Eighth Sunday after Pentecost July 19, 2026 with The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson.

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp11_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Where can I go then from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there. If I make the grave my bed, you are there also. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The story of Jacob opened some weeks ago with Rebecca's womb. Her twins wrestle within her, and when she prays to God, she is told that the children within her are nations in contention. God tells Rebekah that the children in her womb will be in conflict, and that the youngest of the two will be over the firstborn, but that he will be the recipient of God's blessing. This is why it is significant that when Jacob and Esau are born, Jacob grasps the heel of his elder brother. He takes hold of his brother, grasping onto that which was going to be given to him by God anyway. If this sounds familiar, and I hope it does, it may be because Genesis itself opens with the gift of God's blessing, the whole of the created order given into the care of the human creature who is already created in the image of God. And then instead of being partners with God and recipients of free gift and blessing, Adam and Eve become the first to grasp the one thing they have been asked not to, the fruit of one particular tree. They are already made in the image of God. They do not need the tree to make them any closer to that. That is one of the gifts of being human from the beginning. But instead of living as recipients of that gifts, that gift, they seek to become like God. And as with the creation story, so it is with the story of Jacob. He is to be blessed by God, but instead of receiving this blessing as a gift which will come to him, he grabs hold of it. The birth of Jacob already echoes the earlier Genesis stories from creation and from Abraham and Sarah, and it becomes a recurring motif for the rest of the Jacob story. One who is promised blessing seeks to take hold of it on his own terms. Humans grasp for blessing, attempting to seize it despite the fact that God has already given it to them as a gift. Jacob, who in just a couple of lectionary weeks will be named Israel, will make this mistake again and again in a failure that is present from the very start of the story. And this is perhaps why he becomes ranked among the most consistent of tricksters in the Genesis stories. The image of Jacob from today's lectionary picks up with Jacob fleeing for his life alone in the wilderness. He has, with the support of his mother, deceived his brother Esau, convincing him to exchange his birthright and inheritance as the firstborn for a bowl of soup in a moment of Esau's great hunger. And then, as though tricking Esau were not enough, Jacob deceives his dying father to receive a blessing intended for Esau. And Esau is predictably quite angry, flies into a murderous rage, and Jacob flees for his life, making his way to Haran and his uncle Laban. While Jacob has just received through theft and trickery all that was given to him by gift and blessing. He's left with nothing and no one. While fleeing, wandering in the wilderness, he takes for his resting place a rock, no more comfortable to ancient people than to us. And I think we're supposed to see Jacob as a figure who has received all that he ever wanted while retaining, at least in the short term, nothing of ultimate importance. The gifts and blessing he grasps become instead an occasion for alienation. And that is one of the burdens of grasping after a future. It should be the best of times, but for Jacob, it is the worst of times. And that is precisely where God gives Jacob a vision in the form of a dream. In the dream, Jacob becomes witness to the Axis Mundi, a connecting point between heaven and earth, a thin place, the place or point for ancient people at which they could reach the realm of the gods. And this is not the first instance of this motif in Genesis. In an earlier chapter of Genesis, we have a famous example of the phenomenon of the Axis Mundi, told through the story we know as the Tower of Babel. And while we know it as Babel, it is, and it's a convenient wordplay that names the conclusion of the story in the confusion of languages. It may also be recognized by another name with other associations for us: Babylon. This great city, characterized by its immense ziggurats, tall buildings covered in staircases, literally means gate of God. So this earlier story of the Tower of Babel is suggesting that people attempt to establish a gate of God between heaven and earth through their own hubris, self-sufficiency, and ingenuity, through architecture that reaches to the heavens. The story suggests that the people of Babylon build enormous staircases precisely because they imagine Babylon to be such a place, a meeting of heaven and earth. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the building of an immense tower into the heavens prompts God to come down to the gate of God and disturb its work, scattering the people and limiting their capacity to build. Humans are distracted by their own project of reaching God rather than the project that God has given them to spread throughout the world, to be fruitful, to multiply. This is a connection and an echo in the story of Jacob that may have better been heard by its first hearers than it is by us. But it is important because the literary structure of Genesis in conversation with the other peoples of the ancient Near East often finds unique meaning for the people of Israel, not in the similarities of their stories, but at exactly the point where their differences arise. So how is the Axis Mundi of today's story different? To begin with, it is not located in a city or among a strong people. It is happened upon, discovered in a place that we might call off the beaten path. A rural outpost disclosed to a lonely figure wandering the wilderness in the night. This story, all the way through Jacob's wrestling, also through the night, with an angel a bit later in the text, the occasion for his reception of the name Israel is a real turning point for his character. Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it. Unlike towers attempting to reach heaven, this ladder is the place at which the assemblies of heaven ascend and descend, and it's placed by God. The work of God comes from heaven. Jacob does not deserve God's presence, and yet he receives it. Everything in the story indicates that he will receive nothing, that he's reached the end of himself, secured the blessing, lost his brother, deceived his father, lost his home, possesses the promise, sleeps on a rock. It's not powerful, but one lone human wandering the wilderness, connected to generations of humans who have wandered the wilderness, and the ancestor of many, many generations who will wander the wilderness. And yet he comes to bear witness to the presence of God. Surely God was in this place, and I did not know it. It is not because he's grasped a vision that he sees it, but he's given this vision. It's not because he's built a bridge to heaven, but only because God has disclosed the bridge that God made himself. This sets up what I think might be the central question for Jacob. Can Jacob, who will later become Israel, entrust himself to God who has already acted for him? And this is another form of the central question of the people of God in all times and places. Can creatures, can we, trust ourselves to the God who has already acted for us? Within this framework, this quirky dream story from Genesis is remarkably consistent with the God who is present to the people of Israel as they walk through the pages of history as the underdogs, subjected to a variety of oppressive empires, most notably Rome, who crucifies the very one who offers the full presence of God at, you guessed it, the gate of a great city. Surely, God is in this place, and we did not even know it. Jacob wakes, and for the first time in his story, he is no longer grasping, but simply astonished. The wilderness was not empty after all, but shot through with the presence of God. God has been there before Jacob ever recognized him. And if that is true for Jacob, then perhaps the question these stories leave us with is not first where can we find God, but whether we can tr entrust ourselves to the God who is already present. And as is characteristic of good biblical text, I think it is most interested at this point in the narrative in our asking exactly that question. Amen.