STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, July 20, 2008
Scripture: Genesis 28:10-19
Many spiritual traditions have taught the impermanence of experience, of life itself. Impermanence is a cornerstone of Buddhist faith, given eloquent expression in such sayings of the Buddha as, “No conditions are permanent; no conditions are reliable; nothing is self.” Or from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition: “This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds . . . . A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.” From our own tradition, we hear in the Old Testament book of Psalms repeated observations about the impermanence of human experience, likening it to “grass that in the morning flourishes and is renewed, and in the evening fades and withers.” Jesus reminded his followers of impermanence in cryptic warnings about the need to stay alert for the events that would mark the end of time, just in case they had fooled themselves into thinking life as they knew it would go on indefinitely, telling them to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
And I am here today to tell you that I am a walking contradiction to all these teachings on impermanence. No, I have not succeeded in somehow thwarting the impermanence of life itself; on the contrary, as I continue to mark birthdays and anniversaries, my body reminds me ever more insistently that it is very impermanent, is perhaps becoming more impermanent every day.
Where I give the lie to the truth of impermanence, I regret to say, is in my spiritual practice. For nearly three decades now, since I first deliberately and consciously launched myself into meditation, then prayer, with the intent of becoming enlightened and open to God, I have become ever more uncomfortably aware of the fact that my intentions remain stubbornly unrealized. After all the hours spent in meditation, after all the varieties of prayer attempted, I am still not enlightened, and I am not “better” at life or at loving. Just as when I began my spiritual journey, I still now start my day with time for prayer, contemplative reading, and journaling, only to move into the day and see myself growing impatient with waiting in line or for a dental or doctor’s appointment, or worrying about tasks that lie ahead, or fearing something known or unknown in the future, or shaking my first at what I see on the nightly news.
All of which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the teachings of the great traditions about impermanence are only partially true. Humans may be mortal and impermanent, life may be passing away in every minute—but my limited spiritual self seems destined to last forever, no holier than it ever has been regardless of what I do or don’t do.
Beyond my own private spiritual efforts, I also see a countermovement to the passing away of all things in congregational life. People come and go, pastors come and go, money ebbs and flows, organizational structures are shuffled and reshuffled, and yet the basic identity of a congregation, the types of people who frequent it and the opinions they come bearing and the traditions that are maintained have an amazing indestructibility to them. Those of you who have been members of the church for some time now: though I am now the third pastor to pass through this church during your tenure, following George Williamson and Rick Mixon, how similar does church life look to you as when you first came here? Faces have changed—but have ways of functioning changed, have traditions changed, have priorities changed, have the challenges we face as a church changed? What have we mastered, and what do we continue to struggle with? What issues are still contentious whenever they arise—and have the personalities who take sides on those issues changed sides at all? And we are by no means unique in our constancy: studies of congregational life repeatedly emphasize the unchanging nature of the ways things are done, particularly in liberal congregations, which seem to cling to sameness with a special fierceness.
So impermanence is only a constant up to a certain point. Impermanence seems to be overcome by some persistent characteristics in congregations as a whole, and in the individual human heart. Those characteristics abide, even in the face of strenuous efforts to change them, to make them impermanent.
Any of you who have family or friends who belong to a church in the evangelical tradition, or who were yourselves raised in the tradition, know that the most persistent and permanent preoccupation in such a tradition is with salvation. “Have you been saved, born again? Is your soul saved?” Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” are questions asked in every worship service and many personal encounters; members are continually pressed to insert the question about salvation into conversations at every turn; each worship service concludes with an altar call, an opportunity for those who are not saved to become saved that very moment.
By contrast, asking you about the status of your salvation is not something that happens here, despite the name Baptist on our sign outside and the stereotypical concern of many varieties of Baptists with personal salvation. We do talk often about saving the world, not in an evangelical sense, but in the sense of overcoming oppression and establishing justice, a kind of social and political salvation that we hope to help accomplish in the community beyond us.
