At a towering five feet tall, I have never been known for my prowess or skill on a basketball court. In fact, I remember my first time playing basketball in gym class in elementary school. I managed for most of the game to just jog up and down the court and you know look busy without having to do much. But then, some foolish classmate, perhaps out of pity or an ill-placed desire to include me in the game, decided to throw the ball to me. I caught it and immediately froze. And then before I knew it, I had four people around me, towering over me, trying to knock the ball out of my hands. Overwhelmed and over it, I literally handed the ball to one of my defenders and then sat down in the middle of the aggressive huddle. Immediately, the PE teacher blew the whistle to stop play and came jogging over. “Kim, are you OK?” he asked. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I responded matter-of-factly. “Then why in the world did you sit down?” he asked, with a hint of exasperation in his voice. “Because,” I said, “I was surrounded. There was nowhere safe to go.”

When we pick up the story of Jacob in our text today, Jacob is in a similar, but much higher stakes situation. It’s not an elementary school basketball game. It’s real life. And he was surrounded on all sides. There was nowhere safe to go.

Jacob is stuck between a rock and a hard place. And while Jacob could easily be painted as the victim in this little snippet of his story, we know he has brought some of this upon himself. After all, Jacob is not some exemplar of the flawless life of faith. On the contrary, Jacob is flawed to his core; he is kind of a mess. Known as an all-star biblical trickster, he finds his way toward blessing through unconventional means, including deception and devious plots. Jacob blundered his way into wealth and status through behaviors that were questionable if not downright problematic. Yet, God still is determined to work with, and in, and through him despite Jacob’s worst instincts.

So, when we meet Jacob in Genesis 32 on the shores of the river Jabbok, he is wedged between conflicts. Physically and metaphorically. On one side, he has angered and alienated his father-in-law, Laban, by engaging in questionable animal breeding practices to make sure his part of the flock was heartier and healthier than Laban’s. After a classic chase scene fit for a Hollywood movie, Jacob was able to finally make tentative peace with his father-in-law. However, part of the agreement was that Jacob could never return to the land of his wives, where he had lived for the last 20 years. A line is literally drawn in the sand, and Jacob can’t go north.

But, at the same time, heading south—home towards Canaan—meant having to risk facing his twin brother Esau. Now you remember Esau: Esau, the large, hairy hunter. Esau, the one who believed he was the one to carry on the family legacy and lineage, but lost out due to a duplicitous brother, a trickster mother, and even the determination of the Divine. Jacob was not Esau’s favorite person, to put it lightly. And with good reason. When they were both still living at home, Jacob, the younger twin, had manipulated Esau’s birthright away from him by holding lentil stew hostage from his starving brother. Then, Jacob stole Esau’s blessing when he dressed up in goat hair to trick his aging father. In response, Esau had threatened to kill his brother, forcing Jacob to flee north in the first place. And it isn’t looking especially good for Jacob. His messengers report that Esau is “coming to meet him” with 400 men in tow.

So, Jacob does everything he can—he prays; he splits his large household into groups so that if Esau kills or captures one group, the others can escape; he even lines up over 500 animals as a gift for Esau to arrive before he gets there. But, at the end of the day, he is surrounded and there is nowhere safe to go.

Though we today may not be threatened by infuriated in-laws to the north and murderous siblings to the south, I think many of us can resonate with Jacob. There are days, weeks, seasons even where we feel surrounded on all sides. So much seems out of our control and overwhelming: from chronic illness to death and loss, from international war to social divides, from political policies to the financial and technological forces that weigh in all around us. Yet, at the same time, like Jacob we are participants, or at least complicit in some of what ails us as individuals and a society. From ecological damage to funding technologies for war to our inclination to look out for ourselves more than the common good, we, like Jacob, often participate in the forces that seem to trap us, even as we are victims of them.

Put another way, we find ourselves with Jacob on the shores of the Jabbok, between what has been and what will be, unsure how it might all turn out. And so here we sit on the shoreline with Jacob the night before the confrontation is set to go down. Jacob has sent his wives and children across the river. But he stays behind. And there he is left—with his thoughts, his fears, the weight of all that has happened pushing down upon him. Unable to rest, he is haunted by what he has done and by what fate awaits him as he follows God’s instruction to go back to Canaan.

And, amid his internal struggle, a man shows up in the middle of the night to engage in an actual, physical struggle. And Jacob and this man they wrestle all night. But, as daybreak comes, the unnamed man strikes Jacob on the hip, injuring him. The unnamed man then demands to be let go, perhaps for fear of being seen in the daylight. But, Jacob, knowing this wasn’t just any assailant, says, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” And then a stunning exchange occurs where Jacob is renamed Israel (meaning, God-wrestler) and ends up with his blessing, even if he never learns his assailant’s name. And then, just as the sun peeks over the horizon, Jacob identifies his opponent, naming the place Penuel, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” And then Jacob limps across the river towards his fate.

