I am a light sleeper, probably from being on call at the hospital for 27 years.  As a result, I don’t remember my dreams very well, or perhaps I don’t have them at all.  I am amazed at the vivid detail that some people can recall when telling of their dreams.  Bo is such a person, when we worked together, she would often come in and tell me of some funny thing that she dreamed in exacting detail.  This time of sharing was one sided, because I couldn’t ever remember much about my dreams.  I think Eric is good at remembering his dreams. 

            Oh, on occasion I can recall a dream or two.  When we moved to our current house 17 years ago, a day or two before we moved, I had a dream.  Let’s see how good you are at interpreting dreams, tell me what you think of this one.  I dreamed that in the great room, on the ceiling of our new home, bread sticks, a.k.a. Olive Garden style were protruding half-way out of the ceiling, all over.  And where the ceiling fan is, there was a black trash bag tied to the ceiling fan cord.  I stood on a chair, and cut down the bag as to examine its contents.  I found it to be full of my white dress shirts, stuffed full, wadded-up.  Now, what does that mean?  Maybe there’s a reason that I don’t remember my dreams!

            I generally don’t believe that dreams mean a whole lot, sometimes they are more tied to what you had for dinner, but perhaps sometimes we ought to pay attention to them.  For example, I have had at least two reoccurring dreams in my life that I have had over, and over, and over again.  The first one was when I was a kid.  I was constantly being chased by a dragon, sort of a Godzilla looking creature that would really get after me.  He could knock down trees, crash through brick walls.  But I found that if I could get to the screened in porch on the back of the house, he couldn’t get through screen.  I guess it kind of “screened” him out!   And I don’t really know what that one means either. 

            But I have had a recurrent dream as an adult that I have discerned the meaning to I believe.  I am usually in a place of vulnerability, like an open field, and to my surprise I look over my shoulder and see a tornado coming right at me.  I run, and run, and seek shelter.  I barely get to cover in time, and I feel debris passing over me.  After a great sense of relief, I wipe my brow and go on my way.  But to my surprise, there is a much more powerful, scarier storm right on its tail, that I didn’t see coming.  Then I usually wake-up.   I have had this dream 100 times.  I once had a colleague who had studied at the prestigious Carl Jung Dream Institute in Switzerland.  I ask her for her interpretation to my mystery.  Her response was ludicrous.  She suggested that I was dreaming about the insides of my pancreas.  That’s right, pancreas.  But I protested, there’s nothing wrong with my pancreas.  She rebutted, but a tornado is shaped like the inside of your pancreas.  I, of course replied, but I have no idea what my pancreas looks like!  She retorted, but your sub-conscience knows!  Her interpretation was not the panacea that I was looking for.  So much for the mighty Jungian dream school!       

            What I have come to discover the meaning to be is that this is my stress dream, my job dream.  I constantly help people avert danger and cope with crisis.  I don’t always know how to do this, and it takes a lot of emotional energy.  But somehow I work, and I work, and I work to get through the present danger only to have another case waiting for me to tackle.  You see, there is no end to human need around my place. We are like Denny’s, we never close.  I can never relax or let down.  I f someone suffers and dies, before I can rest, someone new is in their hospital bed.  When I have this dream, it is a sign that I am becoming overwhelmed with my job.  I then know to take some time off.

            Well, dreams are fun, both the fanciful and the serious, and most of the time we can’t remember them or we have no clue as to their meaning.  But before we write them off as the result of too much pizza for dinner, we might stop to think of their fascinating role in scripture.  Many big events, many big decisions have centered on something as mysterious and ethereal as a dream.     

            Today’s lectionary text from the book of Genesis is as famous of a dream as there is in scripture, at least the Old Testament, the dream called Jacob’s ladder.  We find Jacob is a man on the run not because of what others have done unjustly to him but because of the nasty things he has done to them.  He is also a momma’s boy who owes his life to his mother twice: the day she brought him into the world alongside his twin-brother Esau and the day she saved him from being strung up by Esau. Jacob was a low-life-crooked-shyster and his seamy adventures throughout the twenty-fifth to thirty-sixth chapter of the book of Genesis tell like a long-running soap opera if it weren’t for one thing: Jacob survives by being cunning all right, but also because he never seems to get what he deserves.  Jacob always gets more.  He cheats his lame-brained brother out of his birthright and gets away with it.  Then years later, he cheats him again, this time out of the blessing that was rightfully coming to Esau, and he gets away with that too.  He not only gets away with it; once his crime is known, codependent enablers known as Rebekah and Isaac (remember him, the great patriarch) cover up for him. 

