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Wrestling the Great Turtle to a Draw

Long ago and far away--perhaps in Middle Earth, perhaps in California, perhaps both--it was my turn to wrestle all week with what to say on Sunday morning.  The text was the story of Jacob wrestling all night with God, or an angel--perhaps both--at the River Jabbok.

Jacob was a scoundrel almost on a par with his two-time father-in-law.  They took turns cheating each other.  Jacob and the angel, or Jacob and God, or maybe just Jacob wrestling with Jacob, fought all night.  And I was supposed to tell the story to a little congregation of Lutherans meeting in a Gold Rush days' Presbyterian Church building.  We rented it.  The Presbyterians had taken their gold dust and built a fine new church in a better part of town.

The question I wrestled with was not so much the story of Jacob wrestling God to a standstill, but of my own wrestling match.

I was a newly-minted pastor.  I knew almost nothing, except what I had been taught.  And what I had been taught was filled with Turtle Talk:  God in the Garden, walking on water, rising from the dead, and of the coming great Tribulation, although Lutherans walk gently around Second Coming talk.  They agree, but they don't get very excited about it.  What I did know was that no rational, 20th century person could take those Biblical stories literally.  Jacob could not have wrestled the Great Turtle to a standstill!  Such things do not happen!

Ah!  But there was the problem!  The whole congregation believed it.  Most of my fellow seminarians believed it.  I am sure the Bishop believed it.  They all talked Turtle Talk.

It made wonderful sense to me to recognize that once upon a long tie ago, people really did believe that God was in his heaven, and that Satan went back and forth on the earth, walking up and down on it; that miracles, while not quite a shekel a dozen, were quite possible, and that people who did not think so were on their way to hell.  People used to think that way.

It made more sense to me that the story of Jacob wrestling God all night was not about God, at all:  it was about Jacob, and people like Jacob, people like me, who sometimes come to the point at which they wrestle all night with what they are, and who limp ever after from the brutal battle.  It made sense to understand that when Jesus was killed for subversive and religious zealotry that his followers would take a few days and come to believe that it was not over; that he lived on in them and their cause; that his Spirit was still with them.

You get the idea (even if you may not agree).  It seemed to me that all those stories--all that Turtle Talk--could be understood as a way to understand ourselves, to understand how much we were like Jacob or that determined little band of disciples who believed in a good life, and a good death.

But, even though those years in that parish were wonderful in terms of friendship and work in the community, in terms of a community of people who cared, and wrestled at their own brooks, the church itself insisted that the Turtle Talk had to be taken literally, and if not all of it, then the most important part of it:  the Great Turtle himself.  The earth still rests on the back of a Turtle, or if the turtle is not really a turtle, perhaps an infinitely old man, and if not a heavenly old man, then perhaps and Old Aura or Spirit.

I simply could not see the Turtle, and everyone else did.  I saw Jacob and the brook, but everyone else saw an angel wrestling with Jacob.  I could hear Jacob grunt and see him sweat, but there was no Turtle.  Just Jacob.  Just us, just like Jacob.

It is the church that will not allow the church to live.  It will insist on God, and tell us why God does not like birth control, and why marriage is between one man and one woman, and all the rest of us will have to do the best we can; maybe wrestling all night with ourselves.

And that is why I chose to let the church go her way--her, the bride of the Great Turtle.

I understand Jacob.


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