Gen 32:22 -31

Have you ever wrestled with God? I doubt that you have physically have wrestled with God, but you probably have emotionally and spiritually wrestled with the Creator.
A good friend once described this passage of scripture to me by asking if I would wrestle with a Sumo – Wrestler. He took my laughter to be the obvious response. Here I am a petite girl of under one hundred pounds, there is no possible way that I am going to beat a skilled Sumo-wrestler, much larger then me. So why would Jacob wrestle God, knowing that it would be worse than a Sumo-Wrestler taking on little Michelle. And an even better question is why did God let Jacob win? This is not a fairly matched fight, folks, God had the power to crush Jacob, but chose not to. Does that puzzle you?
Jacob’s “win” in the wrestling match with the Divine, is not a sign of God’s weakness. Rather it is God wrestling with Jacob over this man’s identity, and ultimately prevailing. God came out victorious.
Turn with me to Genesis 32, starting in verse 27: “So he said to him, ‘what is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and you have prevailed.”
Let’s refresh our memories on Jacob’s past, it was sketchy at best. He pretended to be his brother, Esau, thus lying to and deceiving his dying Father into giving him the birthright of the first son. The word “right” in this words means just that, it is Esau’s inheritance, and Jacob for all practical purposes stole it from him. Esau becomes angry, and Jacob runs. Jacob is a deceiver.
But before we start to criticize Jacob for what he has done to his family, we need to pause and ask ourselves who are we deceiving? Because all too often we deceive others and ourselves, by denying who we are, who God has created us to be. We try so hard to fit in with this crowd or to live up to that image, that the beautiful person God shaped for a unique person, becomes marred if not completely shunned. Like Jacob, God is asking us what our name is.
When I was in Australia I took a literature course, in which we were given free reign to come up with a thesis and prove said thesis through a work of Australian literature. I tended to come up with off the wall topics, because my brain has this weird way of seeing deeper and sometimes left field ideas in texts. For one of my papers I started with an idea that a friend had posted on his blog: that our name is a reflection of our identity and ran with it. Our name is something unique to us and cannot be severed from our personal stories. Our first name holds the story of our life - with its trials, ambitions, and wonderful moments. Our sir name tells an even longer story of our heritage and family. Our nicknames tell of those private and sometimes embarrassing, but always intimate moments. Our name tells our story.
But all too often we give into the idea of the age: convenience. We want to get to know others quickly, isn’t that why we have name tags? But there is a process, that begins with asking people their name and inches forward into more intimate areas. It's a long process. There is a complete difference in my mind between recognizing someone's name and knowing their name. When I know someone's name, I know something meaningful, true, and deep about them. Honestly, even with my closest friends, I'm still getting to know them, and there are things that I learn about my family that are new just about every day. Yet, we try to circumvent this process with a name tag. Is there any hope for intimacy if we aren't willing to take the time, even to introduce ourselves and ask someone their name?
And maybe the problem isn’t just that we want to have a shallow feeling of connection with others. Maybe the problem is much deeper and we don’t really want to take time to know ourselves. It’s hard work. It’s going to involve sifting through the past and remembering both the good and the bad. And it means doing the even harder work of separating the fiction of how other people have defined you from the truth of what God sees when he looks at you. I challenge you to take time to actually ask God what he likes about you, what he sees when he looks at you. Because, brothers and sisters, in the age we live in, he may be the only person who really knows who we are, what our name is, since we don’t even know ourselves. God is asking you, what is your name? What is your story? Who have I created you to be?
But do not be dismayed if you have forgotten who you are, if you forgot your identity that rests in God. God wants to bring you home and it starts by renaming you. In verse 28 God renames Jacob Israel, meaning the one who strives with God. God took the deceiver and said this is not how I see you, you are a man who follows me, desiring my heart and my blessing. Could Jacob have received a better blessing? And he isn’t the only one who God blesses by changing their name. Abram became Abraham and Sari became Sarah and Saul became Paul, just to name a few. God took the identity of who they were, how the world defined them, and banished it. It is like he whipped the slate clean by saying “No, you think this is who you are, but really THIS is who I created you to be.” Do you see the beauty in that? God wants us to see ourselves through his eyes, the only eyes that really matter for anything in the end.
Our name and our purpose are unique. We are not called to do what Israel, Abraham, or Paul did. We are called to do what we were made to do. Somewhere along the way the church has confused this message and we get the idea that God wants us all to be the same. To look the same, act the same, but at that point we might as well be the same person with the same name. And that is NOT how we are identified by God. I think this idea probably came from a misreading of what Paul meant when he tells us to lose our identity in Christ. We have tried to make that into a strict set of dos and don’ts in order to become Christ like. For example: read your Bible x number of hours a day. And it’s not that reading the Bible is a bad thing, but through our relationship with Christ, God defines who we were created to be. God wants to work with the personality he gave us to save the world. He wants you to fully live out who you were created to be in order to serve him. In the words of my friend “we are not zombies.”
You are called to be in a relationship with Christ. When you enter a human relationship you both retain your own personality while making a third identity of you as a couple. Such it is with our relationship with the Lord. We maintain our own identity, but slowly the identity of you with Christ overtakes you, thus you still maintain a piece of yourself. And when you look at finding your identity in Christ this way, then you will see that what your identity in Christ looks like will never be the same as what someone else in Christ will look like, because God is writing your story differently from everyone else.
If you notice through out the Bible God tends to give very vague instructions. I’ve heard the Bible referred to as the instruction manual before, and if this is true, we are in trouble. Because the Bible would never pass for a “how to” book because it tells us what to do, but not how. I believe that God doesn’t get more specific beyond “love your neighbor as yourself” or “feed my sheep” because he wants us to use our own personalities and wills to make those decisions. And we each will make a different decision. There is no such thing as group think in the Bible. We are called to live out the commands as ourselves.
So may you be reminded who you are, by your creator, God almighty. May you come to wrestle with God and be blessed through him bestowing your new identity on you. And may you live out that identity fully, letting your unique story be written as a reflection of your name.
Amen.