______________________________________________________

In today’s lessons, the sure and certain actions of God will come-promise and judgment-so we must place our trust in God’s future and in God’s power, justice, and ultimately, in God’s forgiveness.

Cunning, fleeing Jacob falls into a deep slumber one night on his way to a new place and has an extraordinary Escher-like dream. In it he sees a stairway that spirals from earth to heaven. While celestials or extra-terrestrials traverse the stairwell, God stands at the top and speaks into Jacob’s and the human race’s future. “I am . . . I will . . . I will . . . I will . . . I will . . . I will . . . I have promised . . .” Such is how the New Living Translation records the divine fiats in this passage. Jacob trembling, discovers a truth: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I wasn’t even aware of it.” So moved is Jacob that he thinks he has stumbled into a mysterious Bermuda Triangle: “the gateway up to heaven” (v. 17). Such a place and such a moment calls forth worship and a naming: “The House of God.”

Paul continues his behavioral discourse that emphasizes the Spirit as the transformative Agent in producing godly living. Because the Spirit within frees from the compulsive control of human nature, “you have no obligation whatsoever to do what your sinful nature urges you to do,” Paul exhorts. In fact, Spirit-led living is one of the marks of one’s connection to God. Such a teaching positively impacts the self image-“You should not be like cowering, fearful slaves . . . [but] instead like God’s very own children . . .” (v. 15).

We’re continuing in Matthew’s parable section with the second parable: the wheat and the tares. One can well imagine how this parable might have functioned in the earliest Christian communities-perhaps as caution to those who envisioned a perfect Church, to those who sought to cull their numbers from time to time by raising the standards, adding additional rules and qualifications for Christian membership. But the parable also suggests grace and non-judgment and becoming a welcoming, inclusive community of faith. Good seed, bad seed, wheat and darnel, the farmer and the enemy, God and the harvest all connect to create a powerful story that may well confront our own views and visions of what the worshiping community is supposed look like in the world!