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Fall Asleep to The Story of Jacob _ He Ran for 20 Years. God Was Waiting · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Close your eyes. Somewhere in the middle of the night,
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: a man is alone beside a river. He has sent
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: every one he loves to the other side, his wives,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: his children, his servants, his flocks, everything he has spent
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: twenty years building in a foreign land. And now he
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: is standing in the dark alone, listening to the water
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: moving past him in the night. On the other side
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: of that river, his brother is coming with four hundred men.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: The last time they saw each other, Jacob had taken
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: everything his brother had, the birthright, the blessing, the future
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: that belonged to the first born son. He had taken
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: all of it, and then he ran. That was twenty
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: years ago. To night. The running is over, and something
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: is coming toward him in the dark, something that is
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: not his brother, Something he will fight until the sun
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: comes up, something that will leave him changed in a
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: way he will carry for the rest of his life
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: in his name and in the way he walks. This
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: is not a story about a good man who made mistakes.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: This is a story about a man who grabbed and
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  Speaker 1: schemed and ran and was grabbed back by the only
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: one whose grip he could never escape. You do not
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: have to have it altogether. To night. To belong inside
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: this story, you do not have to be the person
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: who always does the right thing. Jacob never was, and
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: the God of the universe chose him anyway, stayed with
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: him anyway, wrestled with him anyway until the blessing came
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: through the wound. Settle in, Let the noise of the
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: day fall away. The river is dark and the night
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: is long, and the wrestling is about to begin. Let
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: us start at the very beginning, before the river, before
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  Speaker 1: the running, before any of it. Let us start inside
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: a family that was already broken before Jacob took his
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: first breath. Chapter one, The world before Jacob, a family
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: already broken. Before we can understand the man who wrestled
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: with God beside a dark river in the middle of
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  Speaker 1: the night, we need to understand the family he was
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  Speaker 1: born into. Because Jacob did not become a schemer in
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  Speaker 1: a vacuum. He was shaped by something, by a household
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: divided against itself before he was old enough to know
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: what division meant, By a mother who loved him with
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: a fierce and partial love, by a father who loved
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  Speaker 1: his brother, by a world that told him from the
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: very beginning that the blessing he needed was not going
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: to come to him naturally, and so he believed something
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: that would drive every significant decision of his life. He
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: believed that the blessing had to be taken, that waiting
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: was not a real strategy, that the direct path was
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: not available to a man like him. Where did that
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: belief come from? It came from a house, a specific
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: house with specific people in it, and a specific division
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  Speaker 1: that ran through that house, like a fault line running
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  Speaker 1: through stone, invisible from the outside, shaping everything from within.
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  Speaker 1: So let us go back before the river, before Laban
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  Speaker 1: and Rachel, and twenty years in exile, before the stolen
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  Speaker 1: blessing and the brother's rage and the long flight into
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  Speaker 1: the wilderness. Let us go back to the moment before
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Jacob was born. Because the story does not begin with Jacob.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: It begins with his mother, and with a prayer she
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: prayed before she understood what the answer was going to
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: cost her. Rebecca had been unable to conceive. In the
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: world of the ancient Near East, in the culture of
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew people, this was not simply a personal sorrow.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: It was a weight carried publicly, a visible absence in
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  Speaker 1: a world that measured a woman's staff in part by
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: her children. Isaac prayed for his wife. The text in
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  Speaker 1: Genesis says he pleaded with God on her behalf, and
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  Speaker 1: God answered. Rebecca became pregnant with twins, but the pregnancy
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  Speaker 1: was difficult. More than difficult. The children inside her were
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: struggling against each other with a violence she could feel
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  Speaker 1: in her own body, and she asked God a question
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  Speaker 1: that is one of the most honest and human questions
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  Speaker 1: in all of Scripture. She asked, if this is so,
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  Speaker 1: why is this happening to me? She was not asking
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  Speaker 1: for a theological explanation. She was asking the question a
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  Speaker 1: person asks when something is deeply wrong and the language
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  Speaker 1: available to describe it feels insufficient. She was asking the
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  Speaker 1: question every person asks when the thing they prayed for
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  Speaker 1: arrives and turns out to be harder than anything they imagined.
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  Speaker 1: God answered her, and the answer was not simple. He
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  Speaker 1: told her that two nations were in her womb, that
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  Speaker 1: two peoples would be separated from within her, that the
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  Speaker 1: older would serve the younger. She carried that word inside
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  Speaker 1: her through the rest of the pregnancy, through the delivery,
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  Speaker 1: because when the children were born, the first came out
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  Speaker 1: red and covered in hair. They named him Esau, and
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  Speaker 1: then the second came out with his hand gripping the
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  Speaker 1: heel of his brother, as if he had been trying
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  Speaker 1: to hold him back or pull himself forward. The name
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  Speaker 1: they gave him reflected exactly what they saw Jacob. In Hebrew,
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  Speaker 1: the name means one who grabs the heel, one who supplants,
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  Speaker 1: one who comes from behind and takes what belongs to
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  Speaker 1: some one else. He was named for the gesture he
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  Speaker 1: made before he had taken a single breath outside the womb. Now,
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  Speaker 1: I want you to feel the weight of that for
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: a moment, because we often read this story and immediately
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: divide the brothers into simple categories. Esou is the careless one,
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  Speaker 1: Jacob is the cunning one. And there is truth in
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  Speaker 1: those categories. But there is also something we miss when
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  Speaker 1: we reach for them too quickly. These were two children
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  Speaker 1: born into the same house to the same parents on
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  Speaker 1: the same day, and the house they were born into
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  Speaker 1: was already divided before either of them could speak. The
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  Speaker 1: text in Genesis tells us something about Isaac and Rebecca
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  Speaker 1: that most families would not want written down plainly. It
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  Speaker 1: tells us directly who each parent loved Isaac loved Esau
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  Speaker 1: because Esau was a skillful hunter, and Isaac loved the
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  Speaker 1: taste of wild game. That is the reason the text
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  Speaker 1: gives a father's love for his eldest son tied to
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  Speaker 1: something as ordinary as the flavor of food the son
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  Speaker 1: brought home. And Rebeccah loved Jacob. No reason given for Rebeccah,
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  Speaker 1: just the fact of it. She loved Jacob. Think about
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  Speaker 1: what it means to grow up in a house where
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  Speaker 1: that is the visible architecture of daily life, where your
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  Speaker 1: father turns toward your brother and your mother turns toward you,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Where the love in the room is always partial, always
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  Speaker 1: moving in directions that leave some one with less than
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  Speaker 1: they need. Where you learn very early that the blessing
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: you want from your father is going across the room
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  Speaker 1: to some one else. What does a child do with that?
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  Speaker 1: Some children learn to stop wanting. They find a way
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  Speaker 1: to need less, to make peace with the portion that
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  Speaker 1: is available, and not reach for the portion that is not.
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  Speaker 1: Jacob did not do that. Jacob learned to reach to
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  Speaker 1: find another way to the thing. He needed to look
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  Speaker 1: at a situation and identify the angle that was available,
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  Speaker 1: even when the direct path was closed. He became very
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  Speaker 1: good at that, extraordinarily good in a way that would
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  Speaker 1: serve him in some circumstances and cost him enormously in others.
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  Speaker 1: Esau learned different things. He learned the skills of the field.
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  Speaker 1: He was comfortable in his body and comfortable in the world.
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  Speaker 1: He lived close to the surface of experience. What was
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  Speaker 1: in front of him was what mattered. He did not
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: spend much time thinking about the future, because the present
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: was where he was genuinely excellent. Both of them were
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: being formed by the same house indifferent directions. Now Here
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  Speaker 1: is something worth pausing on, because this is the part
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  Speaker 1: of Jacob's story that makes it feel uncomfortably familiar to
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  Speaker 1: a great many people who would never say so out loud.
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  Speaker 1: Most of us know what it is like to grow
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  Speaker 1: up in a house where the love was uneven, where
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  Speaker 1: we were seen by one parent and missed by another,
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  Speaker 1: where the blessing we needed most came from the direction
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  Speaker 1: that was always slightly turned away from us. We do
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  Speaker 1: not all have esource for brothers, but most of us
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  Speaker 1: have felt at some point the particular hunger that comes
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  Speaker 1: from a partial love, the kind that is real but
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  Speaker 1: not sufficient, the kind that teaches you to reach because
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  Speaker 1: way has not worked. Jacob reached his whole life for
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  Speaker 1: things that were sometimes his to reach for, and for
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  Speaker 1: things that were not, and the reaching shaped him in
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  Speaker 1: ways he could not have fully articulated and could not
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  Speaker 1: have easily undone. That is not an excuse for what
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  Speaker 1: he did, but it is an explanation, and understanding the
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  Speaker 1: explanation changes how we sit with this story. It moves
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  Speaker 1: Jacob from a cautionary tale about a bad person to
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  Speaker 1: something much more personal, a mirror, a story about the
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  Speaker 1: ways we are all shaped by the households that shaped us,
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  Speaker 1: and the ways those shapes follow us long after we
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  Speaker 1: have left those households behind. Now there is something else
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  Speaker 1: about this family that rewards careful attention before we move forward.
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  Speaker 1: Rebecca knew she had been told before her sons were
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  Speaker 1: born that the older would serve the younger. She knew
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  Speaker 1: which son carried the promise forward according to the word
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  Speaker 1: she had received, and she loved that son with the
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  Speaker 1: tensity of a mother who believes she is protecting something important.
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  Speaker 1: But somewhere along the way, the knowing became managing. The
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  Speaker 1: understanding of what God had said became a decision to
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  Speaker 1: help God say it, to make sure it happened, to
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  Speaker 1: not simply trust that the one who had spoken the
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  Speaker 1: word was also capable of keeping it without her assistance.
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  Speaker 1: Perhaps that is understandable when you have watched the wrong
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  Speaker 1: sun receive the wrong love for years, when you have
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  Speaker 1: seen the promise moving toward the wrong outcome in your
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  Speaker 1: husband's tent, the impulse to intervene feels less like faithlessness
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  Speaker 1: and more like faithfulness. But the managing had a cost,
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  Speaker 1: and Jacob learned from watching her. He learned that if
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  Speaker 1: you know something is supposed to happen, you do not
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  Speaker 1: wait for it to happen on its own. You find
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  Speaker 1: the angle, you work the situation, you make it happen.
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  Speaker 1: It is a way of living that produces results, short
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  Speaker 1: term results, results that feel like winning in the moment,
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  Speaker 1: and it carries a cost that neither of them fully
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  Speaker 1: calculated in advance, a cost that would come due over
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  Speaker 1: and over in ways neither of them could have predicted.
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  Speaker 1: On the morning Jacob was born with his hand reaching
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  Speaker 1: for his brother's heel. By the time the boys were grown,
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  Speaker 1: Esau was everything a man in that world was supposed
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  Speaker 1: to be capable, strong, the first born son, with the
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  Speaker 1: birthright and the blessing waiting for him, the heir to
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  Speaker 1: Isaac's name and Isaac's flocks, and Isaac's place in the
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  Speaker 1: long covenant line stretching back through Isaac to Abraham. And
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  Speaker 1: Jacob was watching and thinking and waiting for the moment
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  Speaker 1: the angle would present itself. He would not have to
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  Speaker 1: wait long breathe. The house Jacob grew up in had
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  Speaker 1: everything it needed to be a different kind of house.
