July 31, 2011 | 4:00 p.m.

Dreams

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 28:10–22

Over the course of the summer we’ve been reading through some of the most memorable stories in the book of Genesis. Today we continue that theme, moving on from the story of Isaac to the story of Jacob. Isaac has two sons, Jacob and Esau, and the Bible makes it clear that these two brothers were at odds with one another from the moment they were born. As they grow older, Jacob, the younger brother, becomes crafty enough that he manages to steal his older brother’s birthright and his claim to the family inheritance. This action causes the rift between the brothers to become much more severe, and Jacob leaves home, fleeing for his life. We pick up our reading tonight when, on the run, Jacob stops to rest for the night and has a dream.

I’ve always been taken by the stories of Genesis, because in these stories we so clearly see same kinds of conflicts with family and friends that we see in our own lives hundreds and even thousands of years later. Who among us does not know someone who has been in a conflict with a brother or sister about a family inheritance, squabbling over money or property after someone dies? Perhaps that someone is you. In any event, we know we’re dealing with a relevant story here; these ancient people have at least a few things in common with us, and that shared experience draws me into the story. Aside from the relevance, it’s still a great story: Jacob swindles the birthright and blessing; Esau wants to kill his brother; Jacob leaves in the middle of the night and goes on the run—it’s as good as any movie plot I’ve seen. I’m hooked. But it’s the relevance that takes it from just being a story and convinces me to dig deeper and find out what the story might mean for me as a person of faith.

The problem, for me, is that at one point the story threatens to lose my attention and become irrelevant, because in the next part of the story, Jacob has this dream in which God speaks to him. It may be the case that some of you have heard God speak to you in a dream, but speaking for myself, I’m pretty confident that has never happened to me. So as I was thinking about this sermon, I became afraid that in this dream sequence, the Jacob story loses its relevance. About a week ago, something happened that changed my mind.

My Netflix arrived in the mail, and the next movie up in my queue was Inception, last year’s blockbuster film about . . . dreams. In the movie, Leonardo de Caprio plays a man who hires himself out to wealthy businessmen to perform a risky and not-quite legal service: he has found a way to enter the dreams of other people and to participate in those dreams so that when the people wake up, they change their minds about something they were going to do. People hire DeCaprio to protect them from their enemies; it’s a job he calls “subconscious security.”

At first glance, the science-fiction concept of this movie struck me as being no more relevant or accessible than the idea that God speaks to Jacob in a dream, but then it hit me: as I watched Inception, I was quickly taken in by the plot because of a twist in the story—it is extremely difficult for DeCaprio not to allow his own personal desires, fears, and anxieties to creep into the dream he wants to influence (you see, he is dreaming too), and whenever that happens, he’s caught, he blows his cover, and he loses control of the dream. As I thought about this twist in the plot, I realized that the makers of this movie knew something about their audience that was also known by the first people who told the Jacob story: dreams fascinate us because we have no control over them, so most of us would be interested if we thought we could really understand, or even perhaps control, the world of our dreams.

Imagine what you could do . . . Even though we often don’t understand our dreams, most of us assume that they contain our deepest desires and our truest feelings. What if you could play DeCaprio’s character and shape that experience for someone else. What if you could convince a boss to hire or promote you? What if you could convince a person you’ve wronged to forgive you? What if you could convince the person you love to love you back? If we could get into their dreams, it might just be possible, and here’s why: In our dreams, we lose all control. You can’t decide what you dream about; it just happens when you go to sleep, and then when you wake up, if it was a powerful enough dream and if it made sense, you have to deal with it.

