Night Travelers: Fear — The Dark Is Not Empty Genesis 32:22–31

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins

May 10, 2026

The Dark Is Not Empty Genesis 32:22–31

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

We are in the middle of a six-week series called Night Travelers — drawn from the ancient image of the spiritual seeker who turns toward the darkness rather than fleeing it, trusting that the light they are looking for is found precisely in the places they were most afraid to go. Each week we are turning toward one of the difficult emotions — not to be consumed by it, but to discover that God is already there.

Today we turn toward fear.

To begin, let me tell you the story of Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers who walked into the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha on September 14, 2007 and filed a lawsuit. The defendant he named: God. The suit asked for a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of — I love this — “terroristic threats.” Senator Chambers claimed that God had “directly and proximately caused fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues.” The list went on.

Now, the lawsuit was ultimately a statement about frivolous litigation. But it made me wonder — how many of us, if we are honest, have our own grievances to file? How many of us have shaken our fist at the sky over something that felt deeply, personally unfair? How many of us have been genuinely, bone-deep afraid — and wondered where exactly God was in the middle of it?

If that’s you, you are in excellent company. Because today’s text is about a man who didn’t bother with the courthouse. He just grabbed God and refused to let go.

Let me give you the backstory on Jacob, because context matters here.

Jacob is, from the beginning, a piece of work. His very name means “trickster” or “deceiver” — so named because he was grabbing his twin brother’s heel as they emerged from the birth canal. Jacob lives into his “trickster” moniker quite enthusiastically. He tricks his brother Esau out of his birthright. He tricks his father Isaac into giving him the blessing that belonged to the Esau, the firstborn. When Esau finds out, he is — understandably — furious, and plans to kill Jacob. So Jacob runs. He leaves town, builds a life far away, gets married — and get this for a picture of “biblical marriage” — he takes not just one but two wives, sisters, his first cousins! Jacob fathers twelve sons and who knows how many daughters, accumulates considerable wealth through, shall we say, creative business practices, and basically stays gone for twenty years.

And then God tells him to go home.

Now here is where the fear comes in — real, legitimate, bone-deep fear. Home, for Jacob, is where Esau is. The last Jacob knew, his brother wanted him dead. And now Jacob is heading back with his wife, his other wife, his children, his livestock, his entire household. As they make their way towards home, word comes back from his scouts: Esau is coming to meet him. With four hundred men.

Four. Hundred. Men.

This is either the biggest welcome home party in history, or Esau has spent twenty years sharpening his sword. Jacob assumes the latter. He prays. He sends extravagant gifts ahead — over 550 animals — hoping to soften whatever reception is waiting. He sends his family on ahead. (A real stand up guy, this Jacob. “You go on ahead and tell Esau hello for me.”) And after he sends the entire assembly across the river, Jacob is left alone. In the dark. With nothing but his fear and his past and his very uncertain future.

And that is exactly where God shows up.

What happens next is one of the strangest, most mysterious, and perhaps most theologically rich passages in all of Scripture. A figure — the text is deliberately vague, sometimes “a man,” sometimes clearly divine — begins to wrestle with Jacob. All night. In the dark. No explanation, no preamble, no warning.

I want to be honest with you: this passage makes me a little uncomfortable. My tidy picture of a God of peace and love and flowers and puppies does not naturally include a midnight ambush. And yet here we are. God — or God’s messenger, or whatever this figure is — initiates this encounter. Jacob doesn’t ask for it. He doesn’t pray for it. He certainly doesn’t want it. God just shows up in the dark and grabs him.

I think there’s a message in that.

Because here is what I know about fear: it tends to do its worst work in the dark. In the middle of the night when the distractions are gone and the noise has settled and the thing you’ve been running from finally catches up with you. Jacob has been running from himself — from his past, from his brother, from the consequences of twenty years of deception — and now he is alone in the dark with nowhere left to go. And God meets him there. Not in a burning bush, not in a comfortable vision. In a wrestling match.

Maybe that is exactly the form the divine encounter needs to take when we have spent too long avoiding it.

Here is what I find so extraordinary about this wrestling match. At some point the mysterious figure asks Jacob a question: What is your name?

Now, this seems like an odd question. God presumably knows Jacob’s name. But remember — the last time in scripture when someone asked Jacob his name, he lied. He told his blind father Isaac: I am Esau. He stole a blessing he was not entitled to by stealing his brother’s name.

