Text: Genesis 32: 22-32
I took time this past week to see the documentary film currently playing at the Quad Theater, based upon the life and death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a Lutheran pastor and theologian during the period in German history that coincided with the rise of National Socialism. I commend it to you and hope that many will take the opportunity to see it. In case you are unable to do so, I know that Galen is planning to lead a series in October on Bonhoeffer’s life and writings, and is planning to screen the film here then.
Bonhoeffer was born to a prominent family in Berlin, the youngest of eight children. His eldest brother was killed within two weeks after having been sent to the front during the First World War, a harrowing event for this close-knit family, and one that would shape Dietrich’s life and destiny profoundly. Though nominally Protestants, the Bonhoeffers did not practice their religious faith through regular worship. They embraced a highly individual approach to matters of religious belief. So it was something of a surprise when Dietrich chose to read theology at the University of Tubingen. A bril-liant student, he completed all requirements for a doctorate in Theology by the age of 21.
After serving pastorates in Barcelona and London, Bonhoeffer traveled to New York in 1930 to enter postdoctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary. While at Union he came under the influence of the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and three close friends who impacted his life and intellectual development significantly. One was a Protestant Christian from France who was a dedicated pacifist, and who influenced Dietrich to embrace a pacifist theology. A second friend, an African-American, intro-duced Dietrich to the powerful experience of worship in the American black church. While in New York City, Bonhoeffer attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where for the first time he experienced emotionally charged worship and the witness of the social gospel in the preaching of its pastor, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.
The third person Bonhoeffer came to know well was Paul Lehmann, who event-ually became a prominent professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School and later Union Theological Seminary, where he was one of my professors. Curiously the film makes no mention of Lehmann, but while at Union, the two became close friends and carried on a significant correspondence for the rest of Bonhoeffer’s life.
After two years in New York, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in the early thirties just as Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists were coming to power. As the state became more and more totalitarian the church’s loyalty became a central issue. In exchange for support for the regime, the Nazis signed a pact of non-interference with leaders of both the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. (A truly chilling scene in the movie portrays a group of black-robed clergy giving the Nazi salute!) But for a minority of pastors and theologians the claims of the state to absolute authority const-ituted a serious conflict with its professed loyalty to Christ. When the campaign against German Jews became apparent, this group of pastors was mobilized to action. Gathering at Barmen under the leadership of Pastor Martin Niemoeller, theologian, Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer, and other key pastors, they issued the Barmen Declaration that exposed National Socialism and its claim to absolute faith as a religious heresy — a form of idolatry that the church was required to resist.
Those signatories to the Barmen Declaration proclaimed themselves to be part of the Confessing Church — namely those who confessed that Christ alone had authority over Christian conscience-- and vowed to resist the alarming assimilation of the church to the aims and purposes of the Nazi Party. The contemporary relevance of Barmen was once succinctly stated by Franklin Littell of Temple University: "One of the lessons of Barmen is that there is a time and place when Christians are not only entitled but obligated to resist criminal governments, and to resist immoral actions even by legitimate governments."
Following the Barmen Conference Bonhoeffer was assigned the task of creating a new seminary for the training of pastors in the Confessing Church movement. For the next two years he served as Dean and principal instructor of the seminary at Finkenwalde on the shore of the North Sea with a small group of students who had committed themselves to becoming part of the resistance to Nazi policies. When the SS eventually closed the seminary two years later, Bonhoeffer and his colleagues were regarded with suspicion by the political regime and under strong pressure to conform by the church leaders. In 1939 he was offered a teaching position at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In part at the urging of his friends, who feared he would be in grave danger if he remained in Germany, he accepted the offer. But once in the United States he struggled even more with his decision, and felt that he had abandoned his colleagues in the Confessing Church movement.
One of the people he most relied upon during this period of painful decision was his old friend, Paul Lehmann, then a Professor of Religion at Elmhurst College in Illinois. At one critical period Lehmann drove all night to New York to help Dietrich struggle with the question of where he belonged. Though he feared for his friend’s life if he re-turned to Germany, Lehmann nevertheless helped Bonhoeffer weigh the options and wrestle with the consequences, as Bonhoeffer himself had once put it, of accepting and counting the "cost of discipleship." "I would have had no right to participate in the reshaping of Germany after the end of National Socialism," he later said, "unless I also chose to participate in the sufferings of the German people under the Nazi Party." As a result of his struggle Bonhoeffer committed himself to return to Germany, for, as he had already written, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." When he had written that he was not thinking at the time about literal death. But he meant to emphasize that the call of Christ creates a crisis that requires nothing less than the sacrifice of the ego, the death of the old person and a complete reorientation to the claims of a new life in Christ.
