Sunday 29th September 2024
Genesis 28: 10-17
John 1:47-end One of the most precious gifts the Hebrew scriptures give us is a sense of the sublimity of God. In a sense the Bible is a vast cacophony of voices, it can be overwhelming, disorientating, but the writers of the Hebrew scriptures are poets of the first order and what they tell us of the divine, both its closeness to us and its transcendence, remains as life giving and as relevant as when they first wrote, when they first wrestled with the divine, like Jacob in another of his adventures.
This story today, the story of Jacob’s ladder, stands as one of the most profound visions of a person awakening to a new understanding of reality. We all of us need, on a daily basis really, to renew our sense of the reality we live in. Because we can grow tired, jaded, habituated to ourselves and to our world. So easily and swiftly, our innate capacity for wonder is dulled by the sheer weight of the everyday, by the brave struggle of just getting through and keeping your head above water. Stories like this one, of Jacob and the ladder, act as stories of re-enchantment, a re-imagining of the world, or rather discovering again our innate capacity for vision which we have always had but we have forgotten that we have.
Let’s look at the story more closely. ‘Jacob left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set.’ There is nothing exceptional about where Jacob is. It is simply, ‘a certain place’. We live and move in a succession of certain places; they can pass us by in a blur. Here though Jacob stays because the sun has set. We are moving into a different realm, the realm of night, a time where transformations/revelations become possible. ‘Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.’ Jacob here is keeping himself rooted, earthed. A stone will be his pillow. He is taking the earthly and the everyday, the dust and the dirt, and bringing them into a time of dreaming, of re-imagining.
Dreams, if we let them, teach us about the reality we live in, and often hurry through. They teach us that the reality we know is never the reality we think it is. In our dreams, the familiar becomes strange. The comforting might become monstrous. The dull blossoms into the marvellous. You might find yourself delivering a lecture, or a sermon, absurdly dressed. Or you wander out of your house and discover you are living in a new landscape of mysteries and possibilities.
‘And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.’ We find we live a lot of our life separated from the hidden wells which give us life. Somehow or other we can’t seem to get back to the time of enchantment, the dreamtime we might have sensed in childhood perhaps, and we are stranded, and sad, in the cold deserts of the modern world. Nature, or music, or stories, or sport, or drama, or dreams, they take us and lift us and can show us something richer, but then we are back with the overly known. But Jacob’s dream tells us something else.
Jacob’s dream tells us we are not actually separated from God, although we may feel we are, day after day. God is not out there, up there, or over there, thousands of years in the past. There is this ladder, this connection, between earth and heaven and this ladder flows, circulates, with divine life, ‘and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.’ Angels. Not the winged figures we see in many wonderful paintings, artists are always wrestling with the divine and making it into images, it’s what we do as human beings, we make the divine into images and they are wonderful as images as long as we don’t believe in them too much. Rather angels are the bearers of God’s presence, they bear the energy of divine presence.
This revelation for Jacob is not a distant and wonderful divine performance. Rather this God speaks intimately, and personally to Jacob’s heart and soul. This divine vision of the transcendent is also earthy, experienced in a particular here and now, happening to a particular person, ‘Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.’ Now, we are to be careful here. We may, so easily, make this story, in all its primordial depth and splendour, into the wrong kind of fairy tale, in other words, a captivating illusion. It is not that this dream of Jacob means Jacob will walk off and never doubt, suffer, sweat or struggle again because some divine other is holding his hand. But rather perhaps this: when we wake up to God’s baffling closeness to us, and it often comes in fits and starts or for long periods not at all, when we have that fleeting sense of a divine life flowing through the world of the everyday, and through us, then life opens us, or we could say, life deepens. We are not separate. We are connected to the divine fullness of life.
‘Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place-and I did not know it!” Jacob wakes from his sleep, this is what can happen to us, we wake from the sleep of the familiar and we see reality afresh. And we slowly realise that this place, this unsurprising place, is held within God, or we could say this place is pregnant with God. Here different realms are joined, by a ladder, this earthy place is full of heaven, this heavenly place is very earthy. “Surely the LORD is in this place-and I did not know it.” If we don’t know that the divine courses through the familiar, that that stranger is also an angel, that that friend is also Christ, the familiar will stay safely familiar and we will fall into that sense of separation from riches and mysteries and we will be sad and feel obscurely trapped.
We need to learn from Jacob. Wherever we are, take some time, stay in this certain place. Be earthed there for a time. Remember how Jacob takes one of the stones of the place and uses it for a pillow. He takes the ordinary and puts it into the realms of dream. We may take something near us, a book, pen, cushion, stone, whatever it is, just the ordinary stuff, and be present to it. We are earthing ourselves. Perhaps what happens then is we stay, we meditate, we breath, we don’t fall asleep in the normal sense, we allow our spiritual senses to open. And maybe then, or at another time, or the time after that, we sense the mystery of the divine presence, moving through the world, moving in us, circulating, joining heaven and earth, ascending and descending.
Spiritual life is not about trances, heightened states, levitation. Spiritual life is finding time to be still, to allow heart and mind to open to a richer reality which is the reality around us, and within us, but reality sensed with our innate capacity for divine vison woken and working in us. We do need though to make time for being with God, for allowing our hearts and minds to expand, to dream. We need to feed ourselves on those things which make our spirits grow and flourish. To have visions we need to feed our capacity for vision and imagination.
Then, wherever we may be, on a mountaintop or in a crowded bus, in prison or wandering in a forest, in a messy kitchen or by a waterfall, in a hospital, in the most ordinary corner of reality, in the depths of who we are, we could say, with Jacob, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
The Reverend Ben Brown. 2024
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