Genesis 28:10-19
John 1:43-51

Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

The House of God

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "House of God." In your mind, what does the house of God look like?

For me, me the quintessential house of God is the Gothic cathedral with its stone walls, vaulted ceilings, large stained glass windows and vertical sense of space. I don't know how it works for a worshiping community, but there is a sense of holiness that you experience before you even walk in the door.

The recent trend in mega church sanctuaries has been away from "churchy" architecture toward utilitarian "econoboxes" with large open spaces that can be used in a multitude of configurations. Useful, but not very inspiring.

I read the results of a recent survey conducted among young Christians. It seems that this new generation of Christians favors a return to a more reverent form of church architecture, so that the worship space itself becomes part of the experience of God. Good on them. I agree with them.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from large cathedrals and mega churches are the little country churches built with love by their parishioners. These little wood frame churches often convey a tremendous sense of reverence toward God despite their small size.

Our Old Testament reading today concerns a very different kind of house of God.

Jacob's Journey

It's a long way from Beersheba to Haran - about the distance from Savannah, Georgia to Richmond, Virginia.

Jacob had been on the road only a few days. The trip would take 10 times that long. He had been traveling the ridge road through the Judean hills, and he came to a place called Almond Tree - or Luz, in Hebrew.

When he got to Almond Tree, the sun was going down. He had been walking - fast - all day. He was in a hurry. He was hot. He was tired. He was thirsty. He was hungry. He was alone. His future didn't look very bright. He laid down in the dust and literally pulled up a rock as a pillow. And he laid down.

This is not how he pictured things turning out.

Jacob had a twin brother - Esau - a fraternal twin. They didn't look anything alike. They didn't act alike, either. Esau was big, hairy, muscular, and dumb (bless his heart). Esau was a hunter. Jacob was a schemer and a homebody. Esau was daddy's favorite, mostly because daddy loved the good food Esau hunted up. Momma loved Jacob best. That's a recipe for family problems in any age.

Esau was about 30 seconds older than Jacob, but that made all the difference in Jacob's culture. In the custom of the day, Jacob would certainly lose out. The older son inherited almost everything and ruled the family. The younger sons, well they just cleaned up the sheep droppings.

Jacob's Schemes

But Jacob had a plan. He was a schemer, and Esau was dumb. Esau came in from a long day of hunting; Jacob had been hanging around the tents, goofing off and doing a little cooking.

Esau said, "I'm famished" and Jacob said, "How about I trade you some bean soup for your birthright as the firstborn." And Esau agreed. Like I said, dumb as an ox.

Sometime later, Jacob's father Isaac was getting old and announced, "It's time for the 'blessing'". To the people of Isaac's day, the "blessing" was some sort of magical hokum that fathers did for their sons. They thought that there was some sort of power or intangible reality that was transferred from father to son through this act. It seems sort of silly to us; it was important to them.

Isaac said to Esau, "Boy, go hunt me up something good to eat. It's time for the blessing." But Rebekah, the mom, secretly said to Jacob, "Son, go get a couple of goats from the flock. I'll cook up some goat stew and you can take to your father. You're going to get that blessing."

So Rebekah and Jacob cooked up the goats and then they cooked up a plan. Isaac was old and could barely see. They dressed Jacob up in some of Esau's clothes so that he'd smell like Esau. Man, that's something when you have such a pungent body odor that people can identify you by your smell! And they put some goat fur on Jacob's hands and neck so that he'd feel like Esau. Esau was some hairy guy. And it worked. Jacob got the blessing; Esau got the shaft.

There was only one little problem. Esau got mad - in every sense of that word. He became so angry that he lost his mind and hatched a murderous plot. "That brother of mine took my birthright. He took my blessing. As soon as my daddy's dead and in the grave, he's going to die!" Esau was enraged and that was a problem. He was big and he was strong and he was scary.

When Rebekah got wind of this, she made up an excuse to send Jacob away in a hurray. She told Isaac, "We need to send Jacob to get a wife from our own kinfolk. I don't want him marrying one of these Canaanite women!" So Isaac sent Jacob north to Haran near the border of Turkey with Syria. That's where Abraham was living when God called him in Genesis 12.

