Sunday, July 30, 2017 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Cannot Turn Away

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–11
Genesis 29:1, 10–12, 15–20

Our first glimpse of reality this day—everyday—is your fidelity. . . . We ask only that your faithfulness permeate every troubled place we are able to name, that your mercy move against the hurts to make new, that your steadfastness hold firmly what is too fragile on its own. And we begin the day in joy, in hope, and in deep gladness.

Walter Brueggemann, “At the Dawn,” Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

I have to admit to you straight out that I completely changed the part of the story I would read to you, the story assigned by the lectionary to read to you this day, for I simply could not imagine myself standing here in this pulpit and reading some of the intimate details the narrator offers regarding the evening activities of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, all orchestrated by the women’s father, Laban. While the story’s language is not quite as “colorful” as the New Yorker interview with the new White House communications director, I still could not bring myself to read the whole thing to you. After worship, you can read it for yourself: Genesis 29:15–30.

Now, by this point, you may be wondering why, then, I persisted in preaching anything on this passage at all—this story about Laban, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. I asked myself the same thing. But I made a commitment that we were going to follow the stories of our spiritual ancestors through the book of Genesis this summer, and Laban’s tricking Jacob into marrying both of his daughters (that is in the part you didn’t hear) in exchange for fourteen years of work is a portion of that journey. In other words, I am stubborn. But I also have a deeper reason for sticking with this text, one that moves beyond just a stated commitment. I am preaching on this text—specifically on the way this text portrays the place of women and how that impacts the authority of scripture—because of Sherry.

For several years during my ministry, I kept Sherry’s name written on a sticky note attached to my computer monitor. By the way, “Sherry” is not her real name. But that is what we will call her today. I kept her name, because I knew I must not forget her. Sherry had enough people forgetting her. I needed to remember her story for her own good, for my own good, for the good of Christ’s church.

I had been working on my sermon, sitting in my pastor’s office in Texas, when Sherry wandered in. She looked to be around forty years old and was professionally dressed. As soon as she walked in, she asked for the pastor. I told her that she was speaking to her and invited Sherry to sit down.

As we sat down, she slowly began to tell me why she was in my office that day. At first I had the hardest time hearing what she was saying. Sherry spoke in the softest and most timid voice I have ever heard. I kept leaning in, closer and closer, wondering why in the world she was not speaking more loudly. But as Sherry’s story spilled out, I realized why she had lost her voice.

Sherry told a story of domestic violence. She told a story about a marriage in which she was daily berated for nothing, beaten, and basically rendered voiceless. “My husband just has problems controlling his anger,” she said. “We’ve been married for around twenty years. I knew it was bad when, in our first week of marriage, he slapped me for talking back to him.” Sherry was coming to me, she said, because he had tried to strangle their seventeen-year-old daughter the night before. The police had come, but no arrests were made. Sherry was at the end of her rope. As she spoke, she often made religious references. She spoke of God giving her the strength to stay in her marriage. She spoke of her strong Christian faith. She spoke of their church.

At this point in her story, I could not help it. I had to ask. “Sherry,” I asked, “why have you come to tell me this story? Why haven’t you gone to your own pastor?” Sherry responded that she really could not go to her own pastor with this problem. After all, it was her husband’s church too. But even more than that, she knew what he would say. He had said it before.

Sherry told me that her pastor would counsel her with passages from the Bible—passages about submission; passages about the rules for a Christian household; passages that made clear that, in a marriage, a woman had no real agency, no real power to break from her husband’s headship; passages like this one we are considering from Genesis. She knew she would hear biblical stories based on the ancient viewpoint that assume the women of the household belong first to the father, then to the husband, and later to the son. “My pastor says the Bible tells me I should stay,” Sherry said, “that if I followed scriptures’ rules, I would not be in this mess. That is what my pastor always says. I want to be faithful. But I don’t know what to do.”

Sherry’s struggle is why we cannot simply skip over messy biblical stories like this one from Genesis: this story about the trickster Laban scamming the trickster Jacob into marrying both of Laban’s daughters, even though Jacob only expressed interest in Rachel and we honestly have no idea if either Rachel or Leah expressed any interest in Jacob at all. Frankly, the ancient biblical worldview did not really care about their interest.

But we could deal with that, I suppose, if it were only an ancient worldview. Unfortunately, though, it is not. This patriarchal viewpoint still holds power, if not explicitly with many of us at Fourth Church, at least implicitly over all of us. And as Sherry’s story attests, it holds explicit power with many of our other Christian siblings and in many other cultures around our world.

Thus we cannot remain silent on the far-reaching implications of this text and others or just skip over them and pretend they are not there, for if we do not wrestle with them, others will. Others are, and they are using these kinds of stories to support a cultural framework that does not view Sherry and her husband in the same way, with the same power, and the same value. We have countless examples that make the news every single day.

As we read stories like this one, Sherry’s face needs to flash in front of our eyes, for we must ask ourselves, how have stories like this from our Holy Scripture, words that we claim can unveil God for us, been turned from bread to stone? As I just stated, these kinds of stories from scripture are regularly ripped out of their context from ancient time, lifted up, and set back down as if they are to mean the exact same thing today as they did back then. Set down as hard as a rock right on top of people like Sherry.

