Walking With a Limp: The Witness Our Neighbors Can See

The yard sign still faces the street. It says new name, new life. The man who walks his dog past this lot at 8:40 can quote the hours without looking. He has watched the same cars leave after the last song. Last Sunday this church commissioned a couple at a folding table under that sentence. The card in their hands said identity. The couple already knew they would walk. The street is still waiting to see whether the people who printed the card will walk anything a neighbor could name.

A boy from the next driveway sat in the back seat while his father waited for the lot to empty. He saw a man favor one side leaving the building. Nobody named it. He will decide on the way home whether this church is a people who limp in the open or a people who print a name and sell the old walk.

This is a sermon about the witness our neighbors can already see. If you preach Genesis 32 as a map of anyone's private night, you will lie. If you preach it as Yahweh meeting Jacob at the Jabbok in history, you give this church a God whose naming sends a man into sunrise toward people who can already see him walk.

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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.”