A sermon on Genesis 28:10-19 by Darren Cronshaw
(Pastor of the Auburn Baptist Church and Director of Leadership Training with the Baptist Union of Victoria)

One of the privileges of my role with the Baptist Union is getting to see what God is doing through different churches around the state and how we can learn from one another. Let me say we wouldn’t be the same without you at South Yarra and what you bring to the tribe. 

Thanks for your hospitality tonight, and good on you for your commitment to one another and to being church here in South Yarra, and for what you offer to Melbourne.

One of my biblical heroes is Jacob.

Admittedly he was devious. One of his early stories, those of you who had annoying siblings will like this, was when he dressed up like his brother, and his Mum made him a special meal to give to his Dad, and he manipulated his father into giving him the family blessing. He covered his own identity, too afraid or insecure to be himself, and tried to be his brother in order to get favour and approval. That’s sad. Instead of allowing God to mould his dreams and vocations, he handed decision-making over to someone else (in his case his mother) and let her tell him what he should become. 

How much do we sometimes long to be someone else? Instead of celebrating who God has made us to be, and taking responsibility for living our life as God intended it, we strive to be somebody else, or project an image that we think will help us look successful or cool, sexy or glamorous (cf Mark Sayers’ book The Vertical Self).

But this wasn’t the end, or all, of Jacob’s story, but a mistake he made in the first half of his life.  

I’m 39, so have been thinking and about my first half of life, and dreaming about my next half – getting ready for my midlife crisis. As such I have appreciated reading:

Richard Rohr, Falling Upwards: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011)

This guidebook is useful for those of us in the midst of midlife transition, but also for those older who want to understand what they have gone through, or for those younger who do well to plan and prepare.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr suggests that almost all people will face, at some time in their life, at least one situation they cannot control, change or understand. Navigated successfully, this is often what helps us move on to our second half of life.

Rohr invites us to welcome and celebrate the journey from the first half of life to the second half. The first half of life does tend to be driven by a desire to establish ourselves, to build our careers and/or start our families, to mortgage to buy a house. As we get older – and especially as we encounter tragedy, confusion, failure, difficult relationships or perplexing ideas – we realise our boundaries and security were not as sure as we had presumed. We fall and realise our frailty. But instead of falling down, Rohr says the journey is about falling upwards. It is a positive thing to realise our frailty. It is helpful to pause and ask what is it all about? At different points in our life, we are invited to respond to the question, as Rohr quotes Mary Oliver, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (p.1).

In the first half of life (however many years that takes us) we seek to build what makes us significant, work out how we will support ourselves and who will go with us; in the second half we want to take more time for pure friendship, appreciating beauty, communing with nature. This helps us shine and be the sort of people that shows we are the delight of God. But it takes courage and imagination to confront the shadows in our life and to take the journey of falling upwards.

The story of Odysseus from mythology helps guide and give meaning to our journey or “odyssey” through two halves of life. Written by Homer around 700BC, The Odyssey is the hero’s journey of Odysseus returning from the Trojan War. Avoiding gods and monsters, losing his men, his memory and his boat itself, he finally makes it home to his family on their island. But, just at the point a good Hollywood ending could scroll down, Odysseus is called on a second journey. There was something more than settling down into traditional expectations.

Odysseus is led to carry a boat oar and trek across the mainland until he gets to a people who know nothing of the sea or boats, and someone would think it is a winnowing shovel, and then he could sacrifice to the gods and return home and die peacefully as an old man. So he carries this oar, the tool for driving his boat in his first half of life; but a traveller sees it as a winnowing shovel, a tool for separating grain from chaff (or wheat from weeds). And he plants the oar and leaves it there. What had been so significant to him he had to leave behind. Rohr reflects:

His oar (or occupation) had become a tool for inner work, a means for knowing the difference between wheat and chaff, essentials and nonessentials, which is precisely the turn toward discernment and subtlety that we come to in the second half of life. ... Now he can go home because he has, in fact, come home to his true and full self. His sailing and oaring days of mere “outer performance” are over, and he can now rest in the simplicity and ground of his own inner life. He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being (p.94).

Does this remind you of anyone? Can you perhaps see something of your own journey in Odysseus’ pilgrimage?

Or what of Jacob? Jacob who tried so much to be like Esau, but had to leave home to discover who he really was in his own self and cultivate his own walk with God.

The well-known promotion line is “Don’t leave home without it” but spiritual pilgrimage advice is “Leave home to find it.” (Rohr, p.85) Rohr suggests that to find ourselves, and to move into the best of what our second half of life offers, we have to be prepared to leave what is familiar: “Many just fall in love with their first place and position, as an extension of themselves, and spend their whole life building a white picket fence around it” (p46). Now leaving home is not necessarily geographical but it is being prepared to leave the familiar behind and stretch outside of our comfort zones. In trying new paths we can encounter God in profound ways.

So Jacob’s journey led him to change locations and careers, to marry first one wife and then another (sisters), who wrestled with God and finally reconciled with his brother.

Along this journey, Jacob stopped for a night (Genesis 28:10-19). In rather primitive camping mode took one of the many stones in the area, sued it as a pillow, and dreamed away.

Are you someone who dreams a lot I wonder? My wife Jenni wishes she could turn off the dreams of being a nurse and either being late for a shift, run off her feet or out of her depth with difficult patients. She finds it funny that I am embarrassed that my dreams this week took me back to friendship with Claire Kelly. Where do dreams take you?  

For Jacob, his dream took him to a stairway to heaven (who remembers Led Zeppelin?), and this original stairway to heaven went from earth up to heaven, and angels are going up and down on it – perhaps carrying Jacob’s needs & prayers to God, and returning with blessings and answers to Jacob.  

Ten chapters earlier in Genesis people made a staircase-like-building to reach up to God, a symbol of arrogance; here Jacob saw a vision of a ladder that reached down from heaven, a symbol of communion and fellowship with God.

And at the top God is speaking. And to Jacob – who had been seeking after blessing, career and family, and all the importance that comes from that – God reminded him of who God was and what Jacob’s purpose was; what God was planning to do through Jacob: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

This was the Abrahamic blessing for Abraham and his descendants to be blessed to be a blessing. God called Abraham, and Jacob, so that God could bless them and through them bless all peoples on earth.

I wonder how much I have grasped that call on my life? I wonder how much I realise, really, that God blesses me not just for my own sake, but so that I can bless others? And blesses me so that I can bless not just my own people but those that are far different from my own – all corners of world, all peoples on earth? 

God’s word to us is not “Go back to the corner of the world where you came from” but “Bless all people in and from all corners of world.”

How much do we grasp the multi-culturally inclusive heart of God? How much do we get – as individuals and as churches – that God wants to bless us, so that we can be a blessing to our neighbourhoods and our world?

In Jacob’s journey, God wanted him to know that he was blessed to be a blessing.

And God wanted Jacob to know a second truth too ...  

15 “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Part of the good news about the God of the Bible is that God promises to be with us wherever we go – it’s up to us to be attentive.

When I first went to church at Bulleen and started as a youth pastor, an elder Howard Smith pulled me aside and said “I want to tell you three things: ‘You can do it. You’re not alone. And I believe in you.’” That blessed me that he meant those things, and it blessed me that he took time aside to speak those encouraging words into my life.

The message of the Bible, that God took the time to inspire for us, is similar to: “You can do it. You’re not alone. I believe in you.”

This reminds me of the beautiful truth that God is committed to be with us.

The whole Bible teaches that God is with us and we are not alone. The Psalmist appreciated:

   You know when I leave and when I get back;
      I'm never out of your sight. ...
   I look behind me and you're there,
      then up ahead and you're there, too—
      your reassuring presence, coming and going.
..
 7 Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit?
      to be out of your sight?
   If I climb to the sky, you're there!
      If I go underground, you're there!
   If I flew on morning's wings
      to the far western horizon,
   You'd find me in a minute—
      you're already there waiting!
   Then I said to myself, "Oh, he even sees me in the dark!
      At night I'm immersed in the light!"
   It's a fact: darkness isn't dark to you;
      night and day, darkness and light, they're all the same to you.

And if Psalm 139 communicates that most poetically, Jesus communicates that most earthly – that God is with us, Immanuel.

God’s commitment to us is that God is with us wherever we are.

Our task is to be attentive to that.

Like Jacob, when he awoke from his dream, he thought, v.16 “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it. .... This is none other than the house of God”; what Bethel literally means, “the house of God”.

I don’t know about you, but I often need “God awareness training” to recognise that all the world is Bethel. There is no place God is not. There is no sphere that escapes God’s interest – our family-life or our neighbourhoods, our schools or our offices, where we go to shop or play, rest or work, study or teach. Where is God? In all of these places and more.

Prayer
Ps 139: 23-24 Investigate my life, O God,
      find out everything about me;
   Cross-examine and test me,
      get a clear picture of what I'm about;
   See for yourself whether I've done anything wrong—
      then guide me on the road to eternal life.