Andrew Meher: Well good morning every As Andrew said, I'm Steve Bailey. Today I'm here with my wife Kelsey and my two babies. One is kind of three years old, so not really a baby, but you know, they're always babies, right? So my first baby is Junia. she is named after the apostle in Romans 16:7. In case you were wondering, I've never heard of a Junia before. Well, that's where she's from. Okay. And she's in the back right now playing with all the other kids and having a great time. She was so excited to go back into kids' church, you know. And little Aiden right now, he's getting some food. and he's also in the back right now with his mom. But they'll be out at the end of the service. So feel free to say hi to any or all of us afterwards. But yeah, I'm happy to be welcomed back here, to be preaching here again. It's been really cool to see how this church has, you know, grown and developed over the years, and it's exciting to be a part of its story and get to preach on this Sunday. So would you just bow your heads in prayer with me? And we're just gonna invite the Holy Spirit to speak to us afresh as we go into the Word. Holy Spirit, you are most welcome here. Our high and honored guest, and honestly, just the person who constantly invades and is constantly present, but we call you a guest because we forget you're here. So, Jesus, we welcome you. And we say, have your way. Have your way with us. Jesus, where we have been dysregulated this morning from just trying to get into the doors of the church, we just ask you to bring us to ease. Where our hearts are hardened, may they be softened. And we invite you to plant the seeds of the gospel afresh in our souls. We love you and praise you in your holy and precious name. Amen. So I'm just gonna get started with sharing some stories with you about some significant places that I've had in my life that came to mind while I was preparing this sermon. Because you see, today I just really want to express to you how much God wants to meet with you in this place. And when we think about places, sometimes we have a couple memories that come to mind, and I wanna share with you some places that come to my mind. So in August of 2018, my wife Kelsey and I were sipping wine and eating escargot, don't knock it till you try. Try it. At a French bistro along the Seine River in Paris, underneath the shadow of Notre Dame. It was literally surreal. There was even a moment where Kelsey and I were looking at each other and she was like, Is this real life? Like, where are we right now? You know, it was on our honeymoon, we were just married, and we were just like so deeply enthralled with like this pat the past season we were in and the traveling we were doing. And we even got an opportunity to go into Notre Dame before the fire and See the ancient cathedral and all of its majestic beauty. You know, you could even walk in there and feel the magnitude of weight that that place held. It's so difficult to describe. But inside of it, we would learn how central it is to the identity of Paris and the Catholic Church and just many people's experience with God. And while we visited, they were even holding a mass in the middle of the week, showing that it was still more than a museum or a cultural landmark, but it was still a place of worship to God's presence. Yeah. And now let's go backward a little bit in time. That previous June of twenty eighteen, as I mentioned, I married the love of my life, still Kelsey in case you're paying attention to story one. We were both poor college students, but with the money we had, we threw our wedding. for us the location did matter. We wanted to throw it at our college church, the river. We built such deep friendships and connections there that we couldn't imagine being married anywhere else. We also got to enjoy seeing all those friends and family members as we celebrated that day and You know, we love the location, but even more, we just love the people that we connected with there coming to celebrate with us. And on a Saturno on that same week, my dad had died in that right before my wedding as well. Yes. And in twenty twenty one my mom decided to move from the house we grew up in, which was the church parsonage for the church my dad pastored, and move into an apartment still on the church campus but outside of the parsonage. We all knew it was time for mom to leave, but the house still had, you know, vestiges of life from when Dad was still around. You know, from every staircrack to every, you know, room that held a previous moment with Dad. So why would we leave it? Why not just say there And reminisce and sit and pretend and just enjoy the memory of dad in that space. But we had to leave. It was just time to move from that season. And so as we were packing up the entire house, grief was stirred up in my soul during the whole experience while we cleaned up at that place, remembering every moment that dad was with me in a certain object that we had touched together in a certain room or a memory we had shared together as well. And so now cut to every season of my life. I know I'm jumping around everywhere with different memories. Different highs, different lows in different places. But I can distinctly tell you that every single home, every dorm, or every place that I visit, I try to find a breakfast nook and a study space. At my in-laws' house, it's either at the breakfast table in the morning with my father-in-law, or it's out