Jacob’s Dream at Bethel

Jacob’s Dream
Ary de Vois, 1660 - 1680

The Bible recounts how one night Jacob lay down on a stone to sleep. He dreamt that he saw a ladder reaching up to heaven with God’s angels going up and down. When he awoke, Jacob vowed to use the stone to build an altar in that place, which he called Bethel (‘House of God’). De Vois painted Jacob’s almost naked body as smooth as porcelain. The once green leaves have turned blue because the yellow pigment in them has disappeared over time.

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Jacobs-Dream--9cfccd897ed60d26008c67792333016d

Jacob's Ladder....

Sunday 19 July 2026
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 11
Track 1  
Genesis 28:10-19a
Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Jacob's ladder
Rembrandt van Rijn, 1655
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Jacobs-ladder--f93dfe623935498a28487ec279bf4cad

https://www.christiancentury.org/lectionary/july-19-ordinary-16a-genesis-28-10-19a

Heidi Haverkamp, In the Lectionary: July 19, Ordinary 16A (Genesis 28:10–19a). The Christian Century. July 2026. 26.

in a certain place

What is sacred ground? What makes a place holy? How will we know it? Jacob didn’t know it, not until he had a dream. And in the dream he had a promise. Then he woke up, I did not know this was holy ground, and then he made a monument to his discovery, or rather, to its holiness.

We can imagine him running in from stage left, looking about distractedly, and then, finally, sleep overcoming him, laying down his head upon a stone. A stone that in the morning was transformed into a monument. This certain place, as the story calls it, that Jacob did not recognize, in the night set itself apart. 

Angels, messengers of God, communicated between heaven and earth, and then the LORD was right beside him.

The promise he heard, the promise made to him, was the promise that Abraham, his father, and Isaac had received before him. It has been remade. It is new, in his hands, and old again.

Jacob has received the promise - from God. Not only the blessing stolen from his father. Now he has been chosen, like it or not, and he goes on from this place a man newly charged with a mission. He must carry forward, what he has received alone, into a new beginning, a new life.

He came into this place alone, and here he heard God. He was able to hear him, now. He is no longer son or brother, he is not yet husband or father. He is just Jacob, alone, before God.

And it is in this place, this in between place, on his journey from one place to another, one state to another, from son and brother to husband and father, that he is alone enough to listen.

When are we listening? When are we in a holy place? When are we on sacred ground? 

There are plenty of times I know to touch stone, to call back a memory of a special place or person, and those times and places I cherish. I hope to experience them again soon. But the holy place is different: it is where we experience something of the sacred mystery that is God.

This is not necessarily a big deal, with trumpets, or a certificate. It may be in an otherwise insignificant place, or a place we did not know. Jacob said, “I did not know this was holy ground.” But now he does. Something changed. In him. In what he experienced. In what was there all along. 

It may have been there all along, for you or me. But we did not know it. And that’s okay.

The spirit comes to us. We seek holiness. We do. We seek to do God’s will. Or an experience. Or just to be better today so we can be better tomorrow, than we were yesterday. 

Where will we find sacred ground? Or is that the right question? When will it find us? 

And where will we go from there?

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

– Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, page 79. (https://sacredpoetryworkshop.com/a-prayer-of-unknowing-by-thomas-merton/)

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.


JRL+

a thin place at the altar

Notes for a sermon on The Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels
September 28, 2006 5:45 p.m., Trinity Cathedral Sacramento
Genesis 28:10-17, Psalm 103 or 103:19-22, Revelation 12:7-12, John 1:47-51


GENESIS: Jacob’s ladder represents a thin place – a boundary point between the material world and the world of the spirit. Indeed, Jacob declares the place of his dreamtime a sacred site: “none other than the house of God, and the gate of heaven”.

Angels – God’s messengers – ascend and descend upon the ladder, bridging heaven and earth. Angels who are aligned with God’s purposes are his messengers.

But like other created things, angels can be good and fallen and redeemed. Angels may also be described as principalities and powers – the spirits of institutions and of peoples. They are “the powers that be” (as Walter Wink calls them) – made by God, called by God to a purpose. The spirit of a nation is made for good, but it may turn away; many first century Christians and Jews experienced the empire of Rome as demonic.

REVELATION: Michael overthrows the adversary – the angels that are obedient to God’s call confront the angels that have misaligned themselves apart from God’s purpose. They are defeated; there is no strength in them. Eventually God will put all powers in subjection under his Christ, will rightly align them in harmony with Christ.

GOSPEL: As Jesus tells Nathanael, the guile-less true son of Israel (Jacob), the Son of Man himself forms the bridge – the thin place, the boundary point -- where the sacred and the ordinary coincide. Christ accomplishes this through the victory of the Cross: through his obedience, and through his sacrifice. And we encounter him; we will know him, in the breaking of the bread.

“The small round piece of Eucharistic bread is the point from which the whole creation emerges….‘The fires at the center of the earth, the sun above, all the divine essences and ecstasies come to this silence at last – a circle of bread, and a cup of wine on an altar.’

When we look at the bread of the Eucharist we are looking at the point of ‘everything that is made’ – God embracing everything that God has made.”

On this still, small, point is the turning of the world: created, redeemed, and made holy by God.

As we prepare to remember our Lord in the breaking of the bread, may the better angels of our nature, summon us to gather as God’s people, called together for his purpose. AMEN.

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Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (Doubleday, 1998)
Donald Nicholl, The Testing of Hearts (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998)
Timothy J. Joyce, Celtic Christianity (Orbis, 1998)
Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address