The REAL Wrestling

(Adapted from a sermon preached on 2/1/25 at closing worship for the 2025 Association of Partners in Christian Education (APCE) Conference at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.)

When I was 6 years old, in the summer between first and second grade, my family moved. We stayed in the same suburb of Chicago and only moved five blocks down on the same street, but the move now meant that I was zoned to attend a different elementary school. So, without my neighborhood friends and classmates, it felt the same to my 6 year-old self as if we had moved across the country.

I was desperate to make friends with other kids in the neighborhood and the first child I met was a fellow 6 year-old who lived across the alley, Matthew. I was determined to make Matthew my new best friend so that I would have someone with whom I could spend the waning days of summer. As an only child, I was terrified of being forced to do what my parents would always suggest: “You have lots of toys. Go play by yourself.”

I quickly learned that Matthew was super into what most boys were into in the summer of 1986 - WWF Wrestling. In a toy market that, for boys, had been dominated by GI Joes and Star Wars action figures, along came something bigger. Literally, bigger. Between 1984 and 1989, a company called LJN made six different series of WWF action figures that were 8 inches tall and made of some kind of dense yet mildly pliable plastic. You could kind of bend their arms, but not really. Mostly you just banged them against one another and used the rubber band ropes of the Sling ‘em Fling ‘em Wresting Ring (sold separately) to sling shot them toward one another. Toys didn’t do as much back then but from 1984-1989, this was the hottest toy on the market, particularly for boys.

So, this neighbor that I desperately wanted to be friends with invites me over to play, and all of a sudden I am in a room with about 25 of these 8 inch wrestler figures. He’s pointing to them and I am pretending that I know who these people are – Junkyard Dog, Big John Studd, Andre the Giant. Matthew decides that I should be Macho Man Randy Savage, because none of his boy friends ever want to play with that action figure because his outfit looks like a pink Speedo with white starts on it. Over the next couple of weeks, Matthew would invite me back over to play with these WWF action figures and I started to get really into the whole thing. I got my mom to buy the deck of trading cards in the checkout aisle at the grocery store so that I could memorize facts about all the different wrestlers. Sometimes Matthew and I would even watch this VHS tape that was a kind of greatest hits of the WWF video, showing off the “finishing move” of all the biggest wrestlers of the day.

One day, Matthew and I were watching this video, and right as Andre the Giant is finishing a guy with one of his infamous bear hugs, Matthew’s father walks through the living room, glances down at the TV, shakes his head and mumbles, “That’s all so fake.” What?!! WWF wrestling is fake? Surely not! Not this thing to which I had devoted weeks of study in order to desperately solidify my first friendship in the neighborhood. I couldn’t believe it! They were acting? But I asked Matthew and I asked my parents, and it turns out, they all knew it – yup, WWF wrestling is fake. Choreographed theatrics designed for maximum audience engagement and minimizing actual injuries to the participants. This wrestling was fake.

So here we are in 2025, many years after 1986, at a conference talking about Wrestling with God and church toward a more beloved community, and my question to you is, knowing that lesson I learned those many years ago, how do we know when our wrestling is fake? When our wrestling is choreographed theatrics designed for maximum audience engagement and minimizing injuries? Because let me tell you something that I have learned in my 15 years of ministry - There’s some fake wrestling going on out there in our Christian communities. There are some of us out there that wear our faith on the outside – as an identity we carry or as a stylish accessory – without letting that faith inside to the places where the real wrestling takes place. For our faith to be alive, we must be actively engaging with our faith through the lives we are living and the situations we are encountering all the time, wrestling with it.

In many places scripture tells us that faith is a struggle or something that we wrestle with. We’ve noted how Jacob is literally renamed “Israel” or “one who wrestles with God” after wrestling with and receiving and blessing from God. In 1 Timothy, the author gives the instruction to “fight the good fight” in faith and the word used to for “fight” translates to mean “wrestle.” Indeed, there is no shortage of scriptural texts that mention this idea of struggle or wrestling with our faith in this world.

