Love Discussion 5: Sleeping On a Rock

First Presbyterian Church Youth Ministry
“Sleeping on a Rock”
February 22, 2009
Youth Director Adam R. Quine

**GET A BIG OLD ROCK*

We have found ourselves having this discussion on love now for over a month. We have looked at where it all started, what we are to do with it, how we are to share that love with others. Yet if we are to take a look at what it is that we have already discussed, perhaps we have forgotten one of the most important pieces about love, ourselves. We are reminded by the apostle John that if we do not love ourselves then we cannot love others. So where does it begin, this loving ourselves from? What does this even mean? I think we can go back to the beginning again, Genesis.

It is a controversial character we get reintroduced to as we begin to rediscover the love we need for ourselves. How many of you know the story of Jacob? Why is it controversial? Jacob’s story is quite controversial. He stole his brothers blessing, really Esau gave sold him his birthright and thus became holder of his father’s Isaac blessing. Esau was to receive it but Jacob deceived Isaac and was blessed. Esau then was upset to the point where he wanted to kill Jacob but their mother Rebekah, warned Jacob and he left, escaping death. We Jacob fled and as he was making his way to Haran he stopped and he fell asleep. He needed to rest after a long walk and emotional turn of events.

There he slept, quite uncomfortable actually as he used a rock as a pillow. Then he began to drift off into dream world, and what a dream he was having. As he began to dream a stairway was set on the ground and it reached all the way to the sky, angles of God were going up and going down on it. Then God appeared and was right before him saying, “I am God, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. I’m giving the ground on which you are sleeping to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will be as the dust of the Earth; they’ll stretch from the west to east and from north to south. All the families of the Earth will bless themselves in you and your descendants. Yes. I’ll stay with you, I’ll protect you wherever you go, and I’ll bring you back to this very ground. I’ll stick with you until I’ve done everything I promised you.”

How many of you have ever had some pretty intense dreams? How many of you can say that you had God stand in front of you with an escalator full of angels ascending and descending and was told that you were going to be blessed? You’re dreams are meaningful and indeed dreams are definitely ways with which God speaks to us. But this is not what we are focusing on here. We are focusing on what Jacob does next. Jacob woke up from his sleep. He said, “God is in this place—truly! And I didn’t even know it!” Jacob became terrified and overwhelmed as I am sure we all would be. He began to whisper, “Incredible. Wonderful. Holy. This is God’s House. This is the Gate of Heaven.”

Jacob then, we assume, falls back to sleep. When he wakes up first thing in the morning, he picks up where his stammering beat-box session ended and looks around for the rock. He took the rock he had used for his pillow and stood it up as a memorial pillar and poured oil over it. He then took some oil and poured it over the rock, christening it and saying, “This will be the place called Bethel (God’s House).”

He took a rock, stood it up and all of a sudden, this pillow becomes a place where God lives. A once, profane and useless rock, well I guess I shouldn’t say useless because it was used as a pillow, but nonetheless, this rock becomes an altar, a pillar reminding Jacob and others that this is where God lives. Well what is the big deal with this then? A temple was a place where people knew where the gods lived, a place where heaven and earth meant.

What is so fascinating is how the temple was constructed. Let’s take a little walk to the sanctuary.

Stop and take a minute and look around. Sit still and quietly as you take in all that makes up the sanctuary. Look at all parts of it: the pulpit, the lectern, the baptismal font, the chalice and platen, the bread and grapes, the pitcher of water, the candles, notice how we are sitting, notice the shape of the sanctuary. Everything thing in here, everything that you see in front of you, behind you, to the left of you, to the right of you, everything here is used for a reason. This is no different than the temples of the Old Testament. Turn your Bibles to Exodus 25-30. What we have here is a detailed set of instructions on how this first temple, portable, movable temple was to look. The instructions weren’t to go, get anything you see and put a sheet over it and there you have it, a temple. No, it was much more than that. The temple was a place where the sacred could be met, where the sacred overtook the profane, and where the sacred could me the Israelites, where the Holy God of Jacob could meet us.

We came here to this sanctuary not only to be reminded of where we come and where we know we can encounter God, but we come here to be reminded or even perhaps learn for the first time that our bodies are like this sanctuary, our bodies are like those temples. We posses the divine spark that we talked about weeks ago, thus making us a dwelling place for where God lives. The writer of 1st Corinthians shares with the people of Corinth these words, “your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God.” Remember how we a few weeks ago talked about how we treat others reflects how we treat the Creator? How you treat yourself, will show others how you feel about the One who created you. Every single one of you in here is a beautiful child of God and each and every one of you possesses that divine spark, the Holy Spirit, for your body is indeed a temple.

It does not end there for us though. As simple a concept it is to think about, it is slightly more complicated and more challenging. Turn again to 1st Corinthians 6.12-20.


What was the point for this letter than for the Corinthians? Why did the writer focus much of his writings on the body? For this understanding of the body by the Greeks: “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food.” You see the Greeks saw the body as being only a physical body, thus when you are hungry you go get food and when you are tired, you go and get sleep. You did whatever to satisfy your body’s urges. Yet this is very understanding of the body is why the writer makes the statement of how our bodies are temples, something that we do not use or abuse. He asks the people of Corinth to consider that there is more to life than the next fix. Yet sometimes we find ourselves struggling, not respecting our bodies, being so overwhelmed with our own desires and urges that we begin to desecrate the temples. We begin to over eat, we begin to view our bodies, our own bodies, as objects for people to have, we begin to loose sleep because we worry so much, we hurt our bodies because we are in so much pain, we begin to loose the sacredness of our bodies and begin to treat them in a way that an animal does. You are not a lone though in your struggles.

Friends, you, me, we: are not alone! God created us to be in community with each other. From the same dust we were formed and to the same dust we shall return. You and me, and all of these people, we are creations of God. We are continually being renewed and reshaped and recreated. We are God’s beloved and God’s holy creation. We posses the spark that creates and illumines the church, the temple, our bodies!

May it be so then, that we not view our bodies as simply hot or not, skinny or overweight, clear skin or rough skin, instead may we see it as Jacob saw the rock, a place where God lives. Respect your bodies and know that no matter what shape, size or whatever your body is, above all, it is a temple unto the Lord. Take good care of it and may you too soon realize that you’re not just sleeping on a rock!