on the porch by their pool. Mimi's and pop's house is a lot of fun to visit, by the way. At my mom's house, it's this high-rise table from IKEA. And whenever I'm I'm in a season that's incredibly busy or incredibly slow, there's always a place that I go to for encountering the Lord's presence, but also doing any work that I need to do as well. And I know I jumped around all these memories, but I wanted you to sit in them with me. You know, we could all say that all these places are just just locations, right? Notre Dame is just a building. But if Notre Dame is just a building, then why did Paris view it as a loss to their cultural identity when it and grieve its burning in 2019? And yeah, a house is not a home, but when you walk in an old home, it brings you to the memories that probably would have been unprompted otherwise. Every church becomes a home as we remember God's work and the relationships we've built there, which made when the river closed in 2021 all the sadder for me and Kelsey. And a simple workplace becomes sacred as you ritually commit to the same routines in that space over and over and over again. I don't think we like to admit it as much, but places are sacred. And we make places sacred sometimes, and sometimes the Lord makes them sacred for us. We don't need a temple or church to commune with God exclusively, but the places we encounter Him in earn a reverence that make our house a church or a breakfast nook holy. However, sometimes we treat places as secular when they're messy. We like to revisit the ones that were like, yeah, this was amazing, this was awesome. But the places that felt messy in our life, we like to say, I'd like to avoid this for the rest of my life. Thank you very much. And that could be a physical location where something traumatic or awful happened. This could be, you know, a place where, you know, a broke like an emotional place in a broken relationship. Maybe we mentally or emotionally don't want to visit that or that person, or maybe it's, you know, your schedule is messy and it's a place where you you don't have a place where You can meet with God, you know. But regardless, you know, we tend to believe that, you know, all the places in our life need to be organized and clean before we bring Jesus into the scene. But if we believe that God walks with us and desires to encounter us in this place, meaning now. Whether it's physical, relational, in our schedule, or in our pain, it's not unreasonable to believe that where he places his feet becomes beautiful, and all creation is subject to becoming a beautiful place. The question is: will we pause in our place so we can encounter his presence no matter what season, relationship, location, or pain? So today I want to read aloud today's passage from Genesis 28 10 through 19 in the NIV. And would you stand with me for the reading of God's Word? And also you can have a buffer to turn over to the passage in your Bible if you would like to, or you can read it on the screen with me. But here it says, Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. 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 he laid asleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said, I am the Lord your God, the God of your father Abraham, and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants Will be like the dust of the earth. You will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid, and he said, How awesome is this place! There is none other this is none other than the house of House God, this is the gate of heaven. And early the next morning Jacob took the stone that he had placed under his head, and set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz. You may be seated. Thank you for standing with me. So Jacob came to this place after deceiving both Isaac and Esau and taking the blessing of the firstborn. Esau discovered Jacob's deception and wanted to kill him, so Rebekah tells Jacob to run into exile to preserve his life. So Jacob runs until he arrives at Luz, which will eventually be called Bethel. Jacob attempts to leave the Promised Land despite leaving the blessing to cultivate it with his family. If you know or can think about a map of Israel in your mind, Beersheba, where Jacob is running from, is at the southernmost point of Israel. And where he's running to is Haran, which is not just out of Promised land, but northeast and towards Mesopotamia, towards Syria. So he's running all the way through the promised land, trying to run out of it because of what just happened. And in that ancient Near Eastern worldview, he's not only running out of the promised land, but they all imagined that God's presence stayed in a location. So Jacob's thinking, okay, God sits in this land, I'm gonna leave this land. And so his expectation is gonna be turned upside down in a moment, but he is trying to leave and flee, not just from his family, not just from the promise, but from the presence of God. He's putting himself into exile when he has this experience. And so when he sits down, you know, when he finally rests, he's in a place where his family is divided and broken because of his trickery and greed. And he's seeming to emulate the snake from the Garden of Eden. It's no surprise that Jacob means deception in Hebrew. And up until this point, Jacob has had a broken relationship with his family, a broken relationship with the land he grew up in, hence why he's running away to Haran outside in