Genesis
28:10-19a
July
19, 2026
Jacob left
Beer-sheba and went toward Haran.
He came to
a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking
one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that
place.
And he
dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching
to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
And the Lord
stood beside him and said, "I am the Lord, 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, and 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 in your
offspring.
Know that
I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this
land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised
you."
Then Jacob
woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place--and I did
not know it!" And he was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place!
This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."
So Jacob
rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head
and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that
place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
**********************
Jacob was on the run from his
brother, who had sworn to hunt him down and kill him. If he could reach Haran, the town in the
north where his family first came from, and where his uncle Laban lived, he
would be safe. Until he got there his
life would be in danger. Remember how,
not long ago, there was a man who escaped from the county prison? Remember how he was hunted for almost a week
and hid out while the police were combing the woods and fields from Longwood to
Nantmeal, from Chadds Ford to Warwick?
Picture Jacob in that sort of situation.
But there comes a time when exhaustion overcomes fear, and that is where
Jacob was.
“He
came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had
set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay
down in that place.” [Genesis 28:11]
Imagine
being so tired that you can use a stone for a pillow and still nod off.
Would you sleep well? As much as your body would shut down, do you
think your mind would do that? I’ll just
speak for myself here. I’m one of those
people who falls asleep easily. I can
sleep on a train or a plane with no problem.
Generally, 10:00 or so comes around and no matter where I am, my eyes
droop. Once I’ve had some kind of rest,
though, whatever the previous day has held or whatever I expect for the coming
day will filter its way into my thoughts and I start dreaming. It doesn’t have to make sense, as long as
there’s some kind of connection. If I’ve
had a flat tire I might dream about donuts.
If I got stuck on a crossword puzzle hours before I might dream about
playing scrabble or about being in a room with black and white tiles on the
floor. Sometimes I will wake up with a
to-do list on my mind and ten minutes to go before the alarm clock, which I
really resent because it feels too soon to get up but too late to go back to
sleep.
So, yes, I am projecting my own
stuff onto Jacob, but I don’t see how he could have slept and dreamt without
turning his situation round and round in his head no matter how tired he was. What lay behind? What lay ahead? Would he survive the middle?
One word of caution here: not every
dream has a deep significance. A man I
knew was a psychiatrist who worked at a Veterans’ Administration clinic where it
would not be unusual for a patient to walk up to him, describe a dream, and
ask, “What does that mean?” His standard
answer was, “It means don’t eat ice cream right before you go to bed.”
At times of severe stress, though,
it may be that only when that the physical necessity to sleep are we able to
make any kind of assessment of our own situation. It may be, as I think it’s safe to say about
Jacob, that only when he had to slow down whether he wanted to or not, would he
be paying enough attention to anything other than his fear to hear what God was
saying to him over the noise of his thoughts.
“Know
that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to
this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’"
[Genesis 28:15]
In the
midst of external danger and internally a potential nightmare of fears, God found
the one opening he had and used it, telling Jacob, “Get a grip. You’re safe with me.”
Apparently, Jacob had never fully
realized that God is God not just of the beginning and the destination, but the
God of the entire journey. When that
light dawned on him, he was amazed.
“Then
Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place--and I
did not know it!’ And he was afraid and
said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and
this is the gate of heaven.’"
[Genesis 28:16-17]
That’s a
far cry from, “Oh, no! I’m going to be
caught and killed!” Jacob named the
place where he had his dream-vision “Beth-El”, which means “the House of God”.
It’s
not an accident, by the way, that a lot of AME churches, at least the older
ones in this part of the country, are named Bethel. In the decades just before the Civil War, fugitives
from slavery, running for safety and refuge in Canada, could generally find a
protected place to rest, as had Jacob, at a place called Bethel. Such a place is not the destination, but a
gateway, and a place where it becomes visible that there are others traveling
the path so that no one heading in the right direction would travel alone.
Anne
Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, tells of a time when she was mourning
the loss of a close friend. She and her
son, then two-and-a-half years old, had a chance to take a brief vacation in a
Mexican beach town where there was a circus school. (As Bishop Peggy Johnson used to say, “You
can’t make this stuff up.”) Anyway, here’s
what Ann Lamott wrote about that trip:
“There was
a man here this time with just one leg.
I’d seen his prosthetic leg lying around him by the pool a few times
before I actually saw him, and when I did, he was climbing up a trapeze ladder
in the circus grounds. …
He climbed
the ladder with disjointed grace, asymmetrical but not clumsy, rung by rung,
focused and steady and slow. Then he
reached the platform, put on his safety harness, and swung out over the safety
net, his one leg hooked over the bar of the trapeze, swinging back and forth,
and finally letting go. A teacher on the
other trapeze swung toward him, and they caught each other’s hands and held on,
and they swung back and forth for a while.
Then he dropped on his back to the safety net and raised his fist in
victory. ‘Yes,’ he said, and lay there
on the net for a long time, looking at the sky with a secret smile.
I
approached him shyly at lunch the next day and said, ‘You were great on the
trapeze. Are you going to do it again?’ And I had this idea that he might so that I
could do some serious writing about spirit and guts and triumph. But all he said was, ‘Honey? I got much bigger mountains to climb.’”[1]
By the way,
the chapter where Ann Lamott tells this story is called “Ladders”.
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