A Second Chance
Text: Genesis 32:22-31
The hardest funeral I ever had to do was not for a friend, nor someone I knew well. It was not for a child, nor the beloved son or daughter of a member of the congregation. It was not for someone who was the victim of crime or an accident… It was hard, but not for the emotional reasons you might think… but the best way I can describe is to tell the story.
When I served as associate minister in Cornwall, one summer I received a call from a funeral home for an older woman… I wouldn’t say elderly, but older… who had recently died. She had left a husband, and two sisters… I didn’t have much more family information than that. When I went to visit with the family to prepare for the service, I met with the two sisters and the husband. The husband wasn’t really all that responsive, perhaps overcome with grief, he’d acknowledge a few things, but generally didn’t say a great deal. Most of my conversation was with the two sisters… When I do funerals, it has been my practice to ask the people in the family to tell stories. It does two things: first, it helps me get a sense of who the person was, especially if I didn’t know them, and second, by telling stories it can help the members of the family through grief by telling the story of their loved one’s life. I could never hope to get all of those stories into a single service, but that’s not the point. Share the stories, tell the stories, and the stories help define who the person was and who the person continues to be for those who are left behind.
So when I asked the two sisters and the husband to share some stories about this person, the only response I got was “she was a nice person.” … That’s it… “she was a nice person.”
“Can you share any specific stories with me?”
“She was a nice person.”
“Was there any particular reading or book that she liked?”
“Not really. She was a nice person.”
It was like pulling teeth… and I came away from that visit not really knowing anything more than I went in. Even the obituary didn’t say much… except that the couple had two adult children, one daughter and one son. They hadn’t mentioned them.
I had nothing to work with… and so two days later I delivered what I still consider to be my worst funeral ever. Sure, the feedback was good, and they thanked me for it… but it had been so generic… so… bland… and I felt deflated.
The only difference was that at the funeral, the woman’s daughter was there, but there was no sign of the son. She thanked me for the service, but eluded to something that her mother was the only person who was stopping her father from drinking himself to death.
My heart sank… and suddenly a lot more of the picture clicked into place… but too late.
The woman’s husband was a chronic and deeply ingrained alcoholic. The reason he seemed so out of it when I visited the family is because he was drunk. The reason why the adult children weren’t there when I first met with them is because they had long since been estranged from their parents. The daughter had returned out of a sense of duty… they had not successfully gotten a hold of their son. The reason that they didn’t share stories with me is because they were either too painful, or that the denial had run so deep that it was better not to tell any story at all.
But the funeral was over…
I think estrangement is something almost all of our families have experienced at one point or another. Broken relationships, painful experiences, stories of sorrow that we would much rather not tell… The story of Jacob that we hear this morning is set up against a painful story of division between siblings… family members who had conflict in the past who thought the opportunities for reconciliation had long gone.
Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, eventually had two sons of his own: Jacob and Esau. When they were growing up, Jacob had tricked both the first-born Esau and his father to gain the blessing and birthright that was so important to their early cultures. Needless to say it created a bit of a rift, and Jacob had fled fearing the wrath of Esau more than anything else.
Over the next number of years, Jacob lives in exile, becoming prosperous in his own right… and learning some very profound lessons about himself. Eventually, he realizes that God was calling him to return home, to be reconciled with his brother. Jacob is understandably nervous, the last time that he saw Esau, he was screaming something about having his head on a pike.
I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty vivid image of a rather bitter parting.
Before his arrival, Jacob is so nervous about meeting his brother for the first time in nearly twenty years, that he sends a wide array of gifts in order to appease him… not the least of whom were his own wives and children. Before going to meet his brother, Jacob takes his wives and children, sending them across the river at the ford of Jabbok. In the silence, and in the darkness of the night, Jacob finds himself alone… but not for long:
24Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.
As I said before, this was not play fighting. This was an out-and-out knock-down drag ‘em out kind of brawl. Jacob was fighting for his life... hard enough that his hip is dislocated in the midst of the fight… and he still keeps going.