So the story picks up today when Rebekah discovers that Esau is ready to kill his dear old brother deader than dead for what he has done, she makes up a lame excuse to her husband that it would be a bad idea for Jacob to marry a foreign girl now that he is heir to the family blessing.  It is just what Isaac needs to tell Jacob to take a hike back to the ancestral homeland while Esau cools his heels. That’s where this week’s story starts. Jacob is on the lam between a place where he is no longer welcome and a place where he has never been.  As he fell asleep on a pile of rocks on the run, we might say that he was between a rock and a hard place.  He’s guilty, defenseless and scared; and he hasn’t got a friend in the world. He finds himself out in the hill country north of Beer-sheba.  Worn-out and strung-out, he lies down under the night sky with nothing but a stone for a pillow. 

It is what happens next that is surprising and a twist in the plot. One author I read this week interprets the story this way:

Jacob dreams a dream.  Now, sophisticated people like you and me know that dreams are what come back to haunt you during the night – like that left-over pizza you shouldn’t have eaten or that tax deduction you should have reported.  We toss and turn at night often because that is the time we come face to face with the things we have been running from all that day, or all of our lives.  With his defenses down, and his unconscious running the show, you would expect that Jacob would have slept the sleep of the guilty, complete with nightmarish visions of the father he had deceived and the brother he had betrayed.  Getting what he deserved, right?  Think again.  For the story says Jacob dreamed a dream that nearly brings tears to the eyes with its unexpected beauty and wonder.  Jacob dreams a dream of a stone stairway set up on the earth and reaching all the way up into heaven.  Angels are ascending and descending on this ramp; and there, right beside him, is the Lord God himself, speaking to Jacob, not words of reproach and accusation, but of great comfort and blessing: “…the land on which you lie I will give to you and your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth… 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, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Barry Robinson, Keeping the Faith in Babylon)

            Well, what happens next is a bit surprising.  Jacob has this marvelous dream where he is ushered into the presence of the Almighty, and instead of taking his shoes off because he is on holy ground; he tries to cut a deal with God.  God has made this incredible unconditional promise to Jacob, one that is hard to understand on one level as Jacob was so undeserving, and one that Jacob responds to in his usual manipulative conniving way.  Believe it or not he tries to play let’s make a deal with God.  He attached strings to the deal when he is in no position to barter.

            Writer Barry Robinson concludes, “Jacob responds to God’s completely unconditional promise of blessing and protection with a completely conditional promise of his own.  “IF you will give me the land, food, clothing and protection, THEN I will be your man.” In response to this incredible blessing of God, all Jacob can think of saying is, “SHOW ME THE MONEY!”  I mean, can you believe this guy!  God, out of the unbelievable goodness of his heart, gives Jacob holy heaven instead of holy hell, and Jacob, demonstrating that he hasn’t learned a blessed thing, says in response, “Prove it to me!” Still looking for some kind of easy moral in this story?  It’s time to forget it.  There just isn’t one.”

            But there is something here much greater than an easy moral to the story.  There is the amazing grace of God, the theme of the book of Genesis, it has been in every story we have read thus far.  God sticks with Jacob even though it seems that Jacob is the last person on earth that deserves such favor, and that my friends, is the message in a nutshell.  This story is not about Jacob, it is about God and his amazing grace.   It is about a God who gives us more than we deserve, every single time.  It is about a God who doesn’t leave us even though we would leave God; it is about a love and commitment that we can’t begin to see through human lenses.

