(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on July 23, 2017, Proper 11)
What Is Jacob’s Blessing?
Over the course of the Bible,
Jacob develops a reputation. Not
as a scoundrel—which I think he most definitely is—but as a blessed man.
So as we read his story these
next few weeks, I’d like to keep asking the question: What is Jacob’s
blessing? How does he get it? Is it by virtue of grabbing heels,
which he is doing all the time? Or
is his blessing something else?
Something received in a different way?
From Grabbing to Grabbed
Last week, we saw Jacob swindle
his brother out of his firstborn’s privilege. This week, when the curtain rises, we see Jacob in the
wilderness and on the run. Any idea
why? Most of us already know the
story, but even if we didn’t, we’d probably have a good guess. He is running from Esau. Jacob—the “heel-grabber,” the
go-getter—has gone and gotten his brother’s birthright and his father’s
inheritance, both by deception. His
brother Esau has become so enraged that he has been breathing death threats against
Jacob. Jacob takes the cue and
gets out of town as quickly as possible.
Now the sun is setting. Shadows creep over the land. Jacob, I imagine, scans the horizon
behind him. Nothing in sight. Surely his angry brother has given up
the chase by now. Right?
Night presents a problem for
Jacob. The problem about night is
that, sooner or later, Jacob will have to do something that goes against his
name, against every fiber of his heel-grabbing, go-getting nature. He will have to let go. He will have to give up control. He will have to sleep.
Sleep is a very curious
thing. We all do it. But to be more precise, we don’t do
it. Sleep is not something that you do. Sleep is something that happens to you. You cannot control the moment that sleep
happens. It overtakes you when it
will. Sleep reminds us that we are
not in control. Even more
troublesome for Jacob, sleep leaves him helpless, defenseless. What if his brother should show up and
steal back all that he has stolen?
Steal even his life?
What a Surprise!
I imagine that night was one of
the scariest nights of Jacob’s life.
For someone skilled in struggle, gifted in grabbing, sleep is a
terror. In sleep, there is no struggle
to win, nothing to grab. Sleeps
grabs you.
It’s a surprise that a nightmare
didn’t descend upon Jacob that night.
With a murderous brother on his heels, and perhaps a guilty conscience
somewhere deep within, there would be plenty of fearful thoughts ripe for a
dark and distorted dream.
It’s even more of a surprise what
does happen. Jacob has a sweet
dream—the sweetest of dreams.
There is a ladder, and there are messengers of God, and just like Mark’s
busy bees, they’re going up and down, buzzing about their good work. And then there is God, standing beside
him. And God promises him family and land and blessing for all the earth—a
promise that seems utterly ridiculous as he runs away from his family and land, pursued by the curses of his
brother. And then God gets to the
very heart of the blessing: “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” (28:15).
What a surprise! At Jacob’s weakest moment, at the one
time of day when he is not in control, he receives God’s blessing. When he wakes up trembling, he says,
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it” (28:16), and he calls
the place Bethel, “God’s house.”
But if you ask me, this place isn’t any more sacred than another. The reason that this place is divine
has more to do with Jacob than God.
This is where Jacob stopped grabbing for once and let himself be grabbed—by
sleep. And so much more.
The good news according to Jacob
the scoundrel, then, is that blessing is perhaps right under our nose but we’re
too busy struggling for something to notice it. Only when we stop grabbing and let ourselves be grabbed might
we say, like Jacob, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I didn’t know
it!” Only when we stop seizing can
we be seized. That is the surprise
of faith. Literally! Surprise
comes from an old Latin word that means “seize.” A surprise is what seizes us. Sleep is always a surprise, if you think about it. And so is God’s blessing.
The Surprise of Sobriety: One Girl’s Experience
Recently I read a story of
recovery told by Amy Liptrot, a girl about my age. She had grown up on a farm in Orkney, those islands at the
north of Scotland. When she moved
to London as a young adult, the freedom she found was intoxicating. She could go so many different places,
meet so many different people, have so many different experiences. She was worlds away from the sparse
fields and lonely shores of Orkney.
