Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] If you've been around this church for the last couple months, or if you're just a total church Bible theology nerd who pays close attention to how the different texts are assigned for Sunday morning and the narrative arc that they happen to create over the course of a given season, you'll know that for this long season of Pentecost, which started in May on our Genesis, readings, have been tracking the story of Abraham and his progeny and his descendants. And Abraham's story, if you remember, I mean, he's this great figure, right? He's the founder of all the great monotheistic religions. He's the patriarch and the sort of core pillar of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. And his story is as epic as that of Odysseus or any of the other classical heroes. Although Christopher Nolan hasn't yet set it to a blockbuster movie script, we can hold our breath, right? Maybe one day we'll get that Abrahamic epic just like the Odyssey. But his story is just as inspiring and just as consequential. If you remember, the story begins in a place called Ur of the Chaldeans. That's where Abraham's originally from, in modern day Iraq, where by all accounts, Abraham had a pretty prosperous life. And in his epic, his Odyssey begins the way every hero's journey does, with a call.
[00:01:45] God comes to him one day and says, get thee out.
[00:01:50] Leave thy land and the land of thy ancestors and come to a place that I will show you.
[00:01:58] So Abraham gathers up his whole household, all of his possessions, and he embarks toward an undisclosed location. God gives him no roadmap, no itinerary, and he ends up traveling 1200 miles by foot across the Arabian desert until he finally arrives in the promised land, modern day Israel, Palestine.
[00:02:21] And after a number of different trials and tests, Abraham and his wife Sarah, and at the ripe old age of 100, give birth miraculously to this son, Isaac. And then Isaac has two sons. Two sons, two twins that we're told are locked in strife from within their mother's womb.
[00:02:47] The first son to be born is named Esau. And when Esau emerges from the womb, Jacob, his younger brother, is grasping at his heel.
[00:02:58] And they're very different temperamentally. Esau is kind of a wilderness bro.
[00:03:04] We're told that he's very hairy and he spends most of his time just traipsing about in the fields, hunting. And he's kind of like that friend of yours who disappears for a few months every fall and lives up in some, like, obscure elk camp in a remote part, part of the Gros Ventre Mountains, and surely hunts with a bow and arrow rather than a rifle.
[00:03:31] Jacob's kind of the opposite. He's very enterprising, very ambitious, very intelligent and clever. And he's like your friend who graduates college and heads straight to D.C. he's like, that's where the action is, baby. I want to be close to the center of power.
[00:03:48] And over the course of their brotherhood, and as they start to emerge through childhood and adolescence, they have a couple of altercations.
[00:03:57] The first is Esau's been out in the woods doing his wilderness thing. He comes home hungry, and Jacob has a bowl of lentil soup. And Esau's like, I'm famished. Can I have some of that soup? Jacob says, yes, but you have to trade me your birthright.
[00:04:14] Which means that he has to trade his right to being the primary inheritor and then his father's natural, natural successor as the head of the clan, the person who will provide protection and spiritual guidance for their family system. And Esau says, well, what's my birth lot, right, if I'm going to starve to death? So he makes this, like, very bad bargain with his brother Jacob. And then later in life, when Isaac is dying, when he's on his deathbed at the very, very ripe age of 120, he calls his first son, Esau, to him to bestow a final blessing. And Jacob does, like, the most bizarrely devious thing. He cooks up the kind of food, the wild game that Esau used to like to prepare. And then, with his mom's help, he takes some goat skin. He skins a goat and puts the pelts on his arms and walks in to receive his father's blessing. And. And his dad, I mean, I guess he's, like, pretty senile at this point. Cause he falls for it. He feels that goatskin. He's like, oh, you're my hairy son, Esau. All right, you got my blessing, too.
[00:05:32] So Jacob deceives his brother twice. And Esau is not happy about this. Esau threatens to kill Jacob. And so he runs, like any good politician knows how to do when they're in hot water, right? He hightails it 500 miles away, and he ends up settling with a sheep herder. And he works for this guy, Laban, for 20 years. Ends up walking away with a ton of cattle and a couple of wives. And he's finally, after 20 years, heading back to his homeland, which is where we arrive at today's installment of this story. He arrives at this river, Jabbok, that's sort of the boundary between where he's been, the sort of out there country and his familiar fatherland. And he's told that his brother's coming to meet him and he's coming with a detachment of 400 soldiers, 400 men. And we've got to imagine Jacob is pretty terrified.
