Tenth Pentecost/Lectionary 16/Proper 10
Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
It usually begins with me working on a sermon. I work for hours and send it to the printer. I pick up the copy and read with satisfaction. I head for church. It is a fine summer Sunday morning and I decide to walk. I walk and I walk. People, church members, see me walking and begin to offer me rides but I insist that it is good for me to walk and I press on. I begin to notice that the time is growing short. The service will begin soon. I increase my pace. I begin to jog. I can see the driveway entrance but it seems to take forever to get there. I increase my speed to running. Finally I reach the drive entrance and turn into the parking lot. The woods suddenly seem to close in around me. I find myself on a path that I know leads to the church. I continue to run, winding my way through the woods. Occasionally through the trees I see glimpses of the church. I keep looking at my watch and realize it is time the service began. I tell myself that Chris will handle it. She will lead the liturgy to start the service. I can hear the organ in the distance playing the opening hymn. I run on finally reaching the church door. The service has begun. I rush through the office and into the sacristy. I open the closet and look for my robe, only it isn’t there. I begin to search through the building, looking for my robe. I open closet after closet until finally I find it in the back most closet. I can hear the service progressing toward the reading of the lessons. I rush back through the building, I run down one hallway after another. Finally I open the door just as it is time for the Gospel to be read. I walk up the aisle and open the bulletin. I read the lesson and head for the pulpit. This is not the free standing lectern you see this morning. The pulpit I approach is like the pulpit at Wittenberg, Germany where Martin Luther preached. To enter the pulpit you need to climb the steps up into the pulpit. I begin to climb and I climb and I climb. The pulpit hymn goes on and on. Finally I reach the top of the stairs, I open a door and step into the pulpit. I look out across the congregation then look down at my sermon. The pages are blank.
Every human being dreams and some of those dreams fill us with anxiety. We call them nightmares. Sometimes we can make some sense of the dream because we know the stress causing factors. Other times we simply feel anxious because the dream has us being pursued or we are pursuing something that we cannot seem to quite capture. Sometimes the dream focuses on our anxiety about how we look, how we are dressed or not dressed, how we will reach our destination or how frustrated we are in the journey. Dreams seem to come from all the baggage we carry with us into each night. The unfinished business of our lives emotionally, psychologically and maybe even spiritually.
And if there was anyone who was traveling with a lot of unfinished business, it would be the Jacob of our first lesson for today. Last Sunday the semi-continuous readings from the first book of the Bible moved the story of the beginning of God’s covenant promises with Abraham and Isaac one step further through history with the birth of Jacob and Esau. We also glimpsed the character and personality of these very different twins when Jacob succeeds in getting Esau to trade his birthright as the oldest son to the younger brother Jacob for a bowl of stew. Over the next years Esau takes a wife and begins a family while Jacob stays close to his mother, Rebekah. Father Isaac clearly likes Esau best and as he begins to worry about his impending death from old age, Isaac decides it is time to give his blessing to the son who will carry on the family name and the covenant with God. Isaac sends his favorite son, Esau off to hunt for some quality wild game which he intends to eat before giving his final blessing. It is at this point that Jacob and his mother succeed in fooling the nearly blind Isaac by first preparing a domestic dish disguised as wild game and then disguise the smooth skinned Jacob to appear to blind old Isaac as the favored brother Esau. Isaac is tricked into giving his blessing to Jacob. When Esau returns and discovers that he has been cheated not only of his birthright but also now of his father’s irrevocable blessing, he swears that he will get vengeance upon Jacob as soon as father Isaac dies. It is at this point that Jacob’s mother and co-conspirator convinces Isaac that it is time for Jacob to find a wife, but she is not to be just one of the local Canaanite girls. The decision is made that Jacob should journey back to the home land around Haran where Rebekah’s brother still lives and there to find a wife. Rebekah tells her beloved son Jacob, that he needs to stay away for a year or two until his brother Esau cools down. In fact it will be twenty years before Jacob returns by which time both his mother and father will have died. Jacob is fleeing for his life.
This is where our first lesson for today begins. Jacob the deceiver and liar traveling alone across the wilderness toward a land and people he has never known. The night closes in and he lays down, positioning a large stone near his head as protection against whatever manner of creature may be lurking in the night. But what he encounters is not a creature of the night but a dream.
Jacob dreams a dream. Now we all know that most dreams seem to be what comes back to haunt us during the night, like that left–over pizza we shouldn’t have eaten or that tax deduction we should have reported more carefully. We toss and turn at night, often because night is when we come face to face with the things we have been running from all that day or maybe all of our lives. With his defenses down and his unconscious running free, we would expect that Jacob would have slept the sleep of the guilty, complete with nightmarish visions of the father he had deceived and the brother he had betrayed.