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  Speaker 1: Two parents who had experienced enough together to know the
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  Speaker 1: other was real, a God who had spoken clearly about
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  Speaker 1: the future of their family, children who were both remarkable
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  Speaker 1: in their own ways. But the love divided itself, and
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: the division did what divisions always do inside families. It
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  Speaker 1: taught the children that the world was a place of scarcity,
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  Speaker 1: that there was not enough blessing to go around, that
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  Speaker 1: if you did not secure what was yours, someone else
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  Speaker 1: would get there first. Jacob believed that for most of
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  Speaker 1: his life he was wrong, but he could not have
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  Speaker 1: known that yet. He had to live his way to
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  Speaker 1: the river first, and the road to the river was
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  Speaker 1: going to be longer and harder and more instructive than
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  Speaker 1: anything he could have imagined on the morning he came
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  Speaker 1: into the world, Reaching good Night, Chapter two, The Birthright,
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  Speaker 1: A bowl of soup and a life decision. There is
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  Speaker 1: a moment in every life when something small becomes something enormous,
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  Speaker 1: not because the small thing was secretly important all along,
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  Speaker 1: but because of what a person does with it in
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  Speaker 1: a single, unguarded moment, a moment when the hunger is
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  Speaker 1: real and the future feels very far away, and what
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  Speaker 1: is right in front of you feels like the only
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  Speaker 1: thing that matters. Esau had that moment beside a pot
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  Speaker 1: of red soup, and Jacob was ready for it. Now,
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  Speaker 1: before we sit with what happened that afternoon, I want
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  Speaker 1: to make sure we feel the scene correctly, because it
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  Speaker 1: is very easy to read this story and turn it
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  Speaker 1: into a simple moral lesson about a scheming brother and
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  Speaker 1: a foolish one, and there is truth in that reading.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: But if we stop there, we miss something that makes
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  Speaker 1: the story cut much closer to home. So let us
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: slow down and feel what was actually happening. Esore had
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: been out in the field. The text says he came
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: in exhausted. The Hebrew word used carries the sense of
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: a person who has been completely emptied by physical exertion,
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  Speaker 1: not a little tired, the kind of tired where the
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: body stops fully co operating with the mind, where decisions
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: that would be obvious in any other state become genuinely
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: difficult to make. Clearly, he came through the door, and
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  Speaker 1: he smelled what Jacob was cooking. Jacob was making a
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  Speaker 1: red lentil stew, something warm and thick and deeply satisfying
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  Speaker 1: in the way that simple food is deeply satisfying when
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  Speaker 1: the body is asking for exactly that. And Esau said
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: something to his brother that the original Hebrew renders in
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  Speaker 1: a way most English translations soften considerably. He did not say,
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  Speaker 1: please give me some of that stew. The word he
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  Speaker 1: used is closer to the language of an animal consuming
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  Speaker 1: food than a person making a considered request. It is
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: the language of someone whose hunger has pushed him below
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: the level of careful speech. And Jacob heard it. He
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: had probably heard his brother come in. He had probably
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: seen the state Esau was in, and in that moment
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  Speaker 1: Jacob made a calculation. He said, sell me or birthright. First. Now,
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: let us be precise about what the birthright actually was,
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: because it was not a small thing being traded for soup.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: The birthright in the culture of the ancient Hebrew world
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: was the inheritance of the firstborn son, a double portion
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: of the father's estate, the position of leadership in the family,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: the spiritual authority that came with continuing the covenant line.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: In Jacob and Esau's specific family, the birthright was the
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: connection to the promise God had made to Abraham, the
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: promise of land and descendants and blessing that would flow
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: through one family line into the whole world. And Esau said,
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: I am about to die anyway, What good is a
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: birthright to me? He was not actually about to die.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: He was hungry and exhausted, and speaking with the dramatic
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: exaggeration of a man whose body was overriding his better judgment.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: But the exaggeration itself tells us something important about how
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Esau related to the future. The future was abstract, what
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: was in front of him was real. The birthright was
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: a promise attached to things that had not happened yet.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: The soup was here, the soup was now. Jacob pressed
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: him swear to me first, and Esau swore. He traded
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: his birthright for bread and lentil stew, he ate, he drank,
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  Speaker 1: he rose and went his way, And the text says
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: something that lands like a stone dropped into still water.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: It says, thus Esau despised his birthright. That word despised
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: in Hebrew it is bazaar. It means to hold in contempt,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: to treat as worthless, to assign a value of nothing
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: to something that has genuine value. The text is not
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: just telling us what Esau did in a single moment
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: of weakness. It is telling us something about his ongoing
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: orientation toward what the birthright rep resented. This was not
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: a man who deeply valued the covenant and tragically lost
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: it in one bad afternoon. The text suggests this was
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: a man for whom the Covenant had always lived somewhere
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: below the level of what felt urgent and immediately necessary. Now,
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: I want to say something honest about Jacob in this moment,
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: because it would be easy to read his behavior here
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: as purely predatory, and there is truth in that reading.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: But the text may also be showing as this Jacob
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: wanted the birthright, not as a commodity to sell later.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: He wanted what the birthright represented, the connection to the promise,
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: The line of the Covenant, the blessing that flowed through
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: his family from Abraham forward. He wanted it with a
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: hunger that was, in some ways the mirror image of
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: the hunger Esau felt for the soup. The difference was this,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Jacob's hunger was for something that would outlast the afternoon.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Esau's hunger was for something that would satisfy him until dinner.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Neither of them was simply right. Neither of them was
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: simply wrong. One was living entirely for the immediate, one
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: was grasping for the long term by means that were
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: not his to use. And God was watching both of
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: them with the particular patience of some one who already
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: knows where the story is going and is not paniced
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: by the detours the people inside it keep taking. Here
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: is the question this scene presses into the center of
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: every person who reads it carefully. What is the thing
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: in your own life that you have traded for immediate relief.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Not necessarily something dramatic, not necessarily something you would even
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: identify as a trade in the moment you made it,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: but the decision made when you were exhausted and the
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: hunger was real, and what was right in front of
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: you was easier than what was true. Most of us
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: have more in common with both brothers than we want
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: to admit. Esau was not stupid. He was human in
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: a very specific and recognizable way. The kind of human
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: who lives close to the surface of experience, who processes
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: the world through sensation and immediacy, who is genuinely excellent
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: in the present tense and genuinely vulnerable in any conversation
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: about the future. Jacob was not evil. He was human
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: in a different, specific and recognizable way, the kind of
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: human who lives a few steps ahead of the present moment,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: who sees angles and possibilities where other people just see
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: a bowl of soup, who is excellent at strategy and
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: genuinely limited in his ability to simply trust that what
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: he needs will arrive without his engineering it. Both of
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: these are ways of being human. Both carry gifts, both
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: carry wounds. Both were about to be drawn into something
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: much larger than a bowl of soup and a legal
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: exchange of inheritance rights, because Isaac was getting old and
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: the time for the blessing was coming. Breathe. There is
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: a grace in this scene that is easy to miss
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: if you are focused entirely on the moral calculus of
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: who was right and who was wrong. God did not
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: stop it. He did not intervene. He did not send
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: any one to knock the bowl of soup out of
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Jacob's hands. He did not make Esau's exhaustion less complete
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: so he could think more clearly. He let two young
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: men make real choices with real consequences, in the full
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: freedom of their own natures. Because the story God is
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: telling through this family is not a story about perfect
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: people making perfect decisions. It is a story about a
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: God who works through the decisions people actually make, including
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: the ones that look like nothing good could possibly come
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: from them. The birthright changed hands beside a pot of
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: red lentil stew, and God was already in the next
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: chapter good Night, Chapter three, the Stolen Blessing, when deception
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: succeeds and destroys. At the same time, Isaac was old.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: His eyes had grown dim. He could not see clearly
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: any more, and he knew that the days remaining to
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: him were fewer than the days behind him. So he
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: called his eldest son to him. He called Esau. He said,
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: I am old, I do not know the day of
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: my death. Go out into the field and hunt game
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: for me. Make the kind of savory food I love,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: bring it to me so that I may eat, and
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: then my soul will bless you before I die. This
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: was not a casual conversation. A death bed blessing in
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: the ancient Hebrew world was a legal and spiritual act
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: of profound significance. Once given, it could not be taken back.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: It was not simply a father's kind words to a
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: favorite son. It was the formal transfer of authority and
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: identity and future, the moment when the inheritance of one
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: life became the beginning of another. Isaac wanted to give
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: that to Esau, his firstborn, the son he loved. And
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Rebecca was listening at the edge of the tent. She
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: heard everything, and the moment Esau went out into the field,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: she moved. Now. I want to hold the camera on
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: Rebecca for a moment before we follow the events she
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: set in motion, because she is the most complicated figure
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: in this scene and the easiest to either condemn entirely
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: or excuse entirely. She deserves neither. Rebecca knew the word
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: that had been spoken over her sons before they were born.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: She had carried that knowledge. For decades, she had watched
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: her husband's love flow toward Esau year after year, and
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: now she heard Isaac about to do the very thing
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: she had been dreading to formalize a future she believed
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: was moving against what God had said. So she intervened
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: as she had likely been preparing to intervene for years.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: She went to Jacob and told him what she had heard.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: She told him to bring her two young goats from
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: the flock. She would make the savory food Isaac loved,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: Jacob would take it to his father, and Jacob would
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: receive the blessing. Jacob's response is worth sitting with carefully,
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: because it is not what you might expect from someone
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: eager for his chance. He did not say great idea.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: He said, what if my father touches me esou is
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: a hairy man and I am a smooth man. What
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: if my father feels me and discovers I am deceiving him,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: then I will bring a curse on myself instead of
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: a blessing. He was not objecting on moral grounds. He
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: was objecting on practical grounds. He was not asking whether
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: this was right, He was asking whether it would work.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: That distinction matters it tells us something true about where
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Jacob was in his interior life at this point in
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: the story. The moral question was not the first one
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: that rose in him. Rebecca said, let your curse be
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: on me, my son. Just obey my voice and go.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: So Jacob went. He brought the goats. Rebecca made the food.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: She took Esau's best garments and put them on Jacob.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: She put the skins of the young goats on his
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: hands and on the smooth part of his neck, and
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: then she gave him the food and sent him to
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: his father. Jacob went into Isaac and said, my father.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: And Isaac said, here I am, Who are you, my son?
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: And Jacob said to his father, I am Esaure, your firstborn.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: Read that sentence one more time. I am Esau, your firstborn,
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: said to his blind father, looking directly at him, without
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: his voice breaking. Isaac was suspicious. He said, how is
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: it that you found game so quickly, my son? And
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Jacob said, because the Lord, your God, granted me success.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: He put God's name inside the That detail is not small.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Isaac said, come near, so I may feel you to
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: know whether you are really my son Esau or not.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: Jacob went near Isaac felt him. He felt the goat
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: skins on his hands. He said, the voice is Jacob's voice,
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: but the hands are the hands of Esau. And he
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: did not recognize him because his hands felt as his
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: brother's hands. Then Isaac said, are you really my son, Esau?
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: And Jacob said I am, and Isaac ate, and he
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: blessed him. The blessing Isaac spoke over Jacob in that
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: room is one of the most ancient and beautiful pieces
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: of Hebrew poetry in Genesis. He spoke of the smell
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: of a field that the Lord had blessed. He spoke
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: of God giving Jacob the dew of heaven and the
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: richness of the earth, plenty of grain and wine. He
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: spoke of people serving him and nations bowing to him.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: He spoke of being lord over his brothers. And then
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: he said the words that could not be unsaid. Everyone
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: who curses you be cursed, and every one who blesses
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: you be blessed. It was done. Jacob left his father's presence,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: and almost immediately Esau came in from the field. Esau
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: made the savory food. He brought it to his father.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: He said, let my father arise and eat of his
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: son's game, so that you may bless me. And Isaac said,
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: who are you? Esau said, I am your son. You're
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: first born, Esou, And the text says that Isaac trembled
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: very violently. That phrase in Hebrew carries the sense of
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: a complete and overwhelming physical response, not just surprise, a
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: trembling that went through the whole body of an old
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: man who understood in that moment exactly what had happened,
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: and understood that he could not undo it. He said,
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: who was it then that hunted game and brought it
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: to me? And I ate it all before you came,
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: And I blessed him, Yes, and he shall be blessed.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: When Esau heard the words of his father, he cried
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry. That cry,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: the way it is rendered in Hebrew, carries the weight
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: of the most extreme grief. Ancient writers knew how to describe,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: not disappointment, not frustration, the grief of a person watching
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: something irreplaceable disappear in real time while they are standing
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: right there and cannot stop it. He said, bless me
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: me also, o my father, Isaac said, your brother came deceitfully,
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: And he has taken away your blessing. And Esau said,
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: me these two times he took away my birthright. And
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: behold now he has taken away my blessing. Have you
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: not reserved a blessing for me? Isaac gave him what
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: he could, words about the richness of the earth, words
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: about living by the sword. But the blessing that had
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: been given could not be given again. And Esau hated Jacob.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: He said in his heart, the days of mourning for
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: my father are coming. Then I will kill my brother Jacob.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: Now let us stop here and sit with what this
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: scene actually contains. Because something succeeded here. Jacob got what
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: he wanted. The plan worked, every detail came together exactly
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: as Rebeccah had designed it. And something was destroyed here
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: at exactly the same moment. The sound of Esau's cry
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: is not the sound of a man who deserved everything
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: he got. He was not a perfect man. He had
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: traded his birthright carelessly and made choices that complicated his
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: family life in other ways. But that cry is the
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: sound of a real human being losing something real, something
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: that mattered to him. Even when he had not, always
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: treated it as if it mattered. And Jacob did that
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: to him with his mother's help, with deliberation and planning,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: with goat skins on his hands and his brother's clothes
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: on his back, and a lie in his mouth that
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: used God's name as cover. Here is the theological question
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: this scene has pressed on careful readers for a very
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: long time. If God had already said that Jacob would
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: receive the blessing, if the word had been spoken before
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: either son was born, then why did Jacob need to
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: steal it? Why not simply wait? Why not trust that
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: the God who said it would also do it without
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: human engineering? The story itself seems to suggest something like this.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: Jacob did not yet know how to trust that way.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: He had grown up in a house that taught him
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: the direct path was not available to him. He had
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: a mother who had modeled the manager of divine promises
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: rather than the patient waiting on them. He was not
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: yet the kind of person who could hold what God
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: had said and simply rest inside it. He could not wait,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: not yet. He had to live his way to the
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: place where waiting became possible, and that living was going
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: to cost him more than he could have calculated. In
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: the moment he said, I am Esau to his blind
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: father in a darkened tent. The blessing was in his hands.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: Esau's cry was behind him, and Rebecca was about to
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: send him away to save his life. He had won everything,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: and he had nothing left to stay for breathe. I
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: want to say something to any one listening to night
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: who has ever gotten exactly what they wanted and discovered
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: in the getting of it that the cost was something
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: they had not fully counted before reaching for it. Jacob
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: got the blessing. He got it at the expense of
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: his father's trust, his brothers inherited, his family's wholeness, and
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: his own integrity. He got the blessing while wearing someone
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: else's skin and speaking someone else's name. The blessing was real.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: God would honor it. The future it pointed toward would
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: come to pass, But Jacob would carry the memory of
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: that room with him for twenty years. The weight of
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: his father's trembling, the sound of his brother's cry, the
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: goat skins on his hands, the name in his mouth
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: that was not his name. He would carry it to
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: the river, and the river would not give him rest
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: until he could stand in his own skin, speak his
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: own name, and receive a blessing that no one could
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: ever say he stole, because it would come through the wound.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: Good Night, Chapter four, The fugitive running from everything you grabbed.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: There is a particular kind of loneliness that belongs only
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: to people who are running. Not the loneliness of being forgotten,
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: Not the loneliness of being overlooked, The loneliness of having
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: made something happen, of having gotten what you wanted and
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: then watching everything that matterd fall away behind you as
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: the consequences push you forward into a future you did
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: not fully plan for. Jacob knew that loneliness. He was
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: about to know it completely. Rebecca heard what Esau said
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: in his heart, She heard him say that he would
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: kill his brother when their father died, and she did
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: what she had always done. She moved, She planned, She
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: managed the situation before it could manage her. She went
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: to Jacob and told him to flee, to go to
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: her brother Laban in Haran, to stay there awhile until
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: Esau's anger cooled, and then she would send for him.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: She said, why should I be bereft of you? Both
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: in one day. She was thinking, practically, she was protecting
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: what she loved that much was true and real. What
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: she did not say, what perhaps she could not yet
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: bring herself to say, was that sending Jacob away might
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: not be a temporary arrangement. The woman who had loved
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Jacob fiercely enough to plan a deception that changed the
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: course of their family's history was now sending that same
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: son into a future she could not see and could
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: not manage. There is a grief in that which the
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: text leaves mostly silent, and the silence carries its own
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: kind of weight. Isaac called Jacob and blessed him, and
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: sent him toward padan Aram to find a wife from
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: among Laban's daughters. He gave him words, He gave him
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: what a father gives a son who is leaving. And
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Jacob went out from Beersheba and set out toward Haran.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: He left everything behind, the tents he had grown up in,
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: the familiar rhythms of his mother's household, his father's voice,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: the landscape of his childhood, the life he had spent
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: twenty years navigating with such careful attention, all of it
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: receding behind him, with every step north, and he had
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: nothing in front of him except distance. Now I want
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: to stop here and feel something. The narrative moves past quickly,
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: but that deserves more attention than we usually give it.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Jacob was alone for the first time in his life,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: not temporarily alone, structurally alone, the kind of a loan
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: that has no clear end date and no visible exit
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: and no one who knows exactly where you are. His
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: whole life, he had operated inside a web of relationships
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and dynamics. He knew how to navigate. He knew his mother,
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: He knew his father, he knew his brother. He was
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: a man who was very good at the particular game
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: his particular family was playing. And now there was no game.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: There was just the road, and the road did not
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: care who he was. He walked for days through terrain
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: that offered very little shelter and very little comfort, through
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: the hill country of Canaan, through landscapes that were indifferent
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: to the weight he was carrying. And the weight was real,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: not just the physical weight of a man traveling with
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: a staff and whatever he could carry, the weight of
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: everything he had done, and everything he had lost, and
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: everything he was afraid of. He came to a certain
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: place and stopped for the night because the sun had set.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: He took one of the stones of the place and
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: put it under his head, and lay down to sleep,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: one stone under his head. That detail is so specific
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: and so small that it has stayed in the imagination
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: of every reader who has ever spent a night somewhere
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: they did not expect to be. Not a pillow, not
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: a bed, not the warmth of a household that knew
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: his name. A stone on the ground under the open sky.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: This was Jacob, the one who had secured the birthright
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: and the blessing, lying on the ground in a place
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: he had never been before, going somewhere he had never been,
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: running from something he could not outrun, because it was
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: not behind him, it was inside him. Now, I want
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: to say something about those first miles from Beersheba that
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: becomes visible only when you look at the whole ark
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: of Jacob's life from a distance. He left carrying two
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: things that were in deep tension with each other. He
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: carried the blessing, real words spoken over him by his
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: father's mouth, words that could not be taken back, words
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: that carried genuine weight. In the world he inhabited, and
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: he carried the memory of how he got it, the
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: goat skins, the borrowed name, his father's hands reaching out
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: to touch him in the dark, the sound of Esau's
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: cry following him down the road. He had the thing,
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: and he had the memory of what it cost to
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: take it, both of them traveling with him into the wilderness,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: both of them present in the dark, when the stone
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: was under his head and the sky was above him,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: and no one in the world knew exactly where he was,
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: And then he slept, and then the sky opened. But
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: before we go into what happened above him in the night,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: I want to sit one more moment with the figure
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: of Jacob on the ground, because there is something here
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: that is easy to step past in our eagerness to
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: get to the angels and the voice from heaven. The
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: question that was sitting on Jacob's chest that night was
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: not primarily about guilt. It was something deeper than guilt,
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: something that the deception in Isaac's tent had made louder
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: rather than quieter. The question was this, who am I really?
