As many of you know, my daughter-in-law is a Rabbi. My son, Jim, converted to Judaism before he and Rachel married and their little son and daughter, who are two of the four cutest kids in the world, are growing up in a devout Jewish home.
People might wonder what I, as a Christian minister, do with this?
One response I have to people who ask that question is to send them to Jim’s mother who says, “Do I believe God wants me to stop loving my son because he converted to Judaism – No, She wouldn’t make me do that!”
Conventional Evangelical Protestant Theology withers in the face of a Mother Bear’s love. If God doesn’t love us as much as Jacquie loves Jim and his family, we are all in trouble.
But Conventional Evangelical Protestant Theology is still going to ask what I think Jesus meant when he said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).
Answer: I struggle with it. I wrestle with it. Just like Paul does in chapters 9, 10, and 11 of the Book of Romans. Paul is so disturbed that his fellow Jews have not believed that Jesus is the Messiah, that he says he would be willing to be accursed by Christ if that would, somehow, save his people.
I’ll come back to this dilemma in a couple of weeks, but right now I’d like to talk about wrestling with God. The Old Testament Lesson for August 3rd tells about Jacob wrestling with “a man” in the middle of the night. They wrestle all night and neither can make the other say, “uncle”. As dawn breaks, the Stranger tells Jacob to let him go, and Jacob says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”.
The Stranger then tells Jacob that his name from then on will be “ Israel ”, which may mean, “the one who wrestles with God.” And the Stranger also leaves Jacob lame in one hip. When the Stranger leaves, Jacob calls the place: “I-have-seen-God (and lived to tell about it)!”
We wrestle with God when we have big questions like: “How do I resolve John 14:6 with my son’s obvious devotion to God and his wife’s clear calling from God to be a leader in the Jewish community?”
Other people have other questions:
“How can a good God allow good people and innocent children to suffer and even die before their time?”
“How can the Bible say that homosexuality is an abomination when my friends’ love for each other and faithfulness to each other puts to shame a lot of heterosexual couples I know?”
“Does someone who lived a terrible life but accepts Jesus as their savior at the last minute go to heaven and someone who lived a wonderful, caring, loving and highly ethical life but never said, “Jesus is my Lord” goes to hell?
I’ve wrestled with all of these questions and continue to wrestle with some others:
“Do I need to sell all I have and give it to the poor in order to really follow Jesus?”
“What does it mean to love my enemy and turn the other cheek when my enemies fly airliners into big buildings full of innocent people?”
The purpose of wrestling I think is less to get an answer than to get stronger. What gets stronger is not the ability to think theologically – in fact, I think that gets lamed, because we lose the cocksure arrogance of the True Believer who knows he’s right. What gets stronger is that part of us that holds on to God. I’d call it “faith” if that hadn’t been hijacked by those who want to make “faith” to mean “the intellectual assent to a list of doctrines”. So let’s just call it “The-Part-of-Us-that-Holds-On-to-God”.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who tell me that they are agnostic or atheist but who are people who hold on to God – and do so with greater tenacity than some good church folks I know. I used to kid one atheist friend that he talked more about God than most of the people I know who devoutly believe in God.
So, for now, let’s just say that I hold on to my love for Jesus and I hold on to my love for my son, Jim, and his family, even though some would say I am betraying my Lord and condemning my son to eternal fire. If you believe that religious faith is about logical consistency, you and I belong to different religions. If you believe logical consistency is unimportant, you and I belong to different species. When we hold on to God in the darkness of confusion and contradiction and even despair, our grip on the Eternal grows stronger, our confidence in our religious “answers” grow weaker, and we become part of Israel – wrestlers with God.