A sermon by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Given on Easter Sunday, April 23, 2000

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

Angels are "in" these days. We see angel cards, angel ceramic figures, films about angels. We see books written about angels, claiming that angels come into our lives for anything from fixing a flat tire on a lonely stretch of road to guiding us to safety when we become lost at sea. These supernatural beings are thought to be hovering about, protecting us from harm. Why some people get angel assistance and others don’t isn’t totally clear.

But I have to say this popular image of the angel is not like that of the angels in the scripture. The angels of the scripture are prophetic beings, messengers from God. They come to herald new beginnings. Take for example, the angel who appeared to the peasant girl Mary in the town of Nazareth. He tells her that she is to become pregnant with a baby who will be the messiah. Mary does not take this lightly—in fact, she is terrified. She says to the angel, "How can this be, since I don’t have a husband?" A reasonable question. A very down to earth, human question. But you see, angels don’t clarify mystery, they awaken us to mystery and take us deeper into mystery.

And then there were the angels who came on that first Easter. The women disciples of Jesus come to the sepulcher, prepared to anoint his body, and they find the stone rolled away from the door of the tomb and they see two men standing there, in "shining garments." The women are afraid, and they bow low to the ground. The angels say, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen." The mystery. The beginning of the story: Mary, pregnant with new life; and the end of the story, Jesus rising from the dead, to bring new life to all who will follow. Angels, you see, are not docile sweet fluttery things that step between us and danger—they are in fact terrifying creatures that bring us messages from God, who often call us into danger, lead us in a direction we never guessed. We quake at their coming, and so we should.

There is an angel in the story that is the centerpiece of the sermon today, an angel that wrestles with the protagonist, Jacob, all night long, and finally at Jacob’s insistence, blesses him. Those of you who come from what we ministers call an "unchurched" background, may not know the story at all. And those of you who went to Sunday School every Sunday as I did, may need a refresher, as I did, so I’m going to begin by telling the story.

Abraham, as you know, was the great patriarch of Israel. He had a son named Isaac, who in turn had twin sons, Esau and Jacob, born of Rebecca. Even in her womb, Rebecca felt these two sons fighting.

These boys are very different, as they grow up. Esau is a man of the fields, a hunter, covered with hair, whereas Jacob likes to stay at home in the tent with his mother. One day Esau comes home from a hunting trip, faint with hunger, and he asks his brother for food. Jacob answers, "Sell me, then, your birthright." And Esau is so hungry that he does just that—he sells the most precious thing he owns, his birthright, for bread and lentils.

Time goes on, and the boys’ father Isaac is near death. He tells Esau to go hunting and kill a dear and make him some venison stew, which is his favorite food, for he wishes to bless Esau before he dies. Jacob then tricks his father by pretending to be Esau, and so receives his father’s blessing.

Needless to say, when Esau returns from the hunt and finds out he has been tricked, he is furious with his brother and vows that one day he will kill Jacob. Rebecca, the mother, sends Jacob off to safety to live with her brother Laban. As Jacob flees, he has a vision of a ladder going up to heaven. He hears the voice of God telling him, "I am the Lord God of Abraham and the God of Isaac, and your seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed, and I am with you, and I will bring you again into your homeland, and I will not leave you." God’s promise. I will not leave you.

So Jacob begins working for his uncle Laban, who has two daughters, the elder named Leah and the younger named Rachael, who is very beautiful. Jacob asks for Rachael’s hand in marriage, and Laban says that he must work for 7 years to have her. So Jacob works for seven years, and then says to Laban, now give me my wife. But Laban tricks Jacob and sends Leah into the marriage tent. Now this is where you know the story can’t be literal. Jacob thinks he has Rachael, and when the morning light comes, he sees, whoops, it was Leah. Another case of mistaken identity. Laban explains by saying, well, in his country, the eldest daughter has to be married first. So Jacob has to work another 7 years to have Rachael, which he does. Jacob is nothing if not tenacious.