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: Without the scheme, without the plan, without the angle I
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: have found, and the leverage I am holding. If you
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: strip away, the goat skins and the borrowed name. Who
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: is left? He did not know. He had spent so
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: much of his life being strategic that he had not
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: spent much time being simple himself. And now, in the
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: silence of a night, with no one watching and no
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: next move to calculate, the question had space to rise.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: He was Jacob. He knew that, but he did not
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: yet know what Jacob meant in any positive sense. He
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: only knew what the name pointed toward in the story
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: He had just lived. One who grabs, one who supplants.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: He did not yet know what he would become. He
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: could not have known that the answer was going to
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: come from the exact direction he least expected, not from
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: inside himself, not from any plan he could devise from above,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: in a dream, on a night when all he had
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: was a stone under his head and a question in
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: his chest, and a sky he did not know yet
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: was about to open breathe. There is a specific kind
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: of night that belongs to the moments in our lives
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: when we have run out of road, when the strategies
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: have been exhausted, and the relation ships we depended on
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: are behind us, and the thing we have been running from,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: has not been left behind, because it was never behind
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: us in the first place. Those places feel like endings,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: the place where the story stops co operating and the
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: ground gets hard and the sky gets dark. But in
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: Jacob's story, those places were never endings. They were always
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: the place where God showed up. Not at the top
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: of the hill, not in the tent of successful plans,
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: on the ground, in the dark, with a stone under
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: his head and twenty years of hard living still ahead
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: of him. The God of Abraham and Isaac did not
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: wait for Jacob to deserve a visit. He came to
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: find him exactly where he was, and the finding was
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: about to change something that all the scheming in the
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: world could not have changed. Good Night, Chapter five, The
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: dream at Bethel, Heaven touches a fugitive. It was asleep
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: on the ground when the sky opened. Not metaphorically, not
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: as a figure of speech. The account in Genesis describes
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: what Jacob saw with the simple directness of something that
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: was meant to be taken seriously as an event. A
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: ladder set up on the earth, its top reaching to heaven,
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: and the angels of God ascending and descending on it,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: and the Lord stood above it. Now, I want to
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: make sure we feel the specific geometry of this vision
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: before we move into what it means, because the geometry
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: matters more than it might first appear. The angels were
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: not descending from Heaven to Earth in a single direction.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: They were ascending and descending both directions simultaneously, as if
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: the movement between the two realms was continuous and ongoing,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: not something that happened only in special moments at specially
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: designated places, but a constant traffic, a living connection between
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: the world above and the ground where Jacob was sleeping.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: And here is the detail that stops me every time
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: I read it. The ladder was not set up in Jerusalem,
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: not at an altar, not at a place already recognized
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: as sacred by any one. It was set up here,
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: at this unnamed place, on this particular patch of ground,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: in the middle of a wilderness road, because Jacob was here.
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: God did not make Jacob come to where the holy
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: things were. The holy things came to where Jacob was.
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: The Lord stood above the ladder and spoke. He said,
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father,
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie,
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: I will give to you and to your offspring. Your
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: offspring shall be like the dust of the earth. And
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: you shall spread abroad to the west, and to the east,
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: and to the north and to the south. And in
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: you and your offspring shall all the families of the
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: earth be blessed. And then God said something to Jacob
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: that went beyond the large promises about land and descendants.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: He said, behold, I am with you and will keep
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: you wherever you go, and will bring you back to
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: this land. For I will not leave you until I
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: have done what I have promised you. I will not
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: leave you. Not, I will be with you when you
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: deserve it. Not I will stay as long as you
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: make good decisions. Not I will keep you provided you
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: do not make the same mistakes again. I will not
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: leave you. The promise was unconditional in a way that
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: Jacob had no framework for receiving. He had lived his
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: whole life in a world of conditions and exchanges. You
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: give me this, and I give you that, the birthright
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: for the soup, the blessing for the goat skins, and
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: the borrowed name. Everything in Jacob's world up to this
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: moment had been a transaction. And here was a voice
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: from above a ladder in the middle of the night,
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: offering something that could not be transacted, a presence that
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: was not contingent and not going to be withdrawn. When
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Jacob inevitably did the next thing that should have disqualified him.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: Jacob woke up. And the first thing he said is
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: one of the most honest sentences in the entire book
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: of Genesis. He said, surely the Lord is in this place,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: and I did not know it. I did not know it.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: He was not speaking only about the geography. He was
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: saying something much more personal. He had not known that
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: the God who had spoken to his grandfather Abraham and
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: his father Isaac was the kind of God who would
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: show up beside a fugitive on a rock in the
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: middle of the night. He had not known that the
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: promises made to Abraham were the kind of promises that
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: followed a person into the wilderness, rather than waiting for
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: them to arrive at the correct location. He did not
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: know it, and now he did. He was afraid. The
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: text says he was afraid, and he said, how awesome
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: is this place? This is none other than the House
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: of God, and this is the gate of heaven. He
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: took the stone that had been under his head and
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: set it up as a pillar. He poured oil on
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: top of it. He named the place Bethel, which in
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: Hebrew means house of God, Beth, meaning house ell meaning God.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: He named a patch of empty ground in the middle
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: of a desert road the house of God because God
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: had been there, and because God being there was what
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: made any place wholly, not the other way around. The
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: place was not sacred because of what it looked like.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: It was sacred because of who had stood above it
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: in the night. Now Here is where the story does
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: something that is quietly and completely honest about where Jacob
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: actually was in his interior life. Jacob made a vow.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: He said, if God will be with me and will
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: keep me in this way that I go, and will
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: that I come again to my father's house in peace,
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: which I have set up for a pillar, shall be
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: God's house. And of all that you give me, I
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: will give a full tenth to you. If he put
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: a condition on an unconditional promise, he turned what had
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: just been offered freely into a negotiation. He heard the
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: voice from heaven say I will not leave you, and
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: his first instinct was to respond with terms. He was
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: still Jacob, even after the ladder, even after the angels,
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: even after the voice that said I will not leave you.
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: The dream had not fixed him, the vision had not
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: transformed his fundamental orientation toward the world. He was still
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: the man who worked the angle, still looking for terms,
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: even in the presence of grace. And this is one
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: of the things about Jacob's story that I find most
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: deeply and uncomfortably human. Spiritual encounters do not instantly and
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: completely rewrite a person. Not usually. The vision at Bethel
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: was real. Jacob knew it was real. The fear he
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: felt was real. The oil on the stone was a
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: genuine act of recognition and devotion. And he was still Jacob,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: still hedging, still looking for the terms. The transformation God
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: was working in this man was not going to happen
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: in a single night beside a ladder. It was going
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: to happen across twenty years of hard living in a
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: foreign land, across the slow and sometimes painful work of
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: having his own methods turned back on him by a
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: man who was very much his match across the long
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: patient process of a person learning that the God who
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: said I will not leave you actually meant it, not
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: because Jacob earned it, because that is simply who this
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: God is. Now, I want to say something about the
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: name Bethel that rewards a moment of attention. Jacob named
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: the place after the encounter. He said, this is the
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: house of God, and the naming was an act of witness,
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: a way of marking the ground and saying, something happened here,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: something I cannot fully explain and cannot dismiss, and I
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: am going to set a stone here so that I remember.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: We all have our Bethels, the places where the sky
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: opened unexpectedly, the moments when something broke through the ordinary
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: surface of life and touched us in a way we
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: could not explain and could not dismiss. The night when
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: we were running from something and we put our head
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: down and something found us that we had not been
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: looking for. Most of us do not pour oil on
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: a stone to mark those moments, but most of us
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: remember them in the way that certain experiences stay in
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: the body long after the mind has moved on to
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: other things. Jacob remembered Bethel for the rest of his life,
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: even after twenty years in harand even after everything that
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: was about to happen to him, he would come back
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: to this stone. He would need to remember what was
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: said here on the night the sky opened above a
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: fugitive who had nothing but a stone under his head
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: and a question in his chest that he could not
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: yet answer. The road to Haran was still long, and
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: the man waiting for him at the end of it
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: was going to be the most instructive teacher Jacob ever
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: had not because he was wise, because he was Jacob
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: looking back at him from the outside breathe. The ladder
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: was set up on the earth right where Jacob was,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: and the angels were moving in both directions between the
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: place where God dwells and the place where Jacob was
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: sleeping on the ground with a stone under his head.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: Heaven was not far from Jacob that night. It was
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: directly above him. The access was real and continuous, and
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: not sealed off by his failures or his schemes or
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: the lie he had spoken in his father's tent. The
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: gate of Heaven was exactly where he was lying, and
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: he did not know it until he was bake up.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: Whatever ground you are lying on tonight, whatever stone is
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: under your head, whatever road you are on, and whatever
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: is behind you that you would rather not carry any further.
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: The gate is not far. It has never been far.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: Good Night. Chapter six, Laban, the deceiver meets his match.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: There is a specific kind of justice that does not
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: arrive with thunder or announcement. It arrives quietly through the
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: ordinary mechanics of daily life, through the slow and sometimes
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: painful process of living inside the consequences of the things
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: you have set in motion, through the experience of being
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: on the receiving end of exactly what you have given
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: to others. Jacob was about to meet that kind of justice,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: and its name was Laban. He arrived in the land
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: of the people of the East and came to a
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: well in a field. Three flocks of sheep were lying
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: beside it, waiting to be watered. A large stone covered
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: the mouth of the well. The custom of the region
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: was to wait until all the flocks had gathered before
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: rolling the stone away together. Jacob was asking the local
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: shepherds about Laban when a young woman came toward the
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: well with her father's sheep. Her name was Rachel, and
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: Jacob saw her. The text moves quickly here, but we
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: should not, because what happens in the next few moments
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: is one of the most vivid and human scenes in
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: the entire book of Genesis. Jacob saw Rachel coming with
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: her father's sheep, and when he saw her, he went
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: to the well and rolled the stone away from its
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: mouth by himself. That stone was large enough that it
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: normally required the gathered effort of multiple shepherds to move.
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: Jacob rolled it away alone in the first moments after
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: he laid eyes on Rachel. Then Jacob kissed Rachel and
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: wept aloud. The weeping is unexpected, and it is real.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: This was not a man performing emotion for an audience.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: This was a man who had been walking for weeks
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: through the wilderness, carrying everything he had done and everything
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: he had lost. And he arrived at a well in
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: a foreign land and saw a young woman coming toward
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: him with her father's sheep, and something in him broke open.
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: He had arrived somewhere, not at Haran exactly, at the
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: first moment in weeks that felt like it might have
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: something worth staying for, something that was not about strategy
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: or leverage or the next move something that was simply
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: and overwhelmingly real. He told Rachel who he was, that
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: he was Rebecca's son, her father's kinsman, and she ran
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: and told her father, and Laban ran to meet him.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: When Laban heard the news about his nephew Jacob, he
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: ran out and embraced him and kissed him and brought
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: him to his house. Jacob told Laban everything that had happened,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: and Laban said, surely you are my bone and my flesh.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: My bone and my flesh the language of genuine recognition
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: of family, of belonging. But hold that phrase alongside what
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: the text shows us in the very next scene, because
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: Laban's language of family and his practice of family were
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: two very different things, and the distance between them is
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: the entire story of the next twenty years of Jacob's life.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: After Jacob had been with Laban for a month, working, helping,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: contributing to the household, without any formal arrangement in place,
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: Laban said to him, because you are my kinsman, should
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me what shall
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: your wages be. He framed it as consideration for his nephew,
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: But notice what the framing reveals before Jacob has answered
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: a single word. A man who lets a relative work
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: for a month without wages and then offers to negotiate
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: what those wages should be is not not primarily thinking
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: about his nephew's well being. He is assessing the asset
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: he has in front of him and deciding how to
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: structure it to his advantage. Jacob said, I will serve
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: you seven years for your younger daughter, Rachel. Laban said
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: it is better that I give her to you than
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: to any other man. Stay with me. He did not
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: say yes to the specific terms Jacob offered. He said,
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: it is better that I give her to you than
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: to any other man, which is technically not an agreement
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: to specific terms. It is a statement of preference. The
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: distinction will matter in seven years. Jacob served seven years
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: for Rachel, and the text says something about those seven
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: years that has stayed in the imagination of readers across
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: many centuries. It says they seemed to him but a
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: few days because of the love he had for her.
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: Seven years of labor in the heat of a foreign land,
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: working for a man. He was learning to read more
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: carefully with every passing month, and it felt like a
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: few days. That is what genuine love does to time.
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: It changes the felt weight of the hours. It makes
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: the hard thing worth doing, not because the hardness has disappeared,
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: but because the reason for it is present in a
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: way that makes the hours lighter. When the seven years
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: were complete, Jacob said to Laban, give me my wife,
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: for my time is completed. Laban gathered all the people
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: of the place and made a feast, and in the
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: and Jacob went in to her. In the morning, Jacob looked,
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: and it was Lea. Read that sentence slowly and feel
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: what it contains. In the morning, Jacob looked and it
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: was Lea. The morning after what he believed was his
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: wedding night with the woman he had loved for seven years,
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: the morning after the completion of the promise that had
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: made seven years feel like a few days. Jacob looked
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: at the face beside him, and it was not Rachael.