exile. A broken relationship with But in Genesis 28, 10 through 19, we see God encounter Jacob in a place. Now, I want to take a moment to compare the NIV with the NRSV translation to highlight this word. Because the NIV does a really good job on focusing on the overall meaning of a passage, but the NRSV wants to also capture the Greek and Hebrew words that would have been otherwise missed because of idioms, you know? And in verse 11 of the NRSV, it says, He came to a certain place. He stayed there for a night because the sun had set, taking one of the stones of the place. Place and he put it under his head to lay in that place. So if you see the NRSV, you probably notice place is repeated over and over, and you probably realize where I got the inspiration for this sermon, as I've repeated the word place over and over again. You ever wonder when you're reading the Bible, wow, they really decided to repeat that word over and over again? It's because if you find a repeated word or phrase, you're supposed to pause and meditate on what God is saying. And so in this case, place is a loose translation of the word macomb in Hebrew. Makom is frequently refers to a spot where people would encounter the gods in the ancient Near East. Now, this isn't all the time, sometimes it just means go over to that place over there, you know. But frequently we find that this is what this word means: it's a place of encountering with the gods. The theological dictionary of the Old Testament indicates that it's a textual indicator of a theophany, which means a god's appearance on earth. When a human encounters God, Sure enough, in Genesis 32, 22 through 32, this phrase is used to describe the location that God and Jacob wrestle in. And in Exodus 3 through 4, God says, the macomb place you are standing on is holy ground to Moses. The theological dictionary of the Old Testament also seems to believe that this spot is a familiar cultic location, meaning that other altars to pagan gods are also present in that space. Which makes sense why Jacob removes a stone from the place. He's taking a stone from an altar because if you've seen ancient Near Eastern altars, they use the biggest and squarest rocks to make their little altar space. And so he's taking one of the better rocks to use as a pillow because you biggest is best, and then at the same time, Time, you know, it's just easier. There they are set up. I'm just gonna take this one off the stack, put my head on top of it. So Jacob is resting in a pagan space on his journey in exile to leave the Promised Land after he ruptured his family setup. Everything about Jacob's life right now is a complete mess. Has anyone else been in a season where they felt like they've ruined their entire family setup or their life, or maybe that their life is just sloppy everywhere? Yeah. Jacob is probably in a more extreme situation than we are, but he is nonetheless in this spot. He is not expecting God to encounter him. He goes to a macomb. He's not necessarily longing for an encounter with God. If anything, everything about that location is pragmatic, to be a small shelter in a pillow. It seems to be a well-known location where pagans would offer sacrifices to their gods, maybe Yahweh was worshipped among them, but regardless, the purpose there is not to talk to a god. Yet as he sleeps, God encounters him in this place. A staircase which likely looked like a ziggurat was before him. And a ziggurat was an ancient temple that buildings, the ancient Mesopotamians would use. Since Jacob's family comes from this worldview, this would have been a very familiar structure for him to see in religious spaces. Here's what it looks like on the screen. You know, you would start at the bottom, and the priest would ascend all the way to the top to communicate with the gods. So in this image, in this dream that Jacob has, God uses a ziggurat to communicate to Jacob that this is the gateway of heaven and specifically the throne room of God. Jacob sees angels ascending and descending from heaven, which makes sense because angels are messengers for God, so technically they're the ones that Jacob would expect to relay news from and to Yahweh and him. Or Jacob would expect, like I said, a priest to ascend to the top of the stairs on his behalf to go communicate with Yahweh. But we have a translation discrepancy which gives us the beauty of God, either way you read it. In the NIV, it says that Yahweh is on top of the ziggurat, like he would have expected, and he is shouting down to Jacob, telling him what he has to say. Which affirms his kingship, you know, but it also shows he wanted to give the message to Jacob personally. But several other translations, like the NRSV, write that Yahweh stood beside Jacob. This implies that Yahweh, the Lord, came down the ziggurat in advance to encounter Jacob personally. And you don't see that done by gods in the ancient Near Eastern. But Yahweh takes the time to step down to commune with Jacob himself. Regardless of which view, Yahweh is giving Jacob this word intimately. God is Pursuing Jacob in a place that Jacob was not desiring or expecting to meet Yahweh. And in Jacob's crisis, when Jacob is at his messiest, God encounters Jacob to remind him of the promise to him and tell him he's gonna be okay, and he will be with him while he's in exile. And I think all of us would like to imagine that this emotional place in Jacob's life is the wrong place and the wrong