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Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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July 2002 (click here to return to "July
2002 Sermons" page)
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (July 7, 2002)
“How to Choose a Wife?” Dr.
Julie Adkins
Text: Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
SERMON
Our Old Testament readings for the summer seem to be
alternating
between passages and stories that are very familiar
to most of us –
like last week’s, about the near-sacrifice of
Isaac,
and next week’s, about the rivalry between Jacob
and Esau –
and ones that we may never even have heard or read
before,
like two weeks ago, about Hagar and Ishmael,
and this week’s, about how Isaac met and married
Rebekah.
Granted, most of us would probably agree
that we don’t know the Old Testament as well as
the New,
and could probably stand to know them both a
little better!
Even so, isn’t it just a tiny bit disconcerting to find
stories in there
that are completely new to us?
Maybe it doesn’t strike you that way,
but I certainly get caught up short whenever I come
across
a story or text that I can’t remember ever seeing
or hearing before!
Ah, well.
Suffice it to say that even these obscure stories have for
some reason
found their way into the Bible …
and so, they are worthy of at least some attention.
So what are we to make of this odd story?
It doesn’t much resemble any courtship rituals
that any of us are familiar with.
In fact, though I haven’t heard all of your “how
we met” stories,
I’ll bet that none of them involved
a servant, a well, and a herd of camels.
I don’t imagine that any of us
sent someone else out to find or choose our spouse
for us,
no matter what the criteria …
and notice that, in this case,
the servant knew that the “right” wife for
Isaac
would be the one who offered a drink of water
not only to him, but also to his camels.
Pretty much foreign to any of our experience!
Would you propose marriage to someone
just because a friend of yours said:
“She’s really nice;
she gave me a glass of ice water
and poured some in my radiator.”
Not likely.
Or, looking at it from Rebekah’s side:
Would you accept a marriage proposal from someone,
sight unseen,
just because his servant told you an interesting
story
about how the young man needed a wife because his
mother just died,
and gave you some bracelets?
Also not likely.
So, what then is this story doing in the Bible?
If it’s really not a story about, or a set of
instructions for,
“how to choose a wife,”
then what is its purpose?
What were the biblical writers trying to tell us by including
this story?
What is God trying to tell us?
Aside from being a charming story,
and providing continuity so that we know how it is
that Isaac got around to fathering Jacob and Esau
–
it seems to me that one of the very useful things
about a story like this
is that it reminds us that the Bible is not simply
an instruction book
about how to live life as God’s people.
”How Isaac met Rebekah” takes up most a chapter of Genesis,
yet nowhere do we find a suggestion,
either within the biblical text or from later
commentators,
that the inclusion of this story is suggesting
that this is how all of God’s people
should go about finding spouses.
You don’t find people using this text to argue that
God means for all of us to have arranged marriages.
We understand this as being a story about certain of God’s
people,
in a particular place at a particular time,
and how they tried their best to be faithful to God
while God was faithful to them.
We don’t understand it as being a prescription for
how we are supposed to do things in our
particular place and time.
What’s important is what it tells us about God,
not the specific details of the human story.
Think about it in this way,
although this is not an exact analogy:
When we tell fables and fairy tales to our children and
grandchildren,
what’s the point of doing that?
Partly, of course, it’s to entertain,
but it’s also because those stories contain a
lesson,
a truth about how things are in our world.
It doesn’t matter that there have never been three talking
bears
living in a house in the woods
where a little girl with golden hair ate their
porridge,
and sat in their chairs, and slept in their beds.
What matters is that there’s a point to the story.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Bible is only fairy
tales.
But I think that the purpose of much of it is similar.
What matters is not the details.
What matters is what the story tells us about who we are,
and about how life is,
and – in the case of the Bible – about what God
is like.
Now – that may be fairly obvious in a case like this one.
In a story that’s about a culture very different from our
own,
it’s easy to understand that we have to look for
the bigger picture.
To see what the story is saying behind the details.
It is perhaps more difficult to see
that, in a sense, all of the Bible needs to
be seen in this way.
That it is a book of stories, not a book of rules.
And even when it does include rules, as the Bible certainly
does,
they are included because they are part of a
particular story,
not because they are somehow different from the
story.