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: It was her older sister, the one he had not chosen,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: the one who had been in the household the whole time.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: He went to Laban immediately he said, what is this
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: you have done to me? Did I not serve with
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: you for Rachael, Why then have you deceived me? That
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: word deceived in Hebrew it comes from the same route
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: used to describe what Jacob did to his father Isaac
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: in the tent, the same word traveling back to him
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: now from the mouth of another person describing what had
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: just been done to him. Jacob the deceiver had been
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: deceived by his uncle in a darkened room, through the
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: substitution of one person for another, through a veil that
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: covered the face of the one who entered and prevented
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: the man inside from knowing with certainty who was actually there.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: He had put goat skins on his hands and his
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: brother's clothes on his back, and stood before his blind
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: father in someone else's identity. And now someone had put
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: a veil over a bride's face and brought the wrong
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: daughter in the darkness, and let him wake up in
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: the morning to discover that the identity he thought he
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: was embracing was not the one actually present. The architecture
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: of the deception was not merely similar. It was identical,
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: and the story arranges this with the precision of something intentional,
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: not as punishment exactly, but as education, the kind of
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: understanding that only comes from the inside of an experience,
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: from feeling what it actually feels like to be on
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: the receiving end of the thing you gave to some
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: one else. Jacob understood something in that morning that he
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: could not have understood any other way. Laban said, it
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: is not so done in our place to give the
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: younger before the firstborn. The firstborn the younger, the older
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: serve before the younger could be honored. These were the
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: exact categories Jacob had inverted in his fire tent, and
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: Laban had just placed them back in their original order,
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: with Jacob on the wrong side of them. And then
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: Laban made a new proposal. Complete the week of this one,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: and we will give you the other also in return
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: for serving me another seven years, seven more years. Jacob agreed,
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: because what else could he do. He was in a
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: foreign land with no leverage and no ally, He was
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: hundreds of miles from home, and he loved Rachel. He
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: had loved her for seven years, and the love had
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: not diminished, It had not been corrected by circumstances or
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: redirected by practicality. So he agreed, and he worked seven
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: more years. Now, I want to stay with the two
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: women in this scene for a moment, because Lea and
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: Rachel are not simply supporting characters in Jacob's story. They
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: are people with their own experiences of this situation that
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: deserve more than a footnote. Lea did not chewse to
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: be brought to Jacob in the dark. She was managed
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: by her father for his purposes. She was given to
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: a man who would wake up in the morning and
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: immediately ask to have her replaced. She was the one
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: who was present but not wanted, the one whose face
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: Jacob had not been hoping to see when the morning came.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: And Rachel, she did not choose to be withheld for
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: another seven years as a labor arrangement. She was the
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: one Jacob had chosen, the one he had worked seven
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: years for. She watched her sister go to him first
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: while she waited. Both of them entered the central relationship
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: of their adult lives through a transaction their father controlled
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: entirely for his own benefit. There is no clean place
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: to stand in this story. Every person in it is
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: caught inside something they did not fully create and cannot
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: fully escape, and the women bear a weight in it
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: that the text acknowledges even when it cannot resolve. Now
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: Here is something about Laban that is worth sitting with
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: quietly before we move forward. Laban looked at his nephew
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: and saw an asset. He used the language of family
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: to describe a relationship he was actually structuring as a transaction.
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: He said my bone and my flesh, and then immediately
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: began calculating wages. Does any of that sound familiar. It should,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: because it is exactly what Jacob had done with his
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: brother and his father. He had used the language of
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: family while treating the relationships as opportunities. He had seen
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: an asset in his brother's hunger and structured it to
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: his advantage. He had used his father's trust as the
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: mechanism for his own advancement. Laban was not Jacob's punishment.
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: He was Jacob's mirror, and the man looking back at
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: Jacob from that mirror was not a stranger. He was Jacob,
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: with more power and more experience, doing to Jacob what
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: Jacob had done to others, with the same confidence, the
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: same family language, the same willingness to restructure arrangements whenever
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: they stopped working in his favor. And Jacob was learning
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: from the inside what that felt like. He would spend
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: fourteen more years learning it. Breathe. There is a grace
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: hidden inside this chapter that is easy to miss because
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: the chapter is full of things that feel like anything
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: but grace. God was working inside this impossible situation. Jacob's
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: prosperity over the years that followed was not entirely the
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: result of his own considerable strategies. The text is clear
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: that God was blessing Jacob, that the flocks increased under
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: his care in ways that went beyond what any human
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: strategy could fully account for. Even in Haran, even under Laban,
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: even inside years of manipulated wages and shifting arrangements and
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: a household full of complicated grief and complicated love, God
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: was keeping the promise he had made above the ladder
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: at Bethel, I will not leave you. He had not left.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: He was here in Haran, in Laban's house, in the
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: middle of everything Jacob had gotten himself into, and everything
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: that had been done to him, still present, still working
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: in ways that were mostly invisible until Jacob stopped years
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: later and looked back at what had survived. The promise
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: made above a stone in the wilderness was still active,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: still being kept even here. Good night. Chapter seven, Twenty
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: years in exile, building a life on foreign soil. Twenty
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: years is a long time to be somewhere you did
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: not choose, Not a vacation, not a temporary arrangement that
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: feels temporary from the inside. Twenty years of waking up
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: in the same foreign place and doing the same work
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: for the same difficult man, and watching the life you
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: are actually living grow further and further from the life
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: you thought you would be living by now. Jacob spent
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: twenty years in Haran, and those twenty years did things
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: to him that nothing else could have done. They shaped
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: him in the places that cleverness and natural ability and
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: strategic thinking cannot reach. They reached into the parts of
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: a person that only time and difficulty and love and
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: loss can access. So let us sit with those twenty
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: years not as a summary to move past on the
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: way to the more dramatic events that follow, as a
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: life that was actually lived day by day, season by season,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: in the full and complicated texture of its ordinary reality.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: The household Jacob was building in Harn was from the
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: beginning a complicated one. Two wives who were sisters, a
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: husband whose love was visibly directed at one of them,
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: and the dynamic between Leah and Rachel and between both
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: of them and Jacob was one of the most painfully
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: honest portraits of domestic life in all of ancient literature.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: Lea was not chosen. She knew it. She felt it
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: in the daily texture of a household where love moved
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: in directions that left her with less than she needed,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: and God saw what she was carrying. The text says
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: specifically that when the Lord saw that Lea was hated,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: he opened her womb and Rachel was barren. God saw
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: the woman who was not being seen by the man
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: in the room, and he responded not with words or
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: visions or angels, with the most concrete and irreversible gift
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: available to a woman in that world. Lea conceived and
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: bore a son. She named him Reuben, which in Hebrew
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: sounds like he has seen my misery, she said, Because
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: the Lord has seen my misery, surely my husband will
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: love me. Now, she conceived again and bore a son.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: She named him Simeon, which sounds like one who hears,
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: she said, because the Lord heard that I am not loved.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: She conceived again and bore a son. She named him Levi.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: She said, now at last, my husband will become attached
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: to me, because I have borne him three sons. She
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: conceived again and bore a son. She named him Judah,
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: And this time she said something different. She said, simply,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: this time I will praise the Lord fu song. Four names,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: each one a record of where Lea was when she
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: chose it, the hoping, the reaching toward a love that
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: kept not arriving in the form she needed, the waiting,
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: and then finally simply praise. She stopped trying to explain
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: herself through the names. She stopped making each birth a
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: petition for something she was still waiting for. She arrived
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: at a place where the gratitude did not require the
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: situation to have resolved itself first, where the praise was
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: not contingent on receiving what she had been hoping for.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: That is a kind of maturity that does not announce itself.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: It simply appears. One morning in the name, a woman
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: gives her fourth son. Now hold the name Judah in
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: your mind for a moment, because it will matter in
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: a way that no one in that household could possibly
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: have understood at the time. From Judah would come a line,
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: a long and winding line across many generations. That line
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: would eventually produce a king named David, and from David's descendants,
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: the New Testament traces the lineage of the one it
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: calls son of David. The thread begins here in this tent,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: with this woman narming this son. God does not organize
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: his story the way we would organize it. He does
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: not give the most important roles to the most obvious candidates.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: He gives them to Leah, sitting in a tent in
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: her run, naming her sons after the shape of her
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: own longing, unaware that the praise she finally arrived at
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: after years of feeling unseen, was the sound of something
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: enormous moving through her ordinary life without announcing itself. Meanwhile,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: Rachel could not conceive, and the pain of that was
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: real and deep, and the text does not minimize it.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: She went to Jacob and said, give me children, or
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: I shall die. Jacob's response was not gentle. He said,
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: am I in the place of God who has withheld
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: from you the fruit of the womb. He was not
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: wrong in what he said, but he was not tender either.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: And there are moments when a person needs tenderness more
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: than they need accurate theology. Rachel was in one of
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: those moments, and Jacob gave her the accurate theology. He
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: was still learning how to be present to the people
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: he loved as people rather than as situations to be managed.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: The competition that followed between the two sisters, the giving
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: of servant women, the negotiations over plants that the ancient
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: world believed could aid fertility, the careful accounting of who
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: had conceived and who had not. All of it reads
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: like a document of two women doing everything within their
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: power to secure something that ultimately only God could give.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: And eventually God remembered Rachel. The text uses that word
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: remembered as if the waiting had been a kind of holding,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: a pause before something moved. God listened to her and
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: opened her womb, and she conceived and bore a son.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: She named him Joseph, and she said, God has taken
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: away my reproach. Joseph, the son Rachael finally held after
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: years of grief and prayer and watching and waiting. That
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: son would become the pivot point of everything that happened
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: to Jacob's family in the generation that followed. He would
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: be thrown into a pit by his own brothers, sold
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: to slave traders, taken to Egypt, falsely accused and imprisoned,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: forgotten by the people he helped, and then remembered at
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: exactly the right moment, he would rise to become the
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: second most powerful man in the most powerful empire of
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: the ancient world. And through a famine and a reunion
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: and a forgiveness that should not have been possible, but
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: somehow was, he would save the very brothers who had
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: sold him. But none of that was visible yet. He
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: was just a baby in Rachel's arms in a tent
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: in Haran, while his father was outside negotiating the next
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: arrangement with Laban, and Rachel held him the way a
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: woman holds a child she has prayed for through years
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: of empty arms, with a completeness that only long waiting
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: makes possible, with a gratitude that does not have adequate words,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: with the particular tenderness of someone who knows exactly what
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: it cost to arrive at this moment. She had waited
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: long for this, and now he was here.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: Let us talk about Jacob and Laban in these years,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: because the relationship between them was the crucible that did
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: the most visible work on Jacob. During this time, Saban
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: changed Jacob's wages ten times. The text tells us ten teams.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: Every arrangement they made lasted only until Laban found a
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: reason to restructure it in his favor. Jacob responded by
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: becoming increasingly sophisticated in his own counter strategies. The two
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: of them were locked in a continuous and low grade
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: economic conflict that neither would fully acknowledge as conflict because
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: they were family. Jacob prospered despite Laban, or perhaps through
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: the friction of Laban, the way certain materials are strengthened
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: by the process of being pressed against something harder than themselves.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: Jacob accumulated flocks and servants and wealth in amounts that
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: Laban's sons began to notice with visible resentment. They said
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: among themselves, Jacob has taken all that was our fathers
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: from what was our fathers. He has gained everything he has.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: And Jacob saw that Laban did not regard him with
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: the same favor as before. He was reading the room.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: He had always been good at reading the room, and
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: what he read now was accurate. The season in Haran
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: had reached the end of what it could produce. And
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: then God spoke. He said, to Jacob, return to the
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: will be with you that phrase again, I will be
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: with you. The same quality of promise that had been
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: spoken above the ladder at Bethel, still the same promise,
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: still unconditional, still not withdrawn. Despite twenty years of Jacob
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: being entirely and completely himself in every possible way, God
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: called him home. Jacob gathered Rachel and Lear to him
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: in the field and spoke to them for what feels
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: like the first time in the text, as genuine partners
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: in his situation, rather than participants in a household he
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: was managing. He told them what their father had done,
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: how Laban had changed his wages again and again, how
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: God had been with him through all of it, how
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: God had told him to return to his native land.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: And Rachel and Leah said something remarkable. They said, is
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: there any portion or inheritance left for us in our
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: father's house? Are we not regarded by him as foreigners?
