Genesis 28:10-19a

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring, and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.

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.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.

Sermon Text

It is impossible to imagine what Heaven is like. Absolutely, unequivocally impossible. We are limited human beings, and so something infinite like Heaven just cannot fit within our skulls. There are already so many concepts and realities we see every day that we can barely keep a hold on, how can something completely outside of our mortal realm, outside of our ability to perceive, find words that adequately describe what it contains. We are always grasping at metaphors and shadows, reflections far off and distant, but always alluding to something we recognize, even if we do not have words for it.

The easiest way to understand how our idea of Heaven has changed is to just look up at the sky above us. We know today what the seeming dome above our head is, but people throughout the centuries had no idea. If we look at how scripture describes the world, we see something alien to our current understanding. The Hebrew Bible talks about the world as having three levels. There are the Heavens, the Earth, and the Waters below the Earth. The Heavens consist of a large dome, and above that dome is an endless ocean. God stands above that ocean, opening windows that let water in and out. The sun, the moon, the stars, all move through the substance of the sky that holds back the water. They are not solid objects so much as images pressed on a screen.

At some point, probably about the time that Greece took over Judea, that image of the Heavens changed. The realization that the world was not a flat disc with water above and below it, but a sphere with space surrounding it, led to people describing Heaven and Earth a lot differently. Now the world was a sphere, but one surrounded by other interlocking spheres. There was a sphere for the moon, another for the sun, and one for each of the planets. The stars lived on their own, and farthest out of all was the throne of God, wrapping it all round.

Come to the modern day and Heaven means something still different. We are aware of the fact that, beyond a thin shell of gas, there is an infinite void. Impossibly full and impossibly empty, space contains not just the planets we know, but millions of billions of other planets. Stars too numerous to count spread out in all directions. Galaxies and nebulas spin around great attractors of matter – visible and dark – that baffle and terrify to conceive of. We are so small, so tiny in this little speck in the vast cosmic ocean. Yet, we know we are loved, we know we are held onto by God, we know without fear that we are watched over.

A cynic may call that a survival tactic, but “cynic,” is another word for someone lacking the imagination necessary to hope. A more generous and creative perspective is born out of the knowledge that comes with faith – that God is with us. There is something in us that remembers Eden, that remembers being next to God and engaging with the Divine face to face. We know, deep in our bones, that there is something at work in the cosmos. The particular nature of that divinity, that otherness, is something that can only be revealed through revelation.

A scholar of religion named Rudolf Otto famously called this experience of something beyond ourselves, “The Numinous.” In his work, Das Heilige, Otto only lets the reader get a few pages in before he boldly tells the reader, “to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience… Whoever cannot do this… is requested to read no further.”[1] The experience of God is something that cannot be described to someone else without them first having felt it themselves. We can talk about all the symptoms of encountering God, but we cannot talk about what that meeting was like without sounding like lunatics. When I describe seeing a big prism of light, descending upon me in a moment of religious fervor, I do not do it as a rational person – I do it as a religious person. I cannot explain why that moment is more than just a hallucination brought on by a certain collection of neurotransmitters in my brain, except that I know it is.

Our scripture today captures a moment where someone meets God and dreams of what how God works within it. Jacob, fast asleep in a place is grandfather had called Holy, but that he just called a good place to nap, finds that his sleep is disturbed by a grand vision. Looking up into the sky, he sees a city, or perhaps a temple. Coming down from it is a large slope, somehow stretching into the eternity above him and reaching where God must live. All up and down the stairs, messengers are making their way to and from God. The angels are not interested in Jacob though, they have their own work to do. Instead, the person who speaks to him is God, not far away but close enough to be heard and to instruct.

The sense that we as readers have of where God is standing when he speaks to Jacob will depend on what Bible we’re reading. When we come to verse 13, the Hebrew אַל (al) can mean something is “above,” or “upon,” another thing, suggesting God is standing above Jacob when the promise to Jacob is given. If you read the NIV or the KJV, this is the impression you’ll get. The problem emerges, however, that the exact same word can be used to mean that something is “next to,” or “among,” something else. The NRSV and Message reads it as such, suggesting God is right next to Jacob when they speak to one another. It is no wonder, then, that the CEB splits the difference and describes God as standing on the stairs – not quite in Heaven and not quite in front of Jacob.

I think the ambiguity is helpful. We often do not know what God is doing, even we God is right in front of us. When Jacob wrestles God, just a few chapters later, he has no idea who he is dealing with till after the fact. When Jacob sees Heaven and Earth pulled together by this sweeping stairway, I’m sure God feels a thousand miles away and as close as his next breath.

Heaven is something that we cannot really describe easily. The Bible talks about streets of Gold and gates made of crystals, but can we really look and that and say that Heaven will be exactly like that? Elsewhere it seems more like a big field made of gemstones, with God just sitting in the middle of it. Is that the Heaven we adopt as our authoritative version? I think that all of us know that Heaven is probably more complicated than a city or a castle or a big gemstone shining up in the sky. We also cannot say that it is the place that God lives and call it a day because, if we look at our scripture today, God lives on earth too. “Bethel,” the house of God is on Earth, it is also in Heaven.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, imagining how God’s presence is felt across creation, imagines that angels must look to Earth the same way we look to Heaven, discerning what God is doing by how God moves among us. The angels are a different kind of creature, a different kind of servant, but they like us are looking to know more about the God they serve. How beautiful to think that as we dream of angels singing in a chorus around the throne of God, that angels dream of us gathered in this Church singing praises to the God who has saved us.

I do not think we can describe Heaven with human words, but we can still see into what it has for us. We do this, not because we have exceptional vision or a particular ability to be aware, but because God has come to show us something about it. Heaven is revealed, Heaven is felt and known, through God showing us glimpses of it now and then. The glory of a place far off, where God’s glory is known and God’s presence is felt. We chase that all the time, it is something we need to feel and know is real, because that is what sustains us. When we sing a hymn and it touches our heart, when we pray a prayer and we know that it is heard, when we feel God’s spirit whispering gently into our very soul – in these moments, something amazing happens. We dream of Heaven, and that dream, incomplete as it may be, is as real as anything we have before us. Do not be afraid to dream, and take heart that Heaven is always moving closer to Earth. – Amen.

---

[1] Rudolf Otto. “The Elements in the Numinous,” The Idea of the Holy. (Lodon, England: Oxford University Press. 1927) 8