Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

Getting Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable

Genesis 28:10-19a

So, I’m guessing that almost everyone here has their favorite pillow.  In college, one of my roommates had the most unusual pillow.  It was so thin!  It literally looked like a tortilla with a pillow case over it.  He would lay his head on that pillow and sigh because…it was perfect! He was totally comfortable…unless we got to his pillow and fluffed it first.  Now, understand—fluffing a “tortilla” leaves you with something that looks exactly the same.  Nothing had changed.  Except, he would come in, put his head on the pillow and immediately know that something was wrong:  “Alright, you commies, who messed with my pillow?” It was unbelievable! 

Now, in case you’re not a pillow person, try this thought experiment.  What if your spouse came in tonight and laid down on your side of the bed and went to sleep?  How many years have you slept on the side of the bed known as “Your Side of the Bed?” How long would you lay there and stew over this act of sheer disruption on your spouse’s part?  “How dare you?”

Human beings are drawn to comfort.  When it is time to sleep,  we try to comfort ourselves enough so that we can finally rest.  Do you sleep with a fan? Do you need that late night shower to relax?  Do you read before you sleep?  “If I can just get comfortable, maybe I can drift away!”

In our text, Jacob is traveling.  At some point along the way, the sun sets.  It’s time to camp.  So Jacob pitched his North Face tent and got out his Thermarest mattress and inflated his blow up pillow and sacked out for the night, right?  No, Jacob lived in ancient times when folks were tough and nature was even tougher.  Jacob grabs a rock and thinks to himself, “This will make a nice pillow!”  He lays down, puts his head on the rock, and falls fast asleep.

Now, we need to acknowledge here that no matter how tough Jacob is, if you have a rock for a pillow, you’re not comfortable.  You have to be really tired to be that uncomfortable and still sleep.  Try this sometime if you don’t believe me.  Start walking and just keep going in the same direction until the sun goes down.  Then, find the nearest piece of flat ground, pick out your rock pillow and call me in the morning and tell me how that goes. 

 There’s an old saying that says, “A clear conscience yields a good night’s sleep.”  You’d think that must have been Jacob’s story for him to put his head down on a rock and drift away. You would be so wrong!  Let’s fill in a few blanks. First, Jacob was Abraham’s grandson.  Abraham, known as the father of faith, had a wife, Sarah, who, very late in life, gave birth to a son, Isaac.  Isaac married Rebekah.  Although Rebekah and Isaac also had trouble conceiving a child, eventually, they had twin boys:  Jacob and Essau.  The story was that they were fighting the whole time in the womb and continued the fight from birth on.  Essau turned out to be a great outdoorsman and hunter which Isaac loved because he loved to eat meat.  Jacob was the “indoor type,” a quiet guy who enjoyed life in a tent.  Here’s the other thing:  the conflict between the two sons was aggravated by the fact that the parents each had a favorite:  Isaac loved Essau; Rebekah loved Jacob.  (That never really works!)

Here’s the other problem:  Jacob was a bit of a con man.  One day, when the boys are young men, Essau comes in from a day of hard work in the fields and he is famished.  Jacob just happens to have a really good stew ready to eat.  Knowing that he had something that Essau wanted badly, Jacob figured he would put what he wanted badly on the table, too:  “I will give you some stew if you sell me your birthright.”  You see, even though they were twins, Essau was the older son because he was born first.  (Legend had it that when Essau was born, Jacob came out grabbing Essau’s heel!)  So, we look at Jacob and think, “That’s no way to treat your brother! Give your brother some soup!”  Then, however, we watch Essau agree to the deal and we think, “Well, maybe Essau is the strong but not so bright kind of guy.”

Eventually, when Isaac has grown old and his eyes are dim, Jacob comes up with the other half of his plan.  Isaac has asked Essau to go hunt game and make him a savory stew that he can enjoy before he dies.  Rebekah overhears this.  She grabs her favorite son, and together they plot how Jacob can fool Isaac and get the blessing that is supposed to go to Essau.  Rebekah cooks up a stew.  Jacob dresses in Essau’s clothes and then covers his hands and his neck in animal skins because Essau is a really hairy guy.  He takes the stew to his father.  Isaac says, “You sound a lot like my son Jacob but your hands are hairy like Essau.  Are you really my son Essau?”  Jacob answers, “I am.”  Then, having been utterly deceived, Isaac gives Jacob his blessing. Jacob now has all of Isaac’s wealth and power.  When Essau discovers this, he makes a promise:  “The days of mourning for my father, Isaac, are approaching, then I will kill my brother, Jacob.”

So, why is Jacob, the tent loving, quiet guy, traveling and camping under the stars?  He’s on the run!  The consequences of his actions are following him.  Or, to put the matter more concretely, the brother who has always been stronger than him, whom he cheated out of everything, is about to even the score.  Jacob ran until he couldn’t run anymore.  Then, he slept.