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: For he has sold us, and he has indeed devoured
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: our money. His own daughters said plainly that he had
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: sold them, both of them that whatever wealth had come
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: from Jacob's labor had been consumed by Laban rather than
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: invested in the family. It was meant to support. They
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: felt it, they named it, and they released Jacob to go.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: They said, whatever God has said to you, do so.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: Jacob arose. He set his children and his wives on camels.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: He drove all his live stock ahead of him, and
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: all his property that he had gained. He was going
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: back to his father Isaac in the land of Canaan,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: and Rachel stole her father's household gods. That detail is strange,
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: and the text does not fully explain it. Scholars across
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: many centuries have offered various interpretations. Some suggest the household
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: gods carried legal significance related to inheritance rites in the
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: ancient Near Eastern world of that period. Others suggest Rachel
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: was making a statement about her father's household and what
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: she thought of it. Others read it simply as the
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: act of a daughter taking something back from a father
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: who had treated her as property. The text leaves the
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: question open, and sometimes that openness is itself the honest answer.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: Whatever her reasons, she took them, and she hid them
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: in a way that would matter. Before this story was finished,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: Laban discovered that Jacob had fled. He pursued him for
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: seven days and caught up with him in the hill country.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: He accused Jacob of stealing his heart, of carrying away
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: his daughters like captives, of taking his gods. Jacob did
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: not know Rachel had taken the gods. He said, with
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: the full confidence of someone who believes he is telling
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: the truth. Any one with whom you find your gods
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: shall not live in the presence of our kinsman. Point
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: out what I have and take it. He did not
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: know what he had just said. Over his own beloved wife.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: Rachel was sitting on the camel saddle. She had hidden
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: the gods beneath her. She told her father she could
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: not rise because the way of women was upon her.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: Laban searched and did not find them. Then Jacob was angry.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: Everything he had been holding for twenty years came out
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: of him in a speech that is one of the
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: most unguarded moments in his entire story. He listed it
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: all twenty years, the sleepless nights, the cold, the heat,
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: the wages changed ten times, the faithfulness he had brought
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: to a relationship where faithfulness had not been returned, He said,
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: if the God of my father had not been on
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: my side, surely now you would have sent me away
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: empty handed. God saw my affliction and the labor of
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: my hands and rebuked you. Last night. He named God,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: not as a term in a negotiation, this time, not
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: as a bargaining chip, as the one who had actually
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: been keeping him through twenty years of Laban. He was
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: beginning to find words for something that had been true
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: the whole time, but that he was only now able
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: to say clearly. They made a covenant, a pile of
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: stones as a witness, a shared meal. And in the morning,
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: Laban rose early and kissed his grandchildren and his daughters
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: and blessed them. And he departed and returned home. And
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: Jacob went on his way breathe twenty years Leah and
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: Rachel and their children, flocks and servants, and the accumulated
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: weight of a life built in the hardest possible school
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: by the hardest possible teacher. He was leaving with twelve
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: sons and a daughter, and flocks beyond counting, and a
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: life that had been built through pressure and conflict and
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: the slow grinding work of years in a foreign land.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: He was not the same man who had arrived. He
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: was not yet the man he was going to become.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: But between those two things, in the space of what
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: he had lived and what was still ahead of him,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: something real had happened. God had been keeping him the
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: whole time, through all of it, including the parts that
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: had felt like anything but keeping, including the years when
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: the only visible evidence of divine faithfulness was the fact
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: that Jacob was still standing. Twenty years of Iye will
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: not leave You, made visible only in retrospect, only when
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: he stopped and looked back at everything he had survived
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: and understood that he had not survived it alone. Good Night.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: Chapter eight, The return, running toward what you once ran from.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: There is a difference between a man who is traveling
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: and a man who is going home. The traveler moves
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: towards something new, something unknown. What is behind him is background,
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: the material of a life already lived. The man going
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: home carries something different. He carries the memory of what
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: he left, the sound of his brother's cry in a
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: room where a blessing had been stolen, the sight of
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: his father's hands reaching out in the dark to feel
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: whether the sun in front of him was the sun
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: he thought he was calling. He carries the question that
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: has been waiting for him at the end of every
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: road he has taken since the night he left. What
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: happens when I finally faced the thing I ran from.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: Jacob was going home, and he knew exactly what was
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: waiting for him there. He set his face toward Canaan,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: toward his father's land, toward the place where everything had broken,
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: and the question of whether any of it could ever
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: be put back together had been sitting unanswered for two decades.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: And then his messengers came back. He had sent them
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: ahead to Esau, his brother in the land of Sea,
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: to carry words of peace across the distance, to get
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: some sense of what he was walking toward before he
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: walked into it. They came back and said, we came
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: to your brother Esau, and he is coming to meet you,
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: and there are four hundred men with him, four hundred men.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. The text uses two
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: words there and both matter. Afraid describes the physical experience
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: of fear, the cold that moves through the body when
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: something threatening appears on the horizon. Distressed carries the sense
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: of being hemmed in of a situation that has pressed
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: in on all sides and left very little room to move.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Jacob was afraid and he was distressed, both things simultaneously.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: And then he did something that was entirely Jacob. He
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: divided the people with him, and the flocks and the
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: herds and the camels into two camps. He said, if
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: Esau comes to one camp and attacks it, then the
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: camp that is left will escape. He was still Jacob,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: even in the fear, even in the distress, the instinct
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: to find the angle that preserved something, even if everything
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: could not be preserved. He split what he had into
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: two groups, and then he prayed, Now, I want to
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: stop here and give this moment the full weight it deserves,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: because this prayer is one of the most significant turning
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: points in the entire story, and it is easy to
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: read past it in our rush toward the more dramatic
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: events at the river. This is the first time in
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: the entire narrative that Jacob prays in a way that
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: is not structured primarily as a negotiation or a conditional vow.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: Not if you do this, then I will do that.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: Not here are my conditions, just a man bringing his
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: fear to God and asking for help. He said, O,
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac,
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: O Lord who said to me, return to your country
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: and to your kindred, and I will do you good.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: I am not worthy of the least of all the
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: have shown to your servant. For with only my staff,
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: Stop there for a moment, with only my staff, I
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: crossed this Jordan. He was placing himself back at the
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: beginning the night he left with nothing, a single staff
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: in his hand, and the road ahead, and the accumulated
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: weight of everything he had done. And he was looking
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: at what stood around him now, two camps, twelve sons,
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: two wives, servant, flocks beyond counting, and he was saying,
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: I did not do this alone. He had schemed, he
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: had worked, He had negotiated and counter negotiated and Outmann
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: guvered Laban at every turn available to him. He had
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: been very much himself throughout those twenty years. And yet
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: standing at the edge of the Jordan, looking back at
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: what had accumulated, he could see something he had not
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: been able to see while it was happening. He had
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: not built this alone. And then he said, please deliver
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: me from the hand of my brother, from the hand
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: of Esau, for I fear him that he may come
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: and attack me the mothers with the children. He named
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: his fear directly out loud to God, without wrapping it
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: in a scheme or a strategy, without attaching conditions to
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: the asking. He said, I am afraid, He said, please help.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: He named what he was afraid of losing, and he
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: asked some one other than himself to do something about it.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: And then he added something that tells us how much
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: he had grown since Bethel. He said, for you said,
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: I will surely do you good and make your offspring
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: for multitude. He held the promise back up to the
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: one who had spoken it, not as manipulation, not as leverage,
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: as faith, the kind of faith that knows what has
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: been said and brings it back to the one who
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: said it when the situation requires it. The faith of
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: some one who has lived long enough inside a specific
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: faithfulness to know that the promise is real. This was
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: a more honest Jacob than the one who had bargained
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: at Bethel with conditions attached to every line. Not a
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: different Jacob, not a perfected one, but a man who
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: had lived long enough to know the difference between a
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: transaction and a prayer. After the prayer, he prepared gifts.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: He selected from his flocks and herds a substantial portion,
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: and organized them into separate droves, each drove separated from
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: the next by space, and each servant who led a
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: drove was given the same instruction. When Esau meets you
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: and asks whose servant are you? And where are you going?
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: And whose are these animals ahead of you, you shall
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: say they belong to your servant, Jacob. They are a
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: present sent to my Lord Esau. And moreover, he is
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: behind us. He was still Jacob. The prayer was genuine,
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: the fear was genuine, The acknowledgment of God's faithfulness was genuine.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: And then he organized a procession of gifts designed to
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: soften a brother's anger before that brother arrived. Both things
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: were true at the same time, the honest prayer and
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: the continued instinct to also work every available angle. He
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: was not yet the kind of man who prayed and
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: then simply waited in stillness. He was the kind of
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: man who prayed and then also sent two hundred female
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: goats ahead of himself as additional insurance. God did not
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: seem to consider this a failure of faith. He continued
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: to work with Jacob as Jacob actually was, not as
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: Jacob was theoretically supposed to be. He sent the gifts ahead,
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: He sent his wives and his children across the ford
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: of the Jabbuk. He sent everything across, and Jacob was
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: left alone. Now there is something in that phrase worth
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: more attention than we usually give it. He sent everything across,
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: his wives, his children, his servant, his flocks, everything he
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: had accumulated, and everything he was responsible for. And he
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: stayed on this side of the river. Why the text
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: does not tell us, and the silence is honest. Some
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: readers across the sentries have suggested he stayed to pray
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: through the night. Others that the fear of what morning
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: would bring kept his feet on this side of the water.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: Others that he needed one final night alone before stepping
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: into the most important day of his life. Perhaps all
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: of those things were true at once, Perhaps none of
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: them fully captures it. Sometimes the body knows something the
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: mind has not yet articulated, and the body says, not yet,
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: one more night, Let me have one more night on
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: this side of what is coming. He was alone beside
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: the river. The gifts were moving toward Esau in the dark.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: The family was on the other side of the water.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: Esau was somewhere out there in the direction of the morning.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: And Jacob was standing on the near bank, with the
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: river moving past him, and the night fully settled in
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: around him, and nowhere left to go that was not
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: directly toward the thing he had been moving away from
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: for twenty years. The running was over and the night
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: was just beginning. Breathe. There is a specific kind of
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: night that belongs to the moments just before something changes.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: Not a peaceful night, not a RESTful one, the kind
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: of night where sleep does not come easily, because something
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: deep in you know was that the morning arriving is
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: going to be different from every morning that came before it.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: Most of us know that night in some form. The
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: night before a conversation that cannot be avoided any longer,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: the night before something is delivered that will change the
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: shape of things, The night before a relationship is tested
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: by something that will either break it or reveal that
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: it was stronger than you knew. Jacob was living that
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: night beside a river in the dark, with everything he
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: loved on the other side of the water and everything
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: he had done on the side where he was standing.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: He could not go back, he could not stay. He
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: could only go forward. And what was waiting for him
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: in the forward was not what he expected. He did
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: not know yet that the most important encounter of his
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: entire life was not going to happen in the morning
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: when he faced his brother. It was going to happen
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: right here in the dark to night, before the sun
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: came up on the day everything changed. Something was coming
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: toward him out of the night, and it was not
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: Esau good Night. Chapter nine, The night Alone, the dark
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: before the Crossing. There are nights that belong to the
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: category of preparation. Without knowing they are preparation, you live
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: through them as ordinary nights, dark, sometimes sleepless, sometimes full
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: of the kind of thinking that circles back to the
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: same place, no matter how many times you try to
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: redirect it. They do not announce themselves as significant. They
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: do not arrive with any indication that what happens inside
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: them is going to matter in ways that outlast them
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: by thousands of years. They just arrive the way all
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: nights arrive after the day. Jacob's night beside the Jabbuk
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: was that kind of night. He had sent everything across
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: the ford, his family, his servants, his flocks, the carefully
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: organized waves of gifts moving toward Esau in the darkness.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: He had done everything available to him. The prayer had
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: been prayed, the gifts had been sent. The people he
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: loved were on the other side of the water, and
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: he was here on this side alone. The Jabbok River
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: still flows to day in what is now the country
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: of Jordan, a narrow river moving westward through limestone hills
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: before it empties into the Jordan River. You can stand
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: beside it. The water still moves, the hills are still there.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: The darkness that would settle over that ground when the
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: sun goes down is still the same darkness that settled
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: over it on the night Jacob stood there alone. That
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: is not a small thing. The place is real. The
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: ground is real, which means the night was real. And
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: if the night was real there, then something very like
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: it is real. Wherever a person finds themselves alone at
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: the edge of what they cannot control, with nothing left
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: to do but stand in it. The Jabbok does not
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: belong only to the ancient world. It belongs to every
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: night when the strategies have run out, and the people
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: you love are on the other side of something, and
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: you are left standing on the near bank in the dark. Now,
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: let us be present with Jacob on that bank he
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: had sent everything across. He was alone in the way
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: that people are alone when there is nothing left to
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: manage and nothing left to plan, and the night has
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: arrived and it will not be rushed. He was empty
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: in the specific way that people become empty when they
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: have been holding on to everything with both hands for
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: too long. The schemes had been sent ahead with the gifts,
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: the careful arrangements were in place, and what was left
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: was just the man standing in the dark. That emptiness
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: was not a problem to be solved before the real
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: encounter could begin. It was the condition the encounter required.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: You cannot receive a new name while you are hands
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: are still full of the old one. You cannot be
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: given a blessing while you are still engineering one. The
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: Jabock required Jacob to arrive at the place where all
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: the engineering had been sent ahead, and all that was
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: left was the man himself, empty enough to receive something
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: he could not have taken by force. The text says simply,
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: A man, not an angel, explicitly not God with any
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: of the divine titles. A man, and the plainness of
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: that word is itself worth sitting with, because the encounter
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: that was about to reshape Jacob completely began with a
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: single ordinary word. A man came to him in the dark,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: and they wrestled. Now, before we go into the wrestling itself,
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: which belongs to the next chapter, I want to stay
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: here in the moment just before Jacob had sent everything ahead,
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: he had done what he could do, and then the
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: night had arrived and there was nothing left to do
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: but be present inside it. We talk a great deal
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: in our world about action and productivity and the things
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: within our control, and Jacob had been a master of
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: all of those things his entire life. He was the
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: man who always found the next move, who always had
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: a plan inside the plan. And now there was no
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: next move, no angle, no plan that was going to
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: make to morrow easier than it was already going to be,
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: And then the night came and he was left with
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: the night itself. This is not a comfortable place to be,
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: especially for the ones among us who have built our
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: lives on capability, on competence, on the satisfaction of being
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: the person who figures things out and makes things work
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: and finds the way through when others cannot. Because in
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: the night those gifts have very limited application. There is
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: only the darkness and the sound of the water moving past,
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: and the question that has been waiting at the end
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: of every road. Who are you when there is nothing
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: to do, when there is no angle to work and
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: no plan to execute, and the night has arrived and
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: you are alone inside it? Who are you? Then? Jacob
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: was about to find out, not comfortably, not in a
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: vision with angels above a ladder, while he slept peacefully
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: in the most direct and physical way imaginable, by being
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: taken hold of in the dark, by having to fight
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: for something he did not yet know was a blessing.
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: By holding on past the point of reason, and past
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: the point where any sensible person would have let go,
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: the emptiness on the near bank of the Jabbuk was
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: not a failure. It was the beginning of the most
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: important night of his life. Breathe, Let the darkness of
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: this chapter rest on you gently for a moment, without
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: rushing past it. We live in a world that does
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: not know what to do with darkness, that treats it
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: as a problem to be solved or a condition to
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: be managed as briefly as possible before returning to the
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: comfortable sense that things are under control. Jacob, beside the Jabbuk,
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: is standing in a darkness that will not co operate
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: with strategies or short cuts, that requires something from him
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: that all his cleverness and capability cannot provide. It requires
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: presents simple, unmanaged presence inside the dark, and what was
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: waiting for him in that presence was the most important
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: encounter of his life, not in the morning, when the
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: sun came up and Esau appeared in the night beside
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: the river, in the dark, before any of that, because
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: the god who had been with Jacob since the night
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: he left home with a stone under his head had
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: not yet finished what he started. He had a name
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: to give and a wound to leave behind, and neither
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: of them could be received except in the darkness good night.
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten, The wrestling all night until the dawn breaks.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: This chapter begins differently from all the others, not with
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: a thought or an image or a question to ease
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: you into the subject, with a contrast, a sharp one,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: because the contrast is the point. Bethel was peaceful, Jacob
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: was asleep. The sky opened above him while he lay
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: on the ground with a stone under his head. Angels
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: moved on a ladder, a voice spoke promises from above.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: He woke up, afraid and awed, and full of words.
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: The Jabbok was nothing like that. At Bethel, God came
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: to Jacob while Jacob was unconscious, while he was completely passive,
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: while he had no capacity to resist or respond or
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: do anything except receive what was being given. At the Jabbok,
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: God came to Jacob while Jacob was awake and alone
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: and standing upright in the dark, and instead of speaking,
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: he took hold of him. The same God, the same
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: promise of presents a completely different encounter. As if what
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: Bethel could give was not sufficient for what the Jabbok required.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: That the man who had spent twenty years turning everything
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: into a transaction needed something that could not be transacted,
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: something that would have to be felt in the body,
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: something that would leave a mark. And so he came,
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: not with a ladder, with hands. He came out of
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: the dark, without warning, no announcement, no preparation, no moment
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: where Jacob could have steadied himself or decided how he
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: wanted to meet what was coming. One moment, Jacob was
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: alone beside the river, and the next moment he was
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: not alone, and the knot alone, had taken hold of him.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: They wrestled. That word in the original Hebrew is a
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: rare one. It appears only in this passage in the
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: entire Old Testament. The root of it carries the sense
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: of being covered in dust, of two bodies pressed together
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: so complete that the ground rises around them. This was
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: not a formal contest, not a structured competition with rules
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: and a designated end. This was the kind of struggle
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: that happens when two forces meet in the dark and
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: neither one releases all night. Let that settle before we
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: move forward, not a few minutes of dramatic struggle followed
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: by a resolution. All night. From the moment he appeared
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: until the breaking of the day, hours of this in
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: the dark beside the river, neither one yielding, neither one
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: releasing the other, now I want to make sure we
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: feel the physical reality of this before we move into
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: what it meant, because the physical reality matters. This was
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: not a vision, not a metaphor dressed in the language
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: of an event. The text presents it as something that
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: happened to Jacob's body, something he felt in his muscles
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: and his joints and his breath. Through the hours of
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: the night, he was lighting with everything he had against
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: something he could not identify in the darkness, against something
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: whose strength was extraordinary and whose purpose was completely unclear
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: to him. He did not know who this was. He
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: did not know what was being asked of him. He
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: only knew that some one had taken hold of him,
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: and that he was not going to let go. And
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: Jacob was not a small man. Twenty years of physical
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: labor had produced a body capable of serious work. He
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: had rolled a large stone away from a well alone
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: the first day he arrived in Haran. He was not
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: approaching this struggle from a position of weakness, and still
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: neither of them prevailed over the other all night. The
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: sky above the Jabbuk was the way wilderness sky gets
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: before the first light appears, the absolute dark of a
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: place with no cities and no ambient glow, just stars
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: and river and two figures locked together in the dust
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: of the bank. And then something shifted. The man saw
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: that he did not prevail against Jacob. Read that sentence
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: carefully because it is one of the most extraordinary statements
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: in the entire Bible, and we often move past it
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: without stopping to feel what it actually says. The one
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: who came to Jacob was not giving everything he had.
