Everybody Has a Dream
Dr. Larry Thorson
Scripture: Genesis 32:22-32
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female
servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he
had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob
was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw
that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that
his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said,
"Let me go, for it is daybreak."
But Jacob replied, "I will not let
you go unless you bless me."
27 The man asked him, "What is your name?"
"Jacob," he answered.
28 Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but
29 Jacob said, "Please tell me your name."
But he replied, "Why do you ask my
name?" Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face
to face, and yet my life was spared."
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of
his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached
to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near
the tendon.
Today’s New International Version Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society
Everybody
has a dream. The dream is what gets you up in the morning. It is what you are chasing
in life. Every important decision and move you’ve made was based on how close
it gets you to the dream. Even if you don’t know what the dream is, it still
runs your life because then the
dream is to
find a dream.
The
problem is that it keeps moving. Dreams are hard to catch. Some people appear to have lives that are
naturally dream-like. That is Esau’s story, Jacob’s
older brother.
Esau stumbled into every blessing the world has to offer and took it all for
granted. When we look at all his
prosperity, popularity, and good looks, we know that some people are just born
right.
For
the rest of us, life has always been a chore. That’s why we understand Jacob so
well. His story describes how life is for those of us who were not born lucky
but are still determined to make something out of our lives. Some people have
it made, while others have to make it
happen, and we
are in the second group. Believing that nothing is naturally coming our way, we
are determined to go out and make our dreams come true. The problem with dreams
is that the only good ones come from God, and he insists on just giving them to
us as blessings. Even Esau knows that the best dreams are things like having
someone to
love, finding purpose to your life, or a friend who will stick with you through
anything.
These
only come into our lives as blessings, which can only be received as a grace.
You cannot pry a blessing out of God’s hands. But you can mess up a blessing,
and the best way is to insist on getting it for yourself. That’s the great flaw
in Jacob’s life, and perhaps ours as well.
Jacob
and Esau were twins, but they were far from being identical twins. Esau was a
hairy man of the field, a man’s man, and his father’s favorite. Jacob was a
quiet, thoughtful, schemer who stayed in the tents with his mother.
Their
father was named Isaac, and he isn’t all that
significant a
figure except that he was their link to the blessings of life that Jacob wanted
more than life itself. The problem was that everyone else assumed these
blessings would naturally fall to Esau as the firstborn. Everyone, that is, except the twins’ mother
Rebekah, who remembered that God promised to give the blessing to Jacob when
the boys were in her womb. Surely Rebekah told her son about
this promise,
and God himself repeated it to Jacob on several occasions in his life. But
Jacob just couldn’t believe it because everything in the world proclaimed a
preference for Esau.
Like
Jacob, we all have a twin. From the day we were kids, we began measuring
ourselves against some Esau, some image of what we thought we should be. Esau
is like you, but better. He’s the preferred image you have of yourself —
smarter, better looking, more successful. He’s the person you think you have to
become before you can get any blessings. This means that no matter what you
accomplish, it’s never good enough because you’re constantly evaluating
yourself by this big, hairy twin that you drag behind you as a judgment.
When
the boys were young, Esau was picked first when the other kids chose teams. He
got the best grades and went to the best colleges. He has the best jobs, a
great home, and fabulous children. Esau is Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. So maybe your Mamma thinks you’re
special,
but you are no
Esau. And it drives you crazy. The story of Jacob’s life is exactly that. It’s
the story of a man driven crazy to earn a blessing.
When
Isaac had grown old and blind and knew his days on earth were coming to an end,
he summoned Esau, his favorite son who was out in the fields. It was time to
pass the blessing on as Abraham had given it to him. But Rebekah heard her
husband’s instructions and quickly summoned Jacob who was nearby. She dressed
him up in Esau’s clothes and placed goat’s wool on Jacob’s neck and hands so he
would feel like his hairy older brother. Then she told him to go in to Isaac,
pretending he was Esau.
When Jacob
entered his father’s tent, Isaac asked, “Who is there?” Jacob said, “I am
Esau.”
It
was a lie, of course, but only a partial lie. By this time Jacob had become so
obsessed with Esau and
the honor his
father gave him that when he said, “I am Esau,” he was almost telling the
truth. But actually he was still only Jacob dressing up his life to resemble
his preferred image.
