Reckoning and Redemption
Reckoning and Redemption
Genesis 33:1-17
I have a favorite podcast. (At this point, my family and my friends and the entire Church Ladies group are groaning. They all have to listen to me gush about podcasts far too often!) It is called, “Heavyweight.” It is hosted by an amazing person named Jonathan Goldstein. If you’re a fan of “This American Life,” perhaps you already know that some of the very best segments for that show have been done by Jonathan. The premise of the podcast, as Goldstein explains it, is to “mince, wheedle, cajole and backpedal my way into the past like a therapist with a time machine.” Goldstein is no therapist, though. He is a sometimes awkward, sometimes hysterically funny human being who genuinely wants to help.
In each episode, Goldstein meets a person and explores that person’s regrets. One episode has to do with a person who could never do math. Now she wants to be a real estate agent but she has to pass the test, which includes math. Goldstein walks her through confronting this math phobia. In another episode, the person had promised, eighteen years earlier to spread his father’s ashes at his father’s golf course, a promise that had gone unfulfilled. Goldstein and this man get the job done. In the very first episode, Goldstein gets his own father to reconnect with the father’s brother, whom he has not really talked to for forty years.
The key to the show is that Goldstein is completely disarming and honest and funny. There is no judgment about any of these people and their unresolved issues. There is just shared humanity. Getting stuck in things is what we all do at points in our lives. The question is are going to stay stuck forever and waste a lot of emotional energy or are we going to go and find out what we can do to resolve the problem. Jonathan listens. He proposes something. Then, he sort of throws an arm around the person and says, “Let’s go find out.”
Often, the show arrives at some really poignant moments. In the case of Goldstein’s father, after decades of periodic and explosive squabbles over all sorts of trivial things, the two brothers finally sit down and start talking. Eventually, after coming perilously close to getting lost in more squabbles, they finally arrive at the real conflict between them. When they were children, their father was physically abusive. Finally, after the father beat their mother again, the mother left. However, she only took one of the sons with her. She left the other son with the abusive father. Up to that point, the two brothers had been incredibly close. From that point on, they were left to try to figure out what being divided between the two parents could possibly mean. The thing was, they never talked about this with each other. They just took out their frustrations on one another for the next 60 years.
The promise of an episode of “Heavyweight” is a catharsis—a kind of emotional release. Whatever the burden might be that this person has carried for so long, that burden is about to get lighter. It may not be perfectly resolved. It certainly won’t be like nothing ever happened. However, it just might be possible to move forward in a new way. And as they do, they will know that someone cared enough to try to help them make that move.
The show isn’t maudlin. It’s not therapy “lite.” It’s really very funny without being cynical. Mostly, it is just honest and hopeful in a time when things that are honest and hopeful are in short supply. It is also, at its heart, a show about redemption.
Redemption…boy, is that one of those loaded “churchy” words, right? However, there is nothing “parochial” about the experience of redemption. If all we had in life were superficial contacts with casual bystanders—people we would see once or twice and then never see again—then we would have no need for redemption. We could make all the mistakes we want, say all the hurtful things we can think of, get hopelessly mired in the some bad interaction and none of it would matter. It wouldn’t matter because the person wouldn’t matter to us and therefore the relationship, itself, would be disposable.
Now, I’ve known people who seem to live this way. I’ve known some of them long enough to watch them move from seeming like they were the king or queen of the world who had life by the tail, flitting from one hot relationship to the next, from one intriguing job to another, always on the move until, eventually, they turn out to be the most hollow people around. It turns out that walking through life with not just an unwillingness to make commitments but really no concept of commitment at all looks good in the short run but sucks the life out of us in the end. Loving people and investing ourselves in relationships and friendships and work projects is where we express the heart of what it means to be a human being: we care. In the end, being carefree is just the path toward being careless and being careless means our lives will be meaningless, too.
The problem is that caring doesn’t mean that things always work out. People can genuinely love one another and get stuck in hard feelings and end up cut off from one another. Friendships can get waylaid in all sorts of ways. I can care really deeply about a project and that project can fail miserably. And, because I dared to care about any of these things, these failures are incredibly painful. I can run from that pain. I can decide that I’m never going to risk being hurt again. I can remove myself from life, itself.
