July 17 Sermon: Celebrate the Glimpses
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching
Genesis 28:10-19a
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As Jacob lay his head on the rock and attempted to fall asleep, he did so not as a person who was able to relax. He looked up at the stars arriving in the fresh, darkening sky, and his thoughts were not filled with romantic dreams of his future. He was exhausted from the day, yet he found no rest. Every sound startled him — be they distant mountain echoes or nearby nocturnal animals.
He would rather keep moving, but he was unfamiliar with the wilderness that surrounded him. His trip into the wild was not a vacation. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep in. He had no plans to spend the next day taking in the sites or sampling the local cuisine. No, he wondered if he would wake up the next day at all … because he was on the run.
Jacob was a fugitive from his own twin brother Esau, on his way to find his uncle, hoping to be given asylum … to hide there long enough for his brother to forget what he had done to him. At least that’s what his mom, Rebekah, told him to do. Yet what he had done wasn’t something easily forgotten. What Jacob did was unheard of in his day … unforgivable. He defied his culture. He subverted authority. He stole position and honor. He deceived his dying father.
Jacob had always been an opportunist, finding a way to excel — some would say — without doing all the work himself. He hitched a ride out of the womb on his brother’s heel. Later, he traded that same brother, famished from a day’s work, a lovely bowl of stew for his birthright … “red stuff” as the gastronomically challenged Esau called it, in exchange for the right to be heir apparent to all that his father Isaac had.
But the last straw in Esau’s mind was when Jacob lied to his blind father to con him into giving him the blessing that belonged to Esau. It was quite a feat that involved incredible deception. Because while they were twins, they weren’t much alike. Esau was Mr. T to Jacob’s Mr. Bean.
So Jacob and his mother crafted an elaborate disguise that allowed him to get the coveted blessing … the same one that Isaac had been given by Abraham … and the same one that Abraham had been given by God. It was the last thing Isaac had to give, which left Esau without anything of his family apart from his name. This is what led Jacob to the wilderness.
As he looked for a stone to lay under his head, I imagine him reciting the blessing that he’d been given by his father with sarcasm. “May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine,” he’d say, kicking at the earth. The dust rising into the moonlight.
“Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you,” he’d say with a sad chuckle as he crouched down to clear his bed. And there he’d lay. He didn’t understand.
He had only become who God said he would become since before he was born. It was God who told his mother that he’d be the one to inherit the promise. She’d repeated it to him and helped him to live into that inheritance. God told him the same. And he believed it.
Now it looked as if the future he sought was all wrong … that call of God may not even have been from God. He was filled with doubt. And there he’d lay. Eyes bathed in tears. Eyes getting heavier and heavier. Until, finally, the darkness came; and the silence.
***
Some of my most challenging moments in ministry have been in the breaths between the darkness and the silence. The places where doubt begins to emerge. The places where the search for God seems to come up empty. And they usually have something to do with children: children who I’ve watched die in emergency rooms; children who never came, leaving mourning parents; children who strayed from their homes; children whose homes strayed from them. But the most challenging have always been children who struggle with their faith.
Not long after I quit my job to begin ministry, I was thrust into the role of being an “everything guy” and that included youth ministry. I knew very little about how to interact and lead tweens and teens beyond my own experiences at that age, so it was a challenge. Many of them were kids who did what they were asked, recited the creeds, said all the right words.
But what I didn’t learn until much later was that they still felt an absence and a longing for God. They wanted to follow but for some reason, God had eluded them. Many had done the church and Sunday school thing all their lives, and they’d even show up at youth group, too.
That’s where the silence was really loud. I remember all the times I would ask a question … a nice broad-based question; the kind that are meant to get everyone involved … and they’d be silent. Crickets silent. And then I’d get uncomfortable, so we’d go back to playing games.
At about the same time, some of my friends from other small churches were pooling their people together to do some mission trips. And, although I was fearful about how these youth would respond, I added our gang to the pool.
