July 20, 2008

Scripture:         Genesis 28:10-19a

Sermon:           “Ebenezer on the Dashboard”

            Let us now turn to the Word of the Lord.  Open your Bible to the book of Genesis.  Our scripture comes from the 28^th chapter, verses 10 through the first half of 19.  That’s on page 31 of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures in the pew Bible.

            Now, there in the pew Bible we have a drawing of what the patriarch Jacob witnessed in his dream:  “a stairway reaching from earth to heaven”.  It makes me think of a couple of songs.  Slaves in the American South used to sing we are climbing Jacob’s ladder/we are climbing Jacob’s ladder/we are climbing Jacob’s ladder/soldiers of the cross.  You may know that one.  When slaves sang this they were imagining that freedom was closer day by day and the song called them to trust in God to rescue them from bondage.

            Of course there is also that old Led Zeppelin song, “Stairway to Heaven”.  Truth be told, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Genesis 28 and the story of Jacob’s ladder or stairway to heaven.  Great song, though.

            One historical note to keep in mind as we read together:  the place where Jacob had his dream became known as Bethel.  In later days there was a temple to God built there that somewhat rivaled the one in Jerusalem.  When the Israelites divided into a northern and a southern kingdom, the folks in the north wanted their own place of worship.  Jerusalem was a southern city.

            Remnant peoples of that northern kingdom eventually became what was known as the Samaritans in Jesus’ day.  And when you read about the Samaritan woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel, she mentions that old temple in Bethel.  Remember when she said, “my Samaritan ancestors worshiped God on this mountain, but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where we should worship God”?

            Well, today’s story of Jacob is a couple thousand years before all of that.  Something important happened in that place.  So, let’s listen for the Word of the Lord…

            Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran.  He 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 down in that place.  And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.  And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.  Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you god, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  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.”

            So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it.  He called that place Bethel.

            When I was 20 years old, in college, there were some darks days.  I know I’ve mentioned this to many of you before.  Four friends of mine were packed into a little Ford Escort bound for Richmond, Virginia.  Somewhere along Highway 460 over there the car was forced off the road where it went directly into a rather large tree.  Head on.  Probably going 60 miles an hour or so.  In an instant three promising young lives were snuffed out.

            I didn’t talk it about much for years.  Even now I don’t bring it up very often.  The fourth person in the car, a guy I’ve known since I was seven years old, was almost cut in half by his seatbelt.  There’s no real reason for him to have survived.  But he did.  You’ll still find me getting a bit depressed around the date of October 11 every year.  That’s the day it happened.  Anniversaries like that are hard, you may know.

            The two of us, my friend and I, never talked about what happened.  But, eight years to the day when it happened, after he had somehow recovered and was living a kind of life again, we went back to mile marker 6 on Highway 460 outside of Appomattox.  And there we stood in front of that tree.

            We stood there for a while as the breeze from passing cars and trucks shook us.  We just looked at it.  Eight years had gone by and that tree still didn’t have any bark in the place where the car had hit it.

            My friend was going through a depression so deep that he could hardly get out of bed most days.  And there was that tree standing in front of us.  Still scarred around the midsection, you know.  After a while David, my friend’s name is also David, he lifted his shirt up.  And there were still scars around his own midsection, the place where the seatbelt cut into him, the place where several surgeries removed much of his intestines, the place where life almost departed his body just like it had our three friends.  The tree was still scarred.  David was still scarred.

            David still carries around a piece of bark he pulled from that tree on that day.  He says the tree spoke to him.  He heard a voice.  It said, “I’m still here.  I’m still alive.  This scar still hurts, but I’m still growing, still here, still living.  And you’ve got to do the same.”

            David’s not terribly religious.  Spiritual as you can get.  But, he doesn’t put a name on it.  He carries that piece of bark around with him.  Somehow it reminds him of touching the divine and hearing the voice of God.

            Did you ever hear that voice?

            I did once.  February 7, 2007, a few minutes past 8 in the morning.  My wife was lying on an operating table.  Her pregnant belly and her face were the only things exposed to the light.  I was sitting on a stool beside her face.  The doctors were cutting into her.  The pregnancy had become complicated and they needed to get that baby.

            I’ll never forget it.  Dr. Spalding, all I could see were his eyes, he was doing all that miraculous doctor stuff.  Seemed like he had his arms inside my wife’s body and she was feeling things that made her say words I can’t repeat.  Everybody laughed because ordained ministers aren’t supposed to curse, you know.  But, the good doctor suddenly emerged with his hands clutching this little grey mass of flesh.  She had a face.  And the first light to hit her eyes made her squirm.

            Let me tell you something.  For a moment frozen in time, etched in my mind and in my heart, there was this new life in the world and I couldn’t see anything all around me except for that girl we named Madeleine Joy.  And just for a second, I could see directly into heaven.  I heard it.  I heard it.  I’m sure of it.  I heard angels clapping and cheering.  And I could swear that there was laughter.

            I look at the pictures that those nurses took there in the room just after we weighed little Maddy and wrapped her up.  I look at those very first pictures and every single time I’m reminded that I could see heaven, that I could hear God dancing around.

