Desert Scribblings

August 3, 2008 - Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

Genesis 32:22-31 - link to the NRSV text

The story of Jacob wrestling with the mysterious figure near the Jabbok is an ambiguous text.  Two figures, Jacob and the man, enter into conflict but neither walks away a true victor.  There is ambiguity, almost ambivalence, in the outcome.  It doesn’t lay out a clear, new path.  It doesn’t point Jacob in a new direction.  There is no giant shift in Jacob’s mission, no new pronouncement from on high.  Just two figures leaving the site of battle with things changed, but with no strong indication what those changes mean or what should be done about them.

It reminds me, actually, of the ending of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More, With Feeling,” when the villain leaves and the heroes are left standing there with no nice, clean resolution to the conflict, the cast sings:

            The battle’s done, and we kind of won,
            So we sound our victory cheer.
            Where do we go from here?

Not all battles, not all struggles conclude with a clear-cut victory.  It’s a messy, difficult fight for both.  The dialogue between the two in verses 26-29 echoes the back-and-forth struggle that they were engaging in.  In the first back and forth, the stranger speaks then Jacob responds asking for a blessing.  Jacob is the one with the leverage.  The next exchange suddenly shifts to the stranger having dominance, asking Jacob his name then granting him a new name in return.  Then it shifts again, with Jacob now demanding the name of the figure, and instead receiving the blessing he wanted in the first place.

There is a battle of both physical will and mental will going on here.  There is more going on here than a test of strength and skill.  Jacob, the one who wrestled even in the womb, who has wrestled with others through trickery and guile his entire life, has suddenly found himself an opponent that his tricks aren’t working on.  But Jacob finds himself holding his own, being able to keep pace if not actually overcome his adversary.

And though there is not a victory, this does not mean that nothing has happened.  Jacob does emerge from the night changed in two significant ways: Jacob has a new name, and a new wound.

In the biblical world, names are linked with character.  A name change often indicates a shift in status or character, like Abram becoming Abraham.  Jacob, which means something like “heel” or “supplanter,” possible related to the verb “to betray” (see BDB 784, HALOT 872), is changed to Israel.  As Brueggemann points out, the etymology (that is, origin and meaning) of the name is disputed, possible meaning “God preserves” or “God protects” or “God rules” (Brueggemann, Genesis, 268).  The point isn’t so much in the name meaning, but the fact that the name has changed.

No longer is this man the “deceiver” or “betrayer,” but is something else, something more.  No longer is he Jacob, he is now Israel.  And it is Israel that has struggled with God and emerged, if not victorious, at least as something changed, something new.  And there is something poignant in that idea: that in our struggles, we emerge changed, especially in our struggles with God.  There will be times in life when we wrestle with God, either over those dark places in life or just with what faithfulness demands of us.  Either way, there is something to be said for the struggle itself, and not just the outcome.  Thus the lack of “victory” or success doesn’t mean that our struggles in life are not beneficial, though they may not always seem that way a first glance.

Secondly, Jacob emerges changed into this new person Israel, but he emerges limping away from the conflict.  There is something poignant in this also.  Namely, life can sometimes hurt.  Life is struggle, it is not always easy, and sometimes when we emerge from our times of trouble we emerge wounded.  In Jacob’s case, meeting God “did not lead, as we are wont to imagine, to reconciliation, forgiveness, healing.  It resulted in a crippling” (Brueggemann 270).

There is something dangerous about encountering God.  This is demonstrated time again in the biblical witness.  Moses desires to see God’s glory but God allows Moses to only see the back of God’s form because “no one shall see me and live” (Exodus 33:20).  Uzzah reached out to steady the ark of the covenant and was struck down (2 Sam 6:6-7).  Isaiah cried, “Woe is me!” when he beheld God’s presence in the temple vision (Isaiah 6).  There is something dangerous, edgy about encountering the divine.

Encountering God and being changed by that encounter may bring about some pain.  Change is rarely without effort or sacrifice.  To emerge as Israel, Jacob also needed to be wounded.  The apostle Paul expressed a similar theme when he wrote about baptism: “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).  Jesus himself spoke about the kind of change life with God requires by describing it as taking up our cross, or taking up a death sentence.  The life of faith isn’t just something that is a heavy burden, but is something that might just call for something that will cause us pain, either physical or emotional.

The wrestling Jacob story is one that reminds us of what life with God often looks like when we move beyond the promises of prosperity preaching and tired cliché religion: it is often hard, it is often a struggle, and it might even bring us some hurt.  But the One whom we wrestle with is the One whom wants to see us grow, to see us flourish, to see us redeemed, the One who loves us beyond all comprehension or understanding. 

