Ladders
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, November 26, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
– William Sloane Coffin
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is excerpted from a little piece by Terry Tempest Williams called “Why I Write.” She is a naturalist and a marvelous writer – her books include Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger, and, in collaboration with artist and sculptor Mary Frank, a little book called Desert Quartet. Here is “Why I Write”:
I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.
I write to remember. I write to forget. I write to quell the pain. I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness. I write to record what I love in the face of loss. I write as a bow to wilderness. I write because I believe I can create a path in the darkness. I write because I am not employable. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write for the love of ideas. I write knowing words always fall short. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.
2. Our second reading this morning is the inspiration for a spiritual, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” and for several rock-and-roll songs by famous groups like Rush and Huey Lewis and the News. This text also inspired an episode of the tv show South Park. So here is Genesis 28:11-17:
Now Jacob came to a certain place and stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder resting on the earth, with its top 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 your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying; and your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south. And all the families of the earth will be blessed through you and by your descendants. Know that I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."
When Jacob woke from his sleep, he thought, "Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!" This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."
The reason why Jacob was out there that night,
sleeping under the stars with a rock for a pillow,
was that he had just cheated his brother, Esau, out of his father’s blessing,
and Esau wanted to kill him.
Therein lies one of the bible’s best tales.
Esau was his father’s favorite and, as the oldest son, he was entitled to his father’s blessing –
a blessing which would make him the chief architect of Israel’s future –
but his mother, Rebekah, believed that her younger son, Jacob, would be a better leader.
So the plan was to fool dad, who was blind, into thinking that Jacob was Esau, giving him the blessing.
The problem with this plan was noted with great comic relief back in the Sixties
by a group called Beyond the Fringe: Alan Bennett, a member of the troupe,
wore a clerical collar and played a vicar in the Church of England giving his Sunday sermon.
He tells the congregation that he has been pondering the meaning of the morning text –
Genesis 27, verse 11 – “Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man...”
It’s a real verse, and it’s Jacob reminding his mother why the plan won’t work.
As soon as dad reaches out to touch me, he’ll know I’m not my brother.
But Rebekah drapes Jacob in animal skins to give him that hairy feel – and the trick works.
When Esau comes home from a hunting trip and sees what’s just gone down,
he gets a murderous glint in his eye,
and Mom sends Jacob off to stay with her family until Esau cools off.
Jacob walked as far and as fast he could that first day, stopping for the night because the sun had set;
he lay down on the ground, went to sleep – and had a dream.
The Hebrews believed that if you were ever actually to see God, you couldn’t handle it.
Your mind would be blown – it would be too intense.
So in the bible, dreams are a way for God to pay you a visit
without sending you into therapy for the rest of your life;
people believed that our dreams move us into the realm of the sacred –
in our dreams, we are involved with forces and energies larger than our own.
That night Jacob dreamed about a ladder that reached into heaven.
There are angels on the ladder – and angels are normally God’s messengers –
but this time God delivers the message personally because it is a divine promise:
you will have land – the land on which you are lying and the land in all four directions,
you will have children – lots of them, I will keep you safe, now and always.
“I will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you home.”
Jacob wakes from his dream and thinks, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”
I believe this story offers us two valuable gifts.
The first is that God cares much more about our good points than our bad ones.
Jacob is a trickster – he has deceived his father and cheated his brother.
So God makes a huge commitment to a trickster.
At the most vulnerable moment in Jacob’s life, God appears, not in judgment, but with a promise:
“I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go.”
It’s reassuring to know, since none of us is perfect, that God hangs in there with us anyway.
The second gift in the story is the image of the ladder as a connection between earth and spirit.
The idea of a spiritual ladder has deep roots in both Christianity and the Eastern religions.
It stands for any form of spiritual encouragement,
any practice that helps us stay in better touch with our own higher self,
and the rules are simple.
You have to choose your own ladder – you can’t use someone else’s.
You take one rung at a time because each step holds its own life lesson.
And along the way, you’ll probably need more than one ladder.
So to encourage us to think about our own ladders – what they are or what they could be –
let me suggest several that have helped people all over the world,
both people who are religious, and people who never darken the door of a church.
First, we are ladders to each other.
Just think of the people in your own life who have encouraged and guided you.
People who taught you something that has made a real difference.
You can be someone else’s ladder without even knowing it.
The Buddha was a sheltered young prince who was in his late twenties
before he ever left the grounds of his father’s palace;
one day he asked his charioteer, Chama, to take him out to see the world.
According to the tradition, Chama drove the prince out into the village
and the Buddha-to-be saw four things that changed him forever:
an old man, a sick man being cared for by his friends, a corpse, and a monk.
At each of the first three sights he asked, “To whom do these things happen?”
Each time Chama answered, “To everyone, my Lord.”
The prince was stunned.
Then he saw the monk, standing at the edge of a forest,
a man who had devoted his life to the search for understanding:
how do we face the sorrows of this life and find a way beyond their grasp?
The old man, the sick man, the corpse, and the monk were all ladders, “heavenly messengers.”
They started the Buddha on his own lifelong search for understanding.
And heavenly messengers can also come to us in very ordinary ways.
Something as ordinary as watching television.
Dr. Mae Jemison was the first African-American woman astronaut.
