Blessed and Broken--October 24, 2025

Blessed and Broken--October 24, 2025

The same night [Jacob] got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (Genesis 32:22-31)

Reading strange and ancient stories like this one feels like paging through the old family albums of the people of God.  

Just like every family has its own curious stories from generations past--how they left the "old country" and decided to settle here, who met a famous person from history in a chance encounter, or what it was like to survive an earthquake or a blizzard, and the like--the Scriptures are full of these wild and weird stories we don't quite know what to do with.  They aren't really fables with a moral lesson, and they are often mysterious with ambiguous endings.  But earlier generations held on to them and passed them along to us, and sometimes all we can do is just tell it to the next generation with a look of bewilderment as if to say, "I don't quite know what this all means, but I have more than a hunch that you might encounter God here," and trust that they'll retell the story to the ones who come after them.

This story from Genesis, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, is one of those stories, with all the dials for strangeness and mystery turned up to eleven.  Here we meet the figure of Jacob, who will eventually become known as a great patriarch and founding figure of the people of Israel, who will trace their lineage through his many sons back to him, his father Isaac, and his grandfather Abraham as the covenant people of God.  At this point, though, Jacob is on the run and out of options.  As a young man he had ruined his relationship with his parents and brother Esau by conning the family birthright out of Esau and tricking his father to give him the family blessing.  So he ran away, as fast as his little legs could carry him, and found some long-lost relatives in a far country, where he worked for a number of years for his uncle Laban.  There, Jacob and Laban went back and forth scheming and tricking each other over a number of years, with the upshot being that they eventually decided they had better part company before one of them did something truly rotten to the other. So, with another bridge burned and nowhere else to go, Jacob decided to go back to the land where he had last seen his brother and parents. Now, the older man Jacob has two wives and two concubines, a mess of kids, a decent list of assets, and an existential dread about what will happen when he finally does have to face his brother Esau (who did want to kill him, the last time they were in the same place). So, on the night before he will have to face his family again, and all the danger it is likely to bring, Jacob sends his family across the Jabbok River ahead of him (in what amounts to a sort of human-shield situation--Jake isn't very brave at this point).

And there, Jacob is left--alone.  He is as out on the margins as one can be: cut off from every relative he had tricked, conned, or swindled, and now even separated from all of his possessions and kids, as he sits in the dark stewing.  Jacob has never been much of a moral example, and a more respectable deity wouldn't want to be caught dead around a guy like him.  Blessedly for Jacob, there is a God who doesn't particularly care about looking respectable, and who is willing to meet him on the margins so that Jacob can wrestle with who he really is--or who he could become.

Of course, that's the really weird part of this story: out of nowhere, a figure comes to wrestle with Jacob, literally. Like honest-to-goodness rolling around on the ground, pinning and holding and struggling, real wrestling.  And all night long, nobody seems to come out on top--until, just before dawn, the mysterious Stranger punches Jacob in the hip socket, putting it out of joint.  In the exchange that follows, Jacob wants to know the identity of his opponent and tries to scheme a blessing out of him in the mean-time (Jacob is really all about taking as much as he can from the world at this point). And there, the anonymous assailant both blesses Jacob and gives him a new name: Israel, which means something like "strives with God," with the explanation that he has "striven with God and with humans and prevailed." Jacob takes it to mean that he has been in the very presence of God this whole time somehow in the one wrestling with him, and he names the spot "Peniel," which means "Face of God," since he believes he has seen the very face of God there. And now, as the sun comes up, he heads in the direction of his waiting family on the other side of the river, and the encounter with his estranged brother that is waiting beyond.  The outcome of that encounter is still very much uncertain, and there is still plenty of reason to be fearful of what will happen next.  But he is a new man--Israel, the wrestler-with-God--and no longer has to be defined by his old identity (the name "Jacob," by the way, means something like "usurper" or "guy who takes other people's stuff").  

And there is one other change in this patriarch of the children of Israel: he is walking with a limp now, and for the rest of his life in fact.  While that might seem like a punishment or a curse, I'm not so sure.  For one, it means he cannot run away anymore.  He just isn't fast enough for that. Jacob/Israel will walk with a limp as both a sign that he has been touched by God in the very act of being blessed, and a way of preventing him from running away from his problems anymore.  He won't catch the last train out of town every time he strains a relationship with someone else anymore, and he won't be able to burn bridges with people as a coping strategy.  Jacob will now be in a position to face the consequences of his actions, to make different decisions with the people in his life, and maybe to be mature enough now not to ruin things with other people anymore.  The change has come because he is, simultaneously, broken and blessed at the same time.  And God has met Jacob right where he was, out on the margins, in that liminal space by the side of the Jabbok between all of his past failures and a new chapter of his future.

Like I say, it's a strange story, but not one without hope.  It doesn't offer a formulaic promise to us for how to get a new lease on life, nor a moral lesson threatening a comeuppance for schemers and swindlers.  But it does give us a glimpse of the living God as One who is willing to show up in spite of our worst choices and bad habits, in our deepest desperation, and through both blessedness and brokenness.  And maybe in that we discover that we could meet God in our own experiences of brokenness, and that God might just transform those broken places into marks of blessing.  Maybe we discover that, like the bread every Sunday, we can ourselves only be blessed at the very same time that we are broken, as the loaf is fractured and shared to be given to empty hands.  And maybe whatever frightening, anxious Jabbok moment you are facing is not godforsaken, but could be the very place where God comes to meet you in a way you did not expect, and bring something new out of you that you did not know was there, waiting to be called into existence.  Maybe in the place of brokenness, God will show up mysteriously, anonymously, and call you by a new name. Like I say, a more respectable deity might not show up in those marginal places in the midst of our messes--but lucky for us, our is a God who doesn't particularly care about looking respectable. 

So may you find blessedness in your brokenness.  May you see God meeting you in those times of utter aloneness and the times of struggle.  And may you hear your new name called when the voice tells you that you are a new creation, even if it means walking with a limp, too.

Lord God, meet us in our desperation and loneliness, and bless us in the place of our brokenness, to be new creations.