Genesis 32:3-8, 22-30

We are a pilgrim people – we live as strangers, aliens in this world as we look to find our eternal end in God. God has called us to this place as a pilgrim way-station, a place of care for the saints and hospitality to strangers. We ourselves are pilgrims, passing through this temporal world to our end in God; God calls us here with other pilgrims who make their way through this world. This is our work: to care for this place and those who pass through it. What does this take? Let’s look at the passage from Genesis this morning to see what it says for us in this place as we live as pilgrims.

Did you notice that Jacob was an alien, a sojourner, and a pilgrim? Jacob here confronts his past as weak, unprotected, and vulnerable. Jacob had taken advantage of his brother’s weakness; he had stolen from his father-in-law. Now Jacob is adrift. He’s caught in between. His goal is the land God promised him and his ancestors. Yet God’s promise seems irrelevant now. Four hundred men and his brother await him on the other side of the river. Jacob has no option to control the situation. Having lived as an alien, Jacob is caught without his green card with the fed’s immediately ahead.

What to do? Jacob goes off by himself – and wrestles with a man -- or is it God? The narrative strains with gaps. Such gaps often open in the world that pilgrim’s experience. By himself Jacob wrestles with another. The man touches Jacob’s thigh and it becomes dislocated. I’ve had arm’s dislocated, knee caps dislocated. It hurts; pain overwhelms the senses. Jacob experiences the dislocation of his thigh. He suffers. But more is going on in this text at another level. The man touches Jacob’s thigh. Jacob’s thigh. Need I speak of the male thigh in Scriptures, the thigh, for instance of Gideon as we read in Judges 8:30, from which 70 sons were born? From Jacob, from his thigh, the people of Israel come forth. Touching the thigh ruptures Jacob from his previous life to make a promise for the future. The dislocating touch of God – or is it a man? – opens a visible future for Jacob to become Israel. There is a promise in the man’s touch of Jacob’s thigh. The suffering Jacob now with a future hangs on to the man. Jacob makes a vow to the man: Bless me if you want to go. Jacob binds himself in a vow. He clings fully in his suffering to the man – or is it God?

The answer comes. God -- or is it a man? -- renames Jacob as a result of the vow. Jacob becomes Israel. Israel does not merely mean struggling with God; it also means God reigns. The rule of God becomes visible in the world as Israel, not Jacob. Israel: a person, a people living a vowed life to God bound in election and vow to God. God rules; Jacob is no longer Jacob; Jacob will be Israel. As God elects in the middle of the peril of the pilgrimage, God transforms the suffering of Jacob into a sign of God’s rule for Jacob has become Israel – God rules. Jacob is bound to God who has elected him with his words, “I will not let you go until you bless me!” Jacob vows to cling to the God – or is it a man? Jacob becomes Israel.

The passage screams with typological significance. Jacob becomes Israel through a vow, wrestling with God as an alien, dislocated and suffering. God’s rule becomes seen in the world through God’s election of Jacob now Israel after Jacob vows to cling to God until he is blessed. We hear in this story the story of the church through the ages – and today our story as well. The church in its history has forgotten that it is a pilgrim people – we’ve lived as Jacob. The church fights the temptation to belong, to find its true end in this world. We then lose a sense of our distinctive place and try to fill the space of the world, to seek influence in everyplace; we end up witnessing to nothing nowhere.

Yet during such times, people have drifted off and found themselves suddenly wrestling with God. They experience dislocation, suffering, but also election, promise. They learn that they have to cling to God in Christ by the Spirit if they wish to survive their sojourn. They vow themselves to God in response to God’s election. No longer Jacob, they become Israel. God through this group brings forth the church in its fullness into the world as Israel, persons who live to be a blessing to the nations.

Those believers who enter a vow as aliens to cling to God for a blessing remind the church how not to be Jacob, but Israel. They seek to Christianize Christianity; by their presence they urge the rest of the church not to lose its visibility by assimilating to the world. Historically these elect have entered special vows to God to cling to God. Pachomius in the East who brought Christians pursuing perfection in isolation together in witness; Benedict of Nisia in the West who wrote a rule and started houses of prayer, work, and mercy, pilgrimage way-stations, though out Western Europe. Time went on. When the church had fallen to the violence of the crusade and wealth, God raised up Francis and Clare of Assisi, who pursued holy poverty together in preaching Jesus Christ; the Society of Jesus, the Sisters of Mercy, Christians called to live in a special discipline together to pursue the perfection of love of God and neighbor to make the church, the new Israel, fully present, visible in the world, as Israel, not Jacob.

These movements of vowed Christians are not just movements in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. An Anglican Priest named John Wesley started a people called Methodists together to live a vowed life of avoiding all evil, doing all good to the bodies and souls of humans, and observing the ordinances of our Lord. This people called Methodists moved to the United States, but soon learned to fit in. In 1861 they gave up their life as a vowed people. A Methodist elder Phineas Bresee, looked to renew the church by Christianizing Christianity in the late 19th century. Pastor Deron showed me how Phineas Bresee was very aware of this historical tie from the Franciscans to the early Methodists to the Church of the Nazarene. To join the Church of the Nazarene was and is to enter this vowed people like the original Methodists to pursue Christian perfection, the heart cleansed of sin and filled with love divine, the restoration of the fullness of the image of God in us. Congregations in the Church of the Nazarene accept the work to make the church fully visible in the world by participating in Jesus in the Word, the Sacrament, and the Works of Mercy through living as a vowed pilgrim people. We cling to God in Christ, dislocated from the world to live as Israel, not Jacob.

