Wrestling with God

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Genesis 32:22-31

Our reading is of Jacob struggling with a man/angel/God but Jacob’s whole life was one of struggle.  He was the one through whom God would continue to fulfill the promise he had made to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations.  One would think that with Jacob being the one on the receiving end of that promise that life would roll on fairly easily without a hitch.  Just like people think ministers are prayer warriors who never have any real-life struggles of their own when that is definitely not the case.  Speaking from my experience and that of my friends in ministry, God sees to it that we experience probably a little bit more than our fair share of the real-life stuff so that we know what it’s like when you folks go through it and we can help.  On top of that, there are the ministry specific struggles that we get served up as well.  So, we can expect that Jacob too would face more than a fair share of struggles simply because he wears an unseeable target on his back called “God’s Promise” in a world that inexplicably turns from the One who in love made it.

Jacob struggled even before he was born.  He struggled in his mother’s womb with his twin brother Esau, who was the bigger twin.  The struggle affected his mother greatly.  Rebekah and Isaac were childless for twenty years and then like a miracle, there are twins in there and they are painfully.  She went to the family worship spot and prayed, “God, if this is the way motherhood is to be, then why am I here.”  The struggling made her dysphoric.  Dysphoria is when you can’t see past the struggle to the purpose.  So, God gave her a big picture response. “There are two nations in your womb and they will have to be separated.  One is stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.”  These two babies were the fathers of two nations that will not get along and will have to be separated.  And…all the birth order birthright stuff is going to complicate things.

And so, Jacob struggled with his brother Esau.  At the root of the problem is God’s promise.  If God had elected/chosen to fulfill the Promise through Esau who was born first, there likely would not have been a problem.  So also, if Jacob would have been born first, there likely would not have been a problem.  But the unspoken assumption here (mine at least) seems to be that they believed God’s promise to Abraham and then to Isaac would naturally pass to the firstborn son, Esau, along with the birthright, the bulk of the inheritance, and the father’s blessing.  But God chose Jacob and Jacob was born second.  So, there’s some tension here involving whether or not God’s Promise is tied to social conventions involving birth order.

 We know from what the Lord said to Rebekah that the Promise will go to Jacob, but this birth order presumption stands in the way.  Instead of just letting God make the promise to Jacob himself, there must be a way to get Jacob into the position of firstborn son.  As you recall, Jacob got Esau to sell him the birthright for a bowl of lentils.  But it seems that this transfer of birthright from Esau to Jacob was never divulged any further than the two of them and probably Rebekah.  Isaac still continues to regard Esau as the firstborn.  

A few years later, Isaac is quite aged and blind and fears he will soon die so he wants to bless Esau with a special blessing for his firstborn.  So, Rebekah concocts a scheme for Jacob to trick his father to give him the blessing, a blessing that for all shapes and purposes was rightfully his because Esau sold it to him for a bowl of lentils.  The trick works.  Isaac blesses Jacob instead of Esau.  Esau responds by saying, “Isn’t he rightly named Jacob (which means heel grabber or supplanter)?  For he has cheated me twice now.  He took my birthright, and look, now he has taken my blessing.”  

Cheating is an unfair accusation.  Esau didn’t seem to care about his birthright.  The Bible says he despised it.  He failed to tell his father Isaac that he had carelessly and disrespectfully sold it to Jacob for a bowl of beans.  The birthright was not something to be so trifled with.  Because Esau was too short-sighted and dimwitted to see past his own belly, Jacob really should have been the one to receive the blessing.  But apparently Esau never owned up to his father about selling his birthright.  Moreover, he was bigger and stronger than Jacob and likely would have pummeled Jacob if Jacob divulged it.  So, Jacob has to get his rightful blessing by means of trickery concocted by his mother.

Blessing stolen, Rebekah suspects that Esau will try to kill Jacob in order to get it all back.  The struggles of sibling rivalry thus turned deadly.  The only way she can think of to keep him safe is to send him back to where she came from under the auspices of finding a wife from amongst her brother’s people.  She gets Isaac to send him away by saying that she didn’t want him marrying any of those Canaanite women because they drove her crazy.  This was a backhanded jab at Esau because he had two Canaanite wives who actually made it a point to get on Rebekah’s nerves.  Esau hears Rebekah saying all this and decides to take off too but in the opposite direction.  He goes south to what we call Saudi Arabia to his half-uncle Ishmael and marries a couple of his daughters.

