Arranging A Life
Genesis 24: 34-38, 42-49, 58-6

July 7, 2002

In Canada we did not invent multi-culturalism. Nor is it a new, modern way of living together. The Christian Church by necessity and by intention became multi-cultural when it decided almost at the beginning to include all nations, all races, all languages into its fold. We consider very different stories as our story and different cultural inclinations as part of our cultural repertoire. Finding a wife for Isaac reflects a culture far different and even contrary to our way of life, yet it is our story too. It’s worth discovering why.

If this story sounds familiar, it is because it follows a pattern popular in a number of Biblical stories. The fellow travels a long distance to a well where the heroine is in distress and he helps her. She goes back to tell her family about this amazing person she has met and they ask her why she did not bring him home for hospitality. In the end the guy gets the girl. That’s the general plot, but seldom does it work out exactly this way. Jacob meets Rachel at the well, but her father Laban gives him the wrong sister on the wedding night. Moses meets his wife at the well, but everyone thinks he is an Egyptian. Jesus meets the Samaritan woman and begins talking with her, making Jesus’ disciples very nervous. In the differences we discover what the Bible is talking about.

The Abraham family is certainly not the first to have this kind of problem. The matriarch Sarah has died with her beloved son still unmarried at 38. Yes, Isaac is slow in this department, but what do you expect of a man whose parents waited until they were 100 and 90 to give birth to him?

Abraham knows he has to do something, but the neighborhood is bad: these Canaanite floozies will have Isaac worshiping the Baalim in no time flat. Got to go back home and get a good girl, back to northern Mesopotamia to Aram-Naharaim, the home of Abraham’s brother Nahor.

Unlike all these other parallel tales, Isaac does not go. Too young, I guess, to be trusted with such an important task. The servant who is entrusted with the task had to be a least a hundred to be experienced enough.

In reading this story a shortened version is necessary for modern temperaments. By our standards this is a tediously written narrative with plenty of repetition. The servant thinks about what he is going to do, he then does what he was thinking about, and finally he repeats to his hosts exactly how he thought about it and how he did it.

The servant is made to swear a solemn oath to bring back a wife, although Abraham graciously gives him plenty of space to honourably fail. Abraham assures him God will be with him, and even promises the company of an angel to help smooth the way. Isaac does not make the journey which is all on his behalf, but neither do we see a tangible sign of an angel working any magic.

The servant is anxious to do what he has committed himself to do and prays mightily for divine assistance. From our perspective, his prayer is not unlike a few of our more juvenile efforts at piety: make the next girl to come through the door be the one who will marry me. There is almost a tone of testing God’s faithfulness.

Maybe the editor left out a bunch of failures, a series of women who regrettably did not say the magic words. Rebekah, first up in the narrative, hits the home run, although the narrator knows how to build the suspense. Rebekah doesn’t offer to water the camels until after the servant of Abraham has drunk. OK, she has passed the exam, but the servant still watches her in silence to see if she really has the right stuff. Again, a variation on a theme: Rebekah is not the damsel in distress; she is the one who gives relief to the tired and thirsty. She is the powerful one who is able to minister the liquid of life.

When he hears that she is from the family of Abraham, he knows that God has been with him and gives her bracelets and a nose-ring - how modern can you get?

She brings him back to the family home in the usual sequence of the story, introduces him to her father and brother. The mission is rehearsed again and we know it all by heart now. Laban and Bethuel are overwhelmed by all of this and conclude that this is indeed God’s work. Isaac unseen will be the husband of Rebekah. Many will be more than a little disturbed at how Rebekah is treated as so much property, but that’s where the story keeps twisting.

The father and brother agree to hand over Rebekah to Abraham’s messenger, but they ask ten days for her. This is all happening too fast. They want to give Rebekah time to think it over - property seldom gets the opportunity to think.

The servant is insistent for some reason that he has to get home and be successful in his mission. Not unlikely he suspected that to have the girl wait would be an inevitable veto of the arrangements. The servant was playing his hand heavily. So they asked Rebekah, “Will you go with this man?” You don’t ask someone without power. She responded with no apparent hesitation, “I will.”

When God plays a hand in arranging your life, how do you ever know that it really is God, not your ego or insecurity or just luck? Even in the Bible, God is not often obvious about intentions. There was a spirit that grasped her and she knew this was right. “I will” was the only response possible. I dare say few of us have not had one of these encounters: did you say Yes, or did you think about it so long you stopped thinking about it?

The tale ends in an uncharacteristic way for a Biblical story. Back home, Isaac is walking and looking up he sees camels coming. Rebekah, riding one of those camels, looks up. You can hear the music playing in the background. “Looking up,” remember, is the verbal adjective used in this part of Genesis for the looker to find salvation. Hagar looked up and saw a well of water to rescue her dying son Ishmael. Abraham looked up as he raised the knife to sacrifice Isaac and saw a ram caught in a thicket, the lamb that takes away the sin of the world, as the New Testament would call it. Isaac and Rebekah looked up and found salvation for themselves, and for Israel, in one another. Our personal and collective salvation rests not in mission statements and project plans, but in the quality of people.

In the midst of arranging marriages and lives in this Ancient Near Eastern culture, there is usually little room left for love. “Who is the man over there, walking in the field to meet us?” Love at first sight is the case for both Isaac and Rebekah, but note that only Rebekah seems to be able to articulate it.

The central character throughout is Rebekah and she will be the strong player throughout. Isaac wasn’t really part of this story until the end, and that seems to be pretty much the case the rest of the way. This is a patriarchal society, to be sure, but what is the Biblical narrator telling us about a woman who is the one who makes the most important decisions?

A perennial liberal answer is that in the kingdom of heaven there is neither male nor female. Even more radical is the answer given here: in the kingdom of heaven, there is both female and male. The refrain used for a long time is that one follows the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. However, in the way things worked out you really have to insert Rebekah into the formula.

God finds you and me amidst the beauty and disaster of our culture at the moments we are convinced are godless. Even more, God chooses to reject our cultural values at the most outrageous and blasphemous moments, and all you and I are able to think and say about it is “I will.”

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