Always thanking God Jacob Part 4

What do you do when you can’t get along with the inlaws?  This is no facetious question.  In the October Broadview magazine there is an article of the high cost people experience when they are estranged from their families.  Jacob became estranged from two different families in his life.  The first was his birth family after he cheated Esau and Isaac, his brother and his dad.  The second was his father-in-law Laban.  Modern readers might say that turnabout is fair play, for Jacob, the con artist, learned the hard way that it’s not fun to be conned.  

He had trusted that his father-in-law would treat him fairly, which surprises me, given how his wedding day went.  For those of you who missed last week, Jacob planned to marry Rachel, but Laban switched brides on the wedding night and Jacob got Leah instead.  It sounds like a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.  And we don’t know Laban’s side of things.  Was he intimidated by this strapping young man who impressed the neighbors with his care of the livestock?  Did he notice that Jacob was able to breed sheep to whatever color was needed?  Was he impressed that Jacob was able to keep four women happy (there’s that biblical marriage from last week!) and have 11 sons?

We don’t know.  We do know that Jacob got fed up with all the shenanigans, and lost trust in Laban.  He realized that it wasn’t fun dealing with someone who would trick him at the drop of a hat whenever he felt like it.  He also recognized that even though they were family, the disrespect he was experiencing from Laban and his sons was getting to the point where he was worried about being accused of theft of the livestock.  In the bits we didn’t read, after Laban stole the speckled and spotted livestock, Jacob carefully selected what stock he would breed, and rebuilt the herd Laban had stolen. 

He ended up with a sizable striped and spotted herd and gave all the credit to God.  He wasn’t happy with what Laban did, but he was faithful to God and did not use trickery to get even with Laban.

Jacob’s resolve to play fair must have been sorely tested by all this.  He had, after all, been used to getting his own way as a child and choosing the straight and narrow is not easy.  He kept to his resolve to honor God, to trust in God and to play fair.  Be trustworthy.  Keep being thankful.

But he did something even more astonishing, certainly something that his father and his grandfather didn’t do.  He asked his wives for their opinions.  Up until now, women weren’t consulted about anything.  Sarah hadn’t had any say in where she would live when Abraham was wandering around from place to place, and Rebekah hadn’t even seen Isaac she was going to marry, only his wealth.  Jacob asked his wives what they thought before he made a final decision.  He respected their opinion and knew it would be difficult to leave their father and brothers for a one-way trip to a strange land.  They were ready to go.  They recognized that their father had seen them as only a bargaining chip, and not as humans in relation with them.  They were tired of being treated with disrespect and they were not averse to leaving his shenanigans behind.  No more wheeling and dealing in their households.  Or almost – but you’ll have to read the next chapter yourselves to see what trick one daughter pulled on her dad.

Giving thanks when we are facing family estrangement or broken trust or hurtful relationships is not easy.  Some days we must walk away from unhealthy behaviors.  I am very proud of your church council who set a goal of Zero tolerance for negativity, gossip, triangulation and unhealthy communication patterns. 

Tim McKenna suggested that “We encourage optimistic, positive attitudes and communication styles so that we all have fun and live longer.”  Jacob would have agreed with that idea.

Being thankful at all times was brought home to me by a speech I heard this Wednesday at Toastmasters.  Alfred Beaver shared a story with us that had us all thinking.  He gave me permission to share that story here today.  Alfred had a brother, named Archie, who was born with a unusually large head.  The doctor suggested that the baby be taken to Edmonton to live in a hospital or group home of some sort and said that the baby probably would not live to see his first birthday.  Archie was never able to walk, but he was able to talk and lived into his twenties, despite medical predictions to the contrary.  Every year Alfred’s dad would hold a feast on Archie’s birthday, in gratitude to the Creator for Archie’s life.  When Archie was starting to fail, the family was summoned to his bed.  Archie told Alfred, “you can walk, you can talk, you have two good hands and two good feet.  You can leave this room and go wherever you want.  I have never left this bed my whole life, and I am thankful for my life and my family who care for me.  And yet I have never heard you say, “I am thankful for what I can do.”  Archie died shortly after that visit, and Alfred never forgot those words.  Their dad continued to hold a feast on Archie’s birthday in thanksgiving for the life and the wisdom of his son.

So what are we thankful for?  How can we say thank you?  May we find ways this busy weekend to stop and be thankful for our hands and feet, our wise friends, our trustworthy family members, and our God who loves us no matter what.

