Sermon:  
“Know Your Bed is Holy Ground”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

I once heard this great story about a mother and her son and their bedtime routine.  I can’t vouch for it, whether or not it really happened, but I think you’ll agree with me that it ought to be true. It seems this young mother – a very kind and devout woman – was doing her best to raise up her little boy with faith.  And so, every night, she’d tuck him into his bed and read to him from his children’s Bible – probably a Bible much like the ones we present to families at baptisms here.  She’d read him that night’s Bible story, and then sing him a sweet children’s hymn for his lullaby – probably like one we sang today, like “Jacob’s Ladder” – and of course saying a bedtime prayer.  So on this one night, the Bible story the mom read was the familiar passage from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, how God is like a light shining in the darkness that will never go out, and the song she sang was “Angels Watching Over Me.”  When she finished, the mother asked her son what he thought they should pray about that night and he said, “Mom, do you think if I prayed really hard God would leave me his flashlight but go away with all those singing angels?  I want to stay up a while and read a comic book."

See that’s just it – that’s the problem.  It sounds so beautiful, both Psalm 139 and the “Jacob’s ladder” story – God going everywhere with us, always watching over us.  But is that always what we want?  If we’re not careful, God’s angels start to sound a little too much like George Orwell’s “Big Brother” watching us, like in his book 1984.  I’m sure we all have a few things we’d rather do without heaven watching too closely.  We probably all have a few dark, or at least untidy, corners of our lives that we’d prefer God didn’t ever see.  You know how Jesus says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock?”  Well, it is true that when we pray we invite our Lord to make a home in our hearts, but most of us shut off a few of the rooms that aren’t quite up to company coming.

We have to listen to today’s story about Jacob like that, because he finds himself out there in the wilderness – the place the comes to call Beth-El, or “house of the Lord” – because he had to go on the run from his brother.  Jacob, you may remember, was the one who tricked his father into giving him his twin brother Esau’s blessing.  Here’s what it says back there in chapter 27, verses 41 and following:  “⁴¹Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him, and Esau said to himself, ‘The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob.’ ⁴²But the words of her elder son Esau were told to Rebekah; so she sent and called her younger son Jacob and said to him, ‘Your brother Esau is consoling himself by planning to kill you. ⁴³Now therefore, my son, obey my voice; flee at once to my brother Laban in Haran, ⁴⁴and stay with him a while, until your brother’s fury turns away— ⁴⁵until your brother… forgets what you have done to him….” So with his mother’s help, Jacob flees for his life.

Jacob knew he had been dishonest – he had acted like a liar and a thief, to steal for himself an inheritance that was not his birthright as the younger twin.  And so, we could imagine he would have been genuinely surprised when he finds God blessing him with great promises for his future and angel visions out there in the middle of nowhere, on this barren hilltop where the sunset stopped him and he had just chanced to lay his head down on a rock to rest.  It’s no wonder that Jacob there promises God his undying allegiance and sets up the stone as a marker for that holy ground.

Many peoples throughout time and around the world have searched for holy places – places where humans can encounter the divine.  Scholars and archeologists will call a sacred site like this an omphalos, which means “navel of the universe” – it is a mystical point where heaven and earth connect. So Jacob must have counted himself blessed to have found his own “gate of heaven” completely by accident, and at a town called Luz.  (It’s not far from Podunk!)  It’s significant too, that in the years to come, that Samaritans and Jews would bitterly debate where the actual “Jacob’s ladder” site was.  Although there is a “Bethel” on most Bible maps about 10 miles north of Jerusalem, for centuries Samaritans and Jews were locked in heated dispute over whether Jacob’s great epiphany had occurred atop Mt. Gerazim in Samaria or Mt. Zion in Judah.

Jesus steps into that famous debate in the 4^th chapter of John’s Gospel, when the Samaritan woman at the well begins to ask him his opinion about God’s specific geographical location.  And Jesus points her in an entirely new direction – toward himself, toward the incarnation of spirit in the flesh, and toward real human relationships.  Jesus says to her, “God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”  It is as the apostle Paul preached to the Athenians in Acts, chapter 17, God is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”  Jesus lets her know that the God she has met in Christ will stay with her, no matter what.  The love of Jesus cannot be contained in a well or cistern – it is a portable and invisible font of living water never runs dry for those whom Christ calls for his own.

This affirmation is at the heart of our Christian faith.  It is at the heart of our baptismal liturgy and promises and even the song we sing to our babies, “Jesus Loves Me.”  It’s beautiful to sing that and to believe that on a happy day of baptism, but I expect we most need the Good News of God’s eternal love when we (like Jacob on the run) are the most lost – when we have committed our worst sins or suffered our worst tragedies.  It is at those times that we will be moved to rejoice at the assurance that God has gone with us wherever we go.  Yes, God is found wherever love is, and where there is joy and life and blessing – wherever two or three gather together in Christ’s name to give thanks and praise.  But both Psalm 139 and “Jacob’s Ladder” remind us that God is also when we are completely and utterly alone, in the dark nights of the soul – when it’s the hardest to believe God is with us, that God would want any more to be with us.

I read a very moving on-line blog recently by a woman who had been disabled by a surgery that had gone terribly wrong.  She had hoped back surgery would ease her pain and difficulty in walking – and so she prayed, with her pastor, that God would watch over her, protect her, and heal her.  Instead she came out of surgery paralyzed, needing full-time care just to do the simplest things.  She said she completely lost her faith when she spent night after night in rehab crying out to her Lord in vain, because she heard and felt nothing – either in her body or in her heart and soul.  There were no miracles and no messages from God on high.  But in time, she came to know the living Christ in a completely new way in the love and tenderness of caregivers.  This was an entirely new experience of the Divine for her – God present in the true spirit of compassion, not God as superhero.  She came to question her old version of God – one who was completely outside this world, locked away in heaven, or at church, but ready to come save her if she ever needed to call.  Never having needed God before, she had never tested that version of faith – one that Marcus Borg in The Heart of Christianity likes to call “supernatural theism.”  He points instead to a much more widely present God – one of “panentheism,” God throughout the world, everywhere, including broken human bodies.

Why wouldn’t we prefer to have a God who is real, and ever-present, instead of a God, who like a comic book hero, just comes to the rescue when called?  I know I’ve prayed with people who were longing for Christ Immanuel, God with us, when they were sick or dying, desperate or alone – I have encouraged them to go ahead and cry out with the Psalmist “How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?”  The hardened heart, the rabbis would say, is no good to God until it breaks – like a broken clay vessel, when those cracks finally appear, the light of God can finally shine through.  And so this turns out to be very Good News for us – that Jacob’s ladder is not at Bethel, or on Mt. Gerazim, or at the Temple in Jerusalem – but is instead wherever a tired head rests itself on God’s body, wherever we cry out to the Lord for help.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

 

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Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24

¹O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

²You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.

³You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

⁴Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

⁵You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

⁶Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

⁷Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

⁸If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

⁹If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

¹⁰even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

¹¹If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,” ¹²even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you….

²³Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

²⁴See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

 

Genesis 28:10-19

¹⁰Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. ¹¹He 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. ¹²And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. ¹³And 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; ¹⁴and 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. ¹⁵Know 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.”

¹⁶Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” ¹⁷And 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.” ¹⁸So 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. ¹⁹He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first.