            And last summer I got into a taxi cab.  The driver had a picture just like one of those of my little girl on his dashboard.  His baby was grown up, had kids of her own.  But, that picture was still there with him.  Right there on the dashboard.  I asked him about it.  Do you know what he said?  He said, “that’s the day I heard God and all the angels rejoicing.  And that’s the day I got clean and sober.  This is my ebenezer”.

            I’ve heard that word all my life.  The old Ebenezer Baptist Church isn’t too far from the house I grew up in.  That’s where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached for a time.  And that song we sang this morning, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”  I love it.  Can’t sing it without crying.  “Here I raise mine ebenezer, hither by thine help I come.”  It’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it?  Never knew what it was until recently.  But, I’ve loved it.

            Ebenezer.  This taxi driver had what he called an ebenezer on the dashboard.  A picture from the day his daughter was born.  It’s like the picture itself kept speaking to him in the tongues of angels, reminding him of the day he touched the hem of God’s robe.  And he’d run his fingers over it from time and breathe deeply at peace with himself and the world.

            Do you know what an ebenezer is?  The good folks gone before us would say it’s a “stone of help”.  A stone of help.  It’s a little altar.

            Now, this one guy, Jacob, was one day running for his life.  He was getting out of Beer-Sheba, headed for Haran.  He’d been lying and cheating his way through life.  A path that cut through his own brother and his own father.  He tricked his brother, Esau, out of a fortune.  And then he deceived his own father, who was old and blind, into thinking that he was his older brother in order to complete the whole thing.  Jacob was high-tailing it out of there.  No saint, this Jacob.  Running for his life, money securely in hand.

            And one night he couldn’t go any further.  Too dark.  Too dangerous.  No place else to go, so he just plopped down there with nothing but a rock to use for a pillow.  And then he saw that very same thing I saw in the operating room.  He saw what my friend David saw next to that old scarred tree on Highway 460.  He saw was that taxi driver saw, too.  He saw right into the place where God lived.

            There was a ramp of some sort.  A staircase.  A ladder, maybe.  And the angels of the Lord were going from the earth up into the clouds.  And they were going the other direction, too.  Standing right next to him was the Lord.  It was if to say there wasn’t really any distinction from this place where we live and that place where God is.  It’s all just mixed up together if you can only see it.

            Now, despite the scoundrel that Jacob had become, God stood right there with him and said, “I’m with you always.  And I’m going to follow through with all the promises I’ve made to you and the earth by blessing you.  You.  Yes, you.  You are going to be a gift to the world.  And I’m going to be with you every step of the way.”

            He had one of those moments.  They don’t happen very often.  We just aren’t awake to them most of the time.  We’re not looking for it.  And suddenly God makes it quite clear that we’re just always in the presence of the holy things.  “Surely,” Jacob managed to say, “the Lord is in this place and I didn’t even know it!”

            You have to hold on to those times.  They’ll slip away.  You’ll forget about them.  You’ll explain them away.  You’ll do what you know better than doing and figure that you’ve wasted God’s good graces.  You have to remind yourself of those times.  So, Jacob took that rock he’d used for a pillow and stood it up on end.  He poured oil on it, which will take an ordinary stone and stain it for a long time.  That stone will stick out so you can find it again.  He made an altar to remind himself of that moment when it started to be clear—God’s right here!  God’s right here with us!

            Must have been important.  Folks built a temple in that place after a while.

            I went to summer camp with a girl.  Church camp.  She had this green and purple thing working with her hair.  I thought it was cool.  But, the truth was that she was one broken soul most of the time.  What I heard her talk about in her house were things that folks shouldn’t know about.  She didn’t believe much in herself.  And why should she with what she’d been taught?

            We had a tradition in that camp.  In our small groups for the week, we’d sit around in a circle on the last day of camp.  And each person would take a turn in the middle of that circle.  And one by one, everybody in the small group would bombard somebody with these wonderful words of the things they saw and witnessed.  And we’d write these words down on a piece of paper to take home.

            I came across this girl at a General Assembly a few years ago.  She’s a minister now.  Working for the church.  We were chatting and she reached into her purse and pulled out this old crumpled piece of paper.  She said, “you know what this is?”  And it was that list of things people said about her that day about 20 years ago.  Words of affirmation.  Words of praise.  Words of encouragement.  Some of the first words she ever heard that lifted her up and made her believe in herself.

            She carries it around still.  Right there in her wallet.  Ebenezer.  That was a moment when God’s heaven and our earth were suddenly brought together.

            There’s a little detail in three of the gospels.  You might miss it.  Jesus is hanging on that terrible wooden cross.  People are mocking him.  His friends have pretty much run to the hills.  And all alone between a couple of criminals, Jesus died.  Those three gospels say that the curtain of the Temple was torn in two.  From the top to the bottom.

            I always wanted to see what was on the other side of that curtain.  You?

            In that moment we were all brought into the presence of God, you see.  Always there.  Always.  God’s love breaking through every boundary to be present always.

            We’d do well to remind ourselves of that moment, you know.  We’d do well.  And some of us even wear that cross as an ebenezer.  Around the neck.  Dangling from the ear.  Maybe hanging on the wall.  Your life is not the same since that cross.  Don’t ever forget it.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)