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Genesis 28:10-19
Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That’s how the light gets in
– Leonard Cohen, Anthem
In Leonard Cohen’s amazing collection of songs there are some incredible gems, none more potent than his 1992 song “Anthem.” Amongst the ridiculous amount of great lines over his long career, few can compare to the chorus – Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
It’s a chorus that haunts me, though I’ve heard it a thousand times. It haunts me because it reminds me of God’s love when I cannot imagine how some light can get into the wreckage I have often made of things…the cracks, the broken bits, the fractures I think of as detriments to the action of God are, in fact, the very places where God operates…where God squeezes in and shines.
Genesis offers us many opportunities to appreciate the gray areas of life, to understand that we don’t live on the binary, as much as we’d like to think that we do, and all of us are sinner and saint, good and evil, darkness and light. This morning we encounter Jacob, though kind of in the middle of the story. When you read the whole thing, you see that again and again Jacob, who seems to be the hero of the story, is a questionable character. The story sets up in familiar ways, with Esau, the older brother, strong hunter and physically dominating alongside Jacob, the “momma’s boy” who gets a lot of rest and relaxation. But it doesn’t go the way we expect. Esau should be the favored son, but Jacob tricks his brother out of his inheritance and then lies to his father about it. He’s conniving and manipulative, and nothing upon which one would build a dream, or a nation. And yet, the story tells us, this is precisely what God does.
Jacob, the supposed favored of God here, isn’t even particularly religious. Even as his father, Isaac, blesses him in the name of Yahweh, with the promises of God, Jacob hasn’t really bought into the whole “God” thing. To his father he says, “YOUR God”, as if he doesn’t really count himself in this “God Squad” to which Isaac belongs. I don’t even think that Jacob is “spiritual but not religious”, which is the common term these days for people tired of organized religion. He seems to be all about Jacob. And yet this, the story tells us, is precisely who God uses.
Now, I can see the gears working in some heads out there, the squint beginning to manifest on the edges of some eyes. So, if you are beginning to think this is a “God can work through anyone” sermon, or a theological assertion that “God’s plans take things we mean for evil and turn them to good”, you’re going to be disappointed. Or happy. That is not my theological comment for the morning. But neither can I make the assertion that God does not redeem, or restore…that God does not seem to work through people I certainly wouldn’t choose, or do things that are remarkable in people with tremendous flaws, flaws sometimes so potent that we have a hard time reconciling the good with the bad.
The use of Jacob, and the many other broken characters in Genesis, is a way our scriptures describe a God who does not seek our perfection, nor our purity. As soon as Jacob sets off on his journey, the first night away, he has this dream of activity in the sky, what we colloquially call, “Jacob’s Ladder.” The hebrew word that most often gets translated as “ladder” is more ambiguous than that. Perhaps it is ladder, perhaps something like a ramp, or a staircase, something that connects earth to heaven – in that familiar cosmology where we are down here on earth and God is up there in heaven. On this ladder, or staircase, or something, angelic beings, heavenly creatures, move back and forth between the place of divinity and our home, where this brokenness exists. The image of the ladder (or stairway, or ramp, or something), is meant to evoke in the Hebrew listeners the image of a Mesopotamian tower, a place of worship for other gods, who would appear at the top of the stairs to make pronouncements. But here, in Jacob’s dream, God appears beside him, right here on the earth. It’s more than just an alteration of the story, it’s a theological statement. God is here. With us. In this place.
That awareness is so inspiring to Jacob that he anoints the spot – covering a stone in oil and declaring the place “Bethel” or “God’s house.” It is so inspiring to him that he calls the place “me-nura”, which unfortunately gets translated most often as “awesome.” The word is “overawed” in Hebrew, perhaps even something like “dreadful” or “overwhelming”. Awesome gives a whole different impression and, frankly, is just not a word that we should use anymore. Ever. Especially with God. It’s the theological equivalent of Baywatch.
So, anyway, in the wake of all that there is one more thing that Jacob does. You know, with the magic ladder and the mystical awe and the lights and smoke and disco balls, one more thing. Having been promised that, “…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” and having been told, “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”, Jacob’s response is a really, really human one. OK – IF you do that, and IF you do this, THEN you shall be my God.
As much as we’d like Jacob to be radically altered by this direct encounter with the Divine, he is not. As much as we’d like to think that a brush with God would also rid us of our own shortcomings, removing the not so shiny parts and leaving us pure and unblemished, this is not what an encounter with God does. In fact in story after story in the Bible, God is an agent of redemption, not an agent of purification. We do not leave our encounters with God made whole in the way that we might think about it – repaired and perfect – but rather when the Bible speaks of wholeness perhaps it means something else. Perhaps it means that we accept more fully that God accepts us, despite our flaws, our shortcomings, our personality disorders and weakness, our doubts, insecurities and illnesses. Perhaps our wholeness means that God loves us all – and ALL of us, just how we are, just how we were created.
Now, this is not to say that we don’t have things to work on, ways to improve, chances to be better people…but that God’s love, God’s presence, God’s creative energy is here for each of us, seeping in through our broken places. This is not meant to excuse terrible wrongs or to suggest that God is somehow going to transform our worst mistake into a beautiful flower. God’s covenant is there not to make God’s love conditional, but to serve as motivation, to inspire us to reach up that ladder and ascend to better places. God’s covenant is there to assert that we have a part to play in the movement of creation. If we want our worst mistake to flower in some way, WE have work to do…work that God will honor and support. But without contrition, without confession, or truth or admission, there is no true reconciliation, no room for creation to spin it’s web.
That seems like an easy formula – repentance, forgiveness, transformation – but apparently such a realization does not suddenly transform our world. In fact, we seem to go on doing what we always do, for our motives are complex. But here’s to hoping that, like the old adage of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, we can start with small steps, each one helping us grant one another complexity, the gift of seeing beyond the small labels we often stop with and seeking something more…the compassion that comes from stopping a quest for purity and beginning a search for meaning. For we are created not to be unblemished beings, at least not in this lifetime, but rather to be flawed people who reach for greatness, who strive for perfection, who seek the divine…knowing that God does not stand on the top of the ladder, but beside us, on whichever rung we happen to be…or whichever rung our neighbor happens to be.
I’m not sure that I can state a wholly formed, well-crafted theology on the nature of a God who I continue to find mysterious, elusive, and fantastically frustrating. I can say that I remain convinced that God is in the business of creating, and that creation keeps right on creating, even when we try to kill it, or deny it, or ignore it. And that same creation works in us all of the time, right alongside our bad decisions, our moral shortcomings, our darkness and our manipulation and our conniving…creating, creating, and creating still.
The legend around Leonard Cohen’s magical line – “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” – is that it comes from a book by Jack Kornfield on Buddhism. In that book is a story of a young man who had lost his leg. He went to a Buddhist monastery to help deal with his extreme anger at his lot in life. When he first arrived he drew these pictures of cracked vases and damaged things, because he felt damaged. Over time, as he found his inner peace, and changed his outlook, but still drew broken vases. His master asked him one day: “Why do you still draw a crack in the vases you draw? Are you not whole?” And he replied, “Yes, I am, and so are the vases. Now I know that the crack is how the light gets in.”
Thanks be to God.