Dreaming With Jacob

6th Sunday After Pentecost
Romans 8:12-17

Genesis 28:10-19a

Look at Jacob.  There he is.  Asleep.  The Bible is filled with people who are sleeping.  All kinds of interesting things happen to them while they’re asleep.  It’s no wonder that our holy texts show us people sleeping.  We spend a third of our lives asleep.  

Are you interested in what goes on in you when you’re asleep?  Is God interested in us when we’re asleep?  Are we God’s faithful, beloved people when we’re asleep? Or is God only interested in dealing with us when we’re awake?

In our reading today, Jacob is on a journey, and he falls asleep.  And his night of sleep becomes a sacred space where he meets God.  Rich and wonderful things happen to him while he’s asleep.  He dreams.  And his dreams are like yours – filled with strange images and hard to explain happenings.

So what if God is communicating with you in your sleep and you don’t know it?  What if your dreams are a significant part of your life journey, full of suggestive hints, promising new directions, solutions to problems you’re facing -- but you’re missing out on all this because you just wake up each morning and wander off into your day?  

When Jacob woke up after his dream, he realized that something special had happened.  So he set up a small stone pillar, poured oil over it, and named the place “Bethel,” house of God.  He recognized his night of sleep, and his dream, as holy ground.

How many of you dream during sleep on a regular basis?  Anyone dream every night?  Anyone feel like you never dream?  Do any of you write down your dreams in a journal?  That’s one way to get better at remembering your dreams. 

I’m only two minutes in, and some of you have already decided you’re not interested in a sermon about your dreams.  Here’s why: you’re convinced that what happens to you and in you while you’re asleep doesn’t matter.  When my mind drifts into the unconsciousness of sleep, you’re thinking, nothing really significant happens.  Because all the important stuff in life happens when I’m awake, thinking, and making conscious choices.

Others of you have written me off because you think that you don’t dream.  Or that you’re the kind of person who doesn’t dream very often. 

Some of you are intrigued by your dreams – the vivid images, the bizarre story lines, the random people that show up, the way they can feel so real until you wake up.  But you assume that dreams are just chaotic and crazy.  They don’t mean anything.  Your dreams are disorienting flashes of nonsense, people and places that don’t go together are jammed together into some shared storyline.  It seems to repay no reflection to really drill down into it. 

Most people have the experience of feeling like the details of their dreams are held behind a thick gauze.  You might scramble to piece together a dream, but the details scurry away from you.  You might remember an image here, a detail there, but the whole force of the dream often eludes us when we wake.  And it seems next to impossible to imagine how any of the dreams we have are connected to our life with God.

And then some of you believe that the dramatic, powerful things that happen to people like Jacob in Scripture never happen to average, ordinary people like you.  Maybe Jacob’s life and sleep is filled with something holy.  But my dreams are just filled with fear and anxiety and fantasy and elaborately stupid details probably generated by the enchiladas I ate at midnight.

But I think Jacob’s night of sleep teaches us that if you fail to pay attention to your dreams -- if you write them off as meaningless gibberish, not worth reflection, you’re missing a wonderful opportunity to grow and develop as a person.

For centuries, we humans have been open to ecstatic visions and illuminating revelations from God in our dreams.  The Bible is full of these kinds of stories.  But now many of us tend to discount and distrust our dreams.  Why is that?  Well, there are several reasons.

For a little over a century, since Freud, we have been interpreting our dreams in psychological terms - in this sense dreams are the return of the desires we repress in our conscious life.  For example, we might dream about starring in the school play, the basketball game, or in a great battle.  Freud would say that such dreams express a desire for greatness and fame that hides beneath the surface of the modesty we display in our daily lives.  We repress or push down our ambition for success, and then it pops out in our dreams.

And for the past few decades, neuroscientists have been analyzing our dreams scientifically - with various kinds of brain scans.  Scanning the brain while we dream shows us how active our brains are during sleep.  While we’re asleep and unconscious, our brains are rewiring themselves, fixing and healing themselves, sorting information, categorizing experience, and solidifying memories from the day’s activities.

And most of us find it easier to believe the in the psychological and scientific interpretations of our dreams than we do in the ancient, primitive belief that your sleep, and your dreams, might be holy ground.

We dream every night.  We just don’t realize it.  Maybe if we could remember more of our dreams we would find them more meaningful. The reason we don’t remember most of our dreams is pretty simple: we don’t wake up in the middle of the night to do so.  Most human communities, for most of human history, have done exactly that.  A scholar named Roger Ekirch published a book in 2005 called At Day’s Close, Night in Times Past.  His central argument is that patterns of human sleep in premodern or preindustrial society were strikingly different than our sleep patterns now. 

