Jacob Renamed

The reading today is from Genesis 32, 22 to 32.

The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of Jabbak.

He took them and sent them across the stream and everything else that he had.

And Jacob was left alone.

And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.

Then he said, Let me go, for the day is broken.

But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.

And he said to him, What is your name?

And he said, Jacob.

Then he said, Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.

Then Jacob asked him, Please tell me your name.

But he said, Why is it that you ask my name?

And there he blessed him.

So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, For I've seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

Therefore, to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob's hip on the sinew of the thigh.

This is God's word.

Please be seated.

Okay, we're back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman, the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver, and we've finally made it to one of my favorite passages in all of Genesis.

And we've been in Genesis forever, I think.

And we'll continue to be, perhaps until uh Jesus comes back.

And there's uh we've reached this moment, which is this climactic moment in Jacob's life.

And it's where Jacob finally receives the name Israel, and it takes place with this strange wrestling match in this in-between location.

So I'll pray for us and then kind of set the scene.

Sound good?

Holy Father, I pray that you would help us to grasp this text.

Lord, that you would show us the relevance of it for our particular moment.

Lord, we pray that you would encounter us in the same way that you encountered Jacob, that we might see the blessing that you have for our lives in the name that you have given to us in Christ.

Lord, I lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay, so where were we?

Jacob just fled from working for his father-in-law named Laban.

Now, Laban was a bad man.

And so he fled in the night, and after working for him for 20 years, he took his wives and his children, and now they're on the run.

Now, when they were on the run, Laban actually tracked them down, and they make a covenant of peace.

And so Laban is no longer coming to attack Jacob.

So after that covenant of peace is made, Jacob is still in this in-between state.

He's left the place where he was exiled and built his family for 20 years.

He's no longer in his old home.

And he's headed back to the land of promise.

But he's not at the land of promise yet.

Instead, he's in this in-between wilderness place.

And he's walking towards Esau.

Now, Esau was Jacob's brother.

Jacob's brother, who Jacob had tricked and cheated out of the birthright from his father.

And he actually ended up fleeing from his home because Esau, his brother, was set on killing Jacob.

So now, picture this place where Jacob is.

He's left the home that he's known for 20 years.

And now he's in this in-between land, and he's walking towards his old home and what's there, but his brother, who hates him, who the last time he saw him, said he was going to kill him, and worse than that, had good reason to kill him.

His guilt, Jacob's own guilt, is just over the horizon.

Jacob sees this moment coming, and he sees that he will encounter his violent brother Esau.

But Jacob, somewhat out of character for him, he's dealing forthrightly with the situation.

What Jacob is doing is, so Jacob knows that he's headed towards Esau, and he sends out messengers from his own caravan.

And these messengers go and visit Esau, and Jacob explains the situation plainly.

There's no manipulation in the way that Jacob explains it.

He says, I've been with Laban these past 20 years, and the Lord has prospered me.

And he says he offers him this sort of olive branch and he even refers to Esau as Lord.

He's dealing respectfully with his brother, who he has good reason to think will try and kill him, because those are the terms that they left on.

So then the messengers come back after delivering that news to Esau, and the messengers share this terrible, ambiguous news.

They say, Esau himself is coming to meet you, and he's bringing 400 men with him.

Not good news.

That's not what you want to hear when you're out in the open range in the wilderness, no walls to protect you.

Hey, you know that brother who you just sent a message to, who the last time you saw him tried to kill you?

He's coming to see you.

Great news.

He brought 400 men with him.

No, this is a terrifying thing to hear.

It's ambiguous and strange and vague.

It could be good.

It's likely bad.

And so Jacob goes into this extremely stressful period.

And we see him handle it actually pretty well.

Jacob makes a plan.

He divides his camps so that if one camp is taken, there will still be another camp that will survive.

And then he prays this beautiful prayer to the Lord that reminds him of the Lord's promises to be with him.

And then he plans again, which is sending his children in wife away so that he would be alone.

And then he prays again and then he plans again.

