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Stairway to Heaven

Genesis 28:10-19a

July 19, 2026

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When our grandson and granddaughter, Eli and Elise, were little and were staying at our house overnight, they always wanted me to tell them a bedtime story. So I would start by asking what they wanted to hear and they would come up with some absurd situation — like the slice of lasagna that saved the world — and we would go from there. The more ridiculous the scenario, the better they would like it. It was like beginning by painting yourself into a corner and then trying to figure out how to escape. 

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And of course, the stories would always start with the words, “once upon a time…” because everyone knows that’s how you had to begin a childhood tale. The words “once upon a time…” have been used to provide the opening to a veritable library of stories, from comedies to romances to dramas, not to mention my silly little fables. 

 

If you think about it, the words “once upon a time…” provide a signal that the story to follow is not being told like a newspaper account with strict journalistic adherence to the facts, but rather more like a caricature in which the significant details are highlighted to help make the point of the story. Then, the rest of the details are simply sketched in. 

 

Of course, storytelling has an ancient history. It’s role was partially to provide entertainment, but it was also intended to offer a means for passing on cultural traditions, remembering history, explaining the origins of things and teaching significant lessons. 

 

Those things were particularly important for those cultures in which almost no one could read or write. However, the conventions of storytelling continue to invoke our imaginations today where they are used on stage, on television and in the movies. 

 

Many of these conventions are archetypal — that is, they are so closely associated with the way our imaginations work that they even help govern our dreams. And it’s important to gain some glimmer of understanding of these storytelling conventions if we want to understand one of the more famous dream stories of all time. 

 

That is, Jacob’s now iconic dream of a ladder stretching all the way up to heaven — a ladder on which angels were ascending and descending, carrying out missions on earth for God and giving evidence of God’s presence in that place. 

 

Last week we heard some of the background of today’s story when Jacob convinced his slower-witted twin brother sell his birthright as the firstborn in exchange for a bowl of porridge. Next — with his mother as his co-conspirator — Jacob created an elaborate charade to impersonate his brother so that he could fool his blind father into giving him the blessing that rightfully belonged to Esau.

 

When Esau discovered what had happened, he had to have felt that his life had been plundered and he was left with the painful knowledge that the thieves were his twin brother and his own mother. So it’s no surprise that he was enraged. He wants to kill his brother.  As he plots his revenge, their mother acted again, sending Jacob hundreds of miles away from home under the pretext of going to his uncle’s home region to look for a wife.

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Here’s how Don Hoffman describes the situation, “[…] Jacob is a crook and a scoundrel, a liar and a cheat, who always makes promises with his fingers crossed behind his back, and who buries the killer clause in the fine print. And Luz is the back side of nowhere. Of all the people in all the world for God to appear to, Jacob is the wrong person. And Luz is the wrong place. And that night was the wrong night.

 

“Jacob has hacked into the family computer once too often. He stole his brother’s password. He ran a con game on his own father. And he’s been found out. His brother Esau is out to kill him. In order to save his skin, Jacob had to run away from home. And he is spending the night in the armpit of the universe, a place too small to be a ghost town, where the only motel uses rocks for pillows.” 

 

After all of that drama and betrayal, what has Jacob’s scheming really earned him? Nothing at all. Jacob was forced to run from his twin brother, leaving town with pretty much just the clothes on his back. Esau apparently got to keep all of Isaac’s huge estate for himself, no matter what he may have thought that bowl of soup might had cost him. 

 

Here’s how my father once described Jacob’s situation:  “Jacob was fleeing for his life. He was alone and on foot. We can imagine the pounding of his pulse, the throbbing of his heart as he hurried along — constantly looking backwards to make certain Esau wasn’t following him, continually alert against the possibilities that his brother might be lying alongside the trial to ambush him. Jacob, in utter exhaustion, finally threw himself down to sleep. There was no pleasant meadow, no green oasis, no sheltered valley. He lay down in a bleak and desolate place on a hilltop of barren rock. There was nothing by which the guilty, burdened and remorseful Jacob could measure his little soul against except the silent and dreadful immensities he could see from the hilltop where he lay — the hills rising in all their stony starkness and the star-filled sky.”

 

It appears that for all his scheming, his inheritance will be nothing more than the cold ground he sleeps on and the stone he uses as a pillow. But just when you think that Jacob the con man has finally received his comeupp-ance, he has vision in which God himself speaks to Jacob, not to offer punishment for Jacob’s con man ways, but to offer God’s solemn promise that the birthright Jacob clung to so tightly would, in fact, be his. 

 

God tells him, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; 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. 

 

“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

 

Remember that God made this sweeping promise to Jacob when Jacob was at his absolute worst. And just like that, God comes to seek and find me when I’m at my worst; he does the same for each one of you. 

 

For you and me, that reassurance is a matter of faith; we can depend on it with all our hearts, even if we can’t absolutely prove it’s true. For Jacob, it was another matter altogether. He received a promise directly from God. You would think that that would have been enough for him to give up his selfish ways and turn his life around forever right on the spot. 