We
all look so good on Sunday mornings in church. And what about the clergy? We wear
robes, and sometimes we have flags called stoves hanging off of us. Craig
Barnes, pastor of Shadyside Presbyterian in Pittsburgh says every time he puts
his robe and stoles on he can still hear an older woman who told him on the day
he was ordained, “Son,
if you have
nothing to say, you should at least look nice.”
But
is that all we are doing? Are we just dressing up to look like our preferred
images? Can you imagine how this scene
in Isaac’s tent looked from heaven? There, God sees Jacob with goat’s wool
taped to his neck and hands thinking, “Ai-yi-yi. This is the guy I’m blessing?” God is not blind! He has promised to bless
you. Not your preferred image of yourself.
As
a result of all of Jacob’s scheming, he has to run from the home he was
striving to inherit because an angry Esau wanted to kill him for stealing their
father’s blessing. He ran to the home of Laban, Rebekah’s brother, where he
tries to start over.
This
is every striver’s favorite plan. But
Jacob brought his striving heart with him, which means he had actually fled
nothing. Years later, when he had to run away again, he had messed up two
marriages and schemed Laban out of a
fortune. The
only place left to run was back home, but when Esau gets word that Jacob is
returning, he gathers up four hundred men and races toward him. This terrifies
Jacob who sends all of his fortune and his family ahead of him in hopes of
appeasing his angry brother.
Now
Jacob is alone and bankrupt again. There are no more towns to move to, no new
jobs or relationships to start, and no more chances for self-improvement. Now
Jacob is stuck with Jacob.
This
is the great problem with hustling through life. We have to keep letting go of
things in order to run to the next thing we think will make us happy.
Eventually, we start to measure life not by the next achievement but by the
blessings we have lost along the way.
That
dark night a “man” comes to Jacob and begins to wrestle with him. The struggle
is great and lasts until daybreak. Then Jacob realizes he has been wrestling
with God. It is the symbol of Jacob’s life. He’s actually been wrestling with
God for a long time. It is the symbol of our lives as well. We, too, believe in
the blessing, but some nights you have to fight to keep believing, to hold onto
the promise.
This
struggle is not a sign of Jacob’s lack of faith. This is the drama of a man who
believes in God’s promise to bless him, but he cannot see how it will happen.
When you watch a child you raised in the church grow up to reject the faith,
when you discover you have an awful disease, when you’ve lost your job and have
no idea how you will pay your bills, those aren’t just personal problems. When
you read about violence in the
For
people who believe in God’s sovereignty, they are theological problems. If
Jacob had no faith, he would simply accept life as it is. But Jacob takes God
far too seriously for that. He cannot live one more day with the contradictions
between his faith and how it is. Clearly, he cannot make
blessings
happen, and every time he’s tried he’s only made a mess of his life.
So
now that he has hold of God, he will not let go. The man says, “Let me go for
the day is breaking.” Jacob replies, “I will not let you go until you bless
me.” In the course of this struggle with
God, Jacob’s hip is thrown out of its socket, crippling him. What could be worse than a hustler who can no
longer run? So now he just hangs onto God,
refusing to
let go until he gets his blessing. This is the critical position of faith –
broken, exhausted, with hands empty to cling to God.
At
daybreak, the blessing finally comes. It was not the blessing Jacob, or we,
imagined. He received no wealth, esteem, or any of Esau’s success. No, the
blessing is a new name. No longer would he be called Jacob, which means
striver. “Your name shall be
struggled with
God and others and have prevailed.” Prevailed? How has this crippled, bankrupt,
hustler prevailed? He has learned to cling to God. That was the blessing all
along.
It
takes a few years and a whole lot of mistakes to learn this: the blessings of
life come not from what you are
holding, but
from realizing who is holding onto you. The
next morning, it was finally time to confront his old issue with Esau. Jacob
hobbled toward him and then fell to the ground before him. “But Esau ran to
meet him, embraced him, fell on his neck, kissed him, and they wept.”
Whatever the
great dream struggle is in your life, whether it’s a struggle with family,
love, work, others, or even yourself, it is first of all a struggle with God.
You will never find grace in the world around you, until you first find it with
God.
*This
sermon was adapted from a sermon written and delivered by Dr. Craig Barnes at
the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 19,
2006. Used with permission.