Darkness is the beginning
New Ark United Church of Christ,Newark, DE
August 2, 2020
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| The Battle Between Jacob and Esau's Angel, Yoram Raanan |
Have you been wrestling within yourself lately? Have you been wrestling with statues being torn down? Does ‘Defund the police’ challenge your worldview? What about Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security? What do you think about the crowds of protests in cities like Portland and Austin and New York City? Is the phrase “Black Lives Matter” problematic to you? What if we dismantled the two-party system? How do you feel about reparations to African Americans and Indigenous people and how that will directly affect you? Have you thought about what is being asked of us as a church in regards to these issues?
A colleague of mine once said that there’s more rassling in the Church than wrestling. We can rassle over details and strategies and how-to’s more than we wrestle with our motivation, why we resist change, and hard truths like the classism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism that preserves and defends American Christianity. And vice versa.
Even in the United Church of Christ, arguably one of the more progressive Protestant denominations, we have our roots in the racist beginnings of this nation. New England colonists embraced the enslavement of both Africans and Native Americans. Though we may have ordained the first African American, the first woman, and the first openly gay man, we also colonized the Hawai’ian people and imprisoned their queen. In the past few years the UCC has developed a white privilege curriculum for local churches as well as Sacred Conversations to End Racism. In 2003 the 24th General Synod adopted a resolution calling for the UCC to be an anti-racist church, stating that "racism is rooted in a belief of the superiority of whiteness and bestows benefits, unearned rights, rewards, opportunities, advantages, access, and privilege on Europeans and European descendants."
Author and scholar Ibram Kendi says that it goes even deeper than that. Racism has its roots in self-interest, in discriminatory economic policies, politics, and culture designed to protect property owners. Jim Crow laws are but one example. In an article about Kendi, Lonnae O’Neal writes, “Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.”
The book of Genesis is a human record of people who struggle with self-interest versus the wholeness that God desires for everyone. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his family, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah and their sons, Jacob and Esau: all of them are confronted with themselves and their self-interest. Jacob—whose name means “usurper” or “supplanter”—emerged from the womb grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau and swindled him out of his birthright as firstborn. Now he’s running for his life from his brother, so he sends everything and everyone that is precious to him across the river and spends the night alone on the other side, wrestling until daybreak.
There’s all kind of imagination and speculation about who Jacob wrestled with. Was it an angel or a human being? Was it the spirit of his brother Esau? Was it God? Psychoanalyst Carl Jung might ask was Jacob wrestling his shadow, that aspect of himself that hides guilt and shame?
The book of Genesis is a human record of people who struggle with self-interest versus the wholeness that God desires for everyone. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his family, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah and their sons, Jacob and Esau: all of them are confronted with themselves and their self-interest. Jacob—whose name means “usurper” or “supplanter”—emerged from the womb grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau and swindled him out of his birthright as firstborn. Now he’s running for his life from his brother, so he sends everything and everyone that is precious to him across the river and spends the night alone on the other side, wrestling until daybreak.
There’s all kind of imagination and speculation about who Jacob wrestled with. Was it an angel or a human being? Was it the spirit of his brother Esau? Was it God? Psychoanalyst Carl Jung might ask was Jacob wrestling his shadow, that aspect of himself that hides guilt and shame?
The whole of humanity, especially White American Christians, is up for a moral reckoning for its sins of structural racism and what we’ve done to the earth. And though perhaps it was not intended this way, this Table of betrayal and desertion confronts us with how we preserve our own self-interest, like Peter and Judas. When we commune with the death of Jesus, we commune with people like Emmett Till and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Trayvon Martin. Atatiana Jefferson. Michael Brown. Every missing Native American woman. And too many Black and Latinx transgender folx. When we commune with Jesus’ death and we change nothing, nothing changes.
All life begins in the dark. Darkness and that which hides in the darkness is only the beginning. Uncertainty is only the beginning. The word ‘apocalypse’ sounds scary but it’s a Greek word which means ‘revelation’: "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling". Jacob could only run so far. Eventually his responsibility for what he had done caught up with him. And yet he did not give up, he did not let go. He hung on until he was blessed. And not only him but eventually a whole people was blessed through him.
Hang on, beloved, with all your might. Amen.
Benediction – enfleshed.com
God sends us into the world to wrestle with evil.
Confronting injustice around us,
searching our own hearts for untruths and narrow perceptions,
we seek to transform and be transformed.
With love as our guide,
let us go bravely to live out our faith.
The Spirit leads us with peace.
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