Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 23, 2023

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 139:1–12, 23–24
Genesis 28:10–19a

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The house that Meredith and I rented in Kansas City the first year of her residency at the children’s hospital there was in an old neighborhood called Brookside. The house had a lot of quirky features, like most old houses, but my favorite was the patio: about forty feet wide and fifteen or so feet deep, it was pure concrete, painted bright red.

One night I came home from the grocery store with a paper sack that was just a little too full and bounded up the three little steps of that red painted patio a little too enthusiastically, and the glass bottle of extra virgin olive oil — you know, the big ones, the 33.8 ounce ones? — I’d bought broke through the bottom of the bag, shattered on impact, and sent a slick of oil spreading all over that red concrete patio.

I spent the next hour trying to clean the oil off that patio, muttering and cursing under my breath all the while. What occurs to me today, in light of the story we just heard, is that rather than cursing the poor construction of grocery bags or my own clumsiness, I should have been celebrating. Perhaps what happened there was not an accident. Perhaps it was an anointing.

Jacob, the strange biblical character from the story we just heard, stands up a big rock for a pillar and then pours oil over it (probably more than 33.8 ounces).

Anointing happens a lot in the Bible. Kings get anointed, prophets get anointed, people in need of healing are anointed. Anointing is an important biblical symbol; “anointed” is actually the meaning of the Greek word Christ, so for us as Christians, anointing makes up a major part of who we understand Jesus to have been and, by extension, who we are.

Anointing someone sets them apart for a particular task or calling. It designates them as holy. And, as our story demonstrates, things and places can be anointed as much as people can. It achieves the same purpose: anointing a place renders it holy and sets it apart for a special purpose. Anointing a place transforms it from just “some place” to “this place.” Anointing turns a place into a sanctuary.

So Jacob anoints a pillar, and the first people to hear this story would immediately know that place as the sanctuary “Bethel,” or “House of God.” Bethel was an important Israelite sanctuary for a long time, and this is its origin story. The story says that the place you might know as a sanctuary wasn’t always thus; there was a time when our special place was just some place.

Every sanctuary has an origin story. This sanctuary, where we are met in person and online this morning, has an origin story. We rehearse it together every year on the Sunday in May we designate “Dedication Commemoration Sunday,” remembering the Sunday in May of 1914 when this building became our church’s sanctuary, when it held its first worship service. Before this sanctuary was built, this place at the intersection of Delaware and Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) was just a marshy kind of place with boarding houses and a few new mansions.

But as a condition of accepting the call to be the next Pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church, a preacher named John Timothy Stone dictated that a new sanctuary for the church should be built here, in this place. It is hard to imagine, isn’t it, that this place — with its ceilings and its pews, its organ and pulpit and font — this place was once just some place. This place — where we baptize infants and solemnize our friends, sing hymns and lift up prayers, where we tell the story of the faith week after week — this sanctuary was once hardly any place at all.

Well I, for one, am glad that this place is this place — and has been for 109 years now. Because people have always needed sanctuaries, and we always will.

Each week here we enter into a kind of space and a kind of time that is marked off as special and different from all of the other spaces and times we find ourselves in the rest of the week. There is a hymn we sometimes sing in here that captures the distinction for me. Its middle two verses say:

Here are symbols to remind us

of our lifelong need of grace;

here are table, font, and pulpit;

here the cross has central place.

Here in honesty of preaching,

here in silence, as in speech,

here, in newness and renewal,

God the Spirit comes to each.

 

Here our children find a welcome

in the Shepherd's flock and fold;

here as bread and wine are taken,

Christ sustains us as of old.

Here the servants of the Servant

seek in worship to explore

shat it means in daily living

to believe and to adore.

(Fred Pratt Green, “God Is Here!)

We need this place here. I need this place here.

But there’s more than worship that happens here to make this place a sanctuary and to set it apart for holy purposes for all who enter it. The stories may never be told of all of the women and men who have come through these doors or through the Gratz Center doors or the Loggia door to find sanctuary — from weather, from hunger, from loneliness, from doubt, from violence, from God only knows what.

People literally need sanctuary. For going on seven months now the Morse Lounge has provided some measure of sanctuary to hundreds of migrants from Central America through the work of our Chicago Lights Social Service Center. It was estimated in May that more than 10,000 people have arrived in Chicago since August of last year. Hotels and park districts and community centers have been and will continue to be converted into short-term emergency shelters for people who have fled their homes and need sanctuary.

Many, many of those folks have arrived here. And for every one of them, as well as for all of the people across all of the years that have found themselves within these walls for as long as they have been standing, this space has served a holy function that neither we nor they will ever fully grasp.

Somebody asked me recently if Fourth Church would still exist without this sanctuary. I had to think about that. I think it would. After all, there were two other Fourth Church sanctuaries before this one, and there have been seasons that have required us to be without our sanctuary for a time, seasons of fire or construction or COVID.

