Seeing God Face to Face

I was looking at the story of Jacob this week. It's in the book of Genesis (that's the first book in the Bible). Jacob and Esau were brothers who had a pretty bad history...kind of traditional sibling rivalry stuff. Well, after years of estrangement from one another, Jacob finds out that Esau is heading towards his encampment. And Jacob kind of panics. He is concerned that his brother is coming to harm him and perhaps destroy everything. And so he begins to make sure that some remnant of his family and belongings will survive a possible attack.

Jacob sends his family off he hopes to safety and sends his servants ahead with what he hopes will be received as a peace offering between brothers. But that night, while he waits, he undergoes a wrestling match with a "man." This is no ordinary WWF Smackdown. This is a real struggle that Jacob undergoes that lasts the entire night. Towards the end the man manages to dislocate Jacob's hip and still in his grip asks Jacob to let him go. Jacob tells the man that he will not let him go until the man blesses him.

Now that is a pretty odd request. But the man agrees to do so, and in so doing also tells Jacob that now he will have a new name, Israel. It is after this battle that Jacob/Israel decides to call this place "Peniel" because he understood that it was God with whom he had been struggling. "Peniel" translating roughly into "seeing God face to face."

I tell you all of that story to share with you the time this scripture (Genesis 32) hit home. I'm not real fond usually of Old Testament stories, but that particular morning I was at a huge youthworker convention in San Francisco and went to the Morning Bible Study time out of a personal obligation to do something different to start my day. Well, later that afternoon, I went on an immersion experience in the city. Our group spent the day walking through places like Chinatown where we stopped at a local shelter. We were told about the large incidence of domestic violence in the community and the importance of the shelter's work with abused women and children. It made walking on the street as we left a little harder as we began to notice in the faces of many of the women we passed signs of domestic abuse (I don't recall ever seeing that many bruised faces before!).

A little later we went to another mission in the city. The mission was located downtown and served a lot of homeless people. We worshipped there with the folks that came in that day. It was amazing to be in the presence of people coming to God in the midst of their own struggles. None of these experiences though truly made much sense in my own mind until I walked back out the door and realized that we had just been in the Peniel Mission. Indeed, here we had seen God, face-to-face. We each had to struggle with the visible poverty in the midst of our wealth (yes, youthworkers are "wealthy"). We had seen God in the faces of the people who had come to worship at that mission. But we had seen God's eyes in the battered women who walked down the street in Chinatown. In the faces of the hungry children that we passed after lunch. There were visible signs of God everywhere we looked.

Such is the point of "by the way." It's a reminder that God is here in the faces of those who sit around us at the bar, who read quietly in the corner at Barnes and Noble, who are sitting here this afternoon at Panera. All of us are reminded of the nearness of God when we are among others, in community with them. We are able to discover ways to share God's grace in our own lives with those around us because we are able and willing to look at one another.

Sometimes it might seem like a struggle to be in community with others. It is so easy to just hang out in our homes, glued to our TVs, computers....afraid that if we open ourselves up to others we may be too vulnerable. It's the same emotion Jacob no doubt had as he wondered why after all these years his own brother was coming to meet him. Maybe it's the same emotion you are having as you struggle with whether or not you should stop by at Panera, Barnes & Noble, or Unos.

Regardless, know that when are paths do cross we will have the most amazing opportunity to discover the holy in one another. It will be the chance to see in each other the grace that allows us to be who we were created to be. May you also have a "Peniel" moment in the coming week.