Or as Charles Wesley put it in his great poem “Wrestlin’ Jacob” (“Come O Thou Traveler Unknown” in The United Methodist Hymnal, 386-87):

            Yield to me now—for I am weak,
            but confident in self-despair!
            Speak to my heart, in blessing speak,
            be conquered by my instant prayer:
            speak, or thou never hence shalt move,
            And tell me if thy name is Love. 

            'Tis Love!  ‘tis Love!  Thou diedst for me,
            I hear thy whisper in my heart.
            The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
            pure Universal Love thou art:
            To me, to all, thy mercies move—
            thy nature, and thy name is Love. 

Shalom,
Geoff

July 20, 2008 – Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

Genesis 28:10-19a - link to the NRSV text

When I was in elementary school, we would regularly take field trips to the Science & Technology Museum of Atlanta, commonly referred to as SciTrek, where we were exposed to the wonders of science.  Going there and seeing the various exhibits, including a high voltage traveling arc (aka a ‘Jacob’s Ladder’), I remember a sense of having my world opened in new ways. The way I viewed everything around me began to change; no longer was the world restricted just to what I knew through my own observations, no longer was the world restricted to my family, my church, my neighborhood, but those experiences were some of many that began to open my mind to the wider reality around me.

Maybe that’s a little bit how Jacob felt after his visionary experience. Fleeing from his father’s home and the wrath of his brother Esau, Jacob finds himself in what the text refers to as a “certain place,” setting the stage for the etiological explanation of the cultic site Bethel, or “house of God,” in verses 16-19.

Jacob’s interests to this point in the story are strictly material: his desire for the birthright and inheritance of his brother prompted his actions, which lead him to flee to protect his physical life. Jacob finds himself in the desert with no means of shelter or sustenance other than what he might find as he goes. The text emphasizes Jacob’s status as destitute and cut off, of being in a place of exclusion and exile, by noting that the only thing he had to provide comfort in the night was a rock for a pillow. No blanket or tent or other means of comfort; just a hard stone on which to lay his head.

Nothing in the text suggests that Jacob has no thought of or about the LORD; instead, he is tired, afraid, and on the run when he stops at the place that will be known as Bethel. And it is here that Jacob’s world is expanded for the first time and he starts to see the broader reality around him.

Jacob has a vision of what is traditionally referred to as a ladder that goes from the earth up to the heavens, though what the author intends to picture here is most likely the stairway or ramp of a Mesopotamian ziggurat, which were understood to be a place that linked the heavens and the earth.

The point isn’t the messengers or the stairway or any of the visuals of the experience. This is not some symbolic, apocalyptic-style vision that tells deeper truths about current or future events. The real true meaning of the vision occurs after the brief description of what Jacob saw: “And the LORD stood beside him and said, ‘I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac’” (Genesis 28:13).

It is Jacob’s theophany, the revealing of the God of his ancestors to this person in this time and in this place.  It is here that the promises of God to Abraham and Isaac become more than just the promises of the past, but becoming the promises to him also. The vision of the stairway to heaven, the angels ascending and descending drive home this point: that God is there, present, and standing with Jacob. God is not just off in some cut-off, distant realm but present in the world, active, as signified by the rapid movements of God’s agents coming and going.

And God promises that this presence is not restricted to just this place, this beth-el, this ‘house of God.’ The image of the LORD standing beside Jacob in verse 13 is one that the LORD gives to Jacob to take with him for comfort. Language of protection and providence burst from the mouth of the LORD towards Jacob: “Know that I will be with you…will keep you…will bring you back…I will not leave you” (Gen 28:15).

Jacob’s eyes are opened to the wider workings of God, that he is part of a larger reality, that God has things in store for him beyond his own human plans and schemes. This does not mean that Jacob is immune to his own shortcomings or the schemes of the world around him; following this event, Jacob will be suckered by his Laban and then retaliate with his own devious plot. But it is here, in this place, that Jacob begins his own journey to be the continuation of the covenant between God and humankind.

And Jacob responds to that promise; he takes that stone, his only piece of material comfort (if you could call it ‘comfort’) and stands it up as a memorial stone, anointed it with oil, and thus commemorating the visionary experience he had just gone through. And being there, in that place where his eyes were opened, Jacob looked at the world with new eyes. “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!” (v. 16). It was an opening of the eyes and maybe even an opening of his heart.

Those eye opening moments, those moments and experience that expand our horizons, that open us up to God and God’s workings in the world often come in strange places and at strange times and in strange ways. For Jacob, it was in a place that held little to recommend it, at a time he was not looking for it, and in a way that emphasized to him that though the world viewed him as destitute and alone, the LORD was there beside him.

Jacob’s vision at Bethel speaks to one of the core beliefs of biblical faith: the Creator God, the God of Israel, the God of the covenant is not a God that abandons or ignores but is a God who is ever-present. Even in the dark times of life, when the biblical writers speak from their own places of abandonment and exile, there is usually a conviction alongside their laments, a conviction that God is somehow, someway still present and at work, that the promise still holds.

The journey of faith is often filled with these Bethel moments, moments of loneliness and fear and despair that are transformed by the presence of God standing beside us. And sometimes it is only after we emerge on the other side of the trouble that we see where God was at work, when we take stock and look back and see that “the LORD was present in that place—and I did not know it!”

Shalom,
Geoff

July 13, 2008 - Ninth Sunday After Pentecost (Year A)

Genesis 25:19-34 - link to the NRSV text

Why is it that the God of Israel is often referred to as, “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob”?

Reading through Genesis, I would have been more inclined to refer to God as “the God of Abraham, of Jacob, and of Joseph.”  The reality is that Isaac gets a little short-changed by the Genesis accounts; while Isaac would go on to feature a little more prominently in Hellenistic and rabbinic era writings, his story as found in Genesis is incredibly condensed when put alongside his father Abraham, his son Jacob, and his grandson Joseph.  In truth, a good bit of Isaac’s story overlaps with the beginning of Jacob’s, and Isaac becomes more or less a background figure as Rebekah, Isaac, and Esau come to the forefront.

As he is depicted, Isaac is a passive figure in the biblical narratives.  In the binding of Isaac story (Genesis 22:1-14), he is not really an actor in the story, instead just goes along with the events with no signs of struggle or questioned beyond his initial inquiry about where the sacrifice was (Gen 22:7).  He is even a fairly passive figure in the story of his marriage to Rebekah; Abraham, the servant, Rebekah are the actors, not Isaac.

So are we really surprised, when the text describes Esau as Isaac’s favorite and Jacob as Rebekah’s, that we find Esau almost as passive as Isaac has been up to this point?  Yes, Esau is impulsive, but his impulsiveness is one full of apathy.  Esau is a figure with little ambition or foresight; that is what the text really means when it says he “despised his birthright” (Gen 25:34) for a bowl of soup.  He gave up his future (his birthright as the first born) for his present desire (hunger).

Conversely, Rebekah’s favored son Jacob is anything but passive.  In fact, Jacob is active from the moment of birth seemingly grasping after Esau’s place within the family.  Jacob takes advantage of Esau’s impulsiveness to forge his own way forward; thus it is no wonder that Jacob agrees when Rebekah, another very active and ambitious character, plots to a way for Jacob to become the primary heir and to receive the blessing of the first born from Isaac.  But Jacob’s ambition and drive would backfire on him, forcing him to flee his father’s land and ultimately be suckered by his uncle Laban, though he gets Laban back in return.

All of this being said, this story is ultimately an etiological story, or a story that explains the origin of something namely Jacob’s (Israel’s) preference by God over Esau (Edom).  This preference is underscored later in the text when they vocation of Esau and Jacob are given; Esau is a hunter, while Jacob was not.  Ronald J. Allen and Clark M. Williamson note:

Given the biblical editors’ aversion to killing (Gen. 1:26-28; 9:3-4), this is an implicit theological comment not only on the twins but on the communities descended from them.  The Edomites and those like them are descended from a people with an inclination to violence, whereas Israel comes from stock that, at its best, lives in covenant with other elements of creation (Preaching the Old Testament: A Lectionary Commentary, 61).

Allen and Williamson, however, are not willing to leave the text as simply a story of “Israel good, Edom bad,” and I think they’re right in pushing onward.  They later ask two questions that they say are “haunting” (62) for modern interpreters:

How are we, like Esau, willing to sell our birthrights to satisfy immediate hungers?  How do we, like Jacob, exploit others, even taking from them means of blessing (such as the birthright)? (62).

And I want to add a third question: How are we like Isaac and Rebekah, allowing our favored “child” preference over another, almost encouraging conflict and rivalry between groups, ministries, individuals, instead of seeking the best for all?

