If you aren’t a reader…feel free to click off for just a minute! For those of you who are readers, I wanted to tell you about three different things:

Some of you are familiar with the local alternative newspaper called “The Stranger” that is available in lots of coffee shops around town. It’s pretty edgy, and I’m not recommending it for coffee table reading in your house. However, the June 13 edition had a very unprecedented look at local churches, and Bethany was one of 30 that were reviewed. So you may be interested in that.

This morning, we’re continuing to read the stories of Jacob in the book of Genesis, and will do so for the next several weeks. There are two books that I think you would find interesting on Jacob.

One is a book from Craig Barnes called “Hustling God,” which looks at some of the themes of the scripture story and our lives.

The other is from an author I quote a lot, Frederick Buechner, a novel based on the Jacob story called “Son of Laughter.”

I’ll probably mention those today or in the next few weeks.

Last week, we walked through the initial part of Jacob’s story: the birth of Jacob and his twin brother Esau, with Jacob grasping at Esau’s heel even as they came out of the womb. And the story of how Jacob cunningly took both the birthright of inheritance and the blessing of his father from Esau, to whom they rightfully belonged.

When Esau found out that his brother had stolen even his father’s blessing, he was furious and wanted to kill Jacob. Their mother, Rebekah, who had conspired with Jacob in this deed, urged Jacob to leave home and go back to the safety of their relatives in Haran, many miles to the north. This morning our story covers this journey.

Read: Genesis 28:10-22.

This is such a great story! And this morning I just want to poke around at it. Let’s first be clear on one thing. Jacob is well-named: Striver, supplanter, grasper, schemer, hustler. As far as we know up to this point in Genesis, it is all he has ever been.

He has this great heritage- grandson of the Abraham and Sarah, son of Isaac and Rebekah, the matriarchs and patriarchs of God’s people. His family has been on the cutting edge of learning about faith in this mysterious, demanding God they called YAHWEH, or as Buechner’s novel names God, “The FEAR.” They’ve learned a lot about trusting God, about receiving blessings from God’s hand.

But what Jacob is good at…is going and getting what he wants. At grasping. He thinks, he plans, he executes, he gets. Jacob would fit in well to our world, wouldn’t he?

• “Figure out how to get what you want.”
• “It’s not about what you deserve, but what you can negotiate (marketing slogan for a company).”

We run after people who can “make it happen,” who accumulate different kinds of power to get what they want. We exalt them. We call them successful. It’s what drives Jacob. It is his whole world. And now he’s about to have his whole world shaken. He’s about to meet God.

Jacob leaves Beersheba, in the south, where his family has been for some time. He knows the place, he knows the people, he has figured out how to thrive there, he knows how to make things work. But he leaves in a hurry, because he is deathly afraid of his brother Esau. He is living in fear. He is running in fear.

And he is running towards Haran, far to the north. Haran is where Jacob’s grandfather Abraham had lived. It is where his mother Rebekah had come from. His mother’s family is still there. So though Jacob has not lived in Haran before, it is familiar to him. He knows the family is there, he undoubtedly has an idea how he will make things work there. Jacob is a guy who will somehow, someway land on his feet. He will get what he wants.

And then comes the miracle of what I like to call “God’s geography.” As Jacob runs from one familiar place to another, when he’s still in the middle, neither back home nor yet to the place of his extended family…God meets him. Where is he? It just says God meets him “in a certain place.” Jacob is in fact nowhere. He’s out of his territory. Out of his comfort zone.

I often have people ask how God called us out of my career in business and into pastoral ministry. It’s too long of a story to tell, but it started in Oaxaca, Mexico. Anne and I were there on a short-term mission trip, working on a hospital clinic and a school for a week. We were pretty far out of our comfort zone. We’d never been that far out of the country. The climate was different, the food was different, our inadequate Spanish left us very dependent on other people…that’s where it started.

We took a break from our work at lunchtime one day, took a walk out in the hot Mexican sun, and somehow the topic came up out of nowhere: What if God called us into pastoral ministry? It wasn’t much, we only talked about it for 30 seconds. But that’s really when it started. I’m not sure, if we hadn’t been in an unknown climate, culture, land, setting…that we would have heard anything. If we had been in Seattle, where we had jobs, a career, a neighborhood, things that were familiar, knew how to work things, I’m not sure we could have heard.

Jacob knew Beersheba. He knew Haran. But right now he wasn’t in either place. He was somewhere, a certain place. He was nowhere. And God met him.

Mind you, Jacob is not looking to meet God. In fact, as far as we can tell, Jacob has never met God. Oh, he knows the family stories of God speaking to Grandfather Abraham, of the Promise handed down through two generations, of God inciting and then stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac. He’s heard a lot about God…but there is actually nothing to indicate he has ever met God.

It’s the god of his ancestors, but it’s not his god. Like every one of us, especially those who were raised in the church, the moment of truth comes. Will I follow after God myself? Is my faith just what my parents believed, or is there a relationship here for me? Jacob has never met God. Until now. Until he is fearful, and out of his comfort zone.

And how did God meet Jacob? In his sleep. Interesting. We are brought up on some form of Freudian psychology that looks at dreams only as a way of working out our angst. We wake up in the morning and try to figure out what event or person in our life could have caused such a goofy dream.

But in the Bible, God often uses dreams as a way of speaking to people. As Jacob sleeps, that conscious, self-promoting, grasping of his awake mind is temporarily disabled, and God meets him in a dream. Maybe it’s the only way God could meet him. Maybe it’s the only time he’s still enough, or quiet enough, or his defenses are down enough.

In the dream, Jacob sees a ladder, stretching from earth up to heaven. Notice, for you Led Zeppelin fans, this is not a “stairway to heaven!” It’s not something that human beings climb up. There’s a great old spiritual called “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” “We are climbing, Jacob’s Ladder…Every rung goes higher, higher.”

