(next in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, August 7, 2005
Genesis 28: 6-7, 10-19a Mark 6: 30-37a
By deceiving his blind father, Jacob stole the blessing which rightfully belonged to his older brother Esau. Now, terrified of his brother’s wrath, Jacob is on the lam, alone on foot in a wilderness, heading back to the old country some five hundred miles away, maybe to find a girl to marry from his ancestors’ tribe.
In the middle of his lies to his father, Jacob was asked how he had managed to hunt his prey so quickly. Jacob said, “Yahweh, your God, brought it to me.” Your God. Jacob was about twenty years old, according to the tale. Doesn’t this sound like a twenty-year old? I don’t mean smart alecky. I mean not willing to take anything on authority. It is not that he doubted his father’s stories of Yahweh; it’s just that they were his father’s, not his own. He had not had experience of Yahweh himself. Now he is on his own, gone from home, alone. He feels guilty, excited, terrified, sorry, superior, strong, confused, responsible, beat. He is twenty.
On the third day of that journey, perhaps, Jacob came to a certain place and stayed there for the night because the sun had set. Perhaps some of you have traveled like this: going deep into the woods, thumbing by roads, driving all day, trekking north on a desolated sea shore–moving until the sun is about to set, and thus coming to a certain place for the night. It can be an epic experience, to be alone with the dying of the day. Indeed, I believe that every human being has coiled within him and within her all the substance needed for the telling of an epic hero’s tale, a great legend of the mystery and power of being human, yet fearing solitude and our own emptiness, we usually drown out our knowledge of our epic self with the noise of society, with business and television and so forth. Not so, Jacob, not this time. To be alone is a lesson in the beginning.
A certain place. This is anywhere in life’s journey where the means of progress fail, and you must stop. The sun sets on the day; on your eyesight; on your parenthood; on your career; on your health; on your marriage; on your hopes. You don’t have to be twenty to come to this certain place–just at least twenty to stumble into the wilderness of a future not bright with allurements. Oh, we all have the happy tape-recording we let roll when asked how things are going. It brightly chatters on about the children, the job, the spouse, the house, the job, the golf, the… Speak it often enough and you almost believe you are that shallow, happy-faced sticker. But deep down we know we are not full filled. We fend off our fears about this condition. We say, Next year, the whole pie. After this hurdle, after that ordeal is done, then will come my day. But if we will let it, the sun sometimes sets and we do not blast the darkness away with lights. Then you stop in a certain place beyond which you cannot move. Here you rest. And you must take a stone for a pillow.
A stone for a pillow means no more resisting what you most hate about your life, or what has come into your life, or who. Resistance, self-hatred, moralism, guilt–these are all battles in the same war and they do not work for transformation. They only keep everything the same. Conventional religion is popular precisely because it spends all its energy on opposition, so that nothing ever changes. But if you are in a certain place, like Jacob, you have no conventional God. You have no theories about how God works or how prayer works. None. Stop. Do not take a pillow for a pillow. Resistance is the source of suffering. Do not turn on the TV for a pillow. Do not take a drink for a pillow, or surf the net, or call a friend. Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while. Take your stone for a pillow: the worst charge you lay against your life. Take that beneath your weariness. Set that stone under you and lie down in that place. This is the ancient wisdom, the practice of deep faith which has not one thought in its head about God–about “your” God, as Jacob said to his father. Here lies also the power of the cross. Do not resist what you fear. Let the stone come beneath you for your pillow.
Then Jacob dreamed there was a ladder on earth reaching to heaven, and the messengers of God were going up and down on it. Oh sweet telling! This is not a mere dream. This is dream as the ancients meant it, the very pathway by which wisdom comes: “through a vision–a knowing and a seeing given when the individual (always with the support of the community) prepares his inner world to receive it.” (1) “Prepares his inner world”–that is the whole purpose of spiritual practice: the journey, the stopping, the stone for a pillow. Now Jacob sees what you also are called to see through the epic story of your life: heaven and earth as one without resistance. They touch. They communicate. They have communion. Communion is the ladder. As from the height of heaven you see down, not just yourself, lying humbled to your stone of sorrow, but everyone, all the strivers, all the fear-filled, all the error-making, all the exalted hopers of humanity. Also, as from earth, like an angel, you are seeing up to your own God–not your father’s God, not the Apostles Creed of God, but your own, your very own knowing of the One in whom all things are one. All this, after you rested and trusted yourself to your stone for a pillow, resisting no more.
Yahweh stood beside him and said, “I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring.” The land on which he lay was no place, really– except that place where he had stopped resisting his hated life, and stopped watching television, and stopped the nervous banter, and entered into the great silence with his stone. This is the land that God gives to all generations. You have an inheritance in this land. Have you claimed it? From here, at last you can hear the assurance of your God, your God: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until all the families of the earth are blessed in you.”
Jacob woke now, but now “to wake” means not to rub the sand from the corners of the eyes, but rather to come to your day, your ordinary self, after a hot, personal experience of reality, and to choose to walk, today, conscious of that reality. “Surely Yahweh is in this place–and I did not know it!” Now: your own God! Not religion’s, not Sunday’s God, not Presbyterian or hymnal God, or grace-at-meals God, but your own real reality, God, in this place, a back porch, a suburban lawn, a hot apartment, a grove in a park–it does not matter. Wherever you took a stone for a pillow seriously, there: God. Your own. Communion at last.
How awesome, how dreadful: here, the very house of God, God dwelling here, within me; here, the gate of heaven. So Jacob rose early and took the stone that he had used for a pillow and set it up for a pillar and poured oil upon it. He would never forget–you must never forget–how to come to a certain place where heaven and earth touch and have communion. You see, Jacob’s story was not about Jacob. Had it been that only, his grandchildren wouldn’t have bothered their boys’ heads with it.
If you have your own story of God, your own God, your own experience, your own contemplation and meditation, your own dream and vision, you know how this story lights your life from the inside. It is the story of your transformation, not once and just one day, but specific, and renewed, and consequential; social, and political too, and always unfolding. If you have your own story, your own God, you tell this story and you offer its hope and possibilities in all your human intercourse. Sometimes you use words, sometimes not. Now, at various times and in certain places, God’s church has grown, fresh and organic, from the way people lived and told their epic of personal and social transformation. And at other times and places, the church has withered like a fruitless tree, for the people had no story within. Though they would listen to stories about their father’s God, they did not know such a God, and they refused to take lessons in the beginning. They would not go alone to a certain place in the newness of being. And they therefore never could come to the place where heaven and earth touch by an angel’s ladder, so they could not tell a soul where to look for such a wonder, and so they would not talk about God or the ladder we call the Cross and those communities withered, for lack of communion. This was because they feared to stop when the sun was setting, and take a stone for a pillow.
If you will do this, then you will know how to respond when the hungry press upon the mountain and the hour is very late and Jesus says, “You give them something to eat.”
1. Jacob Needleman, The American Soul, p. 201
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, August 2005
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