Rocky Ground
Rocky
Ground
Genesis 28:10-19; Matthew 13:24-43
July 20, 2014
I have spent a few nights sleeping
on the ground, looking for something on which to rest my weary head, but I have
never resorted to using a rock as a pillow. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding,
I am not that hardheaded.
I have, however, used rocks for all
kinds of other things: I’ve skipped ‘em on water; I’ve stacked ‘em; I’ve thrown
‘em; I’ve built with them; I’ve collected them from interesting places; and
I’ve certainly used them in worship more than a few times.
Rocks are pretty basic. You find
them wherever you go. As I was writing this paragraph – surprise, surprise:
while sitting upstairs at Northside Social last week – I glanced out the window
just in time to see a dump-truck filled with rocks rumble down Wilson Blvd.
No doubt because they are
ubiquitous, rocks show up a lot in scripture, too. Moses strikes the stone to
get water. Jesus, famously, is “the cornerstone that the builder rejected.”
Peter, that great hero of the gospels, takes his very name from the Greek word
for rock. One could go on and on in
this vein.
While the gospel reading this
morning doesn’t mention rocks, Jesus certainly used them in other parables, and
you can pretty easily imagine them in the one we just heard. After all, as
anyone who has ever farmed or gardened knows, if you’re going to plant seeds
you also going to remove rocks.
Jesus points to the weeds rather
than rocks as the problem in this instance, and he does so, I’d suggest, to
underscore both the challenge of getting rid of plants whose roots are entwined
with other plants that you want to keep, on the one hand, and, on the other,
the challenge of telling the roots, themselves, apart from each other. In other
words, Jesus is suggesting that what we might believe is a clear and easily
identifiable distinction between the good and the bad, the insiders and the
outsiders, the saved and the damned, is, after all, a confusing mess of reality
that we might be wise to leave to God for final sorting.
That’s a kernel of wisdom worthy of
our attention, especially when dealing with the challenges of multi-layered,
overdetermined texts such as, oh, pretty much the whole of Genesis – which is
to say, there are lots of ways to read the Abraham saga, including this
morning’s little story about Jacob, but we only have time for one sermon today.
There are probably as many interpretations available of this story of Jacob’s
hard pillow as there are stories with rocks and stones in the Bible.
With more than 500 mentions of
rocks and stones in scripture, I’m not going to guarantee that Jacob is the
only character who chooses to sleep on one, but his rock-headed experience is
certainly both the best known in all of literature – Biblical or otherwise –
and among the most significant dream sequences in all of scripture.
So much turns on what happens to
Jacob as he slept with his head on a rock, alone in the wilderness.
Let’s look at that for a moment:
alone, in the wilderness, sleeping with his head against a stone. I can easily
imagine Jacob asking, as the Talking
Heads sang many years ago, “how did I get here?”
Well, not to put too fine a spin on
it, but this is what happens when you fool your aging, blind father in order to
cheat your brother out of his blessing after already pulling a fast one on said
brother concerning his birthright. Big brother gets angry. Murderously so,
according to the story.
So Jacob finds himself in the
wilderness fleeing from Esau. This is not the way it was supposed to be for the
descendants of Abraham. God promised that they would be “a great nation,” but
now the family is coming apart at the seams – broken by their own faults and
failings – and Jacob is utterly bereft.
It makes no sense that this would
be the point in the story when God steps in decisively, unless, that is, this
God makes a habit of showing up in utterly unexpected places to comfort and
confront people in their most vulnerable, powerless moments.
And, of course, that is the
essential character of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the God of Isaiah,
Amos and Micah; the God of Jesus.
This God – and this God’s followers
– are revealed in places of frightening vulnerability, deep brokenness, utter
powerlessness.
Thus the story of Jacob is decisively
instructive, because it reveals essential truths about human nature and about
the nature of God – about the creature and the Creator. We can all see bits and
pieces of our own stories in the saga of the first family of the Bible: we’ve
seen and experienced jealousies, fears, sibling rivalries, small lies that grow
into deep rifts in families, losses, longings – all of the things that shape
and misshape our lives.
But this part of the story –
Jacob’s flight – is, first and foremost, a story about God. Moreover, this
particularly odd story about Jacob and his stairway to heaven, marks the first
time that God utters the promise by which God will be known, especially to
those of us who know God best through the story of Jesus. For it is to Jacob
that God promises to be present always. Here, in this wilderness, God promises
to a refugee to be Emmanuel – God with us.
