Shane Hughes 8-2-26

Good morning, Highland. It is good to be back with you today. I am grateful, I'm grateful for the blessing of a little bit of time to step back from the pulpit to dream and plan and pray and read and think about what the word is that we need to hear together in this next year. And so I'm grateful for that blessing. I'm grateful for the many other blessings that this.

This church has provided me. And I love the. This story. I love the story of Jacob and. And part of the reason I love this story is how well it's told.

When you read the story of Abraham going up the mountain with Isaac, there is this tension that the author keeps building into the text. When God says, take your son, your only son. Now, he does have another son, but we're building the tension here, Isaac. And then Isaac asks, I see the wood, Father, and I see the knife, but where's the offering? And Abraham says, God will provide the offering.

You can feel the tension that's building in that story. Up until that final moment in this story. The author is doing something very different. He's creating ambiguity the whole way. And I want to try to hold that ambiguity today.

I want us to hold that ambiguity together, because there's been a great debate about who this stranger is. And a lot of different people have a lot of different opinions. It could be a river God or a river demon that dwells in the Jabeuk. It could be Esau that's come early to take vengeance. It could be an angel, a messenger, or it could be God, God's self.

And I think. I think I know who it is. In fact, I think you know who it is as well. But I want us to hold the tension and the ambiguity together for a minute, because the storyteller tells us it was a man and an Ish in Hebrew, and that Jacob wrestled. And biblical scholars wondered about the river spirits rising out of the jabok.

After all, the wrestler is worried that it will lose its power when daybreak comes. Like a vampire or some sort of demon. Western art consistently imagines an angel. And Jacob says, I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved. I think later Jungian readers will wonder if Jacob wrestled with himself.

Is this another dream like the latter? Is he wrestling with his conscience or with the divine within? And Jacob, who had to wrestle with his own fear and hatred of Esau. Yet this wrestling cannot be limited to just a psychological realm, for he walks away with a limp. What we do know is that Jacob spent his entire life striving to get the upper hand.

I mean, Jacob begins his life with his. His fist around his brother's heel. Even before that, while in the womb, Rebecca, they have such a tussle that Rebecca prays to God what is going on? Before he takes his first breath, before he has a name, before he's even done a single thing, right or wrong, Jacob is already grabbing, already trying to get a step ahead. Twins wrestling in the dark of their mother's body.

And Jacob comes out on second, but he's holding on for dear life to whatever piece of Esau he can reach, as if to say, you may be first, but I. I am not letting go. I don't know if you have a story like that in your own family, a story of something that somebody did before they even had the ability to choose what they were doing, able to make a conscious choice. And that story gets told and retold over and over and over until it defines them. It is in miniature, kind of the whole story of their life. Down at Houston Impact, where I was an intern one summer, there was a guy there and he was born premature and he was not healthy.

He weighed about six pounds. He was itty bitty. And he was in the ICU for a while, and then he came out and he was always small. So much so that his brothers gave him the nickname Tiny, and that nickname stuck with him his entire life. But then the boy hit puberty and he began to grow.

When I met tiny, he was 6 foot 6. He was 250 pounds of pure muscle. The man spent his days on oil rigs out in the Gulf and came back. He was enormous.

Jacob grows up a mama's boy in a tent of favoritism. Esau, the ruddy hunter, beloved by his father for his taste of wild game. Jacob, the smooth skinned homebody loved by his mother for reasons Scripture doesn't bother to explain, but we could probably guess. And one day, when Esau comes home with a belly full of hunger, Jacob's standing there with a pot of red stew, and he trades a bowl of lentils for his brother's birthright, as easy as you or I might trade a dollar for a candy bar. And Esau, to his eternal discredit, goes along with it.

And that would be deception enough for a lifetime. That alone is a story that will follow you for the rest of his life. But it was not enough for Jacob. Years later, his father is old and dying and blind, and Jacob puts on his brother's clothes and more strangely, straps goatskins to his arms and neck, so that when his father reaches out with those failing hands to feel the hair where there should be smooth skin, and he believes, Isaac's fingers moves over the hide. The voice is Jacob's voice, he thinks, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

And he believes his hands over his ears. And the blessing, the real one, the kind that can't be taken back. Once spoken, it goes to the wrong son, maybe on purpose. And after that, Esau is the one that's blind with rage, understandably. And he wants to kill him.

