Preaching Notes
Pentecost.7.A.2014
Genesis 29:15-28
One of my childhood Sunday School classmates used to call our Sunday School class “As the Bible Turns” because when we were left hanging at the end of a class by some tantalizing storyline (“What happened to Joseph after his brother sold him into slavery?”), our teacher’s standard answer was “You’ll have to come back next week to find out!”
But my classmate was right, don’t you think? Doesn’t the Old Testament read like a soap opera sometimes? According to Wikipedia, “The main characteristics that define soap operas are an emphasis on family life, personal relationships, sexual dramas, emotional and moral conflicts; some coverage of topical issues; set in familiar domestic interiors with only occasional excursions into new locations. Soap narratives, like those of film melodramas, are marked by what Steve Neale has described as 'chance meetings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations,deus ex machinaendings’” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera).
So if the storyline about the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau over the last couple of weeks wasn’t enough, this week we come to the romantic entanglements of Jacob, Rachel and Leah, all brilliantly orchestrated by a shady older businessman named Laban. But, then, perhaps Jacob, the guy who had violated all of the rules of the first-born when he grabbed the birthright and blessing away from his older brother Esau, got what he deserved.
In the end, like in any good soap, true love wins out. Laban agrees that if Jacob will complete his husbandly duties with Leah, and work for another seven years, he can add Rachel as a second wife at the end of the wedding week.
Perhaps the soap operas to cite here is “Sister Wives” or “Big Love!” But seriously, all kidding aside, I have to admit here that as a woman, the only way I can relate to this story is not as a tantalizing soap opera, but rather a classic illustration of the patriarchal system and oppression and abuse of women that it generated and continues to generate as a part of our inherited faith tradition.
I tried, but was not able to find much in the way of a feminist reading of this passage (if anyone reading this knows of a good commentary please let me know at ). Amy C. Howe, writing in Feasting on the Word, notes that due to the patriarchal system in place, neither Leah nor Rachel has any control over her destiny. Howe also observes that for whatever reason, God does not swoop in and right oppressive systems or oppressive regimes. If there is comfort to be found, it is in the quieter and more gentle ways that God gives protection and provides small justices to the oppressed.
Howe turns her focus upon Leah, the older, less physically attractive unchosen sister, and thus, in Howe’s eyes, the more oppressed of the two. While I appreciate Howe’s encouragement to us to be inspired by the story to love the most unlovable among us and to remember and celebrate Leah, somehow this doesn’t help much in critiquing the basic injustice of the patriarchal system.
In my view, both Rachel, as well as their Rachel and Leah’s slaves, Bilhah and Zilpah, who would become concubines to Jacob, deserve to be remembered and celebrated for their sacrifices and their victimization just as much as Leah. The Scriptures would have us believe that Rachel loved Jacob in spite of the fact that he was married to another woman (whether or not he was tricked into it is beside the point) and had two other female lovers that we know about. The Scriptures would have us accept this situation uncritically.
I can’t help but say at this point that I wonder where all of those who would read certain passages of Scripture as condemning of the practice of homosexuality are when it comes to the subject of polygamy in the Bible. Why am I not able to find any commentaries dealing with this sensitive but critical issue? I know that many of our brothers and sisters who have come to faith in Jesus Christ, but who happen to live in places where polygamy is accepted and practiced, must really struggle with this issue.
I think about a delegate I spoke with regarding an experience she had at the last General Conference. She told me that she had spoken to a delegate from the Democratic Republic of the Congo about the legislation on homosexuality, and he had looked at her rather incredulously and said, “I don’t understand! Homosexuality is not the problem we should be talking about. Polygamy is the problem!”
He went on to explain that in his country, when a man who had more than one wife converted to the Christian faith, his new faith required that he practice monogamy with only one wife. This meant that when he became a Christian, all of his other wives and their children had to go away. Who will support these women and children? What will become of them? This, and not homosexuality, is the problem we all need to be discussing in the United Methodist Church as we live into the realities of becoming a global denomination, he told my friend.
This situation must be made all the more complicated by the fact that the Old Testament clearly does not condemn the practice of either polygamy or sexual relations outside of wedlock, at least not in this story.
As we consider the faith that the first families have passed to us, it is important that we hear in these stories both the providence and promises of our loving God, and the difficulties and unresolved dilemmas about human life that they raise for us.
