A Fourth Church Sermon by Rocky Supinger

Sunday, July 9, 2017 | 8:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 145:8–14
Genesis 24:34–38, 42–49, 58–67

You, beyond us, are our God.
We are your creatures met by your holiness,
by your holiness made our true selves.

Walter Brueggemann
“And Then You”
A prayer from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

Florence Henderson died in 2016. She was Carol Brady, the mom of the Brady Bunch, everybody’s second blended family from 1969 to 1974 (and then after that in syndication). That one seemed to me to hit the people I know particularly hard, because she was Carol Brady, the matriarch of the family every teenager for a generation wished they were a part of. When a matriarch dies . . .

The matriarch of my family is Bamo, mother to my mother and her three siblings, grandmother to me and my brother and our four cousins, great grandmother to my daughter, who is named for her. Bamo is, without a doubt, the most influential person in my family.

When I was growing up, Bamo’s house hosted all of the holiday gatherings. Bamo doled out candy and sugary cereal to her grandchildren over the useless objection of their parents.

Bamo is my last living grandparent. I know that she won’t live forever. She is eighty-three and still lives in Colorado, where I grew up, and I am happy to tell you that she is healthy and vibrant. She still lives in her own house.

But I know the day is inevitably coming when my family will be without its matriarch. That will be a difficult, difficult day in my family. When the matriarch dies, the future of the family feels uncertain.

Sarah, the matriarch of the improbable little family we read about here in Genesis, dies in the chapter right before the one we just read from. The future of her family suddenly feels uncertain.

Not that this family’s future was ever all that certain, in genealogical terms. This is Abram and Sarai’s family, and there’s only three of them. Their son, Isaac, is a very, very late addition for whom the aging couple waited an impossibly long time. A promise that she would be the matriarch of a family is the entire premise of her story—and not just a nuclear family, but a great family, a family as numerous as the sand, as prolific as the stars in the sky, a family that would be a blessing to all the families of the earth.

That promise has its first flower in Isaac. But that’s it. And now Sarah is gone. The matriarch has died, and the future of the family might have died with her.

But Abraham has a plan. Indeed, if we have learned anything about Abraham since we first met him thirteen chapters ago, it’s that he makes plans. He trusts God when God tells him to take his family and to leave his country and his kindred and his father’s house and go to . . . a place that I will show you. He trusts God that Abraham and Sarah, both well beyond childbearing years, will have a son. Abraham trusts God, but he also makes his own plans.

I get that. We get that in the church. We are some planning people. Just look at how we choose leaders.

We said good-bye last week to Hardy Kim and his family, after Hardy served as the Associate Pastor for Evangelism here for going on seven years. Now, we trust that God has something in mind for our church in this area. But we’re also making plans.

So here’s Abraham’s plan: get Isaac a wife. This should strike us as hopelessly patriarchal, of course, and it is. That a woman has to be “obtained” by a group of men, that the value of women in ancient societies like this is in their utility in having children, is hard to read, and it should be. I think it is part of a faithful reading of these stories to acknowledge the patriarchal elements—I mean to actually read them, not to pass over them or explain them away—and then to admit that we have not exactly eradicated patriarchy in our own time.

So, a wife. But not a local one. Abraham insists that a wife be found for his Isaac from among his own people, in Haran, the place he left years ago and that is miles and miles away. Oh, and Isaac can’t go.

That’s right. Abraham proposes that a wife be found for his son from among a distant people and that the husband-to-be not even be on hand to make the offer.

Good luck with that.

The person who will be given this unenviable job is, of course, Abraham’s servant, the oldest of his household and the one who is in charge of everything, sort of Abraham’s executive assistant. His name is never given in the story, but he is mentioned elsewhere with the name Eliezer, so we’ll call him that. (I like that better than “the servant.”)

So, Eliezer has a couple of things going for him that I think are really interesting. For one thing, he’s pretty smart. It’s hard to appreciate Eliezer’s wits after hearing only the verses of the story that we heard. You sort of have to hear the whole story.

This story begins in verse 1 of chapter 24. It’s sixty-seven verses long, which makes it one of the longest stories in all of Genesis, longer, even, than the first creation stories. It essentially tells the same events twice. First is the narrator’s version—verses 1–33—and then there is the retelling of those same events by Eliezer, which is the part we heard. And it’s when you pay attention to the way that Eliezer retells parts of this story that his brains really strike you.

Eliezer understands the religious difference between himself, as a member of Abraham’s household, and the people he’s dealing with. Rebekah’s family, like most ancient civilizations, like almost all of the peoples’ in the Old Testament, are polytheistic, and that is very different from the trust in the God of creation who called Abram out of this place and away from these same people, promising to make of him a great nation.

The future of that promise now runs right through the place Abraham left. Eliezer can see that. So when he relates to them the oath that is compelling him on this errand, he simply says, “My master made me swear.” He doesn’t include, as the narrator does earlier in the chapter, that Abraham made him swear by “the Lord, the God of heaven and earth.”

He leaves out the religious stuff, especially the stuff that would highlight the religious differences between Isaac’s people and Rebekah’s people.

That’s smart. Because he needs them more than they need him.

I think this is interesting because, like Eliezer, we live today among people who increasingly do not share our religious convictions. The evidence is in shrinking church attendance and in surveys in which fewer and fewer people identify with a religious tradition. The term nones (n-o-n-e) has firmly established itself to mean those people who answer “none” in these surveys when asked what religious tradition they claim.

Eliezer knows that the future of his church depends upon people who are not in it and who never will be. He is not trying to convert Rebekah’s family. He is trying to enlist one of them in the mission of his church, to be a family that blesses all the families of the earth. That seems pretty smart to me.

For all of his considerable smarts, though, Eliezer has something else going for him, and that is discernment. Eliezer is a discerning person. He wants to find the right way.

The revivalist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon said that “discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.”

In other words, discernment is concerned with discovering what is right because God wills it and what we might think is right based on any other set of criteria. Medical decisions. Career crossroads. Family disputes. Romantic relationships. Diet. The decisions we face every day call for more than informed decision making. We have more information at our disposal than any group of humans have ever had. What we need is discernment.

Eliezer wants to discern the person God has “appointed”—that’s the word the story uses: “appointed”—to take up the matriarchy of the family of God. He trusts that God has a plan, that God has a will in the matter. It’s not just up to him. And so he prays there at the well for a sign that will help him know who the right person is. It’s not magic. He’s not asking for a miraculous sign. In fact, the criteria he’s asking God to show him are incredibly relevant to the thing he’s looking for.

“Let the young woman who comes out to draw, to whom I shall say, ‘Please give me a little water from your jar to drink,’ and who will say to me, ‘Drink, and I will draw for your camels also’—let her be the one.” Eliezer is asking to be shown someone kind and hospitable and strong, someone who can handle animals and isn’t afraid of strangers.

He is asking God to help him discern the right person, not the almost-right person.

And there, in an instant, is Rebekah. Rebekah is the real hero of this story. Rebekah is decisive and full of a courage you can’t hardly fathom.

How many times has history turned toward the good because of courage and strength like this?

I was in Detroit last week with our junior high students, and on our free day we visited the Henry Ford Museum, which hosts the actual Birmingham city bus that Rosa Parks sat on and refused to give up her seat. We know that story. We’ve heard it countless times. But there was something about actually sitting in the bus that made me wonder if I will ever have the strength and the courage it took Rosa Parks to do what she did and also to wonder how many more women whose names we will never know have been equally strong and equally courageous. It is a biblical strength, a Rebakah strength.

That strength is actually kind of humorous in the story. You have to imagine this well not as a hole in the ground with a rope and a bucket, but as large trench that leads down to a stream. The well is so deep that it requires a ladder. And the jugs for the water that the women carry are so large that they have to be hoisted up on their shoulder

(I can’t ever hear this story without thinking of the women in the village of Tshikaji, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where my wife and I worked for a month in 2006—women who would carry on their heads over many miles these large, yellow, five-gallon plastic containers filled with water, often while carrying a baby.)

So Rebekah not only goes down the ladder and back up again to get a drink for Eliezer, but then she waters the camels. There’s, like, ten of them, and each one would have required gallons upon gallons of water. It’s a bit of skillful exaggeration, and the point is clear: Rebekah is strong, like Hercules strong.

The strength of her arms and her shoulders and her back and her legs is only part of the story, though. The strength of her will, perhaps even of her faith, is the force that ultimately determines where the future is going for God’s people.

“I will go,” she says. Though she knows not where and she knows not whom, she has discerned something happening here, and she makes the choice. It is a courageous choice, no doubt, a choice that removes all doubt about whether she is the right one, because this is a family that chooses to go, that chooses to follow the voice of God into the unknown, a “pilgrim” people, to use a phrase from our next hymn. In making this choice, Rebakah is becoming the next Sarah and the next Abraham, the next in a line of men and women whom God is making into a blessing for all the families of the earth.

We are that people, called as heirs of Rebekah to show such strength and such courage to go, to follow God as disciples of Jesus. There is plenty we don’t know, plenty we won’t know until we commit to make a move. We can have faith for the journey, however, that God will show us the right way to go and will provide us with the right people to go with us.

Amen.