Walking With a Limp: For the Week You Did Not Choose

Walking With a Limp: For the Week You Did Not Choose Preview · Opening of the manuscript The imaging center opens the waiting room at 6:40. A man who still runs the Tuesday staff meeting sits with a paper bracelet and a folder he has already stacked twice. He has a plan for the results, for the conversation after the results, and for how this church will hear the news. The plan is the last name he still knows how to wear.

A woman two rows back can tell you the same story from a quieter Thursday. The papers arrived without asking her calendar. The title she used in the grocery line no longer works. She has been managing the household like a campaign, treating any change in her walk as a later chapter to hide until the old name comes back.

This is a sermon for a church sitting in a week it did not choose and still trying to wrestle the morning into a name it already had. If you preach Genesis 32 as a map of anyone's anxiety, you will lie. If you preach it as Yahweh meeting Jacob at the Jabbok in history, you give this church a God who can wound the self a person was using to survive and send them into the sunrise with a name they did not invent.

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.”