Wrestling with God
© Rev. Peggy Meeker, 2011
11/6/11 Sermon at Brockport UU Fellowship
Meditation: two poems by Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet—part of "My heart, sit only with those," and "When Love comes suddenly" [Rumi: Hidden Music, translated by Azima Melita Kolin and Maryam Mafi, p. 105-106, HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd., 2001]
First, lay down your head
then one by one
let go of all distractions.
Embrace the light and let it guide you
beyond the winds of desire.
There you will find a spring and
nourished by its sweet waters
like a tree you will bear fruit forever.
When Love comes suddenly and taps
on your window, run and let it in but first,
shut the door of your reason.
Even the smallest hint chases love away
like smoke that drowns the freshness
of the morning breeze.
To reason Love can only say,
the way is barred, you can’t pass through
but to the lover it offers a hundred blessings.
Before the mind decides to take a step
Love has reached the seventh heaven.
Before the mind can figure how
Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.
I must stop this talk now and let
Love speak from its nest of silence.
Sermon
There is a story in the Book of Genesis about Jacob, one of the forefathers of Judaism and Christianity, wrestling with God, or with a messenger from God. And that’s what I want us to do, today and over the coming months—wrestle with God.
Actually, there are quite a few stories about Jacob. In his youth he struggled with his twin brother Esau over who most deserved their father’s favor. Esau was born first, and stood to inherit the greater portion, but when they were still young, Jacob strong-armed Esau into turning over his birthright. The way that story goes, Esau came home from a long day of working in the fields to find Jacob cooking a pot of lentils. Esau was exhausted and famished and wanted some food. Jacob said, ‘First, give me your birthright in exchange,’ to which Esau replied, ‘Here I am, at death’s door; what use is a birthright to me?’ Another time, when their father was about to die, Jacob tricked his father into giving him the blessing meant for his brother. It’s recorded in the New Jerusalem Bible in these words: “May God give you dew from heaven, and the richness of the earth, abundance of grain and wine! Let peoples serve you and nations bow low before you! Be master of your brothers; let your mother’s other sons bow low before you! Accursed be whoever curses you and blessed be whoever blesses you!” [Gen. 27:28-29].
When Esau learned what had happened, and that the only blessing his father could give him was that he would struggle for his life and would serve his brother until he won his freedom, Esau hated Jacob and resolved to kill him. So Jacob left his family’s homeland and traveled far to the north, a journey of about two weeks on foot, to live with his mother’s brother. On the way, one night he had a dream in which Yahweh, the God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham, stood beside him and promised him the ground on which he was lying and descendants as plentiful as the dust on the ground. Yahweh told him that all the clans of the earth would bless themselves by Jacob. He said, “Be sure, I am with you; I shall keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this country, for I shall never desert you until I have done what I have promised you” [Gen. 28: 15]. Jacob then vowed that if God did remain with him and keep him safe, and if he, Jacob, came home safely to his father’s home, then Yahweh would be his God.
Jacob then continued on to his uncle’s home, where he lived for about twenty years. During that time he married two of his uncle’s daughters and fathered eleven children, some with his wives and some with his slave women, and he accumulated great wealth in livestock, some of it at the expense of his uncle. And so the time came when feelings on both sides were less than warm, and Yahweh said to Jacob, ‘Go back to the land of your ancestors, where you were born, and I shall be with you’ [Gen. 31:3]. So Jacob went, and it was on this return journey that he is said to have wrestled with God.