So, the struggle with Esau takes a hiatus with Jacob fleeing the land empty-handed to go to northern Syria under the auspices of finding a wife from among his uncle’s people.  On the way, God comes to Jacob in a dream and makes the promise to him.  God also promised that he would be with Jacob to watch over him and that he would bring him back to the land.  Jacob in turn makes a vow that if God does indeed bring him back to the land then Jacob would accept him as his God. 

  When Jacob reaches the land of his mother’s people, we are dupped into thinking his struggles are over.  In a storybook match made in heaven fashion he meets Rachel (his cousin) and it’s love at first.  He makes an agreement with his uncle Laban to work seven years for Rachel’s hand in marriage.  Seven years fly by.  The wedding goes down, but his uncle sends Rachel’s older sister Leah into the tent of consummation and for some reason Jacob does not realize that she’s not Rachel until morning and of course the consummating had happened.  Jacob has words with Laban about this trickery and they agree that for seven more years of work he could have Rachel as his wife after the week of wedding celebrations for Leah had ended.  Thus begins Jacob’s family struggles particularly with his father-in-law.  And also, his wives are two sisters and he also has their two servant girls as concubines and there’s a lot of competition over who can have the most babies and who can have Jacob when.  It’s nice to be wanted.

After the next seven years, Jacob and Laban work a deal that Jacob would continue to shepherd Laban’s flocks for another seven in exchange for receiving all the spotted and striped sheep that are born.  Laban had not been anything other than a contentious and dishonest father-in-law who kept changing Jacob’s terms of employment.  So, Jacob decided to get his due by means of some hinky magic.  He believed that if he put the branch of a popular tree into the watering hole, the spotted and striped rams would service the flock while the white one’s watched.  And surprisingly, it works.  Jacob's spotted and striped flock multiplied exponentially while Laban’s white-wooled flock dwindled to nothing.  Laban got very angry and made some accusations.

Jacob’s struggle with Laban culminated with Jacob having to flee for his life with his wives and children and wealth of livestock.  Laban pursued and would have killed him had not God appeared to Laban in a dream and warned him to keep his hands off.  Jacob and Laban made a peace pact and parted ways promising not to encroach upon each other.

And this brings us back to Jacob’s struggles with Esau.  It’s been twenty years.  Isaac and Rebekah are remarkably still alive.  Esau hears that Jacob is coming and gathers 400 men to go and meet him.  Jacob hears that Esau is coming with 400 men and he’s a little Verängstigt wie Scheiße.  Jacob decides to appease Esau by sending his sheep as a gift for Esau in smaller flocks to encounter as he draws near.  He pretty much gives Esau all he has.  He sends his wives and children across the River Jabbok with his remaining servants while he stays put for a night by himself.  Jabbok means to empty.  Jacob emptied himself there.

During the night he finds himself wrestling with someone he cannot identify.  All night long they go at it and the stranger cannot prevail.  As daybreak nears, the stranger decides to end the fight with a form of a Master Ninja death Touch.  He touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it.  Jacob is now a broken and completely vulnerable man but he will not let go.  The stranger says “Let go of me.”  Jacob says “not until you bless me.”  “What’s your name?” the stranger asks.  “Jacob,” he answers.  Jacob means “Heel grabber” or “Usurper” or “Supplanter.  The stranger answers, “You shall no longer be called Heel Grabber.  You are Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.”  

In that moment as a new day dawned on the banks of the River to Empty, Jacob, having emptied himself of everything (that’s a Christ metaphor if I’ve seen one) Jacob became Israel – the Heel Grabbing supplanter, the younger, weaker twin who was destined to be served by the older, became the one who had struggled with God’s promise on his life, with God himself and faithfully prevailed.  While he worked for his father-in-law, Jacob became greater while Laban decreased.  Jacob let God fulfill his promise to him instead of going off on his own way.  He came back to his father’s house no longer a supplanter but now a prevailer worthy of bearing the Promise. 

So, what’s the takeaway?  It is through staying faithful among the struggles of our lives that God shapes us into the people we are to be.  Thus, in order for us to be the persons God wants us to be we will have to struggle.  The faithful life is not this “Bless me. Bless me. Make me wealthy so that I can live the easy life” kind of thing that TV preachers promise you, if you give them money.  The faithful way is the Jesus way, the self-emptying way, emptying ourselves of our grievances, of what we think we deserve, of our need to be in the right or to be vindicated, and especially of any sort of need we have to win over others.  And rather, seek the way of reconciliation, of generosity, of forgiveness.  Jacob did not prevail until he stood on the shore of Jabbok having emptied himself of everything, with a broken hip, refusing to let go of God until God blessed him with a new name.  Jacob limped away from there saying he had seen the face of God and lived.  

