Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
One of the televison shows I watch with some regularity is “House Hunters.” In the show, a couple is looking for a house, perhaps their first, perhaps for a growing family, perhaps in a new city. They sit down with a realtor and tell their budget and their desires. It is fascinating to note that frequently there are competing desires. One will want something urban and close to shops and transit, while the other will want something more suburban. One will want something contemporary and the other will want something with traditional character. One will want a fixer-upper and the other wants a place that is move-in ready. One will want something rustic and the other something classic.
The couple gets to see three homes that meet some of the criteria – it’s rarely possible to hit them all. None of the three choices are absolutely perfect. The couple has to choose one. Sometimes the choice is obvious to the viewer and sometimes the couple surprises with the choice they make. The last couple of minutes shows the couple in their new home and how well it is working out for them.
When Paula and I met with the committee that had determined that God wanted us here, we were shown the manse. In those days it needed a fair amount of work and the trustees were willing to see that it got done. Paula’s comment after the house viewing was that “It had potential.” Several of the committee members got a kick out of that. We like the house very much and have done a lot to keep its Victorian historicity. It is a very different house from the large prairie style house we had lived in for eleven years previously.
Having lived in church-owned housing all our lives, the “House Hunters” show is appealing in that it lets us dream about what we might like in a house when we reach the point of finding one on our own without a church attached to it. And what we will look for a number of years from now won’t be anything like what we might have looked for twenty or thirty years ago. Our needs have changed, and will continue to change.
Jacob wasn’t house hunting. He was hunting safety. A few years earlier he had conned his older brother Esau out of his birthright. The first born male human being or animal was thought to belong to God. You will remember that Hannah and Elkanah gave Samuel to God by placing him in priesthood training with Eli (1Samuel 1:21-28). By tradition first born sons were redeemed through a special sacrifice. Joseph and Mary made the appropriate sacrifice when they presented Jesus at the Temple on the eighth day after his birth. That’s when they encountered Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:21-38).
Apparently Esau thought so little of his inheritance as first born (even if only minutes before Jacob) that he sold it for a meal. As the Hebrews letter writer said, “When he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected because he couldn’t find a way to change his heart and life, though he looked for it with tears” (Hebrews 12:17). It was then that Jacob finished him off by stealing the family blessing.
Isaac had grown blind in old age (cataracts or macular degeneration perhaps). With the help of his mother, Rachel, Jacob covered his arms with fur pelts and musk scent and presented a special stew to Isaac, after which Isaac gave him the paternal blessing reserved for the firstborn son. When Esau arrived with his stew, it was too late and all he got was a good word. Esau vowed to kill Jacob once Isaac died.
Rachel assisted Jacob to flee the home place. She sent him off to her brother Laban. Isaac had previously told Jacob to find a wife in that family. Several days out on the long journey Jacob camped overnight and slept with a rock for a night stand.
It’s a wonder he didn’t have a nightmare instead of a dream. But dream he did. He saw “a raised staircase, its foundation on earth and its top touching the sky, and God’s messengers were ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12). I suspect his initial reaction was something like Scrooge’s when the ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to him: a bit of undigested meat causing heartburn. Then God appeared on the staircase, saying, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will become like the dust of the earth” (vv. 13-14). The fleeing, homeless Jacob all of a sudden became a landowner of sorts. God gave him the first option on that land and God would one day exercise that option on Jacob’s behalf.
God left Jacob with a blessing: “I am with you now, I will protect you everywhere you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done everything that I have promised you” (v. 15).
As Jacob thought about this experience in the wee hours of the morning, he realized that he had been part of something very special. Biblical dreams do not witness to the dreamer’s psychological state. This wasn’t a mental projection by Jacob wishing for stability and rootedness. Biblical dreams are external forms of divine communication in which actual encounters with God take place. Jacob recognized that he didn’t dream; God had encountered him in the midst of sleep. What is interesting is that Jacob doesn’t speak of God’s presence in the dream. He speaks of God’s presence in that place. Terrence Fretheim, The New Interpreter’s Bible, says that “The dream reflects not simply a mental world, but an actual world that can be slept on, touched, and built on.”(1)
Jacob didn’t conjure up this encounter with God. It was all God’s doing. Jacob was enveloped by God and he recognized that God was in that place. So he called it Beth-el, house of God. Jacob wasn’t house hunting. The house found him. Out in the open of the wilderness, shelter found Jacob — God’s shelter. The words of the psalmist come to mind:
Because he will shelter me in his own dwelling during troubling times; he will hide me in a secret place in his own tent; he will set me up high, safe on a rock. (Psalm 27:5)or
Living in the Most High’s shelter, camping in the Almighty’s shade, I say to the Lord “You are my refuge, my stronghold! You are my God — the one I trust!” (Psalm 91:1)Jacob’s experience tell us that encounters with God don’t happen in faraway places with strange sounding names. Meetings with God are not like imagined encounters with aliens who whisk people away to strange planets and fill them with stranger ideas. God meets us where we are, in our times and our places. But God does it on God’s terms. God can’t be conjured up with rituals and hocus-pocus. God chooses to meet us, just as he chose to meet Jacob.
But more than that, God chooses to meet us. Jacob was a trickster, a con artist. His life was filled with conflict and deceit, and it would continue that way. This clever liar did not exhibit the virtues of a great hero. Sometimes he deserved to be forsaken and left to fend for himself in whatever danger befell him. Yet God’s meeting him at Bethel showed that despite his many character flaws, God could still work through him to accomplish a greater purpose than the selfish interests which guided Jacob. Jacob’s own up and down life foreshadowed the nature of the people who would descend from him: contentious, conflicted, conceited, self-serving. Nevertheless, God’s guiding hand still governed the nation’s history through him.
Just as Jacob represented a whole tribe from which Israel later developed a national identity, his life represented a much larger canvass on which the Lord of history revealed a redemptive purpose which was greater than any hero, tribe or nation. We see this when Jacob woke up – physically and spiritually – and realized that God was with him. He set his stone up as an altar and renamed the place Beth-el, “house of God.” Not hunting a house, the house of God found him. Just as the Word was made flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Just as the New Jerusalem will come down of out heaven. All of creation is God’s dwelling. All of creation is sacred. All of creation — even you and me — maybe used by God to advance God’s purposes for countless generations to come.
Thanks be to God for this amazing grace.
(1) Terrence Fretheim, “Genesis,” New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville; Abingdon Press, 1994) vol. I, p. 542.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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