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: He was holding something back. He was capable of more
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: than he was using, and he chose not to use it.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: He chose to engage with Jacob on terms that Jacob
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: could meet, to press without overwhelming, to push without destroying,
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: to stay in the struggle without ending it. Before the
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: night was done, he touched Jacob's hip socket, and the
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: socket was put out of joint. One touch, a single
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: contact with a specific place on Jacob's body that would
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: change the way he walked for the rest of his life.
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: The one who had been wrestling with him all night
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: and had not prevailed, with a single touch, dislocated Jacob's hip.
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: He could have done that at any point in the night.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: He did not. He did it now, at the turning point,
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: as the darkness was beginning to thin toward dawn, as
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: if the wound was not a last resort but an intention,
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: something that was always going to happen at the right moment,
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: in the right night. And Jacob held on. His hip
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: was out of joint. The pain of a dislocated hip
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: is severe and immediate. It radiates through the entire side
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: of the body. Every shift of weight becomes its own agony.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: Every movement costs something. And Jacob held on. The man
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: said let me go, for the day is breaking, And
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: bless me. Stop. This is the center of the entire night,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: the center of Jacob's entire story, the center of one
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: of the most important scenes in all of scripture, and
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: it is contained in those eight words, I will not
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: let you go unless you bless me. Feel what Jacob
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: knew in that moment, he knew not through reasoning or
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: through some one explaining it to him. He knew in
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: the way that the body knows things before the mind
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: catches up. He knew that what he was holding in
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: the dark was the source of everything he had ever needed.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: He had been reaching for it his whole life, reaching
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: incorrectly through schemes and deceptions and transactions, but reaching for
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: it none the less. And now it was here, and
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: it was asking to be released, and Jacob said, no,
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: not until you bless me. He was not holding on
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: to a stranger. He was not refusing to release a threat.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: He was holding on to the only thing that had
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: ever been capable of giving him what he actually needed.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: With everything he had left with a dislocated hip and
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: exhausted arms, and the knight finally thinning toward morning around him,
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: he held on. The man said to him, what is
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: your name? And Jacob told him that moment of naming
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: deserves more attention than it usually receives, because this was
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: not a request for identification. The one wrestling with Jacob
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: already knew his name. This question was something altogether different.
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: It was an invitation to honesty, a request to stop
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: hiding behind other names and other identities, To stop being
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: Esau in his father's tent, to stop being the smooth
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: man with the goat skins on his hands and the
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: borrowed blessing in his mouth, to say out loud in
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: the dark, in the presence of the one whose blessing
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: he was asking for what his actual name was to say,
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: I am Jacob. I am the one who grabs. I
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: am the one who supplants. I am the one who
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: took what was not his and ran from the consequences,
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: and spent twenty years in a foreign land, and is
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: now standing here with a dislocated hip, holding on to
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: the only thing that has ever been able to address
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: any of it. I am Jacob, he said it, and
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: the one who had asked, said, your name shall no
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: with God and with men, and have prevailed Israel. The
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: name in Hebrew carries layers that different translations wait differently,
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: one who strives with God, one who persists with God,
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: one who wrestles and does not let go. The exact
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: nuance is something scholars have discussed across many centuries without
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: arriving at a single tidy answer, and that openness is
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: itself honest. Some things in this story are too large
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: for a single English word to hold. But here is
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: what matters most about the name. Regardless of which translation
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: you hold. God chose to name the people who would
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: carry his covenant through history after a man, after a
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: specific act after a night of wrestling that left the
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: man wounded and the man still holding on. Not named
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: after a mountain of perfect obedience, not named after a
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: vision of overwhelming clarity, not named after the moment everything
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: finally made sense, named after the wrestling. Named after the
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: wound and the holding on. Israel, the nation, the people,
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: the entire subsequent history of the Covenant family of God,
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: all of it named after a man who grabbed the
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: wrong things his whole life and finally found the right
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: thing to grab and would not let go, even when
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: it cost him the ability to walk without a limp.
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: And that name is still being carried to day, still spoken,
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: still present in the world. The name given in the
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: dark beside the Jabbuk on a night thousands of years ago,
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: has traveled through every century since and has not disappeared.
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: Most of the people carrying it have never stood beside
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: that river. But the name itself carries the memory of
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: the wrestling inside it every time it is spoken in
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: any language. In anysentry, the wound and the holding on
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: still alive.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: In a name.
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: Jacob asked the man his name. He said, why is
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: it that you ask my name? And he blessed him there.
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: He did not answer with a name. He blessed him,
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: as if what Jacob needed to know about who he
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: had been wrestling with was contained entirely in the blessing itself.
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, which means
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: face of God. He said, for I have seen God
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: And the sun rose upon him as he passed Peniel,
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: limping because of his hip. That image the sun rising
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: on Jacob as he walked away from the place of wrestling,
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: limping changed named differently, moving toward the morning that can
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: take and everything he had been dreading for twenty years.
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: He was wounded and he was blessed, both at the
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: same time. Now, I want to say something about the wound.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: That is the most important thing in this entire chapter.
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: The wound was not the price Jacob paid for the blessing.
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: The wound was part of the blessing. It was the
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: thing that would make it impossible for him to ever
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: walk away from this night without carrying it, the thing
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: that would keep the memory of the Jaboc alive in
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: his body. Every single time he put weight on that
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: hip every morning for the rest of his life. You
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: were there. Something happened there. The God you have been
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: running toward and away from your whole life took hold
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: of you in the dark, and you held on, and
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: you were named for it. The wound kept the story alive.
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: And one more thing about this night that I want
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: you to carry with you. The one who came to
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: Jacob could have ended the struggle at any moment. He
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: touched the hip, and the hip was immediately dislocated. He
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: had access to that kind of power the entire night.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: He chose not to use it until the right moment,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: which means that through all the hours of darkness, the
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: wrestling was not something Jacob was surviving despite the other's
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: overwhelming strength. It was something Jacob was being allowed to sustain.
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: He was being held in the struggle in a way
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: that made holding on possible, not easy, not without cost,
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: but Pasibyl, the engagement itself was an act of grace.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: God came to the Jabbuk not to destroy Jacob, but
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: to do something to Jacob that could only be done
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: through the wrestling, something that the ladder at Bethel could
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: not do, something that twenty years in Haran could not do,
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: something that required contact close enough to wound, close enough
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: to hold the sun rose. Jacob limped toward the morning,
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: and the morning contained his brother breathe good night. Chapter eleven.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: The morning after meeting Esau with a limp, the sun
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: was fully up when Jacob saw him, Esau, coming from
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: the direction of sea, and with him four hundred men.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: Twenty years of dreading this moment, twenty years of carrying
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: the memory of his brother's face the last time he
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: had seen it, the rage in it, the grief in it,
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: the sound of that cry in the room where the
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: blessing had been stolen, and the cry following Jacob down
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: the road and across the miles into two decades of
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: foreign exile. He had been afraid of this morning for
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: his entire adult life, and now it was here, and
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: Jacob was limping toward it. This detail matters more than
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: it might first appear. The man walking toward Esau and
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: his four hundred men was not the Jacob who had
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: arrived in Haran twenty years ago, not the strategist who
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: could find the anger in any situation and execute it
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: without his voice breaking, Not the one who had stood
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: in his father's tent wearing his brother's clothes and spoken
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: another man's name. The Jacob had been beside the jabbok
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: last night, and what had come away from the Jabbok
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: this morning was Israel walking with a wound that would
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: never fully heal, moving toward the most important encounter of
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: his life, with a body that reminded him with every
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: step that something had changed in the night that could
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: not be unchanged. He organized his family for the meeting.
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: He put the servant women and their children first, then
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: Leah and her children, then Rachel and Joseph. Last, he
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: placed the ones he loved most at the greatest distance
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: from whatever was coming, and then he himself went ahead
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: of them all. This is the moment worth stopping for,
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: because the Jacob, who had organized the camps at the Jabuk,
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: had put himself at the back, had managed the situation
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: from a position of relative protection. He had done what
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: he had always done, found a way to be present
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: without being the most exposed. But this morning was different.
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: Israel went ahead, not behind the gifts and the servants
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: and the carefully organized family groups, ahead of all of them,
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: out in front, between his family and whatever his brother
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: was bringing With those four hundred men, He was not
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: hiding behind a scheme. He was not managing the encounter
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: from a safe position. He was limping toward his brother,
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: with nothing between them but the space of a field
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: and twenty years of unresolved history. As he drew near,
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: he bowed himself to the ground seven times until he
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: came near to his brother. Seven times, each one a
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: deliberate act of submission, each one a physical statement about
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: who he understood himself to be in relation to the
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: brother he had wronged. He was not approaching as the
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: one who had won and was now returning in triumph.
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: He was approaching as the one who knew exactly what
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: he had done, and was placing himself fully in his
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: brother's hands. He had worn his brother's clothes to deceive
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: his father. Now he was putting his face in the
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: dust before his brother, and Esau ran to meet him.
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: He embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him.
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: And they wept, two brothers standing in a field in
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: the morning light, both of them weeping, the one who
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: had taken everything weeping, the one who had lost everything, weeping.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: Twenty years of distance and silence and unanswered questions present
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: in that embrace present in that weeping. Esau lifted his
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: eyes and saw the women and children, and said, who
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: are these with you? Jacob said, the children whom God
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: has graciously given your servant, the children whom God has
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: graciously given. Not the children I acquired, Not the children
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: my labor secured, the children God has graciously given. He
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: was naming the source correctly, now, not himself God. Esau
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: saw the procession of animals that had been arriving since
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: the night before, and asked about them. Jacob said, to
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: find favor in the sight of my lord. Esau said,
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: I have enough, my brother. Keep what you have for yourself.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: I have enough, my brother. That sentence may be the
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: most quietly extraordinary thing spoken in the entire story of Jacob.
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: The man who had lost his birthright and his blessing,
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: and his brother in the same season of his life,
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: who had carried whatever he had carried through twenty years
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: of building his own life in seer. That man looked
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: at his brother across a field and said, keep it.
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: I have what I need. He had become some one
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: in those twenty years, some one who had found his
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: way to sufficiency without the birthright, some one whose life
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: had filled in around the loss, rather than collapsing into it.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: Some one who could look at the brother who had
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: taken everything and say I have enough, without the words
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: costing him something enormous to say. Jacob pressed him to
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: accept the gift. He said, truly, to see your face
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: is like seeing the face of God, since you have
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: received me with such favor, like seeing the face of God.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: He had seen the face of God the night before
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: at the Jabbuk. He knew now what that looked like,
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: the wound and the wrestling, and the blessing and the
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: new name. And he looked at his brother's face on
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: this morning, coming toward him with an embrace, when four
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: hundred men had seemed to promise something very different, and
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: he said, this is what that looked like, grace coming
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: from the direction he least deserved it. Now, many readers
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: across the sentries have noticed something in this scene that
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: carries a remarkable echo of a story told many centuries later.
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: The running, the falling on the neck, the kiss, the
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: embrace before the full speech could be delivered. These are
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: the same gestures and the same grace that Jesus placed
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: at the center of his parable about a father and
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: a returning son. Whether that connection was conscious or not,
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: we cannot say. But the shape of grace in both
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: scenes is the same, unearned moving toward the one who
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: deserved to have to walk the whole way without anyone
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: coming out to meet him. Both of them were met
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: before they finished the journey. Esau offered to travel with Jacob,
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: to walk beside him and accompany him home. Jacob declined gently.
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: He said the children were tender and the nursing flocks
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: were a concern, and traveling at Esau's pace would be
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: too hard for them. He said he would follow at
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: his own pace and meet Esau in Seyr. He did
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: not go to sea. He went to Sukoth and built
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: himself a house, and then he came to Shechem in
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: the land of Canaan. He was still Jacob in the
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: small moments of ordinary life, even on the morning after
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: the Jabbok, even after the wound and the new name,
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: he managed the exit from the reunion in a way
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: that gave him more room than a straightforward agreement would
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: have produced. The Jabbok had not made him someone other
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: than who he was. It had made him someone who
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: had been through the Jabbok, which is different, and which
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: made him different in the ways that actually mattered breathe.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: I want to say something directly to anyone listening to
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: night who is carrying an Esau somewhere in their life.
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: Someone they wronged, someone they ran from, someone whose reaction
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: they have been dreading for so long that the dread
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: has become a permanent feature of the interior landscape. Someone
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: they are not sure they could face even now. Jacob's
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: story says that the meeting you have been imagining in
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: the dark may not go the way you have been
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: imagining it. It may go the way this meeting went,
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: with running and embrace and weeping. And I have enough,
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: my brother. Not always, not in every story. Esau's grace
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: was not something Jacob could have engineered or predicted. It
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: was a gift from a brother who had done his
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: own work in his own years away from Jacob's sight.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: But it happened two brothers in a field in the morning, weeping,
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: both of them the one who had been afraid of
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: this morning for twenty years, had crossed the river, had
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: walked toward what he had been dreading with a limp,
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: And what met him on the other side was not
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: what he had feared. It was grace coming from a
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: direction he had not dared to hope for the way
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: it tends to come good Night, Chapter twelve. The wounds
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: he carried what the limp meant for the rest of
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: his life. Jacob limped into the rest of his life,
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: not metaphorically. Every morning he woke up and put weight
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: on that hip, and the Jabbok was there. Every step
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: he took across the land of Canaan was accompanied by
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: the physical memory of the night. The god of the
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: universe had taken hold of him in the dark and
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: refused to release him until the blessing came through the wound.
