Family Values

I owe you an apology. Each week in the bulletin we print the scripture for the following Sunday’s sermon in the hope that you will read that text before coming to church and be better prepared to hear and respond to God’s word. But last week’s bulletin had an error — my error. It listed selected verses from Genesis 23 as this week’s text. In fact, today we are going to be working in Genesis 24. I apologize, especially to those who read Genesis 23 and expected it to be what I would be talking about today.

But if you read chapter 23 the time was not entirely wasted because that chapter describes the death of Sarah, Abraham’s wife and the great matriarch of the people of Israel. Chapter 24 introduces Rebekah who married Sarah’s son Isaac and became, therefore, the matriarch of Israel’s second generation. So together chapters 23 and 24 portray the transition from one generation to another.

We pick up the story in the middle of chapter 24. We’ve been told that Abraham was very old and that God had blessed him in all things. So the old patriarch summoned his most trusted servant and sent him on a quest back to the homeland of Haran — to what would be southern Turkey today — and told the servant to find a wife for Isaac. The servant has met Rebekah and has been invited to dinner. Rebekah’s big brother Laban asks about the servant’s intentions and we start with the servant’s response

So he said, “I am Abraham’s servant. The Lord has greatly blessed my master, and he has become wealthy; he has given him flocks and herds, silver and gold, male and female slaves, camels and donkeys. And Sarah my master’s wife bore a son to my master when she was old; and he has given him all that he has. My master made me swear, saying, ‘You shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I live; but you shall go to my father’s house, to my kindred, and get a wife for my son.’

[42] “I came today to the spring, and said, ‘O Lord, the God of my master Abraham, if now you will only make successful the way I am going! I am standing here by the spring of water; let the young woman who comes out to draw, to whom I shall say, “Please give me a little water from your jar to drink,” and who will say to me, “Drink, and I will draw for your camels also” — let her be the woman whom the Lord has appointed for my master’s son.’

“Before I had finished speaking in my heart, there was Rebekah coming out with her water jar on her shoulder; and she went down to the spring, and drew. I said to her, ‘Please let me drink.’ She quickly let down her jar from her shoulder, and said, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels.’ So I drank, and she also watered the camels. Then I asked her, ‘Whose daughter are you?’ She said, ‘The daughter of Bethuel, Nahor’s son, whom Milcah bore to him.’ So I put the ring on her nose, and the bracelets on her arms. Then I bowed my head and worshiped the Lord, and blessed the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who had led me by the right way to obtain the daughter of my master’s kinsman for his son. Now then, if you will deal loyally and truly with my master, tell me; and if not, tell me, so that I may turn either to the right hand or to the left.”

[58] And they called Rebekah, and said to her, “Will you go with this man?” She said, “I will.” So they sent away their sister Rebekah and her nurse along with Abraham’s servant and his men. And they blessed Rebekah and said to her,

Then Rebekah and her maids rose up, mounted the camels, and followed the man; thus the servant took Rebekah, and went his way.

Now Isaac had come from Beer-lahai-roi, and was settled in the Negeb. Isaac went out in the evening to walk in the field; and looking up, he saw camels coming. And Rebekah looked up, and when she saw Isaac, she slipped quickly from the camel, and said to the servant, “Who is the man over there, walking in the field to meet us?” The servant said, “It is my master.” So she took her veil and covered herself. And the servant told Isaac all the things that he had done. Then Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent. He took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.

It would be fun to go around the sanctuary this morning and listen to everyone who is or has been married tell how they came to be in love with their spouse or, if married more than once, their spouses. For that matter, even those who have never married might have interesting stories to tell about true loves with whom, for whatever reasons, they never connected. But regardless of the stories we told, none would be like that of Rebekah and Isaac. The world in which we live and love is far removed from that Genesis world of long ago.

Which points out the irony of my title. We hear a lot of talk today about “family values” and getting back to the “family values of the Bible.” But exactly what values are those? The values that let Abraham have a son with Hagar, his wife’s servant, and then a son with Sarah? The values that let Abraham’s servant pick a wife for Isaac because she watered his camels? The values that in the next generation will let Jacob have two wives (Leah and Rachel) and have children with both of them as well as with both of their servants? Exactly what values are we talking about?[1] Reading family values into or from the Bible almost always leads us astray.

Of course, this is why what I said a moment ago needs some qualification. I said it would be fun to go around the sanctuary and hear our stories of love and marriage and family. But it wouldn’t be completely fun. Many of our stories would also be painful because love and family are the arenas where we experience some of our deepest hurts, sorrows, and uncertainties. The text says that Rebekah became Isaac’s wife and he loved her and he was comforted after his mother’s death. Yes, love and family comfort — sometimes. Love and family also wound sometimes and when we talk about family values we need to be honest about that.

