Earth Has To Do With Heaven

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary
Setauket Presbyterian Church

Reformation Sunday
Genesis 27 & 28
October 28, 2001

This past week our church book group had its first meeting at the home of Jan Kavazanjian, and about 20 members of the congregation gathered to discuss a book by Fred Buechner. The book was called Son of Laughter, a book about the generations of the family of Abraham in the book of Genesis, told from the perspective of an aging Jacob. What I didn't mention before we read the book was that Fred is a Presbyterian minister. He has spent his career as a college chaplain, a professor, and an author, during which he has written over 30 works of both fiction and non-fiction.

Buechner's real gift in writing is his eye for uncovering the presence of the holy in the midst of the chaos of life, with a poet's skill of description. His works are particularly marked by an attention to the way generations pass on their inheritance of guilt and grace from one to another, for the good or ill of the next generation, and by a quest to understand that inheritance which we have received.

In reading his book again for this discussion, two lines from Son of Laughter captured these twin concerns for me. The first comes early in the book when the family is preparing sacrifice. Buechner writes, "Heaven has to do with earth, and earth with heaven. As prayers and incense rise, the God comes down." The second comes later in the book as Jacob reflects of the long path that has taken him away from home and back again safely. He notes, "The hand of Abraham stretches down through the years."

Buechner has written that all theology, all attempts to understand our selves, our world, and our God - all theology is autobiographical. "I cannot," he writes "talk about God or sin or grace, for example, without at the same time talking about those parts of my own experience where these ideas become compelling and real. For Buechner, the autobiographical story which haunts all his work is the suicide of his father while Fred was just a boy, and his father's failure to communicate any message that might explain his action to his family. The hand of his own father reaches down through the years, and Buechner searches in all his writing for a bit of heaven on earth.

Another way to describe Buechner's writing is to borrow a title from another of his books, Telling Secrets. That is, Buechner believes that it is only in telling the secrets of our lives, in honest confession and in truthful examination of those things we would rather not explore or look at because they are painful embarrassing, only in this can we see the holy in our midst and find God speaking to us. And it is in the sharing of our own biblical stories and other compelling fictions that we sometimes have the distance to recognize ourselves as we are.

Fred's encounter with the Bible began when he enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in NYC almost 50 years ago. He writes about this in his memoirs,

I had read here and there in the Bible before, the way people do, dutifully, haphazardly, far from sure either what I was looking for or what I was supposed to find. I was aware that there was said to be great treasure buried somewhere among all those unpromising, double-columned pages, but I had never had anybody point me very adequately to a place to start digging.

The place he started digging, at the direction of his Old Testament professor James Muilenburg, was the Jacob story. Yet after a great deal of demanding critical work, he wrote,

Until you can read the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, as your own story, you have not really understood it. The Bible ... is a book finally about ourselves, our own apostasies, our own battles and blessings.

If we leave off the first several chapters for now, we can see that Genesis is the history of a single family over four generations. Genesis looks at the family of Abraham and his kids, how and why they moved to a new land, the faith struggles they had, how sibling rivalry tore a family apart and how the death of a parent brought brothers back together again for the funeral. It tells how Isaac and later Jacob fell in love, and what silly things their love caused them to do. It tells how Rebecca favored one child, Jacob, more than his brother Esau, and how this caused her to lie to her husband and endanger her son's life. It also shows how this favoritism led Jacob to steal his birthright from his father Isaac and swindle his uncle out of sheep. Characters like Rebecca and Jacob are tricky, sneaky people, unscrupulous and not always nice. These are not the kind of characters one would expect from holy scripture! But they are exciting to read about, and their lives sound very familiar to us.

Rabbi Burton Visotsky has written,

Read simply, Genesis is an ugly little soap opera about a dysfunctional family. Four generations of that family dynasty are charted, their foibles exposed and all the dirty laundry, as it were, hung out in public for millions to see. It is a story of rape, incest, murder, deception, brute force, sex, and blood lust. The plotlines and characterizations of Genesis are so crude as to call into serious question how this book became and remained a sacred, canonical text for two thousand years and more. Later, we will delve with more detail into the foibles and peccadilloes of the patriarchal clan, but for now it suffices to recognize that like soap opera itself, it is the unattractive component of Genesis that causes us to have such a strong identification with it in the first place. When we read of the dysfunctional family with its strong lust and murderous intentions, we recognize that it is our family - although we may be reluctant to admit this revelation out loud (Burton Visotzky, The Genesis of Ethics).

And yet this might be the only true revelation, to see ourselves as we are (uncovered and exposed) and to discover God with us even there. This was the discovery of Jacob on the road. Fleeing the conflict of his family, the deception he had worked on his father Isaac, the scheming of his mother Rebecca, the theft of Esau's birthright which he craftily traded for a bowl of red beans, Jacob rightfully believes that everyone is murderously angry with him. He running to escape pursuit, but in no hurry to arrive at the home of an uncle he does not trust. Exhausted from his own deceits, guilt, growing conscience and fear of what God is making out of the whole mess, he falls asleep, as Buechner put it, "waiting for Esau's foot to fall (on his head)". He lays his head upon a stone as a pillow. Cold Comfort. And he dreams.

His dream is of Heaven. And of earth. For there is revealed to him a stair or ladder connecting the two, with angels traveling up and down, endlessly traversing between heaven and earth. Surprisingly, instead of rejection Jacob finds acceptance. God promises to go with Jacob where he journeys and to bring him home again. God says, "I will be with you until all these things come to pass." Not a bad deal for a crook. Little did Jacob know of the journey God would take him on, and of the changes he would go through before reconciliation with his brother and others at home could happen.

And yet Jacob is worthy of our appreciation if only for the words he speaks upon waking. "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."

For this is Buechner's point. Earth has to do with heaven, and heaven has to do with earth. Unless we look closely at our own lives we will never see God - it's in the dirt and the mess that God appears. When we look at the mess we need to trust that God, who loves us like a parent, will give us bread not stone; in other words, we won't be disappointed or forsaken. The heaven is really in the midst of the mess. Heaven has to do with earth, and earth has to do with heaven. If was God's reminder to Jacob and it is a reminder to us as well; for it is in reflecting on our own deceptions, violence, betrayal, jealousies and passions that we will begin to hear the reconciliation and hope of these biblical stories.