Genesis 24.34-38,42-49,58-67
Now this was not an easy task. Andrea knew that going in.
She had looked ahead and knew that when I was away last Sunday at Church Camp,
she would be responsible for preaching about God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice
Isaac. That is a story that challenges our sensibilities. I’m sure that any
generation reading or hearing that story would be uncomfortable.
When I began preparing my sermon after returning from camp,
I read another passage that seems odd in modern times. It is not as repulsive as God asking
Abraham to sacrifice his child, but the selection of wife for Isaac seems odd in
our culture.
I would say that most Americans and a majority of people
worldwide would not consider Abraham’s selection process to be acceptable. Most
of us wouldn’t send a trusted servant to our distant hometown to find a
suitable mate for our child. Nor would we want our parents to do that on our
behalf. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly times when I wish a cut and
dried method were an option to replace the courting, eHarmony, and awkward
pick-up line method of today. You know that I am getting older. But the reality
is, finding a wife or a husband or a partner is probably the most important
decision we make in our lives. And therefore, someone else shouldn’t make it on
our behalf.
And if someone else made it, it shouldn’t be made using the
method of Abraham’s trusted servant. He admits that he doesn’t know what
criteria would be best in finding a wife for Isaac, so, in his uncertainty
while at a spring, he makes a promise to choose the first woman who gives him
water and also draws water for his camels. The only thing positive I can say
about this method is that it selects a generous person, or, at the very least,
a polite one. Is choosing a life partner that happenstance?
This method works for this story because it is set into a
communication with God, a prayer asking God to show a sign. It is kind of like
those stereotypical sports' fans that promise God that they will commit to do a
good deed (to stop drinking,
attend church, or feed the homeless) if only God would let the Cubs (or some
other underdog) win a championship.
So is it right that God responds to such queries. If so,
would we ever move anything forward. What if we would choose our spouses by
asking God to send us someone who stands on her head and eats dessert first or
some other random activity. Does that get to the essence of the building a
loving covenant?
Thankfully, for this sermon, I think it leads us to explore
how God interacts with us through response to prayer. In my experience, people of faith have three ways of understanding
God’s interaction. Of course there are gray areas between these polarized
examples so bear with me:
- Some
believe that God is maneuvering all the outside whims of life around an
individual based on some kind of evaluative system. They believe that God
is waiting at their beck and call to manipulate the world to their whim
and their worship and good deeds play into how God favors them. Someone
from this faith perspective might pray: “O Lord God, I have lived a good
life, I have fulfilled all of your commandments. I have apologized for my
evil deeds. So, I ask you to let me win the lottery. Amen. There is a
direct correlation between what someone does and how favored they are by
God. If they don’t win the lottery, it means that God is not satisfied with
their effort and therefore one must improve. Sometimes this slips into our
response to lucky things when we say that we must have been good today
because something special happening.
- The
opposite of this is the belief that God does not interact with the world.
God is the unmoved mover of Aristotle and prayers are never heard or acted
upon. Someone who believes this way struggles to pray, but they do in
order to center their lives. They might meditate in silence in an effort
to control their mind. Sometimes, a person with this kind of understanding
believes that everything that will happen is pre-determined before one is
born and is therefore unchangeable but they also might believe that it is
just happenstance.
- The
third faithful conception of God believes that God speaks to one through
the actions of the world and the voices or our neighbors. Although
positive and negative randomness occurs, we can learn to respond in faith
through prayer and reflection. A person might pray: Lord God, please guide
me in my action so that I can learn to respond to your call. Amen. This
person relies on being open to hearing God’s voice by reading and
reflecting on scripture (and other insightful prophetic messages) and
discerning what to do with one’s life in response to God’s call. Prayer is
the time to organize the question and to break from busyness to heed God’s
direction. They are not expecting a miraculous encounter to intersect
their lives, but believe that with careful preparation, one can realize
God’s response through a deeper spiritual understanding.
So, taking into account today’s passage from Genesis, one
might believe that God gives us concrete signs based on criteria we set. That
would be a literal reading of the story about Rebekah’s selection as Isaac’s wife.
But that misses what this story is trying to convey about God. When reading
Genesis, we must remember its purpose and its context. Storytellers told the
stories about the beginnings of our faith for generations around campfires.
Over time, they take on mythic extravagance. That does not make the story
untrue, it is a different kind of truth. It is not a truth in the sense of
historical record, but is a truth in helping readers and hearers understand
God. The primary purpose of Genesis is theological. It is not a modern day
textbook about history with footnotes and corroborated first person sources. It
is a collection of foundational stories that express an early understanding of
God. Jesus used this language and story and, at times, redefined the understanding
in a new context.
So, what does this story leave with us theologically? First,
the story expresses how faithful people are chosen and looked after by God.
Otherwise, God would not be involved in our lives (or in this case the lives of
the ancestors of our faith). It also communicates the faith one should have in
God. Abraham proved it in last week’s lesson about the sacrifice of Isaac and
again this week Abraham puts his faith in a servant, guided by God, to choose a
life partner for his only child. If our prime example of ‘faithful servant’ can
trust God that much, why can’t we trust God just a little? So how does that
apply to us…what can we take from this interaction with God?
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus says that his generation is
like children sitting in a marketplace calling to each other: “We played the
flute for you, and you did not dance. We wailed and you did not mourn.” What he
was trying to tell them was that they wanted a certain message from their
prophets and teachers. Essentially, they wanted God to be the God they
imagined. So they complained that John the Baptist was too harsh a prophet and
Jesus was too open and kind. Really, only the status quo was acceptable in
their eyes. They complained about the messenger because the heart of the
message was too difficult to accept.
We have to be careful in our study of scripture that we
don’t get distracted from the message by the details that make us
uncomfortable. We have to keep an open mind, and if I can lean on you a little,
we have to understand that God is in our lives, cares for each of us, and is
calling us to a deeper faith. What that means is that we must pray in a way
that opens our heart, and our senses to feel the Holy Spirit in our lives
through our deep reflections, and in the voices of all those around us who
communicate God’s response to each of us, if we can only discern it.
So, remember that you are God’s, that God loves you, that
faith is lived most fully when we shed the burden of our lifetime of
prejudices, and that through reflection we can hear God calling us to fulfill
our faith in action. If we can live out that faithful response, maybe we can,
like Isaac and Rebekah, be connected with each other through God.
July 3, 2011
Proper 9A
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