What Did I Miss?

In the book "God Was in This Place and I, i Did Not Know," Lawrence Kushner devotes the entire book to reading the story of Jacob climbing the ladder, through the study of different emphasis and interpretations of a single verse, Genesis 28:16. One such view sees the ladder as awareness: "If I had known God was here, I wouldn't have gone to sleep in such a holy place." Kushner shares the fact that classical Hebrew has no word for spirituality. "Judaism sees only one world, which is material and spiritual at the same time." The material world is always potentially spiritual." He recounts a Jewish midrash that tells the story of two Israelites, Reuven and Shimon, who cross the Red Sea in the greatest Jewish miracle and complain and grumble all the while about the mud. But they concentrate so much on the slime that they never look up to see the walls of water being held aside while they cross. For Reuven and Shimon the miracle never happened. When Jacob wakes up to realize he had been wrestling with God and did not recognize the fact, he wonders "If God was here, and I didn't know, then perhaps God has been other places also."

My prayer for the congregation?

Dear God, We are thankful for rich, imaginative dreams of encounters with your presence and possibilites of growing under your watch. Let us not be so entertained by dreams, however, that we fail to wake up to all that is happening around us - daily occurrences of divine interaction. While we wrestle to understand your will, let us not look only for rainbows and burning bushes, but also for gentle nods of encouragement, quiet looks of agreement, and subtle undercurrents of discord. All speak of your vision if we stay vigilant and awake to all possibilities. Let us be a church of dreams and a church fully awake, where everything has the potential of being spiritual. Amen.