God is Here

Genesis 27 & 28

Rebekah waited a long time for children… and when she was pregnant, they were twins. In Genesis 25, we hear this:
The children struggled together within her; and she said, ‘If it is to be this way, why do I live?’ So she went to inquire of the Lord. That’s right, she went directly to God, herself.
And the Lord said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.’ 

Wait? What?

For those of us who believe that the primary work that God does is to bring people together and reconcile them to one another across tribes, these stories from Genesis can be difficult. Abraham sent away one son and nearly killed another. Now, we have two of his grandsons, twin brothers, seemingly fated to be in relentless struggle. In those moments of crisis when we, like many followers of Jesus over the years, think “What does this mean?” It sometimes helps me to hear these stories as descriptive rather than prescriptive. People divide themselves into tribes and groups, and these stories try to imagine back and back to answer “Why is it like this?” But… it’s not necessarily ever that the endings are predictable. People create hierarchies and structures and institutions in an attempt to keep things under control, predictable… and neither life nor God fit into our human-made categories.

So here, we have the big, big story of twin brothers (and two nations)—Esau and Jacob, Edom and Israel.

We heard just a little of the story in the skit. For those who don’t know the story well, the brothers are very different. Esau is hairy and a man of the wilderness and a hunter. His father, Isaac, loves the game he hunts and all that he provides. Jacob is a "an ordinary, quiet sort of person"[1] and likes to stay in the tents. He stays home while his brother adventures out, and his mother loves her youngest, wholesome son. So, we have a family divided by different practices and different ways of being…and different loyalties.

There is another scene that happens before the blessing scene we heard this morning—Esau comes in from hunting one day and he’s famished. Jacob is cooking a stew and Esau wants some. Jacob offers to sell him stew for his “birthright,” a double portion of inheritance. Esau is so hungry, he accepts… and so he’s blamed in the story for despising his birthright (or taking it too lightly—after all, he sold a double-inheritance for a bowl of stew). I might question why Jacob wouldn’t just give his brother some stew? But the storyteller is always trying to help us understand… God chooses to do something with Jacob, the youngest, not the oldest… not the adventurer, but the homebody…

So with that set up, Isaac is growing old. His senses are failing him. He can’t see. He tells his oldest son to go out and find some game, cook it, and bring it back because it’s time for him to pass on his blessing. Esau obeys. Meanwhile, Rebekah overhears the plan and she and Jacob work together to deceive Isaac. She cooks his favorite stew out of two young goats. He puts the goatskin on his arms (because Esau is hairy and he’s not), and brings the stew in, greeting his father as if he’s Esau. To give Isaac credit, he knows something’s up. He knows Jacob’s voice when he hears it, but it’s unthinkable that a son would steal a blessing. But when Jacob asks multiple times, Jacob says he’s Esau, he’s got the stew (in record time?), Jacob’s arms are hairy as a young goat… so Isaac blesses him. Then Esau comes back, comes in with stew and a blessing, and Isaac trembles violently—no one likes knowing they’ve been taken advantage of—and Isaac does not feel he has any blessing left in him for his oldest son. Both men are angry and full of blame, but Esau is mad enough to kill his brother. Rebekah overhears this plan as well, and so she makes a way for Jacob to leave. She doesn’t like Esau’s Canaanite wives, nor does Isaac. So, they tell Jacob to travel to find a wife from their own family (this was acceptable at that time), and Isaac blesses him to go and to one day to come back. Esau overhears, and so he chooses a third wife from among the grandchildren of Abraham (Ishmael’s relatives), trying still to please his parents.

Meanwhile, Jacob leaves. Jacob, the person who has always stayed home, goes out into the wilderness for the first time. He stops for the night and uses a stone for a pillow, and that night, he has a dream. In that dream, there is a ladder and there are angels going up and down… but then, God appears right beside Jacob. In spite of Jacob’s ordinariness, in spite of his lying to his father and grasping for a blessing, God promises to Jacob—in the same way as God promised Abraham and Isaac—that beyond his wildest dreams, God would be with him wherever he goes and will bless him (making his descendants, his tribe numerous), so that all people would be blessed through him, and that God would bring him back to this land, saying, “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Jacob wakes up, filled with a sense of awe. He says, “’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.’”

Again, in response to God’s big and vast promises, a person (this time, Jacob) responds to the immensity with specificity. God says, “I will go with you wherever you go,” and Jacob responds,
“God is right here, right here—I didn’t even realize it.”

Jacob can’t understand the vastness of God’s promise. Jacob has always been the one who stayed at home, who is rooted firmly in one place. So, he connects God’s promise to this place, to the very rock that he put his head on for that dream-filled night.  Here’s what the story says next:

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 Beth-el.... Then Jacob made a vow, saying, ‘If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you.’

Jacob can’t quite believe the fullness of God’s promises… God promises to be everywhere, and Jacob responds with a house for God built right here… God has offered more than Jacob could believe, more than he could have asked or imagined. And Jacob imagines that he can somehow contain God. Still, God’s promises hold strong.

We dare to believe that we can speak to God the way that Rebekah did. We’re courageous to believe that in spite of our fears or our anger, our disbelief, our lying, our cheating, the promise that God gave to Jacob is for us, too. We dare to believe that in spite of all the never-ending ladders we imagine we need to climb to get to heaven, that actually, God appears right beside us, saying:
“I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Until everything is complete, I will never leave you… what a promise!

In one month, we’ll be witnesses as several youth stand up to Affirm their Baptism—a day we call Confirmation. And I think it’s reassuring to know that whatever you do and wherever you go, God will not leave you until God has completed what God has promised you. Just as that’s true for our 14 & 15 year olds, that's true for each one of you, of any age… that God sticks with you through the very end… and in faith we believe, even beyond the end as we know it.

Jacob’s story goes on. The trickster gets tricked… Jacob has to navigate many twists and turns in his many years away from home, but he ends up with 12 sons, that’s a number that the ancient Hebrews considered complete. He was incredibly skilled at breeding and raising animals—and became incredibly powerful. Over and over, his neighbors wanted to make sure that they were in good with him because they sensed there was a power with him that was not his own.

Much later, Jacob does return to his homeland. At that time, he even reconciles with his brother, Esau, and together they bury their father when he dies at the ripe old age of 180.

The struggles do not end—after all, he had 12 sons, there was bound to be competition.

But over and over, God kept God’s promise… Until everything is complete, I will never leave you.

Today, God is here, not just because this is a beautiful church, built by people who like Jacob wanted you to look around and sense God in this particular place… God is here, and not because we are so good.

But God is here because God shows up beside us in the wilderness places of life.. And here, just where you imagine God could never be, God promises to be with you now and through everything that is to come. God gathers us in & through & across our tribes and groups, with all our significant differences, and is still making us one body in Christ. Hopefully, that fills us with some measure of gratitude and a sense of enough, but if the stories are not enough, then we have this too—the table, where Jesus promised God will always meet us—over and over, week after week, until everything is complete.                 God is here, God sustains us, and God goes with us wherever we are.

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[1] http://www.kjvtoday.com/home/was-jacob-plain-or-perfect-in-genesis-2527