A Holy Land: Gatekeepers and Changemakers (Genesis 28:10-19)
Ordinary Time
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 stairway 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 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 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, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
(NRSV)
A
few years ago, the writer Laura Jean Truman had a tweet reading, “God said, ‘Be
still,’ so I ran away extremely fast & made myself extremely busy because I
assumed God was waiting to trap me with a Should or a Punishment or a To Do,
and when I finally ran out of breath and stopped and hollered, ‘WHAT?!?’ God
said, ‘Only this,’ and held me.”[1]
We
continue with the slippery saga of sly Jacob this week, finding him having
“left Beer-sheba.” He didn’t just leave;
he ran. This is directly following him
having taken Esau’s blessing from blind Isaac, tricking their father via the
machinations of their mother. This is
Esau having threatened Jacob’s life and Jacob having left behind everything he
knew to save his own skin. This is a
thief laying down in the desert with nothing but a blessing and a birthright
that were never intended to be his, having fled the punishment he was certain
was coming.
This
is God meeting him after he’s run out of breath and saying, “I have always been
with you,” and holding him.
Just
as last week, the character of Jacob is hard to pin down. He’s the hero of the story, and the villain
of the story, and the put-upon slightly younger sibling, and the scheming usurper,
and the one who treasures the blessings with rightful care, and the one who
lies to his family to get what isn’t his.
He’s not only disgraced himself, it would seem, but the arc of the
Abrahamic covenant; Professor Esther Menn points out that, “Jacob’s flight from
the southern city of Beer Sheba to the northern city of Haran seems to reverse
the celebrated journey of his grandparents Abraham and Sarah, who traveled in
faith from their homeland in Haran to the land that God promised their
descendants (Genesis 12:1-9).”[2] And yet he gets this dream and a
personalization of the promise of his lineage; far more than a simple father’s
blessing, Jacob is told that the God of his forefathers “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.”
Pastor
Geoff McElroy describes it as “Jacob’s theophany, the revealing of the God of
his ancestors to this person in this time and in this place. It is here that the promises of God to
Abraham and Isaac become more than just the promises of the past, but becoming
[sic] the promises to him also. The vision of the stairway to heaven, the
angels ascending and descending drive home this point: that God is there,
present, and standing with Jacob. God is not just off in some cut-off, distant
realm but present in the world, active, as signified by the rapid movements of
God’s agents coming and going.
“And God
promises that this presence is not restricted to just this place, this beth-el,
this ‘house of God.’ The image of the LORD standing beside Jacob in verse 13 is
one that the LORD gives to Jacob to take with him for comfort. Language of
protection and providence burst from the mouth of the LORD towards Jacob: ‘Know
that I will be with you…will keep you…will bring you back…I will not leave you’
(Gen 28:15).”[3]
This
trio of sermons about a holy land is, as I mentioned last week, anchored in my
having gone to the land we call holy back in February. In a way, it was the opposite of Jacob’s
dream here; I wasn’t running from having taken anything, and I was going not to
the middle of nowhere but to the birthplace of my own faith. If anything, I should have had dreams upon
dreams of staircases and ladders and angels galore as I journeyed toward the
place God surely would be.
But
I didn’t. One of the strongest memories
I have is of going to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, the tomb where Jesus was
buried. It’s a beautiful garden, walled
off from the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem around it. The tomb itself is carved out of a sheer rock
wall with an entrance that’s been enlarged for all the tourists; the original
“door” would only have come up to my waist, and the solid stone that was rolled
away was maybe four feet tall but nearly a foot thick. It should have been an incredibly holy place,
a Beth-el filled with the presence of God.
And
it was, for some people. For me, I could
only see that our group took communion together and got little souvenir olive
wood cups out of it; I could only see the store you have to walk through on
your way out; I could only see the rotation of volunteer tour guides, most of
whom are retirees from the United States who feel called to come spend a few
months telling tourists like me about how Jesus died to save me from my sins
and I should be so grateful for His suffering.
I
spent most of my time at the tomb deeply angry, not amazed. I had gone looking for God and felt I did not
find Him; Jacob, a liar and a thief, goes running from God and runs smack into
Him.
The
thing of it is, though, that I was looking for the wrong thing. Holiness, as I mentioned last week, rarely
looks like we think it should; we cannot be the gatekeepers of the sacred, deciding
when and where and how God appears among us, nor can we outrun the God we think
is so ready to scold us. Jacob’s
immediate response to the dream is to set up an altar—a very respectful and
right thing, but then over the years that nowhere place where the extraordinary
happened became a Somewhere that is venerated and expected to be extraordinary. Jacob was acting in good faith after the
shock of such a lovely and overwhelming dream, but he took God’s changemaking
and made it into a kind of gatekeeping by saying, “God is in this place”
when God flat out said, “I am wherever you are.”
