Genesis 28.10-19 20 July 2008
“THE STUFF OF DREAMS”
Summer is a good time to assess the stuff of our dreams. We pause to revisit what our dreams are made of and where they lead. For every night as we open our windows, the cool night air balances the heat of the day. And what blows into our rooms and into our sleep will give us visions of hope or despair with power to propel or cripple our lives. The difference between good dreams and bad dreams is no less than life and death. Truth is, whoever owns our dreams owns our lives.
We begin with Jacob’s dream, seeking leverage on our own. You recall Jacob. His name, in Hebrew means “heel” or “grabber”. That refers to Jacob’s birth, right upon the heels of his twin Esau. He was grasping after his brother even in the birth canal. So Jacob isn’t nicknamed “Grabber” for nothing. Duping Esau out of his birthright is only Jacob’s first scheme. With poor, old father Isaac blind on his deathbed, Jacob dresses up in sheep’s clothing and fools dad into blessing him with the family inheritance. He works every angle to grab what is brother Esau’s.
That typifies how Jacob makes his way through the world, by hook or crook. He never feels so pumped as when he puts one over on poor, thick, slow Esau.
”Pick a card, Esau, any card!” The Bible isn’t kidding as it nicknames Jacob heel.
How does Esau feel about this? Maybe something like this. Esau resolves that after his dad’s funeral, he will skewer Jacob like one of the wild beasts he loved to hunt and roast over a fire. Why, Esau would make short ribs out of Jacob.
Slipping out of the funeral home backdoor during the last verse of “The Old Rugged Cross”, Jacob high tails it out of town before Esau can spring his trap. With that hasty exit, Jacob has gone from rip-off artist to fugitive. He is in exile. He is now the run. His master plan to steal the old man’s estate, to supplant his brother’s inheritance, to “have it all”—remember the mantra from the 80’s?—suddenly doesn’t seem, well, so masterful. Look at Jacob, he’s wandering in the wilderness like some wild animal, without family or friends or support, some-where between
Alone, vulnerable, fleeing, that’s where today’s story from Genesis takes up. It is nighttime in a wilderness known for its savage beasts. Jacob beds down with nothing more than a flat stone for a pillow. Never mind what that did to his neck, it didn’t bode well for a quiet night’s sleep. The sleep of fugitives is always rest-less sleep. Lonely, exposed, between nowhere and no place--ever been there?
Maybe Jacob is no longer feeling so clever about his consuming acquisitiveness. Maybe being reduced to bare survival has taken some starch out of his endless scheming. Maybe for a moment he is no longer so obsessively on the take. Maybe he wants nothing so much as a new identity beyond being called grabber, heel, or striver. When our defenses are down, when we find ourselves in crisis, we are then most suggestible to how God might reshape us. Insecure, alone in a strange place, Jacob tosses and turns. He dreams deeply. What a dream it is.
You know the dream. No, it’s not the one where we show up at school, the only one dressed in our underwear. No, it’s not the one where we are chased only to find ourselves running in mud. No, it’s not the one where we are surprised to learn we must take a test and have only ten minutes to prepare. This is the one we sang at summer camp, the same one we’ll sing again at the close of worship.
The psychoanalysts, now out of fashion, claimed that our dreams recall and work through painful and unsettled events within our past. They churn up from our un-conscious as we sleep to process unresolved inner tensions. If that were true of Jacob, his dream life would be a triple feature: the Sting, part one, two and three.
If a therapist saw Jacob today, he might call him a sociopath, a man without con-science. He had no guilt over bamboozling his easy mark of a brother or his blind aged father. So God didn’t give Jacob the usual dreams to work through stuff. Instead God gave him a technicolor-extravaganza-of-heaven-and-earth dream. A ladder, or actually a staircase, descends from heavenly reaches. Angels ascend and descend that staircase like the beautiful people walking up one side of
These angels are no less than God’s messengers. Moving on that staircase, they connect God above and us below. Remember, they both ascend and descend. That is essential to the story. For they not only bear our messages from earth to God, what we usually call prayer. But they also bear messages from heaven to earth, the word of God, what theologians call “revelation”. These revelations give Jacob something more than working through his past. They give him a new start. That one so buried in his selfishness as Jacob could get a new start is a miracle.
