May the words of
my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock
and my redeemer. Amen.
Over
the last few weeks, we have been hearing the story of Jacob. So far, we have
known Jacob as a trickster, a manipulator, and a self-serving, lying for his
own gain type of person who is more concerned with personal security and
preservation than giving a hoot about family traditions and cultural values.
He
used Esau to be pulled out his mother’s womb. He then bamboozled his brother
out of his firstborn birthright by trading it for a bowl of "red
stuff," as Esau names the soup. Finally, with the careful connivance of
his mother Rebekah, Jacob tricks his dying blind father, Isaac, out of the
patriarchal blessing, first given to Abram so long before. So, with birthright
and blessing in hand, Jacob runs for his life from the justifiable rage of his
brother.
In
today’s reading, he is out to find himself a wife from the family of his crafty
Uncle Laban, his mother’s brother. But before we talk about that, I want to
give you a brief overview of what happened in the first half of Genesis 29,
which we didn’t have the luxury of hearing but is an important piece to today’s
story.
Spurred
on by his "ladder dream," Jacob makes his way through the desert.
Exhausted, hot, thirsty, and surely near the end of his rope, he comes upon a
well. There are three flocks of sheep lying around the well; and on the top of
it, there was a large stone. The custom of the people of the area was that when
all the flocks from the area got to the well, the shepherds would roll away the
stone from the top of the well, they would water their sheep, and then they
would put the stone back on the top of the well. This would all be done as a
team. After speaking with the shepherds, Jacob discovers that he has arrived in
Haran and he is excited! Haran is the land of his mother’s family!
Jacob
begins to ask the shepherds about his uncle and family, but in the middle of
the conversation, Laban's daughter, Rachel appears in on the horizon and with
her is a huge flock of sheep. A huge flock of sheep means Uncle Laban is rich!
And since Jacob’s modus operandi is security, he quickly hatches a plan to be
alone with Rachel. He figures charm the
daughter and get an easy "in" with Uncle Laban.
As
Rachel gets closer, however, Jacob's sole motivation to connect with Uncle
Laban fades. Rachel is so beautiful that Jacob is knocked over. Rachel isn't
just a rich girl, she's a pretty rich girl, and that’s about all Jacob needed
to know. It’s love at first sight!
Jacob
shows off to Rachel by lifting the stone from the well – you know that one that
usually takes all the shepherds to move – and waters Rachel’s sheep. And then,
like a gallant knight in shining armor, he takes Rachel’s hand and gently
kisses it.
Laban
is soon told of the appearance of his nephew, and he runs out to meet Jacob.
Over the next while, Jacob tells his Uncle Laban the whole story, even how he
swindled his brother out of his birthright for soup, and how he tricked his old
Dad Isaac with the goatskin to get a blessing! Laban, the king of manipulators
himself, slaps his nephew on the back shouts a telling phrase: "You are
surely my bone and my flesh!" He means more than they are just related;
they are in fact two peas in a tricky pod, one trying to best the other the
very minute they meet!
Laban
invites Jacob to stay for a month in his house. At the end of that month, he
asks Jacob, “Tell me what you’re doing here, what do you really want?” And so,
Jacob tells him that he wants Rachel as his wife. And now we get back to
today’s reading where the trickery awaits.
Laban
tells Jacob that just because he’s family doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be paid for
his work with the flocks and herds. Jacob offers 7 years of employment in
exchange for Rachel’s hand in marriage. Laban agrees to exchange Rachel for 7
years of labour. When the 7 years are up, Jacob goes to collect his pay. A
great marriage feast is arranged at the end of which a veiled woman is thrust
into Jacob’s tent.
Maybe
he was drunk, maybe she was heavily veiled, maybe it was really dark, but
somehow Jacob didn’t realize until the next morning that he had in fact married
the wrong woman. He went storming off to Laban to demand an answer. It was then
that Laban revealed the custom of the eldest marrying first which is why Jacob
found Leah in his bed. How ironic that birthright is the reason for the switch.
By the way, the custom of taking the older daughter before the younger was the
same for Jacob's people, but we know that honoring tradition was not at the top
of Jacob’s priority list.
Crafty
Uncle Laban doesn’t stop there. He provides yet another deal to the younger,
less sophisticated manipulator. “Stay with Leah through the week and then you
get Rachel at the end. And I can do this for the low, low price of another
seven years of labour.” Because his love for Rachel was so strong, Jacob felt
he had no choice but to agree or he would have had to give her up forever.
