God Is In The World - Genesis 28:10-22

I want to begin this morning by showing you a few photos from a trip to Orkney I made a couple of years ago, and my apologies to the Orcadians in our midst if this stirs up a little homesickness!

These are the Stenness stones in Orkney. A Neolithic Stone Circle dating from 3000 BC, there are now just 4 uprights (of an original 12) the tallest of which is about 5 metres high.

Opposite is St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney. The cathedral dates from 1137 and was founded by the Viking, Earl Rognvald in honour of his uncle St Magnus. Parts of the building are over 850 years old, and it has a particular character because it was built with red a

nd yellow sandstone which are susceptible to weathering and the external of the building shows the effects of centuries of Orcadian weather!

This last image is of the Italian Chapel in Orkney. In 1942, 550 Italian POW’s were held on the island and were involved in building the Churchill Barriers which blocked access to Scapa Flow. It was agreed that they could construct a place of worship and this place was built out of two Nissan huts, and all the features you see were made from concrete metal and paint left over from the construction work. It's now an 'A' listed building and attracts over 100,000 visitors a year.

I show you these images because they neatly prove a point I want to make. Across the centuries and across cultures we feel an abiding human need to raise something, build something, in honour of God. And these places, over time, come to have a great significance in our lives.

And our story this morning, the story of Jacob’s dream and his response to it, is another example of the same phenomenon.

Jacob, if you remember, was the son of Isaac and the twin brother of Esau, and although he was smart, he was conniving. And in Genesis 28 we find him on the run from Esau because he’s robbed him blind. He’s tricked him out of his inheritance and also their father’s blessing.

So although Jacob’s destined for great things – in a few chapters he’s going to be given the name Israel and become the father of a nation – for now, he’s a greedy little shmuck who’s nearly been hoist by his own petard. No great friend of the God of Abraham and Isaac, or Grandad and Dad as Jacob would have called them.

So this strange dream comes out of nowhere. Angels ascending and descending on a ladder whose top reaches to the clouds, but whose feet rest firmly in the red earth. And then God appears, making promises to this no good brat who up until this point doesn’t really seem terribly interested in him. Promises about land and family and blessings, and God’s continuing presence with him.

And Jacob wakes up a changing, if not changed, man. He takes the stone he’d wrapped in a blanket and used as a pillow, sets it up on its end as a memorial, and anoints it with olive oil in blessing. In his 40-odd years of life so far, it’s the first worshipful thing Jacob does, as far as we know. He raises a stone. He blesses it. He thanks God.

There it is – that basic human reaction to an encounter with God that we see throughout all the ages.

Now if you raise a few large stones, and then fill the gaps between them with a few more, work out how to put a roof on it, wire in electricity, get some carpets and some windows and add a few choice pieces of furniture – what have you got?

You’ve got a temple, or a synagogue, or a mosque, or a church. A space dedicated to the worship of God that’s comfortable enough for folk to gather in week by week. Protected from the elements and maybe even the curious looks of outsiders if you forget to put windows in it and surround it with high fences and big gates.

Now buildings, built specifically for worship, are good – for a lot of reasons. They can be beautiful and inspiring and functional. I might be wrong, but I’m guessing January attendances might suffer a little if we decided to congregate in the dunes at Balmedie Beach, or in a neighbouring field.

But here’s the thing. The moment you have a building dedicated for worship, you run the risk that people will start living as though the building were all important. As though we only encounter God, or encounter him most, when we are in that building.

Perhaps unintentionally, that was drilled into many of us as kids. You dress up in your best clothes when you go to church, because it’s God’s house. You sit up straight and keep your mouths shut, because it’s God’s house.

And respect and reverence have their place in the church. But when we step over the threshold as we come and go on a Sunday morning, are we saying hello to a God who hasn’t been with us all week, or farewelling God until next Sunday?

In her book “An Altar In The World”, Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way – “Do we build God a house so that we can choose when to go and see God? Do we build God a house in lieu of having God come and stay at our place?”.

In what sense can we speak of any one place being God’s house? In the Scriptures God laughs at the very idea, though at times he seems to play along with it, more for our sake than for his. But lest anyone get the wrong idea, he’s at pains to say through the Psalmist “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.”

The truth is, God’s house stretches from one end of the universe to the other. There is no one place where we meet him. On the contrary - the geography of our days is littered with opportunities to encounter God in the most ordinary practices and places, if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear.

If Sunday is the only time we expect to encounter God, we place a intolerable weight of expectation on this time together. A burden this hour was never meant to carry.