There used to be a popular bumper sticker in Texas. I am not sure if it ever made it to Chicago. It stated in bold letters “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” Not for us. Those of us in the Reformed Presbyterian tradition trust that kind of surface interpretation of scripture is dangerous. It takes the God-given gift of our curious minds out of the interpretive equation. Furthermore, the God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, the God we know through Jesus Christ, is not a God who wants words of scripture used as stones to be thrown at women and men, beating them down, and robbing them of their futures and their possibilities for living as free, whole children of God. The God of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, the God we know through Jesus Christ, is a God who desires the words of scripture to be bread, nourishment, sustenance for the life of faith. And when the words of scripture are not nourishment, when they are so constrained by the times in which they were written, when they do not reveal God’s living word of grace and freedom, well, at least for this preacher, they simply do not hold the same kind of authority as other words in other stories of scripture.

Let me put it a different way: As people who follow God in the way of Jesus, we do not worship the Bible. We worship the God revealed through the Bible by the power of the Spirit. As Presbyterians, we believe that the words of scripture were not written by God, God’s self. God inspired very real, very fallible human beings to write scripture, to try and give us a sense of the holy mystery of God, human beings that were as much a product of their times as we are of ours. As our Confession of 1967 states, the Bible becomes the Word of God through the power and working of the Spirit. It is that power of the Spirit that uses even stories like this one to reveal more to us about God and about ourselves. That is why before we ever read scripture, we pray a prayer for illumination, as we did earlier. We ask God to unveil something holy for us through these ancient words. It is God who gives scripture authority. For Christians, it is Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, who holds the ultimate authority and power.

That is why when I come face to face with biblical stories like this one, I always ask, “Is this bread or is this stone?” What can I figure out about its meaning in the time and place it was written? How does that historical and literary understanding help me consider if it does or does not translate to our day and time? Though we need to be thoughtful when dealing with scriptures from what we call the Old Testament, I also ask, how does this passage intersect with what I see in Jesus Christ? Is it bread or is it stone? Those are the questions that Sherry and I asked that day in my office about some of the passages her own pastor often quoted.

Believe it or not, when we ask those questions even of this rather sordid story from Genesis, we see glimpses of God’s power at work. We see how, even if neither Laban nor Jacob showed a slight interest in how Leah or Rachel felt about being traded and used, God did. For example, listen to a few verses in chapter 29 that reveal God’s care for Leah, the one Laban used to trick Jacob, the sister often referred to as weak or unlovely: “When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved” and “Leah responded, ‘The Lord has seen my affliction’” (Genesis 29:31, 32). And here are a couple of verses in the next chapter that show God’s care for Rachel, the younger sister also used by her father to get more free labor out of Jacob: “Then God remembered Rachel” and “Rachel responded, ‘God has taken away my reproach’” (Genesis 30:22–24).

Now I realize a few verses do not take away the tension of this text. Those verses do not erase the way neither Leah nor Rachel have little agency or power in their lives. Those verses also do not erase the fact that later Leah and Rachel act out their own power game upon their female servants, each giving a servant to Jacob in order to have a child, doing exactly what Sarah did to Hagar, perpetuating the exploitation they, themselves, suffered. They were far from perfect, too, just like we all are.

Yet just as we have throughout these messy stories of questionable biblical family values in Genesis, we can take note of God’s persistence in noticing those who are never noticed and in God’s continuing action even through those whose motives are tainted—to put it lightly—all because God so desires to be actively present and engaged in our world, both in our history and now in our present. God simply refuses to be God without us.

But did Sherry ever hear about the ways God noticed women like Leah and Rachel, despite the fact their father did not? Did Sherry ever hear that what were common assumptions about family structures and power in ancient biblical times could not simply be applied without explanation to our own day and time? No. And as a result, she was starved. She expected bread from her church, her pastor, but she only received stones in its place. The stories were always ripped out of their context and placed on top of her head. I believe that misuse of scripture was unfaithful.

God did not give us the gift of Holy Scripture so that we could beat each other up with it. God did not give us the gift of Holy Scripture so that we could just apply it, without thinking, as an “add water and stir” recipe for our lives. God gave us the words of scripture so that we could pray, think, and discern together how the Bible reveals God in our midst and where we find our own stories interlaced with its own. And, God gave us the stories of scripture to occasionally serve as cautionary tales, stories that show us who not to be or what not to emulate. God gave us scripture for us to discern how it points to God’s living word, Jesus Christ, a word that will never be bound by a book, not even the Bible.

I hastily told Sherry some of this stuff in my office that day. And then I gave her the number for the battered women’s shelter and hotline. I told her that she needed to call, not just for her sake but also for her children’s sake, that it would indeed be a faithful act. Then we prayed together and asked for God’s liberating strength to be known in Sherry’s life. As she walked out of my door, I prayed for God’s forgiveness of the church; for God’s forgiveness of pastors like me, for all those times we preachers turn God’s Word into stone by our deeds or by our silence, by our decisions to ignore or not preach those parts of scripture we don’t like, by our willingness to look the other way too many times, to refuse to notice what God is noticing and to speak out about what we see.

God gave us the gift of scripture, and I believe God expects us to use its power wisely and compassionately, in the service of God’s new creation of a more just and more whole world for all the Sherrys, all the Rachels, all the Leahs, all the servants exploited, all the Labans, and all the Jacobs—for us all. Amen.

Notes

1. I am grateful for Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s book Bread Not Stone for helping me to articulate my own Reformed feminist hermeneutic.

2. The understanding of scripture’s authority as becoming the Word of God through the power and working of the Spirit is expressed well in the Confession of 1967 from our Book of Confessions. I do know, however, that the Westminster Standards hold a different understanding of scripture’s authority. I fall in line with C67.