A sermon on Genesis 28:10-22 by Nathan Nettleton

I hope you will understand why, over the coming weeks, my preaching may be a bit cautious, especially with regard to how it does or doesn’t touch on the trauma we are presently facing as a congregation. Normally, I would want to try to make strong connections between the scripture readings for the day and the events going on in our lives at the given time, but the level of pain and sensitivity at present makes that a very unsafe thing to do. I won’t be pretending that nothing has happened, but I will avoid anything like today’s gospel reading where every possible direction would be fraught with unintended implications.

Tonight I want instead to look at the story of Jacob that we heard in the reading from Genesis. Here too there is a connection we can make, and I think I can safely make. This story of Jacob’s encounter with God in a dream comes at a time of trauma for Jacob. Jacob and his brother Esau have fallen out and Jacob is in fear for his life. And now, somewhat like us, he doesn’t really know where he is. He is not in the old place of home, with its comforts and security, but he is not sure where he is going to end up. He is in the wilderness, a place that feels threatening, insecure, unknown, and unwelcome.

It is in this place of foreboding that Jacob lies down to sleep, with nothing but a rock for a pillow, and he has a dream in which God appears and speaks to him. The dream is best known to us from songs about Jacob’s ladder, but it is more likely that a ramp or a long flight of stairs is what is meant. It is something like the long stairways that go up to the entrance of a temple, only in this dream, the stairway goes up to heaven itself, and God’s messengers are seen going up and down between heaven and earth. The focus of the story is not on the details of this vision though, but on the promises that God makes to Jacob. God promises to be with Jacob, wherever he goes, and to bless him and his offspring, and to establish them safely in this land and bless all peoples through them.

There are two things I want to draw our attention to out of what happens next. When Jacob awakes from his vision, he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!” And so the first and simplest thing I want to say is that that might be a message we need to hear in this place too. Surely the Lord is in this place, this difficult and unwelcome place that we find ourselves in; surely the Lord is in this place too. Perhaps like Jacob, we feel like this is a God-forsaken place, a place where we would not expect to meet God, and yet surely God is here, whether we recognised it or not. Even at the most God-forsaken moment in history, when Jesus hung dying painfully on a cross, even there, surely the Lord is in this place. Even there God was present to work wonders, to turn brokenness into reconciliation, to turn despair into new hope, to turn the season of tragedy into the season where new possibilities are born again and life rises anew. Surely the Lord is in this place, and we did not know it.

There is a second thing I’d like us to think about out of this too, although it is more general rather than something of special relevance to us in our present situation. When Jacob arises, he sets up a rock pillar to mark this place as a sacred place, a place of worship. We sang a celtic song earlier about the distance between earth and heaven being tissue thin, and one of the features of Celtic Christian spirituality is the concept of “thin places”, special places where earth and heaven seem to touch each other in an unusually transparent way. Jacob is identifying the place of his vision as a “thin place”, as the “gate of heaven”.

But there is potentially a tension in this isn’t there? Although he is identifying this as a special place, God has just promised to be with him wherever he goes, to be with him in every place. So if God is with him in every place — God is in this place, but I didn’t know — then isn’t every place equally special? Why single out this place as an ongoing special place of worship? Is there any value in designating a special place when every place is alive with the presence of God, if we only knew it?

There is no suggestion in the story that Jacob has got his understanding wrong in setting up the pillar to mark this place as special, and indeed it becomes and remains special — Bethel is second only to Jerusalem as a sacred place in the subsequent faith history of the Hebrew people. So what might we make of this apparent tension?

I don’t think the passage gives us an answer, but I think it assumes an answer, so let me try to briefly outline the answer that I think it assumes.

The answer lies in the concept of God’s promises. God is always free. God will be wherever God chooses, and God will do whatever God decides to do. God can freely meet us in any place or situation, regardless of what we expect or wish for. God is always free to do as God will. But God also makes promises, promises to meet us in certain places or to bless us in certain ways or through certain things. And so certain places or things become special places of God’s presence or revelation through God’s free action and promise.

And so God is still free to encounter us anywhere, but God has promised to be present and meet us in this place. God is still free to speak to us through any writings, but God has promised to be present and to speak to us when we prayerfully gather to listen to the writings in the Holy Bible. God is free to reveal his mind to anyone at any time, but God has promised to be present and to reveal the mind of Christ to us when we gather to prayerfully listen for the leading of the Holy Spirit in one another. God is free to meet us and feed us at any table, in any company, and with any food, but God has promised to meet us and feed us at this table, in this company, and with this bread and wine.

We can never presume on those promises, as though we can thereby capture God and have God in our pocket. We cannot force God to say what we want God to say, just because we can find a verse in the Bible that might support it. We cannot force God to bless us, just because we congregate in a place that God has promised to meet us in. God is always free, and we cannot presumptuously try to bend God’s promises to our own ends. But if we will walk humbly before our God, and honour God’s freedom to do as God will and to promise whatever God likes, then we can find comfort and security within those promises.

We will be able to both rejoice in the surprise of God being in a place where we didn’t expect to find God, and graciously surrender ourselves to God’s transforming presence in the certain places where God has promised to meet us and lead us into life.