Jacob Dreams
Genesis 28:10-19
July 19, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

I increasingly find it quite tricky to hold a sacred text and listen for a fresh word for us today when that sacred text more ably belongs in the hands of my rabbi friends. I am aware of how much I have to learn about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, about the tradition that sparked my own, about the intersection of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity each reading themselves into these ancient stories.

But story, I get. And while I am keenly aware of my inability to place Jacob’s dream in a context of rabbinical tradition without a fair amount of study, I am quite confident in our collective ability to hear in this story something of our own. Frederick Buechner is known for his sermons and his writing, but specifically for his remarkable memoirs. His vulnerability and honesty capture the longings of his readers, and he knows there is a power to telling a story. Quite famously, he writes, “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”

I hope that will be our lens for approaching this text before us today; what lies in this story of Jacob laying down to rest and dreaming of a ladder to heaven that we recognize as our own?

Genesis 28:10-19

10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder[a] set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the Lord stood beside him[b] and said, “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 to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed[c] in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” 17 And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

18 So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel

The great storyteller Buechner puts it like this:

The book of Genesis makes no attempt to conceal the fact that Jacob was, among other things, a crook. What's more, you get the feeling that whoever wrote up his seamy adventures got a real kick out of them.

Twice he cheated his…brother, Esau, out of what was coming to him. At least once he took advantage of the blindness of his old father, Isaac, and played him for a sucker. He outdid his double-crossing father-in-law, Laban, by conning him out of most of his livestock and, later on, when Laban was looking the other way, by sneaking off with not only both the man's daughters, but just about everything else that wasn't nailed down including his household gods. Jacob was never satisfied. He wanted the moon, and if he'd ever managed to bilk heaven out of that, he would have been back the next morning for the stars to go with it. But then one day he learned a marvelous lesson in a marvelous and unexpected way.

It happened just after he'd ripped Esau off for the second time and was making his getaway into the hill country to the north. When sunset came and nobody seemed to be after him, he decided that it was safe to camp out for the night and, having left in too much of a hurry to take his bedroll with him, tucked a stone under his head for a pillow and prepared to go to sleep. You might think that what happened next was that he lay there all night bug-eyed as a result of his guilty conscience or, if he did finally manage to drop off, that he was tormented by conscience-stricken dreams, but neither of these was the case. Instead, he dropped off like a baby in a cradle and dreamed the kind of dreams you would have thought were reserved for the high saints.

He dreamed that there was a ladder reaching up to heaven and that there were angels moving up and down it with golden sandals and rainbow-colored wings and that standing somewhere above it was God himself. And the words God spoke in the dream were not the chewing-out you might have expected, but something altogether different. God told Jacob that the land he was lying on was to belong to him and his descendants and that someday his descendants would become a great nation and a great blessing to all the other nations on earth. And as if that wasn't enough, God then added a personal P.S. by saying, "Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”

It wasn't holy hell that God gave him, in other words, but holy heaven, not to mention the marvelous lesson thrown in for good measure. The lesson was, needless to say, that even for a dyed-in-the-wool, double-barreled con artist like Jacob there are a few things in this world you can't get but can only be given, and one of these things is love in general, and another is the love of God in particular.

Jacob didn't have to climb his ladder to bilk heaven of the moon and the stars, even if that had been possible, because the moon and the stars looked like peanuts compared to what God and the angels were using the ladder to hand down to him for free.

Another part of the lesson was that, luckily for Jacob, God doesn't love people because of who they are, but because of who God is. "It's on the house" is one way of saying it and "It's by grace" is another.

It helps me tremendously to hear of the scoundrels and ne’re-do-wells that God seems so utterly drawn to. Perhaps my imperfect, inconsistent, often floundering faith has some stuff in it that might delight God to no end and invite holy heaven, as Buechner says.

Can you join me in that first big exhale from this story? Jacob on the run, another con, another deceit, another plot twist that doesn’t place him in the best light, and God surprises him with this dream of connection and love and grace. What hope we hear in this! What comfort I want for you to allow into your breath and your bones.

God speaks to Jacob in the night and promises goodness for him. Maybe Jacob didn’t need to be such a scoundrel after all. Maybe his anxious grasping for more could be soothed by this unsolicited word from the Divine—I am with you, I will not leave you. 

Now there’s something else that truly speaks to me from Jacob’s story as we move into month five of this pandemic time. I truly don’t know when we will worship together again in our sanctuary, and I do not know how long before we can gather in that space without masks and social distancing. When we can greet one another with a holy hug and kiss. When we can sing our hearts out to the songs of our faith. I fully expect to hear in the next couple of days that schools will be 100% online for the first semester in response to rising COVID cases in Orleans Parish. What we had hoped might last a few weeks…then perhaps a bit of summer…now truly looks to be as long as some of our most concerned friends feared way back in March. We are displaced from one another, far from our worshiping home, and there is not an end in sight just yet.

Now hear Jacob’s story again—always looking over his shoulder, sneaking and taking what isn’t really his, manipulating relationships around him to get what he wants and then a little more. He sleeps and enters another realm, interacting with God and the angels in a thin, flowing place of connection to the eternal. When he awakes, Jacob says, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”

So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel.

There, in that place beyond home, that place outside of place, a stinker of a human has an intimate experience with the holy. Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.

The opportunity for these moments is daily. Hourly. Surely God is in our homes and we did not know it. Surely God is along our walking path and we did not know it. Surely God is among the birds nesting in the trees and we did not know it. Surely God is in the voices of friends calling to check in and we did not know it. Surely God is in the breeze blowing across our sweaty skin on a hot July day and we did not know it.

I want to do something now that’s a little different than our norm. I invite you to unmute yourselves and share where you are hearing yourself in Jacob’s story. Over four months now of time-beyond-time, (likely) many more months to go. In a word or a sentence or maybe even a bit more, share when you have found yourself awake, aware, connected to a holy moment and saying to yourself, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”

—sharing time—

Friends, let’s mark these places with oil today. Let’s call it grace. Let’s delight in a God who gives us holy heaven and surprises us in our dreams. No matter how long our separation goes on or how far we might feel from the familiar places of worship, God is present to us right here in this place. May you awaken and notice and trust God is with you and will keep you wherever you go. In Jacob’s story today, may you find your own. Thanks be to God.

Amen.