But Jacob was traveling not only with guilt but also with a covenanted blessing that it is clear he did not yet fully understand or appreciate. Jacob dreams a dream of a ladder or stairway set up on the earth and reaching to heaven. Angels are ascending and descending the stairs and there right beside him is the Lord God speaking to Jacob. “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your grandfather and the God of Isaac your father.” With these words of introduction God makes it clear that whether Jacob likes it or not, he carries with him a place in the historic line of those who are to be preservers of the covenant that God gave to Abraham for the good of all humanity. This is the promise of land, the very land on which Jacob has just been sleeping; and a promise of off-spring enough to fill the land; and a promise that ultimately these descendents would be a blessing to all the families of the earth. And God concludes by assuring Jacob that he will not leave him until all that has been promised has been fulfilled. Jacob awoke and proclaimed the obvious. God is in this place. And the text tells us “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.” Jacob called the place Bethel which means “House of God” for clearly God dwelt in this place. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy points of this story is that God comes to Jacob. Jacob did not go looking for God. Jacob was looking for a way to stay alive and hopefully find a wife. He may have been blessed by his father but he clearly had no idea what that blessing was for or would mean to his future life and that of his descendents.
It is easy to take blessing and promise from God lightly. Every worship service ends with a benediction or blessing. Pastors bless people and even things all the time. Blessings take many forms but perhaps the most important is that of Baptism. A child, some water, a promise and the word of God declaring that this child has been marked and sealed by God forever. We proclaim it as a defining faith moment but the fact is that no child ever really has the slightest idea what is happening. It will take years, if not a lifetime, before the child grows into the faith and the knowledge of that faith that is planted in baptism. God came to Jacob as God comes to each of us in our baptism. God establishes a covenant with us as God did with Jacob that will endure throughout our days and be renewed each time we meet God in the forms of his word and sacraments. It can take a life time to discern the true meaning of God’s blessing. It would be twenty years before Jacob would fully wrestle with God and ultimately cling to the faith he had discovered. These would be 20 years of continued struggle and deceptions. Each time I hear this story, I am reminded of the old gospel song that contains the familiar words: “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.” The song was made popular by Pete Seeger and recently recorded by Bruce Springsteen. The music is great but the theology is all wrong. The ladder is for angels, not humanity. What God reveals to Jacob and ultimately to each of us, is that no amount of climbing by us is going to get us any closer to God. The story of salvation history is the story of God coming to us. It is the story of God entering into human history to save humanity. The angels that Jacob saw in those ancient days were a vision to behold. They would eventually be known in future centuries by names such as Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. They would not just be climbing between heaven and earth but become actively involved in bringing the word of God to humanity, announcing births and praising God in the night sky over Bethlehem. And ultimately, Jesus tells us in the interpretation of today’s Gospel parable, it will be the angel’s, God’s messengers, who will separate the righteous from all causes of sin and evildoers. This is how humanity is ultimately met by God. In the answering of the cosmic questions about meaning, purpose and the place of good and evil in our lives. We are striving along with all creation to be judged righteous before God. Righteousness means being right before God which humanity always assumes is something we have to do for ourselves. Do the right things, help the right people, serve the right cause. But we also know from experience that try as we might to do what is right, things never seem to turn out the way we had planned. (Assuming we even had a plans.) We are actually more easily drawn to follow Jacob’s example of using deception, half-truths and lies to make our lives easier if not happier. We would like to believe that we can control the world around us, but Jesus knew better.
Jacob was not a good person. He is not the kind of person that any of us would have chosen to be humanities hope for the future. A cheat and a liar so sleep deprived and stressed out he anoints rocks in the wilderness in an attempt to convince us and himself that God has somehow chosen him. Yet holy history declares that God did choose him. Jesus cautions us in the parable he tells this morning to be careful of assuming that we know the mind and will and purpose of God. With the simple example of “good” wheat and a type of weed that looks like wheat being sown together, Jesus reminds us that God’s kingdom will come in its own good time. Jacob is not a great hero of the faith performing miracles and changing people’s lives for the better. But he did come to know the meaning of faith and he did accept his place in keeping the covenant. Jesus told the parable of wheat and weeds to help us all understand that it is God who judges in God’s good time.
The child baptized today did not have to pass the baptism quiz to be here. The gifts and blessings we receive from God are not of our making or deserving but just that, gifts. Jesus teaches that we are to grow and flourish as best we can surrounded by that which is good and that which is not, but being careful not to assume that we can tell the difference. We are not charged with weeding God’s garden. We are planted to grow as best we can in the covenant God makes with each of us and not get lost in the weeds. This is hard enough without worrying about which weeds to pull. This past Friday, Chris and I took a walk through the woods and along the dune ridge at Zion Beach State Park. I was struck by the many colorful blooms of prairie flowers. There were bursts of orange, lacy white, clusters of yellow and carpets of pale blue all attracting butterflies. I did not know the names of most of the blooms but as I studied them more closely I realized that these same plants attempting to grow in one of my flower beds at home would probably be quickly pulled as a weed for that is what their leaves looked like. I decide what grows in my flower bed, although God seems to be regularly trying to sneak a few additions in. Happens each day of our lives. That which we do not value is somehow blessed by God and the weed we would have pulled becomes a gift from God. There is no explanation other than God’s grace. God’s power to enter our lives and bless them. God meets us in forms most unexpected. Jesus says give it time. Stay open to the possibility of God’s grace. Do not close off the conversation. The dream may become a nightmare but sometimes the nightmare becomes a dream, maybe even a vision beyond the dream.
In my dream I looked down and saw blank pages. By God’s grace I have come to understand that blank pages do not always mean the words are lost, it may be that the words simply haven’t arrived yet. Jesus says, give it time.
Amen