“Favoritism in the Family” based on Genesis 27:1-29

June 18, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

If I have a favorite matriarch, its Rebekah. This is not because of this story. This story is Rebekah at her worst. However, her worst isn’t as bad as Sarah, whose treatment of Hagar is atrocious. Nor does Rebekah’s worst even relate to being married to the same man as her sister, a reality that make Leah and Rachel appear rather petty and immature.

Rebekah has a chance to shine her own light through the texts, and they show her as a woman who chooses. Not only does she choose, but her choices change history, repeatedly. The first time we meet her she’s at a well. Abraham’s servant has been sent to find a wife for Issac from Abraham’s home country. The story is told well in scripture, from Genesis 24:

“Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his house, who had charge of all that he had, ‘Put your hand under my thigh and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live, but will go to my country and to my kindred and get a wife for my son Isaac.’ The servant said to him, ‘Perhaps the woman may not be willing to follow me to this land; must I then take your son back to the land from which you came?’ Abraham said to him, ‘See to it that you do not take my son back there. The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my birth, and who spoke to me and swore to me, “To your offspring I will give this land”, he will send his angel before you; you shall take a wife for my son from there. But if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from this oath of mine; only you must not take my son back there.’So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master and swore to him concerning this matter.”(Genesis 24:2-9)

The servant, still rather overwhelmed with his task, comes up with a plan. He’ll head to the well, which would be both practical for accessing water after a desert journey AND practical for finding a woman as the women tended to gather at the well. Then he prays asking for God’s help in identifying the woman. He asks for God’s guidance so that that whichever woman he asks for water from who ALSO offers to water his camels will be the woman he’s seeking.

Then the beautiful young Rebekah attracts his eye and he asks her for a drink. She immediate responds with water and then offers to water to water his camels too. Since there were 10 camels, this seems like a rather vigorous task, indicating rather significant hospitality and a commitment to the care of a stranger. The servant’s plan worked out to identify a hard working and caring young woman. Even better, she was kindred to Abraham, granddaughter to his brother, which was the goal. (The matriarchs and patriarchs are incredibly inbred, sort of like the European royal families in the 19^th century, please don’t get too distracted by it.)

Then Rebekah invites Abraham’s servant to stay with her family and heads home to prepare the welcome. When the servant comes to her family home and tells his story, her father and brother IMMEDIATELY offer to send her off to marry Abraham’s son. As she was still unmarried and available, it is likely that she was also pretty young, prepubescent. Perhaps the journey home took long enough for her to grow up a bit more. (Let’s hope!) In any case, they did forget to ask her if she wanted to go initially, but when the servant wanted to leave immediately the next morning, they asked Rebekah if she wanted to go, and she agreed to it, including the immediately part.

Now, in these first few choices, we already see that Rebekah’s open heart and hard working nature are changing the course of history! She choose to give him a drink, to water his camels, to invite him into her family’s home, and agreed to go and marry a man she’d never met (nor heard of previously), and to do so immediately.

If she had not, the story suggests, Issac would not have married and the lineage would have stopped there. But it doesn’t. In fact, Issac and Rebekah’s meeting continues to indicate Rebekah’s openness to this marriage and her willingness to engage in it. (Here you see why I hope the journey was long enough for her to mature a bit.)

“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.: (Genesis 24:62-67)

The next time we hear of Rebekah is said to be 20 years later when she hasn’t get gotten pregnant. #AllTheMatriarchsStruggledWithInfertility Issac prays for her and she gets pregnant, with twins. I know that the Bible predates the modern concept of romance, but it is SO easy to project it onto these two. Until this point, that is. Once pregnant,and for the first time, we hear of Rebekah praying to God. This is significant because the monotheism of the Bible starts with Abraham and Sarah on their journey away from their home-country. It is not assumed to extend to the family they left back home, and it is clearly a choice on Rebekah’s part to accept the faith of Issac’s family.

The story goes on to say that Rebekah had a terrible pregnancy:

The children struggled together within her; and she said, ‘If it is to be this way, why do I live?’ So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her,
‘Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger.’ (Genesis 25:22-23.)

Sarah never had direct contact with YHWH, although Hagar did. In fact, I think Rebekah is the only one of the matriarchs who is said to have an experience of the Divine. None of us are shocked that the result of the Divine experience is an inverting of the normal ordering of human society. God is like that. The order of human life mean that the elder son would be the one in charge, the inheritor of a double portion, the patriarch. Yet, Rebekah hears otherwise while they are still in her womb.

