Family Politics

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Genesis 25:19-34

Let’s take a moment to catch a glimpse into how big and spread out the family of Abraham was by the time we get to the birth of the twins, Esau and Jacob.  As you know Abraham came to the land of Canaan believing a promise by God to give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation.  He and his wife Sarah had no children at the time and so they brought his nephew Lot just in case he could count as a descendant.  They wandered the land nomads with no children to speak of.  

This childlessness threatened God’s promise.  So, Sarah took matters in hand and convinced Abraham to have a child by her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar.  It was a common practice back then that when a slave girl was giving birth Ma’am would stand over her pretending to be the one giving birth so that she would call the child her own.  Thusly, Ishmael became Abraham’s actual firstborn, but not a child of the promise.  

Not long after that God opened Sarah’s womb so to speak.  She was in her 80’s and Abraham in his 90’s.  Their first and only child, Isaac, was born.  As you would expect, Sarah became jealous of Hagar and Ishmael and certainly did not want Ishmael to receive the birthright inheritance due the firstborn son when it “rightfully” should be Isaac’s.  So, she had Abraham send them away into the wilderness and knowing better than to refuse her, reluctantly did so.  He sent them off with only a wineskin of water and a loaf of bread.  God saw this act of injustice (if not attempted murder) and saved them and promised to make a great nation from Ishmael as well.  

Ishmael eventually settled in what we call Saudi Arabia and like his half-nephew Jacob, he too had twelve sons.  You may also remember that it was to a caravan of Ishmaelites that Jacob’s sons sold their brother Joseph and they in turn sold him to Pharoah.  Story for another day but mind you, if you let your cousins get too distant, you may wind up in the slave trade together.  Just saying.

Time went by and Sarah died.  Not long after, Isaac and Rebekah marry only to remain childless for twenty years.  Abraham also remarried and at the ripe young age of more than 110 he sired another batch of children.  His second wife’s name was Keturah and they had six sons and 7 grandsons and some great-grandsons.  Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac, his most favoured son who was not really his firstborn son.  The firstborn son was Ishmael, but we won’t talk about that.  To his other children, Keturah’s children and to the children of some concubines, he simply gave gifts.  Abraham sent them all away too.  He sent them east into what we call Jordan today.  It was the promised child, Isaac, who was to be the only one of Abraham’s offspring to live on the land God had promised Abraham.  But, just imagine the expanse of it all, Abraham’s descendants were spread out from Israel to Saudi Arabia to Jordan.  Please notice how Abraham sent the “illicit” children away to other lands and gave Isaac, the child of the promise, the Promised Land.  

That gets us to today’s reading concerning the birth of Isaac and Rebekah’s twin sons, “the Twins”, Esau and Jacob and the little problem of the birthright due the oldest son.  The descendants of Abraham are a massive extended family.  As you might guess, this could prove problematic, but interestingly not among the array of half-siblings that were spread out all over the place.  The problem lay between the twins, Esau and Jacob.  

The birthright matter is important.  The birthright wasn’t simply a matter of who gets the bulk of the inheritance and the father’s blessing.  The oldest son indeed got the bulk of the estate while the other sons got a pittance and daughters got nothing and yes there’s nothing fair there.  The birthright also entailed that the oldest son would be the spiritual leader of the family once the father passed.  The big thing about the birthright was that the one who wields it is the one who bears the family honour, the family reputation.  It wasn’t simply a matter of the estate.  It was about the family name, the reputation. Moreover, in the matter of Abraham’s family the birthright also involved the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham.  The oldest son would be the one through whom we should expect that God would fulfill the promise.

Reading along in this story, as it does involve the fulfillment of God’s promise, we might could expect that for the “royal family” here things would be storybook perfect.  Everything should be all “Will and Kate”.  It seemed to start that way.  Isaac and Rebekah were a love-at-first-sight-match-made-in-heaven couple, married for life, no polygamy or concubines.  It was just the two of them and the twins.  Things should have been perfect just like the Cleaver family from Leave It to Beaver, but it wasn’t.  There’s sibling rivalry, deception, parents playing favourites, and one grand estate dispute.  The only things missing from the deal were a gallery of paparazzi and a tabloid.

