A Place of Endless Possibilities

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

July 17, 2011

A Place of Endless Possibilities

Genesis 28:10-22

It was nothing less than God’s house,

God’s dwelling place on earth.

That’s what Solomon built in Jerusalem

almost three thousand years ago.

Solomon’s Temple was home to God.

The great Temple was not like our churches today;

the people did not go inside to worship;

there were new pews or seats;

there was no pulpit,

no space for musicians.

There were just two rooms inside the Temple,

two Sanctuaries, designed only for the priests,

and even then,

they were allowed only in the first Sanctuary.

At the back was the innermost Sanctuary,

the Holy of Holies,

which only the chief priest was allowed to enter.

This was where the Ark of the Covenant

was to be put.

And this was also where God was to have his home.

Solomon’s craftsmen labored for seven years to complete the Temple

and then, as the Ark was set in its place in the Holy of Holies,

the room was filled with a thick cloud,

“[as] the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.”

(1 Kings 8:11)

For 400 years Solomon’s Temple stood

“exceedingly magnificent,

famous and glorified throughout all the lands,”

built as it was from the finest,

the rarest, the most opulent materials.

No expense was spared to glorify God’s home.

Almost a thousand years before, back in Jacob’s time,

God had no Temple, no  tabernacle,

no dwelling place,

so it is not at all surprising

that after having his wonderfully cinematic dream,

Jacob would conclude that he had

stumbled upon God’s home on earth.

“Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!...

This is none other than the house of God!”

Our lesson tells us that Jacob called the place Beth-el

which is a Hebrew word that means very simply,

“House of God”.

“Beth” means “house”;

“El” means “God”.

Bethel: house of God.

Jacob’s dream is biblical cinema at its best,

an image captured by thousands and thousands

of artists over the centuries,

of a stairway, really more like a ramp,

that connected heaven and earth;

a ramp to allow God’s messengers to travel back and forth easily,

some coming down to do God’s bidding,

others heading back up to God for new instructions.

No wings on these angels, apparently;

they walked like mortals.

It would be another four thousand years before Mr. Otis

would invent the elevator,

so these messengers, these angels

needed some sort of conveyance

to help them shuttle between heaven and earth.

                                   

A ramp, spiraling up into the heavens,

that would do,

that would allow God’s messengers

to “go to and fro on the earth,

walking up and down on it,”

(Job 2:2)

and then return to the celestial court of the Lord God.

The story of Jacob’s ladder, his stairway to heaven,

would be extraordinary even if that was all there was to it;

But the miraculous doesn’t stop there,

for we learn that God himself was present,

not looming over Jacob, high in the heavens,

seated on his celestial throne,

peering down through the clouds,

but he was right there, “beside” Jacob,

beside Jacob so he could talk with him,

tell Jacob of the promise

God wanted to make to Jacob.

A promise that no matter where Jacob might go,

God would always be with him:

“Know that I am with you

and will keep you wherever you go…”

“I am with you…

I will keep you…

wherever you go.”

Jacob would know God’s presence anywhere,

everywhere;

God’s presence was not limited to that place,

Bethel, the house of God.

God was in the world.

God made the promise to Jacob

that God makes to all his children,

including you and me:

that God will be with us,

that no matter where we might go,

God will be there.

That God will keep us,

anywhere, everywhere.

And still, the story does not stop here;

there is more, even more

to this extraordinary story.

Do you remember who we are dealing with here?

Jacob:

Jacob the thief,

the liar,

the cheat,

the crook,

the con artist.

Our lesson started out,

“Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran”.

Did you wonder why Jacob was traveling?

He was running away!

He was running for his life!

He had just conspired with his mother Rebekah

to defraud his father Isaac,

and cheat his older brother Esau out of his birthright.

When he realized he had been mugged of his inheritance,

Esau vowed to kill his twin brother.

so Rebekah pushed the younger twin out the door

saying to him, “Your brother is planning to kill you;

flee at once to Haran.”

(Genesis 27:42ff)

Jacob was a cheat, a liar,

and he was also a coward,

a man who ran away out of fear

rather than accept responsibility for what he had done.

Yet, this is the man to whom God appears,

to whom God makes his promise:

“your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth

and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east

and to the north and to the south;

and all the families of the earth

shall be blessed in you and your offspring.”

Jacob had stolen his brother’s birthright,

entitling him to a double-share of his father’s estate,

twice as much as Esau,

and yet God promised always to be with him,

to keep him.

God gave this thief, this liar, this crook,

the same love, the same grace

that he had given to his father Isaac,

his grandfather Abraham.

                                                                       

God gave this thief, this liar, this crook

the same grace, the same love

that God gives to you and to me.  

But then, “God doesn’t love people for who they are,

but for who he is.”

(Frederick Buechner)

Last week we talked about how God calls us

to live holy lives.

We need not be holy to know God’s love, though,

to know God’s grace,

to feel ourselves fully in the presence of God.

God loves equally,

for God loves freely,

never withholding,

always sharing his grace, his love.

Aspiring to holiness is what God wants from us,

but it won’t give us a better place in line

to receive God’s love and grace;

What it does do is helps us to know God more intimately,

to appreciate more completely the grace and love

that God gives to us without regard to merit.

What working on holiness can help us do

is slow us down as we race through life

so we can feel ourselves more completely immersed

in God’s presence,

rather than just bumping from encounter to encounter

Sunday after Sunday.

                                                     

The God who longs to share his love and grace with us

is not a God who dwells in a dark, cloudy room

set in the back of a cold stone building,

but is a God who longs to walk at our side

everywhere we go,

through the light and warmth

and through the cold and dark.  

The esteemed Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman 

wrote of Jacobs dream,

that it wasn’t “a morbid review of a shameful past.

It is rather the presentation of an alternative future with God.”

An alternative future for Jacob the thief:

a future filled with hope,

a future without limitation,

a future with endless possibilities.

We don’t need to come to this Sanctuary to find ourselves

in the presence of God.

God meets us where we are, always present,

keeping us at all times and in all places.

But what this Sanctuary does for us, though,

is helps us to focus,

helps us to focus on God’s promises to us

helps us remember that with God

we too, each of us, has a future without limitation;

a future with endless possibilities.

Bethel, Solomon’s Temple,

Manassas Presbyterian Church – none of them contain God;

but all of them are places of possibilities.

where the lost can be found,

where the despairing can find hope,

where the lonely can find love,

where anyone can find a new beginning,

where even the scoundrel can find redemption.

We look around and see such ordinariness:

brick, wood, lights, carpet;

Yet, surely the Lord is in this place,

surely we are in the presence of God,

surely we stand at the gate of heaven,

new life awaiting us.

But then, that’s a promise that isn’t limited to place,

anymore than it is limited to any person.

It is a promise that blankets the world,

as God’s love blankets the world;

a promise that touches all God’s children,

you, me,

even a scoundrel like Jacob.

Praise the Lord.

AMEN