So, how do we know if our wrestling is fake? I want to suggest that to really be wrestling with our faith and our church practices requires, at minimum, two things:

First, to sincerely wrestle with our Christian faith, we have to be willing to be really uncomfortable. Authentic wrestling is rarely fun. We often hear seminarians talk about their first year of seminary as a “crisis of faith,” because of the holes that are poked in the foundations of one’s fundamental understandings of our faith through the kind of wrestling that takes place in academia. If we only study our faith in the ways that continually affirm what we have always thought and believed to be true, and if we block out any lines of questioning or study that might challenge us and raise hard questions for us, then we are FAKE wrestling.  Maximum theatrics while ensuring minimal injury.

The practice of Christian faith is more than wrestling with what it means for me to be a good person, or to believe the right things “well enough.” Let me offer an example. If you walk 7 city blocks north from where we are right now, you will come to the church I serve. First Presbyterian Church, a congregation founded nearly 197 years ago, on a plot of land deeded to the church by the city in 1832, and in a building constructed in 1884 after a fire took down the original building. It’s on the north end of downtown, and this is the side of Downtown where fewer tourists visit, unless they are attending an event at the nearby performing arts center or at our (struggling) convention center. There are few restaurants nearby and the church sits caddy-corner from the 12 story criminal justice center, which houses the criminal courts and the city jail. Aside from the United Methodists next door and the Catholic church behind us, we are surrounded by parking lots, legal buildings and a whole lot of bail bond offices. What keeps our congregation going is the dedication of our members to the vital ministries that happen out of our building to the many who are unhoused or otherwise finding themselves at the margins in Memphis.

Every week, we have members of our church join with volunteers from a number of congregations and organizations across the city to run a food pantry, clothes closet and soup kitchen. There is a beautiful flurry of activity in our building. The overwhelming majority of our congregation is white, and the overwhelming majority of those we serve through our outreach ministries are Black. And here is where the wrestling comes in. Some might think that the discomfort of serving our guests is enough – some of them don’t have great access to clean clothes and hygiene items, and some of them are mentally ill and behave a little differently as a result. Some might think that doing the work that Jesus commanded us, to feed and clothe, rather than heading to brunch after worship, is sufficient wrestling.

I do not mean to diminish this vital and loving work. However, the kind of wrestling that we are also called to do in our faith is the wrestling that asks the questions about why my congregation looks the way it does – mostly white – and why those we serve are mostly Black. The kind of wrestling we are called to do is to take our faith an apply it to the realities we see in our city in regards to who has sufficient wealth and who is made poor. We are called to wrestle with what is means to be a church that sat on the same corner during the years slave auctions were happening a two blocks away. What does it mean that our community has existed in the same place through the violence of the reconstruction era and the injustice of Jim Crow laws and Redlining. We are called to be the church that wrestles with what our faith has to say about our past and our present, and how our faith should inform how we are shaping our future. And mind you that we are called to do this wrestling in a state that has made it a criminal act to teach “divisive topics” in our public schools. We are called to wrestle in the churches, even when our state is actively working to prohibit uncomfortable wrestling.

For a faith to have deep rootedness and a strong foundation, we have to do the hard and uncomfortable work of digging - mining our faith for meaning, poking at our presuppositions, and shining daylight on the dark corners of doubt that lurk inside all of us. We have to be willing to be made really uncomfortable – admitting we don’t have all of the answers or that some of the answers we think we have are flawed or incomplete. We have to seek the answers for things we might prefer not to know the answers to because of the discomfort they will create. But this is the kind of wrestling that creates for our faith the room it needs to grow.

The second thing, besides allowing ourselves to be uncomfortable, is that we have to engage our theological imaginations. I have three little girls, ages 7, 6 and 5, and one of the thrills of being their mother is that I get to watch their imaginations at work every day – every time they play and every time they are trying to learn something new. As they are grasping a new concept they engage their imaginations – creating a story or a scenario around whatever it is that they are learning to make it more accessible, more concrete, more understandable and more real.