Not only that, we really have no idea who his opponent is. There’s no description… no distinguishing marks… The fight is in complete darkness, and it keeps on going… Jacob refuses to yield, but neither is there a clear winner. The mysterious stranger says “Let me go, it’s almost dawn!” Before the light comes up, before the sun casts rays over the horizon and this opponent is revealed… He says, “Let me go!”
But Jacob says, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”
The mysterious stranger asks him, “What is your name?”
In a moment of complete honesty… He replies, “Jacob.” My name is Jacob… it means liar and cheater. It means that I’m no good… I took something valuable from my brother and my father a long time ago… and now… I… Jacob’s voice trails off… and suddenly he realizes that for all of his life he has struggled with his own identity, over who he was.
The stranger’s arms become less of a grapple and more of an embrace. He says to Jacob, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Jacob is not who you are anymore… you are no longer a liar and a cheater… but someone who wants to be whole again.
It is only after the fact that Jacob realizes who his opponent was. He drops to his knees, stunned by the revelation of who this was. He realizes that he has just had a face-to-face encounter with God, and yet he still lives… it is a blessing that he has neither tricked or cheated his way into… it is a blessing that finally, after many years, he has earned on his own.
This story of forgiveness and reconciliation… before Jacob can be reconciled with his brother, he first finds reconciliation with God… without truly knowing what he was wrestling for, he finds reconciliation with God… and is transformed for something new. Jacob comes away from this encounter forever changed… no longer is he the slippery trickster, but truly someone who will carry on the tradition of his grandfather Abraham… in wrestling with God, in wrestling with himself, Jacob becomes Israel; and comes away from this encounter forever changed.
This is one of these instances where we are tempted to put Jacob up on a pedestal… of one who encountered and wrestled with God… We call him a shining beacon of faith. Yet we forget that Jacob himself never thought of himself that way. He never thought of himself as being particularly extraordinary. In fact, he didn’t feel overly special at all, so much so that he felt he had to trick and cheat his way into the family blessings. He wrestled with his own sense of identity, his sense of who he was, and he wrestled with God… and who God called him to be.
No longer was he the trickster… the cheater… Now he would be someone entirely new: Israel… the one who strives with God. At the end of this struggle, Jacob comes away changed. He gets a second chance to set things right. He’s already tried out getting rich, the fast camels, swindling his friends… all that stuff that he finds doesn’t work for him anymore. He wants to be honest with himself and who he is… and through this struggle he finds God’s blessing that is truly his… a genuine second chance.
Six months after the funeral of this woman with no story, I got a call from the funeral home. The woman’s husband had died… but as I found out, not from alcohol poisoning or cirrhosis of the liver, but from cancer. His daughter, whom I had only met briefly at the funeral had asked for me by name. I agreed, maybe because I needed a second chance myself. This time, I met with his daughter, and she shared the whole story… the real story… about how relationships had been torn apart amidst of flood of alcohol and a denial that anything was wrong. How some things were so irretrievably damaged that they would never be the same… and yet, she also shared with me that in the short months between her mother’s death and her father succumbing to cancer, there was a reconciliation. She and her father became closer than they ever had before. It didn’t erase the hurts and pains of the past, but before he died something did healed. She wanted me to share all of that… even at a funeral where only six people attended, we could tell the whole story… both of the darkness of his alcoholism… how it ruined relationships… and yet how in the end, after all this struggle, there was indeed a second chance… for reconciliation… for hope.
Second chances and reconciliation is what our faith is about. The stories of estrangement both in the Bible and that we experience in life are human ones. Often we find ourselves struggling with God before we find reconciliation in our own relationships. Like Jacob, we find that the struggle is ours… about being honest… about realizing that the relationships we have now are more important than holding on to a book of grudges. Second chances mean that at some point we need to be honest about past wrongs, but not let them prevent us from living. God is all about forgiveness, God is all about reconciliation… As the story of Jacob tells us, it’s not just about a second chance with God, but a second chance with one another. It’s a second chance for reconciliation that God gives to all of us… are we willing to take it?
