Camel Love
Genesis 24:1-67

July 6, 2008


There’s a rumour out that religion will bring health, wealth, power, achievements, wonderful relationships, and peace of mind. Real faith should always be spectacular and overwhelming, a mountain top experience every time, bigger and better just as our relentless consumer society insists. One comes to expect big faith today, not as a gift of grace, but as the entitlement of one’s religious investment.

So, this long story about Rebekah being found for Isaac is easily discarded by those who find the Old Testament too old, historically and culturally, and here too average and boring. How can God be found in such an ordinary arrangement? What happens is that God finds you along the way in the most mundane of events, even arranging a marriage.

Isaac has not had a fun time so far. The promised child of old age, he had to endure silently the rejection and banishment of his half-brother Ishmael, then came within an inch of being sacrificed in the infamous test of Abraham. This may not be religion by most standards, but whether you are in a religious family or not it happens.

Nothing comes easily for this family. God promised Abraham a land and a nation full of his descendants, but every step stumbles as if this promise was not meant to be. Isaac’s mother Sarah has died and Abraham is now really really old and is worried because Isaac was unmarried without any children to keep the promise alive.

He calls on his senior, most trusted servant, commissioning him under solemn oath to find a wife for Isaac back in the homeland, up north in Haran. Abraham’s greatest fear is that Isaac will marry one of the locals, those heathen Canaanites, yet, he does not want Isaac to go back home for this is the Promised Land. Isaac is right where God wants him. Abraham tells his servant that the Lord will send an angel ahead of him to help work things out. The servant heads off on a rather long walk, and it’s camels all the way down.

The Australian Methodist/Uniting Church minister Jim Cain, with whom I worked years back, began several sermons by noting that the 11:00 a.m. worship hour traditional to many churches was a product of a rural past. It was 11:00 a.m. in order to allow everyone to finish off all their chores and then clean up and get dressed in their Sunday best for worship. Even in downtown city churches we can reminisce about milking the cows, and gathering the sheep, collecting eggs from the chickens, leading the cattle out to graze. I am a true blue concrete and asphalt inner city boy and never did any of that, but I know some of you have. Nevertheless, I am equally certain none of you has taken proper care of your camels.

There’s all those churches that crow about following the Bible to the letter, and now the best seller by A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, in which nary a camel is mentioned. How can you possibly be Biblical without a camel? Even when the text doesn’t mention camels we feel compelled to supply them, as in the story of the Magi or Wise Men at the Nativity - not a sound of a camel is heard, but can there be a creche scene without a few camels?

The trusted servants sets out with ten camels and all sorts of choice gifts and heads to Haran in Mesopotamia, about from Regina to Winnipeg. Upon arrival he tends first to his camels’ needs at the well outside the city. Before anything else this servant is a stranger who has to be careful he is not where he doesn’t belong, and has to watch what he says and to whom he says it. An enormous task for this capable man in a difficult situation, so he thinks out loud what he has been likely thinking for many a kilometer on his way. “God of my master Abraham” - not necessarily his God - “when I ask the young women who come to draw water at the well for a drink of water, and one answers, ‘I will give your camels water too,’ may she be the appointed one for Isaac.” Some of us might admit to praying such a suggestive prayer, in which we have decided how God will reveal the divine will in the way we prefer.

So it all comes down to a woman who is concerned for the health of camels. The entire Biblical story, the promise to Abraham, the Promised Land, and eventually the emergence of the Christian Church and civilization itself falls upon the possibility that one young woman in this undistinguished city will actually think kindly of those nastily tempered ‘ships of the deserts’ belonging to a man who does not belong here.

Even before he is finished praying, along comes Rebekah carrying a water jar and it happens just as he had proposed. The servant is stunned by the suddenness of it all, gazing at her in silent contemplation wondering whether she is the one. He asks who she is and whether he and his party could lodge with them and she tells him there is plenty of room. He gives her a golden nose ring - don’t we all do that? - and bracelets, and bows down to worship God in thankfulness. The tone of the narrative now shifts, for first Rebecca and then her relatives sense that this is not an ancient form of computer dating, but a deep occasion of God.

“O blessed one of the Lord” Rachel’s brother Laban addresses the unnamed servant. The servant retells the story and when he is done, Laban and father Bethuel look at one another and respond with the most significant passage of the episode - a passage the Lectionary regrettably omits. “The thing comes from the Lord; we cannot speak to you bad or good.” This is ordinary stuff which has become extraordinary and is beyond our human judgment because it is of God and we are not capable of uttering anything that would make sense. They give their permission and blessing for Rebekah to go with the servant. In case you haven’t noticed, the ultimate decision is in the hands of Rebekah. She could refuse to go, God knows what would happen to Isaac and the Promise, but she did not refuse. Rebekah is perceived as a full player in God’s remarkable drama.

You can make too much too little of this story, dismissing it as a magical event void of reality. This is not big religion; it is the presence and power of God squeezed in between the cracks, into the all-too-ordinary and all-too-human happenings. You and I rarely see our prayerful suggestions like the servant of Abraham and find them instantly fulfilled. Yet there are moments and situations when something beautiful of God is involved, and then the only thing to do is to stop talking and act. The hard part is being alert to those moments without making them up to suit your pleasure and design. Here, for the love of camels, our world was redirected. There are a lot smaller creatures than camels which can and do alter the way things matter, and God uses them more than spectacular epiphanies.

Isaac goes out one night to meditate in the fields, and then happens to look up and the ships of the desert were on the horizon. Rebekah looks up at the same time and sees Isaac, comes down from her camel, and asks the servant, “Who is this guy?” A notable detail: the servant says to her, “It is my master.” No longer is Abraham his master, but Isaac. Isaac receives her and they are married and he loves her. You just cannot escape a camel.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan