Wrestling and Receiving
Genesis 32:22-31; Matthew 14:13-21
A Sermon by the Rev. Ron Parker

Wrestling and receiving,
struggling and snuggling,
striving and arriving,
questing and resting,
running and sunning,
rowing and flowing,
going and stopping,

Breathing out and breathing in.

Our very life relies on our heart's regular rhythm ˆ contracting ∑ relaxing ∑ contracting ∑ relaxing.  Without both, we die.

And what is a drumbeat without the silence between?

Jacob wrestled with an angel and became the ancestor of a great nation.
Jesus blessed a boy's bit of food and it fed five thousand.

I thought that it was T.S. Elliot who wondered which was better, "the song of the bird or the silence after?" but I couldn't find the reference.

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven."  You know how it goes.

So Jacob's limp is a reminder, a hesitation in his forward step which says moving isn't everything.

Jesus had to break the bread before it could be shared.  The people had to sit down.  Breaking and sitting.

Hired and laid off.  Is there a lesson in a  recession?

Lessons and recess.

Some years back, on an early August Sunday, when these same two readings ˆ Jacob wrestling with the angel and Jesus feeding the five thousand ˆ came together in the lectionary readings for the Sunday, I started out a sermon with a similar set of dichotomies.

 There was a parentheses at the beginning of the manuscript, to remind me that these words should be mimed in the style of comedian George Carlin:

Wrestling and receiving,
struggling and snuggling,
striving and arriving,
questing and resting,
running and sunning,
rowing and flowing,
going and stopping.

Now, George Carlin, whom I considered a slightly older contemporary, is dead; and I am viewing the rhythm of my life, not from the side of working but retiring.  ∑but even in my retiring there is always more than enough work to do.

We live our lives along this long continuum ˆ from working to retiring, from wrestling to receiving, from living to dying.

Sometimes we wrestle night and day and feel we're getting nothing for our efforts.
Sometimes we are blessed with effortless abundance.

Most of life is a fusion of the two.

This amazing mix of life is what Paul and so many theologians since have tried to understand: are we saved by works or faith?  Does salvation issue from our efforts or from God's grace alone?  

In these past few years I've come to see that, while retirement is a gift, it really carries no more grace than I received in the years of my so-called work.

In our struggle to understand the work we give and the grace we receive, the answers vary mostly in the nuances of language, but come down to this (singing) "You can't have one without the other."

Hmm.  Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. The horse is the work the carriage grace.  But more to the point:  love is grace and marriage is work.   That's what I always told couples who came to me to get married.  Then they wondered, why should we get married at all?  The answer is that being in love eventually fails without some sort of agreement to stick with the struggle.  So I would remind them that in the midst of commitment and struggle, love flourishes miraculously.  

Wrestling and receiving.  Works and grace.

In our Gospel reading we heard that when it was evening, the disciples came to Jesus and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves."

The place is deserted.  The stomachs are empty.

That's where we often experience grace:  in a deserted place when the hour is late and our stomachs are empty.  In a desperate situation, when we feel hopeless and at wits end, we feel a gentle hand or a wave of peace ˆ some graceful presence.

Empty, full.

We can cultivate that graceful presence.  We can practice noticing when it comes.  In fact, when things are going well and we feel blessed, when we feel ecstatically in love, we can stop, take notice and give thanks for the unearned abundance of our life.  The memory of that abundance will serve us well when life is hard and sparse. Such remembrance helps us recognize the morsels of grace in what seems only wrestling and pain.

And on the other side, we can learn to cultivate a life of joyful struggle that is powered, not by hope of some reward, but by our sense of life's abundant gifts.

In a moment, we will let our joy overflow in the sharing of God's grace-filled gifts to us as we make our offering.  

Receiving, giving.

After that we will share our prayers thanksgiving for life's gifts and our prayers petition for our own struggles and those of others.

Joys, concerns.

Finally we will gather at the table ˆ to celebrate the work of Christ, be nourished, and sent forth to face life's struggle carrying God's grace with us.

Receive and to give.
And, of course, in our giving we will receive more blessing than we could have imagined.