Esau and Jacob must have been fraternal twins as there was nothing identical about them.  Esau was biggish and hairy and his skin tone was a bit reddish.  He loved to hunt and to be out in the fields.  One could say he was short-sighted, lived for the moment, couldn’t see past his belly.  He seems to have been the more aggressive of the two brothers, an alpha-type oldest sibling.  He was loud and lived for the day.  I’m stepping out on a limb and saying that he probably wasn’t someone you’d want making decisions pertaining to the future of the family business nor the one who would give the family the best reputation.  On top of everything, he traded his birthright to his twin brother for a bowl of stew which makes it seem that he just really didn’t care about the role and the politics of being the oldest brother.  One could argue that this stew thing was just a fake trade with no signed papers or anything and so nothing really changed, but still, the birthright was a serious matter and Esau didn’t seem to care about it.  Oddly, Esau was his father’s favourite.  Isaac loved the wild game he cooked.  Should we ask if maybe that’s kind of a shallow reason?

For Jacob, on the other hand, the birthright mattered.  We could play with sibling personality and birth order dynamics psychology stuff.  From that perspective, we could say that Jacob being a twin probably had a chip on his shoulder about being treated as the youngest sibling, labelled a mama’s boy who was sheltered and spoiled, simply because he came into the world a few minutes later.  When in actuality, he was the smarter, more responsible twin who actually cared about the family honour and the promise.  Those are personality characteristics typical of the oldest sibling that Esau should have had.  Yet, Esau was the carefree “let’s go hunting and camping instead of dealing with things” kind of guy which are personality characteristics we would expect of a youngest sibling.  In this stew for birthright deal, to me, it appears Jacob is simply proving he would make the better oldest sibling.  

So, if we were to psychologize the whole situation, Jacob was more like the oldest sibling than Esau was and yet he was forced into the role of being the youngest sibling simply because he was born a few minutes later.  It would have been a completely different world for him if he had just come out first.  On top of it all, and I will withhold comment on it, we have parents playing favourites here and that never goes well.  There was indeed some sibling rivalry there and I’m sure Jacob got pushed around a bit by his brutish big brother for being a “Mama’s boy” who hung around the tents with the women folk.  I think things were unfair for Jacob.  Just because Esau came out first shouldn’t mean he should get the lion’s share of the inheritance and bear the family honour and all that especially when he wasn’t qualified.   That’s my opinion and with me being the youngest in my family, it’s not all that unbiased.

Sadly, Jacob gets painted in a bad light.  I’m sure we have all heard our fair share of sermons and Bible study lessons that portrayed Jacob as not just clever but conniving, a trickster who was covetous of his brother’s birthright and would do anything to get it.  He’s also the one, who at his mother’s behest, steals his blind father’s deathbed blessing by pretending to be Esau.  Then, when he was in a faraway land shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep, he miraculously winds up with all the sheep.  One could say he did that by trickery as well.

But, I’m not so sure about painting Jacob in such a negative light.  He is described here not as conniving or wily, but as “quiet”.  The Hebrew word there means “perfect, righteous, peaceful.”  I don’t know why the translators use “quiet” unless maybe they mean “still” in a prayerful kind of way.  As a point of interest, this is the word used to describe Job’s “righteous” character.  So, let us consider that there was a bit of depth, one might say spiritual depth to Jacob.  He wasn’t brutish as was his brother.  He stayed around the tents as opposed to living in the fields with the livestock.  He was his mother’s, Rebekah’s, favourite, I think, because she knew that Jacob was the one to receive the birthright and his father’s blessing because God had told her so.  One can say that quite often it is the case that “Mama knows best” and it was she who instigated a lot of the stuff for which Jacob gets called dishonest and conniving.  We are also safe to wager that she told her favourite son that God had told her while she was pregnant that there were two nations wrestling inside her and that the older would serve the younger.  We call him a conniving, self-seeking trickster, but he really wasn’t.  Jacob sought what God wanted for him but would be denied him because of birth order politics.

Well, I’ll wrap this up by saying that the family of Isaac, Rebekah, the twins Esau and Jacob, the family of the Promise, was not a perfect family and yet God worked through them.  There was rivalry, deceit, and favouritism just like any of our own families.  And so, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if our families are not perfect.  Imperfection and brokenness aside, it was God’s promise and their pursuit of it that mattered.  So also with us, our families are imperfect and broken as well, but that’s not what defines us.  What defines us is our desire to follow Jesus and become like him, who is the firstborn Son of God who bears the honour of this church family and each of our families included in it.  Amen.