time to meet with God. Jacob doesn't have his nice breakfast nook, his Bible laid out with his highlights. He doesn't have his espresso, the nice little breakfast treat. Maybe that's just me. But Jacob has broken his relationship with his family, his land, his soul, and is too busy to talk to God on his terms. And God doesn't wait for a clean spot to encounter Jacob. He meets with him in the messiest moment of his life. He meets with Jacob in the midst of family division that he has caused himself in the middle of a pagan worship center, spiritually and practically. The place that God meets Jacob is a mess. This is the place that God decides to meet with Jacob. He doesn't wait for the next church service. He doesn't wait for the next season. He doesn't wait for the next worship night. He says, This is the moment that I want to be with you. In the imperfection and utter brokenness of his life, God stands next to him, speaks to him, and says, I am with you. I will watch wherever you go, and you will come home and inherit this promise. You know, and I think even some of us would imagine that if God would encounter us in our mess, the first thing that God would say is, look what you did. Do you think I'm really gonna love you because you did this? Maybe some of us would think that God gets all big and scary and says, Look what your sins have caused. No, what God says is, I'm gonna be with you. He affirms how hard this situation is, and he says, I'm still committed. If God said that to Jacob, how much more is he saying that to us in our mess? And I think we overcomplicate God's presence with this knowledge. It's incredibly tempting to just come to church, a sacred place, and make sure we're all presentable and we're all happy, and we've have all of our ducks in a row, and things can be feel good enough to be in God's presence. But the reality is that God doesn't want us when we're all presented and ready. He wants us right now. He wants us in this place. Now, in this passage, God steps down from the ziggurat to meet Jacob in the midst of his crisis. And in this new creation world that Jesus has inaugurated with his ascension to heaven, Yahweh has forever stepped down from his ziggurats and his temples to make our hearts his home. Regardless of what you think and if your ducks are in a row, the Holy Spirit has stepped down and is with you to redeem the places of your life that are messy. God is as available in the sanctuary as he is when you are outside of the building. God is as present in the moment of musical worship as he is when you are at night. Feeding your kids. God is available in the next season, but He's also available right now in this season. In reality, every place is a potential macom, a place of encounter with the presence of God. All creation and all time belongs to God. There is a Reformed theologian, Abraham Kuypers, who says: There's not one place in all creation where God does not say, mine. Every place and every time is a place where you can make where God can make a place with you. God doesn't want to wait till tomorrow to meet you. He doesn't want to wait for the right place or time. God wants to meet you in this place. For some of us, that place is physical. You know, there are certain places we won't go because of the trauma that was done to us in those spaces. And God wants to meet you. God wants to redeem that space for you. For some of that place is time because we're always too busy to meet with God. We're either working or we feel like we missed our chance to really know him, or we say this next season is best but and more ideal, and I'll start doing my work with God then. But God wants to meet you in this space. Even in our work experiences, those places, God wants to encounter you there. I God loves to show up in restaurants that I work in. Every time I go into the service world, I think, okay, I'm gonna get out of this place and get into a better job. And one time I left serving to be a Bible teacher, the other time I left to be a pastor, but in those serving seasons, I've got to see Jesus work and redeem hearts in beautiful ways. So much so that when I worked in a school or in a church, I couldn't help but miss those seasons when I was serving because all kinds of brokenness would show up in those places. And that is the place I've learned that God wants to be. And for some of us, that place is relational. In our families and friendships that are broken, God wants to meet you in that place. And for some of you, it's your own soul with different lies or secrets or sins or like messages that you've inherited that you believe. and maybe they've led you to believe that Jesus does not want to be with me. God wants to meet you in this place. Jesus wants our hearts to be a macom, a place, a new creation. God wants to be with you in this place no matter what location, no matter what season, no matter what pain, and no matter where you are. At the end of the passage it says, When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said, How awesome is this place? There isn't this is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. Jacob's reflection is that he realizes how God was in the place he was not expecting him to be in. This scripture says he was afraid, but the word for fear more resembles awe. Like you're just shocked and you're startled by what God is doing. And Jacob cannot help but be full but in full awe of God's presence after meeting with