“God’s Place of Business”

Jacob is a fugitive on the road, with only a stone for a pillow on a bitterly cold night in the wilderness. Jacob lays down to sleep, alone and without a friend in the world, without even so much as a rote prayer before bedtime. (Genesis 28:10-19a)

            And right there, at the strangest, loneliest, most apparently God-forsaken moment in his life, God comes to Jacob. As if often the case in the Old Testament, God comes to Jacob in a dream.

            In that dream, there is a stairway to heaven – but it is not a stairway that Jacob buys or even builds, and it is not a stairway that he climbs to meet God somewhere up in the clouds high above. It is a stairway that reaches down from heaven to earth, and upon which angels are going up and, more importantly, down. Angels, in Jacob’s time, were thought of as spiritual beings who were God’s messengers.

But then Jacob realizes that the Lord God is standing right there beside him, and the next thing you know Jacob is being given the same blessing and promise that had been given to his father before him, and to his grandfather, Abraham, before him: a blessing of land, and a future of untold generations who will in their turn be a blessing to the world.

And then there is even more: a promise that this fugitive, alone and on the run, would never again be alone, for his God would be with him, guiding and protecting and bringing him back safely to that very place.

            The claim of this account of Jacob and the stairway from heaven is this: that God’s place of business is right here, and that we are God’s business. We all – even the ones who grasp and trick and steal from our brothers and sisters and who flee like fugitives and even forget to say our prayers or come to church – we all are God’s business, right here, right now.

You may have come to church this afternoon because you thought you were about reaching out to God, reaching up to God. But the account of Jacob and the stairway tells us that God is just as busy reaching out to you, that God’s place of business is not up there somewhere, not on the 964^th floor of a skyscraper whose top lies nestled in the clouds, but right down here,

on the shop room floor,

 in the cubicle with you and your laptop,

in the kitchen at dinner time,

in the bedroom as you discuss the events of the day with your spouse.

In each and every one of those places, you might accurately echo Jacob’s astonished gasp, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”

 This is the meaning of the account of Jacob and the ladder from heaven – this is God’s place of business.

And more than that, just as Jacob, with all his faults, with all his lack of faith, with all his flawed life and wrong choices, was God’s unfinished business, so too we, with all our varying degrees of faith, with all our pasts of wrong choices, with all our flaws and defects of character – so too we are God’s unfinished business.

It is the meaning of the incarnation, of our Christmas celebrations – that God came to us as Jesus to save the world and everyone in it; and it is the meaning of Pentecost, that God sent to us the Holy Spirit to help us in our journey. Because we are God’s unfinished business.

You may have the recently released film “Soul Surfer”, which is based on actual events. Brittany Hamilton, a teenager living in Hawaii, was a successful surfer who was on the cusp of dominating the professional surfing circuit when one day a shark took off one of her arms. Surfing was her life, and so she believes there is nothing left for her. But after recovering, she learns to surf with one arm, and determined to make a comeback, enters a surfing competition – where she is thoroughly beaten by her rivals. Devastated, on a whim she goes off on a mission trip with her church youth group to Thailand, where to compound her despair she learns that her lack of an arm makes her pretty useless on the construction site. But then, on a day off from the work, she finds herself down at the beach, and learns that she has a gift for teaching – she finds a surfboard, and teaches a young child to get over his fear of the ocean through learning to surf.

On her return to the states, she finds that her home is snowed under my mail – fan letters from around the world. She cannot understand it at first – she had failed in her comeback attempt at competitive surfing. But then she starts to read the letters, and finds that her attempt had inspired other-abled folk around the world, inspiring them to find ways to make new lives despite the setbacks that had been visited upon them. Far from being a failure with nothing to live for, Brittany discovers that she is a gift that gives hope to countless others who face their own struggles with disabilities.

Brittany Hamilton had thought her life was over when she lost that arm, but God had unfinished business with her.

And God has unfinished business with you as well.

No matter what your past, no matter what your faults, no matter the catalog of excuses and lists of back-sliding, no matter the bad habits and the repeated failures – God has unfinished business with you.

God loves you, and God loves you just the way you are – but God also loves you too much to leave you that way.

Thanks be to God, you are God’s unfinished business.

Bailing with a . . . boot.

           A brutally cold and blustery March day long ago, the Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut; an intercollegiate sailing event, teams from across New England and the Mid-Atlantic, all foul-weather clad, bundled up as best as possible in those pre-dry suit days.

            Standing on the dock, jumping up and down trying to get warm, happy that a capricious puff had not flipped our little two-person dinghy into the icy Thames in the previous races, we waited to swap boats with those had finished behind us.  A number of boats were being towed in, having capsized and swamped, their crews unable or unwilling to get them upright and sailing again.  One boat came sailing in, bringing up the rear, the last place finisher, but a finisher none the less, and we could see that they still were half-full of water, the crew bailing furiously while the skipper struggled to control the boat. It was the Navy boat.

            Only when they drew right up to the dock did we see that the crew was not using the bucket that came standard with each boat – it had apparently been washed away when they capsized. He was using . . . his boot.  Standing in that freezing water, refusing to accept rescue, determined to finish the race and return under their own power to shore, he was bailing with his boot.

            At the time, I marveled at what I took to be Naval Academy discipline, assuming that the skipper, having sized up the situation, ordered his crew to take off that boot and bail.  But thinking back on it, I now believe I had it wrong, that the crew, on his own initiative, and understanding what had to be done, made that decision instantly and on his own.  And so now I marvel all the more.

            Yesterday I had a funeral for a local firefighter who over the course of forty years put his life on the line each and every day for the public safety, for folk he likely had never met, for what we used to call the “common wealth.”  As each day dawned, he had no idea if that would be the day he would have to put it all on the line, but he did know that this was something that he was called to do, and was ready to do.

            In our life voyage, we can be sure that at some point we, in our turn, will face our own stormy seas, that there will come those times when the capricious winds will threaten to lay us on our beam ends, and the icy waters will threaten to pull us under.  And so maybe the time is now, before it is too late to do anything about it, to ask, will we have the internal resources, the courage, the will, the faith, to pull off a boot, and bail?

------------

Luke 8:  One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side of the lake.” So they put out, and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A windstorm swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. They went to him and woke him up, shouting, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. ²⁵He said to them, “Where is your faith?”