 

A Family Plan

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Genesis 24:34-67

This story of Abraham’s servant going to find a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac and everything happening so according to plan, if I can say it that way, it just seems so right out of the movies.  It starts with what appears to be the makings of a very old school arranged marriage that’s not fair to anybody, especially the woman.  Arranged marriages always leave you asking the Tina Turner question: “What’s love got to do with it?”  But surprisingly Rebekah is given the choice and it’s a choice remarkably like the one Abraham made in responding to God’s promise.  Like Abraham, Rebekah had to leave her native land and her father’s house to go to a land she’d never seen, but a land that would become hers and her offspring will become a great nation.  Like Abraham she goes.  If Abraham is called the father of faith, Rebekah rather than Sarah should be called the mother of faith.  She arrives and is immediately struck with, smitten by Isaac whom she finds doing a prayer walk in a field.  The story ends with the words, “and he loved her.”  This is the only place in the Bible that I am aware of where a husband’s love for his wife is actually noted.  Also, their marriage is one of only a handful that’s not complicated by other wives and concubines.  

Probably the most astonishing thing of all in this story is the role God has in bringing them together.  Abraham sends his head servant off on a fool’s errand – “Go find a wife for my son from among my people.  These Canaanite women just ain’t like us.”  The servant loads up a small caravan of ten or more camels and goes to roughly the area Abraham came from.  He goes to the local watering hole, the well.  That’s where the local shepherds like to watch the young women come to draw water from the well.  There’s just something about watching a woman draw water apparently. Expecting that there will be women coming, he prays and basically tells God what to make happen to make it clear to him who is the right woman for Isaac.  It will be the woman who gives him water and waters his camels too.  As soon as he opens his eyes, there’s Rebekah.  She fills the bill.  Gives him water – check.  Waters the camels – check.  Related to Abraham – check.  A match made in heaven.  Pray, faith, wait, God comes through….umm….hmmm….It does happen, you know.  I don’t know if you have ever had your jaw dropped by God when you asked for a sign, a specific sign, and you got it.  I have.  It happens.

Well anyway, the idea that God can play matchmaker and that a marriage can be life-long and monogamous are ideas that challenge us these days.  There are all kinds of views out there these days on love, marriage, and family.  Just to pop off a few, there’s the idea that we are not complete or whole without a significant love relationship.  You may remember the iconic moment in the vintage 90’s film Jerry McGuire when Jerry played by Tom Cruise, says to Dorothy, played by Renee Zellweger, “I love you…you complete me.”  That one turned up all kinds of red flags in the world of relationship advisors who say, “You should be complete in yourself.  You shouldn’t need another person to complete you.”  Well, yeah.  If you’re saying that to someone you just recently met, red flags should be flying.  That’s just your body pumping some feel good hormones at you.  Even in the long run we cannot make another person responsible for making me feel complete.  That’s a huge burden for one person to bear.  

But…there’s the other side of that coin.  We do need relationships, significant relationships with significant others to be complete…if there is such a thing as completeness in this life.  We are not independent, autonomous, rational, decision-making individual beings who can do and be what we want to do and be with no consequences to others.  We are relational beings.  Sure, there’s some “unique to me” stuff floating around in us, but for the most part, I don’t know who I am apart from the relationships (not just love relationships) I have and have had and some relationships are more foundational to who I am than others so that without those people in my life I am very incomplete and, in some cases, freaking devastated.  

Then there’s also the idea that there isn’t just one person you’d make a good fit for.  Danny DeVito’s character, Eddie, in the movie Jumanji: The Next Level voices this in some advice he gives to his grandson, Spencer.  Spencer is a bit broken up over a relationship that is on the outs with a girl with whom he was well fit.  I couldn’t find the quote exactly but DeVito says something like “Don’t get too bent up over one girl. If I was your age, I’d just go ride the subway. There are all kinds of girls there to meet and one in five of them I’d marry.”  When it comes to mates fit for us, there is more than one person with whom you could make it work, but still, one asks is there that one person we are meant to be with.  It depends on who you ask.

