Well, I still get asked the question if we have recovered from the wedding.  And the answer is yes, I think we finally have.  We still have wedding stuff in piles in places, but hey, some of it came in handy this past week. We had a four or five hour power failure in Maumelle one evening, and man do we have the candles.  We lit enough in each room that our house looked liked a 17th century monastery.  The neighbors all wondered why we still had lights.  We had so many candles that it was bright enough in there to need sunscreen. Our house was so bright that it became the second object visible from outer space along with the Great Wall of China.  Of course, when we blew them all out I thought we would have to call the fire department as I was waiting for the smoke alarm to go off.  It was so smoky that I could have done a rack of ribs on the kitchen table. But the candles came in handy.

The wedding was a lot of work but it was fun.  I was impressed by my Dianna’s (my wife) and Emily’s (my daughter) plan of attack.  They had developed elaborate budgets, Excel Spread Sheets for comparative cost analysis, expense tracking, and a database for shower and wedding gifts, thank you cards etc.,.  They had schematics drawn for set up, a flow chart of logistics on what had to happen the week and days up to the wedding.  They conducted performance appraisals and had to issue me a written warning or two.  And Emily’s MBA she will have next month is starting to pay off as we had a much nicer wedding than the amount of money we spent; the girls did it for about a third of what it was worth, they did a great job and it was a beautiful wedding.  Heck, it was worth the price of admission to see me wear a clerical robe and then cut-a-rug at the reception.

Now, my dancing days are over, I will just dance vicariously by watching Dancing with the Stars on TV.  I danced with a few kids, with Emily and with Dianna.  Funny how the only toes I stepped on were Dianna’s, could be that it wasn’t totally my fault dear. Maybe you were stepping under my big foot.  But there is one picture of me at the reception where we are doing one of those group dances and I looked like a Pentecostal preacher filled with the Holy Ghost.  And good grief, just looking at the pictures, you can’t tell that we were alcohol free at the reception. So, my dancing days are over, I do have my dignity after all.  And the robe thing– way too hot for Arkansas (God Bless all of you liturgical clerics out there on my email list!). 

Emily and Evan’s wedding will be a lifelong memorable event for our family, and thank you for sharing the journey with us.  It was one wedding that I really enjoyed doing, and I don’t always enjoy officiating at such solemn occasions.  If you perform enough ceremonies you see all kinds of things, and have enough negative experiences that you swear that you will never do another one again as a clergy person.  William Willimon addresses the clergy’s need to “clean up the wedding” in an essayed entitled just that, “Cleaning up the Wedding.”  But in the end, tacky as they can be Willimon concludes:

I submit that our chief pastoral duty at weddings is not to make sure that the bride and groom “know what they’re getting into” (did you when you got married?) or that they are suitably matched and able to keep a lifetime promise of love and fidelity (nobody is able — that’s why we ask for grace) or that they know the real meaning of marriage (even bachelor Paul had the good sense to call it musterion). The real meaning of marriage may have as much to do with the crooning cousins, flowers and upset stomachs, arguments over how to cut the cake, and nervous fathers as it does with all our theological rationalizations of this most delightfully irrational of human acts. I submit that the real pastoral task is to stand up boldly, even if embarrassedly, in the middle of all this and dare to proclaim as clearly and sensitively and faithfully as we know how the gospel of Jesus Christ: that these tacky, romantic, transitory moments are redeemed by his loving presence in our midst and thereby given eternal significance. Marriage is “an honorable estate” not because it’s all that spiritual, ethereal or heavenly. Marriage is beautiful because even as it was “adorned and beautified by his presence in Cana of Galilee,” Christ deems our unions worthy of his presence today. It is his blessing, his challenge, his judgment, his commission which we pronounce over the seeming chaos of it all (Cleaning up the Wedding, religion-online.com)

