Chutes and Ladders

 Friends, as I promised you last week if you joined us at Honeoye Falls, today you’re hearing more about Brother Jacob, and how his story starts to finally get better after years of him wrecking his life and alienating his family.

That’s going to come from a bigger question I’m inviting you to: where do we find God? Where do I go, what do I do, who do I talk to, if I want to connect with God?

It’s not an easy question for anyone to answer. A lot of folks who gather in buildings that look like this one find that question intimidating. We, the Frozen Chosen, have no answer for it. A good answer for this question would require vulnerability and the expressing of feelings that we don’t like letting out. “Finding God? Uh, can you check Google Maps?”

For my own amusement, I did exactly that. I’m a literal gal. I’m cerebral. I was going to be a math teacher, remember? I’d like a computer to be able to solve my problems, or an equation, or some academic principle. Even when it’s a spiritual problem, I'd like to “brain” my way out of it.

But when I looked for God on Google Maps, all I found was a street by that name in Nigeria. I mean, that street in Nigeria is as good a place as any to look for Divine inspiration, and we’ll get into why we need to be able to find God anywhere, at any time. But it takes heart work from me to connect to God, not the kind of head work you use when you’re finding a location on a map. Plus, Nigeria is pretty far away.

When some of us try to do that heart work, of “feeling” God instead of looking with our eyes and getting out a compass and a map, we still revert to head work, because we start spouting cliches. Answers that were probably very authentic and deep the first time someone said them, but that have since become tired. They’re comfortable to say, but they’ve lost that “aha” spark. You’ve heard these responses. Oh, where do I find God? Not in a church. I’m spiritual, but not religious. I see God on mountain tops. And in the ocean. And in a rainbow. And in sunsets. Did I mention the sunsets? God likes sunset walks on the beach so much I’m surprised She doesn’t put that on the Divine dating profile.

Mind you, I cast no shade on our spiritual-but-not-religious friends. Nor do I cast shade on anyone looking for God in nature. Folks who look for God that way are absolutely on the right track, it’s just that they’re still trying too hard. Trying too hard to carve out official God space is a mistake people have made since the beginning of time. It’s a mistake Jesus steers us away from in this morning’s Gospel story–we’re looking real hard for nothing but pure wheat in the field, and we get very frustrated the second we see a weed. That weed is getting in the way of our God space, how can we appreciate a field full of wheat if that ugly dandelion is sitting there? It ruins the whole yard! Jesus urges us–slow down. Just till the land. Pick up everything. He’ll sort it out later if need be. We don’t have to be so worried about where the wheat is, and where the weeds are, where is an official holy space, and where we’ve left the God box. It’s all God’s garden. We never step out of it.

Our ancestors loved God so much, and so wanted to obey the God they loved, that they created increasingly formal spaces to commune with the Holy. An altar on a mountain became an upper room, that became a house where folks in town sat in the living room and casually gathered to pray and sing. But can you respect God if you’re being so casual? Our ancestors wrestled with that question. They built churches and temples. They built the steeples higher and higher. They ordered beautiful Tiffany stained glass windows. And yet they never tried to upgrade the wooden pews? Go figure. When folks didn’t feel inspired yet they voted to change the color of the carpet, and to repaint the walls, and expand the parking lot. They built band stands and brought in fog machines and set up a Starbucks in the lobby.

But there was still a huge void that none of that “stuff” could ever fill. A God shaped hole in our hearts, to quote the philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Jesus teaches us another way, a way to identify God in the ordinary. A way to find God in the ground, not on a mountain top or only at sunset, but right on the farm where you spend all your time. And our Brother Jacob, the same guy that taught us the dangers of picking fights with your twin last week, teaches us this week how to put your head on the ground right where you are and listen for God tip toeing.

By this point in Jacob’s narrative, he didn’t have many safe places left to go. His dad was dead, his mom couldn’t be trusted, at least for the moment, his brother wanted to kill him, and he robbed his father in law. He had no family or friends left who wanted to see him, and if he made his way to their doorstep he’d probably burn them, too. Exhausted in the middle of nowhere, and too tired to keep running, Jacob and his two wives fell asleep right in the desert. He stole everything but a pillow and blanket from his father in law, so Jacob had to rough it. He found a rock for a pillow, conceded that he’d wake up with neck issues, and went to bed…and dreamt that a ladder sprung up from the ground right next to him, and angels climbed up and down on it going to and from heaven. God was there, too, and promised Jacob that someday he wouldn’t be homeless and isolated anymore, nor would he have an inescapable reputation for being a cheating scoundrel. He'd have land and a big family that loved him. When he woke up, he didn’t know much, but he knew something important had changed for him, and he made an altar to God out of his rock-pillow and named that spot “Bethel”, or “God-house.”

There’s tons and TONS of commentary out there about this story that we’ve come to nickname “Jacob’s Ladder”. But this week I spent the most time with a book called An Altar in the World by an Episcopalian priest and seminary professor named Barbara Brown Taylor. I’m a big fan of her writing, and I’m deeply indebted to her work. She emphasizes about this story how good humans are at trying to draw arbitrary lines around what is “holy” and what isn’t, around what is “God space” and what isn’t, and we need to stop that, and instead start looking for God everywhere. She had this to say:

“If there is a switch to flip, I have never found it. As with Jacob, most of my visions of the divine have happened while I was busy doing something else…My only part is to decide how I will respond…I can…talk myself out of living in the House of God…Or I can set a little altar, in the world or in my heart. I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is. I can flag one more gate to heaven…Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish–separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world…But Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.” (Taylor, Barabara Brown. An Altar in the World. New York, NY: HarperOne, 2009, pp 14-15) 

I was feeling silly and whimsical when I titled this sermon, and I was thinking of the board game “Chutes and Ladders”. You want to “climb” to the top of the board in that game, so you want to roll, move your marker, and land on ladders that go up. You want to avoid landing on the “chutes” that take you down. Jacob has landed on nothing but chutes for a while, and he’s been hanging out at the bottom of the board. But not because of poor luck, or because he’s bad at this board game for 5 year olds. He’s landed on ladders over and over and taken the chute instead. Sometimes we do that. We make so many bad choices that they all snowball together. 

Jacob finally stopped the snowball in this story because he figured out what he needs to do to turn his life around: quit going out of his way to pick the weeds. Stop being a pain in everyone’s keester long enough to notice one good, inspirational, holy thing. Name that holy moment. Acknowledge God. Then go forth and keep acknowledging that God spots. Taking one earnest moment to appreciate God saved him.

All that said, that still can end up sounding like vague, unsatisfying advice. “Have a good dream about God” isn’t something most of us can just plan to do, and “see God in the rocks” is nearly as cliche as “see God in the sunsets.” You tap into what Jacob did when you make it personal to you instead of trying to copy someone else’s God moment.

The first way we do that is just by thanking God for this moment, right here at Ionia UMC, with all of us sitting here together. A bunch of miracles had to happen for us to all be here. If you don’t believe me, you should see what breakfast looks like at my house.

The next way we make observing God personal is by adopting some kind of spiritual discipline. John Wesley, who founded the Methodist movement, was adamant that those who followed him, and those he eventually trained to be preachers, needed their own personal prayer and scripture reading habits. His Type A insistence that we all pray and read the Bible on schedule is what originally got us teased as “Methodists”, and it stuck. The Honeoye Falls folks have heard this from me pretty recently, but since two thirds of y’all are just meeting me–I picked up a habit of praying in the middle of the afternoon. Stop what I’m doing and pray. I’ve stopped zoom meetings to pray. I’ve prayed in traffic and during doctor’s appointments and in the middle of the grocery store. A lot of my colleagues who are daily pray-ers prefer either starting their day with God, or ending their day with God, and either praying first thing in the morning or last thing at night, and that’s beautiful. But when I started praying in the middle of the afternoon, I learned that God interrupts, and that was very powerful. The weeds of life never get in the way of the wheat that springs up and turns into my daily bread. Many boring, ordinary moments have become charged with Divine energy because I stopped to pray. I’ve turned lots of rocks into altars. As for the prayer itself, I’m a fan of “hey God, yep, that’s me, you’re probably wondering how I got here”, as if my prayers are some kind of voice over situation. But I’m also a huge fan of praying while meditating, and praying while making music. If I need words, I like the German version of the Lord’s Prayer, Das Vaterunser.

Only you can decide what works for you, but if you tap into what’s real and true for you, you’ll find the wheat, even in the weeds, and you’ll see the angels climbing up and down the ladder.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.