Lonely Place
Genesis 32:22-32; Matthew 14:13-21

July 31, 2004

We are supposed to avoid the lonely places in this crowded world. That’s where malicious elements await to pounce upon and take advantage of us. In the early centuries of Christianity, such nether places were called the “wilderness” where that was exactly the assessment: it was a place where no decent human being belonged, only wild beasts and demons and wilder men and women. The man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who was attacked and robbed in the Parable of the Good Samaritan was not left for dead amidst the madding crowd of the city, but in the lonely wilderness.

Yet, are you not drawn to the lonely place: for solitude that cleanses the crowd and the rush out of you; that restores the quiet pace of your soul; that grants you time again to put things back into their proper place? Why else do you retreat to the cabin?

It is sometimes a mystery why two Biblical passages are made neighbours on a particular Sunday by the Lectionary guys. I hope they have a reason; I do not know who these guys are. These two stories seem linked by the main character going off to a lonely place - for quite different reasons in the first place and with very distinctive results in the final story. Most preachers are wise to choose one or the other; I am going to be foolish and go with both to their lonely spots.

Jacob doesn’t know exactly where to go. He just wants to be going in the opposite direction of his brother Esau. His judgment day is coming and he strains to sweeten the situation as much as possible. He tells his servants to give away all his flocks and possessions to Esau as a gift, frankly in order to appease and soften his justified anger. Late at night he evacuates his now rather large family across the River Jabbok, but he finally stays behind and he is alone for a time.

It is a lonely place because he has sought to escape human contact and conflict. Then with no sense of time at all Jacob is confronted by a nameless being who wrestles with him endlessly, neither besting the other. Jacob was the one who dreamed the vision of the ladder going up to heaven with angels descending and ascending, and this wrestling has a dreamy visionary feel to it, but Jacob appears wide-awake. Jacob may not have pinned his opponent, but the other wrestler knows he cannot get loose. So he uses a less than sportsmanlike technique to dislocate Jacob’s hip. Still Jacob doesn’t let go.

The narrator can no longer be subtle and hide the fact that this is an angel, literally a messenger. Angels are neither subtle nor simple for our minds: they occupy some of the same territory as ghosts. The first question is always: are they real? Something unreal cannot do anything to affect you and the way you live.

Jacob has the angel in his clutches and demands to know his opponent’s name. Angels in the Hebrew world are not free, separate agents, heavenly beings with their own agendas no matter how good and nice. Angels are messengers of God, and it seems, equal to and actually God in the flesh. Christians theoretically have no problem with that for if God is defined as the Three in One, then an occasional foray into the human world is plausible. The event of incarnation of God becoming human is not that strange or unknown.

But you cannot ask God directly for his name. Moses would find that out many centuries later. Even we moderns only call the ineffable “God” with a capital G, the generic word that the Hebrews used as well. “El” is the generic term in the Near East for a divine being. Yet the other wrestler wants to rename Jacob, and the name is the name above all human names, Israel - one who wrestles with God. The angel has withdrawn to other lonely places.

Jacob the scoundrel and cheat and fugitive from justice has been reborn. He saw the face of God and lived, naming that very lonely spot Peniel. It was there that he threw out his own agendas and made his relationship with the ground of all being his ground of being.

Struggling, wrestling with God has been demoted throughout the millennia as the basic way we prefer to encounter God. Most have desired a kinder, gentler conversation, a mystical envelopment in God’s loving presence, an affirmation that God is with us. Even as Christians, we proudly declare that we are still the children of Israel. That means that God has a tight hold on us, and we refuse to let God loose.

Jacob, now Israel, limps away - this is not just a dream or an intellectual debate - to face his brother and a reconciliation does happen. What is interesting or perhaps terribly normal about Israel is that we never read of him struggling again. It is the story of his twelve sons that seizes our attention. Jacob is around for a long time to come, but his wrestling match reformed and renewed his mind in order to live a most ordinary life.

Jesus too yearned for an ordinary life. While it is but a novel, that was the thesis of Nikos Kazantsakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ - Jesus wanted to be an ordinary person without all the divine and cosmic pressures and suffering necessary to be the one he knew he was meant to be. So following a humanly exhausting time of preaching and healing, Jesus went off to a lonely place to escape the human crush. He did not count on the locals’ knowledge of local geography. The lonely solitary contemplative space had become St. Peter’s Square on Easter morning.

Jesus’ response had to have been a groan or deep sigh, but he saw the sick and lame and compassion for people was his ruling emotion. So compassionately he ignored his exhaustion until the light started to fade. A large crowd of people, 5000 and more, had painted themselves into the corner of this lonely place and they needed food. Send them back home was the bureaucratic solution, but Jesus wanted his disciples to demonstrate what they had learned from him. Five loaves of bread and two fish are the elements of a communion. Mathematics fail us completely and feeding strategies and hints of hidden caches of food among the gathered company destroy the point. Something remarkable happened there and somehow people were satisfied in a way they always remembered and probably never were again. They ate as part of God’s banquet in a remote sanctuary.

Whether it is Jacob’s wrestling or the meal of the 5000, you never get to surpass such an experience, such an event that measures all other events in your life. You might come close by the grace of God, but it does provide a compass for every direction in your ordinary life to follow. After all had been fed to their satisfaction, it still got dark and now they were really stranded in a lonely place. I assume they did find their way home. If you are born again, that means that you have to start all over again living in ordinary time.

Some of us already have lived out a few of these stories, moments in a lonely or crowded place when you wrestled or were fed or given unthinkable grace. Do not rank them, but collect them, remember and look inside them for yourself and inside yourself for the quiet and demanding God. As for the rest of us who are still waiting for the wrestling match or the banquet to begin, maybe you are expecting too many bells and whistles and fireworks. Think back to the lonely places and moments where a person touched you without touching you, or you felt full of all that is good. Then don’t think any more; live a moment, an hour, each day enveloped by the exertion of that angelic wrestling or full of that infinitesimal amount of food that unites us as the children of Israel. Your lonely place is where you have seen the face of God.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan