Dave Skidmore, church deacon and our preacher on August 3, has received a number of requests for the text of his sermon, "Holy Land." It is available at the "continue reading" link, below.
A sermon preached by
Dave Skidmore
at the
Universalist National Memorial Church
Washington, D.C.
August 3, 2002
Genesis 32: 22-31
The same night he 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. 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 is 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 is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.
Opening words
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
Psalm 19:14
Introduction
My topic today is “Holy Land” – Where is it? What is it? And how do you and I get there? The last question – “How do we get there?” – is, I think, the most difficult. I believe our reading today, about Jacob’s encounter in the night with the enigmatic figure at the stream called “the Jabbok,” suggests an answer. But let me first turn to the question of, “Where is the Holy Land?”
Where Is the Holy Land?
The answer seems straightforward. For us, as liberal Christians – Protestants, Congregationalists, Universalists, inheritors of a legacy running thousands of years from Jacob to Moses to Jesus to John Murray – the answer seems self-evident. The Holy Land is in and around modern-day Israel. You can fly there on an El Al jet, walk on it and see the landscape where the events of our Scriptures played out -- at least you can during the times when the bitter, seemingly never-ending war between the Israelis and Palestinians is quiescent. The Jabbok is a stream in modern-day Jordan, now called the Wadi Zerka, that flows into the River Jordan from the east. It is located in a Holy Land that is not just Christians’ Holy Land but also the Holy Land for millions of Muslims and Jews.
I suspect many of you have had an opportunity to share the Passover Seder with Jewish friends and will recall, as I do, the moment when all declare, “Next year in Jerusalem!’’ It is, in one sense, a political statement of a people, in Diaspora, vowing to return to their homeland. In a spiritual sense, it is a statement of hope. But it underscores an obvious point – the Holy Land is not here. It is not in the home of my friends in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I have participated in Seders. It is someplace else. Once, long ago, our forbears, lived in the Holy Land. But we do not live there now.
I have to note that this sense of exile, of being out of place and out of time, is not true of all cultures and all people. Native Americans lived, and many still live, in their Holy Land. The mountains to the north and the river to the east and desert to the south, for instance, all would have a spiritual significance. Indeed, the very directions themselves – east, west, south and north – have spiritual significance. If a people migrated, the old names of the Holy Land would be affixed to the features of the new landscape. In other words, if they moved, their Holy Land moved with them.
That appeals to me. Though, by and large in Judeo-Christian Western culture, we feel as if we’re exiled from our Holy Land, we do attempt to invest our local landscapes with special significance. I remember when I first heard the phrase, “God’s Country.” It was the early 1980s and I was working the night desk at The Associated Press in Milwaukee. A broadcaster from a tiny town north of Green Bay, Wisconsin – WCCO in Oconto – called in a story for us to share with the other radio stations receiving the AP’s Wisconsin state wire. (In fact, I can still remember the story – it was a barn fire in which no one, at least no human, was injured. The broadcaster had a somewhat parochial view of what people in the rest of the state might consider to be news. Parenthetically, I later discovered that the building that housed the broacaster’s studio had a giant cow on the roof. Somehow it didn’t surprise me.) Anyway, the broadcaster finished the call by observing that, other than the barn fire, things were just fine “up here in ‘God’s Country.’” Now, I grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and I never heard anyone call it God’s Country. So, I naively thought the phrase was a special nickname for Northern Wisconsin and later was somewhat embarrassed to learn that the residents of just about any place with some degree of scenic beauty referred to their region as God’s Country. But, we all have our own parochialisms. New Yorkers believe, as the song goes, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” And I suspect I’m not the only one in this room who doesn’t believe being “Inside the Beltway” is nearly as bad a thing as some members of Congress from God’s Country seem to believe. In fact, I think it’s kind of special.
What Is the Holy Land?
So, that leads me to the second of my three questions: “What is the Holy Land?” What does it mean to live in it? What does it mean to live outside it? Well, one thing the Holy Land is not, in my mind, is heaven, or paradise. The Holy Land is not some promise in the next life. It is a real place we can experience in this life. But, I think you suspect that I am not speaking so literally as to mean that the Holy Land, at least exclusively, is in the Middle East, or Northern Wisconsin, or in the desert of Arizona where the Navajo live, or even Inside the Beltway. If New York is, as they say, “a state of mind,” I think the Holy Land is a state of mind, too.
What’s this state of mind like? Well, I believe it’s a little like being in a movie. I remember when I was in high school, I felt aimless, and wished my life were more like a movie. I’d sit in class and listen, or not. It didn’t much matter. I had mastered the art of sliding by – getting decent enough grades without too much effort. I wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities. I worked in a shoe store and hung out with my friends. We spent a lot of time tossing a basketball at a backboard and rim nailed to telephone pole down the street. Unlike when we were younger, we didn’t actually play any games. We just spent hours taking turns tossing the ball at the backboard, barely noticing if it went in or not, catching the rebound and tossing it up again. I drank beer when I got the chance but, other than that, I wasn’t particularly delinquent. I didn’t get in trouble. In short, I recall being somewhat bored with my life. I felt as if I was hanging around waiting for life to begin. I couldn’t wait to graduate and move away to college. (As an aside, I’ll mention that I went to Penn State and, upon arriving, discovered that the local radio stations referred to the area around State College as “Happy Valley.” I didn’t quite grasp the theological implications of that at the time!)
Anyway, as I hung around in a state of adolescent existential nihilism, I remember wishing that my life was like a movie. I wonder if any of you had ever had that secret wish? What is it that makes that so attractive? For me, it was the fact that every action taken by people in movies, every event they experience, is deeply meaningful. (With the possible exception of 2001, A Space Odyssey, but that’s another subject.) If you don’t realize the significance of a movie character’s action right away, by the end of the movie you almost certainly realize why they did or said X or Y. You might now be chuckling to yourself about this quote-unquote “profound” thought of a teen-ager. Of course every action and event in a movie has significance! If it doesn’t serve to illuminate a character or advance the story, it ends up on the cutting room floor. A movie doesn’t spend 30 or 45 minutes chronicling the lead character’s daily commute to work. We’d all get up and walk out of the theater. But we don’t live in movie time; we live in real time. We commute, we floss our teeth every day (at least if we’re listening to our dentists) and we do all sorts of things you never see in movies.
And yet. And yet I couldn’t, and can’t, shake the notion that real life, not just movie life, has meaning and ought to feel that way. So, for me, the Holy Land is not a paradise where all is wonderful. It is where we live the significant events of our lives, good and bad, where our actions and words matter. It’s where Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, and where he was crucified, where Moses received the Ten Commandments, where we live and die and break bread with people we care about, and wrestle with shadowy figures in the middle of the night.
How Do We Get to the Holy Land?
That leads me to my final question this morning: “How do we get to the Holy Land?” How do we get to this state of mind, where what we do and say is ripe with meaning? Isn’t that the question that runs through our religious and spiritual quests, more so than whether we will get to heaven by and by? The psychologist and ‘60s guru Richard Alpert, better known as Ram Dass, had a pithy answer. “Be here now,” he said. Of course that’s the answer! Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. Have you tried to just, “Be here now”? As Paul Simon sings in You Can Call Me Al, I sometimes find that I’m “soft in the middle” with “a short little span of attention.” Often, I find that I am anywhere but “here now” and, again quoting Paul Simon, “I need a photo opportunity.”
So, what do we do, at least those of us who do not possess enough fame to order up photo opportunities for ourselves? Well, one thing we can do is seek to bring some discipline into our lives. We can quit just hanging around, shooting baskets – not that there’s anything wrong with that! We can pray. We can worship in community. We can fast. We can study. Like the Quakers, we can keep silence. We can meditate. We can dutifully practice those disciplines. The world’s religions teach us that they can be, at the very least, part of the answer. But the story of Jacob at the Jabbok tells me that they are not the whole answer. Let’s consider it.
Jacob’s dark night of the soul came, as it does for us all, during a tough time in his life, a time of change. He is uprooted and on the move. His older brother Esau is pursuing him -- at least that’s what he thinks -- with 400 men. And Jacob, you will remember, has every reason to believe that Esau is angry. Manipulated by his pushy mother, Rebekah, a weak and young Jacob had deceitfully stolen the blessing his father, Isaac, had intended for Esau. Esau vowed to kill Jacob and Jacob fled from Canaan (the Holy Land) to go and work for his mother’s brother, Laban, in what is now Iraq. He married Laban’s daughters, Leah and Rachel. When we see Jacob as he stands at the Jabbok, it is twenty years after that and Jacob is going home. He has prospered; he has wives – two of them! – livestock, household goods. He has not been hanging around waiting for his life to begin. But neither has he been living his own life. He’s been working for his father-in-law (in the family business, so to speak) in his father-in-law’s land. Now it is time for him to strike out on his own, to – in the language of psychotherapy – self-actualize, to finally live up to his potential.