The story continues to indicate that the parents had different favorites in the family, “When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.” (Genesis 25:27-28) This little snippet reminds us that the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs are meant to function in two ways simultaneously: both to tell a good story that makes sense about an individual, and to explain relationships between groups claiming to be the descendants of those individuals. Thus the story is about relations between nations AND about individuals at the same time. This little bit reminds us that the ancient Israelites, by the time they wrote this story down, were domesticated people who had distanced themselves from the nomadic hunter-gatherers of their recent past.

And now, we are caught up and ready to deal with the story read today! Rebekah is committed to the fulfillment of the prediction she’d heard during her pregnancy. She acts as if it is very important. The story believes that blessing is … an act of God of some sort. Issac needs to strengthen himself so that he can function as God’s emissary in the giving of the blessing, and the story clearly believes that the future itself is changed by the speaking of the words. The blessing can’t be taken back, but it can be tricked onto landing on the wrong person. This is an OLD story. The blessing seems to reflect back on the words of God that Rebekah heard during her pregnancy, ones that guided her to make them true.

Rebekah has a plan on hand. (I’ve been told that this subversive women sermon series could also be called “women who plan.”) She is willing to take any curses onto herself. She pushes her favorite son to trick her husband into giving him the blessing he’d reserve for HIS favorite and eldest. She is remarkably committed to fulfilling the words of God, even at cost to her own existence. She pays a high cost for it too. By the end of the story her favorite son is sent away, and we don’t think they ever meet again. I say we don’t think because her death is never mentioned in scripture. Her participation in this deception and her final work to have her son sent back to her family for safety (and the marrying of a woman from Abraham’s home country and family) are her last notated actions. These are the final choices she makes. She fulfills the words of her husband’s God, even at the risk of his fury and curses.

Rebekah starts out leaving her home and her family to marry a man she’s never met who is following a God she doesn’t know. (Seriously. The radical openness and adventurous spirit of these ancient women is astounding.) Then she has an experience of this God, more of one than her husband is ever said to have. Issac is said to have prayers answered but not to hear God’s responses. Furthermore, given the narrative about child sacrifice, Issac also has some serious reasons to distrust God. But Rebekah is given comfort and knowledge to use. Her actions, ones that seem like they break apart the family she created, are done to fulfill the promises God made to her. Her husband’s God at that. She leaves her own family, and then willingly participates in breaking her family out of her faith in this God! By the end of the story she loses her favorite son, her husband is near death, and her other son is (appropriately) mightily angry with her. And she’s not mentioned again. She burns all of her power and influence in this one story that disrupts her entire life.

So, there she is, this adventurous, courageous, pushy, manipulative, faithful matriarch. However, I’m not sure I want anyone to mimic her choices, and there aren’t a lot of moral compass points in this story if you take it directly.

Many scholars have suggested that the Northern Tribes (Israel) identified Jacob as their primary ancestor while the Southern Tribes (Judah – Jew) identified Abraham. In the process of forming a united identity the two were linked. In order to make it less hierarchical, neither was made the son of the other, instead they were separated by Issac. Issac, indeed, is more visible as the son of his father and the father of his sons than he is a stand alone figure. He’s the link. These stories exist to create shared identity! They are successful in doing so, in part, by having a very relatable matriarch, and in part by naming an enemy as the “other” that the group can differentiate from.

Those the Bible identifies as Edomites (descendants of Esau) were the nation to the south of Judah, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies of the Israelites. They became a vassal of Judah for a while, but also contributed to their destruction and exile. This relationship is all being explained with the characters of Esau and Jacob, and in this story the behavior of their parents.

Which is to say, that this is a formative story about the nation, and its relationship with other nations. Similarly, we have narratives that explain our different relationships to Canada and Mexico, ones that aren’t entirely honest about the reasons we worry more about one border than another. We have stories about our relationships with Great Britain as our (I recently heard this) “longest standing ally,” which conveniently forgets that they were our first opponent in wary; we have stories that pervade our subconscious about the relationships between European Americans and Native Americans, ones that include the idea that Columbus “discovered” a continent with millions of people living on it; we have stories about relationships between people of different races that dismiss the history of slavery, segregation, and choices to limit US citizenship to people who were “white enough.” We have stories, as a nation, who tell us who we are, who we are supposed to be, and who we need to exclude and dis-empower to get there.

Those stories today are more overt and readable than they’ve been in my lifetime. More than ever the stories that are being told to our nation sound like telling the so-called descendants of Jacob that Esau (and thus his descendants) was freakishly hairy, smelly, and uncouth. In fact, many of the stories I hear today are intended to create fear of the people who claim to descend from Ishmael (the Muslims). It turns out that the patriarchs, the matriarchs, and their stories still impact global relations today.

