Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's July 10, 2005 Sunday worship service.

---

Holy Intrusion

Genesis 28:10-22

Bethel 7/10/05

Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD

If it hadn’t been for Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb and his opening of the first round-the-clock power plant on Pearl Street in Manhattan in 1882, chances are, our lives would be a lot different. Now, of course, artificial light is everywhere, and our telephones and televisions never shut down even as the internet allows you to shop, gamble, work or flirt at 3 am. Fatigue, sleep deprivation, insomnia, sleep apnea have become household terms that we use to describe the inability of our body to get the kind of rest that it needs. And now, there is a whole branch of medical science devoted to research on the rhythm of sleep and what blocks or helps us to sleep better.

Whether we sleep well or don’t, the time between going to bed and waking up is an odd time when we let our guard down, when we are especially vulnerable to forces beyond our control. In traditional Christian piety, sleep was seen as a foretaste and preparation for death – remember the old children’s bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” As the father of a child who once did some serious sleep walking, I can testify that there is an alternative reality that goes along with our sleeping, a dream world that opens a door onto our subconscious. When someone is in that state of deep sleep, yet whose mind and body are fully active and awake, the advice is not to awaken them but to enter with them into their dream world. I have been shot and killed in a revolutionary war battle ( I was a Redcoat, in case you’re wondering)’ I’ve been the patient in a psychiatrist’s office, been instructed to tell the psychiatrist my “sad thoughts and my happy thoughts”;; I’ve been tied up with rope and I’ve been hunted in a game of hide and seek and I almost had my hair cut around midnight one night. And so I, for one, know how real dreams can be. Sigmund Freud, of course, made a defining study of dreams; he understood that in dreams unexpected and sometimes unwelcome messages come to us that have force and meaning, often embodying those parts of our life that we do not understand or control.

Anyone with young children knows that they fear the dark because they believe ghosts and spooks operate at night when we cannot see them, and its so hard for them to separate the world of dreams from reality.

The biblical record suggests that the night was frequently a time when God spoke in dreams. That, of course, is what happened to Jacob. Jacob has just duped his older twin brother, Esau, out of the birthright, and Jacob, in our text, is now fleeing for his life. He is alone, running to his mother’s relatives. But he must stop to sleep. In this condition, he is a good candidate for an intrusion from beyond. And so it was that God sent him a dream. At sundown, with stone for pillow and ground for bed, he lies down. That’s when God intrudes.

In the Bible, sometimes, dreams come to people as warnings, such as the three magi who were warned in a dream not to return to King Herod but to go home by another way. Or sometimes, in the Bible, dreams are a vehicle for teaching a lesson, such as the dream-vision that came to Peter in the Book of Acts, telling him that certain meat was no longer unclean, that his diet was no longer restricted by Jewish Law, could now include whatever he wished, which was a symbolic message that God’s people now included Gentiles as well as Jews. Other times, dreams hold forth the startling vision for a new heaven and a new earth, such as is recorded by the prophet and seer in the Book of Revelation.

But Jacob’s dream, I think, is of a different sort. He dreams of angels coming and going upon a ladder connecting earth and heaven, messengers from another world. He dreams of the Lord standing alongside of him and speaking anew about the future and the covenant. He hears God’s voice of promise, a promise rooted in the promise of the land. This odd holy voice that comes to Jacob in the night promises to be with this fugitive and to bring him safely home. God’s choice of Jacob, just like God’s choice of his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, and his father, Isaac, is an odd choice, given the assumption in ancient culture that gods should favor the first born, which Jacob was not, and that the strong and the mighty would be the chosen ones, and Jacob, unlike his older twin brother Esau, was soft and tender, a Moma’s boy who ordinarily stayed close to home.

Jacob’s dream is a dream about assurance, the assurance that no matter what you fear, no matter what you are running to or running from, that God is going to be present when night falls, whenever you are most vulnerable and weak. There is the assurance of companionship and the promise of providential care in Jacob’s dream, and in that sense, his dream is for all of us who are sons and daughters of Jacob and prime candidates for our own experience of God’s holy intrusion.

When you think about Jacob’s dream and the place where he had it, it’s not hard to understand why our spiritual ancestors in this place decided on the name Bethel. It is a comforting thought, to know that God’s angels are with you in the night, especially if fear or guilt or shame hangs over you like a dark shadow, as they all probably did with Jacob. Remember, Jacob had done some pretty cowardly things, like trick his brother out of the birthright in exchange for that bowl of stew and lying to his father, Isaac, so that he would get the blessing instead of Esau, the firstborn. The fear of what Esau, the hunter, might do if he caught him, no doubt, weighed heavy on Jacob’s mind as he fled toward Haran, the place where his mother’s relatives could give him shelter and refuge.

But that night and dream at Bethel became a place, not of God’s judgment, but an occasion for renewing the divine promise and letting Jacob know that in spite of his past, God wasn’t going to abandon him.

I’m sure, back in 1818, the founders of this Bethel knew all about Jacob’s checkered past and his tendency to only care about himself. Other options for a name surely abounded, but they settled on the name that Jacob gave to the place where God gave him his dream. It was the place where Jacob responded to God’s holy intrusion by anointing his stone pillow with oil, thus making an altar, naming the place Bethel or house of God, and then making a pledge, that is, committing himself to give a tithe, 10% of all world possessions, as a thank offering for God’s rescue and redemption.

