We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder
We are climbing Jacobs ladder
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder
Soldier of the cross
Jacob is travelling alone.
It gets dark.
He looks around.
Where is he?
He is somewhere. Or is it nowhere? It doesn’t have a name.
It’s just a place.
A certain place
He hasn’t exactly arrived here. He has not chosen it as a place that he wants to be. He was on his way from Beer sheba to Haran, and as the sun started to set, there he was, in a place.
A certain place.
Sounds more like an uncertain place.
It’s more like the place chose him.
The word “place” shows up three times in the first two sentences of the story that Laurie just read for us.
Jacob 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.
Has that ever happened to you?
You find yourself in a place, for no other reason than the fact that you are there, and you have to make the best of it?
For Jacob, making the best of it, means finding a rock.
A rock?
Yes… a rock.
The rock will be his pillow.
Not much of a pillow.
So…
Jacob is in a place that has nothing to say for itself.
And the best he can do for himself, is find a rock to lay his head on.
What is a place?
We can understand this idea in two ways.
The first thing we think of when we hear the word “place” is a physical location. A spot on the planet.
But most places have names that we can use to identify them.
As I deliver this sermon, I am in a place – a town – called Jaffrey.
I have another name for this place. I call it “church.”
If I call it a “place” I give it no meaning except that it exists on the globe.
If I call it “Jaffrey” I give it a shared, public meaning. If told someone I am in Jaffrey, they might be able to meet me here.
If I call this place “my church” I give it a personal meaning. With this name, perhaps, I can try to find myself…
The other place – the second place, as it were – is not a physical location, but a moment in life.
Here is an example.
Once, when I was in my early twenties, I walked into a town in Washington State, as the sun was setting.
I had some friends in Seattle, but I had no car so I couldn’t get to them.
I had no money, so I couldn’t get a motel room.
I had been camping out in the woods, so I had a tent, but it felt strange and maybe even illegal, put up my tent in a public park in a town.
So I stood there on the pavement, looking at the dreary little town on the edge of the mountains.
It was getting dark.
And as the shadows grew, I felt the emptiness of the place. Everyone had gone home. All the doors were closed. All the windows shut.
I felt alone.
Deeply alone.
Not so much lonely…
I felt abandoned. It wasn’t other people, really, that abandoned me. My parents were on the other side of the country – but they were still alive back then, and I knew that they loved me, and that I had a home with them. So this feeling of being abandoned was not a feeling of being left alone in the world.
It was the feeling – tugging at the edges of my soul – that the world could be like this.
The world could put me in this place…
Or, perhaps I had done it to myself.
Either way, I found myself in a “place” – a location without a name.
Strangely, I had arrived in a moment when I was alive, and yet life itself seemed to be happening somewhere else.
Not here.
Without a name or a purpose to give it meaning a “place” is like a vacant lot. Cigarette butts collect on its edges. Crumpled beer cans lie in the tall grass.
This, you understand, is a kind of spiritual unease.
Not a sickness, but a form of disorientation.
To have a spirit is to have a kind of larger awareness – an awareness of self that is set within an awareness that is greater than self.
A greater meaning.
But somehow, human consciousness has the unique capacity to be aware of self, and to be aware of meaning, while, at times, losing the connection between the two.
This, maybe is the second “place” – an uncertain spiritual place – a place that has no name.
When you are there you are not sure what to do.
All you can do, is do what is next.
Whatever that may be.
It’s a simple thing. But it requires an act of faith.
Take the next step, even if it seems to lead nowhere.
For Jacob, the next thing was to find a rock.
For me?
Well, I turned around and walked back out of town.
There were apple orchards surrounding the town, so I found my way into one of these orchards, and lay down under an apple tree.
And went to sleep.
**
Every rung goes higher and higher
Every rung goes higher and higher
Every rung goes higher and higher
Soldier of the cross
When Jacob went to sleep, he had a dream:
Jacob dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
I’ve read this story many times, but this time around, I realized something new about it.
In the text, it says that Jacob dreamed that a stairway was “set up on the earth.”
This phrase is indefinite. It could be anywhere on earth.
And indeed… when I dream, the “place” of my dream is not necessarily located in the place where I am sleeping.
In fact I would say that the “place” of my dreams is almost never located in the place where I happen to be sleeping.
And yet, when Jacob wakes up from this remarkable dream – this dream that literally connects Heaven and Earth – he weaves the dream to that specific place:
Then Jacob woke 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.”
The stairway appeared in a dream.
In a dream.
We have been talking about different kinds of “place.” What about a “dream place?” A dream “place” is yet another variety of “place.” What kind of reality does a dream place have?
Dreams are kind of wild card. Each of us experiences them in our own unique way. But perhaps we can say this about dreams – dreams are removed from everyday, conscious experience. For me, at least, a place in a dream is a more fluid, less anchored reality, than a place that I experience while awake. While I am dreaming I can be in walk out of my home and step onto a gondola on a Venetian canal, and then, without any transition, find myself in a subway station in New York, or on a windswept headland along the coast of Scotland.
But Jacob’s dream is anchored. It is located. Jacob insists on connecting the dream with the specific place where he fell asleep.
I looked over the story again, paying attention to the word “place” and I noticed something. The three times that the word “place” is used in the first two sentences of the story, the language that surrounds the word is uncertain. Before the dream, the place where Jacob lay his head was either indefinite: “A certain place,” or, if it was definite, it was generic: “the place.” The third time the word was used, it was definite, but over there: “That place.”
Now, after the dream has transformed it, the place is definite, specific, and right here: this place.
Jacob marvels: “How awesome is this place.”
Jacob has fully embraced this place. This place that, moments ago, he had essentially dismissed as being a place devoid of purpose or meaning, is now a place of awesome discovery.
This place is where Heaven and earth are connected.
Not a certain place.
Not the place.
Not that place.
but this place.
This is the holy place
This is the holy moment.
The rich bass-baritone voice of Paul Robeson – the great African American singer, athlete and activist, introduced us, at the beginning of today’s service, to another way of experiencing Jacob’s ladder.
The Negro Spiritual “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” gives yet another experience of place in this story.
This spiritual arose out of the fields of slavery. It became a song filled with hope; a song that resounded through the black communities during the Civil War.
We are climbing higher and higher
We are climbing higher and higher
We are climbing higher and higher
Soldier of the cross
In the story that Laurie read for us, Jacob sees a stairway in a dream.
He observes the angels climbing up and down on the stairway.
He locates the stairs where he is.
But Jacob does not climb the stairway himself.
In the Negro spiritual, though, those who sing are eager to climb.
They don’t want to just be in this place.
This place, is a place they want to climb out of…
Faced with spiritual unease, they want to climb.
This place…
This holy place
This holy moment
is not a place to sleep
For enslaved people, to transform a place from an indistinct, uncertain place to holy a place is not simply to give the place a name. To transform a place into this place, is to make it a place to climb.
to climb to freedom.
Jacob’s ladder.
Do not imagine that any place – any spot on earth, or any moment in life, is without meaning.
If you feel it is without meaning… that, perhaps, is when it has the most meaning…
That, perhaps, is where God meets us…
when there is nothing but a rock for a pillow, that, maybe, is when Heaven and Earth are joined.
Insist on the holiness of this place.
Insist on the holiness of this moment.
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder…
Seize the moment
to climb
to freedom.
Amen