Second Sunday in Lent – Reminiscere
Feb. 25^th, Year of Our + Lord 2024
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, SD
Called to Struggle and Fight for Peace and Reconciliation
Genesis 32, Romans 5 and Matthew 15

Audio of the Sermon available HERE

The same night [Jacob] arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. ²³ He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. ²⁴ And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. 

    Faith, hope and love remain, and the greatest of these is love.   God’s goal for us Christians is to forever enjoy the fullness of His peace, the peace which passes all understanding.  And yet, there’s a lot of fighting in the Bible.  What’s that all about? 

    Last week, we heard about young David conquering Goliath with a slingshot, finishing off the enemy with the giant’s own sword.  The second sin recorded in the Bible is Cain killing his brother Abel.  Jacob, the weakling son of Isaac and brother of Esau, used deception and trickery both to steal his brother’s birth right, and secure the final blessing of their father.  Now Jacob has a strange, night-long wrestling match with a man.  This man turns out to be God Himself, making a mysterious appearance on earth.  In our Gospel the Canaanite woman duels verbally, first with the not-very-manly disciples, who whine to Jesus to “make her go away, because she’s pestering us.”  She goes on to struggle with the Savior Himself, fighting to win a miracle for her daughter, who was losing her battle with a demon.  What are we to make of all this? 

    Certainly there is a lot of violence in our world today.  Christian wisdom includes interpreting the world around us using the truth of Scripture.  With God’s Word, we might better understand our current culture’s schizophrenia regarding fighting.  There might even be a connection between our fallen human nature and our predilection to violence. 

   How we as Christians should understand and respond to the culture’s perspective on violence isn’t always clear.  On the one hand, “polite” society pretends to disdain violence and fighting: little boys are restrained from being little boys, and manly virtues like strength and bravery are driven from our midst.  But then “mostly peaceful” protests burn and destroy whole neighborhoods in some of our cities, and some voices shout their approval. 

   Meanwhile, the men and women we pay to actually fight for us are ordered to spend time learning how to avoid “misgendering” their comrades in arms.  Which is important, because our tax dollars are paying for some misguided soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, “transitioners” who decide that God made them wrong.  That they need to become the opposite sex, as if surgery and drugs can make a man, or a woman. 

     Violence is not to be used to get ahead in life.  But increasingly, speaking true words is declared to be violence, a deception that has become a powerful weapon, deployed by those using victimhood as the means to get their way.  Meanwhile, we are becoming numb to the horror of truly evil people taking guns into “gun-free zones” and doing real violence, often destroying young innocents.  Not to mention the spiritual numbness that we inflict on women and men when we celebrate the lie that killing an unborn child is to exercise freedom and agency.  Indeed, you will be labeled as “violent” if you speak the truth about abortion and euthanasia, if you dare to say they are tragic and horrible violence, inflicted on people who can’t defend themselves.     

     We should be concerned about violence.  We should also be distressed by our inability to look away when images of violence are delivered to our smart phones.   “Entertainment” today is sooo violent. We have countless first-person shooter video games, and CGI movies that show us violence our eyes cannot distinguish from reality. 

    In sports we even celebrate flesh and blood women who fight and bleed in cages.  The most popular spectacle in America is the Super Bowl, a sanitized form of combat, yet with some fans as rabid as Romans in the Colosseum, cheering on their gladiators.  Today’s politics are largely reduced to shouting matches, full of violent rhetoric on all sides.  Lord willing, this will remain rhetoric, words about violence, and not actual violence. 

   So, maybe the Bible with all its tales of violence and struggle is God’s way of helping us understand our society.   Just trying to stay relevant to the way we really are.    Struggle and fighting and yes, violence are not going away.  But we can learn a better way to deal with them, by considering how the Holy Spirit treats them. 

     Why would God take on the form of a man for a night, and wrestle for hours with Jacob?  Well, to keep His promise.  The Lord had made Jacob a promise, the same promise He made to Abraham and Isaac.  Through Jacob, the Lord had committed to fulfilling His battle plan against the serpent.  Through the Seed of Jacob, through one of his descendents, the salvation of the world would be won.  Peace and reconciliation with God would be revealed, the free gift for all who believe.  So, to keep His Promise, God needs to keep Jacob in the fold.  He needs to create and sustain faith in the Promise, to keep the flame of faith alive in the heart of the tricky, grasping younger son of Isaac.  

     More than fourteen years earlier, Jacob fled the wrath of his brother.  Remember how Jacob dressed up in animal skins and stole the blessing blind old Isaac intended for his favorite son, Esau?  During his escape, the LORD had appeared to Jacob, descending a stairway from heaven, to assure Jacob that He would never abandon him.  The LORD then blessed Jacob, through trials, as he worked fourteen years to win Rachel, the girl of his dreams.  Jacob learns a good bit about conflict, as through his uncle’s trickery and his sister-wives’ rivalry, he ends up with four wives, and 11 bickering sons. 