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: He could not forget, His body would not let him forget,
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: And perhaps that was exactly the intention behind it, because
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: forgetting was something Jacob had always been capable of. He
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: had moved quickly through his life from one situation to
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: the next, always looking forward at the angle available, rather
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: than backward at the cost already paid. The wound at
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: the Jabbock made that kind of forgetting impossible. It slowed
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: him down in a way that nothing else had ever
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: slowed him down. It made every step a reminder you
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: were there. Something happened there, and you are different now
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: because of it. He settled in Canaan. He set up
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: an altar and called it El Eloh. He Israel God,
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: the God of Israel, not the God of Abraham, only,
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: not the God of Isaac, only the God of Israel.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: His name now the name given in the dark beside
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: the river. He was claiming it publicly, putting his new
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: name on the altar, beside the name of God. He
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: was Israel, now walking with a limp, building an altar.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: But the life that followed was not uncomplicated, and we
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: should not pretend that the Jabbuk resolved everything cleanly, or
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: that the new name meant the old patterns were fully gone.
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: God told him to return to Bethel, to the place
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: where the sky had opened above the fugitive with the
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: stone under his head, to settle there and build an altar.
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: Jacob told his household to put away the foreign gods
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: that were among them, to purify themselves, to change their garments.
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: They were going up to Bethel, back to the beginning,
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: back to the stone he had set up decades before,
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: Carrying everything the journey had given him and everything it
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: had cost him. They buried the foreign gods under the
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: oak near Shechem, and they journeyed. God appeared to Jacob
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: again at Bethel. He blessed him, and he said, your
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: name is Jacob, but your name shall no longer be
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: called Jacob. Only your name shall be Israel. He said
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: it again, as if the first saying at the Jabbok
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: in the dark had to be confirmed in the daylight
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: at Bethel before it fully settled, as if Jacob needed
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: to hear it standing up in the light of day,
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: the way he had first heard it on his knees
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: in the dark beside the river. You are not Jacob
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: only any more. You are Israel. This is the name
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: I am giving you. This is how I see you.
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: And then Rachel died. She was giving birth to her
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: second son. The labor was hard. She was dying, and
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: she knew it. And she named her son ben One,
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: which means son of my sorrow. Her last act was
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 1: to give her child a name that carried the full
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: weight of the moment she was in, as if even
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: at the end she needed to put into words what
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 1: she was carrying. But Jacob called him Benjamin, son of
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: my right hand. He would not let his son carry
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: his mother's dying grief as his permanent name. He changed
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: it from sorrow to strength, from the name given in
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: the last moments of loss, to a name that pointed
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: forward rather than back. It was an act of love
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: toward the child, and perhaps also an act of love
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: toward Rachel, a way of saying that her death would
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: not define the life she had given. Rachel was buried
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: on the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem, and Jacob
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: set up a pillar over her tomb. The man who
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: had set up a pillar at Bethel when the sky opened,
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: who had set up stones where he and Laban made
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: their covenant, now set up a pillar over the grave
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: of the woman he had loved since the afternoon moon
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: at the well in Haran, when he had rolled a
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: stone away alone and wept when he met her. He
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: marked the places that mattered with stones, because he had
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: learned at Bethel that ordinary ground, where important things happen,
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: deserves to be named, deserves a marker that says something
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: happened here, something real, and I am not going to
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: walk past it as if it did not. Rachel was gone,
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: and Jacob carried that grief into the years that followed
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: the way he carried the limp permanently as part of
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: the texture of who he was now. Isaac died. He
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: was one hundred and eighty years old, full of days,
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: and Esau and Jacob buried him together. The two brothers
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: who had wept in a field, who had gone their
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: separate ways after the reunion, but had not become strangers again,
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: they stood together at their father's grave, both of them present,
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: both of them carrying whatever they carried, both of them
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: still standing. And then there was Joseph. Joseph was Rachel's son,
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: the one Jacob had loved with the particular intensity of
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: a man whose love for the boy's mother had never diminished,
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 1: even in her absence. He gave Joseph a robe of
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: many colors. He showed his love visibly and without concealment.
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: His other sons saw it, and they hated Joseph because
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: of it. The pattern was repeating itself in the next generation,
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: the household divided by visible partiality, the father's favor flowing
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: toward one son in ways the others could see and
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: feel and were not able to simply absorb. Jacob had
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: grown in many ways since the tent of his childhood,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: and he had not grown in this one. He was
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: still capable of loving in a way that divided a room,
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: still capable of the particular blindness that belongs to a
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: love too concentrated on one person to see what it
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: was doing to every one around that person. His sons
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: so old Joseph into slavery in Egypt. They brought his
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: robe back, dipped in goat's blood, and let Jacob draw
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: his own conclusion. And Jacob drew it. He tore his garments,
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: he put on sackcloth. He mourned for his son. Many days.
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: All his sons and daughters came to comfort him. He
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: refused to be comforted. He said, I shall go down
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: to Sheol, to my son mourning. The grief was total.
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: It was the grief of a man not unfamiliar with loss.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: Rachel beside the road the years with Laban, the knight
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: at the Jabbo. He was not a man who had
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: been sheltered from hard things. But this loss undid him
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: in a way the others had not. Because this was
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: Rachel's son, and because the love he had for Joseph
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: was the most unguarded love he had left. Years passed
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: inside that grief, fame came and Jacob sent his sons
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: to Egypt to buy grain, because there was grain in Egypt.
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: He did not know that the one managing the grain
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: in Egypt was Joseph. Joseph had not died in the pit.
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: He had been sold to slave traders, taken to Egypt,
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: falsely accused and imprisoned, forgotten by the people he helped,
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: and then remembered at exactly the right moment, brought before Pharaoh,
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: given wisdom to interpret Pharaoh's dream about seven years of
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: plenty followed by seven years of famine, and Pharaoh had
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: placed him in charge of everything. The son Jacob was
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: mourning as dead was the one feeding the world. But
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: Jacob did not know that. Yet his sons went to
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: Egypt and returned with grain and with a demand from
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: the Egyptian official that they bring their youngest brother, Benjamin
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: the next time. Without Benjamin, they would not be received again.
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: Jacob refused. He said, Joseph is no more and Simeon
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: is no more, and now you would take Benjamin. All
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: this has come against me, All this has come again me.
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: It is the cry of a man who has lived
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: long enough and lost enough that the pattern of loss
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: has become the framework through which he interprets everything. Arriving
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: he was not wrong that he had lost much. The
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: losses were real, but he could not yet see what
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: was actually happening underneath the pattern. He could not see
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: that the God who had promised that Bethel was still working,
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: that the son he was mourning as dead was alive
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: and was the reason there was grain to eat in
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: the middle of a famine that was emptying the world.
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: He eventually sent Benjamin because the famine required it, and
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: the Egyptian official revealed himself. Joseph said to his brothers,
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? And his
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: brothers could not answer him. They were dismayed at his presence.
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: Joseph said, come near to me. I am your brother, Joseph,
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 1: distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here,
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: for God sent me before you to preserve life. God
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: sent me before you. He had seen the whole thing
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: from the inside differently than his brothers had seen it
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: from the outside. He had lived through the pit and
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: the slave traders, and the false accusation, and the prison
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: and the forgotten years, and from inside the living of it.
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: He had arrived at an understanding that could only come
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: from having been inside it. God was in it the
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: whole time. Jacob was told Joseph is still alive and
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: he is ruler over all the land of Egypt. The
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: text says, his heart became numb because he did not
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: believe them. He did not believe them. This is one
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: of the most human moments in the entire story. A
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: father who had built his grief into the architecture of
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: his daily life for years, who had organized his understanding
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: of what was possible around the fixed point of Joseph
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: being dead, hearing that Joseph was alive, and being unable
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: in the first moment to receive it. But then they
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: told him all the words of Joseph, everything that had
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: been said, everything that had happened, and the spirit of Jacob,
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: their father revived. The spirit of Jacob revived, something that
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: had been still inside him for years, began to move again.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: And Israel said, it is enough, Joseph, my son is
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: still alive. I will go and see him before I die.
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: He called himself Israel, there the name from the Jabok.
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: He was Israel in this moment, not Jacob, the grieving father,
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: paralyzed by the fixed certainty of his loss. Israel, the
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: man who had wrestled with God and prevailed, the man
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: whose spirit revived when the impossible turned out to be real.
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: He gathered everything he had and went to Egypt. On
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: the way, God spoke to him in visions of the night,
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: He said, Jacob, Jacob, And Jacob said, here I am. Here,
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: I am the words of some one present, available, ready
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: to hear whatever comes next. Not the bargaining of Bethel,
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: not the careful positioning of a man managing his relationship
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: with God. Simply here I am God said I am God,
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: the God of your father. Do not be afraid to
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: go down to Egypt, for there I will make you
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: into a great nation. I myself will go down with
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: you to Egypt, and I myself will also bring you
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: up again. I myself will go down with you. Still
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: the same promise, across all the years, across Bethel and
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: Haran and the Jabbok and Shechem, and the grief of Rachel,
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: and the grief of Joseph, and the long years of
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: mourning that had made him old, still saying itself into
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: the next situation, Still unconditional, still present, I will not
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: leave you. Jacob came to Egypt, and Joseph made ready
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: his chariot and went up to meet his father. He
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: presented himself to him and fell on his neck and
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: wept on his neck a good while, a father and
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: a son weeping together in a foreign country that neither
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: of them had ever planned to end up in, the
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: son who had been thrown into a pit, and the
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: father who had been told he was dead. Both of
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 1: them present, now alive, together in a place neither of
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: them had chosen, and both of them had needed. Jacob said,
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: now let me die, since I have seen your face
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: and know that you are still alive. He had lived
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: long enough to see the thing he had given up
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: believing he would ever see. The grief that had been
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: the shape of his days had been replaced by something
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: larger than the grief, and the replacement was more than
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: he had dared to hope. For. He lived seventeen more
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: years in Egypt. Near the end of those years, he
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: called Joseph to him. He asked him to swear that
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: he would not bury him in Egypt, but would carry
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: him back to Canaan, to the cave where Abraham and
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: Sarah were buried where Isaac and Rebecca were buried. He
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: wanted to go home, even in death. He wanted his
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: bones in the land of the Promise. Joseph swore it,
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: and Jacob bowed himself on the head of his bed.
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: He called all his sons to him, one by one.
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: He spoke over each of them. He named what he saw,
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: the blessings and the cautions, the futures he could perceive
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: for each line. And then there is a detail near
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: the very end of Jacob's life that I want to
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: stay with because it is the most complete picture we
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: have of who Jacob had become. Joseph brought his two
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: sons to Jacob for a blessing. Manassah was the first born,
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: Ephraim was the younger. Joseph positioned them so that Jacob's
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 1: right hand would fall naturally on Manassa, the elder. Right
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: hand carried the greater blessing. The firstborn deserved it. The
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: order was the order, but Jacob crossed his hands. He
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: put his right hand on Ephraim the younger, and his
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: left on manasse the elder. Joseph saw it and tried
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 1: to correct it. He took his father's hand to move
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 1: it from Ephraim to Manasseh. He said, not this way,
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: my father, This one is the firstborn. Put your right
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: hand on his head. Jacob refused. He said, I know,
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: my son, I know, he also shall become a people,
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: and he also shall be great. But his younger brother
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: shall be greater than he. He crossed his hands on purpose.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: He placed the younger above the elder. On purpose. He
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 1: saw something Joseph did not see. Now, hold that image
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: alongside everything we have walked through in this story. This
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: was the man who had grabbed his brother's heel in
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 1: the womb, who had bargained for the birthright beside a
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 1: p of soup, who had worn his brother's skin to
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: receive a blessing meant for the first born, who had
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: spent his entire early life working the angle that put
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: the younger above the elder, including himself, and here at
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: the end, with his eyes dim and his body near death,
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: and the limp from the jabbok still present in every movement,
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: he crossed his hands. He placed the younger above the elder.
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: But this time it was not a scheme, not a deception,
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: not a transaction executed in some one else's darkness. It
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: was vision, the sight of a man who had lived
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: long enough and been broken open enough, and been blessed
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: enough to see something real, to see what God saw,
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: to let his hands go where his eyes were pointing,
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: rather than where conventions said they should rest. The man
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: who had taken the blessing by deception was now giving
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: the blessing by perception. The grabbing had become seeing the
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: wound at the Jabbok had done its full work. He
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: breathed his last and was gathered to his people, and
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: his sons carried him back to Canaan, just as he
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 1: had asked, and buried him in the cave of Makpela.
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: He went home breathe. The life of Jacob resists simple summary.
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: It does not compress into a clean moral lesson. It
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 1: is too full for that two human, too broken and
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: too blessed at the same time. He was a man
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: who grabbed for most of his life, who believed the
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: direct path was not available to him, who learned from
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: a divided household that the blessing you need has to
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: be seized before someone else gets there first. He was
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: wrong about that, and he spent twenty years learning how
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: wrong he was, and then a knight at the Jabbuk,
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 1: having that wrongness met with something he had not expected.
• 2:11:55
  Speaker 1: Not punishment, not rejection, not the finally exhausted patience of
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 1: a god who had run out of grace for his scheming.
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 1: A wrestling, a wound, a new name, and a blessing
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: that came through the wound rather than despite it. He
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: carried the limp for the rest of his life, and
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: the limp was the story, telling everyone who saw him
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 1: walk that something had happened to this man in the
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: dark that had not happened to other men, That he
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: had been somewhere most people have not been, that he
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 1: had held on when letting go would have been easier,
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: and that he had come back from that dark carrying
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: something he had not taken into it. The wound was
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 1: the testimony, and the testimony was still walking every step
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. Good Night, Chapter thirteen,
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: to you tonight the God who wrestles back. The story
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: is complete. A family broke before the first breath was taken,
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: a bowl of soup, and a life decision made in
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: the wrong direction. Goat's skins on the hands of a
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: man who could not believe the blessing would come to
• 2:13:10
  Speaker 1: him without his help. A fugitive on a road with
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 1: a stone under his head and the sky opening above
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: him in the dark, twenty years in the school of
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 1: a difficult man who showed him his own reflection. A
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 1: prayer beside a river that was the most honest thing
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: he had ever said, a wound that never healed, a
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: name given in the dark, a brother running toward him
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: with grace he had not earned. A son returned from
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 1: what had seemed like the permanent finality of death. A
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: pair of crossed hands giving the last blessing by sight
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: rather than by scheme. That is the story of Jacob,
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: and it has been traveling toward this room for thousands
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 1: of years, not as a history lesson, not as a
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: theological case study, not as a text to be analyzed
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: from a respectful distance, as a mirror. So let me
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 1: come to you directly now, because there are several people
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 1: listening to night who are inside this story in ways
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: they may not have fully recognized. Yet. There is some
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: one here who has been running from something for a
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 1: very long time, not necessarily the same kind of running
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 1: Jacob did, not necessarily a physical flight across hundreds of
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: miles to a foreign country, but running in the ways
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 1: that people run when facing something directly feels too costly,
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 1: running into busyness, into the management of surface things, into
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 1: the careful maintenance of a version of yourself that does
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 1: not have to look at what is waiting on the
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: other side of the river. And something in the last
• 2:14:42
  Speaker 1: few years, or the last few months, or the last
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 1: few weeks has brought you to the bank. The road
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 1: you have been on has narrowed. The river is in
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: front of you, and on the other side is the
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 1: thing you have been moving away from. The relationship broke,
• 2:15:01
  Speaker 1: the decision that cannot be undone, the conversation you have
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 1: been postponing, the version of yourself that you are not
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: sure you can face in daylight. Jacob's story says this,
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 1: the meeting on the other side is not necessarily what
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 1: you have been imagining it to be in the dark.
