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Scripture citation(s): Genesis 28:10-17
A Sermon by
The Rev. Dr. Mark McIntosh
on
Genesis 28:10-17
✛
Sermon for the Installation of Carl Turner
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Jacob hurrying through the lengthening shadows, stumbling over the very stones he’ll make his pillow—a fugitive in flight from his past: the brother he’s cheated of his inheritance, and the thousand unreconciled, unachieved, unhallowed impulses of his life . . . .
And yet, at the same time, without realizing it, he’s drawn forward towards something he dare not name, a pilgrim beckoned onwards by some deep desire of his heart that he has not quite yet managed to put out or bury beneath the accumulated heaps of life’s ordinary trials.
And so it is for most of us here: the daily mundane exigencies of life sifting like stacks of unpaid bills over the deeper currents and hidden meanings of our lives, hiding from us — without our intent and without our awareness — those half-remembered, half-cherished moments when we felt ourselves most alive, most truly in touch with who we thought we might become, with those promises of life we have, somehow, left undiscovered.
But then in the midst of our hurrying refugee lives, this happens, this wonderful day of institution, in this house of God, these very stones reverberate with a dream that, strangely, wakes us up most soundly: two priests of this place have now journeyed on before us, bearing all your hopes and loves with them (as they always did) into the nearer presence of the God they served amongst you, and a new pilgrim arrives, a new priest to awaken God’s dream within you, and help you catch sight of Jacob’s ladder in this place and so everywhere; the angels ascending draw your hearts with them as they go, releasing you for a moment from the heavy slumber of life’s ordinary trials, awakening you once more and anew to the deep calling and meaning of your life.
That’s what this moment might do for us here this evening, for Carl and his dear family, and for all of you: awaken within you the mysterious quest at the heart of your life. “It is the secret signature of each soul,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we made our friends or chose our work or met our soul-mate, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows” any of these dear ones (The Problem of Pain). What is this secret signature, this name, this magic key that unlocks our lives and throws wide the doors of heart and mind?
Jacob began locking away the truth of himself, his flight from his true self, while he was still at home. He wrapped himself in animal skins, a false self to win the acceptance and blessing of his father that he so desperately wanted.
But now God was freely offering a blessing to Jacob—a promise so prodigious, so outlandish that even Jacob, that old master of fraternal chicanery and financial sleight-of-hand must have grinned at the stupendous audacity of it; in fact, the Bible says, he was scared stiff. And we should be too! Because what God is always in danger of awakening within us, in these Jacob’s Ladder moments, is a dream so heartbreakingly beautiful, so awe-laden, that we must either fall down in reverence before it, or quietly and numbingly deaden all hope of it within our hearts. Quiet desperation and wretched misery lie that way, indeed—and that is the way of the world, says Jesus in our Gospel, the world which doesn’t know the One whom Jesus called Abba, the true Father of abundant blessing, the Father of our true self.
For what God’s promise to Jacob betokens is in fact the secret truth of our common humanity – the truth of us as God has always known and loved us, beyond all the broken down facades we’ve struggled so hard to build around ourselves.
For to be fully human, it turns out, is indeed to long for something more wonderful than we fear we can ever find. To be fully alive, fully ourselves, we have to go beyond our natural human existence (or what we think of as human, anyway) and journey on into our divine humanity: for the secret signature of our souls is written in the heart of God. We were made in God’s love for us, and sharing in that divine friendship is the true blessing that makes us real at last.
This quantum leap from being simply human to entering our life in God: it’s not something we have to or could ever achieve for ourselves—God simply gives us this because he is so much in love with us.
I think this is why Jesus is so moving to all the people who come to know him.
Think of all the men and women and children who have been drawn to him, someone who seems to understand them so deeply, to hear their troubles and fears without fear or reservation, to unlock within them the real self they’d always feared could never find acceptance; somehow in his presence they feel stirring within them a hope, a dream they had long since forgotten or never realized had been the real reason for the ache within their hearts: to be fully alive as God meant us to be.
I want you to be with me, Jesus says to his friends in prayer to the Father; I want you to see the glory, the acceptance and delight of the Father in me—and of you in me: he loves us, you know, that’s why I have come to be with you, because he gives himself away eternally so that I am and you in me. I want you to see the love from which I flow, the love which has known you and cherished you and brought you to be, from all eternity.
Here, in this place, this house of God, on this day, Jesus Christ says this to us and to Carl.
As his great mentor Archbishop Michael Ramsey always taught, the glory of God is the eternal self-giving love of Father and Son, the self-giving love poured out within us by God the Holy Spirit to create and re-create us, to make us free to become in Christ ourselves at last.
Writing to a young Benedictine prior struggling with the leadership of his community, Catherine of Siena speaks words well-suited for Carl to hear and us to hear with him:
“We discover with what blazing love God’s goodness is established within us, because we see that he loved us within himself before he created us” (Noffke, vol. 1, 120).
“Love, then, love! Ponder the fact that you were loved before you ever loved. For God looked within himself and fell in love with the beauty of his creature and so created us. He was moved by the fire of his ineffable charity to one purpose only: that we should have eternal life and enjoy the infinite good God was enjoying in himself” (1, 132).
May this eternal self-giving love be a blessing to Carl, his family, this parish, and to each of us—hearing God’s call to us, into that true life for which he made us.