It’s
hard to find a moral to this story. Laban’s trickery won out, unloading both
daughters onto Jacob and getting 14 years of free labour out of it. A tough
topic considering women’s rights and equality, and Jacob as the victim of “what
goes around comes around” karma.
But
if we look deeper into Jacob’s part in this story, there is a glimmer of a
silver lining. Jacob gets swept away when he sees something he wants and he
works hard for it. But after working so hard, he didn’t get quite what he was
expecting. Isn’t that the way sometimes? We get our hopes up for something and
in the end, the grass only appeared greener on the other side?
But
maybe we need to follow Laban’s advice – “wait a week, and you’ll get Rachel
too”. In other words, stick around for a while longer, trust that it was God
who has led you here, trust that God knows what God is doing, be faithful to
where God has led you, to what you have been called to do. Sometimes in the
process of facing the morning after, you realize that “Rachel', or the ideal,
comes as a result of working things through and not leaving the table when you
get disappointed, or when things aren't turning out as you expected. It takes
patience and trust that the struggles, the disappointments, and all the ugly
are part of God’s plan for your life and that sticking with it will eventually
put you exactly where you are meant to be.
The
parables found in Matthew today have a similar lesson of living through the
tricky and the ugly before finding the beauty of God’s Kingdom. These parables
do not describe the kingdom in any specific way, but show us a series of
snapshots taken from different perspectives. No single picture is definitive,
but each provides a glimpse that adds to our understanding.
In
the first of the parables, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a mustard seed
that, when sown, grows into a tree in whose branches birds come to nest. The
image of the mustard seed highlights initially its smallness and its
invisibility when it is sown. Then the image expands to include its inevitable
growth and flourishing, its resultant large size that contrasts with its small
beginning, and its hospitable environment that sustains nesting birds.
In
the second parable, Jesus is telling the story of a woman who was busy making
bread. Bread made simply from water and flour is dry and very hard. That is why
we mix it with leaven. When you put the dough in a warm place, at the right
temperature, the leaven changes the quality of the bread and through the
process of fermentation, the whole dough is filled with air, and it becomes
very soft. Three measures of flour are enough to bake bread for 100-150 people.
The point is that even a tiny quantity of leaven has power to affect a large
quantity of flour.
The
usual interpretation of these parables is that big things have small
beginnings, which makes sense as each parable talks about something small
blossoming into something quite grander. Until you realize, however, that
neither mustard seed nor yeast was viewed positively in Jesus’ world. Mustard
was a weed, dreaded by farmers the way today’s gardeners dread English Ivy or Scotch
Broom. It starts out small, but before long has taken over your field.
Similarly, yeast was a contaminant and almost always represents the wicked
nature of sin when mentioned in the Bible.
Why,
then, compare the kingdom of God to a weed and a pollutant? Because both
mustard seed and yeast have this way of spreading beyond anything you’d
imagined, infiltrating a system and taking over a host. The Gospel of God’s
coming kingdom is threatening before it is comforting, ugly before it is
beautiful. It invades our whole world and taints the reality we’ve grown to
accept, challenges the views we’ve lived by, and calls into question
assumptions that have guided much of our lives in the world.
God’s
new reality is closer than you think, already seeping into your life even
though you can’t always feel it. No matter what it may look like, God’s kingdom
will prevail. And so, in the face of war, we claim God’s peace. When confronted
with illness, we look to God’s eternal healing. When faced with hate, we
proclaim love. Why? Because the kingdom is coming and, before you know it, will
transform everything.
But
first we must have patience and trust. God’s disruptive, life changing, and
ultimately life-giving kingdom is coming. It will take some patience, trust,
and perseverance to await it, and when it comes it will likely not be what we
expect and perhaps not what we even wanted. But to those who recognize there is
something more out there than the world has offered, to those who are willing
to acknowledge the deep ache in their hearts for a sense of true if also
illusive joy, then it will come as more than we could have imagined and will
invade, take over, and transform our lives.
Jacob’s
story teaches us that while we may not always get what is expected, we should
trust that this place that we are in right now could be exactly where God wants
us or has been leading us all along; trust that God is working right here, to
bring about things we don’t even know about that are yet to come!
The
parables give us a chance to make the kingdom life and reality Jesus preaches a
tad more concrete by pointing us to those whose actions are perhaps
inexplicable according to the logic of the world but in tune with the promises
of the kingdom.
Church
is the place where we remind each other of God’s promises and point to places
in our lives and the world where we catch glimpses of its presence.
Perseverance,
patience, and trust. Get through the morning after. Stay the week. Put in the
work. You’ll get there in the end.
Amen.
