Sermons

The Residence of God

Rod Frohman	Third Presbyterian Church
July 20, 2008	Genesis 28: 10 – 17

    
What's in a name? Well apparently a whole lot. There can be vocational names, like Smith, or Hunter, or Rider. Then there are names that parents give to their children which they probably shouldn't give, such as the May family should not name their son Earl E. Or the Showers family should not name their daughter April. The Bradley family named their son Milton who now a major league baseball player, of whom it could be said, “He’s got game.” Then, there are names with meanings in other languages. The girl’s name Alexis is very close to the Greek word, “to defend.” Frohman means “seed man” or “gardener” in Swedish And just in case you are wondering, my mother got creative with my first name, Roderic, a combination of her maiden name Rodman and my Dad’s first name, Eric. We are not German but I learned as an adult that “Roderic” means “famous power” in German. That was a random naming accident, so any hubris I may have as a result of the name is surely accidental also.

The name “Jacob”, the central character in our Old Testament story of the morning, is also a fully-loaded name. Jacob in Hebrew means “to seize the heel", because as the biblical story is told, Jacob emerged from his mother's womb holding the heel of his slightly elder twin brother, Esau. (Genesis 25:26) Subsequent meaning attached to the name Jacob means to overreach, or to interfere, or to supplant, or in more colloquial idiom, a buttinski. So when the Old Testament story writer tells us that one of the main characters of the Hebrew scripture is named Jacob, the listener expects the story to be about an overreaching, interfering person. And we are not disappointed.

Throughout this summer the Old Testament lessons for our reading are the “sagas” of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob from Genesis 12 through 50. That is, the stories following the Noah legends through Joseph and his amazing Technicolor dream coat. Scholars call these stories “sagas” because they are not intended to be newspaper reportage, but a mixture of legend and shadowy fact. Scholar William Bright calls them “clan stories”, embellished morality tales told around camp fires by late Bronze Age nomadic tribes. (William Bright, A History of Ancient Israel, c. 1959, Westminster Press. P. 66 & 74)

Jacob you recall, was the child of Isaac and Rebekah and the grandchild of Abraham and Sarah. You also recall the promise of God to Abraham of, “land, divine accompaniment (“I will be with you.”) and a blessing to the nations.” (Brueggemann, Walter, Theology of the Old Testament, Fortress Press, 1997, p. 167ff) But as the saga unfolds this promise is “repeatedly in jeopardy.” (Ibid.) Just prior to the dream story we read about Jacob, is the story of how Jacob cheated his brother Esau out of his promised birthright by deceiving his blind father Isaac on his deathbed while masquerading as his hairy brother Esau. Jacob was the smooth skinned shepherd and Esau was the hairy hunter. Bill Power, a biblical scholar at the University of Georgia, calls it “the story of Hairy and Grabby.”

In stealing the birthright from his aged and blind father, the height of deceitfulness is shown. Jacob perjured himself to get Isaac's blessing. And when Esau finds out about it he declares, "He is rightfully called Jacob". Then the narrator darkly warms us. “Esau hated Jacob.”

So, for protection, Isaac sends Jacob away on a long journey alone, to live with another clan, that of Isaac’s brother Laban. Jacob walks away from his family without any inheritance, learning the bitter lesson that one cannot steal a promise. The listener to this story may come to the conclusion, “He deserved the prodigal condition that he got.” “Good riddance”, we say, “He is a stone cold rip-off artist.”

On the first leg of his journey, Jacob, afraid of the past and uncertain of his future, spiritually and emotionally wrung out, falls asleep on a rock. You have to be very tired to make a rock your pillow. And when you are that tired, you don’t really care.

The story of Jacob (like all Bible stories) is a mirror that is held up to the listener. Is it possible that we are Jacob also? We may not have cheated anyone out of a birthright, but we have all sought social advantage and have used devious means to get it.

We may not be so callous as to frame our siblings and cheat our parents on their deathbeds, but many times we have perjured ourselves before God with statements of intent in order to foster our own positions. That is, we want the benefits of faith without the discipline or the cost.