Jacob had sent messengers on ahead, and they returned with the report that his brother Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men. Jacob was afraid, and he divided the people and animals with him into two camps, thinking that if Esau attacked one camp, at least the other might survive. Then he chose gifts of livestock for his brother and sent them on ahead. Finally, at the River Jabbok, he helped his family across, and as daylight was fading he sent across all his possessions, and he was left there alone. “Then,” and here I am reading from the New Jerusalem Bible, “someone wrestled with him until daybreak who, seeing that he could not master him, struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him. He said, ‘Let me go, for day is breaking.’ Jacob replied, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ The other said, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Jacob,’ he replied. He said, ‘No longer are you to be called Jacob, but Israel [one who strives with God and with humans], since you have shown your strength against God and men and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked, ‘Please tell me your name.’ He replied, ‘Why do you ask my name?’ With that, he blessed him there. Jacob named the place Peniel [which means the face of God], ‘Because I have seen God face to face,’ he said, ‘and have survived.’ The sun rose as he passed Peniel, limping from his hip. That is why to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh sinew which is at the hip socket: because he had struck Jacob at the hip socket on the thigh sinew” [Gen. 32: 25b-33; italics mine].
Jacob met Esau the next day, and bowed before him from some distance away, and Esau ran to him and embraced him. Esau asked why Jacob had sent so many flocks ahead, and Jacob said they were gifts to win his favor. Esau said he already had plenty, and Jacob should keep what was his. “Jacob protested, ‘No, if I have won your favor, please accept the gift I offer, for in fact I have come into your presence as into the presence of God, since you have received me kindly’” [Gen. 33: 10]. And Esau accepted.
What is God? I know some of us are atheists and believe there is no God, but sometimes when a person says “I don’t believe in God,” what they are really saying is that they do not believe in a certain idea of God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for example, Yahweh, was a tribal God—a God that would protect and bless you and yours, and curse your enemies. Jacob’s uncle worshiped a different God. The idea of there being only one God, and the idea of a God of universal love, were way in the future. Today, many people continue to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but they define that God a little differently—a God that does offer blessings, but doesn’t curse those who curse you. Many people pray to that God for various kinds of help. And when something terrible happens, they can feel that God has forgotten them or forsaken them. Usually, when someone says they don’t believe in God, that’s the God they don’t believe in—a supernatural being that can intervene in the natural world to prevent evil, and yet often does not seem to intervene. The atheism that has been popularized recently by books like The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, is a disbelief in that kind of God.
But there is another way of thinking about God that offers something quite different. Not a God who is a being, but a God who is presence. Not a God who does or does not allow things to happen, not an all-powerful God, but a God whose only power is love. Not a God who looks and acts like us, only better, but a God who needs us to be God’s arms and hands. In this way of thinking, to ask if God exists is to misunderstand God, to turn God into an object that might or might not exist. In this way of thinking, God does not exist, but is being itself, beyond existence. Karen Armstrong, in her book A Case for God, writes “Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is ‘nothing’—[no thing]—out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence” [p. xvi]. This is God as sacred reality, known by many different names—God, Goddess, Allah, Buddha Nature, Brahman, Spirit of Life, Pure Awareness, the Dao, the All.
Unitarian Universalism has embraced many different beliefs about God. Over the coming months I’ll talk more about some of those different beliefs—Unitarianism, Universalism, Transcendentalism, Humanism, Paganism, and so on. In the past century Unitarianism turned very humanistic. Talk about God became almost non-existent. Universalism remained more God-friendly, but both religious movements prized freedom of belief over any particular belief. When the two movements consolidated fifty years ago, their joint statement of principles read, in part, “The Association … shall … cherish and spread the universal truths … summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to humankind” [Tom Owen-Towle, Theology Ablaze, p. 5, Flaming Chalice Press, 2011]. It was a carefully crafted statement, intended to respect belief in God without actually affirming it, and for the most part, more intellectual than spiritual.
That was 1961. Then within the last twenty years or so, something very different happened. A desire for something more bubbled up. In 1998, a survey showed that “over 75% of Unitarian Universalists felt something substantial missing in our faith. It was identified as ‘spiritual discipline and depth’” [Theology Ablaze, p. 16]. In 2003, William Sinkford, who was then president of the Association, preached a sermon in which he said, “We need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, … .” His words sparked quite a debate between those who wanted a more spiritual religion and those who didn’t see Unitarian Universalism as a religion at all. Today, talk about God has resurfaced, and we are the richer for it. We cherish our pluralism as much as ever, but we are much more comfortable calling ourselves a religious movement.
