Scripture: Genesis 28:10-22.
I guess I should start this morning by apologizing to anyone who came to church today expecting a sermon about sex. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about…I have been doing a series of sermons this summer based on stories connected with characters from the book of Genesis. I announced sometime back in June what stories I would preaching on, on what Sundays, and up to today I have followed that schedule pretty closely.
My announced story for today was the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, in which our hero Joseph, gets propositioned by the wife of a pretty powerful Egyptian politician. Of course Joseph, who is disgustingly virtuous and entirely without hormones, says, “Oh, no, I would never do such a thing…and please cover up your elbows in my presence.” Potiphar’s wife thought she was a little sexier than that and took offense, accused Joseph of assaulting her and had him thrown into jail.
I was going to preach about that story, partly because I had the privilege of playing Potiphar in our production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so I thought it might be fun to preach on this story that I had helped to act out. But the truth is I have never liked Joseph very much as a character, and I certainly don’t care for the way women are portrayed through Potiphar’s wife, and so I found myself sort of fighting with this story as I was thinking about it. I have often found myself fighting with the stories in Genesis, and I decided I just didn’t want to do that so much again this week. So I found myself not being given much that I wanted to say about that story. Maybe I’ll be more inspired some other time. But not today. I’m sorry for the bait and switch tactics.
What you’re going to get today instead of Potiphar’s wife, or Joseph, is Jacob. I actually don’t know how I could have thought of leaving Jacob out of this series on Genesis. He is actually one of my favorite characters, not just in Genesis but probably in the Bible, and not because he is such an appealing person, because he isn’t, but I do like the stories he’s a part of, and although I don’t see myself as being the kind of person Jacob was, I do see myself in these stories and I’m often drawn back to them, and I continue to be touched by them.
I’ll start with this dream Jacob had about a ladder reaching from heaven to earth, but we really can’t take that story out of the context of Jacob’s life. We need to understand somewhat where Jacob was, both where his body was and where his head was when this story took place.
Jacob is a twin, a few moments younger than his brother Esau. MM is not here this morning. It would be interesting to hear her perspective on this story because not only are she and T the parents of twins, but M has just recently been honored for her 41 years of service in the organization of the mothers of twins. M might have some interesting insights on this story, but they are insights I don’t have. All I can tell you is that the fact that Jacob was younger than his twin brother was important. Even though it may have been just by a few seconds, it meant that Esau was by rights the heir to…well to just about everything. The inheritance. The leadership of the family. The blessings that are handed down from one generation to the next and all the privileges and responsibilities that go along with them. All this was supposed to go to Esau.
Jacob didn’t think it should belong to Esau, first because he, Jacob, wanted all those things, and secondly, because he, Jacob, deserved all those things more than Esau did. He, Jacob, was the one who cared about the family’s inheritance, which was not just a matter of money but was a matter of certain values and traditions and the faith they were expected to carry forward. He, Jacob, wouldn’t ignore the family’s values or drink away the family fortune, and Esau just might.
So Jacob set out to get all the goodies into the right person’s hands, his own. And the last thing he did to accomplish this was to out and out lie to his own father on his deathbed. He pretended to be Esau and got his father’s most sacred blessing. In effect he got Isaac to sign a new will leaving everything to him. Isaac is blind and near death. Jacob, instead of telling his father that he loves him or exchanging a few heartfelt words with his father before he dies, deceives his father and cheats his brother out of everything he had coming to him. There’s some family values for you!
And mostly, I think we would have to say, Jacob gets away with it. Esau begs his father to undo what he has done, but he refuses, and Jacob, who has done nothing which deserves being rewarded, gets pretty much what he set out to get.
The down side was that Esau was mad enough to want to kill Jacob, and so Jacob had to run away. Jacob sets off on a trip to get away from Esau and while he’s at it to go to where his mother’s family is and maybe find a wife or two. That’s where Jacob is when we meet him in the scripture for this morning. Running away, certainly from his brother, in a way from his past, maybe running away from himself, maybe even running away from God. Someday I want to talk about running away from God and how we do that and why we might do that. But not today. I have a few other things I need to talk about today.
