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Sunday July 3, 2005 - Proper 9, Year A

Tomorrow is the fourth of July, one of those days in history
when more than the average number of major events happened.
On this day, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ann Landers were born;
on this day Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Eva Gabor died. On this day in 1802, the Military Academy at West Point opened, in 1827 slavery was abolished in New York, in 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published, and in 1934 Leo Szilard patented the chain-reaction design for the atomic bomb.

But of course the things we remember the most, the reason we have a holiday tomorrow, is that on this day
in 1776, twelve colonies that formed Congress voted for the adoption of the text of the Declaration of Independence, and sent a copy
to the printers.
With that, the United States of America
became independent,
a country in its own right.
And so we celebrate every fourth of July, looking back with pride over the history of this country,
thanking God
for the many blessings it has been given.

I sometimes wonder what is so important about holidays like this. After all, most of us have at least one day off work each week, so while having an extra one is nice, it’s not something totally unknown to us. And while it’s fun to have cookouts and fireworks, there has to be more to this. Why is the fourth of July
such an important day
not only in our minds
but in our hearts?

Part of the answer is that it’s tradition. It’s how we were brought up, and so it’s one of those good, those magical, things
that carry over from our childhoods. But I think it’s also because it’s about history
and as much as we might have hated learning all those dates
history is important to us.
It tells us about where we have come from
and something about who we are. It gives perspective to our lives,
and builds connections between who we are today
and the people who have gone before us.
When we celebrate the fourth of July
we celebrate not just a particular event in history,
but all that has gone into making this country what it is today,
and all that has gone into making us
who we are.

And what is interesting about this process of celebrating our history
is that there are some events
that we choose to celebrate
and others that we choose to ignore.
Sometimes we ignore them because they simply aren’t important to the vast majority of people. We have holidays to celebrate the deaths of certain presidents, but we’re not likely to add a holiday to celebrate the death of our grandparents — most of them just famous enough.
Other times we ignore them because they are things we would prefer not to remember, days where our ancestors did things
that were less than commendable.
But we always make decisions
about what is important
and what is not, what is worth remembering and marking publicly
and what is not.
We look back, we evaluate, we bring all the benefits of hindsight to bear,
and we learn from our history.

Today in our Old Testament
we have another one of the stories from that great period of the history of Israel, the time of the patriarchs. The 40 or so chapters in the book of Genesis
that tell about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel and Leah, and about their dealings with God. Sometimes it’s obvious why the stories were chosen,
other times
we wonder what they were thinking
to include these stories
in the great celebrations of their history
the great celebrations
of their faith.

And today’s story
is one of the latter sort.
The story of Abraham’s servant
heading off to find a wife for Isaac
is not exactly something
that we would normally choose
as worthy of celebrating, worthy of remembering over thousands of years. It’s a family story, a kind of domestic detail that’s interesting in itself
if you happen to be descended from them — and I guess that makes it worth having in the Old Testament, the word of God for the Jewish people
who were in fact descended from Isaac and that carefully selected wife —
but for the rest of us
it really doesn’t seem particularly important.
So why bother reading it? Why bother paying attention?
Especially because
to our ears today
this story of how to go about an arranged marriage
is not exactly edifying.
And it’s not even as if in this story
God even shows up. The servant does a lot of talking about God,
but as far as we can tell
everything that happens
happens more or less by chance.

So what’s the use of reading this today? Why bother? And has all this got anything to do with the Fourth of July?

Well, let me promise that I will come back to the fourth, after we’ve spent a little more time exploring the reading from Genesis. And you probably know me well enough
to know what I’m going to say next.
It’s worth reading this story. It’s an important part of our history, an important part of our faith. Because what it does
is tells us about God — not obviously, clearly, but kind of obliquely.

Abraham
is getting worried. His son Isaac
is getting to the age
where he should be getting married
and Abraham
is getting too old to supervise the process. He doesn’t want Isaac to marry a local girl
but to find someone from his own tribe. Today we would probably call it racism;
then
it was tradition.
And so Abraham sends his trusted servant
back to his homeland
to find a wife for Isaac.
The servant panics. What if he can’t find someone who’s willing to leave her family behind? What if the only one he can find is ugly or lazy or not a very nice person. What he comes up with someone, takes her all the way back to Isaac, and he doesn’t like her?

So he comes up with a plan
on the long journey back home, he comes up with a plan, and tries to bargain with God
so that it will happen.
The theory is, if he goes to the well, and as was the custom, a young woman comes to get water for her household, and he asks her for some water for himself and his camels, and she offers it, then she will be the one.
It sounds kind of superstitious to us, but it was actually common sense. If she comes to draw water, she’s hardworking — important if you live on the land — and if she offers him water, she’s generous as well.

And so he goes to the well, and everything happens as he had hoped. He meets a young woman, she offers him water, and he heads home after her to ask her family for her hand in marriage for Isaac. As it happens, she’s a distant relative of Abraham, and her family is happy enough with the idea of her marrying her cousin, as long as she agrees — and next thing we know, she’s heading off with the servant, ready to meet her new husband, and they all live happily ever after. It’s not how we would do it, but it works.

But that’s hardly justification for including it in scripture. A nice, generous young woman, a string of coincidences, but not a whole lot more. And that’s probably pretty much how it felt at the time.

Except that in hindsight, we can see that there was more to it than that. Remember the promise made to Abraham, that he would be the father of a great nations? For that to happen, not only did he need a son, but that son needed to have children, and they in turn. And so a lot depended
on finding this wife
for Isaac.

And in hindsight
what we see
is that God keeps his promise. It’s nothing dramatic this time, no late in life pregnancy, no surprise visitations from angels. This time
God works his plan not by mighty miracles
but by gently molding and shaping the hearts and wills of people, people like you and me, who are doing their best to be faithful to God.

You see, what’s important about this story
is precisely that
God doesn’t show up, at least not publicly. But that doesn’t mean
that God is not at work. God is at work, but it’s the behind the scenes kind of work
that we often miss, unless we are paying real close attention, listening for God whispering through circumstances and through people’s lives. Much as we would prefer it
if God were to act in dramatic, spectacular, ways
what God does most often
is work through gentle promptings. Human beings take action, looking to God
to lead them, to confirm them, to strengthen them.
That’s what happened for Abraham’s servant and for the young woman Rebekah and for Isaac,
it’s what still happens today.

So I promised you I’d get back to the fourth of July. What’s all this got to do with that?

This holiday is a time
when we look back over our history, remembering the many great things that have made our country what it is today. And it’s a time
when we look around us and celebrate who we are and what we have become.
But the story we read today
invites us to do that looking
with the eyes of faith. To look over our history, and see where it is
that God has been at work, where it is
that God has been leading us. If we do that
we will find wonderful examples of the quiet, gentle promptings of God.
But we will also, if we’re really honest with ourselves, find examples where we failed God, where we made wrong decisions which have shaped our nation in negative ways. Hindsight
is valuable — not to place blame, but to learn for the future.
And the story we read today
invites us to pay attention in the present
to the leading of God. To not just look for momentous miracles,
but to be open to the quiet leadings of God
shaping us
and our nation
in the everyday things of life. That’s what faith is all about. Learning to be open to God, to trust God for the future, not blindly,
but with all the knowledge and wisdom we have inherited from the past,
being ready to find God
in the mundane events of our lives
and the ordinary people
that we know and love.

And the story today, above all else, invites us to be thankful. For the many blessings we have received, individually and as a nation,
for the good things and the wonderful places God has led us,
and most of all, for a God that we can trust
to lead us and guide us and go with us
from this day on and forever.

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2005