Sunday, August 1, 1999

FACE TO FACE
Rev. Linda Carder

My first experience of really coming face to face with something intense and life changing happened when I was quite young. I was exactly 3 and ¾ years old, give or take an hour or two. Unbeknownst to me, I was like Jacob, on a journey, although, unlike Jacob, I had not left home. All those around me had endeavored to prepare me for both the journey and this momentous occasion. I was told story upon story. I was given full descriptions of how I would and should feel, what I would and should do, and how wonderful it would be. No one, of course, told me of the demons I would encounter, both internally and externally.

And then, in the middle of the night, I was snatched from my sleep, thrown into the arms of my doting but somewhat anxious grandmother, and watched as my apparently weird and excited parents drove off into the darkness. The next day, I was told that I had a baby brother.

The trouble with these experiences is that they mark you for life. Forever after I would be John’s sister. There were and are times that was a blessing. But, as I was growing up, I had trouble seeing it as such. After all, younger siblings are so incompetent. They have to learn everything. It is a good thing they are often cute. But, does anyone realize how stressful it is to put up with such incompetence daily. And the predicaments caused by younger siblings are rather intolerable. For instance, you are trying with all your might to keep the young adventurer from burning himself on the stove. You try several tactics, to no avail. The only way, it seems, is to wrestle him to the ground. Then, of course, you are not praised for your valor but punished for making the poor thing cry. And this comes from the very parents who once loved you.

And then there is the whole business of boundaries. Older siblings seem to know about those things, almost without being told. Tell us no, tell us why, praise us a little, and we’ve got it. But younger siblings have something in their nature about breaking every boundary there is. It is their job, and they do it well. Somehow, I knew not to put the hairpin in the electrical socket, but my younger sibling did not. Somehow, I knew Mrs. Glover might not like it if I opened the chicken coop and chased the chickens out, but my younger sibling did not. And somehow I knew that hopping a freight train might be dangerous, but my younger sibling did not. And the parents who used to love me, seemed to think that was just part of who he was. I was, however, convinced that if I tried any one of those exploits, punishment for eternity would be mine! Or, at least, I would be sent to a foster home.

Face to face. There may be nothing that gives us a better look at ourselves than a struggle to get through issues with our family of origin. And sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between family struggles, demon wrestling and encounters with God. Is it an accident that as Jacob struggles with his brother he also struggles with the demon of fear and he struggles with god? Is it an accident that in the Cain and Abel story, the one who murders his brother encounters the demon of guilt and God immediately.

It is interesting that the two times recorded in our Bible in which Jacob comes face to face with God, Jacob is fearful of an encounter with his brother Esau. He first encounters God in a dream at Bethel as he (this is the younger brother, remember) is trying to escape from Esau from whom he has just stolen the much prized and sought after birthright. In the scripture just read today, Jacob is on his way to meet Esau, and he is quite frightened at the prospect of such an encounter. This time, Jacob falls asleep and wrestles with a "man" all night. Is the man Esau? The identity of this man is never revealed but there are clues that this is a demon, since the entity, what ever it is want to be gone before the light. That both of these encounters happen at night is no surprise, as that is the time for demons. This story probably was told for generations around campfires and originally came from a culture that told it as a demon story. When reformed and rephrased by the Israelites some of the demonic elements remained and God was added. The story then became a story of blessing. Jacob wrestles a blessing from God after wrestling a blessing from his father. Jacob’s name is changed from "trickster" to Israel, which means "one who strives with God." Jacob’s hip is dislocated not so much by the wrestling, but by a touch. Israel is not formed by success or shrewdness or land, but by an assault from God. Jacob was not consulted about his new identity. It is imposed. When daylight comes, the stranger is gone. So is Jacob. Only Israel remains, without sleep, blessed, named, and lame. Jacob, now Israel, names the place Peniel, which means, "face of God." This whole story then looks forward to the history of the Israelites who were constantly striving with God.

