CRAIG ORBACK
much simpler. Struggle, we thought, would not be our real- ity. We would be the people who had life and God all fig- ured out. Questions would be avoided, for the faith would be about answers. Life wouldn’t be messy. It would be easy and clear.
But maybe we suffer a bit from amnesia. Maybe we’ve
forgotten that we are the people who struggle, who are engaged in a big time wrestling match with God. Do you see the kind of God we wrestle with, the God we serve? This is the God who blesses us even knowing too well our hypocrisy, our deception. The people outside of the church are right. We are hypocrites and deceivers. We come from a long line of them. Yet the God we struggle with is the God who forever meets us at the fords of the riv- ers of our lives and ambushes us with new chances. God ambushes our dysfunctional church and family lives—lives that have brought separation between relatives of all sorts. This God is the one who knows we’ve even tried to rob the birthrights of our siblings, stealing from them the dignity that is their due. We have hurt them and they have hurt us.
nerable to our fast-approaching Esaus, those siblings from whom we are alienated. The God we wrestle with is the God whose ambushing is for the sake of reunion—reunion of sinners and sinned against.
The God we wrestle with is the one who makes us vul- Download a study guide for this article (free to print/Web subscribers) at
www.thelutheran.org (click on “study guides”).
As the apostle Paul would have us know, the cross of Jesus Christ is a sure sign that God is at work ambushing our lives with reconciliation—reconciliation between God and people, God and the cosmos, church body and other church body, people and people. So we shouldn’t lose heart or give up in our struggle, our wrestling match with God. We need to pray always. Life is tough. Our hypocrisy is overwhelming. Our families are phenomenally disconnected. Church disagreements are real. The wrestling match is big time. But the God we struggle with, the one with whom we wrestle day and night, is the God who is gracious, blessing the deceivers, bringing together the alienated, giving us a new identity. Our big time wrestling match is a struggle with love, which is why we can persist. That’s why we must perse- vere, not lose heart. Love is inviting us into the ring. And love is going to prevail. If you don’t believe that, just look at the One who was raised from the dead. M
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