God is
continually doing, that, I’ve found—upending our desire to grab hold of the
holy and make it manageable, locatable, a travel destination and a
checklist. The very concept of Jesus
negates our efforts at such a thing; God came in the person of a carpenter’s
son from a backwater town born to an unmarried girl and never had any more
power in life than a wandering preacher.
Here, in Jacob’s dream, the angels are not doing anything spectacular;
they’re simply walking up and down the steps of a ziggurat-like temple, and
Professor Julianna Claasens writes that that in itself is the beautiful
thing. The staircase was likely “a
ramp-like structure that served as a divine sanctuary through which heaven and
earth were connected. This stairway to heaven does not give Jacob access to
heaven; rather, God speaks to Jacob where he is, denoting God’s immanent
presence rather than a faraway removed God calling from a distance. It is
significant that this surprise encounter completely comes from God — breaking
into Jacob’s state of sleep which signifies a brief cessation of anxious
fleeing.”[4]
“When
I finally hollered, ‘What?’” says the meme, says Jacob who had to stop running,
said I when everything in the Holy Land felt cheap to me because I wanted a dream
of cathedrals and ziggurats, “God said, ‘Only this,’ and held me.”
The
sacred is very sneaky; it shows up in the weirdest places, like the mouths of
those possessed by demons or the lunch of a young boy in a crowd of 5,000 or
the bumbling bravado of a fisherman. It
shows up in a desert where grief and confusion force rest and the running has
to stop. It shows up in the rocks under
our panicked feet and in the altars we set up to contain holiness. It shows up in the dreams where our minds get
out of God’s way, and it showed up, even, in Jerusalem.
After
the tomb, our tour group made its way to the Garden of Gethsemane. The garden sits midway up one of the hills
that curl around Jerusalem and is almost completely overshadowed by the Church
of All Nations. That’s a structure that was
originally built by the newly-empowered Christians of the fourth century, then
rebuilt by the Crusaders after an earthquake destroyed that, and then rebuilt
in 1920 after excavations found the original foundations, and then rebuilt
after arson damage in 2020. The church
is gorgeous in tones of rich blues and deep purples with the symbols of all the
nations who helped rebuild it painted on the ceiling; the windows are not picture-filled
glass but violet so that the sanctuary is in perpetual shadow, a reminder of
the sorrow of the Mount of Olives as Jesus did not run from the anger of those
pursuing Him.
Both
the church and the garden are very obvious holy places, beautiful in their
grief even with the commotion of the tourists winding through. But what stuck with me were the trees; there
are olive trees, massive, gnarled things too thick for even three people to get
their arms around, in the garden. Olive
trees, it turns out, don’t really die unless you kill them; with proper
pruning, they grow outward instead of upward and can live thousands of
years. The trees in the garden range
from two to four thousand years old. The
people of Jerusalem call them “the silent witnesses” because those olive trees
are old enough to have actually been there when Jesus was.
“‘Surely
the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ 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.’” The oldest tree in
Gethsemane is as old as King David when he first took over after the death of
Saul; the site of the church on the Mount of Olives was considered a holy space
before St. Augustine was converted to Christianity; the stones of Jacob’s
desert and Jerusalem’s have been formed and re-formed by millions, if not
billions of people running from whatever Esau they fear to find a God Who was right
where they were but Whom they couldn’t see until there was nothing else in the
way, until they stopped assuming what God wanted from them.
“I will
keep you wherever you go,” says God to the man who was born second and lived as
though he would never have enough security, wealth, life, love, faith, and
Jacob built an altar to say that that specific place was holy, the house of
God, because it was. And fourteen miles
away was a different kind of holy, and on a separate continent God was at work
for someone else, and thirty years later the messengers were still connecting
us to the heavens that birthed us, and in 2023 I went to Jerusalem and was
given an olive wood cup while having communion at the place where death was overwhelmed,
and neither time nor distance nor greed nor fear have stopped God from reaching
out and saying, “I am here, right here,” and holding us.
What are
you running from that shrouds God from you?
Where do you need to stop and fall to pieces so that God can put you
back together? Where is the space made
holy not because there is an altar there but because God is quietly waiting to
tell you to breathe? How can you become
changed by the realization that God is in this place and you did not know it? Be there, beloved, and rest. Amen.
[1] Unfortunately,
this had already been divorced from its original tweet by the time I discovered
the meme. I know it came from Twitter
and was retweeted by Randall Warren but have been unable to find the original.
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