Genesis 24: 34-39, 42-49, 58-67 Song of Songs 2: 8-13
Romans 7: 15-25a Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
Grace and peace to you from the God who created us, Jesus who redeemed us and the Holy Spirit who sustains us. Amen.
This week I took an informal survey of my Facebook friends. I wanted to find out how people met their sweethearts…husbands, wives, partners, significant others. There were great stories…stories of meeting in college (they were next door neighbors in the dorm), in the military, at their children’s soccer games, in grad school, at church camp, even stories of meeting in Sunday School! There were, of course, several stories of being set up by friends. Some people had known one another for their entire lives…one man was the paper boy for his beloved’s family, then discovered they rode the same school bus together. She wrote “we’ve known one another for so long, we don’t remember meeting.”
I always ask couples in pre-marital counseling how they met. The answers are almost always accompanied by wide smiles and far off, misty looks.
The story we had from Genesis today is the story of how Isaac, who you may remember is the beloved son of Abraham and Sarah, finds his wife. An unnamed servant is sent to find one for him. Not really very romantic by the standards of my Facebook survey or by the standards of the stories I hear in my office. But there it is, in chapter 24 of Genesis. The servant is rather eager to get the task over with. His specific job is to find a suitable wife for Isaac, one who is of the correct family line and that would mean specifically in ancient times, a cousin. The servant is so relieved that he has arrived at the house of Abraham’s kin that he decides that the first person to arrive at the well will be the person he takes back as a wife for Isaac. Before he has even finished articulating this hope, Rebekah arrives at the well and after determining that she is indeed of that family, he places the ring on her nose and the bracelets on her arm, indicating that she has been chosen as Isaac’s wife.
If Rebekah were answering my little online quiz about how she and Isaac met, her story would be markedly different from those I received in response to my question.
Our Old Testament lessons during this church season after Pentecost, which is also called Ordinary Time, are stories that we rarely have the chance to hear. For those of you who keep up with this sort of thing, we will be reading the optional Old Testament and Psalm during this season on most Sundays. Because in these readings, we get to hear stories that remind us how much we are like people in ancient times, for better or for worse. And we get to be reminded that just as God chooses us to carry out the work of God’s kingdom fully aware of our flaws and frailties, God’s choice of workers in the biblical stories most certainly did not involve a single perfect person, other than Jesus. This gives us hope! It gives us hope because it reminds us that the power at work in the world, and in these stories, is not dependent on us. It is dependent on God.
Coupled with today’s Old Testament reading is the Psalmody, which simply means “song” from the Song of Songs, (or the Song of Solomon). This book sometimes borders on being rated R or at least PG-13. This wonderful love story is a dialogue between a woman, who is the main speaker, and her lover. While some puritanical scholars have tried to make it allegorical, it is, quite simply, and according to the Oxford Annotated Bible, a collection of poems dealing with human sexual love. Frankly, I find it miraculous that it was chosen to remain in the canon. But I’m glad we have this book and I’m very thankful that we have it coupled with the story of Isaac and Rebekah this morning. Because in the church we don’t talk about love and love stories enough. At least we don’t talk about the kind of love that resulted in the many responses to my request for stories. We are comfortable talking about God’s love for us…about Agape love. Because that love is constant and true and never ending. And we’re even fairly comfortable talking about love for our sisters and brothers or philia. Because that love doesn’t carry a lot of baggage with it…who doesn’t believe in brotherly love? But when we move to eros, or love that involves human sexuality, we squirm in our seats a little bit. We didn’t come to church to talk about that. Let society talk about that. And therein lies the problem. If the church does not talk about love, the kind of love that makes our hearts beat a bit faster when it begins and break a bit harder if it ends, then we are trusting secularism to tell us all that we need to know, and to offer all that we need to hear, about love.
It would take more than one sermon to cover the great variety of ways that eros, that love, appears in our Scriptures. There would be stories of great sadness and heartache and brokenness, like the story of David and Bathsheba and there would be stories of great joy. And there would be great voids, where we are left to wonder about the relationships. But these are not the stories we get to hear very often, although we will muck about in them a bit this summer. And I say “muck about in them” because love of this kind, eros, is almost always messy. There are unspoken and unmet expectations. Hearts and lives are broken. There is soaring joy, the kind the keeps you up at night and has you counting the moments until you can next see your beloved. Joy of the kind that makes you write poetry, love songs, about them.
One of the responses I received to my query read like this:
I met my wife “backstage at the…theatre. I literally ran into her while trying to get offstage. We dated for a few months, and she dumped me on February 7th. That night I wrote a letter to her that I never sent. We went our separate ways…when a friend was in a nasty accident, I called everyone in my phone, including her. We started talking intermittently and both of us were dating other people. I told her that one day when we married other people we wouldn’t be able to be friends anymore because of our history together. She told me later that that was when she decided she wanted to marry me, because if the choice was to marry someone else or marry her best friend, it was an easy choice. We dated and two nights before I had planned on asking her, with all my plans in place, God prompted me to go look for the letter I had written so long ago. I had forgotten about the letter. In it, it said that if she was reading the letter, God had brought us back together again and it was time for us to take the next step. At the end of the letter, the one I had written years earlier, I had detailed how the engagement would happen and asked her to marry me. I had forgotten about that letter and yet, everything I had planned for her was just as the letter described. She said yes and nine weeks later we were married, on Feb. 7th, the same date she had broken up with me years earlier. We read that letter to open our wedding ceremony.” [1]
Maybe Rebekah would write lovingly about the day that Isaac’s servant came and found her there at the well. Maybe Isaac would write about seeing Rebekah for the first time, there in that caravan of people, how she covered her face upon seeing him. But what we learn from all of the stories…from Rebekah and Isaac’s and from every single response I received, and from our own love stories…is that loving someone else means taking a risk. It is a risk that our hearts will be broken or that they will be expanded in ways that we could only have imagined possible. Rebekah’s willingness to go with Isaac’s servant to meet this unknown man who would become her husband is ultimately a story about risk taking. It is a story about hospitality…shown to the servant while he was on his journey. It is a story about strangers becoming family. It is a story about lives that cross and change the course of their own history and the history of the kingdom of God on this earth.
The text says that Isaac loved Rebekah. The handsome young lover in Song of Solomon says that within this love the time of singing has come. And we, we who find ourselves in the highs and lows that accompany eros, are offered boldness. By trusting that love to God and by learning from the stories of God’s people, we are given confidence to move forward into the love we now live in or the love we now seek or the love we now imagine, knowing that God goes with us, even there.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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