It's a good picture of what a faithful response to a really terrible, potentially hor horrific situation would be.

Planning, praying, planning, praying.

That's a good way to go about things.

Finally, he sends a huge series of gifts to go before him to meet Esau and these 400 men.

He sends camels and, you know, the things we all want.

And as these gifts go, he he instructs them to say that Jacob is following just behind these gifts.

You know, Jacob is coming just behind these gifts.

He says this: he says, I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me, and afterward I shall see his face.

Perhaps he will accept me.

This is the heart of Jacob's cry.

Perhaps my brother will accept me.

He is treating his brother in a sense kind of like a god to be appeased.

Almost like the way that with like a pagan god, you would purchase the blessing of that Lord just by sending gifts ahead of you.

But we'll find as the story continues, we won't really see it this week, we'll see it next week.

We'll find as the story continues that there is no appeasement here, that there's no purchasing your way out of guilt.

There's only grace to answer that.

So we see in all of Jacob's movement that there is no actual ability to eliminate this middle space that he is in.

This is a time of total flux for him.

There's no homeland that he is a part of, and the homeland that he has been called to carries within itself this memory of his guilt, which may in fact lead to his death.

And he tries to appease it, but he knows that this appeasement is likely not going to happen.

So he makes this final decision to send his wife and his child and his children across a ford, and for him to remain on the other side alone to face Esau when he comes.

It's the middle of the night, and Jacob is here alone, and the memory of his guilt is coming across the horizon.

It is about as much uncertainty as you can have in any particular moment.

Now I don't know if you know this, but some of the best preaching in the world is available online for free.

Do you guys know that?

But one of the things that I I think that I can offer you are sermons that are really particular to our church, to Redemption Church Denver.

You can't hear these anywhere else, except for YouTube.

Later.

Our sermons get get tens of views.

But there's a wonder here in the way that God has shaped the church, in that I can speak to you.

And so I try and make it a habit to not get to not preach to the generalities of our culture.

Because I know you all, I know your names, I know the particular things that you're going through.

And often I think that the generalities of our cultural moment, these broad cultural movements, are quite frankly, they're more intoxicating than I think they are generative.

It's something that we relate to more like an addiction than we do where we're developing helpful insights.

But I want to talk broadly for a second.

Because I think that we're in a time that is worth naming.

And it's a time that is a lot like Jacob's moment here.

It is very in between.

There is this sense that the old world has gone.

The old institutions that used to provide such structure and such certainty simply do not anymore.

And our way of relating to them as a way of getting rid of the anxiety that we all face in our lives of relating to the traditional institutions that used to provide some stability and some respite from that anxiety, they no longer do that.

At this moment, we are in a place that is much more like an in-between than it is an exile where we know we're in exile or a promised land where we know we've been headed.

I think this is a good picture of our cultural moment.

And I know I want I want to bring this up because I know that you are experiencing this.

You're experiencing this at nearly every level of your interactions.

We are experiencing the tension as a culture, not just broadly, but even personally.

The tension of being in this type of an in-between moment.

Consider this.

All of the information in the world used to take place at this level that was about the size of the whole world.

Do you see what I mean by that?

Now, all of the information it was almost transcendent in that regard.

If you wanted to be flooded with all of the information in the world, you would you would have to like travel the whole world in order to make something like that happen.

Now, this transcendent information that covers almost the whole world and the trends of the way that we move as a people is made completely imminent to just the size of your phone.

And so all of this anxiety of this system is targeted and made like bespokely, I think that's a word, bespokedly, less of a word, for you, tailored to you every day.

So all of the problems and the in the particular diagnoses and the issues of the day are targeted and aimed at you, and the they're telling you over and over again to consider these are the most real things.

Now, what we see in a world like this, where where this transcendence of information is brought down to this immanence of scale at the at the human level is that we're tricked into engaging with the world at the at this level and structure that we don't actually scale up to.

It's just that the anxiety scales down to us.

And we can see that the structures and institutions that used to filter the important information down to a human level have been replaced by a sort of chaotic noise.