[00:06:38] He gets his family and his flock safely across the river and. And then he goes back across the river and he has this bizarre, mystical encounter where a man, this mysterious man, shows up and wrestles with him till daybreak.
[00:06:58] And tradition says that this wasn't just any man, this wasn't just some sort of a stranger, but this was an angel of God, or perhaps God God self.
[00:07:12] This angelic being, this mysterious emissary of God gives him a blessing at the end of their wrestling match. And this has always been to me, just one of the most interesting, curious, provocative stories in all of Hebrew scripture.
[00:07:33] I think what I love most about it is, is that God might invite us to wrestle with God God self.
[00:07:44] When I look at so many expressions of Christianity in churches throughout this country and wider world, what I often see and find deeply problematic is that the focus of many Christians is trying to box God in, is trying to explain away the mystery and contain the mystery, to control God in some way.
[00:08:10] Where a God who invites us to wrestle with God, God self and the truth that God embodies is a God that invites us to open up our capacity for mystery and to wrestle with these mysteries of faith with courage and intrepidness.
[00:08:30] I think I also love this story because I've always had a certain fondness for wrestling as an athletic pursuit.
[00:08:39] Yes, the WWE, Vince McMahon style wrestling for sure, because I grew up in the south and how couldn't I love me a little Hulk Hogan as a young adolescent? But I also wrestled all through middle school and high school.
[00:08:55] As you know, I'm a man of modest stature and I've never been that good at any traditional athletics pursuits or team sports. I was way too short for basketball. I was way too small for football. I remember when I went out for football in seventh grade because I wasn't fast enough to be a defensive back or a player at a skill position. My coach somewhat bafflingly assigned me to the line to play as a right guard, and you can imagine how well that worked out.
[00:09:31] I wasn't coordinated enough for baseball, but I remember when I went out for Little League tryouts, my dad said to me, who's also a man of modest stature, said Travis we Helms We've never been the biggest or the strongest. We are the fastest, but by golly, we hustle.
[00:09:50] And hustle was what I could always bring for the table. What I lacked in raw talent or skill I could make up for with hustle and unbridled exuberance. And on the wrestling mat, I found an ideal, an optimal context to which to apply that hustle.
[00:10:09] I wasn't bad at wrestling. I was part of a state champion team for a couple years and, and I'm a pretty squirrely dude.
[00:10:18] I had that capacity for sort of improvising moves and figuring out how to last those six minutes with giving it my all. But wrestling, when I look back on it, I'm still not sure if it was a total net positive or a net negative. In my life, I learned a lot about discipline, about hard work, about camaraderie, about being a part of the team. But I also developed some pretty unhealthy habits that connect with this bizarre element that you find in competitive wrestling like you find in boxing, which I'm sure so many of you are aware of. But it's this whole phenomenon around losing weight, around dropping weight or sucking weight every year. I mean, I was the same height, same build, same frame in high school, but I weighed during wrestling seasons about 130, about 30 pounds less. I would drop down to wrestle in the 119 weight bracket because the idea was if you could lose to a lower weight, then you can bring a little bit of your strength and build and height along with you and, and that might give you some sort of an advantage.
[00:11:38] But it requires, to lose that kind of weight requires all sorts of bizarre behavior and methodologies. I can remember after practice every day, I'd put on this plastic suit that would force me to sweat out all my water weight. I'd get home and weigh out that 6 ounces of grilled chicken and stuff. Steamed broccoli for my dinner. On nights before weigh ins when it was especially important to lose water weight, I can remember putting my pillow inside of a trash bag and just lying down in the shower, letting the water fill up my mouth and then just spitting it out because I wasn't allowed to drink it just to get that satisfaction of a little bit of water on a parched tongue. I had such a hard time falling asleep those nights before weigh ins and out because all I was dreaming of was the waffle house breakfast that awaited me after making weight. And for some reason I could only fall asleep my junior and senior year watching the movie Shrek.
[00:12:43] I was under so much stress my junior year before state finals that at the age of 17, I actually gave myself shingles.
[00:12:53] When I look back on it, I think that I focused so intensely on the weight loss aspect of the sport of wrestling because it was something I could control.
[00:13:08] Getting on the mat, meeting my opponent. I could never be sure of what moves they would bring to the interaction of what skill set and what abilities I'd be confronted with. But the weight, the weight loss, that was an opponent I knew I could defeat.
