Ordinary 16 Year A

Sermon Based on:
Genesis 28:10-19a,
Pslam 139:1-12,23-24,
Romans 8:12-25,
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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Jacob is fleeing in fear from his brother Esau – he is alone, and hungry, and tired. He is in deep trouble. He has lied and stolen from his own family, partly because, as it turned out, his family is pretty screwed up. We’ve been following the great arc of Jacob’s generational story in Genesis over these past few weeks.

The great and faithful Abraham was Jacob’s grandfather, and Isaac his father, whom we last met as a child, bound as a sacrifice. But Isaac is now old and dying, and Jacob’s mother had encouraged him to steal Isaac’s fatherly blessing from his first-born twin brother Esau. Jacob succeeded in this plan, but Esau was so enraged that he is now chasing Jacob in order to kill him.

And in a world where one’s family and community were so intrinsic to one’s identity and sense of self, to be cut off from family and cast out was the worst fate imaginable. Jacob was effectively a non-person, with no rights, no claim to safety or refuge. He is in crisis.

So Jacob is on the run, in the middle of nowhere in every sense, and at the end of the day he makes the best of things and settles down to sleep, using a sun-warmed stone as a pillow. He wasn’t looking for the holy, and he would not have expected the holy to be looking for him. On that dark and lonely night in the wilderness, all Jacob was interested in was survival.

But this is a story as much about God as it is about Jacob.

God takes the initiative, and comes to Jacob in his dreaming, that night in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of crisis. Remember that dreaming in scripture is almost always a vulnerable time, a time when the divine can get in past our defences and explanations.

God gives Jacob the vision to see the reality of his situation – what is right there around him – and the reality is that heaven is touching earth. There is a ramp or ladder on which Jacob can see angels – messengers of God’s blessing and presence – ascending and descending, going about their ordinary business.

Then suddenly, without warning, God is somehow right beside Jacob, giving him extraordinary assurances: God’s presence and protection will be with Jacob, and Jacob will one day have the land – a home and an identity – once more.

“Know that I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go…”

When Jacob wakes up he can’t stop talking!

“Surely Yahweh is in this place – and I did not know it!”

I wonder if this is the most important sentence in Jacob’s whole story.

Notice that Jacob doesn’t make the place holy. He simply wakes up to a holiness that was already there. The ladder was already there; the messengers of God were already there; God was already there. What changed was Jacob’s awareness.

He had lain down to sleep in the middle of nowhere because he could run no further. The place was no more than a scruffy tree and a stretch of stony dirt, but now Jacob names it Beth-El – ‘the House of God’.

What can we learn from this story?

I think the most important thing is that Jacob is still Jacob. He is not transformed, actually, by his encounter with the living God. He remains a trickster. The scandal of the story is not that Jacob has finally become worthy of God, but that God came to him while he was still Jacob.

God did not wait for Jacob to sort out his life, to repair the damage he had caused, or to become a better person. God met him on the road, alone and afraid, and renewed the promise.

In doing so, God moved outside the box. God did not choose the firstborn son, the one who appeared to have done everything right, the respectable one, the obvious one. God refused to be constrained by the cultural and social expectations of the day.

God’s presence is never to be limited by the houses we build, or by our notions of who might be appropriate to come into God’s presence.

Jacob’s story also reminds us that God is everywhere – that any and every ordinary corner of this earth can become Beth-El, the house of God. Or perhaps better, any ordinary corner of this earth can be recognised as Beth-El.

As the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only those who see

take off their shoes –

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Jacob discovers what the psalmist later sings in Psalm 139:

If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast…

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around me become night,”

even the darkness is not dark to you.

Jacob has travelled as far from home as he can imagine. Darkness has covered him, and he believes himself utterly alone. Yet even there, God’s hand holds him fast.

Any one of us can suddenly discover God’s presence right beside us, without warning. Sometimes this awareness comes to us in moments of prayer – “OK God, I’m ready” – but more often it happens when we’re doing something entirely different.

What do we do when those unexpected encounters with the divine happen in our lives?

I don’t know about you, but I’m well acquainted with distractions that push God’s Spirit away: rushing on with the next task, thinking myself not good enough for God, paying more attention to the six o’clock news or what I need to buy for dinner.

It takes practice to turn from those distractions; to make a deliberate choice to pause, to pay attention with our whole being to where we are and how awesome and holy the moment is when the sunlight glances through the leaves, when the steam rises gently from a cup of tea… simply to become aware that, inexplicably, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”1

The choice then is to set up an altar, either in the world or in our hearts, a marker of some kind to remind us of where heaven touched earth for a holy moment.

Like Jacob setting up his stone, we all make altars. We all keep touchstones that remind us of what God has done in our lives, those moments when we have known and encountered the presence of God. We return to these touchstones throughout our lives. We draw strength from them, and they sustain us on the journey.

The words of Psalm 139 have been one of my touchstones in faith for more than thirty years.

These were the first words I ever read in the Bible, and when I read them for the first time, as a teenager in the midst of depression, I knew with my whole being that God was real, and God was with me, and I was not alone.

The divine is all around us, for the whole earth is the house of God.

Of course we have the deep habit of gathering in this beautiful, holy place to pray, and it shapes our awareness of God through our worship together.

But it is not for us to limit God’s love and grace to any particular place or persons, for God will be God – a fire of grace that is uncontainable and without limit. Jacob discovered that in the middle of the wilderness when God came to him against all expectation.

We might awaken on any ordinary morning to exclaim, “Surely God is in this place – and I did not know it.”

Pay attention to those moments. Give thanks for them. Set up a reminder – an altar you can return to, a touchstone you can carry with you.

We never know when we will need to be reminded of that holy moment when we found ourselves, quite unexpectedly, at the gate of heaven.

Amen.

1. Gerard Manly Hopkins, from the poem ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877)