After returning to Germany, Bonhoeffer participated in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. After several failed attempts to accomplish this, he and several members of his family were arrested in April of 1943 and imprisoned at Tegel Prison in Berlin for the next two years. In April of 1945 — shortly before Germany’s surrender — he was taken to the SS prison at Flossenburg and one week after Easter he was hanged to death together with his brother Klaus and two brothers-in-law for their role in the resistance.
I see Bonhoeffer’s struggle, like that of so many people of faith throughout the history of religion, reflected profoundly in the story we read earlier from the Book of Genesis we read earlier — the story of Jacob’s mysterious all night confrontation with the angel. It is a strange story, shrouded in mystery, perplexing, yet one that continues to haunt us, and seems to speak to us from some level deep beneath consciousness. Before we addressing the story directly, let us look at it in its context.
Jacob is the third person in the trinity of patriarchs of Jewish faith and tradition. He is the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, who years earlier had had a vision — a visitation by an angel who promised to him that he and his people would inherit a land that God would show to them, and that his descendants would "number more than the stars." Those two promises are the driving forces for all of the Genesis narratives that follow: how are these two promises to be fulfilled?
Abraham’s son, Isaac, fathers twin sons: Esau, rough hewn, a rugged outdoorsman, and Jacob, the second born, and cunning. As Jacob announces at one point, "My brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth one." Indeed, Jacob is a "smooth one" in a number of ways. He may be a patriarch, but he is no saint. According to the narrative he is a trickster, a hustler, a con man. By Jewish custom and law the eldest son receives the lion’s share of the father’s inheritance, as well as the father’s blessing upon his death. But Jacob, the second born, with a big assist from his mother, Rebecca, deceives his aging and blind father into passing the blessing on to him instead of Esau. He dons his brother’s rough costume, impersonates his voice, and places a wooly sheep skin on his arm so that in touching it his father will believe he is indeed his "hairy" son, Esau. Isaac falls for the ruse and passes his blessing to his dishonest younger son, Jacob.
When Esau learns what has happened, he is not amused and threatens to tear Jacob to shreds. At just that moment an angel appears to Jacob suggesting that he leave town until his brother cools down. Again with his mother’s help, Jacob travels a long distance to live with her brother and his uncle, Laban. This uncle is a wealthy farmer and with his mother’s help he goes a long distance away to live with her brother and his uncle Laban. This uncle is a wealthy farmer and raiser of livestock, and he welcomes Jacob’s assistance. In addition he has two eligible daughters, the very beautiful Rachel, and the not so beautiful older daughter, Leah. Jacob predictably falls in love with Rachel and asks for her hand in marriage. Laban agrees on one condition: Jacob must live with their
family and work for seven years helping to expand the family business. Jacob gladly agrees and spends the next seven years in diligent and concerted activity that greatly increases Laban’s wealth. On the day of the great wedding, Laban plays a trick on Jacob. That evening when the consummation is to take place, he slips into Jacob’s darkened tent his elder daughter, Leah. There is no more sorrowful line in all of scripture than the one that describes Jacob’s realization that he has been duped. "And Jacob awoke, and lo, it was Leah."
It is a bit of poetic justice: Laban has just done to Jacob what Jacob had done to his brother Esau seven years earlier. He is furious, but when Laban agrees to also allow him to also marry Rachel for another seven years of service, he is mollified and agrees to this contract, seeing that Laban has no additional plain daughters around. So Jacob works for fourteen years and in the end he has increased Laban’s wealth and his own several fold. He now has two wives, and eleven children, and countless servants. In other words, he has it made.
But suddenly once more an angel appears and tells Jacob he must now return again to his original home. He protests: "What? Esau lives there and he is still mad!" You have noticed by now that in Biblical times it is virtually always futile to attempt to argue with an angel. So he dutifully packs up his wives, his servants, and his brood,
together with his portion of the livestock he has helped to produce, and sets out to return home, all the while fearing to confront his fierce brother, Esau.
That is where this morning’s story enters. Jacob has sent his wives and children and servants and flocks of animals, including gifts for Esau, across the river that marks the boundary of his original homeland. He places all of these before him as a buffer between himself and Esau anticipating that the danger he faces is ahead of him. But as he prepares to sleep on this side of the river, a different kind of danger emerges: an angel, an emissary of God. And the angel challenges him: "Who are you? What is your name?" Jacob is on the edge of the biggest crisis of his life. He is about to confront the brother who years earlier he had tricked out of his inheritance and familial blessing. Now he has returned to face the consequences of his dishonesty. But here the crisis confronts him in the form of an angel who challenges him with a question about his identity: "Who are you? What is your name?"