Genesis says that Jacob came “to a certain place”. Just “a certain place”, no particular place. It could have been anywhere really, out in the middle of nowhere. And it was there in this nowhere-special place that Jacob had this dream of a ladder that extended from heaven to earth, with angels going up and down the ladder moving between heaven and earth. And then in this dream God spoke to Jacob and said really two things. First God renewed the promise he had given to Abraham, said that someday all this land all around would belong to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that those descendants would fill up the land. And then God said, basically, I will be with you. And that was the end of the dream.
This is a dream Jacob had and I’m not sure dreams are ever meant to be understood as though we could say exactly what they mean, but they do suggest things to us, and what this dream suggests to me, what it brings to my awareness, is the whole notion of being blessed. I believe that is what has happened to Jacob and I believe that is one of the things this scripture is inviting me to consider: What does it mean to be blessed?
There was a person I knew back in Chicago who decided that when she was asked, “How are you?” as we do when we’re saying hello to someone or calling them on the phone and say, “Hi ___ , how are you?” and we will typically say “Good.” “Fine.” “Great.” I’m O.K. Doin’ all right. Or, if we want to be a little more honest we might say, “Oh, o.k.” So-so. Not so great today. Or whatever…This woman decided she wasn’t going to say that, and so when I asked her how she was, she would say, “I’m blessed, thank you.”
Now I have to explain some things about this right away. There may be people, maybe lots of people, who say “I’m blessed, thank you,” in the same kind of way we say “Fine, thanks,” as just sort of the routine or polite thing to say so you can get on with the conversation. I don’t know too many people who say that, so I don’t know how unusual it was for this one person to say this.
What I do know is that she wasn’t saying it in just some routine or polite kind of way. Nor was she saying it just to speak in language with sort of a religious flavor. I had a number of friends in Chicago who just used a lot of religious language. When they heard something that was good news or upbeat, they would say “Praise God.” “Praise the Lord”. I knew this was the way they talked, and I didn’t hold it against them. They knew this was not the way I talked, and they didn’t hold that against me. None of us thought you had to talk any certain way to be a Christian. We just understood that different people expressed themselves in different ways. But what I am saying is that when this woman would respond to the question “how are you?” by saying, “I’m blessed”, it was not just polite, and it was not just her way of talking, and it was not just substituting some words that sound religious for some words which don’t. This was something she had thought through, and when she said, “I’m blessed,” it wasn’t that she just wanted to announce that she was Christian or that she wanted to sound religious. When she said “I’m blessed”, she meant “I’m blessed.”
And what she meant was not that things were going well for her. If things did happen to be going well, that was beside the point. Mostly I think words like “fine”, “good”, “great”, “swell”, or even “O.K.” would not have been the right words to describe how she was doing. She was not an intimate friend, but I did know her well enough to have a sense that her life had had, and continued to have, more than her share (if there is such a thing) of pain—body pain, job pain, family type pain, racism pain, trying to find your place in the world pain, trying to make ends meet pain, worn out and beaten down type pain—there are lots of kinds of pain, and she had had many of them. And what she was saying was that she was not going to pretend, even in this relatively innocuous way, she was not going to pretend the pain wasn’t there. Somebody says “How you doin’?” the answer is not fine. Never have been doin’ fine. Not doin’ fine now. Not gonna lie about it. Not gonna whitewash what life has really been like. Not gonna deny my own experience. Not gonna say fine even to be polite.
On the other hand, no need to tell the whole story to every unsuspecting person who happens to ask “How are you?” No need to really explain why things are not “fine”. Besides, that is not the truth either, how awful things are. The point is not really whether things are fine or not fine. What I believe she was saying to me is that for her, speaking the truth did not have to do with being honest about whether things were fine or not so fine, or whether you were having a relatively good day or relatively not so good day. The truth that she wanted to claim and to hold on to was, is, that she was being upheld, supported, strengthened every single day by the grace and love of God. The truth she knew in her heart, but probably was still working on every day, had nothing to do with whether things were going well for her. Her truth was not that things were fine or not fine but that whatever way things were, God was truly powerfully present for her, and that was all the truth she needed. How are you? I’m blessed, thank you. How are you? God is present.
Now of course the issue here is not how we greet each other in everyday conversation. The issue is what it means to be blessed. I believe this woman knew what it means to be blessed, and the way she responded served well to remind me every time she would say, “I’m blessed.” Jacob on the other hand, at this point in our story, was still learning, and was a bit of a slow learner. Let me get back to him for a few moments.
