Ordinary 16 / Pentecost +10 July 20, 2008

Genesis 28:10-19a

Tiepolo, Jacob's Ladder

The story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel suggests at least two things about our encounters with that which is holy.  The first is that the world is the place in which we meet the divine.

Jacob experienced what is known in Celtic spirituality as a “thin place”. Places & times in life when the veneer is so thin that some experience of God or some revelation becomes available to us. Thin places are where this world and others meet; places where a sense of the holy is virtually palpable.

The second is that the Lord may come, not in wakeful control, but in a time of vulnerable yielding, as in a dream while sleeping.

The Lord may come, as the story says, when we are “between places,” that is, in our every day comings and goings. God encounters us when we are running away from something, especially when that something is an unresolved part of our lives. God encounters us when we are betwixt & between, at a threshold (L. limen), at a liminal place. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes such liminality as “an interval, however brief… when the past is momentarily negated… & the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance”.  They are times of confusion, vulnerability, of questioning who we are, but also times of potentially profound transformation – of finding our identity

The Jacob who fled into the wilderness (that liminal place) is not the same Jacob who emerges.

We too, may find ourselves in the wilderness with all that is unresolved in our hearts. Our wakeful worlds may be fraught with loneliness, fear or guilt. We may have come to have known too many broken promises, broken hearts, & broken homes. We too, may find ourselves “between places”. We may be running away from our past, from the shadows in our lives, from what we have become, or from what lies ahead.

But then God comes where God is not anticipated. In actuality, however, God has been there all along, only like Jacob, we did not know it – missed it, were blind to it, too busy and ignored it. But the world is a thin place, and God is close, closer than we ever imagined.

Then, as the Lord looked down upon Jacob; God looks down upon us with a blessing. And gives us the promise: “I am with you and I will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you safely home”.

Ordinary 15 / Pentecost +9 July 13, 2008

Genesis 25:19-34

When we turn to the stories of the twin brothers Esau & Jacob in Genesis, one wonders why they are included as part of holy writ. Here are two brothers for whom – from the very moment of conception – there existed tension, jealousy, & deception. Two brothers for whom each parent, Isaac & Rebekah, had their favorite. Why did the storyteller “hang out the dirty laundry” of the family tree? Why does the Bible have to tell stories that sound so familiar and personal? Why do ‘their’ stories sound like ‘our’ stories?

Why tell these stories of such a dysfunctional family? Why include them in sacred literature? Not merely to say that what goes around comes around. Nobody in the situation is entirely guilty, neither are they wholly blameless. Perhaps we tell & retell these stories precisely because they are our stories too.

● Which of us has not been alienated from a brother or a sister, a parent or child?

● Which one of us isn’t living with a gulf which separates us from another family member, harboring some past resentment which we are unwilling to forget let alone forgive?

● Which one of us hasn’t suffered from apparent parental favoritism or tried or is still trying, even into our own adulthood, to secure the blessing, that is, our parents’ approval?

Fortunately, as Buechner [Peculiar Treasures. p.56] has it, God doesn’t love people because of who they are, but because who God is. God doesn’t withhold God’s love because of what we have done, but loves us in spite of ourselves. It’s known as grace.

Dan Ellis Killian