But it’s a misnomer. It’s not really a ladder, the word is better translated as “stairway.” Nor is it Jacob’s. It is a stairway between heaven and earth, with angels ascending and descending, that is, the presence of God, and the Lord Himself appears and speaks. The ladder/staircase, is God’s, not Jacob’s.

Human history is full of our grasping to get to heaven, to work our way towards God. The humans in Genesis 11 built a big city, and then a high tower that would reach far up into the heavens, trying to get to God, trying to make a name for themselves.

What happens here is not that Jacob or any human being ascends to heaven, but that God descends. Heaven comes to earth. And the further we read in scripture, the more defined that becomes, until we see it’s clearest definition in Jesus. Heaven comes to earth.

Who does God descend upon? It’s not the one we probably would have guessed, is it? God should be coming to a person that is holy, right? A person that has acknowledged Him, one who worships, a person who has lived well and rightly, who is fair and generous, who is deserving of God’s attention, that is who God should be coming to, right? Well, Jacob is none of those things. He’s not even looking for God at all!

Neither was Evel Knievel. Remember him? The great daredevil who feared nothing, who did his own fair share of climbing stairs…on motorcycles, flying throught the air, across canyons, over trucks. In March of this year, after 68 years of refusing to acknowledge God’s presence in his life, he said

"All of a sudden, I just believed in Jesus Christ. I did, I believed in him! … I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go."

He contacted Robert Schuller at the Crystal Cathedral, and made a very public profession of faith in Jesus before 4000 people, and asked to be baptized. According to Christianity Today, "Daredevil Knievel's testimony trigger(ed) mass baptisms at Crystal Cathedral. In a spontaneous response described by some worshipers as one of the most spiritually significant events they had ever experienced, an estimated 500 to 800 people came forward for baptism and to commit or rededicate their lives to God.” He wasn’t looking to meet God at all. But apparently, God met him.

I’ll be honest. I can be pretty skeptical. When I first read this, I was very skeptical. I’m skeptical of high profile conversions. I’m skeptical of anything that just happens to take place with television cameras rolling. I’m skeptical of the Crystal Cathedral, and of reports of hundreds of people being baptized on the spur of the moment…I want to say “But did you even know what you were doing?!” But then I remembered Jacob. The schemer, the hustler. He wasn’t looking for God. God was looking for him.

Jacob is a very unlikely candidate for God to reveal himself to. His life has been one long saga of self-sufficiency. His shabby treatment of his brother and father show his lack of integrity.

Buechner’s novel portrays this well, showing Jacob as thinking that God is going to punish him for what he has done. He’s afraid. He should be afraid! But in the dream, God speaks and says

“I will be with you where you are going, and I will keep you. I will bring you here again. I will bring you home.” I am with you, Jacob. I will not leave you until I have done what I said. I will not leave you. I will keep my promise to you.”

What is God doing? He’s showing grace. The kind of grace that sometimes makes me mad. The kind of grace that would meet someone dishonorable, assure them of a future, provide protection, give them an identity. We say we believe in grace. But do we really, when it doesn’t seem fair? When it seems to reward irresponsibility? Just about the time I can work myself into a lather over God pouring such favor onto someone so undeserving, I hear His voice ask me: “How shall I deal with you, Dan? Based on what you deserve? Or grace?” And my heart is quieted.

This text doesn’t make any effort at all to explain why Jacob received God’s favor. It merely records that it happens. And even when it does, it doesn’t all end happily ever after. Jacob receives the amazing news of God’s favor, of land, children, blessing, protection, presence…and even still must negotiate and reach and grasp:

“If God will be with me, If God keeps me safe, If I come again to my father’s house…then the Lord shall be my God.” He’s still negotiating! He’s still trying to earn something that is already his. Craig Barnes says “Doing nothing is not easy for Jacob. He is sure he has to do something, and that is the only thing that makes it impossible to receive grace.”

Now, here’s the rub. Jacob may not have been looking for God at all. But once he encounters Him, things will never be the same again. Jacob will never be able to hold God at a distance and say only “that’s the god of my ancestors.” He will never be able to think of God as a list of do’s and don’ts. When God speaks again to him, he will never be able to say he does not recognize his voice. And every time he lives out his scheming, clutching nature, he will remember again this God who says: “Why are you trying so hard to gain what you’ve already been given?” Nothing will ever be the same for Jacob again.

So what about you and me this morning?

Is it possible that, like Jacob, you know some things about God, maybe you even know a lot about God…but have never actually encountered Him? Is it possible?

Is it possible that you are a person who is used to simply going and getting what you want, finding a way to make it happen…and find it very difficult to receive anything? I think the pace of our lives in this culture reflect this. Our busyness is often our way of climbing the ladder. We even take pride in being busy. Few of us enjoy responding to “How are you?” with an answer like “Boy, I’m just rested and relaxed and enjoying life immensely.” We never do that! It makes us feel guilty! We’re much more comfortable saying “I’m so busy, I’m exhausted, I don’t know if I can make it.”

Is it possible that you are in an “in-between” place right now? Maybe you feel like you’re nowhere, like you don’t know where you are going, that you are lost for one reason or another and things are out of your control. I would propose that maybe you are exactly where God wants you, and can finally speak to you. Then the word for you might be “Don’t hurry away. Don’t manipulate. Sit for awhile, stack some rocks, worship.” God’s idea of geography might be very different than yours.

Jacob isn’t any different than we are. He didn’t need another ladder to climb. He needed God. He needed the presence of God to walk down a staircase from heaven to earth and find him. In Jesus Christ, it is exactly what God has done, once in history and again and again in our lives. And when we encounter Christ, whether we were looking for Him or not, things will never be the same again.