You didn't have to tell Jacob twice to skedaddle. His brother scared him to death! As soon as he got the green light from daddy, off Jacob went as quick as a flash. In our reading from Genesis 28, we find Jacob on the road to the family's ancestral home.

A few days ago, he thought he would have everything; today, he had nothing. Maybe his brother was chasing him. Maybe he wouldn't wake up in the morning because his brother would find him in the night. Maybe he would never see home again. What would tomorrow bring?

So Jacob laid down in the dust at Almond Tree, rested his head on a stone and went to sleep. Alone. Afraid. Tired. Uncertain. He slept uneasily and his restless dreams were vivid.

He dreamed of angels and a giant ladder or a staircase reaching from the ground to the sky. On this stairway to heaven, angels went up and down, commuting between between heaven and earth.

The Stairway to Heaven

The words of the old spiritual "We are climbing Jacobs ladder" come from Jacob's dream.

We are climbing Jacob's ladder
We are climbing Jacob's ladder
We are climbing Jacob's ladder
Soldiers of the cross

Every round goes higher, higher
Every round goes higher, higher
Every round goes higher, higher
Soldiers of the cross

The song doesn't appear to have much to do with Jacob's dream at Almond tree, or does it? It is an African-American spiritual that came out of the experience of slavery. Is it possible to find the stairway to heaven in the midst of a terrible experience? Jacob did.

The title of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" also comes from this story.

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying the stairway to heaven.
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for.
Ooh, ooh, and she's buying the stairway to heaven.

Again, the lyrics seem far removed from Jacob's experience at Almond Tree, but maybe not.

A lot of people think they know where they can find the stairway to heaven. At least they know where they're looking for it. The stairway to heaven is at the Debec department store. The stairway to heaven is at the Mercedes-Benz dealer. The stairway to heaven is in the penthouse apartment. The stairway to heaven is in the old man's office. Or maybe it's in the next assignment that will make your career. Or maybe it's in retirement or the next career.

Or, perhaps the stairway to heaven is in your girlfriend's bedroom or your boyfriend's car. Or maybe it's to be found at a club with flashing lights, expensive booze and loud music - maybe it's behind the bar in another round of drinks - or with the pretty girl at the table in the corner - or out in the alley with another hit of some drug that will take your spirit to heaven.

We look in vain in so many places for the stairway to heaven.

If he were an ordinary man, Jacob surely thought that he would find the stairway to heaven in all the stuff that being Isaac's heir would bring him: comfortable tents and flocks of sheep and herds of donkeys and servants to meet his every need. Oh, the good life! But that's not where Jacob finds the stairway to heaven. If we keep reading the story, we find that Jacob basically has to start building his life from scratch in Haran.

Jacob doesn't find the stairway to heaven in the life that he imagined his scheming would bring him. He finds it rather in a desolate place, on the run and in danger, alienated from his family, uprooted from everything that mattered to him. And in God's grace, He reveals himself to Jacob in a dream about heavenly staircases.

God's Promise

In Jacob's dream, God is standing at the top of the staircase and he speaks to Jacob.

I am the god your father told you about. I'm the god of your father Isaac and his father Abraham. And I AM YOUR GOD.

Listen, you are going to have so many children, and grand children. Eventually, you'll have more descendants than you can count - as many as particles of dust. And they'll all live on this land right here.

I'm going to be with you wherever you go. I'll watch over you and take care of you, and I'll bring you back home. You can count on me. It's a promise.

When Jacob awoke, everything looked different. This was no longer just plain old dusty Almond Tree. No, this was some place special. This was the House of God - in Hebrew, Beth-El. So that's what he named it: Bethel. And he took that rock he used for a pillow, set it upright and poured some oil on it to consecrate it as a monument to his experience with God in this place.

In time, God kept the promise he made to Jacob at Bethel. It took over 20 years, but Jacob eventually came home with a family and with wealth. He had tents and flocks and herds and servants, but they had not come to him in the manner he had expected.

