Isaac Needs a Wife

4^th Sunday after Pentecost

Roman 7:15-25a

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

The story in Genesis 24 is straightforward.  Isaac needs a wife.

The broader story is that God has promised to bless Abraham – Isaac’s father – and through Abraham to bless the whole world.  God’s promise seemed shaky from the start.  Sarah was 90 and Abraham 100 when God finally blessed them with the child Isaac.  Then immediately following the story of Isaac’s birth, God tests Abraham by commanding him to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice.  Abraham passed the test, but Isaac survived only because God grabbed Abraham’s raised arm at the last second.

Isaac is the son of blessing.  Isaac is the future of the people who will become God’s people.  Isaac’s children will become the feature story in the rest of Genesis.  So . . . Isaac will need a wife.  Sarah his mother has died.  Abraham his father has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.  And the story pauses for a considerable time in Genesis 24 to tell the story of how Isaac got his wife.

 

Now there are all kinds of ways for a man to secure a wife.  I know this because I accomplished the feat myself.  And of course that makes me an expert.  But also, I spent some time this week researching how this mysterious process works.

This statistic will surprise single men in their 20’s, but only 9% of men and 2% of women say they found a long-term relationship in a bar or club.  So that’s not a very good spot to search for a mate.

Going on a cruise might be a better option.  There are singles-only cruises, filled with people sailing the Caribbean, looking for love.  This seems a wonderful option, but I get motion sickness very easily.  And nausea is unattractive.  So I’m going to pass on that one.  And also, I’m already married.

Not surprisingly, most married people find each other in a pretty boring, predictable way.  63% of currently married couples met through a network of friends.

My wife is away for five-weeks in New York, so I spent some time this week checking out online dating sites.  Although that sentence is grammatically correct, it sounds bad.  And so I probably need to erase that browser history.  Anyway, we met long before there was any such thing as online dating.  And so I needed to do a little research.

I was under the impression there were just two or three online dating sites.  I was wrong.  In addition to Facebook, there is match.com, eHarmony, and OKCupid.  But there is also ChristianMingle.com, farmersonly.com, Date.com, Badoo, Chemistry, Friendfinder.com, JDate, plentyoffish.com, spark.com, Yahoo! Personals, and Zoosk.  (I noticed some of you furiously taking notes just now.  You can see me afterwards.)

40 million American adults are using online dating websites or apps – that’s about 40% of the pool of single people in the US.

The average dating site customer spends $239 a year.  I guess that’s not bad if you find the love of your life.

Now not all online dating matches work.  But one benefit of meeting someone online is that you can ditch them online too.  Nearly half of all online daters admit they’ve ended a relationship by email.

The website OKCupid analyzed data from their 1.5 million users.  This analysis showed that – get ready for this – people lie about themselves in their online dating profiles!  Men lie about their height (by about two inches, apparently assuming that women won’t notice) and women lie about their size and build (words like “petite” and “fit” have a range of meanings).  Men tend to lie about their income – increasing their earnings by about 20%.  And both men and women post old pictures of themselves.  So buyer beware - that attractive photo in their profile is likely a year and a half old.

So Isaac needs a wife.  But there is no wanderingnomadsonly.com, so how will he get a wife?  Actually, Isaac doesn’t do much of anything.  It’s his father Abraham who gets the ball rolling.  Abraham commissions his most senior servant – the man in charge of all his vast possessions – to travel the long distance northeast from Canaan to the land of Abraham’s ancestors.  And there he is to find a wife for Isaac.

So off the servant goes.  He takes with him a group of servants and ten camels loaded down with supplies and expensive gifts.  He prays to God for a blessing on this wife-finding journey.  And when he at long last arrives at the town of Nahor and stops at the well just outside of town, the first woman he sees is a beautiful virgin named Rebekah.  (That’s v. 16 – how he knew she was a virgin we’re not told.).

This servant is faithful to Abraham and gives praise to God at every turn.  But he does seem a little creepy.  Here’s the verse describing him leering at the young woman (v. 21).  “Without saying a word, the man watched her closely to learn whether or not the Lord had made his journey successful.”  He sounds like a guy with a combover sitting in a van at this point.

Anyway, he introduces himself to Rebekah.  Turns out she’s a relative of Abraham’s.  He asks if he, his men, and the camels can lodge with her family that night.  She says, “sure.”  And the travelers are welcomed by Rebekah’s family, their camels are fed and watered, their feet are washed, and a feast was set before them.

But Abraham’s servant pushed back from the table, “I will not eat until I have told you what I have come to say” (v. 33).

v. 34-38

This isn’t online dating.  But Abraham’s servant certainly does put the best foot forward.  He begins with a little suggestion about his master’s immense wealth.  And  all this wealth is passing to his son Isaac.  And Isaac needs a wife.  Now the servant is a little coy about his master Abraham, which is a little weird.  Because we’re about to find out that they’re in Abraham’s brothers house, and Rebekah is Abraham’s brother’s granddaughter.

v. 42-49

So this servant wastes no time getting right to it.  The food is on the table.  He and his men just arrived half an hour ago.  And he’s laid it on the line.  I prayed that God would show me the woman that we’re to take back to a faraway land to marry a guy she’s never met.  Well, and she was the first woman I saw, so it’s got to be her.  So anyway, I need to know now, are you going to give us your daughter Rebekah to take back to a distant land or not?

v. 58-61

Now suppose you have a teenage daughter and a group of 20 men shows up at your home around dinner time in a caravan of tricked out SUV’s.  They explain they’re from Las Vegas, sent on a mission to get a wife for their boss, and they camped out at WalMart looking for just the right woman.  And it’s your daughter.  And they’d like to head back with her in the morning.  Would that be OK?

