By Father Richard Humke

JACOB'S LADDER

September 29, 2002, St. Michael and All Angels (observed), Calvary Church

Surely you have noticed the presence of angels today! No, I don't mean adorable children, or even nice, well-meaning ladies, or helpful gentlemen who might pick up nice, well-meaning ladies' scarves and be told, "Oh, you're such an angel."

I'm referring to the fact that we are taking note today of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels which falls on September 29 in the calendar of the Church. That's today, but the Prayer Book only allows three or four special days to nudge out the observance of a Sunday, if they should fall on a Sunday, and this is not one of those days. There still is a way to take note of the day, however, with special hymns and some special readings. And that's what we are doing.

I've got to come clean with you right up front here and tell you that I'm not big on angels. I switch channels right away when Della Reese comes on. I'm tired of cute night lights and earrings and all the things that merchandisers have thought up. Of course, none of that has much to do with angels as one finds them in the Bible anyway.

In the Bible angels are without sex (or gender as we unfortunately say today), but they have masculine names. They aren't cute at all. The archangels (or chief angels) are named Michael, Uriel, Gabriel and Raphael.You will notice that all of the names end in "el" for good reason: "el" means God, and so all the names have a relationship to God.

The archangel who is given the task of watching over God's people is Michael, and he is the one whose name is given to the day. He appears in the the book of Daniel by name in the Old Testament, and of course in the book of the Revelation in the New Testament. The other archangel of note is Gabriel who is the chief messenger of God and appeared to the Virgin to announce the birth of Jesus.

Well, enough of all that. Now let's turn to the First Reading which, however, does have angels in it. It is a very interesting reading, and though I seldom preach from the Old Testament reading, today seems to be a time to do so. Mostly what I am going to do is to put that story in our First Reading in a context, and with some details, that I think you will find interesting. This isn't really a semon in any classical sense; it is more a telling of a Bible story.

Jacob in our story today is one of the patriarchs of the Bible, but we need to go back two generations to his grandfather with whom it all began. That is, of course, Abraham who is the father of the three great monotheistic religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All trace themselves back to Abraham You may see references from time to time to something called "the Abrahamic faiths." If you weren't sure what that meant, it means just what I have said: the three great monotheistic religions of the West who claim a common ancestor in Abraham.

It was this Abraham who with his wife Sarah left the city of Haran in what is now Syria, and made the journey to a new land, the land to be called Israel. They went to the new land because Abraham believed that his God had called him to make the journey, and in time this same God would promise him that this new land would be his and his descendants' forever.

Thus we come so soon in the story to the front page of our newspapers today, for the tragedy of modern-day Palestine begins in chapter 12 of the book of Genesis. I present that suggestion to you, not to develop it any further, but to give you a reference point for what you read in the paper and see on television news.

I said that Abraham and Sarah and their family left a place called Haran to go to the new land. But a generation before that, the book of Genesis says, Abraham's father and grandfather and Abraham and others of his father's family were living in a place called Ur, which seems to have been the ancient family home. And just to bring that fact up to the moment, I will tell you that Ur is in Iraq, almost at the place where Iraq and Kuwait meet. So the spiritual father of us all is an Iraqi.

Of course, that is an anachronism because Iraq was not a country at that time. Its borders were fixed only after the First World War, and within those borders are very disparate groups who have no love for one another.

So our spiritual Iraqi ancestor, Abraham, has come with Sarah his wife to the new land. They have a son named Isaac who marries Rebekah. Rebekah and Isaac have twins, one named Esau and the other named Jacob, our man of the moment. Esau was born first, and Jacob came out of the womb immediately afterwards clutching Esau's heel.

By the usual standards of the time Esau, the older son, if only by a few seconds, stood to be the favored one, the one to inherit. They were not identical twins, and we can ascertain that by the fact that Esau is described as a very hairy man and Jacob as smooth. That's important for the story.