Jacob prospers, so much so that Laban becomes jealous, and Jacob decides he needs to leave, which he does, with his entire entourage of wives and servants and sheep and cattle. He heads back home, and sends messengers ahead of him to Esau. Home means facing Esau. The messengers come back saying that Esau is heading towards Jacob with 400 men. Jacob decides to pray—a good choice, considering his options. He prays, "I am not worthy of the least of all your mercies, oh God, but please deliver me from the hand of my brother." After his prayer, Jacob decides to send a present to Esau—he sends goats and camels and donkeys and bulls. And Jacob takes his two wives and their servants and his eleven sons and hides them as best he can.

That night, then, he is left alone. Imagine how he must have felt. There by the riverbank, he sees the distant campfires burning in the night. As he allows his tired body to rest on the hard ground, he hears a dog bark, breaking the silence. Perhaps he thinks about his life. He wonders if he has really accomplished anything. Was he really called of God? He remembers the look on Esau’s face when he stole his blessing. He thinks of the amazing dream of the ladder reaching to the sky and God’s promise to always be with him. He revisits the fourteen years he spent longing for Rachael, Rachael his beloved, who may be killed in this encounter with Esau. He thinks, "Has my God forsaken me?" Finally, his fatigue overwhelms him, and he falls into a restless sleep. Sometime in the night he wakens with a start, as a man, a mysterious visitor, grabs him and begins wrestling. He wrestles with Jacob until the break of day. The man, the angel, sees that he cannot defeat Jacob, and so he throws Jacob’s hip out of joint. He says to Jacob, "Let me go," and Jacob says, "I will not let you go until you bless me." And the angel relents. He says, "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have power with God and with men, and you have prevailed." Jacob, which means "one who grasps," is changed to Israel, which means "one who prevails."

The story ends well. Jacob looks up and sees Esau coming towards him. He bows down on the ground before Esau, asking his pardon. And Esau runs to meet him, the scripture says, and embraces him and kisses him. And Jacob says to his brother, "I have seen your face as though it were the face of God."

Who is this man, this angel, who comes in the night? Is it Esau, with whom he has wrestled all his life? Is it his shadow self, the doubts and fears that he must face and integrate in order to carry out his calling? Perhaps Jacob is Everyman, struggling with our existential questions: where is meaning in the short days we spend on this earth before we die? Perhaps it is all of these. There is no question, though, that this was a turning point for Jacob. He had to wrestle his demons to the ground, in order to go forward with his life. He needed, after his years of wandering, to go home at last.

For me, Jacob’s story is powerful. In meditating upon it, I wondered about this striving with God. You know, I think we have to strive with God, we have to be engaged, we have to be involved with God—we have to be involved not just with our thinking, but with our bodies, our feelings. We must bring our agonizing questions, our anger, our doubts, our deepest longings. God is big enough for all of these.

I know I strive with God—often. I can’t help it. I’m not Job-like in my prayers. You remember Job. He was so pious. "Just go ahead, God, and take my houses and lands, take my children, take my friends, just let me sit here in this ash heap scraping the boils off my skin—that’s OK, God, I can take it, I won’t complain." No, that’s not my approach.

At times God makes such a mess of things, I think. Almost any newspaper, almost any day, can bring forth my indignation at the ways of this world. Why is there so much suffering? I ask. Why is life so much about loss? Oh, I could give you neat theological answers to these questions, but that’s not where the questions lodge, in textbooks and lectures. No, these questions lodge in my body, in my gut. They sometimes bring me to tears. Take, for instance, the latest airplane crash—this one in the Philippines in which 131 people died, many of them flying home for Easter. Nobody really knows why the plane crashed. Foggy conditions, they said. In the debris were found letters, photos, infant formula, and an unmarred black stiletto-heeled shoe. The stuff of people’s lives. A doctor found a charred pair of bodies—a woman hugging a much smaller figure. "Up to the last minute," the doctor said, "the mother was embracing her child." We try so hard to love, and we’re so fragile.

Foggy conditions? Is that the only excuse from Heaven? Not good enough. Now some of you are going straight to your heads, I know. You’re saying, "Oh, you can’t blame that on God. We’re talking free will here. It was a man-made accident. There was a reason. We’ll find out what happened. We’ll prevent that particular thing from happening again." No, we won’t. There’ll be more crashes and more wars of genocide and more earthquakes and more droughts and more starving people. Not the plan I would have chosen.

