Sunday, July 20, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

Stairway to Heaven

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:1–18
Genesis 28:10–19

God be in my head and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes and in my looking;
God be in my mouth and in my speaking;
God be in my heart and in my thinking;
God be at my end and at my departing.

Sarum Primer, 1558

In the last issue of Real Simple magazine (yes, every month Real Simple magazine shows up in my mailbox), there was an article on sleep and its effect on our overall health. One of the benefits cited was that sleep—enough of it—enhances creativity. Knotty problems can be worked out during one’s sleep. Paul McCartney supposedly came up with the melody for the song Yesterday in a dream. John Steinbeck was quoted as having said, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” Our family tells the story of our older daughter waking up one morning, when she was about four years old, and racing down the stairs to announce that she learned how to tie her shoes in a dream that night. Then she promptly and proudly showed us.

Jacob is on the run, running for his life, and he has a dream one night about a ladder. In that one night’s sleep, a lot changed for Jacob. In his dream, there was a ladder set up on the earth, reaching up to heaven. You can imagine it as a ladder with rungs or as a set of narrow steep stairs. Walter Brueggemann says that it is probably more like a ramp (Walter Bruggemann, Genesis: Interpretation Bible Commentary for Preaching and Teaching). In Jacob’s dream, the ladder was filled with angels—going up and coming down the ladder. Some going up toward heaven. Some coming down toward earth. They were the angels of God. And the topper is that in the dream the Lord stands beside Jacob and then speaks to him.

I have a special affinity for this particular story, because I once had a dream very similar—during a time when I was fearful for my own life, like Jacob. Jacob was fearful that his brother Esau, whom he’d just cheated out of a birthright, would find him and kill him. I was fearful that the breast cancer I’d just been diagnosed with, now twenty-five years ago, would kill me. And so in my dream, there was a ladder pointing up toward a very narrow hole in what must have been the sky or heaven. There was the sense that I had to climb that ladder, but it narrowed so much and was so steep, I couldn’t imagine how I would successfully make the climb to reach that opening. The ladder in my dream didn’t have angels ascending and descending, but when I looked up at the opening in the sky, there were all kinds of friends, looking down and reaching their hands through that opening toward me—the helping hands of so many friends, reaching out to help me make my way up that ladder, through that difficult journey. Those friends were my angels. God’s angels in my life. That dream was God’s assurance to me—assurance that God was with me in so many different ways.

The word God spoke to Jacob in the midst of his dream was a word of grace undeserved, love Jacob never expected to receive. Jacob was a fugitive. He had swindled his brother Esau out of the blessing of their father—a blessing reserved for the firstborn, a blessing that should have been Esau’s and only Esau’s, at least according to the rules of that culture in that day. In cahoots with their mother, Rebekah, Jacob plotted how he would trick their father, poor blind Isaac. And he succeeded. Jacob got the blessing he had plotted and planned and connived for. And now he was on the run for his life. He wasn’t praying to God for help. He wasn’t looking for God. There was nothing that even indicated he had any kind of relationship with God. But in the middle of the night, God speaks to Jacob.

God announces, “I am the Lord, Jacob, and I am the God of your father Abraham, too. This land you’re sleeping on will be yours and it will be the land of your offspring too and they will number greatly and will spread everywhere in every direction—north, south, east, and west—and they will be blessed. But that’s not all. I want you to know that I am with you, Jacob. Know that I am with you and also know that I will keep you wherever you go. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

That’s quite a message for a guy whose name, Jacob, means striver or hustler. Jacob was a manipulator. He had manipulated his brother. He had disrespected his dad. He was in danger. And I don’t doubt that he probably fell asleep that night thinking through every move he would make to save his own skin.

I don’t think any of us would look at one another and readily call the person sitting next to us a conniver. I don’t think we often think of ourselves as manipulating. But we sure spend a lot of time trying to save ourselves, trying to look OK, trying to hold onto what we have, trying to get some things we don’t have, trying to stay on top, to tighten our grip, because there are simply a lot of threats that come our way every day. Shrinking economies. Businesses going under. Benefits being reduced. People who seem to have more talents, more smarts, more money, more looks than we do.