It would be very easy in our culture to get through life without even thinking of striving with God. We have begun in recent years to learn meditation skills, and to learn to listen for God as well as to talk to God. But the idea of striving or struggling with God is unfamiliar to us. And in our age of enlightenment, the age of doubt and unbelief, probably the most difficult task for us is to learn to identify God at all, and especially in our struggles.

How did Jacob know he had come face to face with God? He discovered it at the same time he discovered that he was not the same person. Jacob was changed. And so, I would suggest that as we see ourselves changing, we can, if we make the effort, see the hand of God at work. Perhaps we will even discover that we have, through the struggles that brought about the change, come face to face with God.

For me, like Jacob, I have recognized God after I have struggled through what was for me many, many nights and arrived at the place where I began to be free to be me, to claim my new life and to let go of the old things that bound me. Like Jacob, one does not come from that place unwounded. Often God’s touching requires a letting go that is like a dislocation. Once one has walked a certain way for years, it is painful to undo that walk.

When I was at that place in my journey, I was surprised by two things. First it was very clear what God was calling me to do. There was no uncertainty about God’s presence. I would not describe it as seeing God face to face literally, but in a very real sense I experienced the face of God. Second, others could see a difference. I knew that because a friend gave me a Mary Engelbrite card that showed a little girl with a knapsack on her back. She was standing at a crossroads. The road sign which pointed behind her said "No longer an option."

A face to face encounter with God is a life changing experience. This rarely happens to us when we are young. It is as if we need to have some of life’s hard knocks with us. This is not a confirmation experience. Jacob’s experience at Bethel may have been more like confirmation, for it was a first recognition of God and God’s way. It was not a struggle but a new awareness of God and God’s activity in the world. Jacob promised to begin to trust and to know God. But at Peniel, Jacob struggled to a new place in his life and a new place with God. He became a new person. This usually happens to us after the age of 35. The time when we took on the faith of those around us and the doubting times of college

are behind us. As Jacob had by now struggled with his in-law, Laban, so too have we struggled with in-laws, begun to cope with nuclear family, extended family, jobs, finances, and perhaps even children.

Linda Clark tells of her experience of being ready for and deeply needing such as experience. "I felt terribly wounded, and all the neat categories that had ordered my existence to that point dissolved, and I was faced with chaos. I was in desperate need of new names, and although I longed to do it, I couldn’t take a few weeks off, flee to some place of retreat to confront what I was going through and there discover the new order, and be given the new names. I needed an encounter with God and a new name there and then, in the midst of getting the boys off to school, working at Union Seminary, visiting Peggy in the hospital, trying to find ways of talking about illness to a six year old, doing the dishes, shopping for school clothes, picking up at birthday parties, talking endlessly to everyone, exhausted. And I needed this, - because I was anxious, frightened, bitter and angry, badly wounded and limping."

What a desperate time and a desperate struggle. None of us wants to be in a place like that. But it is at times like this that we come face to face with God. It is times like this that God hears our cry as God heard the cry of Jacob, cry of Moses, and the cry of the Israelites in Egypt. Then we realize that God was with us all the way and is with us still. And somehow, out of all that struggle, we emerge, renamed, limping, and blessed.

It is possible too that the struggle is not only an internal struggle but an external struggle, a struggle for justice and freedom, like that of the Israelites. Like the civil rights struggle in this country in the 1960’s. At times like that, strangers become brothers and sisters and it is a life and death struggle with many demons. Yet in those struggles even a whole society can come face to face with God.

One of those difficult struggles was around the issue of the ordination of women particularly in the Episcopal Church. It had been a bitter struggle. Many evil, painful and hurtful things had been said and done. When the day finally came, Carter Heyward’s words said it all:

"May we realize that God’s blessing upon us – that for which we have wrestled, some of us for so long and so fiercely – is that we be empowered to welcome and bless those who, like Jacob, indeed, like most of us, do not deserve to be blessed."

"May we sustain the confidence and courage, the compassion and humor, to realize the sacred power in this stunning opportunity which is ours today, and will be ours, forever."

"This blessing will not be taken from us."

Indeed, a face to face encounter with God and the blessing given by that encounter, can never be taken away.

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