- Sermon - Mickey Anders

Text: Genesis 29:15-28

I have only read about the HBO series entitled, "Big Love," but it is a fit story for today's sermon. The show, set in Salt Lake City, follows the life of Bill Hendrickson, a modern-day polygamist who has three wives and seven children.

Bill’s wives include Barb, whom he married first. She is the mother of the two oldest children, who are teenagers, and one of the younger kids. Bill’s second wife is Nicki. She is a spender who is always fracturing the family budget. Bill’s third wife is Margene, who is the youngest and is the least inhibited of the three women, which adds its own tensions to the family dynamic.

Each of the sister-wives, as they call themselves, has a different personality, different dreams, different needs and different demands. And, of course, Bill has his own dreams and expectations as well. While they all attempt to work together as a family, there is often conflict, jealousy, sniping and a ton of problems.

Each wife has her own house, side by side on the same street, and the family members roam freely from one to the other. Each wife has her own car, and Bill has a car as well. Bill owns a chain of home supply stores, but the cost of keeping all this real estate and these vehicles going, coupled with the normal costs involved with a family of 11, is enormous, and Bill is constantly worried about money.

One commentator observed about the show, "If you’ve ever had any thought of living in a multiple-spouse arrangement, despite its illegality, this TV show will cure you of it."

We could say the same thing about today's study of the life of Jacob. His was not a life to envy.

In our last episode, Jacob had a vision in the night while he was on his way to the land of his mother to find a wife. He had a vision of a ladder ascending up to heaven, and then God renewed the promise to him. Today's Scripture describes the plot twists and turns as Jacob arrives at the land where his mother grew up and then winds up with two wives and two mistresses.

Jacob has quickly selected the woman he wants as a wife, the beautiful younger daughter of his Uncle Laban. But Laban shows us that he can be as tricky and deceitful as Jacob has been. The local customs require that the oldest daughter marry before the youngest can be given in marriage. Jacob appears to be unaware of this local preference for the oldest daughter, and this time the local custom traps Jacob into 14 years of work. Laban cunningly sends Leah to Jacob's tent on the wedding night. He wakes up and finds Leah there, and it's too late to change anything!

Laban could have and should have told Jacob about this custom, but he didn't. Perhaps he was thinking that he might have trouble pawning off this not-so-attractive older daughter on a suitor. The Bible describes Leah with a comment about her eyes, but the Hebrew is uncertain and some translations use the word "lovely" and others use the word "weak."

Verse 17 says, "Leah's eyes were (lovely/weak), and Rachel was graceful and beautiful." It seems to me that the natural translation would be to contrast Leah's appearance with the "graceful and beautiful" appearance of Rachel.

I suspect that Leah was not an attractive woman, and may have had something seriously wrong in the appearance of her eyes. Perhaps she was cross-eyed, perhaps she had very poor vision in a time without glasses. Something like this seems to be the best way for me to understand her situation.

Notice carefully the conversation in which the deal was made.

29:18 Jacob loved Rachel; so he said, "I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel."

29:19 Laban said, "It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me."

Laban must have been a lot like President Clinton in the careful parsing of his words. Clinton will forever be famous for his line, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

When Jacob came back to ask him about this commitment, he must have replied, "It depends on what the meaning of 'her' is. I said, 'It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man.' I never said I which daughter I was giving you."

It is such poetic justice. In this story, we find a significant theme of reversal of fortunes. Or as some say, "What goes around comes around." Or some might say, "Jacob gets a taste of his own medicine."

What Jacob had been giving, now he is receiving. Jacob should have learned from this experience that evil actions bear bitter fruit. The story is one of great irony, for Jacob has twice subverted the accepted preference for the oldest child in regard to his own brother.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Whenever people plan to deceive another and profit from another's weakness, they cast themselves on the scales of a just and righteous God, and will be weighed in the balance and found wanting. When you cheat another, you live in a world of deception and false promises that will come back to haunt you.

Victims??? Who is the victim here?