This time, Jacob tells the truth.

Jacob. The trickster. The deceiver. The leg-puller. Here I am.

And in that moment of honesty — finally owning who he actually is rather than pretending to be someone else — everything changes. The mysterious figure says: your name will no longer be Jacob. You will be called Israel. Because you have wrestled with God and with humans and have not let go.

Jacob gets a new name not despite the wrestling. Because of it.

The wound and the blessing arrive together, inseparable. Jacob walks away from that riverbank limping — his hip permanently dislocated in the struggle. And he walks away blessed, renamed, transformed. The limp is not incidental to the story. It is the story. The mark of someone who went into the dark and came out changed.

Now I want to say something directly about fear — because that is our topic today, and we shouldn’t dance around it.

Fear is not a character flaw. Fear is not a failure of faith. Fear is biologically hard-wired into our DNA — it’s one of the big reasons we’ve survived as a species. Fear is the honest response of a human being standing at the edge of what they cannot control. Jacob was afraid. He had good reason to be afraid. And God did not remove the fear — God met him inside it.

I think the church has sometimes done a disservice here. We quote “do not fear” and “fear not” and “faith over fear” as though the instruction alone were enough — as though the proper response to fear were simply to stop having it. But those phrases appear over and over in Scripture precisely because the great people of faith receiving them were genuinely terrified. The instruction assumes the fear. It does not eliminate it.

What faith offers is not the absence of fear. It is companionship inside it. It is the God who shows up in the dark — not to remove the danger, not to make the morning come faster — but to be present in the wrestling. To be there when you finally tell the truth about who you are. To rename you on the other side of the struggle.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes that some things can only be learned in the dark, that the rush to light is often a flight from the very formation God is doing in the shadow. Jacob’s night at the Jabbok is a perfect portrait of that. He could not have become Israel without first surviving the darkness. The new name required the long night.

So what happens when Jacob finally meets Esau with his four hundred men?

After all of it — the sleepless night, the wrestling, the wound, the new name, the limping dawn walk toward the thing he has feared for twenty years — Jacob finally sees his brother. And Esau runs to him. Throws his arms around him. Kisses him. They weep together.

The thing Jacob feared most. The thing that kept him in exile for twenty years. The thing that sent him into the dark alone with nothing but his dread . . . that thing never happened.

Most of the things we spend our nights wrestling with never happen. And the ones that do — we survive them. We come out the other side. Sometimes limping. Always marked. But always, in the hands of this God, with the possibility of a new name waiting.

So let me ask you the question Methodist minister, artist and poet, Jan Richardson, asks in her reflection on this passage: on your path, where have you encountered a struggle that brought not only a wound but also a blessing? When has an experience of wrestling in the dark helped you know who you are and which way to go?

I want to close today with one of Jan Richardson’s poems entitled “Jacob’s Blessing.”

If this blessing were easy,
anyone could claim it.
As it is,
I am here to tell you
that it will take some work.

This is the blessing
that visits you
in the struggling,
in the wrestling,
in the striving.

This is the blessing
that comes
after you have left
everything behind,
after you have stepped out,
after you have crossed
into that realm
beyond every landmark
you have known.

This is the blessing
that takes all night
to find.

It’s not that this blessing
is so difficult,
as if it were not filled
with grace
or with the love
that lives
in every line.

It’s simply that
it requires you
to want it,
to ask for it,
to place yourself
in its path.
It demands that you
stand to meet it
when it arrives,
that you stretch yourself
in ways you didn’t know
you could move,
that you agree
to not give up.

So when this blessing comes,
borne in the hands
of the difficult angel
who has chosen you,
do not let go.
Give yourself
into its grip.

It will wound you,
but I tell you
there will come a day
when what felt to you
like limping

was something more
like dancing
as you moved into
the cadence
of your new
and blessed name.

That is the night traveler’s promise. Not that the dark will be easy. Not that the fear will disappear. But that the wrestling is where the blessing begins. That the God who meets us in the darkness does not leave us as we were. That the limp you carry out of the hardest night of your life might, one day, look something more like a dance.

You’ve been wrestling. I know you have. Some of you have been at it for a long time.

Don’t let go.

Come, night travelers. The dark is not empty. And the blessing is already on its way.