This is our heritage. Our heritage meets our need for this work. We must become vowed members of the Church of the Nazarene, vowed as a certain type of order within the church catholic. We must be a pilgrim people, called to care for a pilgrim way-station, vowed to personal involvement in the works of Mercy. God calls us to live our pilgrim life as Israel, not Jacob.

A vowed life? Isn’t that a little extreme? Give up our “freedom” to do whatever we like on the spur of the moment? We have to recognize that we aren’t free. We’re formed by a sinful world. If we are to find our true end in God, we will find it through our vow to pursue the perfection of the love of God shed abroad in our heart in our love of neighbor. If God is to make the church fully visible by the presence of Jesus in Word, Sacrament, and Works of Mercy, nothing less than a vowed life to the discipline of this local congregation for its members will do. We welcome gladly friends who will support the work around us; but from those vowed we need to cling to God in this common mission.

Is it possible? Can such a congregation exist in this world? Oh yes, it can and it does. I could tell you stories of the folk who’ve learned to live this way in local Churches of the Nazarene that I’ve encountered in their simplicity and beauty.

Yet to show you this is possible, the image that has come to me is the Missionaries of Charity begun by the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. A small Albanian woman, Gonxha Bojadijevic left home at age 18 to enter a life of prayer and service as a nun far away in India. On September 10, 1946, at age 36, she had a mystical encounter with Jesus Christ: “I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums – to serve Him in the poorest of the poor” (p. 40). Years later, she reflected to her vowed sisters: “Jesus wants me to tell you again . . . . how much is the love He has for each of you—beyond all what you can imagine. . . . Not only He loves you, even more—He longs for you. He misses you when you don’t come lose. He thirsts for you. He loves you always, even when you don’t feel worthy . . . .
For me it is so clear—everything in MC exists only to satiate Jesus. His words on the wall of every MC chapel, they are not from [the] past only, but alive here and now, spoken to you. . . .Why does Jesus say ‘I thirst’? . . . “I thirst’ is something much deeper than just Jesus saying ‘I love you.’ Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you – you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him” (p. 42).

Teresa ended up on the streets in Calcutta, first alone, then with one other. After a year a congregation of ten women lived as pilgrims, caring for other pilgrims at pilgrimage way-stations God have entrusted to them: “The Particular End is to carry Christ into the homes and streets of the slums, the sick, dying, the beggars and the little street children. The sick will be nursed as far as possible in their poor homes. The little children will have a school in the slums. The beggars will be sought and visited in their holes outside the town or on the streets. To be able to do all these—the Sisters must learn first to live real interior lives of close union with God—and seek and see Him in all they do for the poor.” (pp. 341.

Such a task requires a complete surrender to God in Christ: “As each sister is to be a victim of Christ and do His work, she will understand what God and the Institute expects from her. No half measure—We must give to God all or nothing and keep up that total surrender – cost what it may” (p. 38).

The Missionaries of Charity recognize themselves as pilgrims called to engagement in the world to find their end in God. They care for others whom they recognize as pilgrims, some not long in this world. They set up a unique pilgrimage way-stations, The Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the Dying: “The sisters will use every tenderness and love for those who are leaving this world—so that the love of Jesus will attract them and make them make their peace with Him.—They will pray near the dying and make sure that the priest is called in time.—If the person has not got anybody—the sisters will prepare his or her body for burial” (p. 347). A person had to offer themselves to God in Christ to be made nothing so that God could be everything. In the vow adequacy to the task ahead meets the need for personal sanctification.

Mother Teresa was about Jesus, finding the presence of Jesus in Word, Sacrament, and the works of Mercy to the poor. The presence of Jesus in Word, Sacrament, and Works of Mercy, meeting Jesus by satiating his thirst as a pilgrim people, called to a particular pilgrimage way-station, living as a people vowed to cling to God in the works of mercy so that God might make us visibly present in the world as Israel. God has yet to call us to the poorest of the poor. But to fulfill our work here, we require the same depth of faith in Jesus Christ, the same seeking God’s holiness, God’s perfect love, the same fleeing from all sin, even the sin most deeply embedded in the recesses of our hearts.

This is our mission. We live grasped by the love of God in Jesus Christ through faith, letting the Spirit bring forth hope and love, living as a pilgrim, caring for a pilgrim way-station, vowed to the Works of Mercy for the salvation of our souls, to satiate the thirst of Jesus. This is a life that really is life. Listen to a sister speak of Mother Teresa: “She seemed to delight in you. It was not something of charity that was burdensome, which destroys the dignity of the poor, but it was something that she delighted in . . . . You had the sense that she considered it a privilege to do this” (p. 336).

Don’t resist God’s call. Stop wrestling and cling to God. Come to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Be part of this pilgrim people, called to this place, vowed to the works of Mercy in order that we might live as Israel, not Jacob, in this world.