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 1: The Esau, who was coming with four hundred men, who
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: had every legal and moral right to be what Jacob feared,
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 1: did not come as what Jacob feared. He came running
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 1: with an embrace with I have enough, my brother. Not
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 1: every reunion with the thing we have been avoiding goes
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: that way. I will not promise you they do, but
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: some do more than we expect, and the only way
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: to find out is to cross cross the river. The
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 1: crossing is the beginning of the morning you have been dreading,
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 1: and the morning may hold something you have not dared
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 1: to hope for. There is some one here who is
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 1: carrying a wound that has not healed, something that happened
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 1: that changed the way you moved through the world, something
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 1: you cannot unknow, something that left a mark that is
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 1: still visible to you even when no one else can
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: see it. And you have been treating that wound primarily
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: as evidence of something that went wrong, as the record
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 1: of a loss, as proof of something that should not
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: have happened to you. Jacob limped for the rest of
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: his life, and the limp was not only what it
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: cost him, It was what it carried. It was the
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 1: walking testimony to a knight that had changed everything. It
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 1: was the reason people who knew his story could look
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: at the way he walked and understand without being told,
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 1: that this was a man who had been somewhere most
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 1: people had not been, who had held on when letting
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 1: go would have been easier, who had come back from
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 1: the dark with something he had not carried into it.
• 2:16:53
  Speaker 1: The wound can be the testimony not a testimony to
• 2:16:56
  Speaker 1: what was done to you, a testimony to what you survived,
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: to what you found in the surviving, to the name
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: that was given in the place where the wound happened.
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 1: Your wound is not only what it cost you. It
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: may be the most important thing you have to offer
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 1: the people around you, who are in their own night,
• 2:17:14
  Speaker 1: beside their own river. Let it be that there is
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: someone here who has been trying to secure the blessing
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: through their own hands for so long that they have
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: forgotten what it would feel like to simply receive it.
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 1: Jacob spent most of his life convinced that the blessing
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 1: had to be taken, that it would not come naturally
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: to him, that he had to find the angle, had
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: to work, the situation had to be someone other than
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 1: himself to receive what he needed. He was wrong. He
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 1: was wrong for decades before he found out he was wrong.
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 1: The blessing at the Jabbuk was not something he negotiated
• 2:17:50
  Speaker 1: skillfully enough to deserve. It was given by the one
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 1: who had come to him in the dark, who had
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 1: stayed through the night, who had been willing to wound
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: him in the process, but who blessed him at the
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 1: end of it, the blessing you have been working so
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 1: hard to secure, the love you have been trying to earn,
• 2:18:09
  Speaker 1: the future you have been trying to engineer into existence.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: Those things are not held by some one waiting for
• 2:18:16
  Speaker 1: you to find the right angle. They are held by
• 2:18:19
  Speaker 1: the one who came to you in the dark. And
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: the question is not whether you can be clever enough
• 2:18:23
  Speaker 1: or work hard enough. The question is whether you are
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 1: willing to hold on through the night, through the wound,
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 1: through the moment when everything in you says it would
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 1: be so much easier to let go. Are you willing
• 2:18:36
  Speaker 1: to say I will not let you go unless you
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 1: bless me? Because that sentence said in genuine desperation and
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: genuine faith in the dark beside a river is the
• 2:18:48
  Speaker 1: most powerful thing Jacob ever said, More powerful than any
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: scheme he ever devised, more effective than any plan he
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 1: ever executed. It was honest, it was direct. It named
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 1: what he needed without dressing it in strategy or covering
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: it in some one else's identity. And it worked. There
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 1: is some one here to night who is not sure
• 2:19:10
  Speaker 1: that God is the kind of God who actually engages
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: with people like them. Not the formal philosophical version of
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: that question, the personal one, the one that is harder
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 1: to say out loud. Whether a God who knows everything
• 2:19:25
  Speaker 1: you have done would still choose to show up beside
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: the river and wrestle with you through the night rather
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 1: than simply look the other way. Whether someone with your
• 2:19:34
  Speaker 1: specific history qualifies for that kind of attention. Jacob's answer
• 2:19:39
  Speaker 1: to that question is the entire book of Genesis. He
• 2:19:42
  Speaker 1: qualified not because of his virtue, not because of his consistency,
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: or his moral record, or the quality of his faith.
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: He qualified because God had said I will not leave you,
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: and God had meant it through every possible and imaginable
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 1: circum stance of a life that gave God many opportunities
• 2:20:03
  Speaker 1: to change that statement. He did not change it. Not
• 2:20:07
  Speaker 1: when Jacob put the goat skins on his hands, Not
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 1: when Jacob lied in his father's tent, Not when Jacob
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: bargained at Bethel as if the unconditional promise needed conditions
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: attached to make it real. Not when Jacob spent twenty
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 1: years scheming in Haran, not in any of it. Not
• 2:20:26
  Speaker 1: once did. The eye will not leave you become something
• 2:20:29
  Speaker 1: other than what it said. He kept it through all
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 1: of it. He is keeping it tonight. Whatever the specific
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 1: thing is that your mind returns to when you are
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: trying to assess whether someone like you deserves the kind
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 1: of faithfulness that showed up at the Jabbok, whatever that
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 1: thing is, Jacob's story says it is not too much.
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 1: God wrestles with people like Jacob, which means he wrestles
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 1: with people like us. Now let me say the last thing,
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 1: and I want to say it carefully, because as it
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 1: is the thing I most want you to carry out
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 1: of this night and into the mourning that is coming.
• 2:21:05
  Speaker 1: The name God gave Jacob was not a reward for
• 2:21:08
  Speaker 1: wrestling skillfully. It was a description of the relationship Israel.
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 1: One who wrestles with God, one who persists with God,
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 1: one who strives and does not let go. God named
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 1: the people who would carry his covenant through history after
• 2:21:26
  Speaker 1: a man after a specific act, after a night of
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 1: wrestling that left the man wounded and the man still
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 1: holding on. Not named after a mountain of perfect obedience,
• 2:21:37
  Speaker 1: not named after a vision of overwhelming clarity, not named
• 2:21:41
  Speaker 1: after the moment everything finally made sense. Named after the wrestling,
• 2:21:47
  Speaker 1: named after the wound, and the holding on and the
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 1: refusal to release, even when release would have been so
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 1: much easier. The wrestling is not the opposite of faith.
• 2:21:57
  Speaker 1: For Jacob, it was faith, the most costly and honest
• 2:22:01
  Speaker 1: and genuine faith he ever demonstrated. Not the performance of
• 2:22:05
  Speaker 1: the right rituals, not the careful management of a religious obligation,
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 1: holding on in the dark to the one who could
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 1: bless him with a dislocated hip through the night until
• 2:22:17
  Speaker 1: the dawn. That is what faith looks like sometimes, not beautiful,
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: not serene. Not the faith of someone who has everything
• 2:22:26
  Speaker 1: resolved and all their questions answered. The faith of someone
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: who is wounded and exhausted and has been in the
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 1: dark for hours and knows that the thing they are
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 1: holding on to is the only thing that can give
• 2:22:38
  Speaker 1: them what they actually need, and will not let go.
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 1: If that is where you are to night, If you
• 2:22:45
  Speaker 1: are the person beside the river in the dark, with
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 1: nothing left but the holding on, then you are in
• 2:22:51
  Speaker 1: the right story. You are in exactly the right story.
• 2:22:56
  Speaker 1: Let the prayer come.
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 2: Now, Father, We come to you at the end of
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 2: a long night and a long story, a story that
• 2:23:05
  Speaker 2: began in the womb of a woman who prayed an
• 2:23:08
  Speaker 2: honest question and received an answer that changed the direction
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 2: of everything that moved through a bowl of soup and
• 2:23:15
  Speaker 2: a stolen blessing and a stone under the head of
• 2:23:18
  Speaker 2: a fugitive on a dark road that carried us through
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 2: twenty years in the school of a difficult man, and
• 2:23:25
  Speaker 2: a prayer beside a river and a wound that never healed,
• 2:23:28
  Speaker 2: and a name given in the dark, beside water that
• 2:23:31
  Speaker 2: is still flowing to day, and arrived here in this
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 2: room to night with whoever is listening. Thank you for Jacob,
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 2: not for his virtue, for his honesty, for the way
• 2:23:46
  Speaker 2: his story refuses to clean itself up or resolve itself neatly,
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 2: For the way it insists on being as complicated and
• 2:23:54
  Speaker 2: as broken and as genuinely blessed as it actually was.
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 2: Thank you for preserving a store, this human and this reel.
• 2:24:03
  Speaker 2: There is someone listening tonight who is still on the
• 2:24:06
  Speaker 2: near bank of the river, who has sent everything ahead,
• 2:24:09
  Speaker 2: and is standing in the dark and does not yet
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 2: know what the crossing is going to require. Meet them
• 2:24:15
  Speaker 2: here before the crossing, in the not yet of this
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 2: particular night, tell them, with the only voice that can
• 2:24:23
  Speaker 2: reach that place, that the God who showed up at
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 2: the Jabbock was already there before Jacob arrived, already present
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 2: in the dark, already moving toward the one who was
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 2: standing alone beside the water with nowhere left to run.
• 2:24:38
  Speaker 2: He is already there. There is someone listening tonight who
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 2: is carrying a wound they have been treating as evidence
• 2:24:45
  Speaker 2: of failure, who has been limping through their days and
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 2: hiding the limp, or hating the limp, or believing that
• 2:24:52
  Speaker 2: the limp disqualifies them from something they were made for.
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 2: Let them hear what Jacob's limp was saying with every
• 2:24:59
  Speaker 2: step he took for the rest of his life. You
• 2:25:02
  Speaker 2: were there. Something happened there. The God who made you
• 2:25:06
  Speaker 2: came close enough to touch you, close enough to wound you.
• 2:25:10
  Speaker 2: And you are walking proof that you survived the night
• 2:25:14
  Speaker 2: and came away with a name and a blessing that
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 2: the wound itself is carrying forward. The limp is not
• 2:25:20
  Speaker 2: the disqualification. The limp is the testimony. There is someone
• 2:25:25
  Speaker 2: listening to night who has been trying to secure the
• 2:25:27
  Speaker 2: blessing through their own hands for longer than they want
• 2:25:31
  Speaker 2: to admit. Who is tired in the specific way that
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 2: comes from working very hard at something that was never
• 2:25:38
  Speaker 2: meant to be worked for. Who has been wearing the
• 2:25:41
  Speaker 2: wrong skin and speaking the wrong name, and wondering why,
• 2:25:45
  Speaker 2: even when the plan succeeds, it does not feel like
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 2: what they actually needed. Let them hear the question from
• 2:25:52
  Speaker 2: the river bank, what is your name? Let them say
• 2:25:56
  Speaker 2: the name that is actually theirs, not the name of
• 2:25:59
  Speaker 2: the version of themselves they have been presenting to the world,
• 2:26:04
  Speaker 2: the real one, the honest one, the one that includes
• 2:26:08
  Speaker 2: everything they have done and everything they have failed to do.
• 2:26:12
  Speaker 2: And let them hear the answer that came to Jacob
• 2:26:15
  Speaker 2: when he finally said his real name out loud in
• 2:26:17
  Speaker 2: the dark. You shall no longer be called only by
• 2:26:20
  Speaker 2: that name. I am giving you a new one. There
• 2:26:24
  Speaker 2: is some one listening to night for whom faith has
• 2:26:27
  Speaker 2: become mostly a wrestling who has spent more time in
• 2:26:30
  Speaker 2: the dark beside the river than at the top of
• 2:26:33
  Speaker 2: the ladder, with the sky open and clear above them,
• 2:26:36
  Speaker 2: who sometimes wonders if the wrestling means something is wrong
• 2:26:40
  Speaker 2: with them, if genuine faith is supposed to feel more
• 2:26:44
  Speaker 2: settled than what they are carrying. Let them hear what
• 2:26:47
  Speaker 2: the name Israel means, let it land in the place
• 2:26:51
  Speaker 2: where the doubt has been living. The God of the
• 2:26:54
  Speaker 2: Covenant named his people after the wrestling, not after the
• 2:26:58
  Speaker 2: easy seasons, after the clear and luminous moments of certainty,
• 2:27:03
  Speaker 2: after the nights of honest struggle, after the holding on,
• 2:27:07
  Speaker 2: when everything said to let go. The wrestling is not
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 2: evidence that something is broken. Sometimes it is the most
• 2:27:14
  Speaker 2: alive and honest and present faith a person can have.
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 2: And the God on the other side of the wrestling
• 2:27:21
  Speaker 2: is not trying to break free from your grip. He
• 2:27:24
  Speaker 2: is staying through the night, as long as the night requires,
• 2:27:29
  Speaker 2: until the blessing comes, and the blessing always come. Father.
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 2: As sleep approaches, for each person listening, let whatever Jacob
• 2:27:39
  Speaker 2: they are carrying become a little lighter to night, not
• 2:27:43
  Speaker 2: because the weight has been removed, but because the one
• 2:27:46
  Speaker 2: who was present at Bethel and at Heron, and at
• 2:27:49
  Speaker 2: the Jabbock, and at Peniel, and beside Rachel's grave on
• 2:27:53
  Speaker 2: the road to Bethlehem, and at the reunion in Egypt,
• 2:27:56
  Speaker 2: and at the bedside with the crossed hands, that one
• 2:28:00
  Speaker 2: is here, and he is the one who said I
• 2:28:03
  Speaker 2: will not leave you and meant it across the entire
• 2:28:06
  Speaker 2: length and breadth and wound and blessing of one man's
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 2: very longed and very human life. He means it to
• 2:28:13
  Speaker 2: night over, yours, go into the rest of this night,
• 2:28:18
  Speaker 2: held by the God who wrestles, who wounds, who blesses,
• 2:28:24
  Speaker 2: who names, who keeps every promise he has ever spoken
• 2:28:28
  Speaker 2: to the people he has chosen to walk beside through
• 2:28:32
  Speaker 2: the dark. You are not alone in this room. You
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 2: have never been alone in this room. The river is dark,
• 2:28:39
  Speaker 2: and the night is long, and the God of Jacob
• 2:28:42
  Speaker 2: is here in this room with you.
• 2:28:46
  Speaker 1: To night.
• 2:28:47
  Speaker 2: Limping is allowed, holding on is enough. The dawn is coming,
• 2:28:53
  Speaker 2: and when it comes, it will rise on you the
• 2:28:55
  Speaker 2: way it rose on Jacob, on a man who was
• 2:28:59
  Speaker 2: wounded and blest, and walking differently than he had walked
• 2:29:03
  Speaker 2: the night before. Both things true, both things real, both
• 2:29:09
  Speaker 2: things yours. Good night, beloved, Rest well, you are known,
• 2:29:16
  Speaker 2: you are held, You are blest for ever and ever.
• 2:29:21
  Speaker 1: Amen.