Sunday October 19th, 2025 Worship

I am in the middle of twelve grandkids on my dad’s side of the family. The cousins closest to me in age were all boys. Now, I loved playing with my cousins, however, one of their favorite activities seemed to be practicing their wrestling skills on me, despite my unfair size disadvantage. My aunt would come downstairs, telling them to let me go before one or more of us got hurt, although we all knew I was the most likely to walk away injured.
Besides the fact that my dad was a wrestler growing up, this is the extent of my knowledge about wrestling, and it was enough for me. Despite my love of everything sports, that was one that I had no interest in trying ever. I know people love it, but I had no desire to be flipped and pinned on a mat, especially not if I had to pay for that privilege. This mental image of wrestling that I had, though, I think, actually translates as a good image for our understanding about what it means to wrestle with our faith and our frequent reluctance to do so as humans.
It seems that we have this understanding that our faith should remain constant; that it will never grow and change as we grow up and gain new understandings about the world and how God is at work around us. Or, if it does change, it won’t be too uncomfortable of a transition for us. We long to see it like a sweatshirt, that is old, worn-in, and holey, yet remains the most comfortable one that we own. We desire to be comforted by the Gospel, when the Gospel calls us to both be comforted and to question the holes that are appearing.
We shy away from wrestling because the act of wrestling isn’t always comfortable or easy, especially when we aren’t sure what the result is going to be at the end. The story of Jacob in Genesis is the perfect example of that. Jacob wrestles with this man all night, until the sun was beginning to dawn on the horizon (Genesis 32: 23). This is an exhausting contest, in which neither is relenting. It doesn’t end until the man dislocates Jacob’s hip, to the point that Jacob is left limping as he walks away, and Jacob received a blessing (32: 25-26). The blessing Jacob receives is the change of his name; “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” (32: 28b). Jacob isn’t dismissed for wrestling with God, but is indeed given a blessing, and also his limp as a tangible reminder of the way this event changed the course of his life. He does not remain the same after this encounter with God. This is the blessing that is meant for him, not the one that he stole from his brother Esau in Genesis chapter 27.
As I was trying to understand how all these different verses fit together this week, I dove back into the Hebrew to look more at this idea of Jacob “striving” with God and humans. I learned something new on this adventure. The word that is translated as “striven with” is the verb “sarah” (שָׂרָה, sah-rah). Here I thought my name just meant princess in Hebrew! It is a verb connected to the noun for prince and princess, but this verb can be translated as “to contend, to strive, to persist,” which is what we see today.
This sense of persistence in holding onto our faith, to wrestling with it when we have questions and we aren’t satisfied with the simple answers and dismissals of the world is central to all of these readings today. There isn’t just comfort in them, but there is strength. Whether it is the widow crying out for justice to the point that the judge finally gives in (Luke 18: 1-8) or Paul writing to encourage Timothy in his proclamation of the Gospel even on the days it is difficult and feels pointless (2 Timothy 4: 1-5), these stories of persistence are such a rich part of our history. They teach us that we do not have to give up our faith the second it becomes difficult, but that the Gospel is both a comfort and a challenge to us as we are shaped into followers of Christ. This is not a light call to bear, which is why at times, we may feel like Jacob, walking away with a limp. But, this act of wrestling with our faith, of addressing the parts that don’t fit anymore, of using it to think about and respond to what is happening in the world around us, those are the very activities that will give us strength for all the comes ahead. It creates a depth to our faith that can help give us a foundation when the challenges and struggles around us seem unrelenting too.
I also had an important conversation with my therapist on this topic of persistence this week, and they reminded me that persistence isn’t just about running into the same wall over and over again. There is such a thing as a more well-rounded persistence, in which we still keep striving, but we also rest, we find joy, we learn from what has happened, we look for different ways to move forward. It reminds me a lot of the experience I have when I go bouldering; there are times when I can scale the wall quickly, barely having to think about the next moves I need to make. But, there are also other walls where I get partway up, and I feel stuck, or I fall off. I have to take time to rest in between, look at it again, and see if there is a different way that I should try making the climb the next time I attempt it. Trust me, there have been many times that I have walked away with bruises or scrapes on my arms and legs. So, I couldn’t help but feel the way that this well-rounded sense of persistence also fits well with this understanding that wrestling with our faith is an activity that changes us at our core. When we wrestle with our faith, it gives us a new framework, a different vision of how we move forward, and it also might leave some tender spots for a bit too.
I want to be very clear here, I am not dismissing or judging anyone who has walked away from faith or the church after they have been harmed. The teachings of a church are not always the teaching of the Gospel. As human institutions, our churches are not perfect either. These readings are not advocating that we persist in situations in which we are unsafe or where we are told that we are outside of God’s love unless we change who we are. What these readings do remind us, though, is that the work of faith is often uncomfortable. There is a difference in what we are asked to persist through and strive with.
Psalm 121 may also make it seem like we are never going to face any difficulties in life, but I think that is a dismissal of the very reality of the Israelite people writing and singing those psalms. Instead, it is a recognition that God remains through the challenges with us. But, this desire to always be comfortable in order to believe God loves us is something that can quickly lead us away in search of the next fleeting thing that will make us feel okay until it doesn’t and we need to find something else.
As I talked about last week, we see this with the desire to have God ordain all of our actions and to shape God to be just like us instead of the other way around. This may feel so prevalent and overwhelming in our world today, but as Paul’s writing reminds us, this isn’t anything new either. Paul even writes to Timothy: “For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires” (2 Timothy 4:3). People will go in search of comfort over the challenge of wrestling with faith and trying to make sense of what our beliefs mean for our understanding of and interaction with the world around us.
I get it! Wrestling is complicated, painful, and exhausting. When we start to ask questions, we often get more questions than we do answers. We are like the widow crying out for God’s justice, wanting answers for where God is and what God is doing in the world. But, God doesn’t shy away from that. When we enter into the struggle with the Gospel and what our faith actually means for our daily living, God enters with us. It is a form of praise, to cry out to God and to ask God to be present. While the comfort of walking away to something we just get to believe and never have to question may feel appealing much of the time, I also trust that if we choose to enter into the fray, we too will walk away changed like Jacob. I can’t decide if that risk is worth it for you, but this is one of those wrestling matches that I find I can’t walk away from. And, I wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, I think “one who persists” fits my personality quite a bit better than “princess.”