            So in the end, we understand that God is present at weddings and we earnestly seek his blessings on the happy couple, because we all need it on life’s great adventure.  We need to know that God factor’s into the equation, because frankly, marriage isn’t always easy and love is not always enough. Although I contend that we need to not only “fall” in love but to “rise” in love, that is to continue to grow in love as the key to overcoming whatever life throws at you.  It is in this spirit that our lectionary text today comes into play from Genesis chapter 24.  It is the story, an amazingly long story for its type of Isaac and Rebekah, although Isaac is not a key player in our text today at all.  In fact, it has been suggested that maybe we should mention Yahweh as the God of Abraham, Rebekah, and Jacob, as she was at times more pivotal than Isaac in the annals of the history of Israel.  But the text is about finding a wife for the patriarch so he can appropriately get about the business of creating a great nation with millions of offspring as promised by the Almighty with the covenant with Abraham.            

            You remember the story: Abraham and Sarah, as a Rabbi I read this week said, “like all good Jewish parents after them, were getting worried about their son, Isaac. He was already pushing 40 with no good marriage prospects in sight.” So they decided to send their trusted servant Eliezer to find them a daughter-in-law from their old hometown. No mixed marriage here.  Eliezer travels the distance, and when he approaches the watering hole outside town, he makes the following prayer to the Almighty: “When I approach the well to get a drink, if a young girl shall offer me fresh water from her pitcher, and, without my asking, also offer to draw more water to quench the thirst of all my camels — she is the one who is fitting to marry into the illustrious family of Abraham and Sarah. So, please, God, help me be successful in finding the right girl.”  Well, to make a long story short, along comes Rebekah and offers Eliezer and his camels plenty of water to drink, and she then consents to travel back to Canaan with Eliezer in order to marry Isaac. And no this was not in Arkansas even thought Rebekah was Isaac’s cousin. 

            Much as been written about this being a match made in heaven, and maybe the proof is in the pudding as Isaac was the only patriarch who was monogamous, with no other wives or concubines.  But maybe that was so because the boy was slow, I mean after all dear old dad had to go out and find him a wife at 40.  Eliezer was up to the task, and as far I can tell was the founder of “eHarmony.com”.  Except he did not have 29 areas of compatibility to contend with, he only had three which in my way of thinking ups the odds considerably: One, she had to be fair (I think this must mean she had to be easy on the eyes), two, she had to be nice when she gave him a drink of water, and three she had to on her own volunteer to also water his camels.  Rebekah passed the test and the rest is history.  Isaac saw her coming from afar, welcomed her into his tent, and then he married her.  It was the tent that Sarah his mother had died in, and evidently Isaac had been grieving over her death.  But Rebekah was just what the doctor ordered so that he could put his grief behind him and get on with the important task of being a patriarch. 

            So what about this match made in heaven?  We really don’t know much of the important details even though more verses are devoted to this story of Eliezer finding Isaac a wife that almost any other narrative in the Pentateuch.  Only 17 verses are devoted to the call of Abraham in Genesis chapter 12 and 70 something verses are dedicated to Noah and the great flood, but finding a wife for Isaac takes up 66 verses of text.  It is a very prominent story.  So we might conclude that this is a highly important story based on the amount of press it receives.  I have spent a few days pondering its implications for us in 2008 America, and making that cultural leap across time and space is a tough one.  The point doesn’t seem to be anything about marriage, that happens in about three words, it is in this story all about the chase—maybe the possible lesson here is that God was involved in the whole process.  But I also see something else here on the importance of women in a male dominated world, and the importance of the right woman to carry out God’s master plan.              

            You see, the Bible was the product of a male dominated society, but on its pages are powerful and notable exceptions to the man only club. Rebekah was a pivotal person in the story of faith, and I would suggest to you this morning more so than Isaac.  It was Jacob that was Rebekah’s favorite, and she helped him wrangle the birthright away from Esau to birth the nation of Israel after Esau married a Hittite woman.   Without the right woman for Isaac, there would be no heilsgeschichte through the nation of Israel. The nature of progressive revelation involves by necessity culturally bound or encapsulated texts; it was a man’s world and as such it had to communicate in that culture for the successful propagation of the story.  Anything that is too aversive to the prevailing culture is usually shelved as nonsense. But today is a tribute to a woman, a matriarch of God.