So Jacob runs.

And here's where the story does something that I've always loved. This is where the narration gets good. It doesn't let Jacob off easy. It doesn't let him go unmet either. Alone in the wilderness, alone with nothing but a stone for a pillow, Jacob dreams of a ladder set up between heaven and earth, with angels moving up and down.

And it's like rush hour. And God is at the top saying, essentially, I am going with you. God does not say, I am pleased with you. God does not say, you've earned this. Just, I am going with you, Jacob, wherever you go.

I am not leaving until I have done what I have promised. And the promise there is the promise to Abraham, I will make you a mighty nation. And then Jacob wakes up, terrified, and probably says the most honest line that he's ever spoken in his life. Surely the Lord is in this place and I didn't know it. And then come the Laban years.

There's 20 of them, if you've ever wondered, like, if a trickster is somebody that fools you, somebody that's always out to scheme you, if they ever meet their match. Laban is Jacob's answer to that question. Jacob wants Rachel, and he works seven years for her. And Laban gives him his sister Leah in the dark of the wedding tent. And Jacob doesn't figure it out until morning.

And so he works another seven years for the wife he wanted in the first place. He is out schemed by a man even more calculating himself. And yet children are born and flocks multiply. And Jacob, given against every odd he created for himself, becomes a wealthy man, the father of a nation yet unborn. And then one day, God says, go home.

Go back to the land of your fathers. But that also means go back to the one person on earth who has every reason to kill you. And so Jacob packs up two decades of wives and children and sheep and goats and camels and turns to face the land he fled 20 years before. And this is where we Pick up our story today because Jacob getting home turns out to be its own kind of wrestling match. And it starts long before he lays a hand on anyone.

Word comes to Jacob before he ever sees his brother's face. Esau is coming. And he's bringing 400 men. Now, 400 men is not a welcoming party. For 400 men is an army.

And Jacob, who has spent his whole life running from consequences, discovers the consequences have finally caught up to him and brought reinforcements. And so he does what frightened people do. He splits everything he owns into two camps, thinking if Esau falls on one, at least the other might survive. That's not an act of faith, that's triage. The man doing the math of how much his life he might lose by morning.

And for the first time, for the first time in the book of Genesis, Jacob prays not schemes, not calculates. He prays. He says, I'm not worthy of the least of all of your steadfast love. Which I think is Jacob's way of admitting finally out loud, he hasn't earned a single good thing that's come to him. 20 years of grasping.

And here he is, empty handed before God, asking to be saved from the brother he wronged. Then he gets back to work being Jacob, because old habits, even habits prayed over often die hard. He assembles a small parade. Goats and ewes and camels and donkeys and cows sent ahead, each in waves, with its own servant, with the rehearsed line, these belong to your servant, Jacob. They are a gift sent to my lord Esau.

Wave after wave after wave. So that by the time Esau lays eyes on his brother, he was already been met again and again by generosity, with Jacob's fingerprints all over it. It's a peace offering built out like a drum roll. And then at night, alone by the river, everything Jacob owns on the other side of the water, everyone he loves is on the other side of the water. And Jacob, for reasons that the text never quite explains, stays behind.

And something incredibly powerful is going to happen to him in that moment. But I want to pause and tell you how the story ends first. Because what I want you to see before we get to that wrestling match in the dark, is what happens after it. Jacob crosses the river and he's limping and he lifts up his eyes and there is Esau. And Esau is running.

Not walking, running the way you run towards someone that you haven't seen in 20 years and you have missed more than you want to admit. Running the way the father runs. In the story of the prodigal. And Esau embraces him, falls on his neck and kisses him, and. And the two of them weep in the road like the 20 years never happened.

Or that they happened exactly like the way they happened, and it doesn't matter anymore. And there is an unspoken moment in this text that I want you to see. The moment is that something has happened in those 20 years to Esau, something God has worked in that brother's life, too, to bring about a transformation and a change that allows Esau to forgive. And maybe it was the camels and the donkeys and the sheep and the cows and all of the gifts and all the. Maybe that's what it was.

But I think there was something more. I think there's a whole other gospel there of the power that God works in the hearts of others to forgive when they've been wronged. But it's not a perfect ending. Esau rides back to Seir, and Jacob goes his own way more slowly, tending children too young for the pace. But they don't become close.