The story is an archetypal story. If we were to speak of it in modern psycho-logical terms we might say it is an archetypal story about mid-life crisis. Of course "mid-life" crisis has by now become a cliché. It calls to mind the guy who at age 50 buys a red convertible and runs off with his beautiful young secretary. But what if we return to the original meaning of the word "crisis" as a turning point. "Crisis" in this sense signifies the moment in which we realize all our defenses, all our familiar maneuvers have come to naught, when we are forced to take a long, hard look at ourselves–"warts and all"--at all of our successes and all our failures, and for the first time really
confront the question: "Who are you, really? What are you about?" And then, to have to make a decision about that, to actually choose between alternative paths. Then we are close to the spiritual meaning of the term "mid-life crisis."
That is precisely what is happening to Jacob at this critical moment in his life. Left all alone, in the dark, and facing what he believes will probably be the fight of his life, he is addressed from a surprising and unexpected source while his guard is down. And it confronts him with the central question of his life: "Who are you? What is your name?" What ensues is a life and death kind of struggle, not, as Jacob presumed, with
his brother, Esau, but with this dark emissary of God, the very creator of the universe, the "Holy One" of his fathers Abraham and Isaac. And this mysterious force stops him in his tracks and requires of him to enter this struggle known best to us by the famous dictum of the oracle at Delphi: "Know thyself."
Notice there are three significant moments in this story. The first is the challenge of identity by the angel: "Who are you? What is your name?" Let us be clear. The question that each of us faces at some point in our life is one that addresses us. In Biblical terms, it is God’s question. No one actually sits around and asks, "Who am I?" Rather, we feel ourselves to be confronted as if this question were addressing us from without. And rarely, if ever, does anyone experience that address in moments when everything is going swimmingly. Such questions come to us when we are afraid, or tormented, or deeply dissatisfied, or when we fear even our successes amount to little or nothing. Then we enter what the mystics call the "dark night of the soul," there to wrestle with
the angel of life or death. And there we must stand before his fateful question: "What is your name?"
The second principal moment in this story is when the angel announces, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel." Israel: the name that stands for the long, painful, spiritual journey and destiny. Israel: a people destined to bear witness to God’s life and work through history, and to bear for that "privilege" a special form of suffering. This Jacob, the cunning schemer, the dishonest one, the con man, is called to a new identity by this mysterious Other who says: "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel." This mid life crisis is more than a mere taking stock of things. It is a demand to change, a summons to become someone new. It is the experience of being called to something unpredicted and unpredictable, to place oneself in the hand of God and to be led. Jacob signals his response to this call by entering the struggle with the angel, and by standing firm within his own demand "I will not let you go unless you bless me!"
There is yet one final moment in this remarkable story we must not overlook. In the midst of the struggle, the angel touched Jacob’s thigh so that he is permanently injured. The encounter with God, the one we choose to enter, may provide a particular blessing. But it is also true that it is a wounding experience as well. The experience of transformation, the experience of coming to know, through such a dark encounter, who you are in the uttermost depths of your soul is also a scarring event. And the final glimpse we have of Jacob in this story is a poignant one. There he is, silhouetted against
the rising sun over the place he calls Peniel — "because I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved"—and limping, because of his thigh. For the rest of his life Jacob will bear the scar of that fateful encounter. He will limp, but his limp will also be the sign of his deepest freedom. In this sense the story recalls Ranier Maria Rilke’s warning that "every angel is terrifying," and such an encounter involves an adversary who
would come more fiercely to interrogate you,
and rush to seize you like a blazing star,
and bend you as if trying to create you,
and break you open, out of who you are.(trans. by Stephen Mitchell, cited in Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief, p. 56.)
Like Jacob, I believe Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with the angel in a dark night of the soul. The weeks in 1939 when he struggled in New York over the decision of whether or not to return to Germany were such a harrowing and tormenting experience.
But if we are to believe his letters from prison in the 1940’s so were the long days and nights he spent confined at Tegel prison. Among the writings that have been preserved from that period of his life is this meditation in which he reveals something of the personal struggle to know himself that is so reminiscent of Jacob’s long night with the angel.
WHO AM I?
Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
Freely, and friendly, and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.
Am I then all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself:
Restless, and longing, and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath as though hands were compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliations,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint and ready to say farewell to it all.
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.Bonhoeffer then completes the meditation with this new thought:
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.
In all times and places men and women have wrestled with this same dark angel. In all times and places we are confronted in mysterious ways by the question of our true identity. But like Jacob and Bonhoeffer, we may perceive the event to be a profoundly religious and spiritual one. And we may never see our lives as ever again the same once the question has been completely reframed, when it becomes not so much a question of who we are, and becomes instead the question of whose we are.
Let us end with a prayer that Dietrich Bonhoeffer himself wrote while in prison:
O heavenly Father, I praise and thank you for the peace of the night;
I praise and thank you for this new day; I praise and thank you for all your goodness and faithfulness throughout my life.
You have granted me many blessings;
Now let me also accept what is hard from your hand.
You will lay on me no more than I can bear,
You make all things work together for good for your children. Amen.