One Condition

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
July 17, 2005

One Condition
Genesis 28:10-22
Psalm 139 1-12, 23-24

Last week we heard the story of the birth of Esau and Jacob
the sons of Isaac and Rebekah,
the grandsons of Abraham and Sarah.
Esau was the first born of the twins,
with Jacob following seconds later on Esau’s heel.
Esau was the strong, strapping hunter,……..his father’s favorite,
while Jacob was slight and quiet, his mother’s favorite.
We heard the story of how Jacob got Esau to give up his birthright
for nothing more than a bowl of lentil stew.
In that rash act, Esau lost his standing as the oldest son,
the one who would inherit the bulk of his father’s estate.
Jacob became the older son.

We pick up the story with Jacob stopping for the night
as he journeyed from Beer-sheba to Haran.
But before we look at the text,
before we do our exegesis –
do you remember that word from last week:
our interpretation of God’s word through Scripture -
we need to do go back and fill in the story.
A lot has happened between our reading from last week
and the reading the Lectionary assigned for this morning.

Jacob has not only taken Esau’s birthright,
he has secured his father’s blessing;
and he did this by deceiving his father,
by masquerading as Esau, dressing up as his older brother.
Isaac, their father, was by this time an old and frail man,
and he could no longer see.
Jacob counted on his father’s blindness to pull off his deception.
And as if that was not bad enough,
Jacob had an accomplice in this duplicity, in this deception:
his mother, Isaac’s wife Rebekah!
She favored Jacob over Esau and she wanted to be sure that Jacob
secured Isaac’s blessing before Isaac died.
Rebekah took some of Esau’s clothes and gave them to Jacob
and then she prepared a special feast for Isaac which Jacob
served to his father when he asked for his father’s blessing.

Esau was furious that Jacob had supplanted him a second time,
first taking his birthright, and then taking his blessing.
Esau vowed to avenge himself, vowed to kill Jacob.
But he chose to bide his time and wait until after Isaac died.
Then he would take his grim revenge on his treacherous brother.
Rebekah learned of Esau’s plans,
and told Jacob to flee to escape his brother’s wrath.
To protect Jacob she compounded her crime by lying to her husband:
“Don’t let my son marry one of the local girls”, she said to Isaac.
“None of them are good enough for my son.
Send him north, back to Haran,
back to the land of his grandfather,
where he can find the right kind of girl.”

And so, with his brother’s birthright and his father’s blessing in hand,
Jacob set off and headed north to Haran.
He was on foot facing a journey of more than 500 miles
along dusty roads, across rivers, and over mountains.
all under the relentless glare of the Mediterranean sun.

That’s where we pick up the story:
with Jacob the liar,
Jacob the cheat,
Jacob the deceiver,
Jacob the fugitive,
settling down under the stars for the night.
No hotel, no bed & breakfast, no trailer,
no tent, no air mattress,
nothing but the cold, hard ground,
with a stone as a pillow.

And then he had his dream,
not the kind of dream we would expect from a crook,
a guilty man on the run,
but that marvelous dream,
that dream that even those who have never read the Bible
have heard about and can picture: Jacob’s ladder.
The image that has captured the imagination of artists for centuries;
a portal, a doorway, a gateway between heaven and earth,
by what the Bible says is a ladder,
but really was thought of more as a stairway, a ramp,
yes, I will say it: a stairway to heaven,
with angels ascending and descending,
some heading down to earth to carry out tasks
God had assigned them,
and others going back up to report back to God
on what they had done, seen, and heard.


In Jacob’s day, some four thousand years ago,
those who believed in God believed that there was
but one entrance to heaven, a portal located somewhere on earth,
where God’s messengers were able to go back and forth.
No one thought of angels as celestial beings with wings.
No: angels were simply thought of as “sons of God”
“going to and fro on the earth,
and …walking up and down on it.” (Job 1:7)
all at God’s behest.

With everything we know about Jacob at this point,
we can hardly call him a man of God, a man of faith.
When he stopped for the night to sleep,
he was not resting on a religious pilgrimage;
he was a fugitive, a man on the run,
a man trying to save his own neck.
And yet in his dream he stumbled upon the one place on all the earth
where God’s transit system connected heaven and earth.
Even Jacob, with all his other concerns and fears,
knew he was in a holy place, a special place,
which is why he would call the place “Bethel”
which is Hebrew for “House of God”.

And if the stairway and the angels weren’t enough,
God appeared to him there in that place,
standing either next to him on the ground,
or standing above him on the stairway,
depending on how we translate the Hebrew.
And God spoke to Jacob and made Jacob a promise,
the same promise God had made
to his father Isaac, and his grandfather Abraham
the promise of land and descendants.
It is an extraordinary promise to make to this
liar, this swindler.
God should have whipped up a brutal sand storm
to drive Jacob back to his family
guilty, penitent, spitting out sand as he confessed his treachery,
and sought forgiveness from his father and his brother.

