What You Don’t Knows
Genesis 28:10-19a

July 21, 2002

The story in Genesis continues the Jacob saga with its most memorable episode. Spirituals and Sunday School art have kept Jacob’s ladder among our living images for nearly four millennia. The ladder appeared to Jacob in a dream and we have often been part of that dream, and did not know it.

The dream in the first place is about a place, a holy place. The world is full of holy places, not all mutually agreed upon. That is, your holy place is not necessarily my holy place. Jerusalem is often referred to as the holy city of three great faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even in Jerusalem, the specific holy places are different.

Let’s agree on one holy place in Regina: Taylor Field. Lots of commentators on sports have observed that many stadiums take on the characteristics of sanctuaries. There is an anticipation before the kickoff that should really occur more in the local church: a hopeful expectation that something truly remarkable will happen. The fact that at Taylor Field that does not happen all that often does not diminish the anticipation. Maybe God will come tonight and help our ‘Riders!

What happens in a holy place is the meeting, perhaps better the collision of the human with the divine. What happens there can only happen there. Only in a holy place is an event extraordinary; the same thing may happen elsewhere, yet is ordinary.

A perfectly thrown pass from quarterback to receiver is very nice on the practice field and may not differ in the slightest from a similar reception on a hot night before 25, 000 frenzied fans at Taylor Field. But at Taylor Field that catch may be remembered, celebrated, and recited for a long time to come, perhaps eternally.

Holy places abound in this collection of the saints sitting here today. A cabin at the lake where the family became its best; grandmother’s house where you were considered a saint; a school where you remember learning something you still remember and that still matters; a pilgrimage city or scenic spot that is full of the things you believe are beautiful. Perhaps even this building, this sanctuary, is truly special, holy to you.

Jacob does not plan to find a holy place; it is purely coincidental, if one can ever say that about anything in the Biblical narrative. He is busy doing other things: fleeing the wrath of his un-birthrighted and unblessed brother Esau; and looking for a proper wife, unlike the Canaanite hussies that Esau has picked up. Such ambivalence of escaping and pilgrimage leads to an unsettled soul. No wonder Jacob got such a bad sleep and dreamed such remarkable dreams.

In fact, the place Jacob is forced by natural forces to stay for the night is one of the most ancient pilgrimage worship centres of Israel - Bethel - the House of God.

Jacob dreams, not a nightmare, but an awesome, unsettling vision. We have called it a ladder, but from the surrounding cultures of the Ancient Near East a “stairway to heaven” is more like it. (To those who have ears to hear: Led Zeppelin’s song of the same name owes a lot to the Biblical image.) The idea was actually more like a “gate to heaven” - the place where God’s messengers enter and depart from this world. Ascending and descending, going to and fro’ the earth, these angels were quite busy.

God appears to Jacob and speaks to him in the universal and intimately personal way we generally assume no longer happens. Yes, the Lord reconfirms the big promise made to Abraham and Isaac regarding the Promised Land and a promised innumerable nation. That would have been shocking enough for Jacob, to know that he is the one who will be the father of a nation, if only he can find a wife.

But the Lord means to be even more specific: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” What more can God say than that to a person?

You can’t read this passage alone without knowing where the story goes. Jacob will be cheated by his uncle Laban and given the ugly older sister instead of his beloved Rachel. How unfair that this will happen to such a child of promise.

Later his favourite son Joseph will be sold out of jealousy into slavery in Egypt. We know of Joseph’s story, his fall and rise to success in the court of Pharaoh, but Jacob just believes he is dead and mourns for years. How can one build a real nation if the most important people are lost?

Finally, drought and famine in Israel lead Jacob and his family to Egypt to discover the resurrected Joseph, but Jacob will move to this foreign land permanently and die there. Jacob’s and Joseph’s descendants will live four centuries of slavery and nearly forget who they are and who their God is. “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” God’s timetable is long, slow, patient.

Then Jacob wakes up and declares, “The Lord is in this place and I did not know it.” The poverty of what you do not know!

It’s not that you can ever expect to know where God will be for you. Nor is it that you will be able to confine God to a particular place and time of the week for your convenience, to consult with God when it is your pleasure.

What you do not know is when God will show up and change intimately your whole being. What you can do is come to this worship each week in anticipation that God will speak to you and envelope you in the presence of God which does bring you back into the world of the living. In some ways God may not come in full dress each and every Sunday, but by waiting expectantly, hopefully, for God that will change you. At the very least you will discover the wonder of what you don’t know.

Skeptics can easily complain that if you come week after week and God does not fill this sanctuary with holy presence, it’s either because the worship is dull, the music is too out of date, the preaching is just plain bad, this congregation is uninspired - or there is no God. What have you been going to Taylor Field nine times a year for an eternity expecting to happen? Do you not go even when the ‘Riders are 3-12, hoping that tonight could be the night? What you do not know may be all of our salvation.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan