Walking With a Limp: The Practice That Makes It Visible

The whiteboard still has last week's word in marker. Israel. The formation class can say it without looking down. A man in the second row taught the Jabbok unit on Tuesday and still introduces himself in the lobby by the title he uses to survive the week. The practice card in his Bible is filled in. The limp is not.

A woman across the table has a different finished card. She wrote "walk with a limp" three weeks in a row.

She still waits in the car until her face is arranged. She will enter after the thigh is quiet. She calls that preparation. The group calls it maturity.

This is a sermon about the practice that makes a new name visible. If you preach Genesis 32 as a map of anyone's rule of life, you will lie. If you preach it as Yahweh meeting Jacob at the Jabbok in history, you give this church a God whose naming is practiced in the limp, not stored in the language.

Text

Hear the night as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "He rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of the Jabbok. He took them, and sent them over the stream, and sent over that which he had.

Jacob was left alone, and wrestled with a man there until the breaking of the day. When he saw that he didn’t prevail against him, the man touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was strained as he wrestled. The man said, “Let me go, for the day breaks.” Jacob said, “I won’t let you go unless you bless me.” He said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob”. He said, “Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed.”