Romans 8:26-39
Twelve-step programs have a term known as hitting your “rock bottom.” An addict’s “rock bottom” refers to the point when the person has had enough. It may come after the individual has lost everything, or it may come before causing too much damage to the person’s life. Either way, it is up to each individual to decide when he or she has had enough.
Perhaps the term “rock bottom” could also be taken as a kind of general term or description for the state of human misery that overpowers many people in every generation. Like in AA, this may not necessarily be because we have lost everything (yet), but simply the result of dealing with the continuous march of catastrophes that befall God’s creation: wars and conflicts, oppression and prejudice, the pollution of land, air and water, the disappearing rain forests, the poverty in which people live in so many places in the world, overpopulation, extinction, and the depletion of natural resources. The list could go on and on. I wonder sometimes if the seemingly endless succession of troubles faced by humanity has not engulfed the whole world so deeply that there is coming a time when there will be no way to reverse the damage and we really will “lose everything.”
But of course, we are by no means the first generation of people to feel overwhelmed by the plethora of fear, misery and despair that besieges us. Even without knowledge about how human pollution affects the earth’s atmosphere, or having borne witness to the devastation caused by weapons of mass destruction, or instant news coverage of every natural disaster around the globe, the poet Matthew Arnold felt over a century ago such an overwhelming sense of impending doom that he wrote one of the most famous poems in the English language about the topic: Dover Beach.
In the poem he describes “the eternal note of sadness” that was beginning to afflict the world. Arnold pretends in the poem to be speaking to his lover, describing for her the sights and sounds of the seascape outside his window and then commenting to her how the Greek writer, Sophocles, had long ago thought that the sound of the sea was similar to the ebb and flow of human misery.
What to Matthew Arnold was worse about nineteenth century England than Sophocles’ ancient Greece was that in his estimation, the world had lost its faith, and so had he. He pleads with his lover that she and he should at least be faithful to each other. But here, let me just let you read the poem for yourself, lest you’ve forgotten it from high school English class:
Dover Beach (1867)
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Has our sea of faith, like Matthew Arnold’s, retreated “to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world, [leaving us with] neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain? Have we hit rock bottom? Each generation must decide for itself.
Well, as powerful as this poem is, and as sympathetic as we might be to its sentiment, neither nineteenth-century England, nor twentieth-century America have been the first to feel overwhelmed by the troubles that they face.
Let us consider, for example, the Apostle Paul and the times in which he lived. He was in trouble personally from the time he switched from being a persecutor of Christians to being a Christian leader. In his own words he wrote,
Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea;on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. (2 Corinthians 11: 24-28, NRSV)
Paul was in trouble personally. But in addition, he lived in troublesome times. His own country, Israel, had long ago been overrun: first by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians, and now by the Romans.
Furthermore, the Roman Empire itself was in death throes. Civilization as Paul and his generation knew it was on the verge of collapse. The churches, about which Paul was so anxious, were tiny, and they struggled to survive against both the Jewish hierarchy and the Roman authorities. Paul described the entire world situation, we remember from last week, as “groaning in labor pains.”
It is of these troubles, the rock bottom times in which he lived, that Paul writes this word of hope: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”
How, when he was at his bottom, was Paul able to see so much hope?
The answer is, for Paul, the sea of faith was much more powerful than the rock bottom of despair. But what we need to know as students of Discipleship 101 is how did Paul get this kind of faith? And how did he keep it?
A first response would be that he had seen the faith of other Christians, like Stephen, whom he witnessed being stoned to death. So first he saw and caught the Spirit of Christ from Stephen, and from others.
Then, on the road to Damascus, Paul became so overwhelmed by Christ’s Spirit that he committed himself to living by that Spirit.
And finally, he carried out his commitment in the way he lived his life. He didn’t just talk about Jesus. He immersed himself in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
For Paul, living by the Spirit of Christ was not just some kind of a dream.
It was his reality.
It was not just a future possibility.
It was a present experience.
Paul does not think the troubles of his time are any less perilous than those of any other generation. Nor does he think he is a person of especially great strength. Paul only thinks that, overwhelmed by trouble and misery, the people who live in his day need, along with him, all the help they can get. So Paul takes help.
What he does to help himself is soak up the Spirit of Christ like a sponge soaks up water. That is how he is able to say, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedeswith sighs too deep for words.”
Does this immersion into the Spirit of Christ pull us permanently out of rock bottom? Of course not. Everyone knows that most addicts relapse at least once. But maybe what it does do is make us better able to not be overcome by adverse circumstances, and by the help of God, to ultimately triumph in the Spirit. As Paul puts it, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”