Reading: Genesis 27:1-4, 15-23; 28:10-17 Jacob's Dream
Pastor Emillie pointed out the comedy that is inherent in the Jacob, Esau, and Isaac She preaches about the way we often assume that we can figure out about what God's will or way should be. This is not necessarily what we can best take away from this story..
Jacob’s story is, at its heart, a wrestling with honesty. When he stands before his blind father, disguised as his brother, his voice betrays the deception even as his hands feel like Esau’s.
Later, when he finally meets Esau face-to-face, Jacob cannot hide behind masks anymore. He bows, he trembles, and he offers gifts, not because he has suddenly become blameless, but because he is finally facing the one he wronged.
What passes between the brothers is not the clean slate of truth-telling, but a hard, trembling honesty born of failure, estrangement, and longing for reconciliation.
This kind of honesty is not easy. It does not present us as pure or whole. It admits that we have deceived and been deceived, hurt and been hurt. But it also holds out the possibility that peace is still possible. This happens, not by pretending the past never happened, but by acknowledging it and stepping forward anyway.
That is why Jacob’s dream matters so much. The ladder does not appear to a righteous man, but to one fleeing his lies. Heaven meets him precisely in his wilderness, when all his schemes have collapsed. God does not wait for Jacob to tidy up his past or prove his worth. Instead, the dream interrupts him with a fierce grace: even here, God is present.
In our fractured moment, where words too often wound, where honesty is traded for spin or silence, we are invited into Jacob’s kind of honesty: an honesty that names our harm without excusing it, an honesty that risks reconciliation, an honesty that opens us to grace in unlikely places.
The peace of Jacob’s dream is not escape from conflict, but the presence of some connection between heaven and earth, God and us, and, perhaps, between estranged siblings and fractured communities. To live this honesty is to stand at the base of the ladder, not climbing away from struggle but rooted in it, carrying heaven’s weight to earth and earth’s grief to heaven.
Perhaps then, like Jacob, we may awaken to the trembling truth: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” And perhaps, like Jacob and Esau, we may find that even broken beginnings can open into unexpected embraces.
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