Biblical Marriage? Jacob part 3

I love doing weddings! Some ministers don’t, but I  get to bless couples in a deeply real, meaningful way.  But I would have hated to deal with Jacob’s wedding.  Is this what people mean when they talk about ‘biblical marriage’?

We hear stories all the time about bridezillas or dictatorial mothers, but here we have the father of the bride deceiving his son in law in a nasty, underhanded manner.  Some folks might say it serves Jacob right as he was a nasty trickster himself, stealing the inheritance from his twin brother Esau.  But two wrongs don’t make a right. And maybe there is more to this story that can be applied to our lives in meaningful ways.

One tool that is helpful in understanding family patterns is to make a genealogy family tree.  Family backgrounds and behavior patterns can impact a new couple’s life together, especially if they are not aware of it.  So if Jacob and Rachel came to me for marriage prep, they would have to draw their family tree.  It’s quite complicated.  Abraham has several brothers and at least one half sister, which he marries.  That may seem shocking to our modern ears, but remember that Egypt, the biggest super power of Jacob’s time, was ruled by dynasties of pharaohs who were descendants of the Gods and rather than dilute the sacred DNA, the Pharaohs often married their sisters or half-sisters.  They didn’t understand the dangers of inbreeding any better than the royal families of Europe 200 years ago who spread hemophilia to most of their descendants.

So Jacob’s family tree starts with Abraham.  Interesting aside is that this family unlike many ruling families of the time, did not claim direct descent from God or multiple gods the way the families in Greece, Rome and Egypt did.  No, they recognized that God created them like God created many people and did not claim special status over other people.

There are three brothers in Abraham’s family and at least one half sister.  Abraham leaves home to make his own fortune in the world, suggesting that he was not the first-born going to inherit Terah’s business.  He struggles to have children – Lot is his heir, son of his brother Haran.  Abram’s first born is Ishmael, whose mother was a surrogate mother for Sarah.  There’s no sense of whether Hagar consented to this or not.  Sarah finally has Abraham’s second child Isaac, and bullies her husband into sending Hagar and Ishmael away so that Isaac has no competition for the inheritance.  Isaac is also treated badly by his wife who tricks him into blessing Jacob instead of Esau.  A pattern of disrupting the status quo of the eldest son for the youngest is established in this family.  Rebecca, Isaac’s wife is the granddaughter of Nahor, the other brother of Abraham.  More inbreeding.  And Jacob is sent to find a wife from his mother’s brother, a great-grandson of Terah marrying a great-great granddaughter of Terah.  Yikes!

Convoluted and complicated.  Now, biblical marriage four thousand years ago did not say this was the ideal relationship or that everyone should have multiple wives or play favorites amongst their kids.  But this does show a realization that marriage could be more than just a business deal which is what Rebecca and Isaac’s seemed to be, but men falling in love!  No word about what the women felt at all, although when you read on, they are quite competitive for Jacob’s favors.  They are still determined to do their wifely duty of providing children for the tribe, something else quite foreign to our modern minds.

So these stories may be of biblical marriage, but they are primarily focused on the biological survival of the family.  But there’s another view of biblical marriage, that of a relationship that is modelled on the relationship between God and Jerusalem, God and the Hebrew people, and in our New Testament, Jesus and the church.  It sees marriage as the building block for a heavenly and holy relationship.  A relationship filled with the fruits of the Spirit – love, hope, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.  That’s a biblical marriage too, and we don’t have to be married to work on these fruits of the spirit.

I’d like to challenge you all to do your family tree and look for patterns – do you come from a family of tricksters or a family that plays favorites, or some other pattern?  Are you bringing these patterns into your current friendships or relationships?  Are you ready to challenge the negative patterns to aim for a more spiritual focus?

Jacob, visiting his relatives, discovered that it wasn’t so nice to be on the receiving end of a trick.  He may have thought, ‘oh, so that’s why mother always did this’ and similar ah-ha moments.  This visit would help him unlearn the pattern and be aware of it.  He decided with God’s help to stop being a conman and start orienting his life around God.  And we can remember that when someone says ‘I believe in Biblical marriages’ that there are many kinds of biblical marriages that we don’t tolerate in today’s society, but marriages based on love, peace and kindness are cherished in God’s community.

