Strange Tales, Week 1
A Guide of Sorts
Each week picks up where Sunday left off. A sermon can only hold so much, so these six mornings go back into the passage and sit with the parts we ran past. Read the short passage first, in your own Bible if you have one handy. Then read the reflection. Then pray, in these words or your own. Six days, Monday through Saturday, and then we are back together.
One thread runs under all of it. We are people who like to name things before we understand them, and skip the parts we cannot name at all. This whole series is leaning how to practice the opposite. So, every morning the hope is to keep asking, one way or another, the same two questions...
What am I trying to name before morning?
Where is God in the part of the story I usually skip?
Strange Tales, Week 1:
Monday:
"The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok… Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak."
- Genesis 32:22-24
Read that turn again. Slowly. Jacob organizes the whole crossing himself. Wives, kids, servants, every animal, every last thing he owns, ferried across to the far bank. And then the sentence pivots. He is alone. He built that solitude with his own hands and had no idea what he was making room for.
It helps to know what night this is. Tomorrow he meets Esau. The brother he cheated out of a blessing twenty years back. The one now coming at him with four hundred men. Jacob has spent his whole life managing the distance between himself and the things he is scared of. Send the gifts ahead. Put people between yourself and the danger. Stay quick, stay clever, stay one move ahead. And now, at the river, there is nobody left to hide behind.
Some things only find you once you run out of people to put in front of you.
I will be honest. The real nights of my life almost always start the same way. Everybody else is asleep, or across the river, and it is just me and the thing I have been dodging, finally in the same room with nobody else in it. We do not go looking for those nights. We arrange our whole lives to avoid them. And one shows up anyway.
Who, or what, have you been keeping other people between you and?
A Prayer for Today
God, I am good at crowding my life so I never have to be alone with what scares me. When the river finally empties out and it is just me and you and the truth, do not let me run. Meet me there. Amen.
Tuesday:
"So he said to him, 'What is your name?' And he said, 'Jacob.'"
- Genesis 32:27
The name is the whole hinge here. Jacob means, roughly, he grabs the heel. It is what he was doing on the way out of the womb, gripping his twin's ankle, and it turned into a verb for his whole life. The supplanter. The grabber. The guy who gets what is not his by being faster and slicker than everybody in the room.
So when the stranger asks what is your name, he is not filling out a form. He is asking Jacob to say out loud who he has been. And Jacob does. Cornered in the dark, hip already screaming, he says the name that means cheater.
And only then does he get a new one.
Notice the order. You do not get renamed until you have told the truth about the old name. We want it the other way around, bad. New name first, fresh start, clean slate, and then maybe, quietly, off to the side, we will deal with the old thing later. But the blessing runs straight through the confession, not around it. Jacob has to say Jacob before anybody calls him Israel.
I have got a few names I have honestly earned that I would rather not say out loud in a room full of people who respect me. That is exactly the problem. The names we will not say are usually the ones still running the show.
What is the name you would have to say before God? The true one. The one you hope nobody ever uses on you.
A Prayer for Today
God, you already know the name I am hiding. Give me the nerve to say it out loud to you. Not because you need to hear it, but because I need to quit pretending it is not mine. And then, please, call me something new. Amen.
Wednesday:
"Then he said, 'Let me go, for the day is breaking.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let you go, unless you bless me.'"
- Genesis 32:26
The fight lasts all night. Not a moment. Not a couple rounds. The whole dark. Nothing resolves until the sky starts going gray at the edges.
And the hinge of the whole thing is one refusal. I will not let you go until you bless me. Sit with how strange that sentence is. Jacob has got hold of something he cannot see clearly. It has already hurt him. It is now asking, politely, to leave. And he will not turn it loose without a blessing.
That is either faith or stubbornness, and I am not sure the Bible draws the line between those two as cleanly as we would like.
Sometimes the only faithful thing left in your hands is to not let go before dawn. To stay in the grip of the hard thing until it finally gives you something. Most of us want the blessing by nine o'clock so we can still get a decent night's sleep. This story says some blessings only come at daybreak, and only to the ones who would not let go in the dark.
I am not romanticizing the long night. There is nothing romantic about it while you are in it. I only want to name that letting go is not always the brave move. Sometimes the brave move is the white-knuckle refusal to turn the thing loose until it has done in you what it came to do.
What are you being tempted to let go of, right now, before it has blessed you?