As Walter Brueggemann put it, “God
commits [God’s] self to the empty-handed fugitive. The fugitive has not been
abandoned. This God will accompany him.”[1]
These days, I cannot read this
story without looking at the current crisis along the border. After all, this
is a refugee story. This is a story about someone fleeing violence, tumult and
chaos, albeit, in the case of Jacob he surely brought a great deal of it on
himself. If God shows up for this
refugee in his moment of crisis,
surely God – and, more to the point, God’s followers – will show up in the
present crisis to bring comfort and hope to the most vulnerable ones.
I probably ought to have used the
plural there: crises. Lord knows there’s more than one border in crisis at the
moment, as the news from Gaza reminds us each day. Like the story of Jacob, these
border crises are complicated, with multiple causes, and layers of history.
Truth be told, every true crisis
has its own particular history, and acknowledging that simple fact of complex
reality might be the first lesson for us. Jacob caries the weight of his own
history, perhaps like a stone on which to rest his weary head.
Trying to solve his family’s
problems from the outside looking in would have been just about as likely as,
oh, I don’t know … as likely as any outsider solving the Israel-Palestine
conflict without input from the parties themselves.
One thing I do know for certain:
throwing the Bible at the conflict isn’t going to solve anything. That’s true,
for sure, of any conflict, but all the more so of one whose sides want to make
claims based on these stories from Genesis and Exodus. It’s lousy history, and
even worse theology because it denies the particularity of the story.
The story of Jacob and Esau is
obviously not identical to the story of the United States and Central America,
and no more so is it identical to the story of Israel and Palestine
The weight of histories presses on
every crisis. Fear, hatred, jealousy, hope, love – all these fall under the
general category of human emotions and experiences, just as the various rocks
and stones you received when you came in this morning fall under the general
category of “rock.”
But they’re not any two of them
exactly the same. One of the most appalling aspects of American foreign policy
over the course of my lifetime has been how willfully ignorant we have been of
the histories of countries we’ve tried to influence diplomatically or change
militarily.
You don’t have to look very far –
certainly not past Facebook – to see this same willful ignorance of histories
in so much of what passes for discussion of the crises of the moment. In the
absence of deep understanding, we tend to cling to ideological convictions, and
so many of those are, ultimately, rooted in old injuries, woundedness, fears
and hatreds. Ideologies rooted in memories of Nakba or of Holocaust do more to
flame passions than to spark compassions in the Middle East.
So we have these incredible
complicated and difficult challenges. Does our faith story have anything to
offer?
Well, yes. Here are a couple of
things that stand out for me from the story of Jacob’s ladder.
First, be mindful and prayerful. Be
aware, both in general terms about what’s going on, but more importantly, be
aware of what disturbs you, what keeps you up at night, what really ticks you
off – those are often the places that God is speaking.
Is it children at risk – on the
border, in Gaza, in your neighborhood? Is it violence against women – refugees,
in warzones, right here at home? Is it minority groups denied their rights? Is
it the myriad ways we threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care?
What keeps you up at night?
Take the rock that you were given
this morning, and carry it around all day long today or tomorrow. Literally. Carry
it. It will be inconvenient. It might be uncomfortable. You’ll probably wish to
be rid of it. Every time you feel that desire to pitch it, pause for a moment
and think about what keeps you up at night. Then try to put a face with the
concern, and remember that this person – this child, this young gay man, this
woman, this Palestinian, this Colombian, this unemployed vet on the streets in
DC – this child of God doesn’t get to set aside her suffering.
God’s promise to be present to
Jacob reveals the first principle – or, perhaps better – the first challenge
for faithful responses to the crises of this moment: be compassionate.
Compassion – literally, to suffer with – demands our authentic presence with
those who suffer. If I cannot personally be physically present, I can support –
with time, talent and treasure – those who can be. That’s why the Presbyterian
Peace Fellowship is a significant part of my life.
I noted that there are lots of
rocks in scripture, and that they can mean lots of things. The stone you have
can mean various things as well. So, in addition to thinking about what
disturbs you, let that stone remind you also of the broken places in your own
life. We all have them, and we all carry around like so many stones – like
rocks in our pockets.
They make really lousy pillows. In
truth, they disturb our rest and disrupt our sleep.
They also make it really hard to be
authentically present, to be compassionate, because they keep us overly focused
on our own suffering.
The way of Jesus – who reveals for
us this God who promises to be present always – goes by way of the suffering of
others. That way doesn’t promises that we will not be hurt, but it does suggest
that the best way through our own pain is into the suffering of others.
Hold on to this stone – let it be
for you a stone of hope and a small monument to two things: the ways that God
is present for you in your own pain; and the ways God calls you to be present
to the suffering of others.
Be compassionate, as God is. It
won’t put an end to the problems of the world, but it is a gracious end in and
of itself, and on these stones of hope we build our stairways to heaven. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
6:42 AM