The first year, based on the surface spiritual prowess of some of the other youth who were there, I wondered if I had made a mistake. But I heard few complaints as the teams worked with homeless coalitions, on Habitat for Humanity homes and met with abused agricultural workers. They seemed positive enough about the experience that we planned another one the following year.
Set at a camp along the continental divide, the work that year was much the same, but the silence yielded something new. After each work day, we’d have some teaching time, and this particular year it was all based around spiritual disciplines. We talked about things like prayer, fasting, study and accountability.
And on one of the last evenings, we sent them off to practice the discipline of silence … discarding all the distractions and sitting alone and waiting for God. Leading up to that day, the hurts had begun to surface. Troubles with the family. Hints at past abuse. Coping with adoption. References to alcoholism and drug abuse in the lives of their loved ones. And some plain old doubt about God in general.
For as good as they tried to be, they weren’t perfect, they were surrounded by people who weren’t perfect, and they were struggling. They asked variants of the same questions: How can we be faithful and still be so broken? Why would God allow that? Why doesn’t God just fix everything for us?
I’m sure Jacob was struggling with the same thing. And while he wasn’t given an answer, in our scripture reading today/tonight he was given a dream … a God-inspired dream in which the holy comes to mingle with the mortal. Earth and heaven are joined in a moment of blissful comfort.
“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go,” God tells him.
And although it doesn’t answer everything and make his problems go away, it is enough. It is enough so that Jacob knows that he is not alone. This becomes a turning point for him. He begins to live into his blessing.
Going on, he is patient when it comes to building his family. He doesn’t back down from the challenge of God. And we even see him face his brother again, knowing that his blood could be spilled because of it. He was redefined. And to remember that … to remember the glimpse of the God who he sought … Jacob turned that stone on its end and poured oil over it. He marked the place in time and space where God had broken through and become ever-more real to him.
Thankfully, the same thing happened for many of those youth (and even some of the adults) on that second mission trip. And it happened in the silence. It happened in the difficult awkwardness where doubt and anxiety have the opportunity to bubble over. After sharing the stories of Jacob’s fugitive run and Elijah’s retreat, everyone was sent off to the mountainside alone for half an hour of silence. I and a few other leaders stayed back at camp with the intent to pray for them while they were gone and offer them a blessing (if they so chose) upon their return.
I doubted that any from my group would return for the blessing. We rang a bell to signal the beginning, and we waited. As it was getting close to the conclusion, people began to trickle back. Slowly, the room began to fill up with both youth and adults, all overcome by the sense that a burden that had been removed from them. And the first ones in line were those who I had struggled with in the silence all those months.
“I think this can work,” one told me through her tears. “I think I can be OK with God loving me even though things are so screwed up.”
“Sounds like you met God,” I said.
They talked about that evening with reverence for years … some still remind me of it when they send an update on their life now as adults. It wasn’t a magic cure-all that suddenly made life perfect. But it did serve to strengthen them as they went forward through the many difficult transitions we’ve all encountered. One glimpse of peace, of the staircase, of knowing that the holy dwells among us here, and they knew the seeking was worth it. And sharing in their encounter made my seeking worth it, too. “Know that I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go.”
God’s grace doesn’t make life perfect … at least the kind of perfect we’d like it to be. But it makes it livable. And sometimes, it makes it downright enjoyable.
If we are to be a people who are first-and-foremost about seeking God, we have to remember with collective joy the times when God actually found us. This is what adds our story to the great story of God’s people. This is what adds our blessings to the fount of many that will be celebrated long after have inherited the hereafter.
My prayer … and a fervent one at that … is that we can be a people who are turning stones on their ends all over this great city … and a people who have heard the stories of why those markers are there so well that we can retell them. For a world that is longing for hope, our glimpses of God may not convince everyone, but they may give others the desire to keep seeking.
And if you are someone who isn’t yet convinced, I pray that you see in this community a place where you can keep seeking … and a place where God has shown up enough to give you hope that it will happen again and will happen for you. As we journey this life together, may all we be so attuned (or humbled) that we can quiet ourselves and remember the dreams of God.
“Know that I am with you,” says your God. “I will keep you wherever you go.”
Tags: Matthew