Though our church buildings and services should certainly inspire us, and God undoubtedly meets us here, a biblical faith understands that the real place of encounter with God is in our daily living, during the other six days of the week.

We shouldn’t think of church as the place we come to experience God for an hour every Sunday. Church should be where we come to remember and give thanks for the ways we’ve experienced God throughout the week.

And over the next few months, that’s what I’m going to be preaching and teaching about – how we encounter God in the ordinary routines and patterns of our days. And I need to learn that stuff as much as the next person.

Centuries ago people got this; they knew what they had to do to be rooted deeply in Christ throughout the week. And we’re in danger of losing the memory of those practices, and we need to recover them if the church is to get a second wind in our lifetime.

And it all starts when you begin to live out of a truth that you already know: that God isn’t just in the church. God is in the world.

Earlier in the week I sent out an email to everyone in the church whose emails I have. I asked them to think of a time when they felt especially close to God, and without going into details, to tell me where it happened: here are a selection of the answers:

When I was ill in hospital and feeling a bit down.
When I’m out among the elements, walking.
When I was on the trolley heading for the operating theatre
When I was hanging out the washing.
When I was sitting at my father’s deathbed.
When I met a deer while out for a clifftop walk
When I was looking after a patient in a hospital ward.
When I sat in the kitchen with friends, talking, crying and praying.
When I was at my mother’s funeral
When I was climbing a mountain in Sri Lanka
When I sat looking out a window at the sunset in Southern Spain
When I used to ride on horseback through the countryside as a teenager
When I was really worried about someone and was out looking for them.
When I was out in the middle of nowhere on a Duke of Edinburgh expedition.
When I was at the birth of my children.
When I’m in church.

Of the sixteen folk who responded to the question, fifteen reported that their deep experience of God took place somewhere other than church.

God is waiting to be found in the world. And Jacob, in this morning’s story – shows us just that. Listen to what he says when he wakes up after his restless night’s sleep:

He says in v 16 “The Lord is here! He is in this place, and I didn’t know it!”.

He went to sleep on an ordinary patch of red earth somewhere between Beesheeba and Haran. And he woke up on the very same patch of red earth. Nothing had changed. But everything had changed, because he now knew in a real and vital way, that God was only ever a hairsbreadth away. That any place, any situation, any set of circumstances, can become a meeting place with God if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

God is in the world. The place of meeting isn’t over there, or round the corner, or within four particular walls. It’s right in the place where you are, wherever that may be.

And though Jacob had his dream, and Moses had his burning bush, and Gideon had his fleece, and Elijah his still small voice, there’s a strong current in Scripture which gently reminds us that these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Sometimes God appears unbidden. More often than not, he’s found by those who make it their business to seek him out. God’s canny that way. I think. He’s keen to see who’s interested. The Psalmist says just that in Psalm 14: “The Lord looks down from heaven on his people, to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God”.

“Seek God” is one of the most common commands in the whole of Scripture and the desire to seek God is as vital a sign of living faith as a pulse is a sign of a living body.

Is that desire, that pulse, within you?

If it is, we have a firm promise that that it won’t be disappointed.

“Draw near to God – says the apostle James – and God will draw near to you”.

Earlier this week, with a little bit of time and imagination, we turned this familiar space into a labyrinth. A handful of folk walked it on Sunday and Monday, and a good number more on Tuesday at the Guild. I spoke to many of them afterwards, and there wasn’t one for whom God didn’t show up in some way. Often in a very moving and powerful way.

And over the next few Sundays, I hope to show you that life itself is labyrinth enough to encounter God. All we need to do is approach life with that same spirit of openness and attentiveness, and we will find him, his feet dusty with the red earth of our ordinary living.

“The Lord is here!” we’ll say, as we look around us with new eyes. “He is in this place, and I didn’t know it”

Years after his angelic dream, Jacob made plans to return to Bethel where his stony pillow still stood as a landmark. By now he had wives, children and flocks and his travels had taken him across many hundreds of miles and through many dangers.

And the old man, now well on his way to becoming Israel, the Patriarch, said to his family “we’re going to leave here and go to Bethel, where I will build an altar to the God who helped me in the time of my trouble and who has been with me everywhere I have gone.”

Everywhere I have gone. Not just in Bethel. Not just within the four walls of the place I call my church. God is in the world, and it’s there he waits to meet us.

The Magnificent Defeat

That same night Jacob got up, took his two wives, his two concubines, and his eleven children, and crossed the River Jabbok. After he had sent them across, he also sent across all that he owned, but he stayed behind, alone.