Every four years or so, the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal chooses for study some aspect of our Association that it believes would benefit from independent review. In 2005, the Commission published a report entitled “Engaging our Theological Diversity,” which recommended that we “mobilize an association-wide effort … to develop and articulate a deeper understanding of who Unitarian Universalists are as a religious people and what shared commitments the UU faith calls us to affirm.” There has been a sense that we don’t talk enough about what we believe, as if the idea that we respect each others’ paths and beliefs means that we shouldn’t talk too much about them.
I’d like us to talk about them, and so I’m jumping in with a series of sermons on theology. I hope for it to encourage spiritual deepening for us, not to be just an intellectual exercise, because the point of theology is to consider the deepest questions we have about life. The root word in “theology” refers to reasoning or talking about God, but in a broader sense, theology includes all the questions we might ask about ultimate reality: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do good things happen to bad people? Why is there death? What does my life mean? What’s it all about? To quote another past president of the UUA, William Schulz, theology is “the sweet, earnest, bumbling attempt by us human beings to take serious things like hope, death, iniquity, and transformation seriously” [Theology Ablaze, p. x]. Theology means taking serious things seriously and wrestling with them. It’s not just something for me to do up here in the pulpit. It’s something for each of us to do, in our day-to-day lives.
And so I want us to wrestle with this idea of God. We’ve talked about several different ideas of God today. In the story of Jacob, God is a being who can stand at your side and promise you prosperity and safety, or wrestle with you and cripple you and bless you with a new name. This God is more than human—you might not expect to see this God face-to-face and survive—and yet in many ways this God is very human-like, taking Jacob’s side against his father, his uncle, and even his brother. But at the end of the story, when Jacob approached Esau with real trepidation, and Esau ran and embraced him, Jacob caught a glimpse of a different sort of God. His gifts of livestock to win Esau’s favor were not necessary. And Jacob said ‘I have come into your presence as into the presence of God, since you have received me kindly’ [Gen. 33: 10]. Where there is generous love, God is there.
Something like this has happened to me, in my life. I have caught a glimpse of a different sort of God. It is like what we find in the poems of Rumi: “When Love comes suddenly and taps // on your window, run and let it in but first, // shut the door of your reason. // … Before the mind can figure how // Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.” And “First, lay down your head // then one by one // let go of all distractions. // Embrace the light and let it guide you // beyond the winds of desire. // There you will find a spring and // nourished by its sweet waters // like a tree you will bear fruit forever.”
This is why all of this matters. Who would not want a spring of sweet waters to nourish us so that like a tree we will bear fruit forever? You may not call that God but whatever it is I want it in my life, and I want you to have it in your life. It is love, but it is also more than love. It is that which is deepest in our hearts, that which is beyond our desires, that which scales the mountain. It is peace, oneness, interconnectedness, acceptance, ground of being, wonder, passion, joy. It’s also, sometimes, the struggle. Sometimes, like Jacob, we are alone in the dark, on the other side of something, facing uncertainty or worse, and we have to wrestle our way through toward morning, maybe getting bruised in the process because it’s so terribly important, because we can’t let go of whatever we are wrestling with until we find a blessing.
What word do we have for all of this? We have the word God. This is what God is for me, and so I claim that word, and hope that I can make it sound as big and as wide open to you as it does to me. At the same time, though, one of the things I treasure most about Unitarian Universalism is that there is room here for all our ideas about God, and that we are at our healthiest when these different ideas stand in creative tension. Atheism helps us to discard ideas of God that are obsolete or abhorrent; agnosticism reminds us to stand in awe before all that we do not know; and affirmatism—of one or another concept of God—reminds us of the sacredness, the holiness that lies within and all around us [concept from Theology Ablaze].