    Now Jacob is headed home, back to the Promised Land, back to face Esau, and, he hopes, reconcile with him.  He travels in hope, but is also afraid that Esau will still be angry, and perhaps even kill him.  The Lord comes to Jacob in this moment of crisis, to reassure him that he is still God’s chosen, that the Lord is still looking out for him.  Also to teach Jacob that struggle is a normal part of life as God’s child, living in this fallen world.  For Jacob has always displayed a hope that God would make everything go smoothly for him, all the time.  Kind of like us.  But avoiding struggle and strife is impossible in a world shot through with sin, and for people still given to sin.  The Godly life this side of glory includes struggling and fighting.  So, the Lord needs to teach us how to struggle, and against what and whom we should be fighting. 

    So, a man comes to Jacob, a man who turns out to be God, the Son of God making a mysterious appearance in His Creation, centuries before entering it once and for all in Bethlehem.  This Man wrestles with Jacob all through the night.  He restrains His almighty power, like a father wrestling with his toddler children, teaching Jacob to hang on, to struggle and cling to God, come what may. 

   Adding words to His kinetic instruction, God even gives Jacob a new name, Israel, which means he has and is to continue to struggle and prevail, with God and man.  Keep up the fight of faith, no matter what.  Israel, both the man and the People of God, are to believe the LORD’s promises, cling to God, hate evil, and love their neighbors with the same love they have received from the Man of Promise, Jesus Christ.    

   Which is to say, we are to fight like the Canaanite mother.  Although a despised foreign woman, she has heard and understood and believed the promises of God in Jesus Christ, that He has come to be the Savior of all people.  Although a dirty Gentile, she is a true Israelite, a believer, unwilling to let go of God.  She clings like a dog to a bone, refusing to let go of the Man who is also God.  She endures rejection and insult, for the sake of her beloved daughter.  For the sake of the truth that God desires to rescue all people from the power of the devil and his demons. 

     Violence, whether evil and unrestrained, or justified violence by the earthly authorities set in place by God, in the end, all violence is the outworking of Satan’s hate, a consequence of the evil with which he has infected all of us.  Sometimes violence is even required of God’s people, to protect the family, to defeat those who would hurt Jesus’ little lambs.  But as much as it depends on us, we are to live in peace with all people.  Violence should be rare among us, a last resort used to protect our neighbor.  But struggle is to be our constant companion.  With words, prayers and self-sacrifice, we are always to struggle and fight for the weak and lowly.  Like the Canaanite woman. 

    Sometimes, the right thing to do is suffer.  Like the Canaanite mother, sometimes we must suffer the slings and arrows of the world, the insults and rejection of those who think they are better than us, to suffer in order that the truth of God be proclaimed. 

    Jesus, knowing the depth and strength of her faith, used her to teach His disciples the truth about God’s love and mission.  The greatest blessing we in South Dakota enjoy today is to still receive and rejoice in the Gospel of forgiveness and the presence of Christ.  Our blessing is an outworking of the Gospel Mission Truth that Jesus taught the Twelve 2,000 years ago, through the momentary struggle of this nameless Canaanite mother.  Praise be to God for her struggle.

   Struggle and fighting and violence are often required for true peace to be achieved.  Just consider the Man, Jesus.  For the sake of Gentiles being drawn to the God of Israel, Jesus made a whip out of cords and drove the money lenders and animal sellers out of the Temple.  Unloving Israelites had taken over the space God had assigned for the Nations, that they too could draw near to the LORD and pray.  Jesus violently re-established the Temple as a house of prayer for all Nations. 

     Jesus regularly enraged the Pharisees, Elders and Priests of His own people, in order to get them to falsely accuse Him before Pilate, so that He could die on a Roman Cross, for all of them, and for all of us.  By His glorious battle, on our behalf, Jesus has forever changed the state of the war.  As citizens of the world, the reality of evil and the call to protect the weak and defenseless mean that violence may still at times be required, even of God’s people.  But normally, daily, as the Church of the Resurrected Victor, we seek peace, even risking to turn the other cheek, to suffer for the sake of showing forth the truth of God’s peace.  For we know that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers of evil, still at work in this world.  We fight demons and even the Devil, without fear, because we know Jesus has already defeated them. 

   And so, as Church, we have but one sword, the Word of Peace and Reconciliation with God, Peace and Reconciliation that Christ died to win, for all the ungodly.  This Word of Christ is the weapon we the Church have been given wield, and it’s the only weapon we need.  By the Word, the Holy Spirit keeps us clinging to the Man Jesus and all His promises.  Through the Word, God grants us repentance for our sins, and also washes us clean again, by the blood of Jesus.  Through the Word, God sustains the world and restrains evil, for the sake of His Mission.  With the Word, the Holy Spirit convicts sinful hearts and reveals the Peace of Jesus, to all who hear. 

   This is the struggle we, the New Israel of Christ, His Body the Church, have been called to engage.  With prayer and praise and sacrificial service to our neighbors, we are used by God in His ongoing work, to give true peace to all people.  So, as we go forth and continue in the good fight of faith, we pray the Lord will help us to also rest in this peace, the peace of God which passes all understanding, and which keeps our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, unto life everlasting, Amen.