If you think about it, that middle-of-the-night wrestling match on the banks of the Jabbok may be the first midlife crisis in recorded history. In contrast with his behavior at critical junctures earlier in his life, Jacob confronts his midlife crisis with courage. He doesn’t buy a red convertible (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) or have an affair with an intern. Instead, he confronts what he needs to confront. Which leads to the question: Exactly who or what does he confront? A man? God? The answer is marvelously ambiguous. Scholars believe that the shadowy figure at the Jabbok is an echo of pre-Biblical beliefs in a demonic river spirit, standing guard at the ford. The prophet Hosea says Jacob struggled with an angel and all of the classic illustrations of the encounter depict an angel with wings.
But I go back to the literal words of this morning’s reading from Genesis. It says, “Jacob was left alone” and it says “a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” Jacob cannot both wrestle with a man and be alone. The only logical conclusion, for me, is that the man that wrestled with Jacob was Jacob himself. He may be on the move and leaving his old life behind, but he cannot leave himself behind. The other important thing to keep in mind is that, at the end of the encounter, Jacob concludes, “I have seen God, face to face.” So, somehow, wrestling with himself allows Jacob to glimpse the ultimate Truth – God.
Now the passage in Genesis doesn’t say what Jacob was thinking during this struggle with himself, but I like to think that perhaps he was wrestling with the sorts of inner demons, the questions, that we all wrestle with, alone, in the middle of the night. And, here, I am speaking about larger questions than, “Why am I soft in the middle?” I’m speaking about questions concerning the important relationships of his life, about the choices he had made, the roads taken and the roads not taken. Why didn’t he stand up to his mother when she was badgering him into deceiving Esau? Why did he enrich himself at Laban’s expense and, why, when leaving his father-in-law’s household, did he try to sneak off without even giving the old man a chance to say good-bye to his grandchildren? Now neither Jacob nor we can go back and undo the things we have done, unsay the things that we have said or say and do the things we should have said and done. But, on this night, unlike in his past, Jacob does not evade the persistent questions. He wrestles with them.
What is the result? That, too, seems ambiguous. Whatever Jacob wrestles with, in the words of the Scripture, “did not prevail.” But Jacob isn’t exactly triumphant, either. His hip is out of joint and, as he leaves the scene, he is limping. It is painful when we wrestle with our inner demons; it leaves a permanent mark. But it also is transformative. At the end of the encounter, Jacob’s opponent blesses him. And Jacob has not stolen this blessing from Esau; he has earned it in his own right. Signifying his profound inner transformation, he is given a new name, “Israel.” What happens next? Jacob discovers that Esau is not hostile and, in humbleness (“bowing himself to the ground seven times,” as Genesis says) Jacob reconciles with a tearful Esau and he founds the nation that today bears his then-new name. In short, it is his courageous struggle with himself in the night that permits him to return to the Holy Land and live a life of authenticity and meaning and significance.
Conclusion
What can we learn from Jacob? How can we live, as much as possible, in our own Holy Lands? One thing I find interesting about his encounter at the Jabbok is that Jacob did not exactly seek out the conflict, at least actively. He did not tap his opponent on the shoulder and snarl, “Make my day.” (Or, in this case, night.) But, in taking or sending his household across the stream and returning to the banks of the stream, alone, he did put himself in position to allow the encounter to come to him, so to speak. And when it came, he did not run from it.
So, I try to be mindful, and I invite you to be mindful, of the questions that confront us when we find ourselves alone, in the night, on the banks of our Jabbok. How are things between you and your parents? Between you and your siblings? Between you and your spouse or partner? And/or ex-spouse, or spouses? Between you and your children and/or step children? Between you and your boss or bosses at work? Between you and your colleagues? Between you and your subordinates? Between you and your neighbors? Between you and your friends? Do you see patterns of action or inaction that need to change? Is your work – both your vocations and avocations – satisfying? Is it bearing fruit? Why or why not? What do we need to do, or stop doing?
I hope, as with Jacob, that when we have “striven with God and with humans” we can see our struggles as more than nagging distractions from the pursuit of pleasure, as more than worry and pain to be minimized and avoided, as more than sound and fury signifying nothing. I hope we can see their larger meaning, that these struggles, whether we seek them out or whether they are thrust upon us, are the path for returning to our Holy Land and that the gateway to the Holy Land indeed is “here now “– not somewhere else.
Amen.
Benediction
Here is the Holy Land. Now is the Holy Hour.
May the truth that makes us free, and the hope that never dies, and the love that casts our fear, lead us forward until day breaks and the shadows flee away.
This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Be here now!
Amen.
Posted by the Rev. Scott Wells at August 11, 2003 02:55 PM