This is what theology—our theme for the coming year—is all about. Let’s wrestle with it, like Jacob did. Let’s go face-to-face with God, and ask God’s name, and not let go until we find a blessing. Amen.
First, lay down your head
then one by one
let go of all distractions.
Embrace the light and let it guide you
beyond the winds of desire.
There you will find a spring and
nourished by its sweet waters
like a tree you will bear fruit forever.
When Love comes suddenly and taps
on your window, run and let it in but first,
shut the door of your reason.
Even the smallest hint chases love away
like smoke that drowns the freshness
of the morning breeze.
To reason Love can only say,
the way is barred, you can’t pass through
but to the lover it offers a hundred blessings.
Before the mind decides to take a step
Love has reached the seventh heaven.
Before the mind can figure how
Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.
I must stop this talk now and let
Love speak from its nest of silence.
Sermon
There is a story in the Book of Genesis about Jacob, one of the forefathers of Judaism and Christianity, wrestling with God, or with a messenger from God. And that’s what I want us to do, today and over the coming months—wrestle with God.
Actually, there are quite a few stories about Jacob. In his youth he struggled with his twin brother Esau over who most deserved their father’s favor. Esau was born first, and stood to inherit the greater portion, but when they were still young, Jacob strong-armed Esau into turning over his birthright. The way that story goes, Esau came home from a long day of working in the fields to find Jacob cooking a pot of lentils. Esau was exhausted and famished and wanted some food. Jacob said, ‘First, give me your birthright in exchange,’ to which Esau replied, ‘Here I am, at death’s door; what use is a birthright to me?’ Another time, when their father was about to die, Jacob tricked his father into giving him the blessing meant for his brother. It’s recorded in the New Jerusalem Bible in these words: “May God give you dew from heaven, and the richness of the earth, abundance of grain and wine! Let peoples serve you and nations bow low before you! Be master of your brothers; let your mother’s other sons bow low before you! Accursed be whoever curses you and blessed be whoever blesses you!” [Gen. 27:28-29].
When Esau learned what had happened, and that the only blessing his father could give him was that he would struggle for his life and would serve his brother until he won his freedom, Esau hated Jacob and resolved to kill him. So Jacob left his family’s homeland and traveled far to the north, a journey of about two weeks on foot, to live with his mother’s brother. On the way, one night he had a dream in which Yahweh, the God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham, stood beside him and promised him the ground on which he was lying and descendants as plentiful as the dust on the ground. Yahweh told him that all the clans of the earth would bless themselves by Jacob. He said, “Be sure, I am with you; I shall keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this country, for I shall never desert you until I have done what I have promised you” [Gen. 28: 15]. Jacob then vowed that if God did remain with him and keep him safe, and if he, Jacob, came home safely to his father’s home, then Yahweh would be his God.
Jacob then continued on to his uncle’s home, where he lived for about twenty years. During that time he married two of his uncle’s daughters and fathered eleven children, some with his wives and some with his slave women, and he accumulated great wealth in livestock, some of it at the expense of his uncle. And so the time came when feelings on both sides were less than warm, and Yahweh said to Jacob, ‘Go back to the land of your ancestors, where you were born, and I shall be with you’ [Gen. 31:3]. So Jacob went, and it was on this return journey that he is said to have wrestled with God.
Jacob had sent messengers on ahead, and they returned with the report that his brother Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men. Jacob was afraid, and he divided the people and animals with him into two camps, thinking that if Esau attacked one camp, at least the other might survive. Then he chose gifts of livestock for his brother and sent them on ahead. Finally, at the River Jabbok, he helped his family across, and as daylight was fading he sent across all his possessions, and he was left there alone. “Then,” and here I am reading from the New Jerusalem Bible, “someone wrestled with him until daybreak who, seeing that he could not master him, struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him. He said, ‘Let me go, for day is breaking.’ Jacob replied, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ The other said, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Jacob,’ he replied. He said, ‘No longer are you to be called Jacob, but Israel [one who strives with God and with humans], since you have shown your strength against God and men and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked, ‘Please tell me your name.’ He replied, ‘Why do you ask my name?’ With that, he blessed him there. Jacob named the place Peniel [which means the face of God], ‘Because I have seen God face to face,’ he said, ‘and have survived.’ The sun rose as he passed Peniel, limping from his hip. That is why to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh sinew which is at the hip socket: because he had struck Jacob at the hip socket on the thigh sinew” [Gen. 32: 25b-33; italics mine].
