Our passage opens with "Jacob left
Beer-sheba and went toward Haran," and boy, is that ever an understatement.
There's a whole lot of history wrapped up in that one terse line . . .
it’s more like "Jacob snuck out of Beer-sheba, and went to
Haran." or "Jacob left
Beer-sheba on the lam, and went
to Haran" or how about this:
"Jacob ran out of Beer-sheba just one step in front of his enraged
and murderous brother, and went
toward Haran, where he was expected to get a wife, settle down, and stay out of
Esau's way." that would have more fully described the situation . . . as
he sets out on his journey, he’s just one step away from being a fugitive, a
refugee from his own family.
Let's recap, shall we? Isaac – now blind and in his dotage –
nevertheless retains his strong preference for Jacob's brother Esau, who was
only seconds older – by a heel's-breadth – than Jacob. Back when they were born, Genesis tells us
–with characteristic understatement – "Esau was a skillful hunter, a man
of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of
game." And there you have it – Esau
was a good old boy, a man of the field, probably drove a four-by-four camel,
but Jacob was quiet, and preferred the tents, and that's where the women hung out, for Pete's sake, and
Jacob was a mama's boy for sure, and you know how macho men like Esau treat a
mama’s boy, you know how society, even now, treats one of those . . . the
snickers, then whispers, “I’ve always thought that he was a little, you know,
light in the loafers . . .” Is it any wonder that "Isaac loved Esau, but
Rebekah loved Jacob."
And as usual, the dysfunctionality in
the parent's relationship was played out in that of the brothers. Not once but twice did Jacob take by trickery what was not rightfully his . . . Remember
when he got Esau to trade his birthright for a lousy plate of stew? Then later, at Rebekah's urging, he took
advantage of Isaac's blindness and feeble-mindedness and dressed up like Esau
and stole his blessing, and that's
what put him on the run. Esau hated
Jacob, and he said to himself “My father
isn’t long for this world then I will kill my brother Jacob”
And so Jacob's carrying more baggage
than just a toothbrush and a spare change of clothes . . . he's on the run from
his family, from the comfort of Isaac's riches and his mother's arms, from
everything he loves and knows . . . and we
know that he's not exactly what Cecille B. DeMille would order from central
casting to play a hero. He's a conniver,
he's a deceiver, he's a cheat, one of those weasely little outsiders like
Shylock that get blamed for everything.
And now, in our passage, Jacob is
retracing—in reverse—the route of his illustrious grandfather Abraham, he's
returning to Abraham's kinfolk in Haran to get himself a wife . . . and there's
nobody with him, he's all alone, hardly befitting the son of a wealthy herdsman
like Isaac . . . and he's tired when darkness arrives, at what our passage
calls "a certain place," he's weary to the bone, and so he takes one
of the stones of the place, and he puts it under his head – his back is killing him – and lays down.
And he dreams, and behold! there's a
ladder, set up against the earth and its top – literally in Hebrew
"head" – its head reaches up into the heavens, just as Jacob's head is on that very
earthbound rock . . . and on the ladder are angels – literally messengers – of God, ascending and
descending. And Jacob knows immediately
what he's seeing . . . it's a pathway between the worlds, like the ones in
temples that the priests use to go up into God's presence . . . it's like a rift
between planes of existence . . .
The Celts believed that there are thin
places between the worlds, places where the fabric separating one world from
another is thin, and that the
right people – or things – can travel between the world's through these places
. . . My friend Roberta, a mystic, went to the Isle of Iona in Scotland, the
oldest Christian site continuously in use in the West, and she could feel the
worn place there, she could feel the heavens or God’s Kingdom or something there, perhaps brought on
by centuries of use . . . maybe that's what Jacob feels or sees or experiences in his dream . . . a thin
place, imaged as a ladder – or more faithfully to the Hebrew, a ramp – a two-way highway to heaven,
brothers and sisters, wide enough for angels to pass one another on their way
to and fro . . . and today, when I think of this scene, I don't think of a
ladder or a ramp, I picture escalators in a department store, and here's Jacob
down below, looking up, and the angels, the messengers of God are gliding up
and down, through the opening into and out of the floors above. Only it isn’t some department store, they
aren’t going between small appliances and women’s apparel, they’re reporting to
God above, and bringing God’s messages back on the return trip.
But they don’t bring them to Jacob, he gets special treatment, and
behold! God is standing right there
beside him, delivering the message his very own self: "I am the Lord, the
God of Abraham your father – and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I
will give to you and your offspring, to you and your seed . . ." And once
again, here is the concept of land, or earth, and it’s used five times in this
passage . . . land saturates the Hebrew scriptures . . . the most common Hebrew
word for it – aretz – appears
2500 times . . . it's no coincidence that name of the first man, Adam, is
another Hebrew word for earth. Even today, this concept is threaded through
the Jewish consciousness, at least in the Holy Land . . . one of the biggest
newspapers in Israel is named Ha-Aretz
. . . the land . . .