I had the thought this week that, like Jacob on the run from an angry brother, that the real issue we have to work through as a congregation in the coming weeks is the issue of fear. There hasn’t been enough talk about fear as I think there needs to be. Everyone that I know of who has carefully considered the problems we face at our Bethel believes that a dream is needed here, a dream for change to these buildings. But how do you get there?
Fear instead of faith has come to us in the night, and some see the dream as a nightmare instead of the message from God that it might very well be. I think actually, everyone is afraid, but for a variety of different reasons.

I’d like to name several of the fears as I see them, so they can be brought out of the darkness and exposed to the light. I realize that naming them won’t make them magically go away, but maybe, over time, they can become less fearful.

For some who fear, it is the financial fear of the unknown; you simply don’t want to risk it, “it” being not a building program, per se, but “it” being failure. I haven’t heard anyone own up to this fear, but it is there. You fear what others in the community will think if we make a commitment to a building program and then we can’t come through. You fear a sudden downturn in the economy; you fear maintaining the budgetary status quo while taking on a major capital project. You fear the change of losing familiar space. The safe thing to do, then, is to not take any chances.

The problem with this type of financial fear is that you have forgotten the most basic theology of the church that you learned here in Sunday School – the image of the body of Christ where all are connected. Different functions, hands, eyes, feet, ears, different abilities, but all part of the same body. So what if you simply can’t make the size financial offering that you think you should make? Do you not trust that God will work through other parts of the body to make what needs to happen, happen?

The antidote for this fear is this: I believe there does come a time to trust that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, and I, for one, hope that each one will make this a matter of serious prayer, to consider, not just what is impossible for you, but to ponder what is possible for the whole body when the whole body is being faithful to God’s call and leading. I’m going to repeat that: in our prayers, don’t focus on what is impossible for you, but seek God’s direction on what is possible for the whole body.

Certainly, no one should be coerced to give, but at the same time, anyone who wants to give should not be blocked from doing so, if there is agreement, as I believe there is, that something has to be done. Jacob’s tithe came not because God told him he had to do it, but because he responded to the gracious promise of God that came to him in a dream.

There’s another kind of fear of a very different sort I also want to name. It’s the fear that if this building isn’t preserved by either leaving it alone or, if relocated, by keeping the basic structure and “feel” of the space, that then, if that is lost -- the physical sensation of what has been -- then Bethel as a church, as a congregation, has somehow ceased to be.

I think that this fear is just as deep and just as agonizing as the financial fear. It is the fear of losing an important piece of communal history and generations of attachment and stories that have been tied to this particular sacred space.

And like the financial fear, I know that this one is very, very real. I don’t presume to sit in judgment on either type of fear. But we do need to remind ourselves of the same theology of the church that I just mentioned: the church is a body, not a building; it is a living, breathing organism, a group of believers joined together by the Holy Spirit and set apart to carry forward with the gospel of hope and mercy. If the focus is on the building and its preservation as the end, instead of the vehicle, for heeding Christ’s call, then I believe we have truly and fatally misunderstood the essential teachings of our faith.

There are other fears, fears that a future generation will be saddled with a huge mortgage, or conversely, that a future generation will be saddled with a building whose maintenance problems have become unmanageable. There’s the fear that if something isn’t done, that the young won’t come and the fear that the aged simply can’t come if something is not done. There’s even the fear that the deceased patriarchs and matriarchs are looking over our shoulders, and we’d better not make a mistake.

I may be the only one who experiences fear in this way, but my personal fear is not the money or the possibility the building may not survive a move, but my fear is that in our zeal to do the right thing with this building issue, that we will have lost sight of the vision for ministry and mission that got us here in the first place. I fear being held accountable one day – not by you but by God -- for proclaiming a gospel of inclusion, welcome, and embrace of all people which I believe is at the heart of the gospel, when, at least some of the time, it seems I can only talk the talk but not walk the walk because facility inadequacies don’t allow it. To be honest, I fear that some people are going to be hurt or angry, however the path unfolds from here. There’s plenty of fear to go around, if we but dare to name it for what it is.

What is your fear? No one likes to admit they are afraid. Our culture says it’s a sign of weakness and that it leads to failure. But maybe it’s time to come clean with our fear. Maybe, if we truly believe in the reformed doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, the time is now to seek out someone else, not perhaps in this case the person who necessarily agrees with you, but someone you trust with whom you can speak about your fear and confess that. I am certainly available and the elders of the church are available, too.

Naming our fear is what can lead to healing and to hope.

And, remember, like the experience of Jacob that night when he was on the run, that the hour of greatest fear is precisely when God makes a holy intrusion with angels to bring renewal and new direction.

I thought about closing today with something catchy, like what Roosevelt once said, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

But then I thought of something else. It is a word of scripture from I John 4:18

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

If we can truly practice love for one another – no easy task human nature being what it is – practice love . . . .not just the handful of people you speak with on Sunday morning, but genuine love for the whole body, warts, differences of opinion and all; if love is really the aim, then I can assure you that whatever fear you have, by God’s grace, can be taken away.

Sleep well. But remember Jacob, and remember that God just might choose to make a holy intrusion into your dream world, and thus, into your life.

So let it be. Amen.