            It is an important story from that aspect, because religion is notorious for the suppression and oppression of women.  There has been important cross-cultural research that cultures that are hard on women and children are typically more violent and warlike. In her books The Chalice & The Blade and The Power of Partnership, Riane Eisler explains that throughout history, and cross culturally, the most violently despotic and warlike cultures have been those where violence in homes is culturally condoned. We see this connection in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. We see it in the Taliban, and other cultures that feed terrorism and war today. Logic alone tells us that early training to accept violence as a means of imposing one’s will on others is useful to violent and repressive regimes.  There is a correlation between how a society treats women and it propensity to international violence. Esiler contends that:

Hitler’s Germany (a technologically advanced, Western, rightist society), Stalin’s USSR (a secular leftist society), fundamentalist Iran (an Eastern religious society), and Idi Amin’s Uganda (a tribalist society) were all violent and repressive. There are obvious differences between them. But they all share the core configuration of the domination model. They are characterized by top-down rankings in the family and state or tribe maintained through physical, psychological, and economic control; the rigid ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half; and a high degree of culturally accepted abuse and violence—from child- and wife-beating to chronic warfare. How a society structures the primary human relations— between the female and male halves of humanity, and between them and their children—is central to whether it is violent and inequitable or peaceful and equitable. (Connections among child spanking, other corporal punishment, gender inequality, violence, and war, by Raine Eisler, at religious-tolerance.org)

            So it is disturbing to me to read the story that was reported in EthicsDaily.com this past week about irresponsible comments from a professor at Southern Seminary, a new bastion for the oppression of women.  EthicsDaily reports:

One reason that men abuse their wives is because women rebel against their husband’s God-given authority, a Southern Baptist scholar said Sunday in a Texas church. (I want to read that again, it is so mind-boggling: One reason that men abuse their wives is because women rebel against their husband’s God-given authority—emphasis this author’s) Bruce Ware, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said women desire to have their own way instead of submitting to their husbands because of sin. “And husbands on their parts, because they’re sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged–or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches,” Ware said from the pulpit of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas.  In North Texas for a series of sermons at the church on “Biblical Manhood & Womanhood,” Ware described his “complementarian” view as what “Southern Seminary as a whole represents.” Commenting on selected passages from the first three chapters of Genesis, Ware said Eve’s curse in the Garden of Eden meant “her desire will be to have her way” instead of her obeying her husband, “because she’s a sinner.” What that means to the man, Ware said, is: “He will have to rule, and because he’s a sinner, this can happen in one of two ways. It can happen either through ruling that is abusive and oppressive–and of course we all know the horrors of that and the ugliness of that–but here’s the other way in which he can respond when his authority is threatened. He can acquiesce. He can become passive. He can give up any responsibility that he thought he had to the leader in the relationship and just say ‘OK dear,’ ‘Whatever you say dear,’ ‘Fine dear’ and become a passive husband, because of sin.” Ware also touched on a verse from First Timothy saying that women “shall be saved in childbearing,” by noting that the word translated as “saved” always refers to eternal salvation. (Bob Allen, Ethicsdaily.com)

            This story is unbelievable to me, even if you are in the camp that we should not ordain women, this is a quantum leap beyond that and has absolutely no Biblical basis.  It is a terrible example of using religion to legitimize our prejudices and fears.  Can you believe that he would blame the victim for domestic abuse because she is a sinner who usurps the authority in the house?  And that the man according to Ware (a seminary professor mind you) has only two choices, to acquiesce and be whipped by her leadership or to beat her into submission?  And that a woman gains eternal life not through Jesus Christ but through child bearing? That is crazy, people. He is insane!  But that is not all I have read in recent news reports from Associated Baptist Press and EthicsDaily that at Southern Seminary recently, the Southern faculty have advocated young women must serve as willing sexual partners with their husbands making babies together as often as God (as in the life-giving reproductive powers of nature) wills.  This involves spurning birth-control methods and it labels them as acts of disobedience. Such a theology they call “a full-quiver theology,” meaning the quiver of a man is filled with the arrows of the offspring they sire with their obedient wives. These Southern professors have also condemned the rebellion of young Southern Baptist men and women who might choose not to marry until they are older. Again waiting until they are ready is deemed as disobedience and condemned, as if such condemnation was according to the eternal plan of God.