It also turns out that at the end of this narrative Esau marries a daughter of Ishmael, symbolically restoring relationships between the two “unblessed” parts of Abraham’s family. While I don’t actually encourage marriages as means of restoration (symbolic or otherwise), I hear God calling us to expand our definition of family, including by telling new stories about who we are and who we can be. May we hear, and tell such stories. Amen

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

June 18, 2017

Sermons

“The Hard Work of Departing” based on Genesis 16:7-15 and…

November 6, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

We are told that in order for life to exist three things are necessary: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals. To expand on the last of these, “Life as we know it contains specific combinations of elements including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that combine to form proteins and nucleic acids which can replicate genetic code.”¹ It could be that life could exist with a different combination of chemicals, but the theory remains: a source of energy, liquid water, and essential chemicals are necessary to life.

Those three things exist on this planet, and given that reality, life seems irrepressible. Tiny cracks in pavement or cement sidewalks sprout grass and weeds. Puddles that stand too long grow algae, wet wood grows mold and moss. I’ve been considering this unstoppable quality of life ever since I visited Bryce Cannon National Park and was motivated to take this picture. At one and the same time there is a huge evergreen growing at the base of “hoodoos” easily 5 times its size AND there are tiny little evergreens popping up at the top of hoodoos with remarkably little soil available to them. Yet, life won’t stop. The trees grow.

The Bible is a remarkably interesting document, and within its complexity and contradictions it sometimes feels like there are unquenchable truths gleaming through it. These truths are like the force of life on our planet – no matter what is done to try to stop them and no matter the strength of the circumstances that would prevent them – they prevail. Our two stories today tell profoundly of a God who cares about ALL people, while existing within a narrative about God choosing to focus on just one people.

The story going on here is supposed to be about God choosing Abraham. There is supposed to be a special bond with Abraham, and less so with Sarah, and yet the story keeps diverging to include and bless others. It is as if the universal love of God cannot be contained, even in the stories trying to tell the back-story of the people who long claimed God’s love was particularly for them.

Our two readings today are most likely two versions of the same story that were adapted differently with time. The one in Genesis 16, which we read first, is the version from the Southern Kingdom and much older. The one in Genesis 21 is the version from the Northern Kingdom. The Bible got edited A LOT. Most of the stories in the Torah (first 5 books) were passed on in oral tradition for centuries before they first got written down, and oral tradition naturally changes stories as it goes. Likely each version had changed over time in different ways to suit different time-relevant needs. Then, after being written down, the stories continued to get adapted, including by editors so that they would make a more coherent story. The people responsible for translating the Bible into English also made difficult decisions that functioned as further editing. The stories we have now are the complicated compilations of milenia, with many fingerprints on them.

That is, the two stories we read today are likely the same story with different fingerprints on them. Yet, they are edited into the current version of Genesis whereby they fill two different roles. They are, at one and the same time ONE story and TWO stories that happen sequentially. The editors aren’t perfect, in the second version Ishmael is a 17 year old that his mother carried away into the wilderness in her arms like a baby. (Oops.) But the work of the editors to make a coherent story makes both stories important, and not just the older one.

Throughout both stories, extraordinary things happen to Hagar. Explains of this are coming from the work of the amazing Biblical Scholar Phyllis Trible. In Genesis 16 Hagar has run away from Sarai/Sarah because of Sarai/Sarah’s harsh treatment of her. Hagar is a subversive woman choosing to run away, likely to die, and taking with her the heir that her slave-master husband wants most desperately. She reaches a point where she claims her life as her own, and she acts on it. In Genesis 16, Hagar is pregnant, and when she runs away she is near the border with Egypt, and finds a spring to sustain herself.

“The Hebrew word ‘spring’ (’ayn) also means ‘eye.’ The association resonates with Hagar’s having acquired a new vision of Sarai, and it anticipates the new vision of God that she will soon acquire. She, an Egyptian and a slave, is the first person in the Bible to whom such a messenger visits. Moreover, for the first time in the narrative a character speaks to Hagar (rather than about her) and uses her name. … The messenger promise Hagar innumerable descendants, thereby according her the special status of being the only woman in the Bible to receive such a promise. … The messenger affirms Hagar’s conceiving. She will bear a son and will name him Ishmael. Hagar becomes the first woman in the Bible to receive such an annunciation. … The messenger specifies the meaning of the name Ishamel (God hears): ‘For God heard your affliction.’”²