It might seem at first that Jacob, too, knew what it meant to be blessed. Here Jacob is running away and for good reason. He has pretty much been a low-down rotten scoundrel. He’s trying to put his past behind him, has no idea what the future holds, finds himself out in the middle of nowhere, this sort of solitary individual lost in this big dessert. And then suddenly he has this dream and God throws him a lifeline.
Jacob’s in the middle of nowhere, but God in effect says to him that there is no place on earth that is God-forsaken. God in effect says that there is more to this world than dirt, and that there is more to this world than trying to figure out how we’re going to get where we want to go. Jacob has done nothing his whole life really that is worthwhile, even though he has had a pretty well defined set of goals and objectives and is well on the road to getting where he wants to be. He got himself a small fortune and got appointed the head of the family even though the odds were against him and now after he finds a wife and after Esau cools off, he’ll be in good shape. But having done all this there is still nothing that would commend him much to any other human being much less to God, but God in effect says there is no person on earth who is God-forsaken. By showing Jacob the ladder between heaven and earth, God says something like—this is a dream now and dreams are not easily put into words and I don’t want to put words into God’s mouth, but I’ll do it anyway—God says something like: “Wherever you find yourself, whyever you are there, whatever you have done, I am there too, and my love is not shut off, heaven is not closed, to anyone.
At first Jacob is suitably impressed with all this. He says, “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it. How awesome is this place.” Life is not only good. Life is holy. In fact, life is not so much good as it is holy. It’s made up not just of ambition and deceit, tricks and power plays and the like. God’s here too. Jacob might have been saying to himself that in spite of who I have been, life is awesome. And everyplace is awesome because it is filled not just with me, but with God.” Jacob does seem genuinely overcome with wonder and gratitude and the magnitude of what the ladder has helped him to see.
But, sorry to say, it doesn’t last. Either Jacob’s great insight that he had in the middle of the night has disappeared by morning (this happens sometimes to me), or maybe it was never really there to begin with. When Jacob sets out on his travels again, he says, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God.” God had come to Jacob in an extraordinary way, in a way that Jacob has certainly not merited in any way and had shown Jacob a love that was unconditional, and how does Jacob respond? He tells God what the conditions will be for his loving God. If God does this and this and this and this, then Jacob in all his wonderful generosity will agree to accept God. He will adopt God, make God his god, take God under his wing, so to speak. God has loved Jacob in spite of himself. Jacob has expressed his intention to love God, and he says that his love will take effect … later, after God has done all the things Jacob expects God to do, maybe on the Sunday after the first full moon after the first equinox following the time that God measured up to Jacob’s standards. Jacob has not gotten it after all, this business of being blessed.
And I think sometimes we don’t quite get it either. Not because we are so much like Jacob, God help us. But because we are in some ways like Jacob, and we tend to equate God’s blessing with our good fortune. We fall into this way of talking so easily. A person will say she is blessed with good health. Another will say he is blessed with three wonderful grandchildren. We may be blessed with great weather on a vacation or with friends we can count on, and who count on us. We speak in this way of blessings as good things in our lives, and I don’t want to say that it’s wrong. If a blessing is something that gives us strength or encouragement, that lifts our spirits or provides consolation when we need it, then certainly these very specific good things in our lives qualify as blessings. And we all need at least some of these good things that we call blessings.
But there is this other sense of being blessed that is different from, maybe almost opposite from, this common sense way of talking about things. It is not so much that I am blessed with good health, but I have good health and I am blessed with the presence of God…or I don’t have such good health, and I am blessed with the presence of God. I have grandchildren, and I am blessed, and if I have no grandchildren, I am blessed with the presence of God. The weather on the vacation that we looked forward to for months was absolutely awful, but I am blessed with the presence of God. I don’t have so many friends anymore; I outlived them or they moved away, but I am blessed with the presence of God.
This kind of blessing does not depend on our good fortune; it depends only on God. And it does not refer only to the good things in our lives. It says that although these good things in our lives are important, and in one sense we depend on them, in another sense the only thing we really have to depend on is God’s presence, God’s love.
I know sometimes it is hard for us to hear and understand that message. I know sometimes those things just sound like words, empty words. I know that sometimes we have overused those words. But I pray for us to be able to recover those words, and more than the words—to know God’s presence, to trust God’s presence. I pray that we may have eyes to see and hearts to believe. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 20, 2000