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Leaving home happens
A sermon by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, June 4, 2006
Leaving home happens. In a few weeks these that we have
honored (high school graduates) will be leaving home, not that it’s the first
time. Consider that monumental event when children go to school for the first
day for the first time. When our kids were growing up, summer camp was leaving
home. Leaving home happens. It happens in all of life, it is part of the cycle
of life. It is part of the rhythm of life.
Why did God build into our story leaving home? Maybe more
important: since leaving home is part of the rhythm in which we live, how do we
handle it? How do we grow by it? How do we come more of who we were meant to
be by leaving home. Our choir has just sung about beginning again. You can’t
begin again without leaving home. It may be an emotional leaving home. It may
be some kind of changing job description at work without changing jobs. It can
be all kinds of adult experiences that demand a kind of leaving home. Divorce.
A health situation that has developed. And what was, isn’t. Leaving home
happens.
In a few weeks these young people, many of them, will be
going on a mission trip. Annually we do this. This year they’re going down to
Mississippi. They will be leaving their homes in order to help someone who left
their home last year in the great storm and it hasn’t been built back yet. Oh!
That’s the pattern of redemption. Somebody has to leave home to help the person
who is homeless. That’s what we believe about our Lord Jesus Christ, that he
left -- to put it in story fashion -- he left his home in heaven in order that
he could make a home in us. You see, what we’re after in leaving home is
developing an inner home. So that wherever we are and whatever our situation is
we are always at home. Because we have an inner home, born of God, born of
faith in our Lord, born of the Spirit, and it goes wherever we go.
One of the places in which you can see this, in a most
unlikely person, is in the Old Testament story of Jacob. And I invite your
attention, please, to the book of Genesis, the 28th chapter. Genesis
28. If you have a pew Bible with you, it’s page 43. You don’t have to go very
far this morning. Genesis 28. Jacob was the son of Isaac, the grandson of
Abraham. We are back at the very beginnings. It is a kind of, if I can put it
this way, primitive time of faith. Faith is just beginning. And yet the
pattern that happens within us is already happening within Jacob. For, as the
scripture says, the Lord is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And the
patterns of yesterday are still happening today and will be forever. The first
thing that the Lord has to do is to create, or to create the possibility -- put
it that way -- of a home, a spiritual home within us. How’s he going to do this
with somebody like Jacob?
Jacob. Interesting name. In those days they named people
for what they were like and Jacob can be translated ‘scoundrel.’ He was not
eligible to be a deacon. Nor would he have ever been elected chairman of a
pastoral search committee. He might have not been allowed in the door of the
average congregation. Jacob. What in the world is God going to do with a
Jacob. You see, the first thing that Jacob did, completely arrogant, completely
confident in himself, life was all about him. First thing he did was to
bamboozle, cheat, Esau, his brother, out of his birthright. Now, in that day
and time, if you were the oldest son, after the father died, you were in charge
of everything. And birthright meant ‘top dog.’ Well, Jacob connived; he became
top dog. Then, blessing! It was looked upon as almost magic; it was when the
father laid his hand upon the eldest son and pronounced the blessing. It is one
of those ideas and magical moments that we can’t really grab onto in our
society. But in that early, early time, it was a magic moment and Jacob -- he
connived, he manipulated, and he got the blessing. Now, he’s top dog. Not only
that, he has the blessing, and his mother has helped him do it all. He was the
favorite.
Knowing that Esau would be angry, she decided he needed to
go to live with his uncle, Laban. And so, on the first night away from home,
the first night away from home. Leaving home not only happens, it’s
sometimes necessary. Look what happened. Beginning with verse 10 --
Jacob left his home in Beersheba and set out for Haran. And when he reached a
certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of
the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.
[Holiday Inn has never copied that.]
He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top
reaching the heaven. The angels of God were ascending and descending on it and
there above it stood the Lord. And he said I am the Lord, the God of your
father Abraham and Isaac. And I will give to you and your descendants the land
on which you are lying.
Verse 16:
When Jacob awoke from his sleep he thought ‘Surely the Lord is in the place and
I was not aware of it. And he was afraid and he said ‘how awesome is the
place. This is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven.’
What is God doing to this rascal, here. He’s taking the
first steps at building a home in his heart. And he does it through a dream.
He does it so many different ways. But God, in His infinite wisdom, comes to us
and he begins to build a spiritual home within us. And for all of us, the day
will come when we will not have this earthly home, called a body, any more but
we will still have a spiritual home. And that spiritual home will respond to
the call of the Lord Jesus. ‘I go and prepare a place for you that when I go
and prepare a place for you I will come again and I will receive your spiritual
home unto myself.’ God is making Jacob a spiritual home.
