The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: Genesis 32:22-31
I dare not face my brother in the morning,
I dare not look upon the things I’ve done,
Dare not ignore a nightmare’s dreadful warning,
Dare not endure the rising of the sun.
Today’s poem really shaped how I thought about our Hebrew Bible reading this week. I don’t know about you, but when I was told this story about Jacob wrestling with the angel, it always stood alone, shorn from its context, the weight of the story based on the power of Jacob defeating God’s messenger and demanding a blessing. Who else could do such a thing except one who is clearly called to be the foundation of God’s people into eternity?
But, unlike so much of a Genesis, this story is placed very deliberately and contiguously within a larger story. Right in the middle of it, in fact. Just before, Jacob enters the land of Edom where his brother Esau lives. Jacob hasn’t seen Esau since he swindled him out of his birthright—twice—first by refusing to give Esau food, as we heard about a few weeks ago, and then by tricking their father, Isaac, into giving Jacob the blessing that was rightfully Esau’s.
After that happens, we are told, “Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him, and Esau said to himself, ‘The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob.’”
So now, for today’s story, Jacob is entering Edom and has been told that Esau is coming to meet him, and not alone but with 400 men. Jacob is terrified. He makes a few different plans: first, he prepares to send Esau an abundance of gifts: sheep and goats and bulls—enough to make any person wealthy in that time—a peace offering; second, he divides his household, which was substantial, and sends them to two different places. That way, if Esau attacked at least half of Jacob’s community would survive.
With all those plans set, we hear in today’s reading, “That night Jacob 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.”
As he sat there in the dark by himself, I can imagine him replaying in his head the ways he treated Esau. The ways he was willing to trick his own brother and deceive his own father in order to get what he wanted.
And that’s when the mysterious man, presumably an angel, a messenger from God, comes out of nowhere to wrestle with Jacob. Or is this messenger really God shining a mirror on Jacob and all his small, self-serving deeds at the expense of his brother, and forcing him to wrestle with his own shortcomings, the terrible things he’s done, the relationships he’s sacrificed, just to get ahead?
I imagine every single one of us has had those nights of wrestling when we’ve realized that the way we’ve chosen to move through a situation has deeply hurt someone, that the action we’ve taken to get what we want has compromised our own goodness, our own integrity.
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Most of you know by now that my political beliefs are pretty liberal. I’d like to think that those beliefs stem from a place of compassion, but there have been times I’ve wandered away from that place.
Like back in 2020, 2021. There was a lot going on then, do you remember? Just a global pandemic. And also when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, causing a nationwide uprising against the white supremacy that is embedded in our culture and systems.
St. Luke’s responded by taking part in Sacred Ground, a program built by The Episcopal Church to, as they describe it, “walk through chapters of America’s history of race and racism, while weaving in threads of family story, economic class, and political and regional identity.”
St. Luke’s had three Sacred Ground groups in those years, with around 30 people total completing it, about half of our regular Sunday attendance. It built such a solid foundation for our entire community to understand the insidiousness and ongoing harm of white supremacy.
I remember a particular moment during one of those groups. We were outside in the parking lot sitting on plastic folding chairs six feet away from each other and discussing what was happening all around our country. It was the time of calls to “defund the police,” and I remember how adamantly I defended the idea, even as some in the group pushed back.
Folded into all of this messy reckoning was also the Me Too movement, which led to what we now call Cancel Culture, something I also vehemently defended.
Since then, though, I’ve been through some stuff, namely a shattering divorce, and I had some dark nights wrestling with my own angel. That angel called me to examine where grace, mercy, and relationship fit into my sense of accountability.
Because accountability was and continues to be at the heart of both the George Floyd and Me Too movements. Accountability of police who have shown a clear pattern of racism for decades, for centuries, in the violence they commit. Accountability for a culture of permission for mostly men, and often men in positions of power, to harm women sexually.
These movements continue today, and in this time of Black and brown people being stolen off the street, in this time when women’s rights are being dismantled one piece at a time, thank God. And I continue to support these movements.
And I don’t think my defense of defunding the police or cancelling abusers helps these causes. Because at their most basic level, cutting off relationship is the solution they’re proposing.
Like Jacob—and Esau, too, for that matter—I was willing to sacrifice relationship to get the justice I wanted. But the thing is, there is no justice without relationship. Justice without relationship is called vengeance, which is simply a transaction to appease anger.
In Sacred Ground, we learned about restorative justice, a relational—not transactional—way of holding people who have done harm to accountability. Restorative justice seeks to repair harm after a crime or violence by inviting the victim to be in relationship with the offender so that a) the offender can understand in a deep and personal way the harm they’ve caused, take responsibility, and hopefully repent and change their behavior, and b) the victim can share their experience directly with the offender, take back the power they lost through that experience, and use that power to reconcile, at least with the harm done to them and often even with the offender themself.
This is in contrast to our more transaction-driven criminal justice system which seeks first and foremost to punish the offender, often by cutting them off from their community and relationships. This isolation often serves to harden these people rather than lead them to accountability.
Calling to defund the police and cancelling abusers has also mostly served to isolate and then harden them, to defend and double down on their behavior. That’s not what I want for either the victims or the offenders. And that’s not what my faith teaches me.
So I’ve wrestled, as Jacob did. What do I really believe? Who do I really want to be?
Instead of stepping away from that angel of accountability and continuing on the way he is going, Jacob holds on and demands his blessing, demands the truth of who he is. And the angel tells him, “You aren’t that person anymore. In fact, I’m changing your name to reflect who God meant you to be.”
So the next day, with that new identity, Jacob approaches the brother from whom he stole their father’s blessing. When he sees Esau, he gets on his knees and bows seven times before him. And Esau runs to meet him, and embraces him, and together they weep.
Jacob’s transactional trickery and Esau’s transactional need for revenge both laid aside for the sake of relationship.
Now I’m not naive. I don’t think it’s usually that easy. The wrestling almost always takes a lot longer than a night, and the reconciliation is slow-going, if it happens at all.
I don’t know how long it will take to untangle ourselves from this culture of white supremacy and sexual dominance; to make room for deep and honest accountability that, at its best, makes room for authentic reconciliation. But my faith has taught me that this will only come when I dare to a) wrestle with my own shortcomings in order to remember who God meant for me to be, and b) put relationship first, however scary, however messy, however challenging. That’s what Jacob did.
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