The Faith We Wrestle With — 2 August 2026

The Faith We Wrestle With

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Genesis 32:22-31

At night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone, and someone wrestled with him until daybreak. When the person saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, the person struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the person said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So the person said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the person said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked the person, “Please tell me your name.” But the person said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there the person blessed Jacob. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

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If you’ve been hanging around the Lutherans for a while, you might know that we have a ritual, mostly with pre-teens, where, after a period of study, they stand before the congregation and rehearse their baptismal vows. And we pronounce them “confirmed” and “full members” of the Church. A good pastor friend of mine always jokes that confirmation is a ritual in search of a theology. Confirmation is, on the one hand, an ancient rite. It comes from a time of rapid growth in the early church. The bishop was to be the official baptizer, but, eventually, he couldn’t make it to every baptism, so local priests would baptize folks, and then everyone would have the Spirit “confirmed” in them when the bishop could make it out to this or that village. As subsequent generations were born into already Christian families, baptism moved earlier, and confirmation merged with other coming-of-age rituals, and was among the seven named sacraments. 

In the Reformation, Lutherans retained the ritual, no longer calling it a sacrament—because it wasn’t instituted by Christ, and because it didn’t contain a physical element like baptism and communion. In the worship rituals of our church, we call it “Affirmation of Baptism,” appropriate for many transitions in a baptized believer’s life, including a “period of faith formation” called “confirmation.” Affirmation of baptism is about bridging gaps, perhaps between what was and what may yet be; though, we have to confess, as it is currently designed, it is awfully far away from full adulthood to be a coming of age ritual. 

For a long time, Lutheran pastors seemed to think the purpose of confirmation was to open the heads of adolescents and surgically (and sometimes painfully) insert theological knowledge. I would image we could ask for a show of hands of how many had to memorize Luther’s Small Catechism, with ready answers for Luther’s explanation of the Articles of the Creed, Petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, and of each Commandment. Unfortunately, as too often happens when we teach to the test, confirmation painted a story of faith that expected stony confidence, without a single, exposed hole or gap. 

Around the time I started teaching confirmation, I ran across a quote from theologian Lauren Winner from her book Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. She said, “What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.” This is, I think, what the best confirmation class does: not providing some kind of unshakable knowledge, but teaching people how to wrestle, how to hold on from blessing to limp, and back again. 

This has always been where I have rested with this story—that faith is about wrestling with God, with story, with facts and gaps and unanswerable questions. We wrestle, and sometimes we come away with a limp, and, always, we come away with a blessing, too. Which is an explanation works particularly well when what we’re wrestling with remains in the purely theoretical. Big, gnarly theological questions. Godly riddles. That kind of thing. 

It works particularly well as long as the wrestling feels like a metaphor, and not the nightly anxiety that makes sleep impossible and when the rising sun does not fill us possibility for what is to come. As a metaphor, I worry it dries up when the purely theological, purely theoretical has become the fully, physically actual. When we feel the pain of our hip out of socket, when we know—with full terror—who we’re wrestling, and we finally understand the Bible’s fixation with the fear of the Lord. When we trip and fall face-foward on a gap in our knowledge, tearing wide a hole in our faith that we are unsure how we can ever cross. 

I mean, Jacob was headed home in triumph. Despite the fact that he had wrestled the birthright from his older brother, in truth, he had fled empty-handed. And now he’s coming back, in his mind, a self-made man. With flocks (which he had tricked from his father-in-law, Laban) and wives (admittedly, which had been one of Laban’s tricks) and children and just, apparently, so much wealth. But, as he nears home, his confidence falters. He sends messengers ahead to Esau, and when they return, the news is grim. Esau is headed this way, and he’s got four hundred guys with him. 

No wonder Jacob doesn’t sleep well that night. No amount of success is going to save him if Esau still has murder on his mind. In his anxiety, Jacob had divided up his family and flocks, a little over here and a little over there, hoping that someone could survive, if there were to be a massacre. Jacob is already wrestling—with his past, with who he might meet in the morning, with what tragedy might yet be in the future, wrestling knowing God has pronounced blessings on him, and he still has every reason to be terrified of the future. 

Where is God when we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop? When the storm is barreling down on us, and we fear our shelter is inadequate? When we’re waiting for what we know will be bad news? Where is God when we are witnessing injustice after injustice, and nothing we do is changing the narrative? 

And here is this story, this shaping story, where Jacob wrestles with big questions, and, in the end, he’s permanently scarred. Walks away with a limp. The central story here is about the blessing and the pain of a God who is, ultimately, beyond our knowing; the God who is too often silent and hidden in the face of tragedy and violence; the God we search and seek for; the God, hidden in the shadows, of the dark night of the soul. 

Too many of us learned the words of the scholar Luther as words of confidence, “We are to love and fear God…” but he spent his life terrified of God, begging God for answers, for a great revealing of God’s power that would answer every last question. And his ultimate answer, as Matthias Drobinski wrote for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Luther’s “answer [was] that faith alone makes the terrifying God into a gracious God…this is an act of trust with no external guarantee.” Faced with yawning holes of injustice, of fear, of tragedy and violence, faith is the blessing that bridges the gap. 

Faith is the only chance we have of reconciling with a God that we cannot understand, a God who is all too often hidden just when we are most in need. Faith is the only chance we have of reconciling with one another, of bridging the chasms that doubt and fear and mistakes have broken open among us.

In his fear, Jacob had cooked up a scheme—surprise, surprise: he’d sent ahead gifts for Esau, a bit of this and that, some goats and sheep. And some cattle. Also camels. Throw in a few donkeys, too. He thinks to himself—this is The Message translation, “I will soften [Esau] with the succession of gifts. Then when he sees me face-to-face, maybe he’ll be glad to welcome me.” Face-to-face. Which was how Jacob finally saw God: face-to-face. He names that campsite at the Ford of the Jabbok Peniel, “The Face of God.” 

And the next morning, Jacob limps across the river, leaving his bravado behind. Meets his brother with vulnerability and humility, unsure of what is to come, but still clinging to the blessing, to the faith alone that can turn the terrifying God into the gracious God, the faith alone that reconciles us all. He comes bowed low, but when Jacob looks up, Esau runs to him, embraces him, weeps over him. And Jacob looks up at him and says, “Truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.”

This is the faith we will wrestle with forever: the faith that see the terror of the world, and, with it, the grace: the gaps and holes that divide, and the bridge that can reconcile, the God that can wound, who is the God that, when we hold on, will bless. Amen.