But again, don’t take me literally when I say that I shake my fist in the face of God. I don’t think there’s an old man in the sky who controls things on the earth. What I do believe is that there is a Mystery beyond what I can know, and that I am accountable to that Mystery. I have been given life, and not just any life—a particular life, with particular experiences and particular gifts. Out of who I am emerges what some might call a destiny, what others might call the will of God, what I might call a story. But that Other, that God, is also accountable to me, as well, for we are in covenant. That is the message of the Hebrew scripture: we are in a covenantal relationship with God. And so in my striving, I call God to account.

To my way of thinking, we are in relationship with the Holy One, and like any good relationship, this one deserves honesty—honesty with myself and honesty before God. When I pray, that’s what my raging and my questioning and my doubting are all about—finding out what is really in my heart. You see, it’s impossible to really pray and to be dishonest. I can hear the faltering, the discordance in my own voice, and then I have to start again. I have to get it right. Then the relationship falls into place. I wrestle with my God, because more than anything else, I want that relationship to be right.

Striving with God, though, takes its toll, especially on those as strong and stubborn as Jacob. His hip is, in fact, painfully wrenched from its socket, and he walks with a limp the rest of his days. Nevertheless, he chooses to follow the thread of his particular story and not to run away. Imperfect as he is—a deceiver, a betrayer of his own kin—still, God is able to work though him. He becomes the leader of the nation of Israel.

Jacob’s story is the triumph of faith over fear. He must have wondered during those long years of exile if God’s promise was still good. Again, his story is one that touches me deeply. The fear and the faith. I wonder, like Jacob, will my life count for something? Where is the thread of my story—is it being lost in the everyday routine of church life—the meetings, worrying about the budget? I think that God and I have this covenant—but when I get really cynical or lonely, I think, "Where is God in all of this? Where is my blessing?"

How do we overcome the fear and get to the blessing? Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells of a man from India who recounted the following story. He said he was determined to get rid of his negative emotions—he struggled against anger and lust, laziness and pride. But most of all he wanted to get rid of his fear. His meditation teacher told him to stop struggling, but he could not. Finally the teacher sent him off to meditate in a tiny hut in the foothills. He settled down to practice, and when night fell, he lit three small candles. Around midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and out of the darkness emerged a very large snake, a king cobra. It was right in front of him, swaying. All night he stayed totally alert, keeping his eyes on the snake. He was so full of fear that he couldn’t move. There was just the snake and himself and fear.

Just before dawn the last candle went out, and he began to cry. He cried not out of despair, though, but out of tenderness. He felt the longing of all people, he knew their alienation and their struggle. All his previous meditation practice had done for him was to take him further away from people. In that moment, he accepted—really accepted wholeheartedly—that he was angry and jealous, that he was afraid. He accepted also that he was precious beyond measure. He was filled suddenly with gratitude, and in the darkness he stood up, walked toward the snake, and bowed. Then he fell to sleep on the floor. When he awoke, the snake was gone. As the man put it, his "intimacy with fear caused his dramas to collapse, and the world around him finally got through."

How do we usually deal with the snake? We try to pretend it isn’t there, we take a pill or a drink, we distract ourselves. We feel fear coming, and we run. In this way we cheat ourselves of the moment and cheat ourselves of our learning. Sometimes, though, we get cornered by life—the snake is right there, and the door is locked. With no way to escape, fear becomes our teacher. "The trick," Chodron says, "is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find that something is not what we thought." Keep wrestling with the angel.

Nothing is ever what we think it is. We know only what we learn when we let things fall apart, when we give up our concept of the way things should be. Like Jacob, maybe we think we are lost, but we are on the road all along. Like Jacob, maybe we fear blame, and we find that we are actually blessed. Like Jacob, some of us discover that our small expectations are shattered in the abundance of God’s love. We ask for an apple, and we get the whole tree.

