"A Place of Possibility"

First Presbyterian Church

Peter S. Buehler

July 20, 2008

Genesis 28:10-19a

Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said,

'Surely the LORD is in this place -- and I did not know it!'

If it is one experience we have all had, we have all shared, it is the experience of dreaming. Each one of us dreams. We have all entered into this strange and surprising place where during our sleep the unconscious mind takes over and we see things, and hear things, and feel things that seem absolutely real.

And often it is the case that the dreams we remember most clearly occur just before we wake up. In those moments our dreams are so vivid that we literally cannot tell where we are, what is happening, if our dream world is our real world or our real world is our dream world.

Maybe ours was a wonderful and happy dream that we wanted to cling to, so we tried to stay asleep and remain in that place, to continue in that sense of joy and freedom. Maybe it was such a fitful, anxious, scary dream that when we woke up and became aware it was over, and not real after all, we found ourselves overcome with relief!

We're aware also that our dreams have meaning. Exactly what they mean, how to interpret the events and images, may escape us. We tell our spouse or our friend, "I had the strangest dream last night" -- because, we figure, everyone has had the experience, so it's not embarrassing to share with someone else even a bizarre dream, since, who knows, maybe that person will have an insight into its meaning. Yet have we not also had dreams of stunning clarity where we knew exactly what they meant, who the people were, exactly what the events signified.

Jacob had a dream like that. He knew exactly what it meant. He knew it was God who had stood beside him, that it was God who had spoken to him. Biblical scholars even have a term for this experience: Jacob's was an unintentional incubation dream. Incubation dreams were when ancient kings would intentionally spend the night in a temple, hoping that by being in a holy place a divine-human communication could be induced, a revelation or night vision sought and received. Unintentional incubation dreams occurred when someone happened to stumble onto a holy place and, passing the night there, received a message from heaven.

Jacob had no idea he was in a holy place. The story describes it all in mysterious terms -- leaving Beersheba, headed toward Haran and his uncle's home, fleeing for his life from his angry brother, Jacob, the scripture tells us, came to "a certain place and stayed for the night, because the sun had set." Really it was a no-place, a wilderness place -- actually a between-place -- the last place anyone would expect God to show up.

What's more, Jacob was unworthy -- he was a fugitive. Having induced his brother to sell him his birthright for a pot of lentil stew, Jacob, with his mother Rebekah's help, again got the best of Esau, tricking his nearly blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing due his elder brother -- itself an amazing story of deception.

But now, the one who always seemed to get his way, Jacob the trickster, he was on the run. Banished from his home, his family, and his life -- he was the Prodigal Son of the Old Testament. All he could think about was his survival, all he could feel was fear. Jacob's reality was as dark as the desert night.

So of we were writing the story, what would we imagine Jacob's dream to have been about? If we were writing the story, Jacob's dream in this "certain place" would no doubt be dark and menacing, a terrible nightmare, a guilt-induced vision of his outraged, hate-filled brother bent on revenge, following him, gaining on him, overtaking him, destroying him.

But that is not Jacob's dream. That is not Jacob's reality. What happens, what he sees and hears in his sleep, turns his world on its head. The dream Jacob has is about a reality he could not imagine; a truth he could not see, a grace he could not grasp.

Of all things: a ladder set up on the earth, its top reaching to heaven! Angels ascending and descending on it -- not the kind dressed in white with wings, but God's messengers carrying prayers upward and assurances downward.

Is this reality? Not a heaven separate and cut off from earth, people left to their own devices, God and humanity disconnected, impossibly distant one from the other?

What are our assumptions? We pray, Our Father, who art in heaven -- by that do we mean God "up there," arms folded, looking down, shaking his head, judging, disapproving? Or do we understand a different reality, a God whose angels are busy climbing up and down ladders, a God who is connected to our life on earth, a God who surprises us with possibilities for our life and for our future that we cannot even begin to imagine?

I love the little book, Children's Letters to God. They are handwritten notes, most are brief and succinct. Like the one-liner from Lucy: "Dear God, Are you invisible or is that just a trick?" Or the concern of a girl named Anita: "Dear God, Is it true my father won't get in Heaven if he uses his bowling words in the house?" But my favorite is from a boy named Simon: "Dear God, My name is Simon. That's from the bible. I am eight and a half. We live across the street from the park. I have a dog name(d) Buster. I used to have a hamster but he got out and ran away. I am small for my age. My hobbies are swimming, bowling, my chemistry set, reading, coin collecting and tropical fish. Right now I have three kinds. Well I guess I said a mouthful. Goodbye. Always a friend. Simon."

For Simon, God is right there -- he could be sitting on the living room couch.