Con Artist? Jacob part 2

In high school I had a classmate who was a real smooth-talking charmer.  He could be the kindest and most cheerful kid in the school at times, but at other times he had a real difficulty knowing who to listen to and often chose the wrong person.  Sometimes the wrong person to listen to was himself.

Now in Grade 10 Chemistry class, one of our labs included using sulphuric acid and common, everyday sugar.  It seemed harmless enough back in the seventies, and my teacher had walked many students through the lab quite carefully and successfully.

The idea was to take a small amount of sulphuric acid, which the teacher had warned us considerably about proper handling procedures, dilute it with so much water, then gently add a few drops at a time of the solution to a teaspoon of sugar in a glass beaker.  We were also warned not to put our faces over the beaker, and to have our gloves, lab coats and safety goggles on when we did so.  Pretty straightforward, right?

Except that my classmate decided to see something dramatic.  While the teacher monitored the careful students who were quite impressed with the result, a beaker full of what looked like two cups of molten lava, my classmate decided to use a cupful of sugar and why bother diluting the acid, right, bigger bang for the buck and all that.

Well, the sulphuric acid hit the sugar with great gusto.  One minute everything was peaceful, the next there was a bubbling gurgle like the loudest upset stomach in the world and whoosh!  The foaming, fuming concoction turned into a geyser foaming ever upward, so high that the last time I was there, you could still see the brown spots where it indelibly stained one of the tiles!

Not only that, but this was sulphuric acid, right? So you can imagine the effects of that much sulphur released into the air at that speed.  I have never seen my teacher move so fast, opening the windows, cranking up the fans and the fume cupboard as high as it would go, and despite it being a cold day, with snow on the ground, we opened the emergency room door to the outside and took turns sticking our heads out until we got cold.  And of course the sulphur experiment made us popular with the rest of the school.  Kindergarten to 12 if I remember correctly, and everyone had always known when the chemistry class was using sulphuric acid. 

It became an experiment that the teacher demonstrated after that.  And the teacher could have labelled the kid a trouble-maker that would never amount to much.  Except that the boy was such a good sport, truly embarrassed by the result of his testing, and both the teacher and the student had a good sense of humour.  We all learned a lot about listening to the right voice, and careful experimentation with dangerous substances.  For the most part anyway.

I wonder if Jacob was like my friend.  Listening to the wrong person at the wrong time.  When I heard this story in Sunday school as a kid, I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Esau, who seemed to get a raw deal, or to be cheering Jacob on as a clever lad who fooled a grown up.

Now I tend to read it as a family tragedy, mother and father taking sides, having favourites.  I didn’t notice as a child how much Rebekah got involved in the whole scheme.  Now as a mother of grown children, I shudder at this messy situation.  Like Lady Macbeth egging on her husband to a dark deed and going mad because of it, Rebekah didn’t realize that she had pushed one son into considering murdering the other.  Murder was punishable by exile or worse, and so she had lost both her sons in her scheming.

Jacob lost any trust and reputation and relationship he may have had with his father.  He also had pulled one too many tricks on his brother, stealing not just Esau’s inheritance but also his role as future leader of the tribe.  If you look carefully at Isaac’s blessing, it was about leadership as well as a relationship with God, and people don’t respect someone who can be fooled.  The old saying, ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ was as true then as now.

One also wonders why Isaac left it so late to transfer his leadership to his son, waiting until he couldn’t see well or go outside in the fresh air.  Was he like his eldest son, not a good leader who would plan for the future or what was best for his family?  Was that why Rebekah forced the issue?  Could she have been considering what life would be like if she had to depend on Esau for her old age?  We don’t know.  We do know that this family was a messy bit of chemistry and one day there was too much acid poured on the sugar and phoom!  A messy explosion changed the world.

Why is this important to us today?  I think it helps to remember that this was the scripture that Jesus grew up hearing, and may have been partly the inspiration for the prodigal son and the story of the people hired for the vineyard harvest, and his famous saying, ‘the last will become the first and the first will become the last’.  Jesus reminds us that we may not have the most peaceful of lives, but that God cares about us even in our messy lives.  And this is not the end of the story.  Even in a disastrous and stinky situation like this, God is the one who will have the last word, one of healing and reconciliation.  To God, chemical reactions and con artists alike can be redeemed, and God is there in our messiness with healing love.  May you find that love in your lives in the messy times and the good.  Amen.