Sometimes by our activities we chase God out of our lives, or run from God and become wanderers and strangers to ourselves, pursuing with a fevered pitch, exercising our alleged creative options, a smorgasbord of self-actualization. Eventually we become spiritually and emotionally exhausted, burned out. Of course, one doesn't have to engage in devious fervor to become a Jacob. Routine fervor can produce exhaustion and spiritual overreaching

The result of this kind of living is that we become Jacobs to each other, grabbing at each other's heels, over reaching who we really are personally, socially, nationally, internationally even. And people began to resent us for our overreaching. Yes, there is sibling rivalry, not only in the nuclear family, but also in the family of nations. (We could spend a lot of time on that this morning, but we won’t.) The point is, a promise of love, of relationship, of support, cannot be stolen and when we try it, we are rejected, become isolated and wanderers and drifters. A promise cannot be stolen.

So there is Jacob, asleep between the rock of his past mistakes and the hard place of his uncertain future, and he dreams. And what a dream it is! He dreams of the ladder or a stairway reaching all the way into the heavens. On this celestial escalator angels are ascending and descending in a phantasmagoria of whirling light.

It is important to remember that a dream to an ancient Hebrew is not like a dream to a modern person. Modern people seem to understand dreams as a kind of a videotape, a rerun of the day's activities, or an unwinding of the rational processes. For example, whenever I have big deadline to meet, I have a recurring dream of being constantly late to Mrs. L’Aventure’s seventh-grade social studies class. Teachers, never underestimate your long term impact. But to the Hebrews, a dream was the avenue to the sacred, a means of revelation. In a Hebrew dream, God was frequently speaking.

So there is Jacob, his defenses are down he's exhausted, he's vulnerable, he is ready to get a message of almost any sort. But notice that the message that he gets from God is not, “Why you good for nothing cheater, you deserve what you got."

Rather, the message is a reaffirmation of the very promise he had tried to swindle. It's a promise of “land, divine accompaniment (“I will be with you.”) and a blessing to the nations.” (Brueggemann)

But as we listen to this story, we can't help but say, "Why should a scoundrel like Jacob get such a message like that, angels descending and ascending. His dream should have been that of Dante's Inferno. He should be dreaming about the frustration of being unable to find a sop for the dog, Cerberus."

So what is revealed? The irony and the paradox of God’s acceptance, God's unconditional nature. In the face of Jacob’s perjury at his father's deathbed, we are shown a profoundly true explanation of divine meaning in the face of human sin. “Moral quality is not a condition of [divine] promise.” (Brueggemann) God works through very unusual circumstances, in unsavory situations, and with unworthy persons. Yes, God even reveals God's self through us.

When Jacob awakens something has happened, he is changed. And he exclaims, "Surely God is in this place, and I didn't know it.” And as you remember, he was afraid and he said, "How awesome is this place this is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of Heaven". He called that place Bethel. Of course in Hebrew, Bethel means House of El-- or house of God.

Where is our Bethel? Where is our holy ground? Where is our gate of heaven? For sure, some of us find God in this sanctuary. No wonder we are spending a lot of time, energy and money in our capital campaign to improve and beautify this house and it’s outreach into the community. And well we should. We are doing so because we do find God here. But where else?

Is the house of God ever a hospital, a machine shop, a classroom, that worn spot in front of the kitchen sink, a rocking chair, a wheel chair, a deathbed?? Where does God live?

The Jacob story would tell us that God lives wherever we somehow see the angels ascending and descending.

I have a little confession to make, and that is my personal Beth-el is not here in the sanctuary. I love the sanctuary it's a beautiful place. I do meet God here. But the angels ascend and descend for me in my basement. Yes, my basement. It is there that I am surrounded by various memorials, such as stones of help that fill my bookshelves. Also those basement walls are lined by pictures of thirty one of my forebears, angels of my past that ascend and descend into my consciousness reminding me that I am never alone and am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

Where does God live for you? The residence of God is not just here between two candlesticks, but in the Bausch & Lomb building, on a baseball diamond, at the University, at Hogan's hideaway, at the Pride Parade, where we live and work and have our being, wherever we somehow see the angels ascending and descending up and down the ladder to God.

The difficulty is that most of our everyday faith is like Jacob's, there is little revelation to it. On the surface of things God is somehow never where we are. God somehow never breaks through to who we are. God and our ordinary lives can be as distant as Jacob is from home.

Do we think we need to be lost on the distant Jacob journey to be open to God? If we are lost, hopefully we will be open. But our very own kitchen table could be the altar of God. The fact of the matter is, wherever and whoever we are, God is constantly ascending and descending, covering, moving, creating, energizing all around us. We can never tell WHEN that ladder will come down or WHERE it will come down. But it will come down.

The fact of the matter is, there are more Jacob's ladders in our lives than are found at Lowe's or Home Depot.