Surely The LORD Is in This Place

Genesis 28:10-19

Have you ever had a dream that changed your life? Or maybe a thought that popped up and changed the way you looked at the world, your life, your situation? More often than not, when I dream, I wake up knowing that I’d just been dreaming but am completely unable to remember anything about it. How can a dream, which is so powerful, so inspiring, so insightful in the moment, become like a mirage, so insubstantial and ethereal, upon awakening?

Dreams are kind of like clouds, floating somewhere between here and heaven, sometimes resembling familiar shapes and then shifting in seconds. Sometimes clouds descend to the earth, shrouding it in fog. You can see fog, but have you ever tried to touch it? It slips right through your fingers as if it weren’t there. Dreams are like that: floating somewhere between here and heaven, giving us glimpses of that above, descending close to us in our sleep, but falling through our fingers when we try to grasp them for closer inspection.

Dreams are fascinating. Very real, but also mysterious; very personal, yet often revealing things we didn’t know we knew. Dreams have inspired artists and poets and prophets for as long as there have been artists and poets and prophets. More recently, dreams have inspired psychologists and brain scientists looking at how they happen and where they come from and what they have to teach us. In a Podcast I was listening to recently, Jordan B. Peterson, clinical psychologist, jokes with his audience: “A thought appears in your head. Where does it come from? Turns out, ‘Well, nowhere…it just popped up’ is not a very sophisticated answer.” He takes dreams very seriously, a place where our motivations, emotions, and body can speak to us. “Dreams” he says, “are the birthplace of thinking.”

Dreams are also the birthplace of tomorrow. We dream about the future and then try to make that into a reality. Families, communities, even nations dream together. At the Lord’s Table, we get caught up in a dream that extends even beyond those boundaries—a dream about God’s kingdom on earth. Think about that. A dream that unites the world in vision, hope, and action. This leads to the question, then, where do dreams come from?

Here’s how the psychologists look at it. Imagine three realms. The first is the realm of what we know, the earthly realm, where we can see the stars, smell the roses, touch and hold the hands of our friends. This is a realm where knowledge is acquired through our senses, a realm of science and fact. The second realm is that of mystery, the great unknown, the realm of the unexplainable, the miraculous. This is not a realm of knowledge, but a realm of belief and hope which are acquired through faith. The third realm is the realm of dreams, a realm that bleeds between and connects the world we know with the grand mystery beyond. This is the realm out of which questions of purpose and meaning arise. This is the place where we try to connect our known existence to the reason for our existence.

As spiritual and religious people, this leads to another question: where is God in all of this? The answer is: everywhere. God is in the known and unknown, and yes, even our dreams. In terms of the Holy Trinity: God the Father is how we relate to God’s presence in the unknown realm, God’s sovereignty throughout and beyond all of the universe; God with us, Emanuel, or the Christ is how we relate to the God’s presence in the known world, God made flesh, visible, touchable, relatable; God the Spirit is how we relate to God’s presence in the realm of dreams, bridging the gap between this world and the next. The dream realm is also the realm of story, Holy Scripture is revelation of the mystery of God given to human communities through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. By this great gift, we are given tremendous direction in life. But there are other stories we tell, other stories from other sources, stories that guide our lives and actions far from the purposes of God. These are stories we tell ourselves in times of prosperity and in times of desperation. The story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge is a story that teaches the danger of believing and acting on any story which leads us to believe that there is no mystery, we can know it all. Think about this: to say there is no mystery is just another way of saying “There is no God.” When Adam and Eve took that fruit, they lost the garden, they lost the place where the God descended from the realm of mystery to walk with us and beside us.

All of this is just a big set-up for today’s story: the story of Jacob and his dream. He dreams of a ladder, or perhaps more accurately translated a ramp, that connects the realm of earth with the realm of heaven. What we’ve been given in this Scripture is an exact replica of what modern psychology describes as the dream connection between the unconscious and the conscious, between the unknown and the known. Walter Brueggemann describes Jacob’s “wakeful world” as “a world of fear, terror, loneliness (and, we may imagine, unresolved guilt).”[1] Jacob is a fugitive. He has been sent away by his father. He is in a place of desperation, a place where the world we know threatens to suffocate us, where the mystery of God is drowned out by misery. “The dream,” says Brueggeman, “permits the entry of an alternative into his life. The dream is not a morbid review of a shameful past. It is rather the presentation of an alternative future with God.”[2]

This is Gospel! This is good news. How many of you are in places of desperation, hurt, suffering, confusion? The known realm can be a cruel place to dwell—so cruel in fact that it can lead us to question whether God is good, lead us to doubt the peace that passes understanding, tempt us to abandon the realm of mystery, and to lose hope in the promise of God with us.

Here, in this place of hopelessness, where Jacob’s guilt and shame threatened to sever his known world from the promises of God, he has a dream. He dreams of a ladder, a ramp, a bridge, a vision of the promise God had made to all of us. We are not abandoned by God. Heaven and earth are connected. This dream “shatters the presumed world of Jacob. He had assumed he traveled alone with his only purpose being survival. It was not hard then to conclude that divine reality was irrelevant. Now it has been asserted that earth is a place of possibility because it has not and will not be cut off from the sustaining role of God.”[3]

“Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it.’”

Last week we talked about who gets to decide what is good. Only God. Yet how easily we can be tempted to determine this our own. Friends, where are you? Are you alone? Is there pain in your life, is there doubt? Are you confused, angry, sick, tempted to mock the mystery, or deny the possibility of goodness? Or are you prospering, proud, and yet tempted to celebrate your own achievements, lured by another story in which you get to decide what is good, and you’re it. You’re good. Who among you has a teenager in your life? Have they ever said this to you: “I’m good”? You offer them something to eat or help on their homework and they say: “Nah, I’m good.” In modern “teenager” vocabulary, to say “I’m good” more literally translates to, “I don’t need your help.” Wherever you are, good or bad, God is in that place—to call you back from prideful self-promotion, or to pull you up out of the pit of despair. Surely, God is in that place.

Have you ever had a dream that changed your life? Jacob did. The Word of God presented Jacob with a word of promise that demanded a decision.[4] And that decision “reshape[s] his existence.” And he decides that “the LORD shall be his God.” The story of despair and guilt will not paralyze him, his past of trickery and deception will not write his future. “The LORD shall be his God.” His dream reminds him, and convicts him to allow his story to be written by the mystery of God’s purposes. Will we be so bold, so daring, so trusting, as to surrender to God’s story? Will we be so bold, so daring, so trusting as to allow ourselves to dream?

[1] Brueggemann, Walter. “Genesis” from Interpretation. 243

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid. 248.