See the symbolism at work here? Jacob’s
head is on the land, just as the head of the ladder is in heaven . . . Jacob is
of ha-Aretz, of the land . . . he in a sense is the land—earthy, tricky,
sometimes hard to deal with . . . though he doesn’t know it, he carries all the
hopes of his people for a place of their own with him . . . And the Lord
promises all the land under his head to him and his offspring . . . and they
will be like the dust of the land, and they shall spread out – in Hebrew it's
literally burst – that they
will burst out onto the world, to the east and west and north and south, and
all the families of the earth shall be blessed in Jacob and his offspring . . .
and by now, it's sounding mighty familiar to Jacob, because it’s nearly
word-for-word what God has said to Abraham over the years . . . just as he was
setting out from Haran, the Lord had said "I will make of you a great
nation . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed, "and
another time, a little further down the road "I will make your offspring
like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth,
your offspring also can be counted."
And in point of fact, that's the . . . point . . . what we have here is
a reiteration of the Abrahamic promise, the Abrahamic covenant, upon which all of Israel's claim to fame – then as
well as now – has been based. And it comes to Jacob in a dream.
It reminds me of the old story—forgive
me if I’ve told you this—the story of a woman who went to a shrink and told him
the Lord told her in a dream to become a preacher, and the shrink says—reaching
for the thorazine—but Liz . . . that’s
only a dream, and Liz looks at him like he’s an idiot and says “Of course it
is—God speaks to us in dreams.”
And she’s right—God speaks to people in
dreams. Or at least God did . . . he
doesn’t seem to much any more . . . we are so rational, so steeped in our
materialism—both from a philosophical standpoint and a consumerist one, they
are really one and the same—that we don’t hear or see God any more, and we
pooh-pooh modern stories like that, and prescribe anti-psychotic drugs . . .
and maybe that’s one reason we have so much trouble just relying on God, just
letting go and letting God, as the saying goes.
We really don’t believe God comes down into our lives, we think it’s all
primitive clap trap. We believe in a
God, but it’s a neutered God, trapped in our own rationalistic prison. God still comes to us in dreams, but we don’t
believe it when it happens.
But God doesn’t just come to us in
dreams, God comes to us in everything and in everybody. And I confess that I’m
not very good at seeing this . . . I’m not saying that everything is a message
from God, every little jot and tittle of daily life, but we tend to miss these
things in our daily life that are . . . we tend to get busy, we tend to forget
to look, and in fact, perhaps, it’s impossible with our harried lives . . . but
we can often see it in retrospect, can’t we, see God’s working, God’s speech
after it’s happened . . . and so developing the capability and habit to look
for it is important . . . and when I remember to do it, the Benedictine
practice of examining the day before bed helps tremendously, it helps me to see
the little in-breakings of God’s kingdom in my own life . . .
When Jacob wakes up, he's awe-struck,
and says "How awesome is this
place, anyway? Surely the Lord is in this place . . . and I did not know
it." And in gratitude – or maybe so
God won’t change his mind and fry him instead – Jacob builds a church . . .
well, maybe not a church, but a
shrine like the ones Abraham used to make all the time . . . he takes the stone
where he'd laid his head and poured oil over its top, literally over it's head, as it says in Hebrew, and
sets it up as a pillar, as a sacred marking spot, a pointer to the divine. And the anointing with oil of the standing
stone’s head symbolizes the anointing of Jacob himself as the successor to Abraham. And he calls the place where he knew God was with him Bethel, which
means house of God. Surely God is in the
house, and I did not know it.
This knowing of God’s presence can be elusive to us today . . . we
have to cultivate the practice of looking, and often we have to be content to
glimpse little signs and signals, little indicators
that God is here beside us in the world . . . but they are there, they’re all
around us, just as God surrounds us, working and speaking to us all the time.
God spoke to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Paul and Teilhard de Chardin . . .
and God speaks to us. And in these days
of political posturing, of harm and heartache and hope, it’s ever-more
important that we listen to God in the community, but more importantly, as God
speaks through one another . . . and we need to keep one thing in mind: God
doesn’t speak to us in anger and resentment, God is not a troublemaker or a pot
stirrer. God treats us and speaks to us
as we would like to be treated and spoken to, and we should do the same with
one another. We should treat each other with kindness and patience and
forbearance, and with the knowledge that God speaks through one another. So
let’s be gentle with one another and listen.
Amen.
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