It was winter. In the small village on the western side of the Blue Mountains, it seemed to get dark very early. The sun quickly disappeared behind a steep ridge that shaded the highway. It was cold and bleak and if it wasn’t raining and windy it was snowing. There was always the smell of burning coal fires in the air. I was a young school teacher in the little school there, (this was a long time ago) with just two teachers on the staff, and I was not happy.
That’s not quite true. In some ways I was very happy. But at that time, I was a long way from home. I was separated from my family, who I loved a lot. I was separated from my church family and my friends in Sydney. In that small village I felt lonely and homesick and out of step with the things that interested the local community. And cold!
I knew that I was not going to be there forever. I didn’t know where I would be going next and had no idea that in God’s plan my next home would be in Papua New Guinea. That cold lonely winter, I decided to use my spare time to study for the lay preacher’s exam, and that meant having my first attempts at preaching in small country churches. One of my first sermons was based on Genesis 28 and the story of Jacob and his dream.
Today Matthew read this story for us. Jacob had left home and was travelling north. It was not a good time for him. He had left behind a real mess at home in his family life and they were not very happy with him, especially his twin brother. His mother advised him to leave home in a hurry and travel to his uncle’s place a long way away. Now Jacob was on his way to Haran. It was a really long journey, hundreds of kilometres, from his family home at Beersheba which was quite a way south of present-day Jerusalem to Haran which was north of the Euphrates River in the far north of the Syria of today. That night when it was too dark to go on, he stopped somewhere on the road. It was a nowhere sort of place. There was no friendly house there, no inn where he could get a bed. He just lay down to sleep where he was, on the side of the road, and put his head on a stone for a pillow. He was alone, a long way from home and a very long way from his destination. He was not comfortable – a stone makes a hard pillow. It was a barren time for him.
While he was asleep, he had a dream. In his dream he saw a ladder or a stairway, going from the ground up to heaven, and angels were moving up and down the stairs. And it wasn’t just angels in his dream. In his dream God was standing near him, at the foot of the steps. God was talking to him. God was saying ‘I am the God of your grandfather Abraham and your father Isaac. I am going to give you this land. Your family is going to be so big in future that you won’t be able to count them all. I will go with you wherever you go, I will protect you and I will bring you back here again. This is my promise.’
Jacob woke up. That was strange and disturbing dream. He felt scared. I think it must still have been the middle of the night when he woke up. Maybe he wondered where he was, there in the dark on the side of a road in a strange empty place and maybe his heart was thumping hard with fright.
When I was thinking about that story all those years ago, it was verse 16 that struck me. Jacob woke up suddenly and thought, “The Lord is in this place, and I didn’t even know it.”
That was the first surprise. Jacob was surprised to find God there at all. He had not expected it. It seemed unlikely. ‘The Lord is in THIS place, and I didn’t even know it.’
That is what I noticed, that winter in that small village those years ago. The Lord was in THAT place, too. Even when I didn’t see it. Even when I was criticising my new neighbours in my head. Even when I thought that the people who went to the tiny church on the highway were not like my Christian community at home. I found them a bit unfriendly, and divided among themselves. I discovered that life in a small village can be unhappy with gossip and unpleasantness. And yet, even in that place, God was there. In my loneliness, I found that I was close to God.
Are you in a place where you do not expect to find God? A lonely place? An unhappy workplace? A foreign place? A place where everything seems to be going wrong? Or perhaps you are in a place where you are not sure where you are going. Perhaps like Jacob you are confused and afraid of the future.
We are all somewhere on our own journey. Some of us are at the beginning. If someone asks us, ‘What do you want to do after school? What interests you?’ we are not sure yet.
Some of us are in the middle of life and there is a lot going on. Lots of demands, lots of challenges, maybe lots of questions.
Some of us are at a turning point in our journey, with learning about a new home or a new job or a new relationship.
Some of us are nearer the end of our journey. We are losing dear friends and family and are aware of our own mortality.
None of us know the future. Where ever we are, know that God is with you in this place.
Jacob was not seeking God at that time, even if God was seeking him. He said, with astonishment, ‘The LORD is in this place and I didn’t even know it.’
The first surprise was to find that God was in a place where Jacob did not expect to find him. Jacob was amazed to find that God was there at all.
The second surprise was for Jacob to discover that God knew him and had come to him.
Earlier today we read Psalm 139 together. The psalmist also was thinking about the presence of God and thinking how God was not only there, but knew him and paid attention to him. That was truly amazing. The psalmist wrote:
3 You notice everything I do
and everywhere I go.
4 Before I even speak a word,
you know what I will say,
5 and with your powerful arm
you protect me
from every side.
6 I can’t understand all of this!
Such wonderful knowledge
is far above me.
Jacob would have agreed with the psalmist to say ‘I can’t understand all this!’ In ancient times, when Jacob lived, gods of the tribes were probably not known for their interest in human beings. Gods were beings who expected sacrifices, or who had power over people, or who made the land prosperous or otherwise. A god made of wood or bronze did not care about an individual person. A god like that was not interested in people.
I remember once when I was flying alone across the Pacific to a place and community that was new to me. At the time, I was a member of a national committee with responsibility for Uniting Church connections with churches in other parts of the world. This included any Australian staff that were working with those overseas churches. I was on my way to visit a community in Tonga. I had heard that the Australian church staff working there were not at all happy with our board, and were likely to be quite cranky with me, their visitor. As we flew east, we were flying into darkness with the sun setting in the distance behind us. I was feeling alone and anxious. The words of Psalm 139 came into my mind.
Where could I go to escape
from your Spirit
or from your sight?
8 If I were to climb up
to the highest heavens,
you would be there.
If I were to dig down
to the world of the dead
you would also be there.
9 Suppose I had wings
like the dawning day
and flew across the ocean.
10 Even then your powerful arm
would guide and protect me.
The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob was different. God was powerful and mighty but this God knew people by name. This God knew everything about them, where they were, what they were doing. This God loved and protected people. This was amazing and wonderful. It was also rather frightening. Do I always want God to be watching and aware of me? Maybe not!
When I was a small girl, I had an uncle who I loved dearly. He was great fun to be with. But when I was naughty, which was often, he would say ‘I am looking at you, Margaret!’ and that was enough to pull me up – at least for a while. I knew that he loved me, but he was also watching me.
Our God is one who knows us, sees us in our good moments and our bad ones and cares about us. We are not alone and abandoned, however far we may travel or wherever life may take us.
So Jacob was:
Surprised to find that God was there at all.
Surprised to discover that God was aware of him and knew him.
The third surprise was to find that despite everything God could bless him.
Jacob must have been amazed that God was promising to bless him and protect him. He did not deserve it.
We read the longer story of Jacob in the first book in the Bible, Genesis. Jacob’s parents, Isaac and Rebekah had twin sons, Esau and Jacob. From the time the two boys were babies they were fighting each other. It was not a very happy family. By the time the twins were grown up men, it was a very dysfunctional family. The two parents each had a favourite son and favoured him against the other one. There was intense sibling rivalry between the two sons. When Esau married, his parents complained that their daughters-in-law made their lives a misery. Within the family there were lies, and betrayal, and cheating, and theft, and threats of violence. Jacob himself was guilty of deceit. With his mother’s help he had tricked his father into giving him the special blessing that really belonged to his brother and so had stolen his brother’s inheritance. Now his brother was so angry he wanted to kill him. This was no ideal family.
Jacob, on his long journey north to Haran, was not just going on a trip to find a wife among his ancestors’ people as his mother had advised. He was also running away from his angry brother and his very distressed and disappointed father.
Did he deserve a special blessing and a promise from God? Probably not! Do any of us? Probably not! Like Jacob, we are fallible, flawed and foolish humans.
God comes to us all where we are, whether we deserve it or not. God said to Jacob the runaway, ‘I will go with you wherever you go, I will protect you’ and I believe he says the same to us.
In the morning, after his night disturbed by the dream, Jacob woke up. He took the stone that had been his pillow and set it up like a pillar. This was going to be a memorial, a place where he would always remember meeting God. He poured oil over the stone as a way of marking the place as a sacred place and gave it a new name, Bethel, which means the House of God.
In his dream, he had seen a ladder or a stairway from earth to heaven. The top reached up into heaven but the foot of the ladder landed just where he was. It came to him in that nowhere-in-particular place, somewhere between the familiar home and the unknown future. And God spoke to him, not from way off in the distance at the far end of the ladder, but standing beside it, close to Jacob. Jacob called the place ‘the House of God’ and the ‘gate of heaven’. He did not want to forget it.
When Jacob poured the oil over that stone as a memorial, he was still on the way, not at his original home but not yet at his future destination. He was in an unfamiliar place travelling to an uncertain future. Maybe some of us are in that uncertain place. We have left our original home and we have arrived in Canberra, but it still feels strange and unknown. Perhaps some of us are at a turning point in our working life, or needing to make decisions about our next step and nothing seems clear yet.
God comes close to us, just where we are. What have been some God-moments for you? However those moments came for you, you knew that the foot of the ladder had landed close to you. God’s presence was real.
What does this say to us as a Christian community here in Gungahlin?
Yes, God is here with us and knows us. Today has been marked as Intercultural Neighbouring Sunday in Uniting Churches. The theme is ‘Belonging: One Body, Many Members’. The Uniting church President Charissa Suli asks us to think about these questions: Who belongs? Whose gifts are waiting to be discovered? Whose voices might help us hear Christ more clearly? Who ius still waiting to know they truly belong?
Here at Gungahlin Uniting on Neighbouring Sunday, we have the gift and blessing of being a congregation with a lot of variety. We are just like our local community, with people from different countries, with different political views, different languages, different ages and different interests. What does God ask of us? I believe that God calls us to do the real work of building a community of faith. This will be more than smiling at each other on Sunday mornings, or even sharing a cup of coffee. We will recognise and appreciate our differences. We will build trust. We will make time to try to understand each other better, even when we don’t always agree with each other. We will learn to respect each other. Sometimes we may have to forgive each other. It will take work and it won’t always be easy.
About twenty years ago, my husband Ron and I were involved with a program called Young Ambassadors for Peace. This was a Uniting Church initiative, led by a woman called Joy from the Philippines. Joy ran peace building workshops in places where there was serious conflict in Asia and the Pacific. At one point, she brought leaders from six conflict zones to a major ‘train the trainers’ time here in Canberra.
These are their hands. Very colourful with lots of variety. Here they are, close in a single circle. But in their home places, they were divided, by religion, politics, tribal loyalties, civil war.
They came from Bougainville, North India, Sri Lanka, Ambon, Papua New Guinea highlands, Solomon Islands.
They knew that building peace in their home countries would take slow, exhausting and often frustrating work. It would take work to build stronger relationships. But they were ready to begin and do that work.
Here at Gungahlin Uniting Church, I believe that we are like Jacob on the way. We are not sure where God is leading us yet, but we are people on the way.
Like Jacob, be assured that God is here, where we are, in this place.
Be assured that, like Jacob, God knows us as we are.
Be assured that, despite our failures and worries, God is ready to bless us.
After Cate leads us in our prayers for others, we will sing a final song ‘Be still, for the presence of the Lord is here’. This song was written by David Evans, a piano teacher from England. He says that when he was writing it, the story of Jacob and the presence of the Lord was in his mind.
God in his mercy and grace comes close to us, even today.
