A Sacred Scuffle (Genesis 32:22-31)

Pastor LyAnna Johnson takes on the story of Jacob wrestling an unnamed figure until daybreak, refusing the tidy, well-lit religious art version in favor of the real one: two bodies in the dirt, all night, ending in a limp and a name change. She reframes Israel, literally "wrestles with God," as a kind of blessing on the struggle itself, arguing that some of the hardest, most honest encounters with God don't look peaceful at all. Drawing on her own therapy work and the idea of the "wounded healer," borrowed from Nadia Bolz-Weber's line about preaching from scars, not wounds, she makes the case that healing has to come before helping others, and that only the person who lived through something gets to decide whether it becomes beautiful. Sermon date: August 2, 2026