They don't become the brothers that you would hope to have had. But they are no longer enemies.

You know, whether it's generational wealth or just being called Trey being the third involves a recommitment or a dissolution. You've heard the phrase, you know, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. In three generations, there has to be some sort of recommitment. And Jacob stands in a very different relation to the deity than his grandfather does. At first, there's vigorous encounter, even conflict, replace the conversations and the time that Abraham spends with God.

For Jacob, his whole life, a blessing has been something you take, something you seize from someone else's hands before they know it's gone. And if you want it, you. You get it. And with enough cunning and enough nerve, you can tab it. And that's how it worked with his brother Esau over a bowl of red stew.

And that's how it worked over his father Isaac, blind, easy enough to fool with a couple of goatskins tied to the arms. And that's how it worked with his uncle Laban, whose flocks of Jacob tilted in his own favor, one streaked and speckled and spotted rod at a time. Time. Which is a strange story. You can read it on your own.

Jacob, his whole life is a supplanter. It's not an insult. It's just who he's been from the womb.

So in the night, when he grabs hold of this stranger in the dark and says, I will not let you go until you bless Me. Don't spiritualize it too fast. That line is just Jacob's resume. It isn't devotion talking. This.

This may just be one more grab, one more. Now that I've got you, give me something.

But the stranger doesn't give him more stuff.

The stranger asks him a question instead. He says, what's your name?

What's your name? Has been the problem that Jacob has been wrestling with his whole life. Because the last time that somebody asked him that, his own father, old and blind, reaching out in the dark, Jacob lies.

But not this time.

Not with a stranger.

This time the answer costs him everything, and he gives it anyway. He says, jacob grabber, deceiver, heal holder. And that's exactly where this blessing begins. Not with what Jacob has, not even with what he receives. The bean doesn't give Jacob more stuff.

The bean gives him being.

Y' all catch that? That was brilliant. I worked a while on that. The bean gives him being. He is being blessed of.

And honestly, in spite of who he is, he is being blessed because who God is about to make him. A river demon could offer safe passage across the stream. A man could offer treasure, it could offer fame. An angel could offer a message. Esau could offer forgiveness.

But only God can offer being.

And it isn't. It isn't clear in the text who won the wrestling match. Wrestling is strength, but it's also dexterity, skill and cunning. Jacob gets a blessing, but he doesn't get the name of God that will be given to Moses. And it's possible to see that Israel, the whole nation, not just the man, has been best identified.

Not by the land that was given, not by the patriarch which. Which they came, but not by the law that they received, but by the struggle they have with God, by the questions that they ask God, and by the questions they receive from God. When daylight comes, the stranger is gone, but also so is Jacob. All that remains is Israel, who did not get a good night's rest. Israel, who is formed by struggle with God, blessed and named by God, who must be on his way to reconcile with his brother.

Now Jacob doesn't leave that riverbank with better technique. He leaves with a limp and a new name. The change God makes in him is not like behavioral coaching, it's identity. Notice that the narrator keeps calling him Jacob. After this moment, even.

Even after he's been renamed to Israel. The old self doesn't vanish, but it's no longer the deepest truth about him. The deepest truth is now what God has spoken over him.

Just like this morning when God speaks over us in our baptism, that we are transformed. And we know the old self dies. We also know the old self remains. The deepest truth is now what God has spoken over him. We tend to assume that change means that we try harder to be a cleaner version of the old grasping self.

And this text suggests something even more radical, that what we need is a name change, an identity given from the outside that we could never achieve, which is exactly what happens to everyone who belongs to Christ, given a new name and a new record not based on their own performance.

And we could, if we wanted to today, to turn our Bible all the way over to the book, the book of Hebrews, to the 11th chapter, to this great roll call, to the faithful. Abraham is there, Sarah is there, Moses and Rahab. And tucked into that list, and it's easy to miss, is a single line about Jacob. And the preacher says, by faith, Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of his, each of the sons of Joseph and worshiped. And here's where I want you to lean in.

