Jacob’s Ladder

       I’m Dave.  I’m an addict.   

       I am addicted to the new television series, “My Name is Earl.” 

      For the uninitiated, Earl Hickey, is a man who lives in a cheap motel.  He has done many wrong things in life.  He deserves nothing good from the universe.  But he wins the lottery.  Then he is immediately struck by a car.

      As he lies in his hospital bed, Earl hears a man on a talk show talk about the concept of karma – the idea in Eastern religion that there is a balance in life and that all the wrongs you have done must be exactly paid for in this life or in a future reincarnation.  Earl interprets this to mean that bad stuff will just keep happening to him unless he goes into the past and makes things right.  So he writes a list of all the bad things he has done and sets out, week by week, to make them right.  It’s a long list. 

       It’s very funny.  It works.

       But in the story of Jacob we find that Karma doesn’t work.  Grace works.

       Jacob and Esau are twins.  Esau is born first.  Jacob comes out right behind him holding on to Esau’s heel.  He dogs Esau’s heels from then on.

       Esau sells his birthright as first-born for some bread and lentil soup simply because Jacob comes to him at a time when he is hungry after a long day in the fields. 

       Later, it was time for Jacob to collect on his bargain by receiving the blessing of his aging father.  As writer Frederick Beuchner points out in The Magnificent Defeat, “This was not a blessing in our sense of the word, a vague expression of goodwill that we might use when someone is going on a journey and we say, ‘God bless you.’  For Jacob the blessing is a word of great power.  It conveys the very energy and vitality of the blesser’s soul into the one blessed.  This final blessing by Isaac of his son is to be the most powerful of all.  Once it is given it can never be taken back.

       I like the way Beuchner tells the story.  “The old man waits now for his eldest son, Esau, to appear.  After awhile, he hears someone enter the tent and say, ‘my father’.

       “’Who are you, my son?’  The boy lies and says that he is Esau.  He says it boldly.  Isaac almost believes, but not completely.  The weak-eyed old man asks, ‘Are you really my son, Esau?’ The boy lies a second time.  In the silence of that black, goatskin tent, Isaac reaches out both of his arms and says, ‘Come near and kiss me, my son.’

       This is a problem.  Jacob’s hands are smooth.  His brother’s hands are hairy.  But the boys’ mother Rebecca is in on the whole thing with Jacob.  She has covered the backs of Jacob’s hands with the hair of animals.  Jacob stretches his hands into Isaac’s and Isaac is fully deceived.  He blesses him saying, ‘See, the smell of my son is the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed.’  Then Isaac gave Jacob the great blessing.

      “Jacob steals the blessing that belongs to his brother and takes advantage of his own father’s blindness.  Right here he has broken three of the Ten Commandments – “You shall not steal.” “You shall honor your father and mother,” “You shall not bear false witness.” A fourth commandment – the one against coveting – had gone by the boards years before.

      This it the place where the story completely falls apart both from the point of view of good moral teaching and from the point of view of karma -- belief that what goes around comes around. .  It would have been all right if Jacob, as the result of cheating his brother and duping his blind, old father, had fallen on evil times.  It would be right and just and filled with karmaiosity if he had been cut off by his family and friends and sent off into the wilderness somewhere to wrestle with the pangs of a guilty conscience and repent of his evil ways.  Then the moral would be easy.  “Honesty is the best policy.”  “As a man sows, so shall he reap.”  That would be easy.  We could end this sermon right now.  But this is not the way the story turns out.

      Jacob doesn’t suffer for his dishonesty. Yes, Esau is angry.  Jacob needs to leave for a while until he cools down.  But that’s not bad Rebecca knows that he can stay with her brother Laban up in Syria .  He even has a pretty daughter named Rachel.

      There is no sign whatsoever that Jacob’s conscience bothers him as he sets out on the road with the birthright and the blessing and his mother’s love.

      Of course, now it’s God’s turn.  And at least God can be trusted to make Jacob pay for what he has done.  Or can he?

       Sunset comes, and Esau does not seem to be following him, so Jacob decides that it is safe to camp out for the night.  He left home in too big a hurry to take his down mummy bag, so he puts a smooth stone under his head as a pillow and prepares to go to sleep.

       You might think that sleep would be an impossibility that Jacob would sit up all night in fear and wrestling with the errors of his ways, or that if he did manage to drop off to sleep he would dream the restless dreams of the guilty, like that one where you suddenly discover that you have a final exam in a class you didn’t even know you were taking the then you can’t find the classroom.  You know the dream I mean – because you’re guilty.

       But instead Jacob drops off like a baby in a cradle and dreams the kinds of dreams you would have thought were reserved for the pure and just and righteous.

       He dreams that there was a ladder reaching up to heaven and that there are angels moving up and down with golden sandals and rainbow colored wings and that standing above the ladder is God himself.  Now perhaps Jacob mentally braces himself in his dream for the inevitable divine chewing out the moralist had always promised him.  But he gets something altogether different.  God tells him that the land he is lying on will belong to him and his descendants, and that someday his descendants will become a great nation and a blessing to all of the other nations on earth.  And if that isn’t enough, God adds a personal promise for Jacob, “I will be with you wherever you go” – not as a parole officer but as a friend and protector.

       It isn’t hell that God gives Jacob, in other words, but heaven.  Because for Jacob and for us, God doesn’t love people for who they are, but for who He is.  It was by grace that Jacob, of all people, became not only the father of the twelve tribes of Israel but the many times great-grandfather of Jesus of Nazareth – just as it was by grace that Jesus was born into thing world at all – born not because of who we are but because of who God is.

      Did Jacob get what was coming to him?  No, he didn’t.  He got a beautiful vision on the road and received the promise first made to Abraham.  Was this a reward for cheating Esau?  No!  He received in spite of what he had done to Esau.  God, for reasons of his own, had chosen Jacob – just as God has chosen us in Jesus Christ – and Jacob’s unworthiness could not cancel out God’s gracious choice.

       You see, God is bigger that our logical categories.  God’s love is super-logical.  God is bigger than the ability of an Aristotle to figure out the laws of cause and effect.  God is bigger than karmic forces.

       We find this surprising grace in the Upper Room, where Jesus Christ sat with His disciples.  He said, “One of you will betray me, all of you will desert me.  Peter, you will deny three times that you even know me.”  Therefore, He says not “to hell with you” which is what they deserve, but “to hell with me.”  I will descent into hell.  This is my body for you.  This is my blood, shed for you.  This do in remembrance of Me.”

       Perhaps you have done something that you know  deserves God’s punishment.  That can be the time of greatest surprise.  You come in fear, and find that God is not the God of logical consequences, but the God of illogical blessings.  God has determined to bless us, in Jesus Christ and even our sin cannot finally get in His way.  That’s what grace is all about.

       That is God’s surprising love.  Jacob tasted it early.  But you can taste it now.  This table is the ladder of heaven – the place of meeting between God and us.  Come and eat.