This is the time of year when many young people head off for their freshman year of college in a new city, maybe even a new state or new country. Or they join the military, or leave home to find a job elsewhere. They leave behind family, friends, everything that’s familiar, and head off into the unknown. They imagine that they will make new friends, learn lots of interesting things, have some life experiences, venture into adulthood—but right now they can’t see it all yet. It’s all still out ahead of them, and they are traveling blind into that future with some excitement and trepidation. On that car ride, or plane ride, or train ride, or however they are traveling, they are in liminal space—no longer home, but not yet in the new place. In that liminal space they may be doing some serious thinking about what their lives have been so far, all that is ending, all that is beginning, and what they hope their lives will become. So many dreams and hopes and wishes come to the fore in that liminal space, and perhaps also so many fears of this unknown toward which they are hurtling at great speed. They may be intensely lonely.
Jacob is in that liminal space, too. He has taken his twin brother Esau’s birthright and then also cheated him out of their father’s blessing. Esau is furious and has vowed to kill Jacob. Their mother, Rebekah, tells Jacob to flee to her brother Laban’s home for safety. Jacob has never been to his Uncle Laban’s, has never met this uncle or his family, but he sets out, alone. He leaves behind his family, all that he knows, and travels alone.
Jacob stops at that particular place not because it’s stunning or special, but because the sun has set. Just as he can’t see what’s ahead of him in the future, now he literally can’t see what’s ahead of him because it’s dark out. He’s been traveling all day, and it’s just time to stop. We’re not given any description of the land—hills, greenery, water, trees—nothing. It’s just “a certain place.” He makes camp there: sets up his REI tent, rolls out his sleeping pad and sleeping bag, puts a nice fluffy pillow under his head—oh wait, there was no REI then. He picks a stone for a pillow, lies down on the bare ground, and goes to sleep.
And as we heard in the reading, he dreams that there’s a ladder or a stairway to heaven. Maybe some of you right now are thinking of the song “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” while those of you who ever learned even a little bit of guitar learned the opening to the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven.” There it is, right in the scripture, with angels going up and down. And there is God saying, “Hey, Jacob, it’s me, the God of your ancestors. I’m going to give you this land, and you will have so many descendants they will be like the dust of the earth. I am with you and will keep you, wherever you go. I will bring you back here someday. I will not leave you. I promise.”
Imagine being a scared and lonely young person out on your own in liminal space for the very first time and hearing this message. You are not alone. I’ve got you. I won’t leave you. I see you, and I care about you.
Implicit in the promise of having many descendants is that, whatever lies ahead, Jacob will not only survive but prosper. He will marry and have children, and they will have children, on through the generations. Esau won’t succeed in killing Jacob. This threat that is very real in the moment will pass.
Jacob wakes up from this dream and says, “Surely God is in this place—and I didn’t know it!” This place that didn’t even merit a description, this ho-hum, ordinary place, is actually filled with God’s presence. Jacob names the place Bethel, which literally means “house (beth) of God (El).” Bethel. House of God. He takes his stone pillow, sets up upright, and anoints it with oil to set it apart as sacred. And he travels on, knowing that he lives in God’s presence wherever he goes. He is open to that sacred presence the way Joy Harjo describes it in the poem we read earlier:
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
[Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War, © 1990 by Joy Harjo (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).]
In Jacob’s case, it is the language of dreams combined with the language of this certain space. It is all holy. It is all one whole voice, and we are a part of it. Jacob, in gratitude for God’s promise to be with him, promises in turn that whenever he has more than just the clothes on his back, he will give a tithe or a tenth of it back to God. He will continue to show up to this relationship with the Divine.
In this summer sermon series, “Church of the Wild,” we have been exploring our connections to God through creation. God is in this place and every place. God is with us and in us. Jacob experiences God out in the middle of nowhere and realizes that God is in that place and in every place.
Let’s talk a bit about what it means to be a Christian if God is in this place. Ecotheologian Sallie McFague invites us to consider how our understanding of God’s presence in our midst impacts our behavior as children of God, especially in the light of climate change, the greatest challenge of our time. Some theologians describe God as a divine clockmaker, who creates everything, sets it in motion, and then leaves it to its own devices, with just a bit of tinkering intervention here and there. This model suggests that God is not always watching what we do, that God is distant and uninvolved. So if we decide to use up all the resources, burn all the fossil fuels, throw our litter on the side of the road, trash the place, God might not notice.
But if our model of God is to think of all of creation as being an incarnation of God, of being part of God’s body, then we know that we ourselves are in God, that God knows how we connect to creation, and that God knows whether we are taking care of it. Sallie McFague writes,
The model of the world as God’s body is appropriate for our time . . . because it encourages us to focus on the neighborhood. It understands the doctrine of creation to be not primarily about God’s power, but about God’s love: how we can live together, all of us, within and for God’s body. It focuses attention on the near, on the neighbor, on the earth, on meeting God not later in heaven but here and now. We meet God in the world and especially in the flesh of the world: in feeding the hungry, healing the sick—and in reducing greenhouse gases. An incarnational understanding of creation says nothing is too lowly, too physical, too mean a labor if it helps creation to flourish. We find God in caring for the garden, in loving the earth well: this becomes our vocation, our central task. Climate change, then, becomes a major religious, a major Christian, issue. To be a Christian in our time, one must respond to the consequences of global warming. [Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 73.]
One way we practice falling in love with God in creation is to spend time paying attention. As Joy Harjo writes in “Eagle Poem,”
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this. . . .
[Harjo, ibid.]
We are made of all this. Surely God is in this place, whether we experience a vision like Jacob’s or not. God is in this place and in us. Or rather, we are in God.
So connect to God. Go sit in a meadow, or walk on the beach, or hike to a mountaintop, or watch an eagle soar overhead, or look out the window at a cherry tree, as Sallie McFague did one breezy, rainy March morning. She writes,
God is not far off, but the near God, nearer to me than my own breath. God is in the cherry tree—oh, yes, especially in my cherry tree! Every time I look at that beautiful creature, I see it shouting out the glory of God. It would not be so beautiful, or so transparent to God, if it were not for the breeze. The filmy white blossoms on the irregular, fragile limbs move in the wind, in the breath of the Holy Spirit, calling me to deeper appreciation of its loveliness. It is saying, “See me speak of God, of a tiny bit of the divine glory, the bit that I can image.” I do see and I thank you, my cherry tree, for telling me of God. I wish I might do the same. Can any of us be as fine an image of God as a cherry tree? [McFague, ibid., 176.]
God tells Jacob—as God tells us—I see you. I made you, and I love you. Go without fear and live your best life as your best possible self. I am with you; I am in you. Pay attention, and you will see me. May we all be paying attention, open to experiencing the Divine within and all around us—in dreams, in stones, in land, in cherry trees and eagles. Amen.