Because have you tried to track a trend of who's winning?

I I don't think there is one.

I think what we're seeing now is the wins and the losses are just getting stacked closer and closer together.

That's what the world looks like to me.

And so we're in this, we're in this point where because of the shape of our cultural moment, you as an individual stand alone against this flood.

And you're not in the old world, but there's a new world coming, and you don't know what it is.

We don't know what the institutions will be like that might regain shape.

They could be better, they could be worse.

Right now it feels very up for grabs.

Now, in this type of moment where all of the transcendence of the world's anxiety is pointed at you individually, there's only one thing that stands there.

It's an identity.

What you need to be able to stand in a moment like this is an identity that could be forged as by fire.

Because that's what this moment requires.

When you stand alone against a flood that is as large as the world, then you require an identity that could sustain, so that could sustain itself as though through fire.

Edwin Friedman describes anxious systems like this.

And I think thinking of our culture right now in terms of an anxious family dynamic, I think is very helpful.

So I think it's very true of what's happening.

We're in an anxious system.

And he describes it like this this is what anxious systems tend to function like.

More aggressive members are in a perpetually argumentative stance, and the more passive are in a constant state of flinch.

Right?

This is just out of touch I am.

I thought that would get a last.

I read that and I was like, that's so true.

Right?

Doesn't that the more aggressive members in an anxious system like this are in a perpetually argumentative stance, like we're just the next argument one away from things settling down.

And the more passive members are in a constant state of flinch, of like, if we just all stopped arguing, this would go away.

I'm here to tell you, neither of those are true.

It's much worse than that.

It's much worse than that.

You're going to require to live in a world like we live in now, you are going to require a sturdier, more able-to-accept challenges type of identity than it you might have ever imagined.

This is the end of an era.

I'm just gonna say it.

You kind of need to know it.

You know, I don't, it's not gospel.

Okay?

This is different from what I'm about to do, which is just pure exegesis.

But I think if it goes unlabeled, then you're more likely to be tossed about by it than you are to be able to name it and find your stability in the word of God for this identity.

So I just hope to offer that to you.

We've had end of eras before.

Want to hear my favorite end of an era quote?

Doesn't matter what you say.

I already wrote it down.

At the end of the great theological work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is about it by Hunter Thompson.

It's about an end of an era.

That's what that book is about.

It's about the end of the 60s.

This is the way he describes it.

We had all the momentum.

We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west.

And with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high watermark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The 60s contained this incredible optimism.

And when you were riding that optimism of what would breakthrough into a world of peace, you know, if you were turning on, tuning in, dropping out, then you were in that wave, and it felt like this was an era that was unstoppable and inevitable.

And then what happened?

It crashed like a wave.

And all that was available to see of it was just a high water mark.

Do you know?

Do you know what isn't there when you can see the high watermark?

Water isn't there.

That's why you can see the mark.

Ends of eras happen.

I think we are at a moment where we have used up all the fuel of our scientific optimism, and it no longer serves us anymore.

We've used up the fuel of modernist rationalist thinking, and it does not work.

You hear the optimism in that quote.

We had all the momentum, like riding a wave, and then it crashed.

Here's where we stand now.

In this in-between, in these vague moments, we know a new world is coming.

And we know that it will carry with it some of the memory of our own guilt.

Because we'll have some part in creating it.

Which means that there's a part of this where we ought to be afraid of what's next.

We don't know what it is.

And it will carry a memory of our own guilt with it.

I'm not bringing this up to try and take your problems and blow them up to a global scale.

I'm not bringing this up in the way that social media brings it up to you to make this narrative the center of your life and then uh monetize the attention that you give to it.

You know, we look back on these ancient cultures and we think, what is what a foolish thing for to set up something that's unthinking in the middle of their society and then everybody pay their attention to it and then crown it with deity.

But we operate precisely the same way.

What are idols made of?

Attention.

So I I'm not doing I'm I'm not saying this or going so big in scale this morning in order to draw your attention to the place that the idols are already commanding you draw it.

I'm trying to do precisely the opposite.

Because you need to recognize the mistake of scale.

The mistake of scale is this that all of the information in the world which exists at this transcendent level has been scaled down to you and is technologically pointed at you At you.

And what you can do, what it can effectively give to you, is its anxiety and its paralysis.

It can even make you want to fight.

But here's the trick you can't fight it.

It's too big.

You don't scale up.

The anxiety scales down and your fight doesn't scale up.

That's why the world just looks like a swirl of unproductive energy right now.

The anxiety scales down, you don't scale up to the problems.

But if you have the sense that you need to fight and you need to fight something that's transcendent and that matters, I'm here to tell you, you're right.

You're right.

And we see that take place in today's story with Jacob.

Because in this very place, in this very in-between, the most transcendent of scales, God himself scales down to the human level to pick a fight.

And today we're going to see that fight.

It's the longest intro I've ever written.

It's not a very long text, though.

Genesis 32, 24.

And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.

It's an odd text.

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.

How did it start?

Where did this man come from?

It's a slow reveal in this text.

Jacob alone, he knows his guilt is just on the horizon.

So let's try and enter Jacob's imagination.

Who is it that I'm fighting with?

Well, first we might imagine Esau came.

Maybe Esau, the one who carried this memory of Jacob's guilt, came just over the horizon.

And Jacob knew Esau's trying to kill me, so I better fight this guy.

Maybe it's Laban.

Remember, Laban made that covenant of peace, but Laban is one to consistently go back on his word.

Maybe he rethought it and said, I want my household gods and my daughters back.

And so Laban shows up again across the horizon to fight him.

Jacob has good reason to fight Laban.

Twenty years of a miserable indentured servitude was a good reason to fight Laban.

Or perhaps it was Isaac, Jacob's father.

You know, their last interaction, well, just before their last interaction, Jacob had tricked his father into thinking that he was his brother Esau.

And he heard his father bless Esau in such a way that it would put Jacob forever in Esau's service.

He came face to face with this reality that his father did not really love him.

He had good reason to fight his dad.

Who was it?

You see, when you consider all of the people that could so quickly come to Jacob's mind of who he was fighting, you realize Jacob has good reason to fight.

This would have been built up, something almost pent up in Jacob's life.

And then when we think back on what Jacob's life was, it wasn't really a life of fighting.

It wasn't a life of wrestling any of those peoples.

It was a life of running.

He runs away from Isaac, he runs away from Esau.

He runs away from Laban.

He's for the first time headed towards Esau, but he's trying to tactically sort of run away from what's coming his way.

But now, with this man, he fights.

Genesis 32, 25.

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.

Okay, this is so strange.

The man sees that he doesn't prevail against Jacob.

It means they're wrestling a really long time.

Jacob's name means like a trickster, deceiver.

But it also has this other connotation of tenacity.

There's something about him that's that's unstoppable.

The guy just keeps showing up.

He's like Rocky.

And he we see this even like in the bad deals with Laban.

It's like, you tricked me, and I worked seven years for the wrong daughter.

I'll just work seven more for the right one.

The guy's tenacious.

He's almost unshakable.

And we see that in his character here.

God, not to give away the ending, it's God who he's wrestling, is wrestling him all night.

The man, the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob.

The fight was just going to continue.

But then the man touches Jacob's hip socket, touches his hip socket, doesn't hit or like, I don't know, like arm bar.

What is that with a leg?

Leg bar?

I don't know, jujitsu, but I've heard terms like that.

So I thought I'd try them here.

And Jacob's hip was put out of joint.

So I I know enough jiu-jitsu to know that would really hurt as he wrestled with him.

Okay, look at what we've got.

We've got a man who isn't prevailing against Jacob.

But at the same time, this man who's not prevailing against Jacob has this unthinkable reserve of power.

And with this power, he's able to just with a touch undo Jacob's hip socket.

Now, this power that was displayed by the man to Jacob was a revelation.