            Well our text makes it plain this morning that Rebekah had a choice; this was not an arraigned marriage.  She too traveled by faith leaving home. She too had faith as she left the familiar to a far away land to meet her destiny.  She too had faith as she gave up her family and friends.  Besides, Rebekah had to pass three tests to get to Isaac, and as far as we know Isaac only had to show up.  To be fair, Rebekah was in fact there to pop out at least two babies and to give birth to a great nation alright, but she also showed leadership when she arraigned for Jacob (whom you recall would later be named Israel) to steal Esau’s birthright as Esau (Isaac’s favorite and the firstborn) would have likely been a disastrous choice.  So the entire nation’s existence and birthright was orchestrated by Rebekah, hardly a shut up and sit there kind of woman.  And whatever lessons are here in this passage of scripture, one thing is obvious:  God can use whomever he chooses to accomplish his purposes to carry out his plans. 

            Because the truth is, Scripture is full of all kinds of unlikely people in unlikely places doing God’s bidding.  In fact, people we expected to be chosen hardly ever were.  Paul says it best in the first chapter of I Corinthians: For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.  Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

            You see, what we should never forget is that God calls all of us according to His purposes.  And I do mean all of us, every single one of us.  No one can define the call of God for us but ourselves, no one can limit God’s direction but God himself. To speak right down to the specifics for the way God acts is to not have a very big god at all.  Our God is too small if we set the course for his will.  Our God is too small if we limit what he can and cannot do based on our own finitude.  Our God is too small if we use his power to coerce people into molds constructed from our prejudices and fueled by our fears. Our God is too small if his call comes from the mouths of human beings.

            Because the truth is, we use religion to constrain and oppress when it should be about enlarging and liberating.  We bind and limit others when we should be losing the yoke of bondage that religions shackles people with, and we should be preaching the truth that set us free.  We should not be about the business of condemning others as problems but should be about the business of creating in others possibilities.  We pigeon-hole the creator of the heavens and the earth, we recreate him in our image to pursue our own agendas.  Our modern god is the popular one of convenience that does our bidding and fights our fights.  And that my friend is all backwards and nowhere in this story today.

            I am here today to say that if the great stories of Genesis, Exodus, and of the Old Testament in general do nothing else, they put us straight that God is the creator and we are the created.  The God in Genesis is a great big all powerful creator God whose very words spews out worlds without end.  Sure our faith ought to be the faith of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob.  But it also should be the faith of Rebekah, of Leah, of Deborah, of Rahab.  We should have the faith of Paul and Silas and Barnabus.  But it should also be the faith of Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene.  When the disciples tucked their tails and ran in fear at Jesus arrest, the women did not abandon him. And they were the first at the tomb and Mary received the news flash of the ages and was first to see and believe in the risen Christ, the first post-resurrection believer if you will.  She was the first to spread the good news, “I have seen the Lord.”  She had to go find the men who were hiding and tell them pull themselves together and get down to that empty tomb, because Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, just as he said.

            By Faith, Rebekah listened to the call of God.  By faith, Rebekah left her home for a long journey not knowing all that God had in store.  By faith, Rebekah acted radically on nothing more than the promise of God.  By faith, Rebekah birth two little boys and secure the birthright for the right one who would write the first chapter in God’s story of salvation, a story that would affect us all.

            Today, where is our faith?  In a God of limits, or a limitless God?  In a God who acts like we believe he should, or one who acts to get us to believe as we should?  It is a critical difference.  For one leads to the burden of always having to speak for God; the other leads to proclaiming some very Good News.  The Good News of a God who uses us all by whatever means available to reconcile us to himself, even the salvation of the whole world. And that my friends, is the Good News of Jesus Christ!  Thanks be to God! Amen.