God was with Jacob and had blessed him. And when he came home, Jacob remembered how God had appeared to him at Bethel.

"Let us arise and go up to Bethel, and I will make an altar there to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone." (Genesis 35:3)

Jacob realized that it was God's free choice - the theological word is "election" - again God's free choice that brought these blessings into Jacob's life. His scheming hadn't gotten him anything but heartache. When he came home with flocks and family, he didn't say, "Let's go back and set up an altar where I tricked my brother out of his birthright. Let's go back and set up an altar where I tricked my dad into giving me his blessing" No, let's go back and set up an altar where God made his promise to me. Jacob's blessing was a gift from God, not the work of his own scheming mind.

I am Your God

"I am your God." That's something new for Jacob.

Now Jacob had probably heard about God his whole life from his mother and father. "Yeh, I remember when the Lord got me and your momma together when we were younger." "Oh, the Lord got me out of a fix with the king Abimelech." "You know, your grand-dad used to go on and on about how God had called him to leave home and go to the promised land."

He had heard the stories of God's promises to Abraham and Isaac, but now God had appeared to him personally and had made promises to him personally.

So this was something different. It wasn't just his folks talking about God. He experienced God first-hand. No longer was it just his father's god. It was his god, too.

Do you get what happened to Jacob at Bethel? One minute, it's plain old dusty Almond Tree. The next, it's the House of God. What changed. It's still dusty. It's still lonely. The outward circumstances hadn't changed. His perception had changed.

Back in high school, I was having a tough time. My parents took me to eat at the cafeteria at the mall, and then they went to Sears. I pouted and stood in the parking lot while they shopped. It started to snow. And something happened. The God that I had learned about in Sunday School and in worship services spoke to me. All of a sudden, it wasn't the Sears parking lot. It was the house of God.

How Awesome is this Place

Where is the house of God? Is it here in this building? Well, yes. But it can be also be in the motor pool. It can be the commissary or the PX. It can be your living room or your bedroom. In can be in a tent in a faraway land. It can be in a desert wasteland with nothing but a stone for a pillow. The house of God is wherever God in his grace meets you.

Jacob, alone in the wilderness, on the run from his brother, dispossessed from everyone and everything, opened his eyes and discovered the truth of his situation:

Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

Oh that we could all have that same experience of recognizing God's amazing presence in the midst of our sometimes troubling lives. If there is one part of this scripture that I would burn into our brains so that it might become part of our outlook on life, it is this. Let me say these wonderful words again.

Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

Angels Ascending and Descending on the Son of Man

What if I told you I knew exactly where you could find the stairway to heaven? It's not a secret. Jesus used the story of Jacob at Bethel to describe himself.

"Rabbi," Nathanael replied, "You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Jesus responded to him, "Do you believe only because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this." Then He said, "I assure you: You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." (John 1:49-51 HCSB)

You will see the heavens opened and the angels of God descending and ascending on the Son of Man. In Jesus, heaven and earth come together. In the presence of Jesus, we can truly say with Jacob, "Surely the LORD is in this place. How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

The house of God and the gate of heaven is not so much a place as a person.

But as Jacob discovered, this house of God, this gate of heaven, is different than we might have imagined. This man in whom heaven and earth meet is a poor rabbi who journeys from village to village casting out demons, healing the sick, bringing forgiveness to sinners and depending on the hospitality of those he meets. Along the way he experiences both joy and sorrow. He lives in a world marked by both divine power and human suffering. He will die on a cross, rejected by the world but rise to conquer even death. Someday he will appear again to bring all things to completion. And even now he gathers those who see in him the union of heaven and earth to his side, that he might share his life with them.

This is where we find the house of God today: wherever the people of God gather in Jesus' name, wherever they go led by his Spirit, wherever the story of his amazing grace is told, there is the stairway to heaven.

Have you experienced the grace and love of God first hand? Open your eyes today and see the divine reality that is present here this morning for you.

Surely the LORD is in this place today for Christ is worshipped here. How awesome is this Jesus! In him we are the house of God, and he is the gate of heaven.

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