I want to point out a couple of things at this point.  If you had a chance to tell the story of your ancestors, how honest would you be?  We all have “clay feet,” right?  Aren’t we supposed to “gussy”  things up a bit?  In case you don’t remember this, if Abraham was the “Father of Faith,” then Jacob was literally the father of Israel.  His sons would be the leaders of the ten tribes.  (I know that some of you just started hearing the soundtrack to “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in you heads, right?)  There is a blunt honesty here about what brothers can do to one another, about how messed up family can be.  This is a sibling rivalry that not only recalls Cain and Abel but that foretells Israel’s relationship with one of its early enemies:  Israel would be Jacob’s descendants; their enemy, Edom, would be the descendants of Essau.  Injustices start small and spread across generations.  This was true then.  This is the truth that we are living through now.  No one outruns such truths.

The second thing is that eventually there will be a reckoning.  Although it can look for all the world like someone is getting away with something, no one really gets away with anything.  What is true, though, is that the reckoning is not always what we think it will be.  We will hear more on this in the next two weeks.  For now, I just want you to remember this: you can run but you cannot hide.  Eventually, we have to face the truth and face our brothers (and sisters) and hash things through.  We have to stop running.

For now, though, we have to return to our not so sleeping beauty, Jacob.  How is he sleeping so soundly?  Well, I think that a good night’s sleep is sometimes a gift from God.  (The older I get, the stronger this belief becomes!)  In Jacob’s case, I think he may have had an assist as he laid his head down on that rock because there was a dream he was meant to have.  In the Bible, God often speaks through dreams.  Remember, Jacob’s son, Joseph would be a dreamer, too.  I happen to believe that God is not above a powerful dream or two in our lives, as well, especially when it is the only way to get our attention because we are running so hard.  

In Jacob’s dream, there is a stairway.  (Do you remember the song?  “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder?”)  This stairway runs all the way from the ground to the sky.  Angels are walking up and down that stairway, back and forth between the ground and heaven.  Just stop there and consider.  Here is Jacob, terrified of his brother and maybe, just maybe, beginning to see the horror of what he has done.  He’s out of sorts and the whole world is topsy-turvy.  He’s laying on the ground and sleeping with his head on a rock.  And yet, the sacred breaks through.  He’s not comfortable.  Nothing is right.  And yet, as soon as he shuts his eyes, the holy breaks through.

Then, he is standing in God’s presence.  God makes a nifty introduction, as if…I don’t know, maybe God was pretty sure Jacob might not be that familiar with God… “I am God, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac.  You remember me, right?”  At this point, I think Jacob had to be in a cold sweat:  “I thought it would be Essau who got me.  It turned out it is God who is going to do the dirty work!” Then, God utterly shocks Jacob.  Instead of saying, “Jacob, I’m here to kill you,” God says, “Jacob, everything you see here is yours.  I’m going to bless you and your children and your children’s children.  I’m going to protect you wherever you go. This is my promise and I keep my promises!” 

 Do you catch the irony here?  Jacob had dedicated his life to deceiving his own family.  Now, this “conman” is given a promise from God that eclipses everything he’d ever managed to steal.  God knows exactly who Jacob is and what he’s done and God loves him anyway.  Then, Jacob wakes up.  He’s terrified!  When is God going to realize that there’s been a mistake?  Then, he whispers the most amazing words:  “God is in this place—truly.  And I didn’t even know it!”  Jacob takes his rock pillow and makes a shrine of it and pours oil over it.  He renames the place, “Bethel” literally, “God’s house.”

“God’s house.”  Wherever we are, when God reveals God’s self to us, that place becomes God’s house.  Consider this, though…God is revealed to Jacob in the midst of a really uncomfortable time, in a really out-of-sorts place.  Nothing is going right.  Jacob is slowly realizing that he’ll never run fast enough to flee the truth about himself or the consequences of what he has done.  That’s the moment when the sacred breaks through, when God appears, when grace becomes real. Discomfort is what precedes real change!

A lot of things are not right these days for us.  It’s uncomfortable to wear a mask.  It’s hard to practice social distancing.  It’s tempting to pretend the pandemic is over.  It’s uncomfortable to face the truths that are being revealed about the consequences of racism in our culture.  It’s tempting to run, to hide, to deny the the truth of the consequences of our choices or the truth that we have benefited from others’ choices that granted us privilege.  Yet, for as wrong and off and out of sorts as things might seem, for as uncomfortable as we meet be, we have to remember, these are the conditions under which the holy and the sacred often break through, in which we meet the God who whispers, “Hey…remember me?” We might want to make peace with our discomfort as something that is both necessary and even sacred.

The question is whether we can tolerate the discomfort long enough for the holy to catch up to us? How many opportunities for growth have we missed because the person in front of us just made us uncomfortable because they committed the sin of not being like us?  How many chances to finally hear the truth did we blow right past because that truth would disturb us and we really just wanted to be soothed? Seeking comfort will always be the easy way out.  What if instead, it’s time to learn for a while to sleep with our heads on a rock in the hopes that we might join Jacob in declaring that God was here the whole time and we just didn’t know it yet?