That’s where redemption comes in. Real redemption doesn’t have to do with some religious person tossing guilt at you. You don’t get shamed into seeking redemption. No…the need for redemption comes from way deep inside of us. It starts with the dream that reminds us of life before we carried this burden with us every day. It starts with the realization that arises when we are at the end of our rope, when we are totally exhausted and this exhaustion really is the result of the garbage that we are carrying around inside us, all day, every day. Or, it starts when Jonathan Goldstein says to his father, “Dad, don’t you think it’s about time that you and Uncle Sheldon took another shot at talking to each other?” Or, as a friend of mine said, change started the day that it dawned on him that, “Life wasn’t meant to be horse…manure.”
Every human being who has ever cared about anyone or anything deeply has gotten hopelessly stuck in some failure or impasse. If we are going to make it to tomorrow, we have to get past this. If we don’t get past this, then we are each going to leave a certain percentage of our souls and our life energy behind. We will flourish less and laugh less and live with less passion as a result. At some point, we have to realize that this is just plain too expensive.
This is where we find Jacob in our text. Everywhere he has gone, he has ended up taking advantage of someone. He has found some way to swindle people—mostly family members. At the same time, he has built his own family: two wives, two maidservants, eleven sons and a lot of animals. The problem is that every time he swindled someone and turned a person whom he cared about and who cared about him into an enemy, he has made life less livable. The short-term easy thing to do was to take what he wanted from whoever had what he wanted and he was really good at that. The long-term problem was that every time he did this he burned a bridge. There was no going back until God told him one day in a dream that it was time to go back.
So, last week, on his way back home to finally face his brother, Esau, the man he swindled first, Jacob spends a long night literally wrestling with a man who was doing God’s work or an angel or God. Whoever it was, this other forced Jacob to deal with his own stuff. After a long night of wrestling, Jacob is totally exhausted and worn out and limping. As I suggested to you, if you think you can outsmart anyone in the room, then maybe it’s a gift to be so tapped out that you don’t have any of those wits about you on the most important morning of your life when you finally have the chance to do something different. Are you with me? As long as you think you’ve got a leg to stand on (and Jacob is literally down to one leg to stand on), you might think the old way of doing things that got you in this fix in the first place is still the way to do things. For Jacob, having met his match, all he can do is watch the sun rise, gasp for breath and wait for his brother to arrive.
I suspect that we’ve all been here, one way or another. Whatever the circumstances were, however long it took, we’ve finally come to grips with the consequences of what we’ve done. As the kids say today, “We’re woke!” We’re done blaming others. We’re done offering excuses. We need to take responsibility for what we’ve done. We need talk to the person we hurt. This is the reckoning and it starts the moment we show up and own our regrets.
Jacob shows up and sees his brother Esau and 400 men barreling down on him. (Ever been there? I have…you think to yourself, “I’m trying to do the right thing but I’m about to get run over!”) Then, Jacob does the most amazing thing. He sends his wives and children and maids away rather than trying to hide behind them—perhaps the most self-less thing he has ever done. Then, Jacob humbles himself. This is what someone who is going through the reckoning looks like: he bows all the way to the ground—forehead in the dirt—seven times, as he walks toward Esau. He makes himself completely vulnerable and defenseless to the brother who had sworn to kill him.
Then, Esau kills him! No! Then, Esau tells Jacob what a loser he is! No! Then, Esau slowly begins to review every mistake that Jacob ever made! No! Then, Esau embraces his brother. Jacob’s repentance and humility—his reckoning with what he’s done—is met with grace and forgiveness and love. In the end, the only thing that Jacob, the guy who was always one step ahead of whoever was in front of him, can think to do is ask a question: “Why should my lord be so kind to me?” This, in the end, is the question that anyone who has ever received redemption is left to ask: “How did I ever get to receive so much more forgiveness and grace and love than I ever deserved?”
Here’s what’s so interesting about this. This kind of redemption is the only way any of us will ever make it through life as caring, loving people in a world in which we make mistakes. As soon as forgiveness is withheld, the game is over. Consider this: this is the story our ancestors in faith told us about the father of their nation—that he was a conman who swindled his own family and that his brother—the one who would be the father of their enemies—was the good guy who offered forgiveness and grace and love. Imagine that! Consider this: Jesus of Nazareth would tell a story about a prodigal son that echoes the story of Jacob and ends with a father who embraces and forgives his wayward son and celebrates his return. Consider this: there may be no higher purpose in our lives than to be a source of redemption in someone else’s life.
Someone may be dying for our forgiveness. Something may be dying in us while we wait to be forgiven. Christ may even have died, in part, to bring this powerful truth to life.