Shalom,
Geoff

July 6, 2008 - Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-29, 58-67 - link to the NRSV text

I know it’s a cliché, but God does really work in mysterious ways.  For some reason, there is often a human responsibility, a human action that God seeks out to make things come to pass.  Faith in God’s providence isn’t just sitting back and waiting for God to do something.  One of my friends in college had a sign in his dorm that expressed this well: “Never take action with prayer, but never pray without taking action.”

That kind of faith is what is found in our reading from Genesis this week.  Sarah has passed away, and Abraham figures his time is probably drawing near as well and starts putting his affairs in order.  And one of those major affairs that needed to be settled is the future of the household.  Isaac needed a wife.

And so Abraham sends his head servant, the one who oversees all of his household, off to his homeland where he had first heard the call from God so many years ago to find a wife for Isaac from “my kindred, from my father’s house” (Gen 24:40).  And even though Abraham has come to understand the importance of the promise and the land that God is promising to his offspring, so much so that Abraham insists Isaac not return to that land at any cost, there is an intrinsic tie between the future promise and the past.  The future of the promise is found, not in the promised land, but back where the journey had started.

But the way that the promise is secured is interesting.  There are a lot of references to the deity in the story, but God takes no direct action at anytime in chapter 24.  Instead, Abraham, the servant, Rebekah, and Laban and Bethuel are the actors, the agents of securing the future of the covenant.  Most of the characters show great piety throughout the story, praying and supplicating God for assistance, confessing God’s blessing and asking for it in return.

And the two figures that stand out the most are the two central figures of the middle parts of the story (vv. 11-27 & vv. 28-61): the servant and Rebekah.  First, the servant shows great faith in the God of Abraham throughout the narrative, but especially with that great prayer of faith found in vv. 12-14, where he asks God to reveal to him the correct woman through a particular action.

One could interpret this prayer as asking God for a sign, but maybe that isn’t the case or at the very least isn’t strictly meant to be that way.  Maybe the servant was looking for a certain type of person for Isaac.  The request is that when he asks for water, the correct person be the one that offers water to not just him, but to his camels as well.  As the great rabbinic commentator Rashi pointed out, this sign is an appropriate one because the correct woman to marry into Abraham’s house must also so the same kind of kindness and generosity of her soon-to-be father-in-law (Jon D. Levenson, “Genesis” in The Jewish Study Bible).

How often do we sit at the well waiting for a miraculous sign, when the reality is that we already know what is needed, and do we sometimes forget that God is expecting us to do some of the work?  That doesn’t mean we don’t pray and reflect and seek God’s guidance, but we also have a responsibility to be a part of the solution.   Maybe the servant’s prayer was not, “God, give me a sign to reveal to me the exact person you destined for this task” but instead was a prayer asking, “God, help me find the kind of person that Isaac and Abraham’s household will need to face the future.”

So maybe the test isn’t a test of God but a test of Rebekah and her character.  This character that is revealed in her generosity is later upheld in the narrative when there is conflict between the servant and Rebekah’s father and brother.  Though they have already agreed to the marriage, they want her to stay a little longer; the servant doesn’t want to delay anymore.  When the question is placed to Rebekah, she is quick to echo the same quick response that Abraham showed in chapter 12.  

Though Abraham does not speak, he goes “just as the LORD told him” (12:4).  In much the same way, when asked if she would go Rebekah doesn’t waffle but gives a simple, “I will” (24:59).  She has chosen her path, and does not allow anything to delay what she might have come to understand as God’s leading.

And so she returns with the servant and, in what is maybe one of the most touching and moving scenes in the biblical narrative, meets Isaac and there are hints in the text that there is true love and feeling in a relationship that could have been nothing more than a legal transaction and a way to provide security in the form of an heir.  Rebekah seems to be intrigued by Isaac at first glance, and the final verse of the chapter notes “Isaac loved her” (24:67).  

The text seems to assume that God was at work in all of this, though God is never an active figure in the story.  Instead, God works through agents, through these people in the ordinary circumstances, through their ordinary actions, and through their ordinary societal functions to provide for the future God has planned.  And even more so, God may have provided far and beyond what was expected.  What was intended to strictly be a legal transaction that insured the family future had also become, through the faithfulness of the servant and Rebekah, a far greater blessing than they could have imagined.

For some strange reason, God has made us partners in this promise to the world, that the world might be redeemed and that peace and mercy and justice would come to reign in the hearts of the people of this world.  I don’t understand it, because God works through the people (that is, us) that are part of the problem in the first place.  But at the same time, we often find ourselves surprised time and again what God can and will do when we try to be faithful.

Shalom,
Geoff