Sermon Text

Do you remember The Fugitive? It was both a hit TV series and a blockbuster movie. In The Fugitive, Dr. Richard Kimble is a man on the run from the law. Wrongfully accused and then found guilty of his wife's brutal murder, he escapes his own death sentence by miraculously surviving a terrible accident and then by managing to elude a relentless police detective. He is a man for whom we can’t help feeling sympathy and compassion; his simple honesty and goodness elicit the same kind of response from just about every stranger he happens to meet.

There is something about the underdog, the decent person who has been dealt a bad hand by life with which just about any of us can immediately identify. We can't help pulling for this guy to make it in the end because we want to believe that somehow, somewhere goodness is on our side, justice will prevail, right will win out, and God will not forget about us.

But the Bible's version of how all this plays out is the story of Jacob; and it is as different from any Hollywood story of how goodness prevails as night is from day.

Jacob is a fugitive, too, but not the kind of fugitive for whom anybody feels an iota of sympathy. He is a man on the run, not because of what others have done unjustly to him, but because of the nasty things he has done to others. He owes his life to his mother twice: the day she brought him into the world alongside his twin-brother Esau and the day she saved him from being killed by Esau.

Jacob is what one commentator calls “a crafty man,” and his seamy adventures throughout the middle chapters of the book of Genesis are like a long-running soap opera. Jacob survives by his cunning, and never seems to get what he deserves. He cheats his brother out of his birthright and gets away with it. Years later, he cheats his brother again, this time out of the blessing that was rightfully coming to Esau, and he gets away with that, too. Once his crime is known, both of his parents cover for him. When his mother discovers that Esau is ready to slit Jacob’s throat for what he has done, she suggests to her husband that it would be a bad idea for Jacob to marry a foreign girl now that he is heir to the family blessing. Isaac sends Jacob back to the ancestral homeland for a bride while Esau has a chance to cool off.

That's where we have entered the story today. Jacob is on the run away from a place where he is no longer welcome and toward a place where he has never been. He's guilty, defenseless and scared; and he hasn't got a friend in the world. He finds himself out in the wilderness north of Beer-sheba. Worn-out, he lies down under the night sky with nothing but a stone for a pillow. It is what happens next that Hollywood would never have thought to write.

Jacob dreams a dream. Now, sophisticated people like us know that dreams are what come back to haunt you during the night – like that left-over pizza you shouldn't have eaten or that tax deduction you shouldn’t have claimed. We toss and turn at night, often because that is the time we come face to face with what we have been running from all day, or all of our lives. With his defenses down, and his unconscious engaged, you would expect that Jacob would sleep the sleep of the guilty, complete with nightmarish visions of the father he had deceived and the brother he had betrayed. Think again.

Jacob dreams a dream that nearly brings tears to our eyes with its unexpected beauty and wonder. Jacob dreams of a stairway set up on the earth and reaching all the way up into heaven. Angels are ascending and descending on this stairway; and there, right beside him, is the very Lord God, speaking to Jacob, not words of reproach and accusation, but of great comfort and blessing:

"...the land on which you lie I will give to you and your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth... 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."
- Genesis 28.13-15

Now, let's not get sidetracked by this, off on some tangent about the kind of mystical experiences we can have at the most unforeseeable times or the nature of dreams and their place in the spiritual life; because that is not the point. The point, as always, is what God says in the dream; and what God says, quite pointedly, is that God is going to give Jacob, our clever crook, everything he could ever want or need: more land, family, power and honor than he could ever imagine. It was more than Jacob ever dreamed of trying to get, more than his own father could have given him, more actually than God had ever promised anyone, to this point; because God even reassures Jacob by saying that God will stick with him until every last part of the promise is kept.

It was, to say the least, quite a dream. We might have expected God to have had something else in mind for the little cheat, a taste of divine wrath, perhaps, a dose of Jacob's own medicine for a change, and that just for starters. But what Jacob got was this unbelievably beautiful dream, not to mention the God who went with it. It would take a while for everything to play itself out and for Jacob to become the great father of Israel as God had promised him; but it didn't take long for Jacob to realize what had happened, and to make the most of it. Upon awaking, he built a monument in honor of the place, called it Beth-el, 'house of God', and then made a vow to God, and it’s clear that he hadn't lost his touch:

"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." Genesis 28.20-22

Jacob responds to God's unconditional promise of blessing and protection with a conditional promise of his own. "IF you will give me the land, food, clothing and protection, THEN I will be your man." Can you believe this guy? God, out of unbelievable goodness, gives Jacob holy heaven instead of holy hell, and Jacob, demonstrating that he hasn't learned a blessed thing, says in response, "You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”

Still looking for some kind of easy moral in this story? There just isn't one.

What there is, instead, is the remarkable tale of the God who insists on sticking with the likes of people like Jacob and his offspring down through all the dark days and all the crooked paths they would take. And did Jacob himself ever realize what it all meant, ever "come to his senses" and finally express remorse for having "scammed" all the people he ever "scammed"? Did he ever once appreciate the generosity and goodness that he was being shown, enough to mend his ways, or have a change of heart?

The judgment is still out on that one, I suppose, the way it's still out on whether people like you and I have ever fully appreciated what that strange night Visitor has been doing for us, going with us every step of our way, and promising never to leave us until it is all ours, too, just as God said God would do for Jacob and his family.

But the message of the Gospel is that that is precisely what God has been doing all along, what God did most clearly in Jesus of Nazareth, and has been doing ever since for a world, for a Church, and for people like us who, most days, can’t think of much better to say in response than, "I’ll believe it when I see it." It is enough to stagger the imagination, let alone break the heart.

What did Jacob finally give back in the end to the One who gave him everything? What will you and I give back? What can we give back? What should we? One tenth of our lives? Everything? Who knows. The only thing that is certain is what the One who meets us at Beth-el always seems to do, which is to grant us blessed dreams, precisely when we need them, and to give us everything we have never and could never deserve.

It is what the Bible means by grace; because in the Bible it is not anything about who we are that makes God stick with us. It is always something about who God is.