So what does all of this have to do with Jacob and the story about his dream? Up to this point in the story, most of us probably don’t really like what little we know about Jacob. He’s a liar and a cheat who steals from his own brother. He’s probably not someone whom we would want to have anything to do with, and if we consider that this story is found in the Bible, we probably find ourselves wondering what God would want to do with such a man. Can Jacob be saved? Is he redeemable? There’s not a lot of psychologizing that goes on in this story about Jacob. We’re not told much about how he felt, but if you pay attention to the plot, you get the sense that he must have been in a place of deep despair. Jacob had screwed up his own life so badly that he had to flee from his own home and the murderous fury of his older brother. I think it’s safe to assume that Jacob probably asked himself the same questions we ask about him, and it’s a question we might ask ourselves at times when we’ve made grave mistakes: Can I be saved? Am I worth redeeming?

When we see Jacob in this light and know that he is about to have a dream, suddenly we realize that when we read this story we are at the hands of a master storyteller. Remember that in dreams, we are not in control. Jacob may look at himself in the mirror and see a lost, broken, cold-hearted betrayer. He is on the run and hiding, and it may very well be the case that he is beyond help and resistant to any voice that would suggest otherwise. But the moment he arrives at this place called Luz, exhausted from his travels, the moment he lays his head down and drops off to sleep, the story is no longer about what Jacob thinks of himself, and it’s no longer about what we or anyone else thinks about him. Once he’s asleep, he loses control, and it’s all about the dream.

In Jacob’s dream, he sees what we’ve come to refer to as “Jacob’s Ladder.” It isn’t really a ladder if you read the story in the original Hebrew; it’s more of a ramp or a staircase. When you compare this story to what we know of the world near ancient Mesopotamia, it’s somewhat likely that he’s envisioning something like a ziggurat, one of those ancient temples that people built in hopes of climbing as close to heaven as they could get in order to speak to God. In Jacob’s dream, the stairway goes right up to heaven, and angels are ascending and descending on it, and if Jacob wants to ascend to God’s presence, all he needs to do is take a first step onto that staircase and start his way up. In the dream, Jacob isn’t without help—help is right upstairs.

When he awakens, the dream was so vivid that Jacob cannot deny the feeling: For all he has done wrong, God is not done with him. God has a purpose for his life and work for him to do. Jacob piles some stones on one another so that he will remember this place and this important moment in his life. And he gets started on making the changes he needs to make. It’s the first day of the rest of his life.

The book of Genesis is full of unsavory characters. One of the reasons that, as I’ve said, these stories are fascinating to me is that, like us, none of the people in Genesis are perfect; they all make mistakes, just like we do. But in Jacob, the plot thickens. Abraham and Isaac may have had shortcomings, but we mostly perceive them as faithful people. Jacob, though, is really a scoundrel. When God is present with Abraham, we learn the probably unsurprising lesson that God will be present with people who are faithful, but in Jacob, we learn that God can also be present with people who have been faithless. As Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann states it, in this story, “God commits himself to the empty-handed fugitive” (Walter Brueggemann, Genesis in Interpretation, p. 245).

Earlier this month, I preached about Abraham and I talked about the importance of imagination in faith. The point of that sermon was that faith requires some imagination, because sometimes we need to believe that things in the world can be different and better and more hopeful than we are usually inclined to believe. Imagination is how we can find hope in the world when things seem hopeless.

I think that’s an important lesson, but the one we take from this Jacob story may be even more important. Dreams are, in a way, the opposite of imagination, because while we can control our imagination, we cannot control our dreams. And here again we see God raising the stakes in this story about Jacob, because Jacob, who cannot imagine his own redemption, is given a new imagination; he has a different vision of himself in a dream. The story says that when we have lost our imagination, when we cannot possibly imagine that God can find a way into our lives, when we see ourselves as unredeemable, God finds a way to change our minds.

While Jacob is asleep, when he is in that place that none of us can control, God slips inside of his heart and says, “I am not finished with you yet.” I am convinced that God is not finished with any of us, just like he was not finished with Jacob. Even when we cannot imagine what it is like for us to be faithful, God can. This is the beauty of dreams: they are the place in our lives that we cannot control. And I pray that if any one among us tonight believes that you are beyond the reach of God, I pray that God would slip into a place in your life that you cannot control and remind you that your life is not done yet.

Thanks be to God. Amen.