Awakenings
July 19, 2026
8th Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Psalm 139: 1-12; Genesis 28: 10-19a
“Awakenings”
by Rev. David J. Wood
8th Sunday After Pentecost, July 19, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden
Scripture Readings: Psalm 139: 1-13 & Genesis 28: 10-19
My father often regaled us with stories about his life. More often than not they involved motorcycles. Racing or crashing them. One in particular I remember, when he was coming back from a late night event on his motorcycle.
He was on a dark road in the back woods of the Australian countryside. It was a night with no moon…and it was dark. There is nothing quite like the pitch black darkness of the Australian countryside.
His bike simply quit on him. He lost all engine and battery power. There he was stranded on a back road with no light and no power. He had no choice but to pull himself and his bike off the road and bed down for the night.
Which he did. And he slept…that is until a few hours later, in the middle of that dark night, he woke up to a light barreling towards him at a blinding rate of speed. Frozen in fear, assuming his life was over, he managed to leap to one side as the train went whizzing by.
While he had managed to get safely off the road, he had unknowingly made his bed just inches away from a railroad track.
Talk about a rude awakening. I think that qualifies.
Our story from Genesis is about an awakening that happened to Jacob. Perhaps not rude…but most certainly an awakening. It was the kind of awakening not just from sleep. It was an awakening to life.
Dreams are sometimes like that, aren’t they. Unlike a train barreling down the tracks, they come from somewhere inside of us. And yet, often they feel like they are from somewhere beyond us.
How many times have you had a dream, one that startled you…but you couldn’t remember what it was. It was lost to you. Jacob’s dream wasn’t like that. It was one he would remember vividly and in detail and he would never forget it. It awakened him in more ways than one…and paved the way for the rest of his life. Jacob’s dream was more like a vision.
Let me say a word about the PLACE Jacob was in.
He was on the run—mostly from his twin brother, Esau. Esau was out to kill him because Jacob had tricked their father into bestowing on him the inheritance that legally belonged to Esau.
There is the image he saw and there is the promise he received.
First the image: a ladder set up on the earth that reached all the way up to the heaven. And there was a lot of traffic on that ladder: angels ascending and descending. A connection, a communion, portal of sorts. It was a busy thoroughfare. No explanation is given. But the implication was clear. The place where he was was anything but God-forsaken. He was not alone in that lonely, deserted, god-forsaken place that was his life.
How many times have you found yourself in that kind of place? You feel you are between a forsaken past and lost future. The sun has set on your past and the horizon is lost to you. Your life—your surroundings, your sense of self feels forsaken and alien. There in that place Jacob was given a glimpse of a dimension of presence, of activity, of fulness.
Don’t miss this point:
He was not taken out of the place he was in.
Instead he was awakened to its fullness.
[An aside: Worth noting that the richest man in the world is promising to take us out of this god-forsaken place—abandon this place and make for us and for our descendants a new and better world on a planet that is a deserted desert that cannot sustain life without space suits and giant hermetically sealed containers. Sounds less like a dream than a nightmare.]
Jacob was not transported to some other place. He was awakened to what and who was in the place where he was. This brings me to the promise he was given to accompany the image he was shown.
The Lord stood beside him as he took in the scene before him, interpreting the scene to him: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
If there is one plot line that runs through all of Scripture, it is the story of God’s accompaniment: from slavery to freedom, from exile to return, whether in life or in death..
Of Jesus it was said, “He shall be called IMMANUEL, “GOD WITH US.”
Among Jesus’ final words to his Disciples were, “I will be with you.” “I will not leave you or forsake you.” “Wherever two or three of you are gathered in my name, I will be among you.”
When Jacob awoke from his dream, he said:
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”
He took the stone that had been his pillow and marked the place where he had slept as a sacred place….none other than The Place where of God dwells. Bethel.
It was not a place as much as it was a presence…a promise of accompaniment…that was not bound to that place…it was how he would come to see every place he would find himself in.
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”
That is one of my favorite verses in all of scripture. I have said those words in one way or another about my own life…about the life of this world. I stand amazed at how often—usually in retrospect—I stand amazed at how at times when I thought nothing was moving, being born, there was a way being made for me…that there was a presence at work that was lost on me.
I am always late to the party.
Others tell me of such awakenings in their own lives…Glimpses here and there that there is something at work that is beyond my comprehension. Not fate. But that sense of being accompanied on this wild and mysterious journey.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel in his book, The Holy Dimension, writes:
• To have faith is not to infer some beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be caught up into the holy order of living.
• It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge or a matter of being convinced without proof, faith is the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp...Even when the upper stairs are beyond our sight, we constantly rise toward the distant goal. [“The Holy Dimension", p. 330]
Elsewhere he writes, that a core aspect of the life of faith is the sense that something is being asked of us. This "something" is not a specific task or obligation, but rather a call to awareness, to wonder, and to a responsive engagement with the mystery of life.
This feeling that something is asked of us is not a one-time event, but a continuous and eternal call that shapes our lives and actions. It is not about adhering to a strict set of rules, but about cultivating a way of being that is responsive to the divine call and the needs of the world.
We are living in trying times.
I don’t need to rehearse that for you.
What I do need to rehearse with you is that for all the trials of this time, there is more in this time than meets the eye.
To be a people of Faith and hope is to become vulnerable to that something more…to the ever present possibility of the communion between heaven and earth…that we are part of in every moment, that is in the mix of every place we find ourselves in.
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”
In his book, Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience, James Carse recounts a story from his childhood, growing up in Wisconsin an marveling at the migration of ducks and geese.
Even in November the water was so cold that a swimmer couldn’t survive in it for more than a minute or two. Yet, through this menacing void passed a restless river of life — ducks and geese by the million.
He remembers a conversation he had as a 6 year old with his father as together they watched the geese fly overhead…
“Where are they going?”
“South.”
“Where’s that?”
“Far, very far from here.”
“How do they know how to find it?”
“They just know.”
“Why don’t they stop here?”
“They know this isn’t the south.”
“Do they know this is Milwaukee?”
“Well, no, they don’t know that.” “Are they lost?” “No.”
“This last answer,” he writes, “always brought a pause to the conversation.”
The birds didn’t know where they were but they weren’t lost.
They knew where they were going even if they had never been there before.
“If the birds aren’t lost but don’t know they’re in Milwaukee,”
I wanted to ask,
“does that mean that we are lost because we do know this is Milwaukee?“
Perhaps we are more lost the more convinced we are that we know where we are. And perhaps we are closer than ever to being found, when we think all is lost.
The story of Jacob is known more widely because it became a song that was first sung in the one of the darkest, God-forsaken places on this earth…by a enslaved people laboring in cotton fields under that the most inhuman conditions imaginable. It eventually became a song of the Civil Rights movement….Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen all recorded versions of it.
Theologian and Civil Rights leader Howard Thurman said of this song that it articulates a theology of hope: “It was first sung…Sometimes blindly, sometimes with scarce hope of vindication, often with wild irrationality, it dared to affirm an ultimate hope”
He went on, “We are all climbing Jacob’s ladder, and every round goes higher and higher. All who recognize that this are a living part of their experience join with those early destiny-bound singers who marched through all the miseries of slavery confident that they could never be entirely earth-bound”
Whatever place we find ourselves in this world…That’s a hope, we need to rehearse, remember, and be revived by again and again…not just for our own sakes…but for the sake of the world. Amen.