I hope you can catch a glimpse of the poetic beauty in this wrestling match.  I certainly can’t do it justice.  In the sufferings, the strugglings of our lives we are in fact wrestling with God as we strive to cling to him in fidelity with everything we got.  We strive for what God wants for us which is to bear the image of Jesus in this very hurting and hurtful world.  Facing our struggles faithfully, clinging to God, will cause them to take on purpose.  Suffering that otherwise seems pointless and undeserved takes on the purpose of shaping us more into the image of Christ.  Amen.  

 

Following Dreams?

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Genesis 28:10-22

Many of the songs I know on the fiddle and banjo are rooted in the repertoire of a particular family down in West Virginia, the Hammons family.  It’s figured they arrived in the US in the late 1700’s and settled in Eastern Kentucky and eventually wound up in Pocahontas County, WV.  The reason they left Kentucky had something to do with a dream, but it wasn’t what we today would call following your dreams or even the American Dream.  There were a couple of literal dreams that wound up playing out in the awake world.  Here’s the story according to Maggie Hammons Parker who died in 1987 (born in 1899) and it pertains to her great-grandfather whose name she never mentioned.

They were one of two families of white settlers living near a place called Whitley in Kentucky among a lot of First Nations people most likely the Shawnee.  They got along great.  There was an old Shawnee man who came to visit nearly every day.  They shared stories and jokes.  He often brought a little boy who taught her great uncle who was also just a boy how to hunt with a bow and arrow and how to swim.  One day another man came with the old man.  The other man said he had had a dream the night before and that for his people, whenever they had a dream, it had to come true.  He said the dream was that he owned her great-grandfather’s gun.  It was a very nice gun that under any other circumstance he would never have parted with.  But he was afraid they would kill the two families of settlers if he didn’t, so he gave up the gun.

Her great-grandfather was greatly disturbed with having to part with the gun but didn’t know what to do about it.  A couple of weeks passed and he got up one morning and said that he had had a dream that he owned his gun again and one of the Shawnee’s ponies.  So, he went to the Shawnee camp and told the man who had his gun the dream.  The man studied him for a bit and then said, “Take it, pale face, but dream no more.” 

A few days later, the old man came to see them.  He was visibly bothered but wouldn’t say why.  He actually wouldn’t talk at all.  They finally got him to speak and he said for them not to tell anybody that he told them.  He said the Shawnee were coming to kill them and they’d better leave.  So, they grabbed what they could and fled all the while listening to a war party “a-hollering” behind them.  The two families came to the Ohio River and swam across to West Virginia and kept heading east on up into the mountains until in a generation or so they wound up in Pocahontas County.

Well, there’s some similarity here to our story of Jacob’s dream.  Jacob was fleeing for his life from his brother Esau after having stolen his father’s blessing and he had this dream in which God conveyed the promise he had made to Abraham on to Jacob.  On the other hand, the Hammons’ had to flee for their lives on the coattails of some dream inspired events that may have involved some trickery as well.  Personally, I can’t help but believe that by means of those dreams about a gun God was saving the Hammons’ lives and also a strand in West Virginia traditional music.  This event occurred at the time when things were starting to get really bad between the Shawnee (and also the Cherokee) and the European settlers.  

So, let’s talk about dreams for a moment.  I think I’ve opened that can of worms.  In the Bible and in most every pre-Scientific Revolution culture, they believed dreams could be a means of communication from the divine realm to us in our everyday lives.  It is easy to understand how this could be because dreams can seem a lot like real life, but we’re asleep and so they must be like a window or a portal into someplace else.  Sometimes they can seem so emotionally impactful.  We can wake from dreams with feelings that persist for days.  Dreams can recur.  Sometimes in dreams we run into relatives and friends who have passed on and they seem to have something relative to say, if we could only remember it.  Sometimes our dreams feel so good we wish they would go on forever…and then there are night mares.  Sometimes we dream of something we wish could happen.  Sometimes we dream of walking naked through town.  Interesting things, dreams are.  Could there be meaning to them?  Can they tell us something?

