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Sixth Sunday after Pentecost July 20, 2014

Genesis 28:10-19 “The Promise of God’s Dreams”

Matthew B. Reeves Our story from Genesis is about a dream. This makes it a story about us because everyone has

dreams. Our dreams don’t only come when we fall asleep at night. Our dreams are also what get us out of bed in the morning. Our dreams tell us there’s more life for living than what we know today. Dreams are so important to us that we even say that nations are founded on them.

When I left home for college, my dream was to go to medical school and live in the Pacific

Northwest. You can see how well that dream came true. This is the problem with dreams. They can end up going unfulfilled. We can say that this is okay because we can put one dream to bed and another one to wake up. Then we can go out and do what we can to make the next dream come true. The problem, though, is that we weren’t made to come up with and chase our own dreams. We were made to receive God’s dreams. Only the dream that God has for us will ever be good enough. Only God’s dreams come true in ways that really finally last.

Jacob discovered this the hard way. He was running away from home because he’d gotten

everything he dreamed of. But once he’d gotten everything he’d wanted, his life became a nightmare. Last week we heard the story of Rebekah’s nightmare pregnancy, and how when Jacob was born

moments after his twin brother Esau, Jacob’s hand was a pair of vice grips latched onto his brother’s heel. This is why he was named Jacob, which means, “he grasps at the heel.” So Jacob was born grasping after Esau and he grew up dreaming about what belonged to his brother: the rights of the firstborn, the family inheritance, the blessing of his father. Jacob believed that if he got these things for himself, then he would be living the dream.

This way of thinking turned out to be Jacob’s big shortcoming. He believed that the blessed life––

the life of your dreams––is something you have to go and get for yourself. It could be that you and I have this shortcoming too.

It’s easy to fall into the trip of being an envious dreamer. We look at people around us and think, “Now they haven’t worked any harder in life than me, and they certainly aren’t more deserving, so why do they appear to have a life more desirable than what I have?” We can each fill in the blank for what makes more desirable life. Is it leisure, disposable income, health, apparently satisfying relationships? A kind of house, a level of influence? The blank we fill in with our envious dreaming can hold a lot of things. All the television commercials filled with happy, healthy, good looking, apparently well off, carefree people, they’re all a bunch of Esaus who are put in front of our eyes so we’ll want what they have. It doesn’t matter what stage of life we’re in. There’s always some Esau we can compare ourselves to.

Jacob’s first dream was how to obtain the life that Esau had. He hatched a plan for how to make

his dream come true. We heard part of this plan last week, how Esau came in from hunting so famished he couldn’t see straight. Jacob got Esau to trade his birthright as the firstborn for a bowl of Jacob’s stew. But that was only Phase One for how Jacob went about making his dream come true.

For Phase Two, Jacob waited until his father Isaac had grown old and weak, his eyesight had

failed, and the family thought he might die any day. One day, when that time came, Isaac called Esau in from the fields to pass on the blessing he’d received from his father Abraham. But before Esau arrived,

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Jacob’s mom dressed up Jacob up in Esau’s clothes and animal skins that made him feel hairy like his older brother. She told Jacob to go to his father and pretend that he was Esau. Jacob gladly did this, and Isaac put his hand on Jacob and blessed him in the name of God.

When Isaac blessed Jacob instead of Esau, the dream after which Jacob had pined all those years

finally came true. He’d come into the family inheritance. He’d received the blessing of his father. True, he’d received these by deceit. Still, all he’d ever grasped for was there in his hands. The thing is, as his dream came true, a nightmare of sorts began. When Esau came home and learned what happened, he said, “I’ll kill Jacob that little punk!” Their mom Rebekah had no doubt that Esau meant this and told Jacob to run away. So, in our text today, Jacob’s on the lam, a fugitive from his own family. This was not part of the dream.

Some of our greatest moments of clarity come when we’ve realized some dream, only to have our

souls tell us this wasn’t really everything we always wanted. Poet Scott Cairns has described such a realization. He was romping on the beach with his yellow Lab on a gorgeous spring morning. He launched a piece of driftwood into the surf and the dog bounded into the waves yelping, prancing, again and again. Life seemed pretty good. He’d recently moved with his wife and children to a better place and a better home for a better job that was going well. His life seemed to have everything anyone could want. Except, as he raised his arm to fling the stick for his expectant, sopping dog, his heart sank. It struck him that while had accomplished a lot, he himself hadn’t become much. He remembered a bumper sticker he’d once seen: I WANT TO BE THE MAN THAT MY DOG THINKS I AM.