Amen.
The hardest funeral I ever had to do was not for a friend, nor someone I knew well. It was not for a child, nor the beloved son or daughter of a member of the congregation. It was not for someone who was the victim of crime or an accident… It was hard, but not for the emotional reasons you might think… but the best way I can describe is to tell the story.
When I served as associate minister in Cornwall, one summer I received a call from a funeral home for an older woman… I wouldn’t say elderly, but older… who had recently died. She had left a husband, and two sisters… I didn’t have much more family information than that. When I went to visit with the family to prepare for the service, I met with the two sisters and the husband. The husband wasn’t really all that responsive, perhaps overcome with grief, he’d acknowledge a few things, but generally didn’t say a great deal. Most of my conversation was with the two sisters… When I do funerals, it has been my practice to ask the people in the family to tell stories. It does two things: first, it helps me get a sense of who the person was, especially if I didn’t know them, and second, by telling stories it can help the members of the family through grief by telling the story of their loved one’s life. I could never hope to get all of those stories into a single service, but that’s not the point. Share the stories, tell the stories, and the stories help define who the person was and who the person continues to be for those who are left behind.
So when I asked the two sisters and the husband to share some stories about this person, the only response I got was “she was a nice person.” … That’s it… “she was a nice person.”
“Can you share any specific stories with me?”
“She was a nice person.”
“Was there any particular reading or book that she liked?”
“Not really. She was a nice person.”
It was like pulling teeth… and I came away from that visit not really knowing anything more than I went in. Even the obituary didn’t say much… except that the couple had two adult children, one daughter and one son. They hadn’t mentioned them.
I had nothing to work with… and so two days later I delivered what I still consider to be my worst funeral ever. Sure, the feedback was good, and they thanked me for it… but it had been so generic… so… bland… and I felt deflated.
The only difference was that at the funeral, the woman’s daughter was there, but there was no sign of the son. She thanked me for the service, but eluded to something that her mother was the only person who was stopping her father from drinking himself to death.
My heart sank… and suddenly a lot more of the picture clicked into place… but too late.
The woman’s husband was a chronic and deeply ingrained alcoholic. The reason he seemed so out of it when I visited the family is because he was drunk. The reason why the adult children weren’t there when I first met with them is because they had long since been estranged from their parents. The daughter had returned out of a sense of duty… they had not successfully gotten a hold of their son. The reason that they didn’t share stories with me is because they were either too painful, or that the denial had run so deep that it was better not to tell any story at all.
But the funeral was over…
I think estrangement is something almost all of our families have experienced at one point or another. Broken relationships, painful experiences, stories of sorrow that we would much rather not tell… The story of Jacob that we hear this morning is set up against a painful story of division between siblings… family members who had conflict in the past who thought the opportunities for reconciliation had long gone.
Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, eventually had two sons of his own: Jacob and Esau. When they were growing up, Jacob had tricked both the first-born Esau and his father to gain the blessing and birthright that was so important to their early cultures. Needless to say it created a bit of a rift, and Jacob had fled fearing the wrath of Esau more than anything else.
Over the next number of years, Jacob lives in exile, becoming prosperous in his own right… and learning some very profound lessons about himself. Eventually, he realizes that God was calling him to return home, to be reconciled with his brother. Jacob is understandably nervous, the last time that he saw Esau, he was screaming something about having his head on a pike.
I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty vivid image of a rather bitter parting.
Before his arrival, Jacob is so nervous about meeting his brother for the first time in nearly twenty years, that he sends a wide array of gifts in order to appease him… not the least of whom were his own wives and children. Before going to meet his brother, Jacob takes his wives and children, sending them across the river at the ford of Jabbok. In the silence, and in the darkness of the night, Jacob finds himself alone… but not for long:
24Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.
As I said before, this was not play fighting. This was an out-and-out knock-down drag ‘em out kind of brawl. Jacob was fighting for his life... hard enough that his hip is dislocated in the midst of the fight… and he still keeps going.