A Prayer for Today
God, I am tired and I want to let go. If this is a thing I am supposed to release, give me the peace to release it. But if this is a night I am supposed to hold through until morning, give me the grip to hold on. Amen.
Thursday:
"When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket… The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip."
- Genesis 32:25, 31
Here is the part we would quietly edit out if the story let us. The same night that gives Jacob a new name gives him a permanent limp. The blessing and the wound are not two separate events with a comfortable gap between them. They are one event. He does not get to keep one and hand the other back.
On Sunday we said the limp is a witness. A mark that says: something happened here, I was in that fight, I made it to morning. I still believe that. This morning I want the harder edge of it. The wound is not a price Jacob pays to unlock the blessing. It is not a punishment for the wrestling either. It just comes with. The hand that pops his hip out of joint and the voice that renames him belong to the same stranger, in the same dark, in the same second.
I do not have a clean theology for that, and I have finally stopped pretending I do. Some of the people I admire most in this world walk with a limp you can see, if you know where to look. They would not trade the night that gave it to them. And they would never, ever wish that night on you. Both of those are true at once, and the day I quit trying to squeeze them into one tidy sentence was a good day for my faith.
Where have you been quietly limping? And what would change if you stopped hiding it and started calling it a witness?
A Prayer for Today
God, I have got wounds I have been treating as proof that something went wrong. Help me wonder if some of them are proof that I showed up, and stayed, and made it to morning. Teach me the difference. Amen.
Friday:
"Then Jacob asked him, 'Please tell me your name.' But he said, 'Why is it that you ask my name?'… So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, 'For I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.'"
- Genesis 32:29-30
Jacob asks the one question every last one of us would ask. Who are you? And he gets nothing. The stranger will not be named. Whatever, whoever Jacob spent the night wrestling, it leaves without ever handing over its name.
And here is the move I think is the beating heart of this whole series. Jacob names the place instead.
He cannot name the man, so he names the ground. Peniel, the face of God. He takes the one thing he is actually able to name, and he names it, and he lets everything else stay a mystery on purpose.
This is what honest naming looks like. It is not explaining everything. It is not resolving the figure in the dark or filing a full report on what it meant. It is saying, out loud, the truest thing you can say about where you have been. I met God here. Something holy happened on this exact patch of dirt, and I will not walk away pretending it did not, even though I could not tell you, to save my life, who I was wrestling.
All week I have been asking what you are trying to name before morning. Here is the other half. Sometimes the faithful thing is to name only what you can actually name, and leave the rest unnamed, unexplained, and holy. Jacob does not get the whole answer. He gets a place, a limp, and a new name, and he decides that is enough to build the rest of his life on.
What is the one true thing you could name about a hard season, even if you cannot, and maybe never will, explain the whole of it?
A Prayer for Today
God, I keep waiting to understand the whole thing before I will admit you were in it. Let me name the little I can name. Let me call the ground holy with the mystery still standing right in the middle of it. Amen.
Saturday:
"The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket…"
- Genesis 32:31-32
The story ends in daylight. Jacob crosses back over the river, into the morning, and walks toward Esau. Toward the exact thing he had been scared of all night. And he does it limping. He is not healed first. He is not handed an explanation to carry along for comfort. He gets a sunrise, a limp, and a new name, and he walks straight at the fear anyway.
And then the strangest little footnote in the whole passage. To this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle. A whole people built an eating habit around Jacob's hip. Every generation since has remembered his strange, unexplained night by not eating one specific thing. A scar folded into a shared meal.
Think about what that is. It is not an explanation of the night. Nobody at that table can tell you who Jacob fought. It is a way of carrying the night. Honoring it, remembering it, refusing to skip it, without ever pretending to resolve it. That is what a community can do with a strange story it will not throw away.
Tomorrow we walk down a narrow road with a man and a donkey, and get asked whether we can hear a voice we already decided not to listen to. But this morning, stay with Jacob at daybreak a little longer. He said his name. He held on till dawn. He named the ground he could name and let the rest be holy. And then he crossed the river, limping, into the day.
He made it across. So will you.
What would it look like for us to carry each other's strange nights the way Israel carried Jacob's? Remembered, honored, and for once, un-skipped.
A Prayer for Today
God, tomorrow I have got to walk toward something I would rather avoid. Let me walk anyway. Limp and all. And make me part of a people who carry each other's hard nights instead of skipping past them. Amen.