That last phrase hangs in the air, and it’s meant to, I think.

I imagine Jacob standing still for a long time, watching as the caravans of his people and his animals trudged off into a future he couldn’t control; the usual hubbub of noise strangely subdued as evening took a firm hold of the sky and wrung the last vestiges of colour out of it. He watched them go, alone.

Alone but for the babbling waters of the river, the wind in the rushes, and the calling of the night birds.

And there must have come a moment when he turned away from where they were bound and turned back to the business for which he had remained behind.

And what that business was, the writer gives us no clue. But there’s little doubt that taking stock and remembering how he had got to this point in his life were part of what he had stayed for.

I imagine him perched on a large boulder overlooking the river as the sun sets. And though I know it’s anachronistic, I picture him drawing deep on a cigarette and cupping its glow in his hands as he slowly sighs the smoke out into the night air. He’s a man with a lot to reflect on.

For a man whose name - or new name, Israel – has entered into the pantheon of history Jacob was pretty far from the paragon of virtue we expect our spiritual heroes to be.

He was said to have emerged from the womb grabbing his older twin brother by the heel – that’s the literal meaning of the name Jacob – and a good part of his life, up to this point, has been spent in grasping, scheming and fighting.

Jacob was his mothers’ favourite, but he was always second to his brother Esau in his father’s eyes. Esau was the alpha male – the hunter and provider, and being the elder son, the birthright and his father’s blessing would be coming to him.

But Esau was also a fool. He came in famished from the field one day and sold his birthright to Jacob with a binding oath for the sake of a plate of stew. He forfeited the extra money and status that were due him as the elder son for the instant hit of a full belly. Not one of his best decisions.

But Jacob, in this incident, which hardly covers him with glory, learns an important lesson. What he can’t have by right, he can gain for himself through cunning. And a trajectory for his life was set.

Many years later, Jacob’s father Isaac was old and blind and on the verge of death and the time had come to pass on his blessing to Esau. And the cultural significance of that could easily pass us by.

In the world of their day, a blessing was much more than a vague expression of good will towards someone, like wishing them well.

A Father’s blessing was seen as passing on something of the very essence of his soul to the one he blessed; and this final blessing to a firstborn son was the most powerful of all – so much so that once it had been given it could never be taken back.

And though that idea might seem strange to us, we know enough to realise that words spoken in deep love or deep anger set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed.

And chances are you know the story of what happened next– Isaac sends Esau out hunting so he can prepare him one last tasty meal cooked with fresh game, and while he’s away Jacob and his mother hatch a plan. She covers Jacob’s arms in goatskin to make him hairy like his brother, she puts Esau’s robe on him, cooks the kind of tasty food Isaac wanted, and sends Jacob in to steal his brothers blessing.

And poor Isaac is taken in. He gives his blessing to Jacob and Esau is left empty handed. And the empty hands soon curl into fists and Jacob has to run for his life, heading far north to stay with his uncle Laban. And it was on that journey that he had his first encounter with God in a dream at Bethel, where he saw a ladder spanning earth and heaven and angels ascending and descending on it. Jacob’s ladder, we call it.

Once he arrives with Laban, he falls in love with his cousin Rachel and Laban says that Jacob can marry her in return for seven years work on the farm. But Laban was no slouch in the art of deception himself and managed to switch his slightly less desirable daughter Leah for Rachel at the last moment. I’m guessing that veils or copious amounts of wine must have been involved somewhere! So for once the deceiver was deceived. And he had to work another seven years to get the woman he really wanted.

Needless to say, his relationship with his Father-in-law wasn’t exactly cordial after that and things only got worse when thanks to some creative animal husbandry, Jacob managed to get his flocks to thrive at the expense of Laban’s.

Eventually things got so bad between them that Jacob decided to do a runner and head back home, knowing full well that at some point he would have to face the wrath of his brother.

And that’s where we find him in today’s reading: right on the cusp of that encounter he’s been dreading for years. Esau is coming out to meet him and he has 400 men with him.

And Jacob sits alone, on a rock by the river Jabbok. Fearing the worst; fearing for his life, and the lives of his household, who at that very moment could well be being slaughtered.

Jacob, the arch-manipulator, the cunning strategist has come to the end of his own considerable resources. And he sits there as helpless in the face of what’s about to happen as any man could possibly be.

And it’s then that God barrels into him and knocks him flying. And so begins a scrap that makes John Wayne and Victor McLaglen’s fight scene in the Quiet Man seem like a storm in a teacup.