 

But that’s not what happened. This is no “and they all lived happily ever after” moment. When Jacob wakes up from his vision, he offers God a deal. Here’s how Paul Kabo puts it:  “[…] in the morning, Jacob got up and he set up the stone on which he had been sleeping and he poured some oil on it and made it into a shrine. And then he said to God, ‘Now, God, if you really will go with me wherever I go, and if you will protect me, and if you will give me food to eat, and clothes to wear, and you will bring me back home safely again; then, I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll worship you and I will give you ten percent of everything of what you give me.’ 

 

“Through the centuries as the rabbis have preached this passage, they asked the question ‘Why doesn’t God answer? Why doesn’t God respond to this nice deal which Jacob offers him?’ At first one rabbi answers the question by saying one thing and then another rabbi another thing. And finally in the Middle Ages, one rabbi finished off the conversation by saying, ‘The reason God doesn’t say anything is that even God doesn’t know what to say to somebody with that much gall.’ You see the promise to Jacob is a promise which comes out of God’s grace. But the Jacobs […] of this world are never able to accept grace. All they can accept, whether they are dealing with God or with their […] brothers, is a bargain.”

 

In other words, Jacob reacts to God’s promise by remaining completely within his existing character. After all, this is just the beginning of his transformation into a person of faith. 

 

This was Jacob’s first direct encounter with God and it would prove to be the beginning of Jacob’s transformation from a self-involved schemer into a person of genuine faith. This encounter starts Jacob on a lifelong journey of faith — a journey through which he will learn what it means to believe in and serve the one true God.

 

Having said all that, somehow this story doesn’t seem quite right. After all, Jacob is unquestionably a con man. He inherited God’s promise to Abraham in an unethical fashion. It’s true that Esau might not have fully appreciated the value of the blessing he gave up, but at least it was rightfully his; he didn’t have to trick anyone to get it.

 

On the other hand, Jacob doesn’t really deserve to inherit the promise and to be the one through whom the whole world would be blessed. And yet, there he is. In fact, Jacob becomes so integral to God’s promise that the Chosen People will later come to bear Jacob’s nickname of Israel, which means the one who struggles with God.

 

The bottom line of Jacob’s story is that he thought he would have to cheat and manipulate in order to have any chance at receiving God’s blessing. But God surprised him by freely offering his blessing to Jacob just as he was. Although that doesn’t mean that God would simply allow Jacob to remain forever in that emotional place of distrust and cunning self-interest. Over time, Jacob would truly become changed by the presence of God in his life.

 

In fact, there’s even more to the story that’s hard to see in our English translation. Many chapters earlier in Genesis — and about a dozen generations before Jacob — the people of the earth had tried to build a tower into the heavens. Their tower was intended to serve as their launching pad for an assault on God. They wanted to force God to do their will. That story ended with God giving the people many different languages, which, in turn, led to them to scatter across the face of the earth. 

 

What does that have to do with Jacob? The truth of the matter is that the Hebrew word that’s translated as “ladder” in our Old Testament lesson today doesn’t really mean a ladder at all. Instead, that word refers to a stairway ramp — the kind that led up to the summit of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. That is, it was a stairway just like the one on the Tower of Babel. Only in our story, God uses that stairway to come down and freely offer his blessing to Jacob. Therefore, our Old Testament lesson is a reversal of the Tower of Babel story. It is a gift of grace. 

 

In the Canaanite language, the word “Luz” means departure. That’s an appropriate name for the site of this story, because it’s from here that Jacob departs to begin his new life with his uncle and it’s from here that Jacob begins a journey of faith, which will ultimately cause him to leave his old life of scheming behind. 

 

In the end, our Old Testament lesson serves to tell us that no person and no place is ever beyond the reach of God’s grace. If God could find the person of faith buried underneath a scoundrel like Jacob, surely there is hope for you and me. 

 

But what a wonderful image of God’s patience that is! God chooses to withhold judgment from us — at least in this life — because God is well aware that within each of us lie the seeds of both good and bad intermingled; within each of us lies a portal to sin and a gateway to heaven and over time, we will access both, over and over again. As the old saying puts it:

 

There is so much bad in the best of us,

and there is so much good in the worst of us,

that it hardly behooves any of us,

to speak any ill of the rest of us.

 

Isn’t that the joy of the Christian life? As much as we want to live for God, we regularly stumble, hurting ourselves and sometimes those around us. But somehow in ways we can’t quite understand, God is able to transform the dark and messy aspects of our lives into something new and powerful and good. God trusts us and empowers us because God knows that the tiniest seed of good is far more important and far more powerful than the bushels of sin that we have scattered all around ourselves.

 

When it’s all said and done, you’ll find that the story of Jacob isn’t really a profile of a pathological liar and scoundrel, but a portrait of the indescribable love of God, who turns his back on no one, and who offers redemption to even the most despicable characters. 

 

Isn’t that good news for us as well? When things are looking bleak in your life, when it seems that you may never get your act together and that your attempts at faithful living have been transformed into one stumble after another, remember that life is a journey during which we are brought back time and time again onto the pathway of grace. 

 

And remember, too, that God’s promise to Jacob is also his promise to you:  “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.” Amen. 

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Jim McCrea

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