(The readings for July 3 were from Genesis 24, Song of Solomon 2, Romans 7, and Matthew 11)
I remember, as a teenager, walking down the street behind my grandparents and noticing that they were holding hands and whispering to one another. They'd been married forty-something years at that point; they had three children and eight grandchildren and did everything together. So of course I knew that they loved one another, but that was the first time I realized that they were in love with each other. I hadn't known they shared such an abiding affection. Seeing this private exchange changed the way I thought about them - and about my family, and my own hope of love - forever.
Though it has a specific place in my grandparents' story, that image of a long-married couple holding hands is sort of iconic - it's the kind of thing love stories are made of, and we encounter scenes like it again and again when we talk about the great relationships we have known, or when we celebrate weddings and anniversaries. These narratives about what romantic love looks like - our love stories - actually do something for us: they show us what we want. We want to believe that people aren't randomly thrown together in time, but are meant to find one another. We want to believe that our relationships have a bigger purpose, or participate in something bigger than ourselves: Love, with a capital "L." And we want to believe that this kind of love is possible - for us, and for all people.
This sense of a greater meaning and purpose in love is all over the story of Isaac and Rebekah. In fact, what we're getting when we hear it today isn't even a straight-forward telling of their tale - it's the interpretive, hopeful re-telling of their story by Abraham's servant, who's just discovered Rebekah, wants to take her home to Isaac, and is blown out of the water by how all of the pieces have fallen into place so that these two people can come together exactly as they're supposed to.
Granted, this guy has a definite stake in the idea that Isaac and Rebekah are meant for one another. He's charged with finding a wife for his master's son, and since God has promised Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky, this nameless servant ends up being the trustee of untold generations. So he prays, asking God for more than a hint, more than a sign pointing him to the right woman - he asks for the right woman to walk up to him, wave her hands in front of his face, and shout, "It's me! I'm the one!" And according to the story, she does. Rebekah falls perfectly in line with the servant's vision before he's done visioning it, and everybody seems to agree that something promising - if not something special - is going on here.
If you think about the story of Isaac more broadly, you may recall that something like this has happened around him before. Last week, in fact, we heard about a time when he was a boy and his father, Abraham, was about to sacrifice him, when at the very last moment, a ram appeared on the scene, clearly provided by God to stand in for the beloved child. Rebekah's appearance has that same sense of redemptive promise, that same sense of divine provision, but with an important message about fulfillment. For when she gets close to the fields and sees Isaac walking toward her, we get another one of those iconic love story moments: Rebekah sees Isaac, Isaac meets Rebekah, and it's love at first sight. He takes her home, she becomes the matriarch of the family, and he loves her. Their relationship doesn't satisfy or propitiate anything - it isn't sacrificial. It's a constructive and positive sacrament of human love at the center of this ongoing biblical narrative. And as the story says, it was comforting, which in the language of the Bible doesn't mean that it was therapeutic - it means that it was strong and durable and protective, like a fort surrounding this primeval human family.
And if you know anything about this primeval human family, you know that they need something like a fort - they need all the help they can get. When we talk about pre-marital counseling, Ray always jokes about the geneagram, a sort of family tree where you use different shapes and symbols to track the things that happen in the life of a family system - which ends up being a lot of difficult things: deaths, separations, divorces, childlessness, or rifts between parents and children. If we were to do a geneagram for Abraham's family, I'm not even sure where we'd start ... how do you chart Hagar and Ishmael, a son and mother forced to leave their home and wander in the desert? How do you chart Isaac and Abraham with that ram? How do you chart Isaac's son Jacob deceiving his father and brother, or his sons selling their brother, Joseph, into slavery in Egypt? It all sounds really epic and terrible, but if we dig deeply into our own families, we find this-millennium versions of some of the same stuff. Alienation, betrayal, conflict, and death still wind themselves like a snake around the branches of our family trees, and disappointment is the fruit of many a relationship that hangs there, be it between siblings, parents and children, or life partners.
Which is why it matters that when we hear the story of Isaac and Rebekah today, thousands of years after it happened, this unambiguous picture of their love is preserved for us. For we receive it not merely as a love story, but as the story of our own people, the family through which God's blessing opens out onto the whole world: "in the calling of Israel to be a people, in the word spoken through the prophets, and above all in the word made flesh." The descendants of Isaac and Rebekah are Jacob and Joseph, but also Moses, David, and a man named Jesus who sends the roots and the canopy of this family tree shooting out into all the world, picking up all families and all relationships - drawing all of creation into the close of God's embrace, where at the center of things is included this simple, eternal testament to human relationship: "Rebekah became Isaac's wife, and he loved her."
That's not quite kismet - it's actually what we call redemption. And it justifies everything that our love stories tell us that we want to believe in: a sense of meaning and purpose, participation in something larger than ourselves, and the righteous belief that we can love and be loved despite any evidence to the contrary. God created in the power of love and we were created to love as the primary act of our existence. Creation continues by means of love and uses all kinds of human love to do its work. Believe in the love that God has for you and that you are due simply by virtue of being here; believe in the love that you are called to give; and remember that inscribed in the tale of your own human family, there is an ancient and endearing love story.
(This sermon was preached by Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, July 3, 2011)