            I seriously would like Jacob to get his comeuppance, as I like to see evil repaid with evil. I would like someone better and more faithful to inherit the promises of God, not this two bit spineless weasel.  But again, the story is not about Jacob, or just about Jacob it is about God.  And less we get our holy righteous indignation riled up to much; it is a story about how God relates to us as well, and that is the rub. 

            You see, the story of Genesis is the same as we find in the gospel: God loves us anyway.  We will never be who we need to be in life, but that is OK. Jacob was a loser who was sinister at best. We would not like Jacob.  But this very human person is merely one in a long line of very human persons that God accomplished remarkable things through anyway.  The roll call of faith looks like any other roll call you have been part of – there are all sorts of people included.  And that is because none of us deserve to be there anyway, save for the amazing grace of God. Like Jacob, even when it should be something else, we have the opportunity to enter the presence of God Almighty.

            You have no doubt heard the story of John Newton, I read it again this week.  In 1744 John was forced into service on a man-of-war, the H. M. S. Harwich. The conditions on board were intolerable to him, so he deserted but was soon recaptured and publicly flogged and demoted from midshipman to common seaman. Finally, at his own request, Newton was exchanged into service on a slave ship, which took him to the coast of Sierra Leone. He then became the servant of a slave trader and was brutally abused. Early in 1748 he was rescued by a sea captain who had known John’s father. John Newton ultimately became captain of his own slave ship. And what kind of captain was he? Lindsay Terry writes, “It is reported that at times he was so wretched that even his crew regarded him as little more than an animal. Once he fell overboard and his ship’s crew refused to drop a boat to him. Instead they threw a harpoon at him, with which they dragged him back into the ship.  But it was after a terrible storm at sea where no one should have survived that Newton recounts his conversion experience in 1748. Newton wrote of the experience, “thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come.  ‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”  John Newton was a vile man by his own description, but experienced God’s Amazing Grace, and so penned the words to the best loved hymn in the English language.  End of story. But wait minute friends, that is not the end of the story!

            I discovered that Newton did not write the hymn after realizing what a louse he was for human trafficking and a captain of a slave trading vessel. He didn’t abandon the practice for years afterwards, maybe 40 years afterward.  How can that be?  The man who gave us this and other great hymns, a slave trader.  As the saying goes, God wasn’t finished with him yet, but loved him and used him anyway.

            In time Newton did repent as a member of his congregation in London was a man by the name of William Wilberforce, an important abolitionist.  Newton eventually joined ranks with Wilberforce to decry the evils of slavery.  He died in 1807, and had this epitaph placed at his tomb: “John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.”

            But grace is great, right?  Who has a problem with a message of grace?  In short, we do.  Newton’s story mirrors Jacob’s in that personal piety is way overrated.  God can call anyone God chooses. We would all put qualifications on that call in many ways that God will not own.  In our own arrogance we define the call of God by human logic and principles, and friends it doesn’t work that way hardly ever.  God uses the folly of this world to confound the wise.  And for those of us committed to meeting certain standards of behavior, that is disturbing. 

I had dinner with a friend this week, and I don’t remember the entire context of the conversation because I rally wasn’t paying attention, but he talked about a person who intimated that he was a “believer” in the sense that the person he was talking with was a believer.  Knowing that his own answer would be a great deal different than what this person was expecting, he found himself defining himself as a Christian.  What I remember was that he said that he tried to live a Christian life everyday, but failed miserably at it all the time.  But that did not in effect alter his commitment to try to follow Christ.  It was at that point that this sermon came to me, because it is the story of Jacob and therein lies the gospel. 

            See, the point is that we all do fail miserably.  There are those brands of Christians who believe that we should behave in a certain way, aspire to certain standards.  There are those who think that we should promote a certain body of beliefs or we are less than human, and we should share similar values to some artificially derived standard.  There are those who place piety over obedience and servanthood, and that is not in this story or any other in scripture.  Maybe some of us are better than others, I don’t think so, but not any of us are good enough to earn what God gives us.  And I will tell you this:  we are not better than non-Christians just because we are such believers ourselves.  Christianity doesn’t make us any better than anybody else, let alone other kinds of Christians. You would have a hard time proving it to me.  You can sing amazing grace how sweet the sound while whipping slaves you ripped from their homes and families. 

So when all is said and done, does Jesus make a difference in my life?  Absolutely.  Does Jesus make me better than the next guy?  No– doesn’t work that way.  Maybe it should, but it doesn’t.  In fact, it usually just makes us arrogant and hypocritical and holier-than-thou.

            We Christians are very hard on ourselves and on our kind.  We Baptist find more acceptance for people of other faiths than we do some other Baptists.  We shoot our own soldiers with anything other than friendly fire.   I spoke to a beautiful young lady recently who was very much on fire for Jesus but felt like a failure because she had to be hospitalized for her mental illness.   She said that she couldn’t help but believe that she had failed and let God down because she needed help.  She was of course a Baptist.  Now, her husband was a skunk and just lost his job for the umpteenth time.  He couldn’t keep a job because of his immaturity she said, and that coupled with two needy kids at home under four years of age, and her bipolar illness just overwhelmed her, so she came in for help.  What do we do to people by suggesting that there are certain impossible standards that we must live up to in order to please God?  It is hogwash brothers and sister, because it doesn’t matter what your poison is, we all fall short.  And the story is not about Jacob remember, it is about God.

Sure, we get ourselves some fire insurance and get saved, but what do we do with that nasty bent towards sinning, and somehow we think that we should be better than that, that we should be good, or even perfect.  We have the expectation that those perfect standards apply to us. We find that we are prohibited from many of this world’s quote, “pleasures” because good Christians don’t partake in such things.  We constant fail trying to live up to these impossible standards, and that is destructive to our personal sense of self esteem, because we are destined to fail.

            So how good do we have to be?  If nothing else, we must learn to love ourselves as God has so loved us.  In his best selling book, M. Scott Peck has this to say about loving oneself:

“Since I am human and you are human, if I am to love people I must also love myself. We are incapable of loving others if we do not first love ourselves. Unfortunately, in the process of our education we have been blamed and scolded so often that we have come to believe that we are basically bad. We have been made pay for love but very often we could not come up with the behavior that we were asked to produce to pay for that love. We then ended up believing that we are not lovable. It is only when we can accept ourselves as good, beautiful but imperfect that we can also accept the other who is good, beautiful but very imperfect.  I believe that the great obstacle to love of others lies in the fact that we have been taught not to be at home with ourselves. If we believe that we are bad inside then we cannot be at home there, and if we are not at home there we are not comfortable to bring others into out lives in a free and detached way. We usually relate to others in a clinging, grasping or controlling way. Traditionally, we also use prayer to relate to God in the same way. We use it to help us get the things we think will make us secure.

            Whatever else self love might be, we must begin with the belief that I am enough.  Not I am perfect, because we are not, and to be perfect is not enough.  I am human, and the funny thing about that is that it is enough.  Enough for God to love us above all and in spite of all.  And God loves us because we are valuable, not because we are worthless.  For to love something that is worthless would be foolish, and God is instead the definition and the beginning of wisdom.  And the message of our faith ought be not that we aren’t good enough, but that we are.  That when we fail we have not forfeited God’s love, that we are not unworthy.  To believe we had forfeited God’s love or earned his displeasure would to be to denigrate the amazing grace of God, and belittle God’s love for us.  Because the truth is, our gospel is one of liberation, not one of constriction; our gospel is one freedom not one of bondage; our gospel is one self love, not self hate; our gospel is one of forgiveness not one of punishment. 

            And it is something else: It is about getting something that we do not deserve, yea that we cannot ever deserve.  Because the message is not or has never been about how bad we are, but is instead about how great the grace of God is.  I for one am glad that a low-life on the run schmuck fell asleep on a rock and dreamed that he was in the very presence of God.  Because in the end, that is exactly what happened for one who would birth a nation that would bless the planet. God came to him, sinner though he was.  And God comes to us in the same way.  And regardless of who you are, where you have been, what you have done or what you are doing, God’s grace is on display, especially when we like our kindred Jacob, are between a rock and a hard place.  And I find that to be some very Good News indeed. Thanks be to God! Amen.