Scripture: Genesis 28:10-17
“Jacob
left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran.
He came to a certain place and
stayed there for the night, because the sun had set” (Gen 28:10-11).
When
I go fishing there are many things that go into the best kind of fishing spot.
We look for rock piles or weed lines or drop offs or saddles between
islands—those kinds of things—and we do this because certain species will
relate to these features of the lake at certain times. This is what separates
an angler who knows what they’re doing from a person who’s out to have a few
beers under the guise of fishing. The same principles hold for hunting or
wildlife viewing. The good angler or hunter or photographer looks in certain
places at certain times with certain conditions, because that’s where the fish
or the deer or the wildlife are likely to be.
This
is so commonplace for anglers and hunters that we often fail to consider why
the fish or the deer are there in the first place. What is it about this place
that attracts them again and again? Probably it has something to do with food
and shelter, or something biological that triggers them to return to that spot
for mating or spawning purposes. Many of the same fish—and many of the same
deer—visit many of the same places again and again so, naturally, it pays to
look in those spots first.
As
much as we might think differently, human beings are pretty much the same. We
like to think that we’re something special, but honestly, if anything, we’re
more creatures of habit than the fish in the water or the deer in the woods.
You think you’re a pretty smart person, but in football season I know exactly
where you’ll be reclining on Saturday or Sunday afternoons. You think you’re a
higher form of intelligence than wild animals, but I know (even more than I do
with fish) exactly where you’re going to be going for food. If the fish were
fishing for us—or the deer hunting for us—they would set up just outside the grocery store and pick us off one by one. Thank God they don’t have opposable
thumbs or we really wouldn’t have a chance.
We
are, all of us, tied to certain places
in ways we rarely stop to consider. So in Genesis 28, when Jacob leaves for Haran, we should hardly
be surprised that he stops not at any old place but at a certain place. In fact, as the story unfolds we discover that he
has stopped at a pagan cult site very near to where his grandfather, Abraham,
had once built an altar. This is certainly not a coincidence. Jacob is drawn to
this certain place in a way he cannot understand. Each of us has these places:
grave sites and mountain tops, backyards and swimming holes, holy places and
profane places, to which we are bound by time and memory; where our experiences
have quite literally grounded us like tent pegs to that specific location.
So,
when Jacob dreams a dream at this certain place, we should hardly be surprised that he awakes with the compelling
need to mark the location as holy. He doesn’t have the God-fish-finder, so
instead he does what most human beings do after encountering God:
he names the place “Beth-el” or “House of God” and on that spot he builds a
church. This kind of behavior is paralleled in the Gospels when Jesus
goes up the mountain and becomes transfigured into this shining emblem of
light. In that case it is Peter who has the same response, exclaiming, “Holy ball
of light!”—this is the very, very new revised not-so-standard-version, but I’m
pretty sure that’s actually what he said—“Holy cow… I mean Jesus! We better
build an altar!”[1]
God,
however, was not—is not—impressed.
In
the case of Jacob, God does not re-frame the situation as he does with
Peter, and perhaps this has something to do with the long road that Jacob has
had to walk to get to this point where he can understand any experience as divine. Jacob is like our young people when they
head off into the world to do mission. We take them to a certain, strange place,
and there they have these experiences that reveal God to them in new and
startling ways. The temptation is to take that strange experience and conclude
that it is due to a particularly holy place. That’s a danger for our youth who
went out to Idaho
last summer. They had some awesome experiences and it happened in a certain
place, so perhaps this place itself is holy—perhaps Idaho is truly God’s country.
Like
Jacob’s realization after the dream, there’s truth in that: Idaho can be a sacred place, just as the
grave site of a loved one can be a sacred place, the backyard of a childhood
home can be a sacred place, and this church building can be a sacred place.
Each place where we live our lives has memories and experiences that
make it the place that it is, and these memories and experiences draw us back
like a weed line for a fish or a particular field for a deer. Moreover, these
places are sacred; they are where God has met us before and
continues to meet us again and again.
But
the point of Jacob’s ladder is not that there is a place somewhere in Israel that is
the gate of heaven. Instead, there are two profound messages here: First,
certain places are marked as holy because God’s presence has been made known
there, but second—and, I think, more important—every place is a sacred place
just waiting to be known. When Jacob wakes up he exclaims, “Holy giant ladder!
God has been here all along—and I did
not know it!” But then he draws absolutely the wrong conclusion, saying,
“How awesome is this place! This is none
other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Jacobs falls
into the trap of the specific, believing that because he has experienced God in
this way at this location this is where the presence of God in the universe is
centered. Jacob fails to understand that God goes with and before him everywhere
that he goes, and the fact that he experienced God on that spot has far more to
do with Jacob, and his openness to God's presence at that moment in time, than it has to do
with God.
Yes, certain
places will be more sacred than others. We don’t let our kids play in the
cemetery, for example, or run between the pews of the church building. We have
these areas set aside as holy, because they are holy; they are
sacred; they are places where God has been made known to us once and is known
to us there again and again. But you know what other space is sacred? The lawn
outside, the road through town, the river and the woods, the fields, the
combines and tractors; even the deer stand and the fishing boat—all of these
are sacred spaces. What sets this one apart is only one thing: it is the place
where we come together as a community. It is not just the sacred space for one;
it is the space for many. So, in a way, Jacob gets it right, but only when his
family, tribe and, eventually, nation follow him there. Then, Bethel becomes a particularly special sacred
space, because it is a space for the whole community.
That’s what makes
this space we inhabit together on Sunday morning special. It’s not that the ground here is
more or less sacred than the yard outside or the fields or the lakes; God is
just as present out there as he is here. But this space is special and sacred
because we have all borne witness to God’s presence here together, as one
community. When Jacob dreamed of a ladder descending from heaven to earth on a
specific place his mistake was not in believing that that space was sacred—it
was. Instead, his mistake was in believing that what made it special was its
unique connection to heaven, when, in truth, what made it especially sacred
was that his family would come and share in it together as one community
oriented around God’s promise for them and their descendents.
We live this out
together on a weekly basis. You could worship in a boat or a tree stand, even
in a mall or a parking lot, but the sacredness of your space depends not just
on God’s presence there but also on the community that inhabits it together. If
you want to fish instead of worship—or hunt deer or climb a mountain—and you
believe that that is the holy space you need, that’s OK, but a space only
becomes sacred when the community witnesses to it together. So, what it comes
down to is this, in the immortal words of Roy Scheider: you’re going to need a
bigger boat.
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