So the question is, what sense can we make of today’s text, this portion of the long and complicated story of family Abraham, this story that is mostly about the love and marriage of Rebekah and Isaac? What sense can we make of it?

We begin to make sense of this story when we ask, where is God in the story? Almost always, that should be the first question we ask of the Bible and sometimes the only question we should ask. Here we have what appears to be mostly a love story. We don’t find love and marriage the way that Rebekah and Isaac did but we still recognize this as a love story. Where is God in the story?

It’s a tricky question because all too often we read God into a Bible story moralistically. This is what we might call the Aesop’s Fables approach to the Bible. You know how the Fables go. A story or situation is told and at the end you have the “moral of the story.” So we often read a Bible story and think, consciously or unconsciously, and sometimes even say, “And the moral of the story is …” Then we presume this is what God is saying to us.

For example, were we to read this story moralistically, we might conclude that God was saying any or all of the following:

Any of these may be a good thing to do in a given situation but they are not what the text is about. Rather than moralize — what’s the moral of the story? — we need to theologize on this text — where is God?

We find the best clue in how Abraham’s servant began his prayer when he was looking for a wife for Isaac. He prayed, “O Lord, the God of my master Abraham …” Our ears are so attuned to this phrasing that we think of it as just a normal way of speaking to God. In fact, such a manner of speaking to God reveals a profoundly new way that the Hebrews people began to understand God.

I’m sure you know that in the time of Abraham, roughly 4,000 years ago, it was generally thought that there were many gods and there were many names for the gods. The story of family Abraham tells how beginning with Abraham, the Hebrew people came to be monotheistic, how they came to believe in the one, true God. But the Bible still reflects the thinking of the ancient world and in the scriptures there are many names for God: El Shaddai, Elohim, Yahweh, or just the generic El which like our word god can be either capitalized to refer to the God or lowercase to refer to any god.

Now in the polytheistic culture of Abraham’s day they tended to distinguish the roles of the gods. So there was a “big” God or Gods, usually indicated with the capitalized name El, who took care of things like creation, the weather, the destiny of nations, fertility of the crops, life and death — you know, the big stuff. Then there were the lowercase “els” who were mostly considered to be personal gods. Typically they were referred to as the “god of so and so,” that is the god of the person for whom they were responsible. So we would have the “god of Bill,” the “god of Sid,” the “god of Abraham,” and so on. These personal gods didn’t have much power or authority. But their sole job was to watch out for their worshiper-client. Nothing was too small or humble to bring to the personal god’s attention.[3]

Now notice. Up until this point in the Genesis story we have for the most part been dealing with the Big God — the God who creates the world; the God who brings a flood to destroy human wickedness but in mercy saves a family and the created order; the God who calls Abraham to leave his family and homeland and promises that in him all the families of earth will be blessed; a God who in dark mystery demands that Abraham sacrifice the son of promise before — amazing grace —providing another way. So far the story is mostly about the Big God — Yahweh.

But in chapter 24 there is a change. Abraham’s servant knew that his master worshiped the Lord, the Big God named Yahweh. But in his prayer he combines this with the personal god, “the god of my master Abraham.”[4] In other words, the Big God who runs the Cosmos is the same God who cares for every human person. We take that so much for granted but we probably should be awed down to our tippy toes to read a text revealing the first glimmers of this amazing insight. Rebekah’s and Isaac’s story is about love and family — personal things. But even in that, the God of the universe is at work to fulfill his promise. So even though God says nothing in this text, God is present everywhere. Amazing! Amazing grace.^[5]

So I want to conclude this morning with a story about love and family, not the love of husband and wife but of mother and daughter. The latest novel by Presbyterian author Anne Lamott is called Blue Shoe. Her main character is a single mother named Mattie. Mattie is a Christian who goes to church almost every Sunday. But she struggles nonetheless and almost all her struggles have to do with love and family and family values. She struggles raising her two kids. She struggles with her former husband and her desire to have a new husband. Perhaps most of all she struggles with her mother named Isa. Isa may not be in early Alzheimer’s but she has her crazy moments. Mattie loves Isa dearly but sometimes her mother drives her crazy and Mattie feels like strangling her.