him. Later in the story, we know that it doesn't fully resolve all of his problems, specifically with Esau, but this moment gives him the strength and the courage and restores him to know that he is deeply loved by the presence of the Father. That he's not abandoned by him because of his mistakes. That even though all after all he's done, God will step in and restore all the broken things. God is not limited by the place where we meet him. God can meet us anywhere in creation. If our heart is God's home, every place is a place that God wants to meet with you. And even though meeting with God can feel scary afterwards or beforehand, you know, scary beforehand, afterwards, you will leave feeling in awe of what He's done. That the place in your soul that felt untouchable, secular, and messy will become sacred, holy, and desired. God is on a mission to restore all the broken things inside of us, all the broken places. But He does not do it far away from us. He is not intimidated by our brokenness. Rather, he sees our brokenness as an opportunity to make his name known and bring us deeper into his love. Because at the end of the story, and at the end of this story, a messy place becomes a sacred space. Jacob renames the city Luz into Bethel, the house of God. And this place becomes a place of encountering God's presence all throughout the Old Testament. And it also becomes a place that Jacob frequently revisits in order to meet with God. So God wants to meet you in this place if you haven't gotten it already. He wants to redeem the broken places in your life and make the pagan places into sanctuaries of his holiness. Yahweh ends his encounter with Jacob in a beautiful way. As Jacob is about to leave the promised land and put himself into exile, Yahweh says this: I will not leave you until I have done all I've promised you. God promises to personally walk with Jacob into exile to show him his faithfulness. If that is true for Jacob, how much more is it true for all of us who carry his Holy Spirit? That God will walk with us into every place. So will we become more aware of his presence in the places that we have said, no, he won't come here. God wants to encounter you in this place, your messy places, this place you think of when you hear of messy place, it can be a physical location, your soul, your relationships, or a busy season of life. Regardless, God wants to encounter you here today. So as the Christmas hymn says, and I'll sing it for you guys because I feel like saying the words doesn't give it justice. The no more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found, far as far as the curse is. Found. He does not say, I'll make my blessing known in the clean spot where I've already made my blessing. He says, I'll make my blessing known where the curse is found. So any messy spot where the curse has taken hold of your life, he's gonna make his blessing known. And if you imagine that in the biblical story, that the biggest place of the curse was the cross. And now the image that we hold to remember the blessing of Jesus is a cross. And if you think about the fact that Mary and the women went to the tomb, a place of death and destruction, a place that was filled with curse and evil and just impurity, was the place that God restored to become a garden. It was the place of resurrection and the place of hope. All of our messy places, all of our macombs. Our places that God wants to show you are now places of hope and healing. So will you join me today in surrendering our messy places, our idolatrous places, our places of exile? And would you join me inviting the Holy Spirit to speak afresh over us in those places? Let us surrender the places where we've said no to God. So would you hold out your hands with me? It's an invitation, you can say no. I want to let you know that. But we're just gonna say, Holy Spirit, we welcome you again. And this time we welcome you intimately to come to the places where we've said no to you. Jesus, we invite you into the places in our memories, the locations that we've walked in where there is pain, where there is trauma, that we avoid because of the fear of feeling anxious or revisiting that bad place. Lord Jesus, we declare that you are there and you want to make it into a holy place and bring your healing. Jesus, we welcome you into the place that's been damaged in our souls because of our sin, our trauma, or the lies spoken against us. Every place that is broken in our soul, Lord Jesus, we invite you. We invite you to come bring your new creation life and your healing inside. Jesus, over the places where of time where we are overworked and we are too busy for you, we invite you to make room and make space and to show us how you are so present and so near. Jesus, would you meet us in the midst of our busyness and say that I am present and I am available? Make a macomb in our busyness. And Jesus, in the places of our broken relationships, we invite you to make a macomb. Make a place of encounter where we see your restoration, where we see your healing, where there's ownership and forgiveness and confession, Lord Jesus, would you make our relationships a macomb? Come, Holy Spirit. Come enter our messy places and make us a muckom. So, God, we surrender all to you, and we anticipate your active work in our lives. That you are going to bring your healing and your blessing and make our hearts a home, but also make this place a place you want to meet us. Amen.