Grabbing on tight - Jacob part 1

Welcome to the story of Jacob!  How many of you have read his story in the bible?  He is quite the character, called grabber of heals.  I can’t imagine growing up with that as a name.  It would be like calling a baby ‘greedy guts’ or ‘take what he can get’.  What parent would name their kids such bad names. And his brother’s name was a little better, hairy red man.  At least that was descriptive of his physical personality, and not an assumption of personality traits.

I’m sure you’ve heard of self-fulfilling prophecies, how if you tell a kid they are bad or stupid or selfish often enough, they will start to believe it and live it out.  When I was studying to be a teacher, there was a case we studied where a teacher was handed the class list of students names and a number beside each, one was 85, another 92, 110, etc.  The teacher assumed it was the students’ iq scores and sure enough at the end of the year, the students with the higher numbers did better in class than the students with lower numbers.  Except when the teacher commented on the correlation between the students’ iq’s and their marks to the school adminstrator, the administrator corrected the teacher, “that’s not their IQ scores, that’s their locker numbers!”

So is Jacob a heel because he was named that way, or because his personality was such that the parents assumed he would always be grabbing after more than his share?  Is it nature or nurture?

This little tale of two brothers is further complicated by the fact that we don’t know what a ‘birthright’ is or why it’s so important.  Why would someone try to cheat a brother out of that?  Well, birthrights predated the practise of writing wills.  The tradition of the day was that the firstborn child would inherit automatically through their right by being born first, to two thirds of the father’s will. 

Scholars have no idea where this two-thirds rule came from, or what happened when there were more than two male children  - did more children get increasingly smaller amounts or even nothing at all?  It wouldn’t help much if the parents weren’t agreeing either, which sounds like what was happening here, Rebekkah preferred Jacob, the quiet one while Isaac like his red-haired hunter boy.  Such blatant favoritism would not be healthy back then any more than it is healthy today.

Some scholars think that this was an imaginative retelling of the primitive humanity struggling to transition from hunters and gatherers to agrarians and farmers, from nomads to settlers.  Others think it was about a community’s folk hero ancestor, like an early brer Rabbit or trickster figure.  But whatever theory we use, this is a memorable story.   

The good twin vs the evil twin is a common theme.  Even in the world of comics, we have Thor and Loki, one big and brawny, one clever and scheming.  And how many times have soap operas explored the theme of twins?  I have experienced my fair share of hearing stories of children squabbling over estates and wills, arguing over who gets what before the funeral is even over.  I’ll never forget the ugly scene of one of my first funerals, a big family where the last kids in the family were twins.  Back even in the 1940’s and 50’s, twins were seen as challenging.  If it was a big family, one twin might stay at home and the other twin might be raised by a brother or sister or cousin or other member of the family who could afford to take the second one on.  In this particular family, the resultant adoption of one of the twins led her to grow up feeling abandoned, not good enough and even rejected by her family of origin.  The ostracized twin struggled so much with the feelings of betrayal and abandonment that she didn’t know how to relate healthily with her twin.

It was so bad that before the funeral lunch was over, her daughter and aunt raced to the bank to try to clean out her account before the other person could arrive.

How ugly is that? Not much uglier than one brother bargaining for his dad’s wealth with another brother over a simple bean porridge, as Jacob did to Esau.  And Esau, founder of a rival tribe that would often compete with the Hebrew people over land, was not portrayed flatteringly.  Who would give away two thirds of their inheritance simply because they were hungry and didn’t have the self-discipline or patience to make some supper for themselves?  What a silly and impulsive thing to do.  What a human thing to do.

Greed destroys families and couples, communities and friendships.  Grabbing after more than your share can make you look like a heel.  Assuming that one person is bad and another is good is also a problem that can have terrible consequences.  And yet we see it happen often around us.  We may even have it happen to us or think we deserve more than our fair share of something.  We can give all kinds of excuses, like the rich farmer hoping to hoard too much of the crop one year.  It may be money or simple things, like my own personal temptation, more yarn than I can knit in a lifetime.  Or more books than I can ever read and so on.

What are we really needing to grab on to hard?  As the foolish farmer story suggests, we need to grab hard onto God’s vision for us, grab hard onto our faith and trust in God.  When we live lives based in fear of losing out, of not getting our fair share, of assuming we are the good twin and everyone else is bad, we can destroy families, and friendships.  But when we live as if God is real, and as if there is enough to go around, we may be able to live lives of peace with one another in ways that inspire all who know us.