It's All About the Benjamins

Jump to Comments Thursday morning I gave the chapel devotional at both 9 and 10 o’clock here at Harding. Assuming I understand this interface right, my speech as written [with some edits as read indicated] is below the break. Dream. A powerful word. Like many other English words, it has varied meanings. A dream can be a hope, or ideal to be achieved, like the American Dream, or the dream that Dr Martin Luther King had. A dream is also what some of you are certainly doing right now: what the mind does sometimes to avoid focus on matters at hand, like Thursday morning chapel speeches. Don’t worry; personal announcements are not far off. Then there’s that other meaning of dream: visions and thoughts had while asleep. These kind of dreams can be exciting, like those daydreams of what you all could be doing at 9 am besides listening to me; or, they can be moving and motivating like those aforementioned hopes; sometimes dreams can be terrifying. Honestly, those descriptions of night-time dreams are mostly second-hand information, from my perspective. I confess that I have really boring dreams. Even my nightmares are boring. Sunday night — or Monday morning — I had a nightmare. In this nightmare, I had received a substantial number of traffic tickets, even a court summons, for running red lights in some Californian city. In the nightmare I supposed that some traffic camera was misreading some other car’s license plate as my own, since in the dream, like in the waking world, I had never been to California, much less committed moving violations there. There was no way I could leave to plead my case, as it was finals week. It was absurd, unfair, and infuriating! But it was still pretty boring. Dreams occur in several Biblical stories in both the old and new testaments. The obvious choice in a devotional whose lead-in story is about dreams would be the story of Joseph; however, I am instead going to talk about a dream his father, Jacob, had. In the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis, we find Jacob, after he had deceived his father Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing. Rebecca, Jacob’s mother, fearful that Esau will take Jacob’s life in anger, concocts a story about her distaste for the locals so that Isaac will send Jacob off to get a wife in Paddan-Aram, northeast of Canaan and out of Esau’s hands. In verse 10, Jacob sets out for Haran, a city in Paddan-Aram where his relatives live. This is how the NRSV puts it: 10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went towards Haran. 11He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12And he dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. Now, I know that we normally say “Jacob’s Ladder” and not “Jacob’s Stairway” when referring to this passage, but Jacob was probably seeing something like an ethereal ziggurat — a near eastern place for worshipping Gods — rather than the rungs up to the heavenly hayloft. Remember this ziggurat bit, it will be important later. Continuing in verse 16, after God affirms his promises to Jacob in the dream: 16Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ 17And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ Something you probably didn’t know, unless you’ve had Dr. Fortner before, is the Sumerian name for Babel, or Babylon. It’s “KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI.” It means the “gate of the gods” in that long-dead language. As the Sumerian name and the story earlier in Genesis both demonstrate, the locals in Babylon thought their town was awesome. They had a ziggurat, where the priest could climb up the stairs of man-made pyramidal hill and therefore be closer to heaven, where they thought their so-called-gods would hear them. It had levees to control the random and chaotic forces of the river Euphrates. At about the time of the patriarchs, [– Abraham, Issac, and Jacob –] Babylon was the largest city in the world, according to Tertius Chandler’s “Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth”. Babylon had everything that could be had at that time in history. Lying on the ground, in the middle of nowhere, with a rock for a pillow, Jacob declares that where he is — Bethel — is the true Ka Dingir Ra Ki: the gateway to God’s residence. We moderns are no different from the ancient Babylonians — it’s easy for us to get caught up in our own achievements and use them for self aggrandizement. I challenge us, then, to look for those desolate places, those Bethels, and not to our own individual greatness, for our own connection to the Lord and to true greatness. James 4:10: Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.