And he believes God cares about every detail of his life. I love that! A childlike faith!

What Jacob sees in his dream is this same wonderful connection, not anything dark or ominous or scary as he might have imagined, or we might have imagined, but rather a joyous, even a playful image of an immense ladder, a ramp, an escalator full of angel traffic -- activity and possibility, earth and heaven connected.

Is there something in your life that you believe is your reality, something you're convinced is your fate? Something you have stopped praying about, something you would change if you could but at this point cannot imagine ever being changed?

Do you ever find yourself in Jacob's place, somewhere out in no-man's land? But is it possible that what seems like your reality is not real, but instead what is real is your dream?

There's a discernment here, of course. There's a difference between reality and fantasy, and we don't want to confuse the two. What's more, many of us have had to learn the hard way not only about courage, what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called changing the things we can, but also about serenity, in his words, accept(ing) those things we cannot change.

But there are days when we resist the one as well as the other, both courage and serenity; instead we see ourselves like Jacob, in no certain place. There are days, are there not, when we are stuck, and we assume being stuck is our reality.

In her powerful book of reflections, Memories of God, author and church history scholar Roberta Bondi tells of her early life and how her relationship with her father for many years complicated and severely strained her relationship with God. In the book she tells how impossible it was for her as a child to gain her father's approval and love. Overly strict and given to withering insults, Bondi writes that "he (also) held to an exaggerated version of the cultural stereotypes of the forties and fifties. He only respected men who were highly intelligent and would stand up to him and argue with him. (Yet) these same qualities in a woman he found contemptible. A good woman was sweet and pliant, quiet and obedient.

I not only knew I could not be sweet, pliant, quiet, and obedient; I also knew I did not want to be that way. But I had to be! I loved my father so much, yet I could never please him."

She goes on to say how for many years she could not bear to call God her Father, fearing that God was like her earthly father, only more judgmental and disapproving.

Until years later, when her father was elderly, frail, and dying, and his sister -- Bondi's most beloved and favorite aunt -- urged her to set aside her life's worth of hurt and disdain and go visit him.

Bondi, an early church history professor, found herself unable to ignore the lessons of the ancient Christian teachers she had studied and taught, particularly their warning that the work of prayer and healing is not only an internal mental process, but it also involves work and real risk in the external world of human relationships.

So Bondi went to see her father. She saw immediately that he had changed. He was thrilled to see her, he was warm to her, he was proud of her, they spent many happy hours and special moments together prior to his death.

And as so often happens when one makes the decision to take risks for love's sake, to be the initiator for love's sake, she forgave him long before she saw him.

In so doing, in making the pilgrimage to physically be with him and be reconciled with him, her life, her reality was changed. She became unstuck; she became free.

What initiative is God calling us to take for the sake of love? What alternative future is God calling us to believe in and act upon? How might our dreams be more real than our reality? What risk can we imagine ourselves taking that would cause us to wake up awestruck and amazed, and say, with Jacob, Surely the LORD is in this place -- and I did not know it!

Isn't that exactly God's way, God present with us in our joys as well as our struggles -- only we didn't realize it until we woke up! Maybe it's then that we see the ladder and the angels, and all the ways heaven and earth are connected,

all the ways God is at work in our lives, all the ways our world is a place of possibility, and we did not know it.

I want to close by encouraging you: Jesus shows us the way into the world of possibility. We can rely on him to guide us through what is difficult; we can depend on him to lead us through what is risky; we can be confident that he will bring us through desert places into promised places. We follow him, we believe in him, we go the way he goes -- and his direction, according to the New Testament, is down, then up.

We know the old African-American spiritual, "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder."

The first two verses take us up: We are climbing Jacob's ladder, We are climbing Jacob's ladder, We are climbing Jacob's ladder, Soldiers of the cross.

Then: Every round goes higher, higher; Every round goes higher, higher; Every round goes higher, higher; Soldiers of the cross.

But the last two verses bring us down to where we are, to where we live, to what we believe and do: Sinner do you love my Jesus; Brother do you love my Jesus; Sister do you love my Jesus; Soldiers of the cross.

Then the fourth verse: If you love him why not serve him; If you love him why not serve him; If you love him why not serve him; Soldiers of the cross.

Because the way we love him and serve him is to do as he does, to empty ourselves, to humble ourselves, to think less about ascending the ladder and being right, and more about descending the ladder and being loving.

First down, then up.

We put our lives in God's hands, we trust God's love and justice, we follow Jesus and take risks, we practice courage and kindness for the sake of our neighbor, our friend, our loved one.

Because for us the way to climb Jacob's ladder is first down, then up.