In London, her life turned into a
never-ending party. It began
innocently enough: her curiosity led her from one event to the next, from one
group of friends to another. But
there was a deep undercurrent beneath her new life. She was always drinking. It turned into a hurtful, all-consuming addiction.
What caught my attention in her
memoir is her turning point. In a
single sentence, she describes the day that she stopped drinking and turned
herself in to a rehab center: “That day,” she says, “my will just broke.”[1] Soon enough, she found herself
confessing in the words of AA’s 12-step program that her life had become
“unmanageable.”
What had caused this great
reversal? What was the source of
her recovery? I think if you asked
her, she would say: I honestly don’t know. It was a surprise.
Which is literally to say, something seized
me.
The funny thing about Amy’s story
is that she also has a profound distaste for Christianity. Whenever someone talks about “God and
faith,” she says, it makes her “heart beat faster” and “anger rise” within her.[2] But the experience of faith, I believe,
is much deeper than words. She may
never use the words of our Christian tradition. But what happened to her bears a remarkable resemblance to what
happened to Jacob when he finally lay down to sleep that dark night. Somehow the girl who was always
impulsively seizing the bottle, stopped seizing long enough to be seized by something else. And what happened next was a complete
surprise.
Blessing Is Not Happiness but God-with-Us
In the experiences of Jacob and
Amy, blessing is not something we do.
It’s not something we achieve.
It’s not a paycheck or a big house or the perfect relationship. Most importantly, blessing is not
happiness. At least, not the
blessing of God that seizes us when we give up control and surrender the
struggle. Amy says honestly in her
memoir: “People like to tell me [now] I’m looking ‘well’ but there are late
hours alone when my heart is an open wound and I wonder if the pain will ever
stop brimming fresh.”[3]
Blessing is not happiness. It is deeper than happiness. It stays with us when happiness fades. Indeed, that’s perhaps when we know it
most clearly.
Blessing is the promise that
seized the scoundrel Jacob by a dream, the promise that somehow seized Amy on the day her
will just broke: it is the promise that God
is with us and will keep us wherever we go and will bring us back where we
belong. Which is another way
of saying the surprising gospel that we hear all across scripture: God is with
us, and there is a way to life. We
hear it today in our Psalm: there is nowhere we can go where God is not,
neither heaven nor hell; wherever we go God’s hand will be there to hold us
fast (cf. Psalm 139). We heard it
this last week at Vacation Bible School: “The Lord your God is with you; he’s
mighty to save” (cf. Zeph 3:17).
We hear it in Paul’s undying proclamation that nothing can separate us
from the love of God.
Blessing cannot be achieved or
bought or won, because it’s something we always already have. On those rare moments when we give up
grabbing the heels of life, we might find grace enough to see what Jacob saw:
that “surely the Lord is [already] in this place” (28:16), and we just didn’t know it.
A Struggle or a Gift?
What happens next in Jacob’s tale
can only be called a relapse. On
this one dark night, blessing seizes him.
He knows, if only for that moment, that he has God’s love. He does not need to grab it, to seize
it, to struggle for it. He already
has it.
But old habits die hard. Jacob will soon be back to his
heel-grabbing ways.
In the meantime, we might ponder:
When has blessing surprised us?
Seized us? Maybe it’s not
at the times of our greatest happiness, but in fact in the opposite times, in
the times when we’ve had nothing left to hold onto, nothing to grab, no
strength left to grab.
And what if this blessing were the
most important thing in the world to us?
If God really does love us, and there’s nothing that we need to do to
secure that love—then would we live any differently? Would it be as important to defend our honor? Would it be as important to secure a
reputation? Would it be as
important to achieve a more comfortable lifestyle?
Would life be something that we
struggle for? Or would it be a
gift?
Prayer
God of blessing,
Like Jacob, may we today
Find ourselves saying:
“Surely the Lord is in this place—
And I didn’t know it”;
May we stop struggling
Long enough to be surprised,
Seized,
Seized,
By your blessing of love,
And may that love become
The center of our life.
Amen.
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