Jacob met Esau the next day, and bowed before him from some distance away, and Esau ran to him and embraced him. Esau asked why Jacob had sent so many flocks ahead, and Jacob said they were gifts to win his favor. Esau said he already had plenty, and Jacob should keep what was his. “Jacob protested, ‘No, if I have won your favor, please accept the gift I offer, for in fact I have come into your presence as into the presence of God, since you have received me kindly’” [Gen. 33: 10]. And Esau accepted.
What is God? I know some of us are atheists and believe there is no God, but sometimes when a person says “I don’t believe in God,” what they are really saying is that they do not believe in a certain idea of God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for example, Yahweh, was a tribal God—a God that would protect and bless you and yours, and curse your enemies. Jacob’s uncle worshiped a different God. The idea of there being only one God, and the idea of a God of universal love, were way in the future. Today, many people continue to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but they define that God a little differently—a God that does offer blessings, but doesn’t curse those who curse you. Many people pray to that God for various kinds of help. And when something terrible happens, they can feel that God has forgotten them or forsaken them. Usually, when someone says they don’t believe in God, that’s the God they don’t believe in—a supernatural being that can intervene in the natural world to prevent evil, and yet often does not seem to intervene. The atheism that has been popularized recently by books like The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, is a disbelief in that kind of God.
But there is another way of thinking about God that offers something quite different. Not a God who is a being, but a God who is presence. Not a God who does or does not allow things to happen, not an all-powerful God, but a God whose only power is love. Not a God who looks and acts like us, only better, but a God who needs us to be God’s arms and hands. In this way of thinking, to ask if God exists is to misunderstand God, to turn God into an object that might or might not exist. In this way of thinking, God does not exist, but is being itself, beyond existence. Karen Armstrong, in her book A Case for God, writes “Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is ‘nothing’—[no thing]—out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence” [p. xvi]. This is God as sacred reality, known by many different names—God, Goddess, Allah, Buddha Nature, Brahman, Spirit of Life, Pure Awareness, the Dao, the All.
Unitarian Universalism has embraced many different beliefs about God. Over the coming months I’ll talk more about some of those different beliefs—Unitarianism, Universalism, Transcendentalism, Humanism, Paganism, and so on. In the past century Unitarianism turned very humanistic. Talk about God became almost non-existent. Universalism remained more God-friendly, but both religious movements prized freedom of belief over any particular belief. When the two movements consolidated fifty years ago, their joint statement of principles read, in part, “The Association … shall … cherish and spread the universal truths … summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to humankind” [Tom Owen-Towle, Theology Ablaze, p. 5, Flaming Chalice Press, 2011]. It was a carefully crafted statement, intended to respect belief in God without actually affirming it, and for the most part, more intellectual than spiritual.
That was 1961. Then within the last twenty years or so, something very different happened. A desire for something more bubbled up. In 1998, a survey showed that “over 75% of Unitarian Universalists felt something substantial missing in our faith. It was identified as ‘spiritual discipline and depth’” [Theology Ablaze, p. 16]. In 2003, William Sinkford, who was then president of the Association, preached a sermon in which he said, “We need some language that would allow us to capture the possibility of reverence, to name the holy, … .” His words sparked quite a debate between those who wanted a more spiritual religion and those who didn’t see Unitarian Universalism as a religion at all. Today, talk about God has resurfaced, and we are the richer for it. We cherish our pluralism as much as ever, but we are much more comfortable calling ourselves a religious movement.