Back in 1986, yes, the WWF wrestling productions were fake. Yet. in my friend Matthew’s living room, with those 8 inch hunks of plastic, what we were doing was very real. In engaging our imaginations in our play in that space, those characters came alive and their actions were very real. The permanent dents and scuffs on the toys proved it! As we grow older, we seem to lose some of the ability that we have as children to engage our imaginations to make concepts more real, and arguably nothing is better served by engaging our imaginations than our faith.

When I worked for years as a hospital chaplain at Vanderbilt Medical Center, I spent a year as chaplain helping to open up one of the nation’s first palliative care hospital units. Virtually all of the patients there were no longer seeking a cure for their terminal conditions, and would likely either die on that unit or be stabilized enough to go home with hospice. Unlike chaplaincy in the Emergency Department or the Trauma Unit, which I had previously covered, this unit was much quieter, with lots of opportunities to simply sit at the bedside and talk.

I had an exercise that I would do with some of those patients. When questions about what happens when we die would arise – What happens? What will I see? Where will I go? How will God be a part of it? – I used to invite them to use their imaginations by saying, “Honestly, none of us know. The Bible doesn’t explain that part. So tell me, how do you want it go? What do you think might happen?” It may sound silly, but by extending this invitation to imagine what happens when we die I heard so many of the most beautiful visions of what that experience might be like – how God might greet us and who might be there when we get where we are going. I don’t know if any of them are right or wrong, and neither do any of you, but for these folks it seemed to make the presence of God feel closer, and the experience of encountering God seem more real. By giving them the opportunity to imagine the possibilities, it brought them comfort, and sometimes joy or laughter. One man told me, “I bet my wife will be right there with that yappy dog I hated.”

These accounts  that were shared with me were sacred and I hold each of them in the deepest part of me and allow them to inspire my own theological imagination. They told me something about that person’s relationship with God and allowed me to reflect upon my own. And this is what engaging our theological imaginations can do for us.

This morning you heard the scripture from Luke describing the encounter with the risen Christ on the Road to Emmaus. These two disciples are walking along talking about all of the things that have happened. Jesus, who they don’t know is Jesus comes along and asks them what they are talking about. They share with him what they are wrestling with - “This prophet mighty in deed and word was handed over by our chief priests and leaders, and he was condemned to death and crucified, but we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel, and now it’s the third day since this happened and some women we know  were at the tomb this morning and they didn’t see his body there but saw angels who said he was alive and then other people went and saw the same thing…”

They were talking through something that probably sounded so fake, so impossible. But they were talking about these thing while wrestling with their own hope that this was all true, because as they noted, they had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel. So they were hashing through it as they walked, engaging their own theological imaginations to try to understand what this all looked like because they weren’t there, and wondering what this all might mean. And Jesus shows up and helps them along in their wrestling – unpacking the scriptures for them, strengthening their belief in the seemingly unbelievable.  

And that’s it – that’s the thing that I want you remember, because I suspect as educators you already know this to be true. If we dare to wrestle with our faith – real wrestling, uncomfortable wrestling that forces us to use our imaginations – God shows up. We may not recognize it right away, just as these two didn’t recognize Jesus until they broke bread together at the end of a day of travels, but God shows us in the midst of our wrestling. God helps us if we are willing to do the uncomfortable, sometimes scary work of wrestling with our faith.

So, friends, there is plenty of fake wrestling is out there. Wrestling that looks like it’s doing something but that really is all for show and no one is really even getting their hair messed up. Let’s endeavor to turn on our imaginations, be willing to get uncomfortable and a little tussled up, and engage in REAL wresting with our faith in this complicated world. The moment we find ourselves in offers no shortage of opportunities for some real wrestling, Amen?

And guess what? God will meet us there. God will show up when we wrestle together.

And all of God’s people who could said - Amen.