Sermons from the Pulpit
A Spirit of Adoption
Preached to Exeter Congregational United Church of Christ on the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 18, 1999, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.
"click" to hear.Genesis 8:10-19; Romans 8:14-19, 22-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!
A stone was Jacob's pillow for dreaming, and he set that stone up afterward to mark the place, which he now called Bethel, "house of God," because of the dream that was given to him there. And I say, God grant us stones like that to sleep on, and dreams like his to dream!
Jacob was all alone by himself in a place of no importance, an empty place, a godforsaken place on the way to someplace else, and that's where he met God face to face. Not only was the place godforsaken, so was he - or should have been, by all rights.
Jacob was on the run from his brother, and for good reason. A liar and a cheat is what he was. He stole by trickery the birthright of his big brother Esau. He lied shamelessly to a dying blind man, their father Isaac.
So now his doting, spoiling mother Rachel has persuaded his father to send him away from Canaan, where they live in tents, to the old country from which they came, sent him where he can find himself a wife from among his own kind before he has a chance to get involved with one of the native Canaanite women. But Rachel's real motive is to save his skin, his smooth skin, from the absolutely justified rage of his big hairy brother Esau.
And Jacob isn't even sorry for what he did. A godforsaken man in a godforsaken place, and God dreams in him a dream to die for, or better to live for. Is there no justice in the world? Is this what Jesus means when he says the first shall be last and the last shall be first?
Bet-Elohim he calls it, Bethel, the house of God, an awesome, fearsome place, and he sets up the stone so the world will remember where God did this great thing, and we have, we have. He and we don't seem to understand what a nowhere place it is. Why can't he see, why can't we see that the place had nothing to do with what happened to him?
With reverent fear he sets up the stone and solemnly pours oil on it as if it were somehow sanctified by having held the weight of the head that contained the brain that dreamt the dream. He's a fool. He's even blinder than his father. He has rocks in his head, never mind under it. God is telling him in so many words, God is hanging an animated billboard in the sky to tell him that the whole wide world is one big Bethel, one big house of God, and he doesn't get it.
Forget the stone, Jacob. Let it go, and let go the place where it laid when you laid your head on it. You don't need to hold on to them, and neither do all the families of the earth who are blessed in you and your offspring. What you need to cling to is the dream, only the dream.
But the thing about dreams is, they're gone when you wake up. You have to make a discipline of remembering them, you have to keep a dream journal or something, you need some reminder of them, or they fade as fast as your eyes get used to the morning light. That's why we hang on to stones. They stay put. Dreams don't. But it's dreams, not rocks, that live and give life. You know that. You've dreamt, in your time, and I doubt that you're done doing it.
How does a grabber and a schemer become a dreamer? Not on purpose, I can tell you. He didn't go out there to dream, he went on the lam from his own family, and with no clue that God was out there waiting, sneaking up on him, besting him at his own game.
We focus on the special effects - this ladder reaching up from earth to heaven, with the angels of God going up and down on it. Pure Hollywood, and there's nothing wrong with that. If God can out-Jacob Jacob, then why shouldn't God out-Disney Disney? God is God. But we make a mistake if we get so dazzled that we forget the other part, how God stood beside Jacob and said, "I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this place you are a refugee from, and it will be yours."
You can pick up a stone and put it where you want it. A dream picks you up and puts you where it wants you and makes you who it wants, which may not be where and who you want to be. God grabs the grabber and says, Jacob, you're a clever fellow. You play the game better than most. You can take care of yourself. But you just got drafted into the army of the Lord, son, and if you think you were in trouble when you arrived at this place you ain't seen nothin' yet. You can run from Isaac and Esau, but you can't run from me. You can go on being clever, but from now on your cleverness belongs to God.
Jacob escapes from his family and runs off by himself, and he seems to be the kind of guy who only thinks of himself anyway - but surprise, he's not cut off. He's not as much of a loner as he thought he was. He's not a weed in the field of the Kingdom of God. He just got adopted. Or as Paul would have it in this reading from Romans, Jacob has received the spirit of adoption, the spirit that bears witness with our own spirit that we are children of God.
So the dream ends and the morning comes, and Jacob wakes up, all alone in that godforsaken place, out in the open with a rock under his head. This is the moment of truth. What will he do? Will he yawn and stretch and rub his eyes and say, "Man, that was some dream!" and then shrug it off and go his way? Why not? It's what I'd do. The dream is over. It's invisible. All he can see is this rock.
He seizes on the rock, but praise the Lord, he doesn't quite lose the dream. It stays with him, and as a result he begins to acquire what he never had before, a taste for invisible things.
The parable of the weeds among the wheat gets everybody thinking. Am I wheat, or am I a weed? And what about those other people? Who's going to get gathered into the barn and shine like the sun in the Kingdom, and who's going to get thrown into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth? Can we vote on it?
It's fun to think about everybody getting what they deserve, so we cut to the chase. But that misses the point. The only point that matters to us here and now is this: that we can't tell the wheat from the weeds, no matter how hard we try, so we might as well give up trying and put our brains and energies to doing something that they might actually be capable of doing, such as loving God and our neighbor.
I have a suspicion that not even God is all that clear about who's wheat and who's weed. Maybe God doesn't think about it very much. What is good seed anyway, and what's weed? A weed is something that grows where it's not wanted. Well, not wanted by whom?
Maybe the line between wheat and weed doesn't exist except in our poor little minds. If there is a line, Jacob crossed it from weed to wheat without intending to. I bet there are people who cross it the other way too. I bet you can think of a few right now. So can I. There we go again, getting all pumped up to set fire to the weeds and have a good time watching them burn.
So we don't get to vote on it. We just watch and wonder and hope. You can hope if you've acquired that taste for invisible things. Hope for Jacob, the selfish swine, to turn out to be a child of God. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? It's what we don't see, or see only in disappearing glimpses, that is worth living for. And living for it, you discover that you actually have a life worth living.
Amen