— Returning to Bethel

God said to Jacob, “Arise. Go up to Bethel. Live there.

Build an altar
to the God
who appeared to you
when you were fleeing
from your brother Esau.”

Bethel. The place of the stone. The place of the dream.

The place where
he once slept alone
with a stone beneath his head
and heaven opened above him.

Years had passed. He had wrestled with God. He had faced his brother. He had carried wounds
through distant roads.

And now God called him back to the place
where the journey began.

*

Jacob said to his household, “Put away
the foreign gods
among you.

Purify yourselves. Change your clothes.

Let us arise
and go to Bethel.

There I will build an altar
to the God
who answered me
in the day of my trouble and who has been with me
wherever I have gone.”

So they gave Jacob
their foreign gods
and the rings
in their ears.

Jacob buried them
under the oak
near Shechem.

Some things
must not be carried
into the next chapter. Old gods. Old fears. Old loyalties. Old ways
of trusting ourselves
instead of God.

They buried them.

*

And they went on. God protected them
along the road.

When Jacob arrived
at Bethel, he built an altar. He called the place
El-Bethel— the God of Bethel.

Not merely
the God of the place, but the God
who had met him there.

*

Then Deborah died. Rebekah’s nurse. An old woman
who had traveled
through generations
of the family. Jacob buried her
beneath the oak. And they called the tree Allon-bacuth— the oak of weeping.

Even on the road
toward promise, there are places
where we must stop
and mourn.

Faith does not mean
we do not weep. Sometimes
the holy place
is also
a place of tears.

*

Then God appeared
to Jacob again. “Your name is Jacob. But you shall no longer
be called Jacob. Your name shall be Israel.”

And God blessed him. “I am God Almighty.

Be fruitful
and multiply.

A nation
and a company of nations
shall come from you.

Kings shall come
from your body.

The land I gave
to Abraham and Isaac,

I will give to you
and to your descendants.”

*

God was repeating
the promise.

Not because
Jacob had forgotten it, but because
human beings
need to hear grace
again and again.

*

Jacob set up
a stone pillar.

He poured out
a drink offering
and oil upon it.

And he called
the place Bethel.

Again.

The name remained.

But Jacob
was not the same.

*

Then they journeyed on.

Rachel was giving birth. The labor was hard. The road became
a place of pain.

As she struggled,
the midwife said, “Do not be afraid. You have another son.”

But Rachel was dying. With her last breath
she named him Ben-oni— “son of my sorrow.”

But Jacob called him Benjamin— “son of the right hand.”

A child entered the world
through the doorway of death.

Rachel was buried
on the road to Ephrath,
near Bethlehem.

*

Jacob set up
a pillar over her grave.

A stone again.

So many stones
along Jacob’s life— stones of dreams, stones of altars, stones of remembrance, stones beside graves.

Perhaps our lives
are also marked
by such stones.

Places where
something ended. Places where
something began. Places where
we learned
that love remains
even after death.

*

Rachel was gone. But Benjamin remained. The mother was buried.

The promise continued.

And Jacob
walked on.

*

The story does not
hide the complexity
of his family.

Reuben violated
his father’s concubine.

Jacob heard of it.

The family carried
its brokenness
into the future.

*

And then
the sons of Jacob
were named—

the children
born along the journey, the children
through whom
a people would come.

*

At last,
Jacob returned
to his father Isaac
at Mamre, near Hebron, the place where
Abraham and Isaac
had lived.

Isaac died
at the age of
one hundred eighty.

Esau and Jacob,
the two brothers,
buried their father
together.

*

The story that began
with rivalry

ended, for a moment,
beside a grave.

Two brothers
standing together.

Not young anymore. Not the men
they once were. Time had changed them.

*

And perhaps
that is one of the quiet
miracles of Genesis:

God does not erase
the past.

He carries us
through it.

Jacob returns
to Bethel, but Bethel
is no longer
the same place.

The stone is there. The altar is there. The memory is there.

But the man
who stands before it
has been changed
by every road,
every fear,
every wound,
every blessing.

He has learned
that God is not
only the God
of beginnings.

God is also
the God
who walks with us
through endings.

The God
of birth and death.

The God
of laughter and tears.

The God
of dreams
and graves.

*

The God
who calls us back
when we have wandered.

And perhaps
returning to Bethel
does not mean
going backward.

It means
coming home
to the God
who was waiting

at the beginning,

and discovering
that the God
who waited there

has been walking
beside us
all along.