What are we to make of the strange account of what happens next?

Parts of the story seem almost mythic – the business of the assailant having to be gone before daybreak sounds like the old legends of demons or spooks who can’t stand the daylight. What do we make of the killer karate move that dislocates somebody’s hip with one punch? And if Jacob’s attacker were God, why did God find it so hard to overcome him and get away from him? And why does he never actually say that he IS God? Read the text carefully and you'll see that's the case.

This is all very odd.

And I found myself wondering if it’s possible that the attacker was an ordinary man, but Jacob gave this encounter such significance and weight it was as though God himself were wrestling with him?

Indeed, there’s a part of me that wonders if this attacker, hidden in the darkness of night, mightn’t have been Esau himself. He knew Jacob was on his way. He was probably longing for revenge. This feud had always been about the two of them – maybe Esau wanted to settle it one-to-one. Mano-a-mano as they say in the movies?!

Was having Jacob beg for his blessing some kind of compensation for losing his Father’s blessing all those years ago?

Was he keen to get away before dawn because he wanted to get one over on Jacob without being recognised?

And when Jacob said of this event “I saw God face to face” did he mean it literally, or metaphorically? Was that just a poetic way of saying that as he wrestled with his enemy he knew his life was in the balance?

I think it’s fascinating that when the brothers meet in the light of the next day, one of the things Jacob says to Esau is that to see his face is like seeing the face of God. Did Jacob realise in that moment just who he had been wrestling with all night? Did he recognise God at work through the agency of Esau's wrath?

Just a theory. Drop it if you don’t like it.

Here’s something more important to hold onto from our story this morning:

Like Jacob, sitting on a boulder by the river Jabbok, there are times in our lives when we get to the end of ourselves. No matter how resourceful or wise or cunning or able we might be, there come times when we can get no further under our own steam. We are literally at our wits end.

We cannot make that relationship work. We cannot unravel the mess that life has become. We cannot deal with the anger about what happened. We cannot hold things together any longer. We cannot fix the problem and it refuses to go away.

These times come to us all, believer and unbeliever alike.

And in some ways those times are harder for the believer than the unbeliever because we believe in a God who is supposed to be good! So where is he? What kind of a God sits back and lets this kind of thing happen?

We grow angry – and the wrestling begins. Days, weeks, months, maybe years of it. Backwards and forwards. Scrabbling to lay hold of some truth in the darkness; to get a foothold on the scree; to catch a clear glimpse of this God that we are struggling with.

But here’s the thing that God’s people have found throughout the generations and that’s testified to in so many places in the Scriptures, though it’s seen most clearly in today’s story – it’s the wrestling that brings the blessing. That brings us to a deeper understanding of the God we worship.

We don’t have time this morning for me to run through the roll call of the Old and New Testament giants who discovered that truth, but think of how Abraham must have wrestled when God commanded him to sacrifice his son Isaac; how Moses must have wrestled when God told him to go back to Egypt and set the people free; how the Psalmists wrestled with the seeming unfairness of life and the injustices they saw around them; how Jesus wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying it could happen in some other way – any other way.

But they hung on. They refused to let go. And spent and exhausted though they were in the struggle, they found their blessing. God provided a ram for Abraham’s sacrifice and Isaac was spared; Moses found the strength to stand before Pharaoh and deliver the people; the Psalmists found deeper insights into the nature of the God they worshipped; Jesus found peace, and committed his spirit into the hands of the God who can raise the dead.

It’s in the wrestling that we find the blessing.

Perhaps you don’t need to hear that today. You might not be ready for this word. But one day you will be – because there will come a time when you find yourself like Jacob - alone, and at the end of your own resources. It comes to us all.

But maybe that’s where some of you are this morning. Something has happened that’s brought you to the end of yourself and called into question your whole idea of who God is and where life’s going.

I want you to believe me this morning when I tell you that that can be a good place to be. Because in the struggle to understand, to hold on and keep faith, we come to believe in a deeper way and see God with new eyes. The magnificent defeat of our anger, our doubt, or our naivety is a victory, both for God and for us.

But we don’t come through it unscathed. No-one ever does when they tangle with God.

The sun was bleeding over the horizon as Jacob gathered himself, dragged himself to his feet, and set off in pursuit of his family and his brother.

Limping, as from now on he would always limp. But blessed with a new name, and a different identity. Jacob the grasper had become Israel, the one who grapples with God; broken in body, but sounder in soul, and ready to face whatever the future might hold because he had wrestled with the one who holds the future.



(Title, though not sermon, due to Fred Buechner)