Scripture: Genesis 28:10-22
One of my most treasured memories is of a day many years ago when Pam and I were in Vancouver with a little three-month old Charlie. We had been visiting relatives in Abbotsford an hour away, and had come into the big city so Pam could catch a show with her cousin before we continued up to Whistler where my family was having a reunion. We left for Vancouver in good time, but ended up hitting a major roadblock on the highway. We found out later that a police officer had been hit and killed while making a traffic stop, so the whole road was shut down for hours. So as the afternoon wore on we sat in our car and then stood on the road watching the time tick away.
Finally the highway re-opened, and we started moving again towards Vancouver, now trying to get through downtown towards Stanley Park at the worst possible time. We had long bailed on dinner before the show already, but now even getting there in time at all was not looking good. I ended up dropping Pam off a few blocks away just as the show was supposed to start and watched her run frantically towards the theatre before taking Charlie with me to our hotel. It was a rather stressful day, and with a three month old baby in a hotel room – not a great night either. It was easy to forget where we were and what was around us.
But the next morning I woke up and stood on the hotel room balcony looking at the Vancouver skyline and the mountains behind. The sun made the buildings and the ocean sparkle. I took Charlie out in the stroller and we walked into Stanley Park. Burnished from years of fond recollection, I remember this as one of the happiest mornings of my life. We strolled through the park, walked the seawall and stopped for pastries at a nearby bakery. It was a moment of actually seeing the world around me and finally recognizing how beautiful and wonderful this life is. It was a spiritual experience, to be sure. The background noise and distractions fell away, and I knew that this was good.
For most of us, life is full and often complicated. It comes with so many ups and downs, so many tough stretches to go with the good times. There are mountains and valleys, green pastures and barren deserts. And long stretches of the ordinary that leave us carrying on day by day with the same old, same old. Most of the time we’ve got our heads down just trying to figure out the next step. But every once in a while, something breaks through. A moment pierces the armour of our defences and touches us in a different way. It need not be an exceptional moment – it might be something very ordinary too. But for that moment, however long it lasts, we’re able to see something more. We recognize that wherever we are is holy ground, and each minute that passes a sacred gift. We know, perhaps at a level too deep for words, that God is in this very place.
So what do we do when something like this happens? Well, if you’re Jacob – or countless others who have stood in awe of an experience that wakes them up – you build an altar. You set up a stone and pour oil over it. You find a way to mark the spot or the experience so that you can remember what happened. We’re not going to live in this kind of sacred space all the time. Our glimpses will come and go, and if we try to re-create the experience it might not have the same effect again. But a marker of faith gives us something to hold onto even when life moves on again. It can nourish us through drier seasons where the sparkle of holy ground seems stubbornly hard to find.
I didn’t actually set up an altar in Stanley Park that day. Though in retrospect, I kind of wish I had. I wish I had taken a moment to name the experience for myself and either left something there or taken something with me to mark it in my life. We so often need this kind of tangible sign to keep connected to the truths of our lives. But I have marked that morning in my memory, and I return to it sometimes when I need to be encouraged or refreshed.
For Jacob, his altar at Bethel marked an experience of God that carried him through a pretty rough stretch. He had this dream of heaven’s ladder out in the desert, alone and on the run. Jacob had just connived to steal his father’s blessing from his twin brother after having already stolen his birthright, and now Esau was furious and out to kill him. So Jacob took off, heading towards his uncle’s place to hide out for a while. I imagine it was a pretty lively internal dialogue playing out in Jacob’s head and heart. Fear, doubt, remorse, shame, hopelessness, confusion. It sure can’t be said that he’d done a bang-up job of navigating life the last while. And now he finds himself in the middle of nowhere as night falls, with a stone for a pillow and nothing but a stolen blessing to keep him company. A self-defeating con artist if ever there was one, too clever by half and now exiled for his own greed. And so he settles into an uncomfortable and troubled sleep.
But as he sleeps, he has this vision that we saw play out during the children’s time. A ladder set up from earth to heaven, with angels going up and down. And the voice of God pronouncing upon him nothing but blessing. Not judgment, not anger, but the promise of a future in the very land on which he lies.
Jacob did not deserve any of it. Ill-gotten gains, all. He did nothing to invite or prepare himself for this gift of encounter with God. In fact, if anything he was running away from God! Head down, tail between his legs. The only thing, and I mean the only thing, that Jacob did right was recognize and take note of what happened to him. The only thing he did right was to build an altar. “Surely God was in this place, and I didn’t even know it… This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” And so Jacob set up his stone. He built an altar, a marker so that he would not forget. So that the very ground on which he slept would shout to him for all time that God is here and that he had been changed.
There was nothing Jacob could do to make this experience happen, but nothing he could do to stop it either. God can drop a ladder in any old place and make it suddenly and blindingly holy. Or better, God’s ladders are all around us – in desert and field and city – and from time to time we may actually wake up to the holy ground we’ve been cursing as we try to get comfortable sleeping on a stone. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars” (An Altar in the World, (HarperCollins, 2009), 15.
So today we recognize and celebrate the altars, the markers of faith, that nourish us by holding this world of blessing before our eyes for all those times when we forget or look away. We each have our own altars, whether set up in the world or in our hearts. Those points we return to, those touchstones of grace that keep us grounded and encouraged and renewed, those places where God has surprised us by showing up when we’d forgotten even to look.
This morning we have the great joy of sharing markers of faith with three of our youth as they come to the end of highschool and make the transition to adulthood. We don’t assume that this particular morning is a Jacob’s ladder experience for anyone. It might be – who knows! Unlikely as it may seem, God can also show up on a Sunday morning in church… But even if this is a time and place like any other, we want to recognize and mark a touchstone of blessing that we can leave with these young people as they set out into the world.
I love the sense of surprise that we get from Jacob as he scrambles up after his dream. “Surely God was in this place, and I didn’t even know it!!” Which is true. And true in so many different places. How often have we walked blithely past or through or around God’s presence with us and noticed not at all. Sometimes we see it in retrospect looking back. And sometimes our eyes are opened in a particular moment, and we realize that there are so many more of these moments that we have probably missed.
The prayer shawls we will present today claim this truth in the years that have been and the years now beckoning just ahead. They carry the love and prayers of this congregation, offered as a warm and cozy reminder that any old moment could be a place where we’re surprised again by God’s blessing.
And these shawls are also an invitation for the rest of us to think about our touchstones too. Our own altars and markers of faith where goodness and beauty break through. And they are encouragement to keep our eyes open for these moments as they come. As we are surprised by God, wherever it happens. And a reminder that all we need to do is take note and mark the spot. Set a stone and build an altar. “How awesome is this place!”
Amen.