Before the modern period, humans experienced “segmented” sleep (as many wild animals do).  Here’s the explanation: Before artificial light enabled us to stay up, stay out, keep working, or entertaining ourselves after dark, humans experienced 12 to 14 hours of darkness.  When you recreate those conditions in sleep studies, human subjects eventually come to practice segmented sleep.  They first lay awake in bed for two hours, sleep for four, awaken again for two or three hours, and fall back asleep for four hours before finally awakening.  So there were two periods of sleep separated by a period of wakefulness.  That period of first sleep often ends with vivid dreams.  So people woke from first sleep with vivid dreams, could remember them in detail, and could contemplate them in the darkness.

Here’s what Erkich says about the period of wakefulness between two periods of sleep: “Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors.  Many others made love, prayed, and reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.”  We used to be better at remembering and making sense of our dreams.  It’s a skill we’ve largely lost.  But one we might want to recover.

Jacob’s Dream

Now let’s come back for a minute to the story of Jacob’s dream.  The primary image in Jacob’s dream is a ladder or a stairway stretching from heaven to earth.  With angels going up and down, back and forth.  It’s an image suggesting that there is traffic between heaven and earth; that earth is full of heaven; that our ordinary lives are shot through with the presence and grace of God. 

But there’s more to the dream.  From the top of the stairs Jacob hears God speaking, and God is saying something about the promise of land and of a great many descendants.  He hears God saying that he has been chosen for a special role.  But it’s not completely clear what that role is or what he’s supposed to do about it.

Oh and here’s one other thing you need to know about Jacob’s dream.  The night when he had this crazy dream occurred in an intensely stressful and confusing time in his life.  He was anxious about the damage and dysfunction in his past.  And he was worried about what the future held.  Those are the times our dreaming gets really good!

Jacob’s relationship with his twin brother Esau had been terrible from birth.  But now it’s worse than ever.  With some fancy legal maneuvering Jacob stole the inheritance privileges from the older twin.  He then tricked his blind, dying father Isaac by pretending to be Esau and getting his father to sign all the family’s blessings over to himself.  And Jacob’s conniving mother Rebekah helped him do all this, because he was her favorite.  When Esau found out what happened, he vowed to murder Jacob just as soon as their father died. 

So Jacob fled town before his brother could find him to kill him.  And he’s by himself.  And he’s traveling a long way to the strange place where his mother’s family lives so that he can try to find a wife and start a new life.  There’s a lot on his plate.  He’s emotionally exhausted.  His mind is spinning.  His heart feels dark.  His whole life is a confusing mess.  And it’s on this escape journey that he falls asleep and has this dream. 

Yes, Jacob is God’s chosen one.  But his life is a mess.  There’s nothing virtuous or impressive about him.  In fact, he’s a scheming scoundrel of a man.  A dishonest mama’s boy.  And yet he’s been chosen by God.  The life of faith would be more comforting, and more predictable, if God chose virtuous, stable people with impressive credentials.  But God doesn’t.  God chooses people like Jacob.  And people like you and me.

And when Jacob awakes, he marks the place of his dream as holy ground.  He recognizes that this dream has expressed a deep and important conversation within his own soul.  So he sets up a rock as a memorial and pours oil over it.  This elaborate ritual may surprise us.  And yet how foolish it would be to wake, grab breakfast, and start on the to-do list without pausing to notice what’s going on in our lives.

Jacob’s dream was a sacred space where God met him.  Holy ground.  Like Jacob, you and I have been chosen by God.  Chosen by God’s grace to be drawn to Jesus Christ and into this community of his people.  Chosen to play a role in God’s project of healing and blessing the world by using our gifts and our powers (and our wits if we’ve got any).  And just like Jacob, we are on a life-journey that is fraught with complicated family situations, seemingly unresolvable problems, and anxiety out the wazoo.

Your dreams, too, are holy places where God can meet you.  Your dreams are not nonsense.  They are a mysterious and profound conversation down in the depths of who you are.

Our dreams express our deeply human struggles to cope with what’s before us.  Like Jacob, we are complicated, multi-layered persons with much to bear.  We honor the complexity and the difficulty of life by honoring and paying attention to our dreams.  It’s a way of slowing down and paying attention to your life -- what’s going on, what you’re processing, what you might be missing in your conscious life, and maybe even the voice of God speaking to you in and through the depths of your unconscious life.  OK, so now I see that you’re all asleep.  I’m done.  Amen.