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Sermon - July 20th, 2008
Jacob's Dream
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Genesis 28:10-29a
We are moving through the stories of Genesis this summer, stories rich with human conflict and family dysfunction and God’s incredible grace. We are spending a few Sundays with the twins, Esau and Jacob, sons of Rebekah and Isaac. This Sunday Jacob is on the run. With the help and encouragement of his mother, Jacob had succeeded in cheating and stealing the birthrite and his father’s blessing. Because Esau beat Jacob out of the womb, Esau rightfully and lawfully inherited everything. However, Jacob got it all and Esau was murderously angry.
Jacob’s whole life had been one of struggle, always looking for that opening to take advantage of someone’s weaknesses, manipulating others to get what he wanted. His life was one of conflict. It was him against the world. He did have his mother on his side; but, that wasn’t much in a man’s world where the first-born son got everything. Jacob was alone, he had to look after himself, and take advantage when he could. He guarded his flank so he would not be ambushed. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was going to over take him. He was on the run to his uncle’s house, barely remembering his mother’s advice, “Be sure and marry a nice Jewish girl.” What was foremost on his mind was that he was estranged from his family and running from his brother’s wrath.
Then, he came to this certain place and it was night. The writer of Genesis is preparing us for something special to happen. He camped at that place. Jacob prepared for a long, restless night by selecting a stone for a pillow. He was alone, vulnerable, exiled, between nowhere and no place, a rock and a hard place. But in spite of that pillow, he went to sleep, and he dreamed.
Now, dreams are very interesting things. The Bible records several dreams as if they are messages from God. I don’t get messages from God in my dreams. I wrote to Kate this last week, our District Superintendent, and told her that I had a dream that the two District Superintendents, Donna Pritchard and Bob Flaherty were both elected as bishops at the Western Jurisdictional Conference that was held in Portland this last week. I am not sure why I had such a dream. Maybe because if it came true it would cause quite a bit of chaos as far as appointments go in our conference. The Bishop would have to find two District Superintendents to replace them. Anyway, neither one of them were elected and I am pleased to announce that Bishop Hoshibata is appointed to stay with us another four years, so all is well. My dreams are not prophetic. Most of the time they reflect what I am currently working on emotionally.
Jacob’s dream is one of the most famous dreams in the Bible…Jacob’s Ladder. Ladder is not a good translation, so I have read. Jacob’s ladder was really Jacob’s ramp or Jacob’s staircase. It was something that looked more like a pyramid, wide at the bottom, narrowing at the top. These towers were common in the ancient Middle East. They were built so priests could climb up to the top, make sacrifices to God and bring messages down from heaven.
In Jacob’s dream there was a ramp that reached all the way to heaven, and on it were not priests, but angels—going up the ramp and coming down the ramp. Angels were known as messengers. For the Hebrew people, God was not as accessible to everyone as Jesus is to us. So it was believed that God sent messengers to the earth to do God’s business. Jacob had unfinished business with God, so angels were very important in Jacob’s life; but he doesn’t realize it yet. And in this scene the angels kept their distance. They didn’t say anything. They were like a chorus in the background. There was someone else in the dream and that someone was standing at the top and that someone had a word or two to say.
You see, Jacob was not a man on a religious quest. He was not out looking for God. He was on the run. God was the least of his concerns. My guess is that the less he had to do with God the better. He was making his own way in the world.
So that dream, with its angels ascending and descending on a stairway between heaven and earth was an interruption, a jolting kind of wake-up call. Jacob was not seeking God. God was seeking Jacob. And the word that God gave Jacob was “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.” Up or down the staircase, God was with Jacob. Jacob woke up from the dream and proclaimed, “Surely, the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.”
Jacob who deceived his brother and father to obtain everything, Jacob, who left everything behind to flee for his life, who was blessed by his father one minute and the next was in exile, is confronted by God in a dream. Dreams come at a time when the mind’s defenses are down. In the dream, Jacob sees that although he pulled the wool over his blind father’s eyes, he did not escape the attention of God who has angels moving freely between earth and heaven.
One would think, however, that God would have given Jacob holy hell. Instead, God gave him holy heaven. God spoke words of promise and grace, “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land.”
