Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!" 

- Genesis 28.16

If you've ever watched a police procedural show on television, you've heard someone say, "We've put out a BOLO on the suspect!" The acronym stands for, "Be On the Look Out for." The idea is that the person you want is out there, but you might not spot them if you did not know to be looking.

Advent is the BOLO season of the Christian year. The Messiah is coming, but in ways, and in places, and through people we don't expect: a helpless baby, born in a no-star hotel, to an unwed mother. Zecharias sees an angel where he expected only a cloud of incense. The shepherds see a heavenly battalion where they expected only sheep. The wise men see a star that defies their carefully-crafted zodiac. 

The ongoing soap opera of Harry and Heels (the literal translation of "Esau" and "Jacob"), reminds us to pay this kind of attention. Jacob has conned his big brother one time too many and made Canaan too to hold him so he does a runner to Haran, some five hundred miles to the north. (Think of Al Pacino's character in "The Godfather" who takes it on the lam to Sicily after he offs a rival mob boss.) Just a few days into his trek he sacks out on a hillside expecting nothing more than a bad night's sleep. (I've never understood why someone would use a rock for a pillow.) Instead, God appears; even so, Jacob must pay attention. Notice a couple of interesting things.

In one way, the vision fits Jacob's expectations. What he sees is probably not a "ladder," but a "stairway" reaching to Heaven (like the Led Zeppelin song). Some scholars believe this was a ziggurat, the stepped pyramids with a central staircase that featured in the pagan religions of Mesopotamia. The idea was that the priest would ascend the steps to get in shouting distance of the gods in order to cut a deal. The Tower of Babel was probably designed along these lines.

However, notice a few important differences: First of all, instead of a portal for human beings to ascend to the heavens, this was a means by which heavenly agents entered human turf in order to be active in their affairs. More importantly, God does not park in the penthouse. The best translation of verse 13 indicates that God stood "beside" the whole structure (NRSV). So Jacob learns that heavenly intervention in the world is not achieved but received, and that the God of Abraham and Isaac is not absent but present. Most important of all, God's promise in verse 14 is that "all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and your offspring." The gist of the blessing that Jacob had swiped was the ultimate coming of the Savior to set right Adam's original sin. 

"Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!" 

So here's the payoff: Advent offers a time of preparation for the arrival of Christ in our world in new ways that reconfigure our religious expectations. God works within our cultural matrix, but repurposes our theological categories with the shock of grace.

So, waking or sleeping, working or resting, be on the lookout for Christ, who comes to us daily, often in a distressing disguise. When he comes, we must do what Jacob did: mark the moment by offering to God whatever means of revelation God chooses: a rock for a pillow, or an emotional rock in my psychological shoe; a perfect child, or a stew-hustling identity thief who troubles the family hearth. God uses it all to bring in the Kingdom of Heaven.

As the poet Elizabeth Barret Browning writes, "Earth's crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God/But only he who sees takes off his shoes."