We want our kids to get into schools that are good or to get the best teacher each year possible and we’re upset if they get the teacher no one requests or the new teacher with little experience. We have to grasp our purses tightly at night and be aware of them all the time, because the streets are filled with threats. The news this morning as I drove here cited again all the shootings that took place last night in Chicago. And so we might not think of ourselves as conniving or manipulating, but we really do have to work very hard to hold onto our lives and to stay afloat. And it gets wearisome sometimes. And consuming at others.

And if you can’t wrap your mind around how you might be even a little bit like Jacob, you can see manipulation and conniving going on all the time in our news reports. Nations needing to protect themselves to the degree that missiles are launched and people are killed. Other nations striving to get rights they think have been taken away from them. Nations of all sorts holding onto their lives, their borders. Constant scrambling and having to watch out. And children running for their lives—away from their own countries because of fear, toward our country, hoping for safety, and then meeting with fear and threat again. Oh, do I hope God is speaking to those children at night, in the middle of their dreams, whether they have a relationship with God already or not. I hope and pray those children hear a word of comfort and begin to know that the Lord is with them.

We can become so fearful—sometimes rightly so and sometimes without due cause—that we miss the grace of God that exists everywhere around us. We miss the cues when we become so consumed with protecting ourselves. And sometimes we miss the cues because we don’t think we deserve any grace from God. The world works on a scale of judgment and climbing up ladders and believing we have to please God in order to get God’s attention. And we have absorbed the way the world works. But God’s interaction with Jacob alerts us to God’s way again. Brueggemann says that in this story, “God commits himself to the empty-handed fugitive. The fugitive has not been abandoned. This God will accompany him” (Genesis: Interpretation Bible Commentary for Preaching and Teaching).

That defensive, on-guard, striving stance is the stance we take on when we’re under pressure or threat, and it gets worse the more pressure we feel, the greater the threat, and our stance of defensiveness and self-protection at all costs can get to be habit and it can lead to our missing the signs, missing the signs of the ever-loving presence of the Lord, our God, here on earth, in this place.

Fred Craddock tells the story of his father’s attitude toward church and his father’s inability to see God’s grace:

My mother took us to church and Sunday school; my father didn’t go. He complained about Sunday dinner being late when she came home. Sometimes the preacher would call, and my father would say, “I know what the church wants. Church doesn’t care about me. Church wants another name, another pledge, another name, another pledge. Right? Isn’t that the name of it? Another name, another pledge.” That’s what he always said.

Sometimes we’d have a revival. Pastor would bring the evangelist and say to the evangelist, “There’s one now, sic him, get him, get him,” and my father would say the same thing. Every time, my mother in the kitchen, always nervous, in fear of flaring tempers, of somebody being hurt. And always my father said, “The church doesn’t care about me. The church wants another name and another pledge.” I guess I heard it a thousand times.

One time he didn’t say it. He was in the veteran’s hospital, and he was down to seventy-three pounds. They’d taken out his throat and said, “It’s too late.” They put in a metal tube, and X-rays burned him to pieces. I flew in to see him. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. I looked around the room, potted plants and cut flowers on all the windowsills, a stack of cards twenty inches deep beside his bed. And even that tray where they put food, if you can eat, on that was a flower. And all the flowers beside the bed, every card, every blossom, were from persons or groups from the church.

He saw me read a card. He could not speak, so he took a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it a line from Shakespeare. If he had not written this line, I would not tell you this story. He wrote, “In this harsh world draw your breath in pain to tell my story.”

I said, “What is your story, Daddy?”

And he wrote, “I was wrong.”

(Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, Craddock Stories)

I don’t want us to be wrong and think that God doesn’t care about us, doesn’t love us, doesn’t commit passionately to us, no matter how much we have connived or failed or manipulated or become self-protective. The amazing and good news of Jacob’s story is that God committed God’s self to a fugitive, to a man on the run, to a person working overtime to protect himself, to a sinner. The good news is that the angels on that ladder were going in both directions, closing the gap between heaven and earth, telling Jacob that God is right here in front of us, in a multitude of ways—Emmanuel, God with us—if we settle down enough to take it in, to believe in the dream, that the promise is for us and for those children crossing borders and those nations filled with threat and violence. We might not have solutions for all of it, but if only we could all see what Jacob saw and felt—that surely the presence of the Lord is in fact in this very place. May it be so for you and for me.