Jacob, running from the company of all who loved, and hated, him, was promised the presence of God (“I am with you”). Jacob, fleeing for his life that was no longer within his own capabilities to defend, was offered the protective sheltering of God (“I will keep you wherever you go”). Jacob, the one who carried the blessing but not the possession of land and home, was offered homecoming by God (“I will bring you back to this land”).
Jacob would receive all that he had schemed and deceived to gain. Only now it was not a matter of seized opportunity but of patient waiting. Jacob would no longer be able to rely on his wits and tricks. He could only rely on God, the Promise-Maker. This was grace, pure undeserving grace, a gift from God.
The dream had an impact on Jacob. He acknowledged that the Lord was in this place; something that was far from his mind when he laid his head on his stone pillow. Jacob realized his own unworthiness. “This is the gate of heaven,” he confessed. It was the first of several turning points in Jacob’s life.
I can’t tell you that Jacob was instantly transformed into a righteous man. He was impressed and humbled, yes. It was not long, though, that he was bargaining his way into God’s good graces. He set the conditions for relationship and covenant with God. He said, “If God will be with me, if God will keep me…, if God will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace”—then, and only then, will the Lord be my God. It was as if Jacob was doing God a favor. Jacob also sweetened the pot by vowing to return a tenth of what God gives.
Once again, Jacob is the deal-maker, not ready to turn loose his life in trust. If you do these things, God, then you shall be my God. We humans love to bargain with God. Like Jacob, we do not quite know what to do with our chosen-ness. Like Jacob, we want to get all that we can by our own devices, while God simply wants to give. Jacob attached conditions and prices to relationship and covenant. God simply offered grace, absolutely free.
God is not our own personal benefactor. God does not fulfill our wants and desires. Is our faith conditional? Do we wait to see if God is equal to our own task? Do we say, Here God, do this, and I will believe!
The problem with bargaining, for us and Jacob, it does not allow God’s grace to reign in our lives. It assumes that we know better than God what is best. It assumes that God will not do good for us unless we coerce God to do so. Do we really believe in this kind of God? Have we become so used to fending for ourselves that we have stopped trusting in God’s gracious keeping of our lives?
God does not bargain with Jacob. God simply gave Jacob a promise. We cannot bargain for grace: it can only be offered and received. That’s all. That’s all, thanks be to God. God has already offered us all that we need. When we bargain for more, we are not trusting that what God has already given us is enough. Or, we aren’t truly receiving what God has already offered us. We are already chosen, we are already loved, we are already in the presence of God. Do we acknowledge this? Do we believe it? Do we know it?
Jacob was fleeing and he found God. “Surely the Lord is in this place,” he said, out in the middle of nowhere, in-between danger and sanctuary.
Maybe we are like Jacob, more than we want to admit, scheming bargaining, not very proud of ourselves, on the run mostly from ourselves. We may say, I’ll never have that kind of experience. I’m not that kind of person. Or, it was only a dream. Or, we may say, fall asleep on a stone pillow and of course, you’ll have some crazy dreams. Or, we could just dismiss the story as a relic from the Old Testament.
We can do that. But if we are honest, we just may also say this: I want all the striving, all the struggling, all the fear and anxiety, all this scraping to end in my life. I want to stop working so hard to get ahead. I want to stop needing approval from others. What I really want, what all of us want, is to recieve our life daily as a gift to be enjoyed, and to hear God say to us, “Behold, I am with you. And no matter what happens to you, I will never leave you.”
Jacob didn’t believe that it could happen to him. He started out alone, scheming, scrambling, striving, struggling. Then one night, out there all by himself, exhausted and scared, he laid his head on a pillow made of stone, he put down his defenses and it happened, as a surprise, without his expecting it to. And because it happened to him, we can expect it to happen to us. And, eventually, like Jacob, we will get that when comes to God’s love, “it’s on the house” or it’s by God’s grace. God doesn’t love us because of who we are. God loves us because that’s who God is. It was by God’s grace that Jacob of all people became not only the father of the twelve tribes of Israel but the many times great grandfather of Jesus of Nazareth, and just as it was by grace that Jesus of Nazareth was born into this world at all.
Amen. 1