Fall Convocation– Oct. 15, 2025 – Closing Worship

Holiday Inn, Richland on the River

Genesis 32:22-31, Luke 18:1-8

In the late 1950s, my dad and three other guys bought a piece of property west of Custer, South Dakota. It was all my dad’s idea, and he was the one with the relationship with previous owner and widow Laura Behrens. My father had come to Lutheranism in his 20s through men he met while working at the downtown YMCA in St. Paul, MN. The Christianity of his childhood he would later call a fundamentalism of sorts. In leaving the faith of us childhood, he also separated from family. Later he separated from his first wife and married my mom. Maybe life for all of us is moving and growing within changing relationships, including our relationship with God, but that was certainly true for my father. We moved to that piece of land west of Custer when I was four years old, in 1980. 

And so it is that every time I turned onto the mile-driveway leading up to our home, I read these words on the mounted wooden sign: Peniel Valley Ranch, named after our story from Genesis. I recently remarked to my mom that it was so good of dad to name a place where others could come and wrestle with their faith, wrestle with God, see the face of God, and my mom said, “It was really mostly about your dad’s wrestling.” I know she is right. 

And yet, these last few days, as Dr. Bateza has talked so much about relationships, I couldn’t help but reflect on the gift it was to me to grow up knowing that wrestling with God was an acceptable part of the life of faith, of following Jesus. Similar but not identical to lament, when I have gone through difficult times, with relationships: familial, professional, and personal. I’m not a trickster like Jacob. My shadow side is that I am fiercely loyal, until I’m not (in personal relationships). This has caused plenty of wrestling with God. Through everything, I never felt like God abandoned me. I held on and wrestled, which usually manifested as waking up to my own tears as my subconscious and the divine worked out something. I learned only in my mid-30s that my exvangelical friends were never given such permission, and neither had my dad as he was growing up.

You know this story well, preaching it or teaching it to adults or confirmation students, but let’s still do some review. We encounter Jacob when he is terribly afraid that his twin brother Esau will kill him for taking his birthright.  He has not heard back from his messengers; he does not know if Esau has accepted his gifts. He does not know if his servants are even still alive. And yet he sends his wives and children into the path of Esau and his riders — without him. 

Jacob has evaded his greatest fear up to that point. The danger is across the water from him. He is safe, for a while; or so he thinks. But then, a person or personage he does not know (or does not recognize) grapples him to the ground. Jacob responds by fighting back and they wrestle for a long time. 

There was a stalemate. And then, the wrestler did something to Jacob’s hip and put it out of joint. That part has always been a mystery to me. Is God, who has been named by now, taking a cheap shot? Surely not. Jacob himself demands a blessing. The wrestler asks Jacob’s name and then gives him a new name, “Israel.” Finally, as dawn is breaking on the Jabok Riverbank, God bestows the blessing itself.  That is only the first part of the story, because Jacob does go on to meet Esau face-to-face.  

God has and may encounter people in conflictual times by taking the very form of the anticipated difficulty—a broken relationship, a hard transition, a new experience we fear. Think of Moses arguing on Mount Sinai with God before going down to deal with the Israelites or picture Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying in agony even as he anticipates his death.  

If we go through such a time with God, we experience a gracious rehearsal for the actual circumstance. In simplistic words, we practice. But of course, we can turn our back on God. To refuse to engage with God in that struggling moment denies oneself a God-given resource. But going through it with God before we go through it with others can be a blessing. 

Jacob had a very real fear of his Brother Esau’s anger. Jacob’s deliverance from God does not resolve the conflict with Esau. Jacob still must face that. But it must have been different for him having already wrestled with God.  In other words, Jacob was not just delivered from something. Deliverance, a new name, and a blessing are not ends in themselves. Jacob was also delivered for something—a new relationship with a human being.

Jacob’s later confrontation with Esau mirrors the encounter with God. Jacob testifies that seeing Esau’s face is like seeing God’s face. The opposite might be true in hindsight: Seeing God’s face is like seeing Esau’s face. What Jacob had expected from Esau was hostility; he got graciousness. What Jacob might have expected from God was graciousness. He did get that but only on the far side of the attack.

Even after his encounter with Esau, Jacob’s wrestling match is still with him. I think of Jacob’s limp as like the seal on our foreheads in the Sacrament of Baptism. We have died with Christ. That should forever change us. After my father died in December 2020, a friend whose own mom had died several years before wrote, “The hole is still there, but healing comes.” I think of what we heard yesterday between the difference between grief and melancholy.  If you truly die with Christ in the waters of baptism, of course you are changed. You have your own limp, your own mark. You also have the freedom, forgiveness, and new life that are promised in baptism. And of course, You too have a new name, “child of God.”

In this moment, as we have been reflecting on together the past few days, we read and hear so much about our disagreements, our polarization, our ongoing resentments. Many of you are not just reading about polarization but living it in your various contexts. I have yet to see the signage or testimony or social media post from Christians admitting to wrestling with God. I think it’s likely we are wrestling with God, wrestling with our faith, but we’re too afraid to admit it to one another. It’s not something we talk about, even though it is quite natural. But you do that wrestling with one who has already been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit.

I love presiding at installations and ordinations and it has been an honor to be a symbol of Christian unity at three bishop’s installations in the last month. And yet, I find myself leaning on the promises made in holy baptism more than ever now.  The renunciations of evil, the marks of discipleship named so clearly, and the promises made by God and the assembly are all gifts for the baptized, for you. Through water and the word, you were trusted by God and entrusted with God’s own love and mercy. You were sealed by the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that is with you still. It is that same Spirit that frees you today to see God in the face of the other: stranger, friend, neighbor. It’s that same Spirit that frees you today to see God in your own face—beloved child of God.