[00:13:30] And I imagine that all of us have some version of this dynamic we've experienced in our lives, that we've experienced some portion of our life or our activities that we're seeking to control in any way we can. And at its root, that desire for control, I think ultimately has to do with our tendency to want to abolish fear and eradicate it from our lives.
[00:14:00] We are so terrified by ambiguity and by uncertainty. And so we create these patterns in our lives where we try to manipulate external circumstances in any way possible that just to resolve that fear, we want to control our life circumstances. We want to control things about our habitat and about our workplace. And in the process of doing so, we end up trying to control people around us as well.
[00:14:31] We control our family members, we control our colleagues. We try to control the people who are in front of us in traffic with a license plate that we don't approve of.
[00:14:42] We want to do anything to resolve or abolish or eradicate that fear. And so we hold on with this white knuckle grip and ultimately we just stress ourselves out as a result.
[00:15:01] We put this immense pressure on ourselves to try ultimately to push play God in our own lives, to script the narrative and the story we're living, rather than just letting go and entertaining the possibility that God may have more imagined for us than we could possibly wrap our heads or our hearts around.
[00:15:29] It's probably dangerous and unfair to psychoanalyze a character of the Bible and who may be a mythological fiction anyway with just a little bit of basis in reality. But when I read this story of Jacob and his wrestling with the angel and his whole biography and trajectory up into this moment, I see someone who's obsessed with the need to control.
[00:15:54] Someone who's so afraid of not having enough, of not being included, of not belonging, that he has to grasp for whatever he can at every stage of his life's journey. He grasps at his brother's heel in the womb. He grasps after that birthright. He grasps after that blessing and finally in this moment of perplexing grace when he's encountered by the divine God. It's as if God is saying to Jacob, you've been grasping what all your life, my child.
[00:16:32] Now grasp me.
[00:16:35] Now hold on to me and see what your life looks like if you can learn to let go.
[00:16:46] There are so many aspects of this story I love, and I think the primary one is how God condescends to meet us where we are.
[00:16:57] It's as if God says, okay, you want to wrestle? You want to wrestle? You want to grasp? I'll meet you there. And we've got to believe that God, if God wanted, could end that match in God's power at any single moment. But God enters that contest with him and meets Jacob where he is.
[00:17:15] There's that curious moment when Jacob finally lets go, that he receives the blessing. But before that, the angel says, hey, let go of me, because the day is breaking. And there's this great little rabbinical tradition that says that the angels were said to sing hymns of praise to God at first light as the new day is dawning. And so the angels basically saying, like, hey, dude, okay, this has been fun, but I've got to get to church now. I've got to, like, get back to the throne room and take my place in the stall of angels. And so Jacob finally relents and lets go. And when he does, he receives this blessing and this new name. But he receives a wound as well, right?
[00:18:02] The wound for me, is the necessary, inevitable wear and tear that we all carry from a result of that tendency and that need to try to figure it out on our own, to try to do it our way instead of God's way. To refuse to let go of that white knuckle grip when doing so would ultimately allow us to receive an influx of God's grace to a greater degree than we could ever imagine.
[00:18:37] There's a priest I love who mentored me in Houston, Texas, when I was going through the process to apply to seminary. And he used to contrast the sort of grasping that Jacob embodies, the movement of Adam and Eve when they reached and grasped for that fruit on the tree in the garden, with the posture of hands that we adopt when we receive communion at the altar rail.
[00:19:06] Not a posture of grasping, but of reception, of turning our palms upward so that we can become an open container for God's grace to flow through.
[00:19:22] Earlier this month, I had the chance to go to Suwanee, Tennessee, for a writing conference. I was there for 12 days, which makes my wife Gracie an absolute saint to take care of our 5 year old and 9 month old for 12 days on her own.
[00:19:38] And it was a really important trip to me because this has been a conference that I've been applying to for years and years. And I finally had this chance to go and study with an amazing poet who won a Pulitzer Prize and whose work I really deeply admire. And Suwanee is a special place to me on a personal level. I had a cousin and an uncle who attended Suwanee. And do y' all know that Suwannee is sort of angel haunted?