But I also think the sanctuary is a major part of who the church is and what we are called to be about in the world today. Because people need sanctuary. And people still know, when they see a church, that they can expect to find sanctuary within it.

Jacob needs sanctuary. When we meet him in this story Jacob is alone and vulnerable. He has fled his home and is stumbling toward a future he did not choose for himself; you see, among the things Jacob needs sanctuary from is himself — his own actions and their consequences.

And in a vision from the God who called to his parents and his grandparents, Jacob finds sanctuary, finds that he’s already in it, though he did not know it.

And even though he is the one who sets up the pillar and anoints it with oil, even though he gives the place its ancestral name, Jacob is not the one who makes Bethel a sanctuary. God does that.

People don’t make sanctuaries. God does. A place is a holy place not because of us or anything we might do to it. A place is holy because God is in it, and any place may be holy, and we probably won’t ever know it.

What Jacob’s vision of a ladder (or a stairway or ramp) reaching into heaven filled with angels going up and down it — what that vision shows him — and us — is that any place, perhaps every place, becomes holy when God is revealed there.

Any place. The lakeshore at sunset, sure, but also a highway overpass during rush hour. Yes, the mountains, and also a back alley. It is the presence of God that renders the places we inhabit and pass through as holy. And mostly we don’t know it. Until God opens our eyes and we do.

The surgeon Richard Selzer described a time when his eyes were opened.

“I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on.

“The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.

“Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks, ‘Will my mouth always be like this?’ she asks. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it will. It is because the nerve was cut.’ She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. ‘I like it,’ he says. ‘It is kind of cute.’

“All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”

The surgeon lowers his eyes. Jacob shudders with fear at the awesomeness of what he has seen and he exclaims, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it.”

What about you? What would happen in you were you to realize that God was present and you didn’t know it? Would you get quiet? Would you call someone? Would you shout? Would you cry?

God is near at hand to us, and we do not know it. God is in this place, even when we don’t know it; our not knowing it doesn’t make it any less true.

Such knowledge, to borrow words from the biblical psalmist, is “too wonderful” for us. It’s too high for us to attain. Whatever knowledge or awareness we have of God is given to us by God as a gift. It’s grace. It’s not up to us and our intelligence or spiritual sensitivity to detect and actualize God’s presence in our lives. God is with us and promises to remain with us whether we know it or not.

What I’m working against here is the notion that we must attain a level of enlightenment or moral fitness before God will have anything to do with us. A lot of us are dogged by a sense that we’re not “religious” enough — we don’t read our Bible enough or pray enough or give enough. We cuss a little (we cuss a lot). What, we wonder, could God have to do with us?

Well, let me introduce you to Jacob.

Jacob — patriarch of the faith — is straight up shady. He’s a trickster. He’s dishonest. He spends most of his time scheming to secure his own well-being and future. His name literally means “to supplant.” The Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner has a great phrase about the biblical character of Jacob. He says, Jacob “wanted the moon, and if he’d ever managed to bilk heaven out of that, he would have been back the next morning for the stars to go with it.”

Jacob manipulates his brother into giving up his birthright. Jacob tricks his blind father into giving him the blessing that is rightfully due his brother; he puts on his brother’s clothes and pretends to be Esau, and he receives the blessing.

Jacob hustles from one scheme to the next. He gets what he can get from people, and then he gets out. He’s always been like this, and he will always be like this; in a later story, Jacob will ghost his father-in-law and take pretty much everything in his house that isn’t nailed down.

What I’m saying is, nobody is nominating Jacob to be a church officer. A lot of us aren’t sure he should even be a member. And yet the gospel is that God is with Jacob and has a purpose for Jacob and Jacob doesn’t even know it.

That’s not to make a model of Jacob; grace does not license badness. It’s to put the spotlight of faith in the right place, which is on the presence of God in any place we might find ourselves, not because we did anything to summon it but simply because God loves us.

Jacob’s vision locates his life within the life of God. Jacob’s life is about what God’s life is about, for this is “The Lord” that is speaking to him, the God who conscripted first Jacob’s grandparents and then Jacob’s parents into a plot to “bless all the families of the earth.” Whatever else has been promised — land, descendants, protection, a home — serves this primary agenda of blessing the world.

Though Jacob never knew it until now, and though he still doesn’t seem like the best candidate for the job, this is what his life is about. It’s what the life of the people that will follow him will be about as they spread out like the dust of the earth.

Blessing the world is what the church’s life is about.

So we have work to do. Women at Fourth are running a school supply drive. The World Mission and Social Justice Council is engaging “Violence Interrupters” to reduce gun violence. Meals Ministry needs Spanish translators. We need beadles and ushers and liturgists for worship and people to help set up Communion. We need Cookie Table Hosts, Servers, and Hospitality Coordinators for Coffee Hour.

All of that is in the News and Opportunities section of this morning’s worship bulletin. And all of it relates to blessing. It’s all part of our job description as people who have been given this vision and so have received this calling.

So let’s get to work.

Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church