As a girl growing up in Alabama, she was a Star Trek fan,
and Star Trek was way ahead of its time in more ways than one:
the crew was multi-racial and multi-planetary,
and the chief communications officer was a black woman, Lt. Uhura.
Her name comes from the Swahili word for freedom, and Lt. Uhura – without knowing it –
was a heavenly messenger for Mae Jemison,
who was recruited by NASA after she got her M.D. at Cornell.
As an astronaut on the space shuttle Endeavor in 1992,
Dr. Mae Jemison started her transmissions to Houston
with Lt. Uhura’s signature line: “All hailing frequencies are open.”
We are ladders to each other – sometimes without even knowing it.
Another ladder, as close to us as a pen and a pad of paper, is writing.
Not the writing we do for a term paper or a work project,
but the writing we do for ourselves, like writing in a journal, or writing a poem,
or writing something for our Lenten Booklet.
That kind of writing is an act of the soul.
As Terry Tempest Williams says, writing is a way to slow down, regain your balance,
begin a dialogue, safeguard a memory;
it is a way to record what you love in the face of loss.
Sometimes it is even a way to survive.
Viktor Frankl, in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, tells us how just the idea of writing
helped keep some of his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz alive.
They had no writing materials,
so he challenged the writers and musicians in the camp
to finish their incomplete books and compositions in their minds.
He asked everyone else to imagine taking a bus ride in their home town,
unlocking the door of their own apartment,
switching on the lights, and answering the phone.
These thoughts and memories often reduced people to tears – and helped them stay alive.
There are all kinds of spiritual ladders that don’t cost you a thing –
you can take up yoga, develop a prayer life, spend more time outdoors;
and here’s one that might not be so obvious at first glance:
the disciplined pursuit of a passion – something you love to do.
Why is this a ladder?
Because when we do something we love, no matter it is, we are more connected to our own best self.
Whether it’s playing a sport, having friends over for a party, writing a poem,
or playing the guitar, if you love doing it, earth and spirit are joined within you.
One of the best, most fun essayists I know is Sarah Vowell – if you don’t know her, look her up.
She loves to shoot a basketball.
As a girl in Oklahoma, she was a forward on her elementary school basketball team.
She couldn’t run, pass or dribble – but she could shoot.
And, she says, there were two reasons why she could shoot: “black-eyed peas and Uncle Hoy.”
She lived in the country and shot baskets in the backyard every night after dinner.
The backboard was nailed to an oak tree that grew on the top of a hill.
So when she missed a shot, the ball would roll downhill into a muddy drainage ditch
which ran along the edge of a field planted with black-eyed peas.
She would have to run after the ball and pull it out of the gross black-eyed pea mud and hose it off.
So, she says, “I learned not to miss.”
When her Uncle Hoy saw that she had a knack for shooting, he started training her.
He had gone to college on a math-basketball scholarship; he taught Sarah how to swish the ball.
Uncle Hoy hated the backboard – he thought players who relied on it lacked elegance.
So when Sarah made a basket that hit the backboard before going in, he’d yell, “Doesn’t count!”
That’s why Sarah Vowell can shoot – and usually swish – a basketball.
And that, she says, “is why [even] today,
every time a basketball slides off my fingertips and drops perfectly, flawlessly, into that hole,
well, swish, happiness found.”
The disciplined pursuit of a passion – something you love to do – is a ladder.
If you’ve ever swished a basketball, you know it’s a spiritual experience.
The image on the cover of your Order of Service is a pale shadow
of one of Georgia O’Keefe’s most famous paintings – it’s called “Ladder to the Moon.”
Across the bottom is the black silhouette of a mountain range, the Pedernal,
where her ashes are now scattered.
In the painting, the evening sky is turquoise green,
and the ladder, suspended in mid-air as if it is enchanted,
is a rich yellow-gold.
If you’d like a better sense of it, there’s a color print on the table below the pulpit.
Georgia O’Keefe didn’t like to talk about the meaning behind her art.
She once said that “colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.”
But on most days she would climb up a ladder leaning against an outer wall of her abobe home
and watch the sun rise and set from her roof –
and she knew that in the natural religion of the New Mexico Indians,
the ladder stood for the link between earth and sky, nature and spirit.
For me, “Ladder to the Moon” is saying, in Bill Coffin’s words,
that “heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads”
and there is more magic in the world than we know.
Last week in La Jolla, California, there was conference on religion and science called “Beyond Belief.”
The presenters were all scientists, and there were two camps –
those who think God is a delusion and those who aren’t quite so sure about that.
At the end of it all, a woman who teaches biology at Stanford said to her colleagues:
let’s not forget, any of us,
what it feels like just to walk outside after dark and look up.
Looking up on a clear night, a religious person might think, “Surely the Lord is in this place...!”
A humanist, looking up, is no less filled with awe and gratitude for the beauty of it all.
A scientist, whether religious or not, may well feel more than anyone,
because scientists know more about how vast and beautiful the universe is –
they know, without any doubt, that however all of this got started,
what we see when we look up at the night sky is the greatest story ever told.
Amen.
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Notes:
1. “Why I Write” by Terry Tempest Williams was published in Writing Creative Nonfiction, Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard, editors
2. The story by Viktor Frankl is repeated in the book, God and the Evolving Universe, Redfield, et. al., 141-2.
3. Sarah Vowell’s story about learning to shoot a basketball is in her collection of essays, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, pp. 62-65