And I mean literally, it was a revelation of the one whom he was wrestling.

The man says this in verse 26 Let me go, for the day has broken.

But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.

Okay, picture this fight.

You're fighting one another.

You've just been broken with your hip socket.

And then the man is like, look, it's almost daytime.

What do you say we wrap this thing up?

And Jacob said, all of a sudden, Jacob isn't punching or pushing away.

He won't let go of the man now.

He won't let go of him.

He says, I won't let you go unless you bless me.

We saw when we traced his life that Jacob's life had been a life of running, a life of almost constant running.

He would deceive and then just try and stay ahead of it.

Many of our lives are structured that way.

I'm just trying to stay ahead of it.

If I can just stay ahead of it, I won't be exposed.

If I can just continue to move fast enough, I won't be caught up to.

If I can just grind it out and not look up ever, and then maybe I'll be able to wrestle this blessing out of the world in that way.

I'll know that I have what it takes to be out here in the world, something worth blessing.

But now Jacob has a hip that's out of joint.

He can't run.

And he recognizes that he's wrestling somebody who's more intense, more immense, more incredible than any other foe that he has come up against in his life, one who can, with a touch, defeat him.

And when he comes against this person, he is made by the one he is fighting unable to run.

He doesn't have a hip.

He can't run.

And so this other fear sets in.

What if I could be abandoned?

What if this most immense power, what if the greatest thing that I've ever come in contact with, what if it could stand up and leave me?

So he doesn't let go.

He says he won't let go until he is blessed.

Now the man asks him this question, which I think is the climactic question of Jacob's life.

In verse 27.

And he said to him, What is your name?

And he said, Jacob.

Why is that so important?

When Jacob was younger, he deeply desired his father's blessing.

He desired it so much that he would contort and twist himself into anything to receive it.

And so he even hatched a plan with his mother to pretend to be his brother and then sneak in and go and get his father's blessing.

Even if his father thought that he was just blessing a fraud, you know, or thought that he was blessing Esau, the other brother, Jacob would know I can make myself as good as the other brother in order to be blessed.

I can make myself whoever I need to be in order to be blessed.

And he did it.

But Jacob hasn't been blessed as Jacob.

Jacob hasn't been blessed, where he said, where the person who had the power to do the blessing was able to say, What is your name?

And Jacob responded, It's Jacob.

That is where the blessing of the Lord takes place.

Jacob's name, remember, it is not just a name.

It means deceiver, and he's lived up to it.

His name is a confession.

It's all that he is, like his whole character is in this name, Jacob.

It's almost absurd.

Like the tenacity that we see, the relentlessness that we see, the deception that we see, these are all there in him, and it's in his name.

And God says, if I'm going to bless you, you have to tell me your name.

This is the gospel, you see.

When is it that God offers his blessing to his people?

It is not when you finally measured up.

It is not when you finally lived up to the standard.

It's not when you've finally been as good as your brother, when you finally predicted what the future is going to be.

It is not finally when your uh the the whatever your finally is, fill in, fill in the blank.

There's that is not the place that God gives his blessing.

God gives his blessing when you say your name.

What is it now?

What is the deception you carry now?

What is the fear you live in now?

What is the sin that so easily entangles that besets you now?

Say that name to God.

That is what the blessing is on the other side of.

Now, God, who else could be blessing him other than God?

Because who else would know Jacob's story to know that the one question you have to ask Jacob when he's asking for a blessing is what is your name?

What blessings are you pursuing right now?

Where you're pursuing them under a guise.

What blessings have you received where you where you realize I've never actually said my name in this place?

It's a dangerous thing to say your name, especially when your name is Jacob.

Here's the Lord's response.

Genesis 32, 28.

Then he said, Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.

Jacob means deceiver, but also tenacious.

You see, Jacob gets this new name from the Lord.

What he's given from the Lord is the truth of his identity.

But here's what I want you to see in this dynamic of the changing of the names.

It's that Jacob has this deception, but also this goodness in its tenacity.