Now I don’t think it is a coincidence that Jacob finds himself wrestling with God in one of the most frightening and overwhelming moments of his life. We, too, no matter how faithful or well-read we are; no matter how many creeds we can recite or Bible passages we have memorized, often find ourselves struggling with God in the harder moments. When we are faced with the challenging realities of the world or the uphill battles of our own lives, when we feel overwhelmed or surrounded, it can throw our understanding of God and the world and even ourselves into question. When we feel helpless and yet complicit, when we are faced with the realities of gun violence, climate change, war, grief, or poverty, we are forced to re-examine who we are and who we believe God to be. And so, we end up wrestling with God.

In one of my church communities, there was a parishioner, Bill, who lost his teenage daughter and wife all in one month—his daughter in a car accident and his wife from an aggressive cancer. Understandably, he was overwhelmed and felt completely helpless, even as he wondered if there was something more he could have done to spare his daughter or save his wife. But mostly, he wondered about God. You see the old platitudes no longer worked; the things he believed about God never giving you more than you can handle or God rewarding those who do good, those platitudes no longer held up. And it was hard for him to come to church, not only because of the empty seats in the pews where his daughter and wife should be, but because, in his words, he could “no longer honestly say and sing those things about God.” So, he asked if we could meet and talk. And in conversation over mediocre soup and sandwiches, he pulled out a paper with probably fifty theological questions written down all about heaven, God’s plan, God’s love, God’s absence, God’s omnipotence. And while I would love to say that I offered him firm and convincing theological responses to each and every question he offered, there was no way I could do so. Instead, and perhaps the best (and only) thing I was able to give him was permission to wrestle—to wrestle with himself, with his faith, and especially wrestle with God. He took up the invitation and began to question not just why this happened, but to question wrestle with God’s steadfastness, love, care, and power. He wrestled in our conversations; he wrestled with the books he read; he wrestled with Scripture; he wrestled in his grief support group. And I’ll tell you what, I respected Bill for the fact that he was willing to wrestle so doggedly with the divine—an act of faith, I assured him. And nobody from the church ever hounded him to come back or made him feel bad for his absence from worship. But then, over a year later, one Sunday, he unexpectedly darkened the door of the church, entering the sanctuary just before the service was about to start. I saw him, nodded, and smiled. It was clear that he had not necessarily solved the “why” of his tragic circumstances, but it was clear he had wrestled some sort of blessing, enough to try again. And I watched him enter the sanctuary, determined, ready, even eager, though perhaps with a bit of a divine limp.

Friends, the struggle is real. The wrestling is real. What we are encountering as individuals, as communities, and as a society is not just an emotional storm or figment of our imagination. Like Jacob it is bodily, it takes all of who we are.

But the good news is that God stays in it with us. God does not give up on us. As biblical scholar Terence Fretheim reflects, “Jacob cannot struggle with God if God refuses to be so engaged…God will be caught up in this relationship. God’s promise involves not a passive presence, but an active, engaged relationship.” You see, God wrestles with us, God strives alongside us, and even better, God blesses us amid and in the struggle.

In this midst of the frightening, helpless place, God shows up for Jacob not with simple words of comfort or assurance. No, God shows up to be engaged with him in the struggle. God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and, yes, of deceitful Jacob, literally gets in the dirt with Jacob as he wrestles with his own demons: as he struggles with the choices and experiences that have brought him to this place. God is willing to be in it with him, all night. And, let’s be honest. God could have won that fight in a minute. But, God was not there to destroy Jacob or merely hover over Jacob as he dealt with it all. Instead, God wrestled with Jacob, ultimately offering him blessing, a new name, and a physical reminder that Jacob carries with him the divine touch.

We are not alone amid these overwhelming and chaotic seasons; God gets down into the dirt with us. And God is not “with us” in some far-off sense, cheerleading from the sidelines. God is not “with us” in the sense that God is up ahead summoning or guiding us to make good choices. God is in the struggle with us. This is the God who is willing to get into the dirt and remind us that blessing and struggle are not mutually exclusive. This is the God who shows up not to destroy us, but to remind us—even if it takes a whack on the hip—that we are God’s own and we do not go through these adversities alone.

And this is not easy. This kind of faithfulness requires honesty and stamina. We still have to face the struggles, the challenges, the overwhelm, the guilt, the pain, the complicity. We still have to participate in the wrestling. And friends we rarely walk out unscathed. But we may also be able to walk into a future confident that God is bigger than our pretty platitudes or limited imaginations.

We live in uncertain and challenging times. Like Jacob, like my grieving friend Bill, we may find that the wrestling demands all of who we are and what we have. We may find that, when faced with challenging realities, God feels as much opponent as friend. And, yet, my prayer is that we may engage in the scuffle, and stay in it. For in that wrestling, we may find ourselves marked, named, claimed, and blessed in the process. And we, like Bill, like Jacob, may limp our way toward an unknown future where God can be trusted. Thanks be to God. Amen.