Every four years or so, the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal chooses for study some aspect of our Association that it believes would benefit from independent review. In 2005, the Commission published a report entitled “Engaging our Theological Diversity,” which recommended that we “mobilize an association-wide effort … to develop and articulate a deeper understanding of who Unitarian Universalists are as a religious people and what shared commitments the UU faith calls us to affirm.” There has been a sense that we don’t talk enough about what we believe, as if the idea that we respect each others’ paths and beliefs means that we shouldn’t talk too much about them.
I’d like us to talk about them, and so I’m jumping in with a series of sermons on theology. I hope for it to encourage spiritual deepening for us, not to be just an intellectual exercise, because the point of theology is to consider the deepest questions we have about life. The root word in “theology” refers to reasoning or talking about God, but in a broader sense, theology includes all the questions we might ask about ultimate reality: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do good things happen to bad people? Why is there death? What does my life mean? What’s it all about? To quote another past president of the UUA, William Schulz, theology is “the sweet, earnest, bumbling attempt by us human beings to take serious things like hope, death, iniquity, and transformation seriously” [Theology Ablaze, p. x]. Theology means taking serious things seriously and wrestling with them. It’s not just something for me to do up here in the pulpit. It’s something for each of us to do, in our day-to-day lives.
And so I want us to wrestle with this idea of God. We’ve talked about several different ideas of God today. In the story of Jacob, God is a being who can stand at your side and promise you prosperity and safety, or wrestle with you and cripple you and bless you with a new name. This God is more than human—you might not expect to see this God face-to-face and survive—and yet in many ways this God is very human-like, taking Jacob’s side against his father, his uncle, and even his brother. But at the end of the story, when Jacob approached Esau with real trepidation, and Esau ran and embraced him, Jacob caught a glimpse of a different sort of God. His gifts of livestock to win Esau’s favor were not necessary. And Jacob said ‘I have come into your presence as into the presence of God, since you have received me kindly’ [Gen. 33: 10]. Where there is generous love, God is there.
Something like this has happened to me, in my life. I have caught a glimpse of a different sort of God. It is like what we find in the poems of Rumi: “When Love comes suddenly and taps // on your window, run and let it in but first, // shut the door of your reason. // … Before the mind can figure how // Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.” And “First, lay down your head // then one by one // let go of all distractions. // Embrace the light and let it guide you // beyond the winds of desire. // There you will find a spring and // nourished by its sweet waters // like a tree you will bear fruit forever.”
This is why all of this matters. Who would not want a spring of sweet waters to nourish us so that like a tree we will bear fruit forever? You may not call that God but whatever it is I want it in my life, and I want you to have it in your life. It is love, but it is also more than love. It is that which is deepest in our hearts, that which is beyond our desires, that which scales the mountain. It is peace, oneness, interconnectedness, acceptance, ground of being, wonder, passion, joy. It’s also, sometimes, the struggle. Sometimes, like Jacob, we are alone in the dark, on the other side of something, facing uncertainty or worse, and we have to wrestle our way through toward morning, maybe getting bruised in the process because it’s so terribly important, because we can’t let go of whatever we are wrestling with until we find a blessing.
What word do we have for all of this? We have the word God. This is what God is for me, and so I claim that word, and hope that I can make it sound as big and as wide open to you as it does to me. At the same time, though, one of the things I treasure most about Unitarian Universalism is that there is room here for all our ideas about God, and that we are at our healthiest when these different ideas stand in creative tension. Atheism helps us to discard ideas of God that are obsolete or abhorrent; agnosticism reminds us to stand in awe before all that we do not know; and affirmatism—of one or another concept of God—reminds us of the sacredness, the holiness that lies within and all around us [concept from Theology Ablaze].
This is what theology—our theme for the coming year—is all about. Let’s wrestle with it, like Jacob did. Let’s go face-to-face with God, and ask God’s name, and not let go until we find a blessing. Amen.