Let me share with you the story of another man who struggled, this time with depression. His name is Parker Palmer, and he is a Quaker, an educator, by profession. He says that twice in his life, in his words, he "spent endless months in the snake pit of the soul." Sometimes he wanted to die, cut off as he was from himself and from others. He felt only the burden of his life and the exhaustion of trying to sustain it.

Depression, says Palmer, demands that we learn to embrace mystery, for mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart. Our culture wants mystery to be solved, puzzles to be explained, but mystery never gives way to solutions. We are drawn into mystery, and we deepen, and if we are fortunate we are blessed with wisdom, but never solutions. Now Palmer is clear that he’s not against taking medication, if drugs will help. But depression is rarely about a quick fix. It means, again in his words, "waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering whatever self-knowledge one can—and then making choices based on that knowledge."

Palmer does an excellent job of putting into words how it feels to be depressed. It’s not just a bad mood, it’s not merely feeling blue. Depression is the "ultimate state of disconnection," he says. You cannot connect with others, with yourself, or with God. You know what beauty is, intellectually, but you are unable to experience beauty. Your mind and your feelings become strangely unrelated. You feel that your supposed goodness is all a fraud, a mask, and you will be found out.

Parker Palmer says that friends tried to help, but their "help" just made things worse. One might say, "It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you go out and soak up some sunshine?" Or another might say, "You’re such a good person, Parker. You teach and write so well." Or still another might say, "I know just how you feel." But no one knows just how another feels. All these admonitions just made Palmer feel worse. He began to realize that his friends were trying, but they were into avoidance and denial. Though it is difficult, what we must do is just be present with another person in his pain, just "be with," and not try to fix anything—just stand there "respectfully," as Palmer says, "at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery."

The person who helped Palmer the most with his depression was a friend named Bill. Having asked Palmer’s permission, Bill stopped by his home every afternoon, sat him down in a chair, knelt in front of him, removed his socks and shoes, and for half an hour simply massaged his feet. This was the one place in Palmer’s body where he could still experience feeling. Bill rarely spoke at all. When he did, he would simply mirror Parker’s condition. He would say, "I can sense your struggle," or maybe "It feels like you are getting stronger."

Palmer acknowledged his need for professional help, and finally found a therapist who was a good match for him. After hours of careful listening, his therapist gave him an image that helped him reclaim his life. The therapist said, "You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?" At first Palmer thought that was a dippy thing to say. But then he began to understand that he had been living an ungrounded life, living at an altitude that was unsafe. When we’re up too high and we slip, as we always do, we have a long way to fall. Parker realized that his altitude problem came from several things: as an intellectual, he was living largely in his head; he had an inflated ego, in order to mask his fear; and he was living by images of what he ought to do, rather than what was life-giving for him. Depression was indeed the hand of a friend, trying to press him down to the ground on which it was safe to stand.

Years before someone had told Palmer that humility was central to the spiritual life. And he had always been proud of his humility. This person had failed to tell him that the path to humility was humiliation, when we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretenses and defenses, a place where we grow again, from the ground up, from the common ground of humanity.

The tricky thing to understand here is that the risk is the outcome, the wrestling itself is the answer. When we feel like beggars on this earth, and in our anguish we engage the Divine, and no matter what, no matter what, when we are so tenacious, when we will not bail, when we will not let go until we are blessed, then we find that we are in, fact, in relationship with our God, with the Ground of our Being, and truly that relationship is all we are here for on the earth. Then out of that relationship, our story--our unique story--will be told, in spite of our fear, in spite of our flaws. The thread will be spun. And we will understand in the end that the promise has held: I will not leave you, I am with you—in exile, every step along the road, leading you home.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, hear our prayer on this Easter morning. We do not understand your ways. We live too often in fear. We lose the path. When we grow weary of life, hold us close, and let us know you are near. We see you in the bloom of the spring flowers. In the eyes of one who stands with us when we are in pain. We have come this far by faith. Give us courage for the struggle, strength to hold on until we are blessed. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you be blessed, may you be blessed, may you be greatly blessed on this Easter day. Go in love, and go in peace. Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Welcome to you all on this Easter morning. May the joy of the season, may the promise of new life be yours today. Come, let us worship together.

Copyright 2000 by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.