There’s been a resurgence in the last couple of decades of people searching for meaning and direction from their dreams.  The idea is that dreams are a window into your subconscious.  If you can figure out what’s in your subconscious, you can figure out anything you want to know about yourself.  Moreover, they say the subconscious can tell you what you really want in life.  It will show you the dreams you should pursue.  Thus, there are lots of sites on the internet where you can go to find out what a dream means.  Things like, if you see a black dog in your dream, this is what it means.  They tell you to write down your dreams as soon as you wake up so you can figure them out and determine what your subconscious is telling you.  Do that and you’re on the way to your unique happiness.

Well, who knows.  I tend to lean towards what science says.  As best as can be determined by scientific method, there likely is not some hidden vault full of hidden treasure inside ourselves that if we can unlock it the secrets of me and my little universe of happiness can be fully manifest and I can be all that I am supposed to be according to deep inner me which is somehow divine.  Sorry, my sarcasm bleeds through.  There are things about ourselves that we are not aware of that show up in patterns of behaviour that we choose not to deal with.  There are emotions that weigh on us and beliefs about ourselves that are attached to traumatic events we chose not to remember because they are too painful to bring up.  Any credible psychologist will admit that the subconscious is a closed vault that we are clueless as to how to open it and it’s probably best we didn’t.  As far as actual dreams go, as best as anyone can tell, dreams are the brain's way of resolving what went on in a day, deciding what to keep.  If we have recurring dreams, there might be something there we need to deal with.  Since our memory of what we dream about typically lasts just minutes past waking, maybe we best just get plenty of sleep and let the brain do what it does.

That said, I’ve had dreams come true.  We don’t have space and time for them in this sermon.  What the dreams were about and what came true about them wasn’t life or world history changing, but was rather on the hilarious side of interesting.  Ask me if you know what they are.  There can be a hinky something or other about dreams.  For some people this can be very true, but for most people not so much.

I will also say that God can and does speak to us through dreams and when God does, we will know it.  Jacob here is the case and point.  We find Jacob here fleeing for his life because at his mother’s prompting and scheming he stole a blessing from his blind and dying father that was meant for his older twin brother Esau.  But his mother, Rebekah knew from a word that she had received from the Lord when she was pregnant with these twins who struggled greatly in her womb, she knew that the promise God made to Abraham to give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations was to be fulfilled through Jacob.  Jacob was fleeing for his life from his brother.  He was leaving the land God had promised to give Abraham and heading back to the land that Abraham had come from.  So, in this dream God reveals what he is up to with Jacob.  Though Jacob seems to be losing everything pertaining to God’s promise to Abraham and Isaac, he is actually going to receive it all.  This tragic turn of events was not going to hinder God’s plans for ultimately saving his creation.

In the midst of what was probably Jacob’s most painful and disillusioning moment of his life, God spoke to Jacob in a dream and got him on course.  That happens.  Don’t think you’re crazy if it happens to you.

Something else that needs to be said with respect to following our dreams.  It’s very popular today for people to give the advice that we should follow our dreams, follow our passions.  Go and be and do what we really want to be and do and that’s the path to happiness.  Jacob here is not following his dreams.  He’s watching for God to fulfill the Promise.  The next 20 years of his life are not storybook-dream-come true stuff.  They are quite difficult, full of hard work and routine abuse from his father-in-law.  Yet, through it all he finds that God is blessing him.  Eventually, he has to flee with his family from his father-in-law and his posse and go back to the Land of Promise and face Esau who actually welcomes him home. God had looked after Esau too. 

Jacob cannot be accused of following his dreams, his passions, in the pursuit of happiness.  That follow your dream stuff is a myth of wealthy, Western culture and quite frankly, you pretty much have to be independently wealthy to do it.  Jacob pursued what God wanted for his life and God made it happen.  God protected and provided for him through a life full of normal work and family struggles just like we all have.  

I find Jacob’s reaction to this dream to be profound.  “’Surely, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.’  Overcome with reverence he said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is the house of God, the gate to Heaven.’”  His response reminds me of Peter, James, and John and their response to Jesus when Jesus took them up a mountain and was transfigured and the Father spoke and the Spirit was there as a cloud.  They responded, “This is GOOD!”  In Jacob’s dream God promised that he was and always would be with Jacob and Jacob realized God was with him.  He had been in God’s presence and it was good.  The presence of God is the fullness of life that we all seek.  Seek God’s presence above all else and God will take care of the rest.  Amen.

 

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.