But we are about salvation of souls here, as much as any other Baptist church, as much as any other church, as much as all spiritual traditions are about salvation. If you strip away the particular theological terminology, what salvation really involves in the notion of spiritual change, of spiritual growth, of movement from one way of being to another, presumably better way of being. Though defined in multiple ways, that belief—that religious life is fundamentally about change, deep personal change, significant change in our ability to love and live well—that belief is central in all traditions. Whenever humans go looking for spirituality, one element we seem to be intent on finding in whatever form of spirituality we embrace is the possibility of being different than we are now. True, we want to be accepted as we are, affirmed as not everlastingly evil but inherently a child of God, sons and daughters of the Most High; yet we also want encouragement and challenge to grow, along with reassurance that we can be more than we are at present, that our lives can open out before us, that we can love more deeply. Salvation is one way, perhaps the most prevalent way in our present culture, of pointing toward that possibility of more abundant life. And while we wrestle in this congregation with just what to make of Jesus, how much divine status to grant him, how to understand his life and message, one place we agree is that in ways both ordinary and extraordinary, Jesus points us in the direction of that more abundant life. Just how we get to it, whether through our own efforts, through grace, through a mysterious encounter with the sacred that Jesus may or may not be an integral part of—that we differ tremendously on. Yet however we go about it, each of us is on a personal journey into the heart of salvation. My dogged persistence in my spiritual practice, day after day sitting down with the desire to grow in wisdom and awareness of God, is my own way of pursuing salvation, a salvation that seems forever just beyond my grasp. I cherish knowing that on some level of my being I am already home free, a beloved child of God. Nonetheless, I also know that I am called to keep returning to my pursuit of salvation, to sit down yet again and seek meaning, growth in compassion, holiness. Already beloved; still working out my salvation.
Which is much the same position that Jacob found himself in when the dramatic experience described in today’s scripture reading occurred. He had just finished behaving abominably—not entirely of his own volition, but with considerable encouragement from his scheming mother. Not content with his position as second son in a family tradition that granted the prized status to the first born son, Jacob had worked to steal some of that prized status for himself by taking advantage of his older brother Esau. First Jacob struck a deal with Esau at a moment when Esau was vulnerable, trading food for birthright, a special blessing; then, with his mother’s assistance, Jacob tricks his blind father into bestowing on him the firstborn son’s blessing and privileges. Not surprisingly, Esau was furious when he learned of this betrayal, to the point that he threatened to kill Jacob. So again with his mother’s assistance, Jacob runs away to spend time with a relative while waiting for Esau to cool down.
And it is on this flight that Jacob experiences the extraordinary dream that has since become famous as a metaphor for all sorts of things, the dream of a ladder between heaven and earth, a ladder that angels traversed, a ladder that led directly to God. At the time this part of the book of Genesis was being written, the culture tended to regard heaven and earth as thoroughly distinct and separate spheres of existence. The older pagan vision that drew no such boundaries between secular and sacred, human and divine, earth and heaven, was being replaced by a dualistic vision that marked off everything about God, everything having to do with God, into a realm apart from the everyday, profane world where human life unfolded. So a dream in which that dualism was still present, but yet crossed by a connection of some sort, a ladder between heaven and earth, between humans and God, would have been a powerful, nearly incomprehensible experience. Making the dream even more remarkable is that fact that it comes not to a holy person, not to a spiritual man, not to someone whose life has been marked by a diligent attempt to live morally and seek God in all things, not to someone who yearned for salvation, but to a rather self-centered young man who has been noteworthy thus far because of his ability to manipulate others to his own advantage. Whatever has Jacob done to deserve such a dream? Why would a dream come to a little jerk like this, who has shown no signs of being able to benefit from it himself, much less to benefit others as a result of dreaming this? Jacob’s response suggests that God might have chosen a far better recipient of the dream than this young man: while Jacob does recognize that something sacred has occurred and marks the place as a sacred spot, his vow as he leaves—that if God gives him what he wants, he will in turn serve God and tithe—is less than laudable. Not enough for Jacob to have been blessed with such an extraordinary vision; he has to be given more before he is ready to commit his life and possessions to God.
