us go, why not
live boldly into the audacious hope we are promised?
Wrestle with God. Resist the easier
paths, the more comfortable places. Instead, hold on and support one another in
their own wrestling, which probably looks quite different from yours. And do it
all not to be right, and not to be proud, and not to be smart, and not to be
wise, but instead, wrestle with God, because that’s where you find peace. The
one and only place where you can discover who you truly are. Your reason for
being.
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