But God didn’t not stop there – he kept going.
He said to Jacob: “Know that I am with you
and will keep you wherever you go…’ (28:15)
“I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”
That was God’s promise to Jacob.
God didn’t say to Jacob, “If you go back and apologize to Esau,
if you confess to your father,
if you agree to live a holy and pure life,
I will be with you.”
No, God said simply, resolutely, and absolutely:
“I will be with you”
As Frederick Buechner puts it so colorfully,
“It wasn’t holy hell that God gave Jacob, but holy heaven.”
(Beyond Words 177)

And isn’t that God’s promise to all his children,
including you and me?
God will be with us,
be with us in every moment of our lives:
here with us on Sunday when we gather
in community to worship him;
With us when we pray,
With us when we act with mercy
and righteousness, and goodness.
With us when we reach out to others in love and kindness.

But God will also be with us when we ignore
his commandments to honor the Sabbath
which we seem to have a propensity to do in the summertime;
with us when we are selfish, arrogant, mean, tight-fisted;
with us when we walk by those who are hungry, sick, or lonely.
with us when we think about praying,
but find ourselves distracted by all the things on our “to-do” lists.

That is the love of God,
the grace of God given to us
with no questions, no tests, no judgment
no periodic checkups and examinations.
We can flee from God, turn away from God,
ignore God, pay no attention to God,
step all over his commandments and his teachings,
and God is still with us.

There is no place we can go,
nothing we can do that can change that.
The Psalmist captures this gift so beautifully:
“where can I go from your spirit?
where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me.” (Psalm 139:7-10)

Unlike Jacob, we don’t need to see a staircase
to know of God’s constant presence in our lives.
God’s presence was revealed to us through the womb
of a frightened, unmarried young woman,
the one who gave birth to our Lord Jesus the Christ.
And didn’t Jesus reinforce God’s promise to be with us
“until the end of the age” through the power of the Spirit?
This is grace upon grace!
A gift that can’t be bought,
A gift that can’t even be taken through a well-planned swindle.
It is something God gives, gives from his love,
to all his children.

Now Jacob was a con artist, a crook
a scheming young man who could not begin to understand
the breadth of God’s goodness,
the depth of God’s grace,
So we should not be at all surprised by Jacob’s response
“You will be my God…. if you deliver.”
did you catch that one word that trips him up: “if”?
“If God will be with me
and will keep the way I go,
and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear
so that I come again to my father’s house in peace”
then, and only then will the Lord God be Jacob’s God.

God didn’t use the word “if” when he made his promise to Jacob;
God put no conditions on his promise to Jacob.
But Jacob is putting a condition on his response.
And don’t we do the same thing?
We hear God’s promise to us,
and we promise to respond in faithfulness,
but we always seem to have a condition:
God if you deliver the goods, I will be faithful.
Just like Jacob: feed me, clothe me, house me,
make me prosperous, make me better than my neighbor.
God, if you do all these things and I will honor you.
God if I have time, I will worship you,
if I have extra money I will share my blessings,
if I can manage it, I will help another
if I don’t dislike that person, I may not judge him
or criticize him, or gossip about him.

We may be separated by 4,000 years, but we have something
in common with Jacob: the immaturity of our faith.
Even after his encounter with God,
even after his amazing dream, Jacob continued his lying, cheating ways.
Jacob may have been “born again” to use a phrase from our time
and culture, but being “born again” doesn’t mean we are suddenly
filled with wisdom and understanding.
“Born again” means just what it suggests:
we are infants in faith and we need to work to grow in maturity in faith.
For Jacob, it took the rest of his life.
For each of us, it will take the rest of our lives.
But we will have help through God’s constant presence;
as Paul reminds us, “ God will help us in our weakness
for we do not even know how to pray as we ought.”
(Romans 8:26)

Our Lord Jesus Christ understood the immaturity of our faith
when he used the imagery of his words and teachings
as seeds, seeds to take root and grow throughout life.

But so many of God’s words and Christ’s teachings
don’t take root, or are smothered, or simply left to wither.

We too are on a journey, just like Jacob,
a journey that will take all of our lives.
We will continue our journey with Jacob over the next few weeks;
as we journey with him, look for the ways in which he grows in faith,
and ask yourself if you too are growing as he did.
By the time Jacob reaches the end of his life,
the word “if” is no longer part of his conversation with God.
There are no conditions;
he develops the faith of his grandfather Abraham.

And if there is hope for a liar, a swindler, a cheat,
then there is surely hope for you and me.
Hope that we will come to know God’s love,
Christ’s peace,
and the Spirit’s wisdom more completely,
more maturely, more faithfully.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Let it take root.
Tend it, nurture it…
all the days of your life
AMEN