Leaning on the top of his staff. This is the last time Jacob's name is mentioned anywhere in Scripture. It's not at the Jabok, wrestling in the dark, not receiving his new name. It's here, decades later, an old man near the end of his life, blessing his grandchildren and worshiping, leaning on his staff. Now, I think that the Hebrew experts would tell you that that word staff there, it could also be translated as bed.

And in some texts, that's the way they. They take it, meaning that he maybe couldn't even have gotten up, and he wasn't even very mobile at this point. This is a man who cannot entirely stand on his own anymore. He needs something outside of himself to hold him up while he worships. And as I look at that text, I can't help but think of that hip, that one that was wretched out of socket in the dark beside the river by a God who would not let go and would not be let go of.

Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his life because of that night. And you have to wonder, years later, around campfires at night, as Jacob is telling the story to his grandchildren and his great grandchildren, if somebody interrupted him and asked him, you know, why didn't you just let the stranger go? You have spent decades nearly falling over every time you try to sit, hobbling every time you took a step, why did you take it so far?

And I don't know what Jacob would have said in that moment, but here's what I think not every scar is reg.

I have like three scars, maybe four. Two are on my shins and one's on my eyebrow. I got the one in my eyebrow when I was 4 years old because I was leaning over the table on a folding chair and the folding chair folded up on me and my head hit that table on the way down. Right. Nice.

The second one is not glorious. I was trying to take off a pair of boots like this, and my foot slipped and I kicked myself in the shin hard enough to make a scar right there. The third one is even less glorious. I was stepping out of the shower as a college student and I slipped on the floor and cut myself on the way down. Not great stories.

I wish I had better stories.

And I think sometimes we use tattoos as scars to mark a moment.

One of my cousins has a semicolon on the inside of her wrist. Semicolon in grammar is to connect two sentences together that can stand equally apart on their own. You can just put a period there and it would be the same thing for her. It's a symbol, and I think a lot of people use it to say that there was a before time in her life, there was an after time in her life, but there is a semicolon that connects those two ideas together. So a particularly difficult point in her existence.

You can get a tattoo to remember a friend or one that's lost, or even just to go on a vacation and remember something you loved.

But I think my favorite stories is when I ask somebody about their tattoos or their scars.

And sometimes a scar doesn't necessarily mean regret.

So I don't think that Jacob had much regret over every step that he took, the pain in his hip as he stood or sat.

Frederick Buechner is an amazing preacher, called this story the magnificent defeat. But he also could have called it the crippling victory. Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament theologian, says that Jacob's wound is. Is more than a line on his skin and a good story to tell. It is debilitating to his manhood all his life.

This is no minor injury. Meeting this God did not lead to, as we might imagine, to reconciliation or forgiveness or healing. It resulted in a crippling. So Jacob's rendezvous in the night is ambivalent. He has penetrated the mystery of God like none before him.

He. He dares to do what Moses Israel will not do, and he has prevailed. But this prevalence is a victory as well as defeat. There is a dangerous, costly mystery in daring too close, drawing too close, and daring too much. And I Think what we encounter when we travel with Jacob into the night to this wrestling match is some of the most sophisticated theology in the Old Testament.

I think we're forced. We're compelled to ponder what blessing is given, at what cost.

And the same theology of weakness and power and power and weakness. It turns our eyes toward the New Testament and the Gospel of a cross. Excuse me? Gospel of a cross. Jesus will live this struggle and through his wounding, emerge victorious by the power of God.

How dare we, as mortals, draw close to a living God?

But on the other hand, how can we not?

And here in Hebrews, at the very last mention of him in the whole of the Bible, we find him still leaning. Old, weakened, worn down by 80 more years of living and somehow still worshipping.

That's not a tragic ending. That's the whole gospel in one image. The wound Jacob carried out of his wrestling match never fully heals. And it didn't need to, because the same weakness that made him lean is the very thing that kept him leaning on the one who could hold him up.

And maybe that's what it means to belong to God.

Not that we eventually stop limping, but that we learn, like Jacob, to worship leaning.

Would you please stand for our benediction, Hyland? I want to pray today that our God, who is living and active, would give you a blessing this week. But I am reminded that not every blessing is one that we wish to receive. So instead, let me offer you this charge. That you lean into the struggle of your faith, that you lean into the struggle of your life, and that you choose to do the courageous thing this week, whether with someone you love, someone you don't, or God above.

May you be filled with God's mercy as you go in peace.