Now, unfortunately, in the form of this story that we have now, the messenger of God tells Hagar that God hears and knows her affliction, AND sends Hagar back to it anyway. The first act of subversiveness doesn’t get her free, although she is different afterward. Perhaps the only reason it doesn’t work is so that we can get to the second story though. After the words of the messenger, Hagar speaks for the second time, and from the way the story explains it, what happens is astounding. Trible puts it this way:

“Hagar’s next words bypass the messenger’s words. She does not comment on her continued affliction, the promise of descendants, the naming of her son, the meaning of his name, or his future. Nor does she comment on the God who hears. Instead she names the Lord who sees. The narrator introduces her words with a striking expression that accords her a power attributed to no one else in the Bible. Hagar ‘calls the name of the Lord who spoke to her’ (Gen 16:13*). She does not invoke the Lord; she names the Lord. She calls the name; she does not call up on the name. ‘You are El-roi [God of seeing],’ she says.”³

And then, after all of that astounding-ness, the text seems to revert to the mundane. “Hagar bore Abram a son.” (Genesis 15a). It isn’t as mundane as it seems. Trible says, “Hagar becomes the first woman in the ancestor stories to bear a child.”⁴ Mostly sons are attributed as coming to their fathers (as if that’s how it works.) But, that isn’t all. Hagar gets a lot of “firsts” in the Bible. Moving onto the Genesis 21 version, according to Trible “She is the first slave in Scripture to be freed. At the same time, she becomes the first divorced wife – banished by her husband at the command of his first wife and God.”⁵

In the Genesis 21 version of the story, Hagar prepares a deathbed for her son, and sits to wait for his death. The story is clearly about a very young child. Within this story, Hagar “becomes the first character in the Bible to weep.”⁶ According to Trible, “The God who she saw (r’h) long ago in Shur opens her eyes enabling her to see (r’h) a well of water at the site of the ‘well of seven’ (Beersheba).”⁷

Whether the stories are taken sequentially or as two versions of the same narrative, some themes emerge. First and foremost, God takes care of Hagar and cares about Hagar. She is given extraordinary access to the Divine, paralleling Abraham’s. Unlike any other person in the Bible, she gets to NAME God. Her survival, which is inherently threatened by being sent out alone into the barren wilderness of the desert, is assured by God who SHE renames “The God who sees.” It feels like she names God, “The God who sees ME” because that seems to more completely articulate the wonder spoken by Hagar. She knows she’s a woman, a foreigner, a slave, and in both stories she is profoundly alone and utterly powerless.

Yet, God sees her.

Isn’t it weird? Throughout the rest of the Bible, God is referred to as the “God of Abraham”, but “The God of Abraham” goes with Hagar to care for her. God refuses to be contained by the stories boundaries. God’s love and grace are too expansive to be held within the walls of the narrative. Hagar is meant to be placeholder for Sarah, simply the womb to the woman who matters – and THAT woman only matters enough to be the one to provide descendants. That’s how this is supposed to go, according to the story itself! Instead we get Hagar naming God in the desert.

God disrespects human separations, especially about who matters in the world, even within a story trying to articulate how the ancestors of Israel came to be in the world! Even in that story, the sparkle of God’s love for outsiders shines through. Hagar is one of the least empowered characters in the Bible, by any set of human standards, and she is one of the people given the most access to God in the Bible. Her experiences of God are more expressive and profound than Abraham’s.

That is, Hagar matters. Those like Hagar matter. The Native Americans whose tribal lands were taken by the United States matter, even when the USA disregards its treaties, even with energy companies want protests squelched, even when protesters get arrested. Those seeking to protect the land from the Dakotas Access Pipeline matter like Hagar matters. Women and girls who are used in sexual trafficking matter, even when they are being used to make profits for others, even when they are using drugs to try to escape, even when they are being raped for other people’s pleasures. Women and girls living in modern sexual slavery matter like Hagar matters. Refugees around the world fleeing violence and horrors matter, even when no country wants to welcome them in, even when they use all that they have to get onto ships that may sink, even when getting to a new country means they’ll be labeled ‘illegal.” Refugees and immigrants matter like Hagar matters.

If a refugee, a slave girl of an ancient nomadic herder was important enough to name God, then the world’s standards are COMPLETELY irrelevant. Everyone matters because Hagar matters. Thanks be to God. Amen

1“Life Needs” found at http://phillips.seti.org/kids/what-life-needs.html on 11/3/2016

2Phyllis Trible, “Ominous Beginnings for a Promise of Blessing” in Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell, editors, Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian PerspectivesTrible, (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, Kentucky, 2006) p. 40-41.

3Trible, 41.

4Trible, 41.

5Trible, 46.

6Trible, 49

7Trible, 49.

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