This is the problem with chasing dreams. The dream you try to catch for yourself doesn’t make

your soul become what it wants to be. A day’s walk from home, it was clear to Jacob that the dream he’d obtained for himself hadn’t enlarged his life. Instead Jacob, was now far from home and alone, exposed to the open sky. It’s an ironic twist that Jacob, whom we are told preferred to stay home in the tents, is now out in the wild that his brother Esau so loved. For Jacob, though, the open country is a terror. He fears for his life and his future. As night falls, it occurs to him that the dream he’d gone after so long didn’t give near the life that he thought it would.

In worship this summer, these old Genesis stories are asking questions about our lives. Today’s

story asks, What kind of dreams are we going after? And, Do the dreams we are after actually have any life in them? When are the times we’ve discovered that our souls were looking for more than the dream we had chased?

Deep down, the dreams we yearn to have come true are the ones that come from God.

Sometimes it’s only when our own dreams have failed us that we’re ready to receive the dreams that God has for us.

Jacob wasn’t looking to meet God out in the open country the night he ran from home. He was

just looking for the pillow he didn’t have, he’d left home in such a rush. The best he could find was a stone, which he put under his head as he lay down to sleep. While he was sleeping he fell into dream in which he saw a ladder with its feet on the earth and it’s top rung in heaven. God’s angel messengers were going up and down the ladder. At the very top of the ladder, Jacob saw the Lord.

From the top of the ladder, the Lord would have had every right to lay into conniving, deceitful

Jacob. He had lied to his father, stolen from his brother, and had even used the Lord’s name to pull off the ruse. But when God spoke, the word that came was pure blessing and grace. God spoke to Jacob the same promise given to Abraham and Isaac, that God would give them land, children, and a blessing that would reach all the people of earth. This was very different from Jacob’s dream of getting a life for himself. In God’s dream, all things came from God’s generous hand.

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But the heart of the promise was more than a life filled with good things. At its core, dream was

about a life filled with God. God said to Jacob, “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Do we see how different God’s dream is from the one Jacob hatched for himself? While Jacob was

dreaming of getting a life like Esau’s, God was dreaming simply of a life in communion with Jacob. Isn’t it amazing that God still wants to be with Jacob, watch over Jacob, keep Jacob, and bless Jacob who, up to this point in the story, hasn’t shown a lick of interest in God? This is because God is always more interested in us than we are in God. Before we ever started dreaming of life with God, God dreamt of life with us. No matter how far off track we get, God never gives up on his dream of communion with us. This is because God knows that our soul’s wildest dream is communion with the Lord.

When Jacob awoke the next morning, his heart wasn’t swelling with those promises of land or

greatness, blessed though they were. Jacob’s heart was ringing with the notion that God had been there all along and he didn’t know it. He said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Notice that he didn’t say, “The Lord was in this place,” but “the Lord is in this place,” which means that Jacob had woken up and he was starting to live the dream. Of all God said that night, Jacob was most taken with the notion that he might live in the presence of God.

That we should live in communion with God is the great dream of the Bible. The Bible begins

with this dream, as Adam and Eve live with Lord walking and talking with them in the garden. The Bible ends with this dream of God’s presence with us as John sees the New Jerusalem coming from heaven to earth. A voice says, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”

And so while some people have dreamt of getting ahead and others have dreamt of getting even;

as some have dreamt how they’ll prove they’re right and that someone else is wrong; as some have dreamt of defeating their enemies, and their enemies have dreamt of defeating them; as we have hatched in our hearts dreams of the life we’d like to get for ourselves, all along God has been dreaming that he would live with us and that we would live with God.

Since the only dreams worth living for are the ones worth dying for, God descended a ladder

from heaven to earth in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ endured the nightmare of the cross and God laid his head a stone in the tomb so that when we wake from death we’ll find we’re with God, risen together with Christ. But God’s dream of communion with us in Christ doesn’t come true just in the life to come. God is in this place, God is in this life now, even as we sometimes live as though we didn’t know it.

Jacob was so taken with this new dream of his, that he should live in God’s presence, that he

made a monument to commemorate his awakening. He took the stone upon which he’d dreamt and set it as a pillar pointing to the sky. He anointed it with oil saying, ““How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”

In the Lord Jesus, the gate of heaven is open to the earth, which means that God is sending his

dreams down to us. Our receiving them will involve taking life’s most ordinary things––some stone, some kitchen, some classroom, some office; some route to work; some lonely living room; some conflicted space between us and someone else––taking these, anointing them with oil, and saying surely the Lord is present in this place, and I just didn’t know it. As we do this, we are waking into God’s big dream for us––that we might know the gate of heaven is open and God has come down. How awesome is this place! We are free to live the dream. Amen.