Then there’s what’s vogue today in popular relationship psychology.  Some will say monogamy and marriage are unrealistic expectations only meant to cause us shame and guilt.  They say we are living longer now and people change and grow and you can’t expect life-long commitments.  So, grow as a person all you can with the person you’re with now and there’s no shame in moving on to someone else.  We should all be mature adults and able to let go of people when they or we need/want to move on.  It only hurts if you hold on to those unrealistic expectations.  They also make the argument that Evolutionarily speaking we are not wired for monogamy.  It’s better for the species if we have more than one partner.  To that I say, in every culture that has endured, those evolutionary urges have always had to be curbed.  Stable communities require relationships based in trust and for some reason, the evolutionary urge to have more than one partner does a world of hurt in the trust department.  

Then there’s the biblical perspective.  Well, honestly, it’s all over the place and you have to say that the role of Scripture at times is to show us that some things are wrong, for lack of a better word, by making them look accepted and even right; things like polygamy and giving a slave to your husband as a wife to bear children for you.  These things are wrong.  Just because it’s a seemingly accepted practice in the Bible doesn’t make it right.  If you pay attention to how having multiple spouses plays outin the biblical stories, you find it leads to a world of hurt.  

King Solomon is probably the worst example of them all.  He was the wisest and richest of all of Israel’s kings but he had the habit of marrying to form alliances with other kings.  He had over 700 wives who were princesses and 300 concubines.  Nowhere is love mentioned in these relationships.  These women were simply “treaty-trophies” to him.  There seems to be such total disregard for the fact that they were real women, real persons, and certainly not property.  In the end, Solomon’s marrying for political reasons led him to put shrines to other gods in the Temple so that his wives and he along with them could worship their own gods…in the Temple…and he did it with them.  Polygamy damaged his relationship to God…we can only imagine the damage it did to the women.  Polygamy (or polyamorous relationships as they are called today) only led to idolatry and shallow family relationships.  As soon as he died, Solomon’s son split the nation.

To the other extreme, the New Testament would seem to offer celibate singleness as the way to go, but with the advice that if you can’t control your urges, it’s better to marry than to burn with passion or to be untowards to another.  But the singleness thing was simply the bias of the Apostle Paul whose opinions were skewed by his own ability and preference to live single and probably more so by his very urgent expectation that Jesus would return at any moment and that, to him, was more important than love, marriage, and pushing a baby carriage.  That noted, there is nothing wrong with staying single but in the New Testament the overall bias is that monogamous, life-long marriage is the best way for women and men to partner up.  We also find that marriage should be rooted in love, a love that grows and blossoms to resemble the way that Jesus loves the church and the church loves Jesus – unconditionally and selflessly, full of hospitality, generosity, patience, kindness, and forgiveness.  Serving, not demanding to be served.    

Turning back to our reading here about Isaac and Rebekah, there’s a couple of things to notice.  First, in God’s plan for healing his very good creation from evil, sin, and death through a people of faith, marriage and family play a central role.  Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is the story of marriages and families who are trying to be faithful.  It’s not the stories of faithful individuals.  Moreover, even Jesus was born and raised within the context of the marriage and family of Mary and Joseph.  Solid societies are built on solid families not on individuals seeking self-fulfillment.  

Second, one could make the argument that yes, there is that one certain somebody that God would have us to be with.  But we need to acknowledge that if God does indeed bring two people together, those two people need to keep God in the relationship, acknowledge that the relationship is a gift from God not to be taken for granted, and in times of trouble we must always let God and the relationship take precedence over “me, myself, and I”.  God has a purpose for our marriages, for our families.  The best way to keep things healthy is to together seek that higher purpose. 

To close, I think I need to say that this sermon is not meant to be part of the ongoing debates of who can and cannot be married due to sexual orientation and what constitutes a family.  As far as I’m concerned, the love of Christ will and should always surprise and challenge us in its scope.  God’s heart will always be bigger than our own and God’s arms open wider than our own.  It’s best we learn to live with that reality.  I’m simply trying to say that in God’s plan to heal this hurting creation, particularly the aspect of wounded human community, the roles of marriage and family are vital.  Amen.