Sermon for Bible Sunday, Knox Church
Genesis 28:10-22
Bible Sunday & the Lectionary gives us Jacob – along with Ps 139 and the weeds parable. But Jacob! – born already gripping his brother Esau by the heel - Ya‘akov – the name’s a pun: Jacob the grasper – a hint of what is to follow.
It’s a good story – a very good story, told by a good storyteller - in the Bible! Not to be read a few verses at a time – from a lectern – but a story to be read as we read all good stories – sitting comfortably – enjoying the puns, the turns, the pathos and the laughter – just as those earliest communities in ancient Israel must have done.
Today we have this section in ch.28 and a lot has happened since that grasping birth. So, a quick catch-up: the chapter that followed is pure comedy – like the Shakespearean bits for the pits – told three times in Genesis twice of Abraham but here of Jacob’s father, Isaac, who’s driven by famine to go over the border to Gerar & has a culture shock tizzy fit. Convinced the men will be after his wife, because she’s so beautiful, and kill him, he says Rebekah’s his sister – not his wife – no mention of the twin babies she’s already borne. But - the king of that place just happens to look out the window & sees the two of them canoodling – so much for that ploy - but a hint we’re into tricky families.
Then we skip time to discover Esau has married two Hittite women. i.e. bad move, making life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah. It’s watch-out time for Esau, and ch.27 is the famous birthright tale. Jacob, urged on by Rebekah, his mother – we’re now into favouritism – tricks his blind father, passing himself off as Esau and so gains the birthright, which rightly belongs to the first son, i.e. Esau. It’s a long chapter and again the ending is pivotal. Esau, perhaps not surprisingly, is out to kill Jacob - openly out to kill Jacob. So Rebekah comes up with another tricky plan - Jacob must go - to her brother and marry one of his daughters, i.e. a good Israelite wife, not a Hittite. Esau, always one step too late, and one step out of line, then marries the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, so she’s only half a good Israelite & he still has the two Hittites. Esau can’t win! He’s virtually disinherited – to become the ancestor of neighbouring Edom
Some years ago there was an American TV series where a group of biblical scholars and writers, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, sat and talked about these Genesis stories. As one of them says, you could imagine this family on the Oprah Winfrey show![1]
But where we are now, is with Jacob, fleeing for his life – a thief and a fugitive – his only interest seemingly himself. But then he has this dream: of a stairway stretching up to heaven with angels going up and down, and he senses God standing beside him, delivering the classic divine promise – of land – of offspring – of divine help. This promised to Jacob! Can we believable it?! Jacob does, saying in some wonderment, surely God is in this place and I did not know it – so sets up a stone - anoints it as a sacred pillar – and names the place Bethel, bet-el, house of God.
It’s a turning point – with that lovely image of angels going up and down on the ladder from earth to heaven & heaven to earth. Walter Brueggemann, who is part of the Genesis conversation, in rather computer geek language, calls them “connectors” … “{Jacob} is disconnected, and what he discovers in his vulnerability is that he is connected” (292) – with God.
But he’s still Jacob – still wanting to outmanoeuvre. His vow is full of conditions – full of “if”s –if you protect me, if you make sure you get me home, then – i.e. and only then, you’ll be my God. Cheeky! Not quite the word!! Interestingly, of course, God’s promise that Jacob will be returned home means that Jacob will have to face Esau – but that’s later.
The angel imagery may seem lovely, but the dream is terrifying. Biblical angels don’t say “fear not” for nothing! God and fearsome angels are intruding upon Jacob. This is, quite literally, an awesome experience. He is rightly terrified. No wonder he wants reassurance – will God really be with him and stay with him. He wants to know – he wants to hear it a second time!! He now wants God.
There is, of course, an earthly political agenda behind this text: Jacob’s descendents, as many as the dust of the earth, are to spread out in every direction - a text most likely written late in Israel’s history, for a people under heavy imperial rule in dire need of such hope. But this promise, like the promise to Abraham, carries a universal blessing, a blessing for all the families of the earth. The striking thing is that it’s to come through Jacob! This Jacob.
Later - in another God encounter - from which Jacob emerges the crippled victor – his name becomes Israel
Well, what do we do with this text? Dissect it and extrapolate messages for ourselves? Brueggemann suggests (305) that communities of faith, “whether Israel or the Christian Church [are] … always going to be weird and odd misfits,” and that “what is now being rediscovered, as the Church is being disestablished in the West, is that we are having to face up to our weirdness and the sense of being a misfit in the world.” He continues, “I suppose we always chafe against it, but it seems to me it’s a given in the nature of this community of faith.” But is Jacob either weird or a misfit? Is Brueggemann overstating to make a point? Do we agree in any case?
The vision is, of course, a dream - a night dream. Brueggemann also makes the point that most of us, and the Church itself, are so full of daytime busyness, we need to experience night-time vulnerabilities to recognize the phony-ness of much of the daytime stuff. A bit tough on the administrators & all those we depend on for that daytime stuff?
Brueggemann’s connections are, as always, worth thinking about, but as with all stories there is no prescribed message to be drawn – each of us receives the story – each of us makes of it what it brings to us – in our here and now.
We may not see angels - we may be very relieved we do not see such awesome angels - but do we sometimes sense, with Jacob, that surely God is in this place and [we] did not know it?
Well all this is early on in Jacob’s story – it continues to his death & he doesn’t entirely change his character – albeit God is with him. If you haven’t met the full story, there’s a lot to come. His love for Rachel, the mother of his sons, Joseph and Benjamin – the trick played upon the trickster himself by Laban, his uncle – such poignancies, such losses, such conflicts - along with the blessings – & reconciliation with Esau.[2] A life writ very large in a story gifted to us – each time we return we experience it differently – we learn something more about ourselves, about being in the world, about this God/human relationship, which is the very heart of faith.
Take this book out of the Bible’s library, read it and reread it – in the daytime and in the night. You might even sense some angels. For this story, like the Bible itself, comes to us as a blessing.
& we are now to retell it. The poet, Sheila Nelson-McJilton does this in poetry, in the voice of Jacob:
You have found me, broken and empty,
On holy stones that ascend to the very gates of heaven,
And you have not cursed me.
In a desert midnight, I know
The smell of blessed fields …
The sweet dew of heaven.
1 will tell of You, O Lord God,
To laughing children who bless my tent,
To strong children who become tribes as countless as dust.
I will tell them of desert midnights filled with blazing stars,
Of fierce angels who carve holy stones
And dance with glittering swords among clouds,
Of hymns sung by joyous stars over Bethel
And over Bethlehem
What can we say but amen.
Judith E. McKinlay
[1] Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 280.
[2] See Frank Crüsemann “Dominion, Guilt, and Reconciliation: The Contribution of the Jacob Narrative in Genesis to Political Ethics,” Semeia 66 (1994): 67-77.
[3] From Sheila Nelson-McJilton,” Who Sleep on Holy Stones: A Meditation on Genesis 28:10-17,” Anglican Theological Review, 82.1 (Wint 2000): 152-153.
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