In Genesis 32, the Hebrew patriarch Jacob rests for the night by the river. An unknown man approaches him, and the two wrestle until daybreak. Jacob doesn’t let the man get away but says “I will not let you go unless you bless me!” The unknown man – who turns out to be none other than the God of his grandfather Abraham – gives him a new name in addition to a blessing. Jacob becomes Israel, “for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Jacob might be the only person in the Bible who physically wrestled with God, but the Scriptures are filled with stories of people who wrestled with God in other ways. People are still wrestling with God today.
“Deconstruction” is a hot term these days. It’s how people describe looking critically at the religious beliefs they were handed by their community of origin – typically a very conservative environment. Often, the questions are theological: “was the world really created in a literal seven days?” Other times, it’s more personal: “is it really a sin for me to be gay?” Because of the witness of churches like St. Bart’s, many people come to us as a safe and welcoming place where they can explore these questions. There’s no better place to wrestle with God than in church! To be a Christian is to wrestle. To read the Bible is to wrestle. To follow Jesus is to wrestle. And we will find that when we wrestle with God, God blesses us.
As someone who has wrestled with many of the same questions, a large part of my work is focused on creating safe spaces for people to deconstruct what is harmful and reclaim the Church and the Bible as sources of hope, joy, and liberation. As part of this, the next two Sundays at the Forum we welcome scholars of contemporary American Evangelicalism to help us better understand the religious climate in our country. This Sunday, Professor Melanie Ross from Yale Divinity School will speak about evangelical worship, music and the “megachurch” phenomenon. She engages a practice of autoethnography – of telling her own personal story – as part of her research. The following Sunday (February 9), Professor Isaac Sharp from Union Theological Seminary will speak on his research into the socially progressive and activist streams of American Evangelicalism. I look forward to engaging both of them in conversation.
Nathan Peace
Seminarian