Not only that, we really have no idea who his opponent is. There’s no description… no distinguishing marks… The fight is in complete darkness, and it keeps on going… Jacob refuses to yield, but neither is there a clear winner. The mysterious stranger says “Let me go, it’s almost dawn!” Before the light comes up, before the sun casts rays over the horizon and this opponent is revealed… He says, “Let me go!”
But Jacob says, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”
The mysterious stranger asks him, “What is your name?”
In a moment of complete honesty… He replies, “Jacob.” My name is Jacob… it means liar and cheater. It means that I’m no good… I took something valuable from my brother and my father a long time ago… and now… I… Jacob’s voice trails off… and suddenly he realizes that for all of his life he has struggled with his own identity, over who he was.
The stranger’s arms become less of a grapple and more of an embrace. He says to Jacob, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Jacob is not who you are anymore… you are no longer a liar and a cheater… but someone who wants to be whole again.
It is only after the fact that Jacob realizes who his opponent was. He drops to his knees, stunned by the revelation of who this was. He realizes that he has just had a face-to-face encounter with God, and yet he still lives… it is a blessing that he has neither tricked or cheated his way into… it is a blessing that finally, after many years, he has earned on his own.
This story of forgiveness and reconciliation… before Jacob can be reconciled with his brother, he first finds reconciliation with God… without truly knowing what he was wrestling for, he finds reconciliation with God… and is transformed for something new. Jacob comes away from this encounter forever changed… no longer is he the slippery trickster, but truly someone who will carry on the tradition of his grandfather Abraham… in wrestling with God, in wrestling with himself, Jacob becomes Israel; and comes away from this encounter forever changed.
This is one of these instances where we are tempted to put Jacob up on a pedestal… of one who encountered and wrestled with God… We call him a shining beacon of faith. Yet we forget that Jacob himself never thought of himself that way. He never thought of himself as being particularly extraordinary. In fact, he didn’t feel overly special at all, so much so that he felt he had to trick and cheat his way into the family blessings. He wrestled with his own sense of identity, his sense of who he was, and he wrestled with God… and who God called him to be.
No longer was he the trickster… the cheater… Now he would be someone entirely new: Israel… the one who strives with God. At the end of this struggle, Jacob comes away changed. He gets a second chance to set things right. He’s already tried out getting rich, the fast camels, swindling his friends… all that stuff that he finds doesn’t work for him anymore. He wants to be honest with himself and who he is… and through this struggle he finds God’s blessing that is truly his… a genuine second chance.
Six months after the funeral of this woman with no story, I got a call from the funeral home. The woman’s husband had died… but as I found out, not from alcohol poisoning or cirrhosis of the liver, but from cancer. His daughter, whom I had only met briefly at the funeral had asked for me by name. I agreed, maybe because I needed a second chance myself. This time, I met with his daughter, and she shared the whole story… the real story… about how relationships had been torn apart amidst of flood of alcohol and a denial that anything was wrong. How some things were so irretrievably damaged that they would never be the same… and yet, she also shared with me that in the short months between her mother’s death and her father succumbing to cancer, there was a reconciliation. She and her father became closer than they ever had before. It didn’t erase the hurts and pains of the past, but before he died something did healed. She wanted me to share all of that… even at a funeral where only six people attended, we could tell the whole story… both of the darkness of his alcoholism… how it ruined relationships… and yet how in the end, after all this struggle, there was indeed a second chance… for reconciliation… for hope.
Second chances and reconciliation is what our faith is about. The stories of estrangement both in the Bible and that we experience in life are human ones. Often we find ourselves struggling with God before we find reconciliation in our own relationships. Like Jacob, we find that the struggle is ours… about being honest… about realizing that the relationships we have now are more important than holding on to a book of grudges. Second chances mean that at some point we need to be honest about past wrongs, but not let them prevent us from living. God is all about forgiveness, God is all about reconciliation… As the story of Jacob tells us, it’s not just about a second chance with God, but a second chance with one another. It’s a second chance for reconciliation that God gives to all of us… are we willing to take it?
Amen.
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