But now, when his name is Israel, it is not that the Lord has erased who Jacob is.

It is not that he has removed Jacob's identity.

It's different than that.

He's redeemed it.

Do you see?

He's brought this tenacity, this goodness that Jacob carries in him.

And he said, no longer will that be a mark of your deception and the wickedness that you've carried with you, and all the negatives that your demeanor and personality and story have brought into the world.

I'm going to take those things, and instead they will be a mark of the one who wrestled with God and man.

Wrestled with God and man.

Isn't it crazy that that was at the same time?

Wrestled with God and man and received a name as a mark.

That now who he is, with all its flaws, those can be, in a sense, washed clean.

And who he was made to be as one whose life is oriented towards the Lord, who looks to the Lord for his blessing.

Do you see when he when he had received the blessing of the Lord with a fake name, with who he wasn't really, his life was constantly on the run.

And he spent all his days just trying to appease whatever came next so that he might get a blessing.

He had no name.

He was just tossed around.

In a middle space, it's really easy to be tossed around when you have no name.

We have to receive our name from the Lord so that we might have an identity that is forged in the proper wrestling, in the proper place of wrestling where we become who God has intended us to be, is in wrestling with Him.

There are transcendent problems in the world.

You need to fight them, but you're incapable of fighting them at scale.

You need to fight Him.

Yes, I'm calling.

This is the word of the Lord for you today.

You need to wrestle with God.

This was the revelation.

His whole life.

He hadn't been running away from Isaac.

He hadn't been running away from Esau.

He hadn't been running away from Laban.

He had been running away from God.

He hadn't been cultivating a desire to fight them.

He had been cultivating a desire to fight God.

But you can only do that as yourself.

And Jacob asked him, please tell me your name.

Jacob asked the Lord that.

Says, Why is it that you ask me my name?

God can be a bit dodgy.

And there he blessed him.

So Jacob called the name of that place, Peniel, saying, For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.

That is what the human heart needs.

You know, they say you're born looking for a face that's looking for you.

That's true.

And you're wrestling.

To try and find a way to appease the face that you think might not kill you.

But there's one blessing that actually matters.

There's only one blessing that you can receive in the world that will actually give you an identity which can make it through the wilderness places.

That's only the blessing from God.

How much do we know God means it?

Enough so that he would give his own son, so that when we come to him, we will not perish.

Enough so that he would perish for us, so that when we see his face, we might experience it smiling onto us, so that he might say, give us a name like righteousness, and it be true because of what Christ has accomplished.

It is the only place where you can find your identity.

But you have to say your name.

And then this is what it looks like to walk from there.

In 32, verse 31, the way the scene ends, the sun rose upon him as he passed Pinuel, limping because of his hip.

That's what it looks like when you walk towards the promised land.

The sun rose.

The sun rose on him.

Light shined on him.

He stood in his real identity, who he really is, and he walked with a limp.

He won't run away anymore.

He can't.

That's what it means to find your identity in Christ, in the Lord.

I want you to think who you're wrestling with.

You know, it if you stare long enough into the abyss, you will find that it is staring right back at you.

I'm I'm so fearful of what the abyss of all the information that we stare into all the time is turning us into.

All the places where we outsource our wrestling.

Wrestle with God.

Find your identity there.

Don't let go until he blesses you.

The sun will rise and you will limp.

It's a beautiful image.

Okay.

Are there any questions today, Tim?

Great.

We covered it.

We covered it.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, we pray that this meal would be a reminder.

That you have called us as we are, the ones that want to war against you.

And you say, Come, come to me.

Bring your wrestling to me, to the Lord, that we might bring those to you.

Lord, and you promise that in the midst of that, we can even say our name, reveal our the reality of our intentions, and that when those are revealed before you, Lord, that you might atone for the wickedness that's in us, and we might look up and see our Father's face smiling at us to bless us.

Lord, give us hearts that are made resilient by that, that are made strong for the fire.

Lord, let us look to you, you, Lord, you for our name.

Let us remember your poured out blood and your broken body.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.