Here is how Jacob’s dream informs our own. Have you ever noticed that our dreams, at least our waking dreams, are mostly a one-way staircase to heaven? What I mean is we think we know what we want and what need. And the task of prayer is to persuade God. Frankly, a lot of our dreaming, pardon me for saying so, is selfish. Many of the dreams afoot in our land are grasping and acquisitive, dreams of personal status and comfort, wrapped in brand names from Nike to Neiman Marcus. Dreams are bought and sold in
Jacob’s dream had always been to own and run the family business and have big dumb Esau waxing his Bentley. Jacob had been mindlessly pursuing that dream since before he was born, it seems. “God make me, God give me, God grant me, God get me,” he told any angel headed up that staircase toward heaven.
It sounds frighteningly like many consumer dreams sold in our economic system. For many this “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” dream is the American dream. This dream pits winners against losers and haves at the expense of have-nots.
I’m not preaching today against goods or things. Jesus said our heavenly Father knows we need specific things and certainly to pray for them. I am not preaching against accomplishment or abundance today. John Wesley once said make as much as you can, save as much as you can, and give away as much as you can. I am preaching against how individualistic and selfish our dreams can become, how acquisitive and narcissistic dreams get heralded as the be all and end all.
Fortunately, in Jacob’s dreams, angels not only ascend the staircase, they des-cend also. What that means is the business between heaven and earth traffics both ways. What that means is, yes, God listens for our dreams, our hopes, our aspirations. God will grant parts of our dream, never all of it. But we are not the only dreamers. God has a dream also, one bigger than ours. It’s a dream not only for Jacob and his descendents, but also for all families of the earth. God’s dream is so expansive, so all-embracing, it transforms any and all human dreams forever. God’s dream is what Jesus meant by the term kingdom or reign of God.
All right, so it’s not like Jacob hears an altar call and promises to be blameless forever. But after he awakens, Jacob does say in effect, “Ok God, if you feed me, clothe me, shelter me, and give me land, then I will let you be my God. And I will stop acting like a god unto myself.” Would you trust this guy if you were God? It’s like, “All right God, take a card, any card.” But the amazing thing is that God not only trusted Jacob the schemer and con-artist. But that God chose and called Jacob, just as God would later call Moses the murderer and David the adulterer.
If nothing else today, we learn that God has a glowing and universal dream greater than the self-preening dreams of our own personal success and status.
Dreams are funny, aren’t they? They can seem nonsensical and so absurd we are embarrassed to admit to them. They have the power to define and direct us. Sometimes our dreams are self-interested like Jacob’s, trying to make a big splash in the puddles of this lifetime. Other times our dreams are so soaring and majestic and right that God’s angels must have surely implanted them within us.
I have a book, written by the splendid African-American writer, Verna Dozier called The Dream of God. If you can guess what it’s about, then my sermon suc-ceeded. She writes, ”Jesus came to serve the world, to restore it to the oneness with God from which it had fallen. That restoration is always the mission of the people of God. Any talk about ministry that does not talk about (restoration) has already missed the mark. Ministry is serving the world God loves. The pe
ople of God are sent to love the world—the people of the world, not the kingdoms of the world, not the way of life that exalts one person over another, greed over giving, power over vulnerability, the kingdoms of this world over the kingdom of God…We are a chosen people, chosen for God’s high purposes, that the dream of God for a new creation may be realized. God has paid us the high compliment of calling us to be coworkers, a compliment so awesome that we have fled from it and taken refuge in the church….Like Esau, we have surrendered our birthright.”
Remember God’s dream when your human dreams exhaust themselves—and all human dreams must exhaust themselves. Remember God’s dream, when your pillow feels like a stone because you are worried about whether you will get and have enough. With this bigger and holier dream, wake then refreshed from sleep. Knowing God will keep us and bring us home, come around with me to Jacob’s confession, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, and I didn’t know it.” Amen.
God of the day and of the night, whose presence surrounds us, whose home is everywhere, whose human family embraces every last one of us, there is no nook to hide where we’re beyond the reach of your love. The gateway to heaven is wherever we are in the moment as we turn back to you, preferring your will and your way over our own. You whisper promise and hope within our dreams. Your dream brackets our dreams, sorting out the worthy and noble from the fraudulent and self-seeking. In sleep or in wakefulness, you whisper through your angels, “Come along, take my hand, we have work to do.” Lord, speak to us. For you are continually with us. Strengthen us to hear your call and to respond to your vision.