And just as the stories have to be understood, not for their
specific details,
but for the lessons they teach us …
so, too, even the teachings and rules have to be understood
in the context of their stories,
for the lessons they teach us within those stories,
not necessarily as hard and fast commands for all
time.
People get fearful when you say things like that.
“You’re just throwing out the rules!” they often claim.
“You’re not taking the Bible seriously!”
Actually, it’s quite the opposite.
Understanding the Bible in the world in which it was
written,
and in the context where its characters and authors
found themselves,
is a much more difficult and serious
task
than it is simply to claim that everything must be
taken literally.
I try to be fair about this,
but what concerns me the most about biblical
literalists or fundamentalists
is that there is no one who takes everything
in the Bible literally.
Even the most strict fundamentalists don’t teach that
you literally must cut off your hand or pluck out
your eye
if they cause you to sin.
Yet, Jesus said to do it!
So which takes the Bible more seriously:
claiming to be a literalist, but not about
everything …
or trying to understand everything that we
find in the scriptures
in terms of the story it tells us about God?
I know, I’m straying a good bit from Isaac and Rebekah,
but this is important.
Just as today’s story from Genesis is not necessarily about
“how to choose a wife” – despite the title in
your bulletin!
so, too, the rest of the scriptures
are not
a book of laws,
or a manual of operations about how to act in any
specific instance.
The Bible is a book of stories.
True stories, perhaps, but stories nonetheless.
I could even say it’s a book of theology,
though that word tends to scare people.
We think that “theology” is something done by scholars in
seminaries,
which is partly true,
but it’s also something that we do
every time we engage the scriptures seriously
and try to understand what they are telling us
about God.
You can see that as being one of the greatest gifts,
or the biggest challenges, of our Reformed
tradition:
that all of us, not just those with a
seminary degree,
are supposed to study and reflect seriously on the
scriptures,
and what they are telling us about
being the people of God in this time and this place.
So, the Old Testament tells us little or nothing about how to
choose a wife:
Abraham sent his own servant to find
a wife for Isaac …
We don’t know how Abraham and
Sarah found each other …
Esau went off and married a foreign
woman to make his mother angry …
Jacob worked for Rachel seven years
only to find that
“in the morning, behold, it was Leah…”
and he had to work longer to get the wife he really
wanted …
No consistent set of instructions there!
What is consistent is God,
present and active in the lives of all of these
patriarchs and matriarchs,
sometimes because of good choices they have made,
and sometimes in spite of bad choices they have
made.
About the only thing consistent throughout the Old Testament
is God,
present and active in the lives of both believers
and nonbelievers.
And often, we do find long lists of laws or rules or
commandments,
purporting to be from God for the people …
Laws, rules, and commandments that were useful and perhaps
even necessary
for those people, in that place, at that time.
Our job, as twenty-first century inheritors of God’s
promise,
is to study and try to understand the story of
God’s people then,
and then to seek wisdom about what God’s rules,
and laws,
should be for us today.
Some of them may in fact be the same.
After all, there’s a whole lot about human nature that
hasn’t changed all that much
in three or four thousand years.
But our story is different.
And the guidance and rules we need here and now
may at times be different.
We can’t assume anything, one way or the other.
We have to use the wisdom and the brains God gives us.
Of course, we have an unfair advantage over our ancestors in
the faith
that we find in the Old Testament …
We have the life and witness of Jesus Christ
that we can also look toward and learn from.
One who understands that many of us are weary
and have carried heavy burdens,
both on our faith journeys
and in our lives in general.
One who offers to share the road and the burden with us,
to make the journey with us,
to share with us his wisdom about who God
is,
and what God wants from us.
One who gave his life up for us,
to remind us yet again how much God loves us,
and wants to be united with us,
whether we’ve figured out the right way to live
or are still
seeking and stumbling.
The Bible is not a detailed road map
for how we find God,
or how we make God love us by being good.
The Bible is the story of how God already loves us,
and how we try and fail, try and succeed,
to live as people who are loved by God.
How to choose a wife – doesn’t matter …
or even, if you choose a wife.
What matters is how God chose you.
How are you going to respond?
How will we all?
Amen.