Jagged edges

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Clare L. Hickman

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale

October 19, 2025—Proper 24C

Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

“What is your name? What is your quest? What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” Or, if you’re not a Monty Python fan, perhaps your favorite bridge story is The Three Billy Goats Gruff, in which those plucky little kids trick the hungry troll by promising that their big brother will be a MUCH better meal than they would be.

Or maybe your favorite is one of the many, many others that span every culture, to describe a barrier that must be overcome, by wits or brawn or both, in order to cross over. Heck, maybe it’s Jacob, here at the Jabbok. 

Somehow, in the fractured folk tale that made it into the Hebrew Scriptures, Jacob is able to send his wives and all his household over the river before him. But he is still left on the other side, toe to toe with the guardian of the river who demands that he earn his passage back into the Land. He must grapple; he must overcome somehow, this figure. Is it a man, is it an angel? Is it, in fact, God in human form? The text leaves room for that, naming the figure a man, but declaring that in him Jacob has seen God face to face. And Jacob, somehow, has prevailed.

It’s a tricky text, for some, to face into the idea that God could lose any kind of encounter with a human. Seriously, Jacob wrestles God … and wins! That’s weird. Then again, Abraham once had an argument about ethics and compassion with God and won that one, so it’s not without precedent! Here, at least, we are dealing with incarnation: God took human form, for some reason, and was willing to take on human limitation. So Jacob was able, with persistence, to last until daybreak, at which point God perhaps feared Jacob would be overwhelmed by the sight of the Almighty. “Let me go,” God suggests. And after negotiating both a blessing  and a new name (which holds the promise that he will be the father of a nation), Jacob does so. Only then, is he able to continue his journey.

Limping.

He walks away from his encounter with the Living, incarnate God: Blessed, saturated with promise, and a little the worse for wear. Which sounds about right. Because even when we are living out iconic hero quest kind of adventures, it’s likely we won’t emerge unscathed. It’s going to be one more spiritual mixed bag!

Most of the biblical narrative presents this kind of complexity. But every time I encounter it, it makes me wonder anew, that we (those who claim to be guided by this book) so often buy into the culture’s tendency to define things as zero-sum games, in which we are either saved or damned, wrong or right, good or evil. All or nothing.

Of course, sorting mechanisms do make things simpler, easy to manage and at least pretend to understand. And the simpler the sorting categories, the easier and clearer things get. So, in a family, there’s the pretty sister, the smart sister, and the sporty sister (and maybe a plain one and a stupid one too). In the story, there’s the hero and there’s the villain. In the world, there’s us and there’s them.

But nobody really fits perfectly into any of those boxes. There’s way more ways in which to be the villain (to be responsible for suffering and death) than anyone wants to admit, and at least as many ways to be stupid. And there are many different ways to be a hero. Or to be smart. Or pretty. And we ALL have some measure of each of these things.

So much is lost, when we invest too heavily in all or nothing categories. Our perception of our self can get very twisted, when we internalize too simple a narrative about what and who we are. And even more terrible damage gets done, when we use them to sort entire groups of people into one category or another. When we use them to sort ourselves into a dominant, positive category, and others into a negative. Rigging the zero-sum game, so that we are by definition the winners. Doing so, by weaponizing the simplicity of easy categories (good and bad, winners and losers, saved and damned) rather than the complexity of life as we know it, and for that matter, life in the Bible!

Jacob limps away from his encounter with God: victorious, and yet wounded. Blessed, and yet still the trickster he has always been. Complicated, hurt, and chosen, all at once. Against all our natural instincts, the biblical story urges us in this direction: into vulnerability, into contests we know we might not win, into complexity rather than simplicity. It dares us, in fact, to accept the fact that we limped into the arena in the first place, that our encounter with God might well leave us limping even worse, and that when we reach the finish line, we might just have to crawl across.

We are wounded, like all the heroes of the Bible. We have jagged edges, dodgy histories, questionable motives, and highly doubtful futures. Honestly, we have NO idea why God would want to take a chance on us! Which is probably why we can’t quite take hold of the idea that God will take us on just as we are. So we resist the idea of grace, and start trying to shape ourselves up a little. Just smooth off the edges a bit, right? That’s how Nadia Bolz Weber talks about it: we want to smooth ourselves off to be ready (to be worthy) of being in relationship with God and other people.

So we try to become that fantasy version of ourselves (you know, the non-existent one who has NONE of what you see as your flaws? Yeah, THAT one: the one who isn’t actually you), as though that’s who God wants to be with. But the problem is two-fold: not only is that perfectly smooth person not actually you, but that person isn’t even a person. There’s nothing there to grab onto. It is our jagged edges, Nadia reminds us, that give us enough texture for God and other people to grab hold of.

Because if we’re perfectly smooth, then we don’t even need God: we’ve managed to “save” ourselves at that point, right? Very impressive, by the way, and also very lonely. Because we also will have no ragged edges to meet with other people’s ragged edges. No pain, no weakness, no way for others to know that we understand … that we can meet them in those scary, broken places in their lives … that we know how hard it is, and can hear their story with understanding ears and hearts.

The people of God need those visibly jagged edges, if we are to be the powerfully healing communities we are called to be. And we need to claim the jagged nature of scripture as well. All of it, 2 Timothy insists, is inspired by God and useful to equip God’s children for every good work. But that does not mean that the bible is a rule book that will smooth off all your rough edges, so that you will eventually not even need God. It’s a complicated book, full of a complication of stories and characters, struggling to be in relationship with themselves, with other people and with God. It’s not a cohesive whole that can be easily understood and applied. It has jagged edges, giving every child of God just enough that they can grab onto something. To give us a chance of being in relationship, connected, struggling, wrestling … limping, probably, yet richly blessed. May it ever be so. Amen.