[00:20:07] There's this whole mythology around angels and angelology. At the University of the south, when you matriculate or go onto that church camp, that, that seminary camp, that college campus, you're given a guardian angel. And the lore is that when you leave the campus and pass through the old gates of the university, you're supposed to touch the inside roof of your car. And that bring. That kind of sucks your angel down so that they'll watch over you and keep you safe while you're out in the world. Then when you go back onto the campus, you touch the roof again. And that kind of releases your angel to, I guess, just like run around and party on the mountaintop while you're there.
[00:20:54] And if I'm honest, what I wanted out of that experience, I think more than anything was to have this opportunity to learn at the feet, to sit at the feet of this poet whom I deeply admire and respect. And it was also to receive his blessing.
[00:21:15] I wanted this poet, this authority figure, to tell me, travis, you're writing is good.
[00:21:23] Your writing is strong enough, and you are good enough and strong enough to make it as a poet.
[00:21:31] And you know what?
[00:21:33] I didn't get his blessing.
[00:21:36] I didn't get his blessing. I had a wonderful rapport with this particular poet. We shared a lot of warmth and fellow feeling and joked around quite a bit together.
[00:21:48] But when it came down to it, he just didn't dig my writing.
[00:21:51] We had a difference in taste, a difference in aesthetics. And what was so cool is that other people did express their gratitude for my writing.
[00:22:01] And I would find myself walking around that angel haunted campus deep into the night, often with this whole chorus of katydids around me, as if, like nature itself was alive and accompanying me. And I found myself asking myself, travis, what is this writing for?
[00:22:25] Who are you writing for and what are you writing for? Are you writing to receive the approval of some authority figure or someone who's made it? Or are you just writing because that's who you are, and that's what you need to do.
[00:22:43] That poetry is one of the ways you approach the mystery of life and try to figure it out and express yourself in the way you know how to.
[00:22:55] And a puzzling thing would happen to me as I asked myself those questions. I'd find myself either ruminating on how that morning's class session had gone, or I'd find myself feeling anxiety about the next morning. Morning. And how my poem was going to be received.
[00:23:13] And at some point, somehow. And a lot of y' all who are like, mindfulness gurus are going to be like, dude, this is like Mindfulness 101. How did you just figure this out?
[00:23:23] But I would find myself taking a very deep breath, you know, like a real deep breath where it's, like, under your lungs, almost like in your diaphragm. And. And I would find myself, as I took those deep breaths, letting go.
[00:23:45] Letting go of whatever that need for external validation was, letting go of the need to control that outcome. Because when we breathe deeply, we can't help but be in the present moment.
[00:24:00] Breath brings us back to our body and to the only place we actually are and have our existence, which is here and now.
[00:24:11] Those ghosts of the past and the future vanish away, and we're able to just be present.
[00:24:22] I would imagine we could all use a few more deep breaths every now and again.
[00:24:29] And what I'd invite you to do right now is to join me in taking just a few deep breaths together.
[00:24:40] If you're comfortable doing so, I'd invite you to close your eyes or relax your gaze.
[00:24:47] And we're going to do seven deep breaths, because people always do three.
[00:24:55] So why not go a little further?
[00:24:59] Get comfortable.
[00:25:02] Ready?
[00:25:03] Inhale.
[00:25:06] Exhale.
[00:25:12] Inhale.
[00:25:15] Exhale.
[00:25:20] Inhale.
[00:25:23] Exhale.
[00:25:28] Inhale.
[00:25:31] Exhale.
[00:25:36] Inhale.
[00:25:39] Exhale.
[00:25:43] Inhale.
[00:25:46] Exhale.
[00:25:53] We've got this, y'. All.
[00:25:56] No matter how tough or confusing or dark or bewildering life sometimes seems, we've got this.
[00:26:10] There are angels all around us.
[00:26:14] We can wrestle and strive as much as we want.
[00:26:19] And we also have the choice of letting go, of opening up, perhaps to the possibility of being wounded, but also to the possibility of receiving that blessing and that new name.
[00:26:35] You've got this.
[00:26:37] We've got this, y'. All.
[00:26:39] Just keep breathing.
[00:26:42] Amen.
[00:27:26] Friends, I invite you to stand or kneel as you are able and as you feel moved to.
[00:27:33] And let us pray the prayers of the people. People together.
[00:27:38] God of laughter and light. God of mountains and rivers. God of children and wild creatures.
[00:27:45] You created this world not merely to be used, but to be loved.
[00:27:50] Not merely to be endured, but to be enjoyed as.
