Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Whether reading it as a child, parent, or grandparent, I suspect many of you are familiar with Margaret Wise Brown’s classic The Runaway Bunny. In the story, a little bunny is trying to run away from home, but his mother keeps coming after him. The bunny threatens each time to turn into something else, but each time his mother comes up with something to counter him.
When he threatens to turn into a fish, the mother says she’ll become a fisher. When the bunny says he’ll turn into a rock, she says she’ll become a mountain climber to climb him. When the bunny wants to hide as a flower, the mother says she’ll become a gardener to tend to him. When the little bunny wants to become a bird, his mother says she’ll become the tree he flies home to. When the bunny decides to become a sailboat, the mother says she’ll become the wind that blows at his sails. The little bunny even decides to run away to the circus as a trapeze artist, where he finds his mother as a tightrope walker. Finally, the bunny decides to become a little boy, and the mother becomes the little boy’s mother to welcome him with open arms. At that point, the bunny gives up on running away.
And now, you can understand our reading from Genesis today.
As we saw last week, Jacob is a trickster, and he tricked his own twin brother out of his inheritance as first born and then his father’s blessing. While he is the more clever of the two, Jacob’s brother Esau is the stronger of the twins, so Jacob flees out of fear for his own life.
Now in Jacob’s day, it was believed that gods and deities were tied to the land. When Jacob was fleeing from his father’s house, he would have been fleeing from God too, or so he thought.
Instead, Jacob has a dream of a ladder reaching up to Heaven, with God’s messengers, the angels, going up and down it. And then he finds God right there beside him. Here is the God of his father Isaac and his father Abraham, now adding Jacob to this list of the Covenant and Promise for the future.
So what Jacob’s “How awesome is the place!” probably really translates into is more of a “Oh, Sugar!” or “Oh, darn!” or words to that affect.
Jacob thought he could escape God, just like the Runaway Bunny thought he could do with his mother. He could not. God isn’t just tied to the land, like the false gods of that day. God was everywhere. God is everywhere. If we try to escape, just like the Runaway Bunny’s mom, God will find a way to be there with us.
Our Psalm this morning is such a good response to our reading because it conveys just that sense. As this Psalm of David reminds us, “Where can I go then from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I climb up to Heaven, You are there; if I make the grave my bed, You are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me and Your right hand hold me fast.”
Even if we are not tricksters like Jacob, this presence of God can be scary, because we cannot escape it. Yet there is also reason for hope. This is the hope we receive from Jesus’ Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. This Parable is a promise that God will be there with us in the midst of evil and the worst life has to offer us. Jesus’ words here are really the answer to the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” (though we should admittedly be thoughtful and sparing in our own application of this term to ourselves). The answer the Parable gives us is simple: we don’t know exactly how and when this enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, but we do know that good will ultimately win out in the end.
This victory only comes from God’s continued presence with us in our lives. This is the lesson of our reading in Genesis today, the story of Jacob’s Ladder. It is what is reflected in the response of our Psalm as well as in the story of The Runaway Bunny. No matter where we are and what we do, God is there with us always. My hope is that we might find ourselves on the side of the Wheat and rejoice in that. At the very least, I hope we can be like Jacob the scoundrel and at least find ourselves honoring and revering the holiness of those places where we come to realize that there is no running away, or escaping, from God.