Well, Rebekah’s family did just what you would do.  They said, well let’s just ask Rebekah what she’d like to do.  “Rebekah, get out here!”   “You wanna go with these guys and marry a guy way off in some other place?”  . . . “Yeah, I’ll go.”  What??  The story leaves us the readers with a sneaking suspicion that Rebekah’s family was impressed that Abraham’s servant arrived on ten camels loaded down with gold and silver jewelry, exotic fabrics, and other costly gifts.

OK, cue the dramatic, swooning music, we’re coming to the romantic end.

Vs. 62-67

Now the final scene where Isaac and Rebekah finally meet is a little anti-climactic if you ask me.  It looks like things are all set for a pretty smoking romantic scene.  We’ve got handsome, wealthy, meditating Isaac wandering in the field.  Rebekah is off her camel and modestly attempts to hide her amazing good looks underneath a veil so as not send Isaac into hyperventilation. 

And I kind of imagined them leaping into one another’s arms.   But it’s almost like the storyteller got tired at this point and just wanted to get it over with.  “Yeah, she got there.  Rebekah kind of stood over there while the servant gave Isaac the whole rigamaroll of what happened.  Then Isaac married her.  And they lived in his mom’s house.  And that was good, because he was sad about his mom.  The end.”

If someone adapts this story for the big screen, this ending is really going to need some work!

What I love about this story in Genesis is that it asks us to reflect on how God is present and at work in our own lives.  In some ways, the story is very primitive.  This is no longer the way men get their wives.  But in another way the story is quite profound and powerful.  Genesis 24 is laser focused on a very personal story about how Isaac met and married his wife Rebekah.  The details are different, but this is the kind of thing you can find in a good Victorian novel.

But out beyond this very personal story of Isaac and Rebekah is a geo-political story.  This is Israel’s reflection on how God relates to different people groups and different territories and nations.  You see, Abraham and Isaac are living in Canaan, the land promised by God to Israel.  But Rebekah hails from modern day Iraq near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  And the powerful Egyptian empire is part of the story too – Abraham’s second wife Hagar was a servant they secured while living down in Egypt. 

So the story raises a question on two levels – how are we to find God at work in our personal lives; and how are we to find God at work in the complicated political world of nations and empires?

When we’re growing up, we might imagine the regular, ordinary, daily world as some kind of stage or platform on which God performs occasional miracles. 

But the story of Isaac and Rebekah suggests something different.  There aren’t any miracles.  There is a plot with tension.  Isaac needs a wife.  That’s what’s driving the story forward.  There’s a knot that needs to be untangled.  And we’re held in suspense, wondering how events are going to unfold.  God is present as the one coordinating the events and efforts of ordinary people into a larger whole.

So how is God going to sort out all the twists of human history?  How is God going to untangle all the knots in our own personal lives?  And how will God coordinate all the promises to bless the world – to bless you, and me, and our grandkids, people of all different countries and races, those in developed world and the third world, those who won wars and those who lost them, those who have lived in abundance and those who have starved to death, those who lived long and full lives and those with lives cut short? 

How will God do it?  I do not know.  It’s a story with too many loose ends.  I don’t have the imagination to see how it can all come out right. 

Mark Twain’s novel Huck Finn is an American treasure.  One of the greatest pieces of literature ever written.  Twain had already written about Tom Sawyer.  And that was pretty good.  But the Huck Finn story is better.  Huck is a boy you can’t trust.  He’s lived a hard luck life with an abusive dad who was the town drunk.  And so Huck left home early and lived his life up and down the Mississippi River.  He learned how to survive – how to lie, steal, cheat, and bribe.  And the central tension of the plot is whether Huck is going to report an escaped slave he meets named Jim.  Can Huck see Jim not as a slave but as an honest to goodness human being?  When Jim is captured and imprisoned in the deep South by vicious people, will Huck the trickster find a way to free him? 

Here I defer to a wonderful essay from George Saunders (The Brain Dead Megaphone, p. 201), where he writes:

So what does Twain do?  This literary purist . . . commits one of the worst Conicindences in the history of writing.  Huck approaches the house where Jim is being held, planning to enact another swindle, and a woman comes out, mistakes him for another little boy (we flinch a bit at this; mistaken identity has been used maybe once too often in the book), and then – horror of horrors – we learn that this other little boy’s name is Tom, and we begin whispering to ourselves, No way, no way, Mark, Sam, don’t do it – but our worst fears are soon confirmed: this woman is Tom Sawyer’s aunt, and she – here, eleven hundred miles upriver – is expecting a visit from Tom himself any minute now.

Mark Twain, one of the great authors ever to live, had a hard time coordinating all the various details and plot lines of his story into a satisfying ending.  Can you imagine how difficult it will be for God to sort out the mess of our lives in the end?  For God to tie up all the loose ends of history in a way that counts for God keeping God’s promises to bless the whole world?

How will God organize terrible historical events into something meaningful?  How will God coordinate personal tragedy and suffering into a larger whole that one day makes sense?  I don’t know.  All we have is the clue that is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In the death of Jesus, God takes the violence of a world empire and the nastiness and hatred of ordinary folks and allows both to do their absolute worst, bringing about the death of God’s beloved Son.  But out of that terrible darkness, God brings the light of resurrection, hope, and forgiveness. 

I believe that you can trust God with your life.  You can trust God’s imaginative, creative wisdom to coordinate all the loose ends of your life together: your joys and victories as well as your dead-ends and disappointments.  I have neither proof nor an air-tight argument.  All I can offer you is the confession of Israel and the earliest Christians that God is the one who keeps the promises God makes.  How God is organizing the different parts of your life into a larger whole is always difficult to see while it’s happening.  Usually, you have to look back over your journey so far, seeking signs of God’s quiet presence.  But God is there, and God is here, and God will be always here.  May the Spirit give us eyes to see.