This Is None Other than the House of God

Genesis 28:10-19; Psalm 139; Romans 8:12-25

Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24

¹ O Lord , you have searched me and known me.

² You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

³ You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

⁴ Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord , you know it completely.

⁵ You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

⁷ Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

⁹ If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

¹¹ If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”

¹² even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

²³ Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

²⁴ See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Romans 8:14-25 (selected)

¹⁴ For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. ¹⁵…When we cry, “Abba! Father!” ¹⁶it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

¹⁷ and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

¹⁸ I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us… ²⁴For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Genesis 28:10-19

¹⁰ Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. ¹¹He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.

¹² And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. ¹³And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord , the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; ¹⁴and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. ¹⁵Know 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.”

¹⁶ Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” ¹⁷And 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.” ¹⁸So 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. ¹⁹He called that place Bethel.

The Sermon

Do you ever think of yourself as an unlikely person to have any kind of experience that’s really significant to the whole rest of the world?

Do you ever think of your self as kind of being out in the middle of nowhere in your life?

We all have times once in a while when we may feel that way, but I hope you think of yourself as profoundly worthy of your life, worthy of your time on this planet; and I hope, when you look at where you are—geographically, or just “where you are” in your own life journey—that you see yourself as being either where you want to be, or going to a place you want to go.

But an unlikely person in the middle of nowhere? No. God put you here, for now anyway, for a reason.

But what if you tried to imagine who would be the most important person of your generation—this generation? What if you tried to imagine who would be the central figure of your generation in the ongoing story of God’s interaction with humankind?

As someone to fulfill that role, would you think of yourself as an unlikely person? Would you think of yourself as being in the middle of nowhere, as opposed to Jerusalem, or Rome, or New York City, or some other place where people and things that are that important are more likely to be found?

Hazarding a guess that you may be considering the answer “yes, I would be an unlikely person in an unlikely place for that,” allow me to introduce Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah. He’s the grandson of the recipient of the covenant—the covenant God established with Abraham—which by the year 2008 will have resulted in all of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That’s pretty impressive to you and to me and to all the world. But at this point in Jacob’s journey, all he is is an unlikely person in the middle of nowhere.

Jacob was, to use the scholastic Biblical term, kind of a jerk. As Walter Brueggemann points out, e ven t he name Jacob means something like “heel, trickster, overreacher” (Genesis [Interpreter’s Commentary]).

He had elaborately lied to his own father who was on his deathbed; and in so doing, cheated his own brother, Esau, out of that entirely worthy brother’s rightful inheritance. Jacob had gotten away just in time by being tipped off that once the period of mourning for Isaac was over, Esau was going to kill him.

So Jacob is running not only from the violent, vigilante justice that was going to be carried out against him, but in a way, he was running from his own pathetic, selfish, conniving actions; he was, in a way, running from the wrongs that he had done—the misguided and unworthy past that would always be part of his present, as far as he could see into his future.

He went to take a wife in Haran, so that after his brother’s wrath had hopefully cooled off, he could return and claim his technically legal place as the head of the household inherited from their father.

So he set out, and he went as far as he could for a day’s journey, until evening began to fall, and Genesis says it best: “He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set.”

Not, “He found the most amazing place he had ever seen;” not, “he wondered if he had stumbled into the very house of God.” Just, the sun went down, and there he was; and you know what they say: no matter where you go, there you are. And there he was.

And Jacob took a stone to use for a pillow, and he lay down for a restful night’s sleep before getting up for the next day’s journey to continue being the same inadequate person, doing the same pathetic thing, all over again.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”

And he dreamed that there was a ladder —the Hebrew word really means a ramp—set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham and Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be beyond counting…, 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.”

T hen Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “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.”

It’s not very popular these days to be afraid, or to have fear of the Lord; in fact, the language is generally considered to be kind of archaic. Fear the Lord? No, no; God loves you. What’s to be afraid of? Jesus is your pal!

That’s true. But it’s incomplete.

One evening when I was very small, one of my older brothers and I were out walking, and he was on one side of a railroad track, and I was on the other; and a train came by, which I had always loved to see from the position of being inside a car.

But standing not far from the track, those huge lumbering wheels each supporting unthinkable tonnage, the horn blaring to drown out every other sound in the universe; the mammoth enormity of the whole, and the endless snaking train winding off into the unseeable distance—the feeling I was experiencing was not primarily that this train was my pal. It was awe, and the perspective of being incredibly small, and a certain amount of terror.

When we replace the awe of God with comfy familiarity, we lose our perspective, and the familiarity threatens to become kind of a take-it-or-leave-it, I-don’t-feel-like-going-to-church-today proposition.

Say what you will about Jacob, the heel, the trickster, the cheater, the liar, the runner, the transient screw-up: he now understood his place in God’s universe. Not all of us are so blessed.

So he got up early in the morning, and he took the stone he’d been using under his head and made a little monument, a pillow to a pillar; and he called that place—that lonely, isolated, meaningless, empty place, out in the middle of nowhere, Bethel, which means, “House of God.”

Do you ever think of yourself as an unlikely person, out in the middle of nowhere?

If so, I humbly submit to you, you are wrong.

If anyone was ever unworthy, Jacob was.

If anyone ever had nothing of substance to offer the world, no character and no reason to look at him let alone like him, it was Jacob.

If ever there was someone who in every way imaginable had found himself out in the middle of nowhere, a scoundrel on his way to try to work through his latest inane, idiotically immoral misadventure, it was this clown Jacob.

And God said, “I am with you.”

And Jacob said, this place—even this place—is God’s house. And I’m in the living room.

And God blessed Jacob on his journey; and it didn’t all happen at once, but Jacob would soon become Israel, and his family would be the covenant people, through whom God would bless the whole human race and from whom would come the son of a Nazorean carpenter, Jesus of Nazareth, God from God, light from light.

An unworthy person in the middle of nowhere special was used by God as the cornerstone of the holiness that permeates the earth, the universe, and all creation.

But maybe that shouldn’t really be all that surprising. It wasn’t surprising to Paul, who told the church in Rome, “A ll who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” That pretty well puts you in the house, doesn’t it.

You can’t mess things up enough to make God forget you or abandon you or ever stop loving you—or even to use you to play your part, no matter how great or how small, in the salvation of humankind. And to be the object of God’s regard is to be given dreams and visions and hope, no matter who you are or what you have done or where you are going or where you have stopped for the night.

Sometimes when we’re not attending to things that we need to be paying attention to, God puts dreams in our heads. That’s true for the Church universal, and for this church, and for each of us in this room—and for those who are occupied elsewhere today, and even those who are sleepwalking through the discipline of belonging to Jesus Christ, who have lost all sense or willingness to cope with the cost of discipleship.

In the still of the night, when nothing else is going on and you have stopped, ever so temporarily, the rushed fever of this hectic life, what is God saying to you in your dreams?

They matter—and not just to you, because whoever you are, no matter where in God’s universe you may find yourself, it is none other than the house of God.