Stairway

“Lord, you have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar.” (Psalm 139:1, BCP)

God knows all that can be known; He is present in all places; no one can escape His reach.

God knows the whole of your life and activity.

God is in control and will be your guide, your shield, and your savior; he will help you, wherever you go.

You cannot escape from God – he is bound to find you everywhere you go.

He is present even in the womb.

His thoughts are unfathomable.

God is all knowing.

And he is just.

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“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Genesis 28:15, NRSV)

God is everywhere and you cannot escape from it. You need not; he is wise and glorious. His love for you, and his care for you, is unshakeable. He will never leave you. He will always guide you, protect you, be by your side – whether you feel his presence or not, God is always there. Indeed, he has promised, from ages old in time and history, to be the fulfiller of the promise: through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob all the families of the earth shall be blessed and in them shall find their blessing.

That hope of the world, that promise, comes to us from God in Jesus Christ. He is the one, as Paul exhorts us to grasp, who brings reconciliation, renewal, renewal, the one who brings us a vision of hope, of freedom, and glory in God. In Christ is the hope of the resurrection.

All things were made through him and in him all things will reach their completion.

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"Jacob left Beer-sheba, and set out for Haran. He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of that place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. He had a dream; a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it." (Genesis 28:10-13, JPS)


The vision of Jacob – the stairway to heaven – is a vision of connectedness.

God and Man at Bethel – the place of God’s choosing, not Jacob’s. It is holy because God is there. Because God is there, Jacob honors it and consecrates it.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Jacob feels a sense of awe, of the presence of the holy.

What are our lives for? For our own purposes? No – for the purposes of God. We are God’s creatures, through and through he knows us; he fashions us, and carries us – covers us – through life and at the end he welcomes us home into eternity. We are called only to grow in relationship with God, to live responsibly, … responsively, in answering God’s call to a devout and holy life.

“I don't know Who — or what — put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”— Dag Hammarskjöld (29 July 1905 - 18 September 1961), Markings (1964).


At some point in life, as Dag Hammarsjkold saw, we have a chance to say YES to God, to life, to God’s call to life in abundance. To something beyond ourselves.

This call – to life, to respond to God in his love with our own faithful obedience and trust – is at the heart of what Paul is saying, and what Jacob lived.

Here was a man, who tricked his brother, outwitted his father-in-law Laban (stay tuned, for further episodes in this summer’s saga), and – well, who would have thought he would be a patriarch, one in whom all nations would be blessed? And yet here he is: encountering God at the House of God.

His response first is AWE – praise, worship – and as we will see, in further episodes of our story (and his), that he goes forward from this point in faith.

His trust in God is complete, by the end: he has followed the path of God’s law, covenant, promise, and come to fulfillment of his own role in God’s plan.

We do not know what our own roles will be or are, entirely; what we know is that we should act faithfully, responding in awe to God’s presence, responding in confident faith to God’s guidance, responding in obedient surrender to his Lordship, responding in thankfulness to his endless Grace.

“For all that has been — Thanks. For all that shall be — Yes.”—Markings.

In the name of God, the merciful Father, the compassionate Son, the spirit of Wisdom. Amen.


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