Karma

I've been reflecting on the Old Testament readings offered on Track 1 of the Revised Common Lectionary this summer, from Genesis. The reading for next Sunday can be found here.

The story of God’s people (and particularly the story of God’s encounters with Abraham, Rebecca, and Jacob and their families) is a story not so different from our own lives. It unfolds in chapters about birth and marriage and death and all the stuff in between. Sometimes it reads like a soap opera or reality show because sometimes life is like a soap opera or a reality show. Truth is often stranger than fiction. The Bible doesn't sugar coat much. It's not interested in a sanitized version, even if preachers are tempted to move the narratives in that directions. Rather, it's interested in the very real challenges of being human and that includes being "family." I've joked more than once when a parish describes themselves as "just like a family" to assign them to a year-long Bible study in Genesis and then report back!

This first scroll of the Torah includes the sibling rivalries and generational conflicts that all families must navigate. It lays it all out there. We have been reading and hearing about this crazy family since the first Sunday in June, so perhaps it's time for a quick review...

It all began with Abraham and Sarah, back on the weekend of June 7. Previously (in readings we did not get this summer because of the timing of Easter, and therefore Pentecost) God had called them to leave behind their old country and set out for a new land, a Promised Land. God also promised Abraham a heritage, that he will be the father of many nations. We picked it up at the oaks of Mamre in chapter eighteen.

And so the story has continued to unfold, week after week as we have moved from generation to generation, like looking through an old photo album and telling the stories that go with those snapshots. After the miraculous birth of Isaac in Abraham and Sarah’s old age, the casting away of Hagar and Ishmael, the testing of Abraham on Mount Moriah, Isaac's marriage to Rebecca, and the birth of their twin sons, Esau and Jacob we get to where we are today.

If we hear today's portion of the story in isolation, as if nothing has happened before and nothing will happen afterwards, then we might find ourselves saying, “poor Jacob.” He falls in love with a beautiful girl and agrees to work seven years for her hand in marriage. He shakes hands on it with the father-of-the-bride (who also happens to be his mother’s brother.) But Uncle Laban tricks him. His uncle makes a last minute switch on the wedding day and instead of Rachel, Jacob finds himself married to Leah. The narrator is ridiculously direct: the marriage feast happens, there is apparently lots of drinking involved as often happens at weddings, the marriage is consummated and then this simple declarative statement: “when morning came, it was Leah!”

The best thing the narrator can think to tell us about this older sister is…well, she had nice eyes.

Jacob has been tricked! Poor Jacob! Unless you’ve been paying attention to the narrative. Then you will recall how he came to be at his uncle’s house looking for love in the first place. His old man, Isaac, was on his deathbed. Jacob the heel grabber (born just after his brother, Esau) who tricked his hungry older brother to give up his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup gets his father to bless him while Esau is out hunting to fulfill his dying father's last request.

Yes, that Jacob is now tricked by his mother's brother. Isn't karma a bitch? 

 Jacob has reaped what he previously sowed and I think we are meant to have a good laugh about that. "What goes around, comes around.” He’s really not a bad guy. In fact, I think he’s quite likable because he is so real, so imperfect, so human. So much like us. Even so, the trickster has been tricked. If we were encouraged to laugh more in church when we hear these old stories read we'd have a good laugh over this one. It’s as if the narrator is winking at us and saying, “you see…you can’t run away forever. Sooner or later your past catches up with you. And the only real question is this: what will you do when it does?”

Ironically, maybe it is precisely in having an uncle like Laban that Jacob’s salvation lies. Because Jacob and his uncle really are two peas in a pod. (Remember that Jacob was and is his mother's favorite. He clearly takes after her side of the family.) Rebecca's brother and son deserve each other and there is a certain kind of grace in all of this because in spite of it all these are God’s people, just as we are God’s people. The stuff of their lives and ours—the good, the bad, and the ugly—that is where God will hunt us down. And that is where we will find God. Not in some distant heaven far away but taking on flesh, Incarnate; among and in and through us.

So in today’s Old Testament reading, Jacob gets a glimpse of how his father and barely-older brother must have felt when they got tricked, because now he is on the other side of all that. When morning came, it was Leah.

Here is the thing: Jacob can now choose how to react to that. He can become bitter or resentful, seek revenge or turn to alcohol to numb the pain. Or he can take that experience as an opportunity for growth and self-realization that brings healing and new life. We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see where this is all going (just as in our own lives we have to wait to see how it turns out after the wedding or the baptism or dropping our kid off at college, or the kid dropping out of college, or celebrating a retirement or gathering with aunts and uncles and cousins we haven’t seen in years for a funeral.) We should simply notice that time has marched on in this narrative for Jacob and there will be more to come. Fourteen years, and two wives later, he's had a lot of time to think about home. And the family he's left behind. 

As the rest of the summer continues to unfold, we will continue to attention to this crazy family because we profess that in so doing we may catch a glimpse of ourselves. And that when that happens there is good news not too far away, good news about the God of this whole lot: Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Rebecca, Esau and Jacob and Leah and Rachel. This God who has promised us a heritage as well, the God who has claimed us and marked us and loves us into new and abundant life.