St. Peter's By The Sea
The Episcopal Church in Narragansett, RI
July 20, 2008 - Jacob’s Ladder
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Good morning. It’s good to be back from vacation and it’s good to see you.
In our Old Testament lesson this morning from the Book of Genesis we heard the well-known story of the dream of Jacob’s ladder, and this morning I would like to share a few thoughts with you about Jacob’s dream and its possible significance for us today.
In many ancient traditions and in modern depth psychology a distinction is made between “little dreams” and “big dreams.” Little dreams are those dreams that seem most ordinary and seem to relate to the events of the day, while big dreams are of a more archetypal nature and seem to have a larger or more collective meaning. These big or archetypal dreams then can speak to us across the ages, and I think Jacob’s dream is of this nature and it is why it is still remembered today, thousands of years later.
Now, when we look at a dream and seek its meaning we often start with looking at the dreamer’s personal situation, with what is going on in his or her life, in order to try to understand what the dream is saying.
When we look at Jacob’s situation we find he is in great turmoil. You will remember that Jacob was a difficult character who had earlier refused to share food with his brother Esau until he got Esau to give him his birth right. And then when their father Isaac was old and close to death and he wished to give his blessing and all his earthly goods to his first-born son Esau, Jacob tricked Isaac and deceived him into thinking he was Esau and he received the blessing instead. So basically, he stole the inheritance from his brother. When Isaac died, Jacob’s mother told him to flee to the land of his Uncle Laban and there to seek a bride, and to stay away long enough for Esau to forgive him and not kill him.
And it was while Jacob was fleeing Beer-sheba and on his way to Haran that we read: “He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. Then the Lord appeared to him and told him this land would be his and then God told him ‘know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.’ ”
Now, I think several things stand out about this dream right away. The first and most obvious one is a point that is hard for many people to accept these days: the fact that we sometimes get messages from God in our dreams, that God can appear to us in our dreams. This was accepted as a fact in biblical times, but is a reality of the Spirit many have lost touch with.
The second obvious point is that God comes to Jacob when he is in great personal turmoil, he’s running away from home to save his life. And in fact, it is often when our lives are falling apart in some way that we can hear what the Spirit is saying to us.
And the third obvious point is that Jacob didn’t have his dream and a divine visitation because he had been so good and deserving. No, Jacob, like the rest of us, is at best a very mixed character and not at all a model of good behavior.
Jacob, however, does show us how to respond to and value our dreams and our spiritual experiences. Jacob paid attention to his dream and he acted upon it. When Jacob woke from his sleep he said “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
And to honor and acknowledge what had happened there, he “rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up on a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the place Bethel,” which means “House of God.”
So Jacob shows us the way to relate to our dreams and other experiences of the Spirit by first paying attention to them, by acknowledging them, and by acting on them. You see, one of us might have had this dream and said in the morning “Oh, I had a strange dream last night” and then gone on about our day and forgotten all about it.
But the deeper question is, what does the dream mean and how might it speak to us this morning. When we have the so-called little dreams we can usually get associations with the elements of the dreams because they come out of our daily life. However, with the big dreams it is more difficult because they often speak to us in a more universal symbolic language, and to understand that we often need to look at the history of religions and the universal symbolic themes.
The ladder is an archetypal image of ascent and descent, and it symbolizes the opening between our ordinary consciousness and the world of the Spirit; it connects heaven and earth. As Jacob says … “This is the gate of heaven.”
The ladder is part of a large complex of symbols, such as the various cosmic mountains found at the center of the world, or mountains of revelation between God and man. The classic example of this is the experience of Moses at Mt. Sinai; then there’s the symbol of the cosmic tree at the center of the world, which early Christians believed to be the Tree of Life, the wood of which became the cross of Jesus. And the tree in ancient Shamanistic tradition is both a tree and a ladder which the holy person climbs to go into the Spirit world or into the underworld.
In all these examples and many others, the great historian of religions, Mucia Eliade, tells us that these various symbols say to us that any place can be the center of the world, the gate to the Spirit. I think as a big dream, Jacob’s dream was not only for him, it was a dream for us also – it is telling us that the place where we are right now, or at any moment, is of significance – it is where we are supposed to be, and it is the gate of heaven. It is where you need to be to meet God.
In the novel the Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber, the main character is a woman named Emmylou who experiences a call from God. In the novel, Emmylou is being examined by a state psychiatrist and Emmylou tells her, “Dr. Wise, I know you want to help me and I appreciate it, but … you’re thinking of all the bad things that happened to me as traumas, leaving psychological scars that grew into a mental disease, which you think I have. I look at them as afflictions sent by God to attract my attention to him.”1
Then Emmy Lou tells the doctor a “big” dream she had. “I dreamed I was getting a guided tour of heaven” Emmylou says. “I was wearing a jumpsuit and a hard hat and my tour guide, he was an angel, of course, but he looked just like a regular man, dressed the same as I was, and we were in this giant building, kind of an industrial shed like in those boring old movies they used to show us in high school, how they make paper or ice cream. And there was this big huge machine in it, whirring and clanking away, and there was a conveyor belt coming out of one end of it, and on the conveyor belt were rows of golden bricks, but softer: they looked like giant Twinkies, row after row of them, and when they got to the end of the conveyor belt they fell off of it. I looked to see where they were falling to and I saw that there was a big hole in the floor there and through it I could see clouds and blue sky and the earth far below. I asked the guide what the Twinkie things were, and he said they were blessings, and I remember thinking, in the dream, how marvelous is the Lord showering all these blessings down on us. Then we moved on, across an alley and into another big huge shed with the same kind of machine cranking away, the same conveyor belt, the same giant Twinkies falling down, and I said to the guide, ‘Oh, these are more blessings,’ and he said, ‘No, those are afflictions,’ and I said, ‘Oh, but they look just the same as the blessings,’ and he said, ‘They are the same!’ ”2
Later, quoting the French saint Simone Weil, she would tell the doctor that the “pure love of God means being exactly as grateful for your afflictions as you are for your blessings.”3
St. Paul advises us in this to “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.”
The dream of Jacob, and even the dream of Emmylou, is for all of us, and it says to us that all of our life, all the good things and even all the bad things are from God. It is a very difficult and even at times an unwelcome suggestion; but the key is that this point of view will open out to the divine, and the gate of heaven will open for you as it did for Jacob and you will know the presence of God in your life.
Jacob’s dream has at least one other important aspect, and that is the angels that he sees ascending and descending on the ladder. This image is such a common one it is easy to take it for granted and not realize what it shows us. For Jacob was experiencing in his dream the presence of God, but also the presence of angels in his life. For it is often the angels of God who bring messages, like the three angels who appeared to Abraham.
The Sufi mystic, Ibu Arabi, says we all have a personal angel, which he calls the “angel of our being.” In the Christian tradition we call this our Guardian Angel. The concept, of course is that each of us actually has an angel assigned to us – to look after and protect us. When you really think about this, though, it’s amazing: that there are spiritual beings in the universe whose job it is to care for us. In fact, an anonymous French monk once wrote that angelic “geniality,” so to speak, shows up only when a human being has need of it. Thus, if we fail to call upon our angels and ask for their help, they languish in a kind of twilight world, unable to fulfill their divine function.
So if we view both our afflictions and our blessings as gifts from God, and call upon our guardian angels to help us understand and work with those gifts, we will in our own way be fulfilling the promise of Jacob’s dream and drawing ever closer to God.
In His Name. Amen.
1 Michael Gruber, The Valley of Bones, pp. 202-203.
2 Ibid, p. 203.
3 Ibid, p. 263.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 8:16 am
Category: Sermons