LADDER OF ANGELS

 

            Today we hear a story about Jacob.  He was a scoundrel, a liar and a cheat and yet in a dream he learns that God is still present in his life offering blessing upon blessing testifying once again to the reality that God’s ways are not our ways.

            We need to rewind the story a bit and remember who Jacob was.  He was the son of Isaac and the grandson of Abraham…that great patriarchal figure of our tradition….the one who, with his wife Sarah, left behind an old life and world view to venture forth into an unknown future, responding to a sense of being called into this adventure by God.   The story becomes the bones of our spiritual tradition, one that always includes a sense of call and response and adventure…a surprising turn of events that opens the door to new possibilities.  You remember the dark story of the near sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac who lives after all and grows up and marries Rebeka and they have twin sons,  Esau and Jacob.

            Unlike fairy tales there is not a lot of generic happily ever after living.  Esau and Jacob, though twins, are very different and their parents relate to them differently.  Esau is the outdoorsman and hunter adored by his father Isaac.  Jacob is gentle and thoughtful and the apple of his mother’s eye.  Esau, being the older by about a minute and a half is the heir to the larger portion of his father’s estate but apparently not too bright or farsighted.  So when he comes in hungry one day and asks Jacob for some of the stew he’s been cooking, Jacob says sure.  I’ll give you a bowl of stew if you sign over your portion of your inheritance to me.  And Esau does it which is about the dumbest thing I can imagine.  Some of you may remember the show “Everyone Loves Raymond.”  I envision Esau kind of like Raymond’s older brother Robert.  He’s not really that dumb but he sometimes just doesn’t get it and grows increasingly resentful of his younger brother who is clearly favored by their mother.

            But things get worse for Esau.  Not only does Jacob trick him out of his inheritance.  At their mother’s suggestion and with her help Jacob disguises himself as his brother, goes in to his partially blind father Isaac and gets his Dad to give him his blessings which essentially makes him heir, not only of a material inheritance but a spiritual one as well.  Isaac in effect makes Jacob the guardian of the divine call and giving him the responsibility to keep the vision and the promise alive.  After Isaac realizes what has happened, while Esau, in his anger and resentment, and plots to kill his brother Jacob’s mother Rebekah, herself complicit in all this manipulation and deceit, suggests that Jacob should get out of Dodge.  She develops a clever excuse for sending him off to her brother in a distant land and Jacob packs up and heads out.

            So far doesn’t this just sound like a great script for a TV series?  In fact the family in this story is  a little like the Ewings of the Dallas series, a little like the Barones from Everyone Loves Raymond.  We see the same themes in Greek myth and Shakespearean drama…. all of them are variations of the same story bearing testimony to the reality of the conflicted nature of human community.     I think that one reason we are attracted to stories that center on these stories is that we recognize ourselves in them and most of the time we can take heart that our own family dramas aren’t that bad…most of the time.  Up to this point Jacob’s story is in many ways a universal story full of archetypes.  But it is also a specific family story…an ancestral history,  written down by a people who traced their ancestry to Jacob.  It was important to tell his story but you can only airbrush the character’s features so much without losing him altogether and so Jacob is presented in a not altogether flattering light as he prepares to bed down for his first night away from home, alone under the canopy of  stars, away from almost everything that is familiar and secure.  

            I agree with Barbara Brown Taylor who said that Jacob doesn’t deserve the dream he gets.  In his dream Jacob hears only promises of blessing and presence and nothing he has done makes him worthy.  At this point we have that all important reminder that our relationship with the elusive, blessing presence of God….of the Holy in our midst…is in no way transactional.  Whatever God is up to in our lives….and it’s usually far more enigmatic and perplexing than it is straightforward and rational….it is not managed by how good we are.  The critical variable in the divine/human relationship seems to be not so much our moral perfection or lack thereof but how open we are, how much we are paying attention to the subtle signs of God’s real but elusive presence and how we respond to whatever way God’s blessings might take shape in and through us.

            The theme of undeserved grace didn’t start with Jesus.  It runs all the way through the Bible right alongside all those human conflicts.  And every encounter with grace changes things.  People take stock and shift priorities, they re-evaluate their goals, they become more compassionate and just.  We don’t do those things to make God love us.  We do those things because God loves us.  And even though all these centuries and millennia later we still can’t explain it in a one-size fits all way, it is the reality in which all our living takes place.  Jacob’s encounter with God changed him.  You can read the rest of his story this afternoon.  Though there is plenty more to say about unmerited grace this is the end of today’s first sermon.

 But there is another takeaway that I think is often overlooked in our post-enlightenment age.  And that is that Jacob’s brush with something that he recognized as holy was not a totally rational or provable experience.   There is, without a doubt much about the  I/Thou relationship that is honored and nurtured by intellectual inquiry and reasoned discourse.  Our reformed heritage has always insisted that intelligent and thoughtful study and debate is one of the ways we resist the slick and simplistic caricatures of  God that are so cleverly used by those seeking to market an approach to faith that benefits institutions but leaves most of us feeling like there’s something missing….OR perpetuates a simplistic and static view of God that does not grow in wonder and complexity  with the proliferation of discoveries of science.  But, as one of my colleagues said in a study group this week, “we cannot ‘smart’ our way to God.”  It is just as important to recognize that there is more to God than what our minds can comprehend…and God will find all sorts of  avenues for being with us that lead to possibilities that are creative and life-giving and transforming.

            But, you might ask, how can we prove that Jacob’s dream was really an encounter with God and not just indigestion?  We can’t.  Such things are deeply personal and one of the challenges we face in our post-enlightenment world is the challenge of not trying to make our encounters with the spirit always fit a scientific or mathematical model without crossing the line into a superstition based understanding of the Holy, or an unreflecting acceptance of whatever the latest religious fad is.  And one of the ways we try to maintain the balance is by telling our stories.  It is a neglected practice in our tradition but one that we are trying to reclaim.  What is the Bible itself if not stories of men and women and communities learning how to live in and with God.  Some seem quite strange.  Some resonate with our own experiences.  When we are open to the stories others tell it helps us recognize new dimensions in our own experiences.        The colleague I mentioned earlier who said “we can’t smart our way to God” is part of a study group of clergy that meets regularly and we like to challenge each other intellectually as we study and discuss and we are all strengthened and enriched in our faith and our vocations by this approach, informed by some pretty demanding reading and study.  But gradually we are also beginning to share our stories.  Sometimes sharing things for the first time because before we might have feared that others would think we were crazy if we confessed to having these un-provable God moments.  And our faith and our commitment to living as God’s people is energized and strengthened by the stories we tell.  Every one of us has these encounters….these God moments because God is imagination as much as intelligence…present not just in sanctuary and liturgy but in butterflies and dreams.  It’s just that we have not been encouraged to pay attention to these encounters…we haven’t learned fully how to know with our hearts and souls as much as with our heads.

            Pay attention this week.  What catches your eye as you walk about….what is stirring inside you that keeps insisting that you do something you aren’t naturally inclined to do?  Is there a day dream or a night dream that you just can’t shake?  Have you given yourself some time and space in which to invite clarity or insight into what is going on in your life with God?  Surely, as Jacob affirmed, God is in this place and we just didn’t know it…didn’t pay attention until now.  How awesome it all is.  Even this life we are living is God’s home….the gateway to the eternal.

 

   Mary D. Gaut