“Are you saved? Is your soul saved?” When a member of an evangelical church poses that question, what they are actually wanting to know is whether I have had a very particular sort of experience. If I posed that question to you gathered here this morning, how would you answer? My guess is that you would respond with some sort of answer that suggests salvation, at least in the evangelical sense, perhaps in any sense, is not part of your faith perspective, not something you see yourself needing. But then what do I do with a group of fine people who do not need saving, who were already saved long before I arrived here, whose salvation required not one whit of my pastoral expertise? If we are not here to save our souls, if our church life is not bound up with the notion of salvation, if our spiritual path does not derive its shape and substance from any concern whatsoever with salvation, with deep and ongoing personal change—then what are we up to here? What distinguishes us from any other warm, mutually supportive community that gathers for any reason, what makes us different from any nonprofit group seeking to make a difference in the welfare of those struggling for a better life?
God blesses Jacob with a dream of reassurance at the beginning of his literal and metaphorical journey—not because Jacob has done anything to deserve it, but in order to send him on a different kind of quest, not for salvation in the sense of some special holy status, but for a more subtle kind of salvation that comes not suddenly, in a one-time magical experience, but over time, through persistent effort, with many detours and mistakes along the way. Our culture tends to diminish the value of steady, stubborn stick-to-itiveness. We are taught to either expect things to come easily and conveniently, and to feel angry and depressed when they do not; or else we value only those efforts which can produce evidence of some accomplishment or reward. Without that evidence, or without that ready result, we look sill, ineffective. Before embarking on any effort, we want to know, much like Jacob, what the end result will be, what the point is of that effort—and we want, like Jacob, to be reassured that we will have something to show for the effort.
And here I stand, after years of meditation and prayer, with very little to show for my abiding efforts. I have not reached enlightenment; I have not become a saint; I do not even live more compassionately, more generously, than anyone else I know. But I have come to see that none of those laudable ends were ever the reason for my effort. There was no reason to seek heaven or salvation, because it was already there from the outset, just as it was present at the beginning, not the end, of Jacob’s journey.
The point, rather, of my practice, of any spiritual practice, of the journey Jacob makes that will last far longer and be far harder than he ever imagines, the point of any effort to grow in wisdom or compassion, the point even of being a congregation that gathers Sunday after Sunday, year after year, in a kind of group spiritual practice, is the practice itself, the effort, the persistence in that effort, the turning again and again to what is true and real, turning to God who is right here, right now. Once I realize this, that the stairway to heaven is already available, that God is already present, then efforts at salvation become not efforts directed toward an end but ends in themselves, efforts that remind me, remind us all, to look to this day, this moment, to find God in what is happening right now, all the time.
My Texas family, all of whom have either remained in the Southern Baptist church or opted for something even more conservative, ask me from time to time, as their tradition insists that they must, whether I am saved. Are you saved? Is your soul saved? For a while I answered confidently in the affirmative, secure in my status as a child of God. As I persisted in my spiritual journey, however, that easy confidence left me, so that I found myself then replying to my family’s concerned question with “I don’t know” or “Maybe, but I’m not sure.” Since holiness seemed to elude me no matter how diligently I worked at it, I had my doubts about my salvation.
These days, having reluctantly concluded that I will likely never be any holier than anyone else, not even more generous and compassionate than anyone else, I understand my salvation differently and can once again answer in the affirmative. Yes, I am saved, always have been, always will be. You, too, are saved, always have been, always will be. And with that nagging question settled, we are free to be about the real work of salvation, of persistence in whatever our practice may be, of finding ways each day to attend to what is sacred right here, right now, to celebrate the discovery of a stairway to heaven in every moment, to understand ever more deeply that no matter what we do or who we are or where we go, we are saved again and again, all life long.
