May 7, 2006 Sermon

Jacob's Ladder
Genesis 28:10-22

In the summer of 1990 I completed five years’ service as a youth pastor in St. Louis. I loved most of my work with youth. I still have contact with a few of those “kids”, now in their 30’s. One of them, a neurosurgeon, corresponds with our son, Dan, on career choices and whatnot. I can think of nobody (outside of his mother and I) I would rather have advising my son. Oh—the neurosurgeon’s name? Dan.

I actually added one youth duty when I left full-time youth ministry: the weekly children’s sermon. Early on at my new church in Indiana, I came up with what I thought was a good one. I cannot recall why, but I had two kids run a footrace around the pews in the sanctuary. For days afterward I received visits and telephone calls. People were irate. How dare I encourage children to desecrate the sanctuary? I honestly had not thought about the possibility that the members could see it that way. I did not believe that children running and laughing in church was a bad thing. But I failed to consider the context. I failed to see that children running and laughing in a worship service in a traditional Presbyterian church would come across as disrespectful. I ignored the holiness of that space.

The Bible teaches that God created all. God inhabits all. All space is therefore holy. But we experience certain spaces as holy. In these places we know the presence of God. Our old friend Jacob had one of those experiences in the passage we just read from Genesis. Reading it, we get distracted by his vivid dream. But the dream is not the point. Jacob has slept in a holy place. Do we fall asleep in holy places? Do we miss experiences of the presence of God because we have lost that sense of holiness? Wake up. Know God.

Jacob’s dream happens during a journey. He has started the long walk back to his grandfather Abraham’s home country. He hopes to find a wife among his kin. He has gone only a couple of days and stops for the night at what the text calls “a certain place”. Using a stone for a pillow he lies down on the ground and falls asleep. He dreams, and sees a ladder reaching from earth to heaven. On it angels climb and descend. God then speaks to Jacob in his dream. God renews with Jacob the covenant first made with Abraham: that he will father a nation, that the land on which he now lies will belong to them, and that all the world will bless themselves through Jacob’s descendants.

Jacob awakens and says the words that remind us of the point of it all: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” How many times has that happened to you? When you wake up and realize what you missed do you respond as Jacob did? He adds, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” What makes him respond so powerfully? The dream. But the dream has more to it than the vision of angels on a ladder. In its second half God renews the covenant with Jacob. God re-promises to give Jacob descendants and a land—the land, in fact, on which his head now rests as he has this dream. God promises to bless the people, and to remain in relationship with them. That’s why Jacob woke up into a powerful sense of the holiness of that place.

We believe that our faith in Jesus Christ makes us the inheritors of the covenant God has made with mere human beings. We believe that Jesus is the New Covenant, the New Testament, the New Witness to God’s holiness and power. In Christ, therefore, we ought to experience certain places as holy. Yes, God created all. Yes, God inhabits all. Yes, Jesus is the Son of God, our Savior, God’s final, perfect and complete covenant blessing. So why don’t we wake up to the holy presence of God in more places?

Here is a very partial list of places I have become aware of the holy presence of God: in the sanctuaries of churches and cathedrals, in the delivery room at the birth of our two babies, on top of Pike’s Peak looking out over the high plains, beside a man’s death bed in a picture window in his home overlooking a lake, in the eyes of a woman who has just forgiven me again, on sheet music, around a campfire.

Where have you experienced the holy presence of God?

Maybe asking that question presumes too much. Maybe you are not sure how to know, how to feel the holy presence of God. Maybe you doubt that such a thing, such a god, exists. If so, I urge you to wake up.

Jacob was not the holiest man ever to live. The past two weeks we have reviewed how he lied and cheated and schemed to take his brother’s most precious things. He was no saint. Yet God chose to use even him. God made himself known to Jacob. If God can become known to Jacob, God can become known to us. But how?

How do we awaken to the holy presence of God? At times God’s power overwhelms us. Our skin prickles. Our hearts overflow with the pure love and true peace that come only from God. We have done nothing to make it work. We have not even asked for it, yet we know the holy presence of God. But how can we awaken to it when God is not choosing to make it so obvious? How can we know God on demand, as it were?

First, we can pray. We can pray any time, anywhere. The prayer need not be wordy. In fact, prayers might work better when short and to the point. We can pray simple requests like, “Lord, let me know you are here.” Then we can fall silent, both outwardly and in the inner workings of our brains. We can wait for God. Many of the more powerful experiences I have had of the holy presence of God have come when I have somehow succeeded in being quiet. Try that for yourself.

A second excellent method for coming to know the holy presence of God is to hang out with God’s people. Make no mistake: we are not holy. But we do have fellowship created by the Holy Spirit. Whenever we gather together in the name of Jesus Christ we become his body. This does not happen through our magnificence but through the power of God. Many of the most powerful experiences I have had of the holy presence of God have come in the midst of the people of God. Try hanging out with your fellow sinners who are trying to follow Jesus.

Seven or eight men sat in a circle on overturned five-gallon paint buckets. They balanced paper plates on their knees and took sips of coffee from Styrofoam cups that sat on the unfinished concrete floor at their feet. They were indoors, but it was cold and a film of plaster dust hung in the air. As they ate they insulted each other. The word “God” likely did not come up. Yet God was among them and they knew it. They came together almost every night: to work, they told themselves. But they also came together because in their work, and in their fellowship, they experienced the presence of God.

Those men belonged to this church. They sat between the offices and the kitchen of this building. The night we visit them sitting and eating supper together could have been any of a hundred nights. They were finishing our building, sanding and painting and trimming and tiling. Every man, woman and child who participated in that effort remembers the spirit of the experience. We remember the bonds we forged with each other and with our Lord. Soon we will expand this building and we will have the chance to experience God’s presence through work and fellowship again. In the meanwhile, awaken to God through prayer and work wherever you may find yourself.

Pray. Fellowship. God is everywhere, all the time. God is here, now, in this worship service. Wake up and know God.