Jacob is obviously the first, and perhaps most obvious, victim. He has been tricked by Laban. It sounds hard enough to work seven years for a wife, but then he has to work an additional seven years. The trickster got tricked.

But there are other victims in this story, pawns who have very little control over what happens.

Perhaps we should feel for poor Leah, the unloved wife. Here she was, always in the shadow of her beautiful younger sister. The world of a beautiful woman is radically different from the world of an ugly woman. Everyone must have responded to the two girls just like Jacob did - instantly attracted to Rachel, and instantly repelled by Leah. She must have yearned for someone to look beyond physical beauty and discover and accept the person she was. No doubt, she dreamed of a good man who would come to say, "I don't care about your eyes. You are still beautiful to me, and I love you." But because of this deal brokered by her father, she would spend the rest of her life with a man who did not love her and did not want to marry her in the first place.

Even God knew that Jacob did not love Leah. Verse 31 says, "When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren."

Now here's a tragic story of a woman who was unloved her entire life. But the Bible makes it clear that God understood her plight and had compassion on her. He granted that she would have many children.

And one of the most remarkable aspects of this story is that Leah was the Mother of Promise. For it was through her son Judah, that that the family lineage would trace directly to King David and ultimately to Jesus.

Rachel, too, is a victim here. Both she and her sister hardly have anything to say at all about this marriage arrangement. Their lives are all arranged for them. What must it do to someone to be seen like property to be used as the father wills? One wonders how Rachel felt?

While it must have been flattering for Jacob to be so in love with her that he would work 14 years for her hand in marriage, her life certainly did not turn out the way she had expected. With all her grace and beauty, she expected to have a happy and prosperous life. But suddenly she finds herself as the second wife in this marriage. She is clearly the beloved wife, but she certainly never planned to have a marriage of three people. Then she suffers the added pain of not being able to have children while her sister was having kids right and left. Finally, in her frustration she sends her servant in to lie with Jacob so that she could have a child by proxy. Then Leah responds by sending her servant in to lie with Jacob!

At this point we realize this family is like those that appear on the Jerry Springer show! Can you imagine the introduction? Our next speaker is Jacob who fathered thirteen children, only two came from the wife he loved. He also was married to a woman he hated, and bore eleven children by her and two servants girls. He clearly showed favoritism for his son Joseph by giving him a coat of many colors.

I often find myself wondering why the Bible tells such racy tales as the one in our passage for today. Why was the great patriarch, the one whose name would be changed to "Israel" so clearly described as a man who had children by four different women? Why couldn't he have been a more moral and upright example?

Instead we read about the tragic dysfunction of many of the families of the patriarchs. After last week's sermon, Elise Wallace told me of a colleague who often said, "Now that family puts the fun in dysfunction!"

I am struck by the fact that these patriarchs would likely be thrown out of most contemporary churches. They clearly would not have been popular speakers at a Promise Keepers rally. They would not be allowed to serve as deacons in most churches today, much less allowed to serve as pastors. Why in the world are they lifted up as the patriarchs of God's special people?

We can learn from this passage that God doesn't work only with perfect people. The fact that God works with Jacob, with all of his conflicting pushes and drives and struggles, is a sign of hope that God actually works with human beings like us.

I think this story points out that you don't have to get rid of family conflicts before God's purposes can be worked out. In fact, we can identify with these people because it is precisely in the messy parts of our lives that God's purposes are worked out.

In the Talmud there is a tale about Rabbi Yoshua ben Levi who comes upon Elijah the prophet while he was standing at the entrance of another rabbi’s cave. He asked Elijah, "When will the Messiah come?"

Elijah replied, "Go ask him yourself."

"Where is he?"

"Sitting at the gates of the city."

"How will I know him?"

"He is sitting among the poor covered with wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed: if so I must be ready so as not to delay for a moment.’"

Henri Nouwen wrote the book "the Wounded Healer."

That certainly seems to be the strategy God used with all these dysfunctional families in Genesis. Most of these families had glaring faults about them, but God chose to use them anyway. Even with such faulty patriarchs, God began His work of revelation, which finally led to the ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ.