“And Jacob awoke…” (Genesis 28:16)
There is religion, and then there is
God. The two do not necessarily coincide. A person can be very religious and
not have a clue when it comes to knowing God. By “knowing God” I mean a conscious
awareness of the presence of God. Spiritually speaking, all that matters is being
in God’s presence. If religious beliefs, practices, rules, and rituals help
people know God, the that is great! But if they get in the way of knowing God,
then they should be discarded. The religion of Jesus’ day – the religion of the
Pharisees and Sadducees - had gotten in the way of people knowing God. Jesus
preached about knowing God; he called it the Kingdom of God. He taught with the
authority of firsthand experience, not like the secondhand traditions of the scribes
and Pharisees. The religious big wigs didn’t like Jesus’ teaching, but the
people loved it. Consequently Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders. Ultimately
he was killed by temple and synagogue authorities in cooperation with the Roman
state, who did the dirty work of crucifixion. Neither politics nor religion can
tolerate people knowing God firsthand, because it undermines their authority.
True spirituality begins by awakening
to the presence of God. This fall I am going to be doing some sermons on the
Presence of God. This is the heart of Jesus’ message and of Christianity. Today
I will begin by talking about waking up to the Presence of God. God is present,
and it is essential that we wake up and see this for ourselves. God is present
here now and is always present everywhere. God is Spirit; Spirit knows no spatial
or temporal boundaries. God is not bound by time and space. There is no place
where God is not. Psalm 139:8 says, “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art
there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” There is no place or
time God is not.
That means that God is not just inside
some people and not in other people. God is not just within some good righteous
Christian people and not in ordinary people or bad people. If that were true,
God would not be omnipresent, and would not be God. God is present everywhere.
There is no inside and outside for God. As high as you can go in the heavens
and as low as you can go into the subatomic world, God is present. God is
omnipresent – always and everywhere present. The spiritual life begins when one
wakes up to this presence of God, when one experiences this reality for oneself.
The omnipresence of God is more than a theological doctrine; it is one’s
experiential reality. The spiritual life begins in earnest when one wakes up.
The patriarch Jacob woke up – both
physically and spiritually. Our OT scripture for today is the famous story of
Jacob’s ladder in Genesis 28. It is the beginning of the spiritual
transformation of Jacob. It is not the whole story. Jacob’s transformation is
not complete until chapter 32 when he wrestles with God (or wrestles with an
angel of God) and his name is changed to Israel. That name change signifies an
inner change. That was the culmination of the process of spiritual
transformation that began when he had a dream about a ladder stretching between
heaven and earth.
Up to this point when Jacob had this
dream-vision of a stairway to heaven, Jacob was not the nicest fellow. In fact
he was a real scoundrel. Earlier chapters in Genesis record how he tricked his
older brother Esau out of his birthright. Then he tricked his father Isaac into
giving him the paternal blessing intended for Esau. Jacob schemed and
maneuvered and lied and deceived to get the lion’s share of the family fortune
for himself. Jacob was not a nice guy.
His behavior got him into trouble. As
Chapter 28 opens Jacob is in the wilderness running for his life. His brother Esau
wants to kill him, and for good reason. Seeing the danger to her son, Jacob’s
mom, Rebecca, thought it would be best if Jacob left town for a while until his
brother cooled off. So Jacob went off by himself to stay with his Uncle Laban
for a while. Laban lived a few hundred miles away, so it was a long walk. As
night fell on his first night away from home, Jacob laid down on the ground,
pulled up a rock for a pillow and fell asleep. The scripture says:
Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its
top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and
descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: “I am the Lord
God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac …. Behold, 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 spoken to you.” Then Jacob awoke
from his sleep and 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!” (Genesis 28:12-17)
Jacob woke up to a spiritual reality
that he never knew existed. He is the forerunner of all those who have ever become
aware of a higher dimension of reality. Christian history is filled with
examples of people waking up in this manner. One of my favorite people in
church history is Brother Lawrence. He was a seventeenth century monk who lived
in a Carmelite monastery in Paris. He left us a wonderful little book of
conversations and letters entitled “The Practice of the Presence of God.” I
have mentioned this book before, and I am sure I will mention it again, because
it is so important for understanding how to live in the Presence of God. The
narrator of this little book describes Brother Lawrence’s conversion:
“That in the winter, seeing a tree
stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time, the leaves
would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a
high view of the Providence and Power of GOD, which has never since been
effaced from his soul. That this view had perfectly set him loose from the
world, and kindled in him such a love for GOD, that he could not tell whether
it had increased in above forty years that he had lived since.”
For Brother Lawrence it was something
as simple as seeing a tree in winter and pondering the changes in that tree that
opened him up to the spiritual reality of the Presence of God. He saw with his
spiritual eyes the truth of the changing nature of this world, and it ushered
him into the changeless Reality of God.
John Wesley, the founder of
Methodism, had such an experience in 1738. By this time he was already an
ordained Anglican clergyman. He knew and accepted in all the doctrines of
Christianity. He had a degree from Oxford University. He had even served as a missionary
in America in Georgia. But then on May 24, 1738 something happened. That
evening he attended a meeting in Aldersgate in London. Someone read from Martin
Luther's Preface to the Epistle to Romans. About 8:45 pm "while he was
describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt
my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for
salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even
mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." Wesley identifies that
as the transformative moment in his spiritual life. The head knowledge became a
heart reality at that moment.
This type of awakening is the heart
of Christianity. It moves us from the realm of beliefs and ideas, emotions and
rituals, into the Presence of God. Spiritual awakening has three
characteristics.
First, it is an opening to the
spiritual dimension of existence. Jacob thought that this physical world was
all there was. Then in an instant his eyes were opened, and he realized there
was a higher dimension, a spiritual dimension of reality. The veil between the
physical world and the spiritual world was opened. Jacob had thought he was
alone in the wilderness, and then all of a sudden he awoke from his sleep –
physically and spiritually – and exclaimed, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it…. How awesome
is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate
of heaven!” He awoke to the reality
that God was present with him all along.
There are parallels between spiritual
awakening and physical awakening. Each night we sleep, and we dream – whether
or not we remember our dreams. During sleep our dreams feel very real. They
feel like they are really happening. While we are dreaming we do not know it is
a dream. It is reality for us at the moment. Then we wake up and find ourselves
in our bed in our bedroom, and we realize it was a dream. It wasn’t real. Spiritual
awakening is like this. We are living this physical life and it feels real. Of
course in one sense it certainly is real. I am not suggesting that we are
living in an illusion – like in some science fiction film - and actually dreaming now. I am not saying you will wake up
in a moment and be in your pajamas. This world is physically real. I am not
playing mind games with you.
I am making an analogy. I am saying
that there is another world more real than this physical one. Just like this
physical world is more real than the dream world we enter into every night, so
also is there a spiritual world more real than this physical world. And we don’t even know it exists until we wake
up. But most people never wake up. They live all their lives in this physical
world without ever knowing there is a more; there is a real spiritual world.
Spiritual awakening is waking up to that spiritual world. Jesus calls it entering
the Kingdom of God. He calls it being “born of the Spirit” and “born from above.”
He says, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see
the kingdom of God.”
The second characteristic of
spiritual awakening is GRACE. It is always experienced as a gift. It is not
something we can work at and achieve by our religious efforts or moral living.
We don’t earn it. When we wake up from sleep every morning we would never think
that we earned this waking state by what we did in our dreams. Likewise we do
not earn eternal life, which is what I am talking about, sharing the very life
of God - by what we do in our physical life. It is a gift. As Christians we
describe this as the grace of God. Paul says, “For by grace you have been saved
through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works,
lest anyone should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8)
The third characteristic of spiritual
awakening is Christ. Christ is the Way to wake up to the Presence of God. That
is what the apostle Paul is referring to in Ephesians. It is what John Wesley
was referring to and Brother Lawrence was referring to. It is even what Jacob experienced,
even though he lived two thousand years before Jesus was born. That is the
meaning of our gospel lesson.
In our gospel story Philip introduces
Jesus to Nathanael. During the conversation, Nathanael wakes up to who Jesus
really is. He sees Jesus’ true identity. His eyes are opened and he says to
Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel.” Jesus’ reply
is important. He says to him, “You will see greater things than this.” And He
said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven
open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
Jesus is referring to the story of Jacob’s ladder. Jesus was saying that he is
the stairway between heaven and earth. Christ in his eternal nature as the Son
of God is our opening into the presence of God. We experience God in and through
Christ.
Later in the gospel of John, Jesus is
having a conversation with Philip, who was the one who introduced Nathanael to
Jesus in chapter 1. In this conversation Jesus says those famous words, “I am the
way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
But those words we not the end of the conversation. Philip replies to Jesus,
“Show me!” Jesus says, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father…. I am in the
Father, and the Father in Me.” In all these words Jesus is saying that he is
the portal that opens into heaven. When we see Christ, we know God.
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