When the Lord said ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’
– Three weeks ago, we’re, four, we were talking about ‘I am the Way,’ Jesus
saying. And we said that the way is composed of birthing, learning, healing,
bearing the cross, resurrection. And that, in fact, the Christian life is made
up of that rhythm. OK. It was happening way back with Jacob. God is birthing
a spiritual Jacob. Has He begun within you? Are you willing to let him
continue within you? If so, it will continue with His teaching and your
learning. And how does He do this with Jacob?
Well, He sends him to Laban, who is his uncle. Now Laban
is even a greater scoundrel than Jacob. If Jacob can manipulate, Laban is a
manipulator par excellence. And Jacob gets left in the dust. He
learns, he learns to leave the home of arrogance and enter the land of
disappointment. And out of that disappointment God begins to develop some
dependence. Jacob begins to understand that he can’t manage all of life. Isn’t
it interesting that so many of us have come to the Lord, out of disappointment,
out of suddenly realizing that we can’t manage life all by ourselves and we need
the Lord to be helping us.
Then, there comes the need for healing. You see, most of
us, when we leave home, take our wounds with us. When are they going to get
healed? They get healed along the way, if we will let them be healed. But to
be healed, oftentimes, we have to stop and interrupt and listen. Some – that’s
physically true. We go to a doctor. Emotionally, we go to a counselor.
Spiritually, we find ourselves praying and listening to God, just like Jacob
did.
Well, the great healing happened, of all places, with
Esau. And I ask you to turn over to chapter 33. Here’s what happened. Jacob
finally got free of Laban, but he didn’t do it with Laban’s affirmation. Laban
didn’t have a going-away party for him. Matter of fact, humh, Jacob snuck out.
Laban went after him. OK. Then he heard Esau was coming to get him. How would
you like to be Jacob? The guy behind you that you snuck away from, the guy in
front of you that you cheated, who is your brother.
A counselor once said that siblings sometimes poison each
other’s wells. Jacob had poisoned Esau’s well and he assumed Esau had poisoned
his as well. As Jacob begins to handle the stress of that moment, he tried to
arrange and manage and manipulate so that everything would be protected and he
wouldn’t lose everything. But then came the moment when he met Esau. Verse 4.
This is a great verse. But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him and he threw
his arms around his neck and he kissed him and they wept. Esau has come as the
forgiver, not the get-evener. Esau has come with the healing word, not the
hurting word. And it gets a hold of Jacob in a marvelous and an incredible
way. Listen to me. When you leave home, get rid of your trash so that you can
have a triumph in the tomorrows of your life.
Forgiveness is one of those key spiritual treatments and I
encourage you who are young or old. Learn forgiveness. And if you would learn
it best, look at Christ on the cross. And this day, as, in a little bit, we
gather round the table, we will celebrate the possibility, the wonder of
forgiveness. That we can be embraced and that the Lord himself can weep as he
embraces us and we, Him.
But there is a fourth. Not only birthing and learning and
healing, there’s cross-bearing. And Jacob bore his own cross. A cross is
something that you have to live with that you don’t want to, but you always
will. It may be a tragedy, a trauma, a loss. It’s something you can’t change,
but you have to live with. That’s cross-bearing.
What happened with Jacob was he had a favorite son named
Joseph. And Joseph was such the favorite, gave him a coat of many colors. If I
were to ask how many of you in Sunday School colored in a coat of many colors
for Joseph, almost all of us would raise our hands. His brothers hated him and
they got rid of him. Pretended to have killed him, or pretended, rather, that
an animal had. Actually they sold him to some Midianites as slave who took him
into Egypt. And Jacob was without his son of blessing for virtually the rest of
his life.
Cross bearing. But cross bearing does something to us.
For one thing it nurtures us finally if we will see it as part of the plan of
Christ. And it can even embrace and heal us. One thing it will do. It will
humble us. And it will make us open to our dependency on sources beyond
ourselves.
But there is finally that resurrection. And there came the
time, you remember, in the story, and I have not the time to go into it, when
the famine hit and Joseph in Egypt, now a leader of the government, was the one
person who could give grain to his own family in order that they could survive.
Look at what God did with Jacob, the scoundrel.
After a night of wrestling with God, Jacob got a new name,
Israel. Humh. If this (Jacob) means scoundrel, Israel often can be translated
‘prince.’ To be turned from a scoundrel into a prince in the kingdom of God.
What a marvelous thing God has going, if we would just let Him. Not only that,
it is Jacob, Israel, who will give the names to the twelve tribes of Israel.
And his name will become the name of the nation and it is until this day. From
scoundrel to prince. Through the processes of birth, teaching, healing cross
bearing, resurrection.
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