They were different in other ways as well, ways that are not unfamiliar to us even today. Esau was the hunter in the family He could hardly wait for the deer season to open every year. Jacob tended the sheep and helped with the cooking. Esau was the father's favorite and Jacob was the mother's favorite. Hmm, nothing radical there!

Now we come almost to today's story. Esau came in from the field one day famished and asked Jacob for some lentil stew that Jacob was cooking. Jacob, more crafy than Esau, said he would give it to him in exchange for Esau's birthright, that is, in exchange for Esau's special privilege as the first-born son. Esau agrees to that, saying what good is the birthright when I am dying of hunger. I've always thought Esau was probably a few cards short of a full deck. Why would anyone do that for a bowl of lentils? Anyway, he did.

Next in the story father Isaac is blind and is dying, and in preparation for his death his sons are to visit him for that beautiful custom that died out not so many centuries ago, the father's blessing. Rebekah takes her favorite son, Jacob, and says he should go in and pretend that he is Esau and receive the blessing reserved for the first-born. Jacob says that wouldn't be possible because Esau is hairy and he is smooth, and the moment his father reached out to touch him, the jig would be up.

No problem, says Rebekah. Put some animal skins on your arms, and your father will think he is touching Esau. I guess when the story says Esau was hairy, we mean gorilla.

That is what Jacob does. Isaac is deceived, and Jacob receives the blessing reserved for the first-born son. So now he has taken both the birthright and the blessing from Esau.

Then in good dramatic fashion Esau appears and enters his father's tent for his blessing. Blind Isaac asks who he is, and when he identifies himself as Esau, Isaac "trembled violently," the Bible says. He tells Esau that the blessing was already given to his brother Jacob. In the ancient world, words had something approaching a magical power, and once Isaac had spoken those particular words over Jacob, they could not be retracted and given to Esau.

My summary cannot approach the beauty of the Bible, so let me read a few verses to you:

Isn't that beautiful? Can't you feel the pain of Esau in that ancient story?

But that pain was to turn into murderous anger, and so Jacob, getting wind of Esau's intent to kill him, flees from his home and heads back toward the country from where his family had come some couple of generations before.

On his first night out he comes to a place called Luz, which may have been a religious shrine already, and spends the night there. Perhaps he chose that place purposely for it was believed, and is still believed by some, that one may receive oracles by sleeping in a holy place. (We're at our reading for today finally.)

He takes a stone and uses it for a pillow. I think of Jacob whenever I get one of those foam rubber pillows in a motel. Jacob's stone couldn't have been any more uncomfortable.

Apparently he was so tired that stone or no stone, he went to sleep; and while asleep he had the famous dream that is in our reading today. He saw a ladder reaching from the earth to the heavens and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. (Those angels are the reason the story is read today.)

When he awakens, he realizes that he has been visited by God in his dream, and so he renames the place. It is no longer Luz; it is now Bethel. (There's that "el" again, so you know the word has something to do with God, as indeed it does. Bethel -- the house of God.)

So Jacob the deceiver, Jacob the supplanter, is the one to whom the promise of the land is also given, as it was given to his grandfather Abraham and to his father Isaac.

That's the story. Now to wrap this whole long story up, let me close with a few summary remarks.

The story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a story that has ramifications to this very day in the Jewish claim to the land of Israel. But can religious texts, which only have meaning for one group of people, be used as justification for taking the land of another people 4000 years later? Think about that.

Jacob sees the angels of God moving up and down the ladder, connecting heaven to earth and earth to heaven. Is your whole life earthbound, is your whole life focused on the world, or is there a greater dimension in your life than that? Is there any place in your life for Jacob's ladder? Think about that.

And finally, Jacob says that Bethel is an awesome place and is none other than the house of God and the very gate of heaven. There aren't many places like that any more. How can we be certain that Calvary Church continues to be such a place, so that people who come here will know that they stand in the house of God and at the very gate of heaven? Think about that, too.

Richard H. Humke