One day Mattie and Isa are out for a drive and they are almost out of time before Mattie needs to pick up her kids. Isa decides right then that she needs to go to the grocery store and buy cat food and toilet paper. Warning bells go off in Mattie’s head. She knows this will be a disaster. They will run out of time. Isa will meander in the aisles and hand out the coupons she always has in her purse to box boys who will run to find whatever the coupons are for. Already Mattie is panicky, tense, angry.

It was worse than she feared. Isa disappeared with her own cart and couldn’t be found in the pet food aisle or the toilet paper aisle. Desperate for time, Mattie found the few things she needed and got in the express checkout line, hoping her mother would reappear soon. Mattie looked at her watch and got more tense. Then at the far end of the store she glimpsed Isa. Her mother was out there, with her cart, next to two store employees. She appeared to be dealing cards to them. They took what she had dealt and dispersed throughout the store, and Mattie realized her mother was dispensing coupons.

She imagined a quick trip to the housewares department to buy a hammer. One blow should do it, she thought. She stood there quietly instead, refusing to lose her place in the express line with six people behind her. Only if Isa came right then would there be time to pick up the kids. But all she saw was her mother tottering down an aisle, waving at her, and scanning for box boys returning with their coupon bounty. Mattie didn’t know what else to do. So she prayed.

“She prayed to see Isa through God’s eyes, from the inside out. Nothing happened, that was too much of a stretch. So she prayed to see her through the eyes of a friend, the eyes of someone besides her overly critical daughter. Eventually she began to see her mother differently. She saw this gawky, tremulous woman with a badly pleated memory, working hard to keep living independently. She saw an elderly woman cadging coupons so she could pay her own way and not have to ask her skittish children for help. So Mattie stood in line as patiently as she could. She let six people go ahead of her. And by the time her mother popped back out of the waves to stand beside her in line, goggle-eyed and blinky, Mattie’s heart was soft toward her again. Mattie knew this was not clinically a miracle, but it felt like one; or maybe not a miracle, but grace, if grace meant you went from small and hassled and full of hate, tapping your foot with impatience, to holding your mother’s warm hand.

“‘Mom!’ Mattie said, but Isa could hear in her daughter’s voice that she was not mad. She turned to the man behind them and said, with her nose in the air and her eyes squinched shut, ‘This is my daughter,’ as if introducing him to the queen.”[6]

Grace comes because the God of the universe is faithful to us in life, in love, in family. This does not mean that God is our personal genie-in-a-bottle who does whatever we want or always makes sense to us. God is faithful but God is also sovereign and reigns in power and mystery. Nonetheless, because God is faithful, the apostle Paul could say: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4.6-7) This is the God we first catch a glimpse of in Rebekah’s and Isaac’s love story. Thanks be! The God of the universe is your God and my God.

[1] A few other examples besides multiple wives or childbearing partners: the wife/sister conundrum where three times a patriarch tells an alien ruler that his wife is actually his sister (Genesis 12.10-20, 20.1-18, and 26.1-17); levirate marriage, dowries and arranged marriages, the wife as trickster (Genesis 27). All translate poorly into contemporary western culture.

[2] Examples are from Sidney Greidanus in Roger E. Van Harn, ed., The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts, The First Readings (The Old Testament and Acts) (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001) 46.

[3] Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 63. Miles concludes this chapter with a quite profound insight about how God is seen in the rest of Genesis. “[God] will come to be seen, often enough, more like a busy friend of the family than like the Judge of all the earth, as Abraham called him at Sodom. His help will be sought for conception and other human needs, but, significantly, the initiative will be on the human side. He will not attempt again to assert the same sort of control over reproduction that we have seen him attempting to assert over Abraham’s reproduction. He will claim only what Abraham has already conceded. Yet the modest storms and calms of the house of Abraham will not be quite his only concern. At times, the masterful, abrupt, inscrutable being we first met will return, for the radically unpredictable creator and destroyer personalities of yahweh and elohim remain in him alongside the loyal advocate now called ‘god of your father.’ All are in him, in a combination whose explosive potential will only gradually be revealed.”

[4] The NRSV and most other English translations capitalize God in the second phrase and by doing so diminish the profound insight that Genesis claims for the nature of God.

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982) 202. “The faith of this narrative is one in which things occur seemingly as they will and yet are credited to God. The text nurtures a mature faith that resists both easy romanticism and hard cynicism. Thus the listening community can sing about the One who leads, even when we seem to be walking of our own accord. ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us / O’er the world’s tempestuous sea; / Guide us, guide us, keep us, feed us, / For we have no help but Thee, / Yet possessing every blessing, / If our God our Father be.’ James Edmeston, 1821.”

[6] Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002) 180-182.