The concept of the TV show My Name Is Earl and karma seem to inhabit this passage. The seven years seemed a few days could be a similarity in Hebrew so seven years seemed like seven days. Any6way, isn’t it a beautiful way to speak of time’s passage when in love? Since it seems quick, I don’t know if this is an exercise fo patience or not.

Leah’s eyes could be weak, nearsighted, or maybe light in color or delicate. It is clear Rachel is a babe. The whole deception with Leah is confusing, but I take it that Jacob is being paid back for deceiving his father, but it is not clear tome how much either ofthem is being deceived. Now Laban will not allow the younger to less in status than the elder, although that is Jacob’s destiny. Jacob hasn’t learned about favoritism in his own family, as he favors Rachel God uses fertility as a possible weapon now. All the births will not melt Jacob’s heart, as the names attest. This is a great example of hwo we may use children for ulterior reasons, or vicarious ones. It is a good example fo drawing others into alliance when we are displeased with the treatment we receive but don’t go to face to face resolution.

Reuben=see, a son but she links it to Jacob

Simeon=being heard (shema) linked to being hated

Levi=has a sense of joining (lawah) her husband, no relation to God

Judah’s name is for praising God, but it has no mention of the husband

Last week we just touched on the sower and the seed falling into different types of soil. Weeds, the cares of the world, choked off one batch of seed. Jesus now continues the image a field assaulted by a seeding of weeds. Who would plant weeds in someone’s field? In our time, weeds could be a computer virus from outside. Weeds planted from within will sometimes ruin all of the information on a computer. This time, Jesus sees the weeds as evil people.

Weeds grow well when so many other things struggle. Some weeds are incredibly productive. One weed, witchweed, can produce ½ million seeds. The roots on a dandelion always impressed me as so sturdy compared to many vegetables.

Paul sees the whole creation subjected to futility and decay, in another word, weeds.. Christian would say we live in a fallen world. Today we continue to have to deal with all sorts of weeds. Creation itself waits for a world without weeds, labor pains for a new age

In the meantime, plowing buries the weeds. Would this be repression or forgetting for our souls? It could follow the AA pattern of burying the action one day at a time. Herbicides are part of modern agriculture. Pre-emergent would be trying to stop before becoming an issue. It could be never starting a bad habit, never putting yourself in a situation where danger would lurk. Post- emergent: Another way would be for the weeds to be countered by virtues, so gambling could be countered by moderation. Would the solution be to nip it in the bud, as Don Knotts used to say? Rotation uses variety to undercut a staging area for weeds year in and year out. One crop farming saps the ground, but the weeds still seem to flourish. Here, I’d suggest keeping an eye open for different spiritual practices for a more robust spiritual life.

Weeds and wheat grow up together in the story of Jesus. I don’t think any person is all wheat or all weeds. All of us are a mixture of wheat and weeds internally. No, we are not weeds; we are children of God. I don’t think any human group can be all weeds or all wheat. With that, it seems to be particularly difficult to judge any one else as all wheat or weeds. To some degree the difference between wheat and weeds is arbitrary. Little kids think a dandelion is a flower when they give it to their mothers. When we discover some utility in a weed and cultivate it, then it is no longer a weed. For Paul, the better idea is to look for the wheat in everyone, as a child of God. We can’t go looking for a perfect church. The wheat and weeds grow up together to protect the wheat from injury. In some ways, maybe they need each other.

The Christian walk could be called raising souls instead of crops. For the foreseeable future, we will have to deal with weeds in life. The harvest and sorting out will come some day. We deal with the fruit of the Spirit, those virtues for happiness. They’ll help us manage the weeds in life, even as we will not eradicate them. They seem to be perennial. Already we are growing into God’s victory garden, God’s liberty garden. No matter how carefully we tend the soil, plant good seed, and fertilize, weeds will erupt. God, that great gardener, will not allow the weeds to win out in the end, not for a person, not for the church. We may struggle to manage weeds, but god can change a weed into something good. God is at work so our lives will be fruitful, resilient, and strong.

Gen. 28:10-22

Jacob is on the run. He has a cover story for seeking a bride, but he is fleeing the wrath of his brother for grabbing his birthright and blessing by manipulation and deception. Even though he flees the land of promise, God tells Jacob that he is accompanied by the promise. Breuggemann (Genesis, Interpr. Comm) sees the vision as direct, a slap at Bethel as a shrine. I doubt it, as the word from God parallels the ascent and descent motif of messengers on the ramp. Jacob is clearly no wimp, as he uses a stone for a pillow. Janzen (p.108) wonders if it is to induce a vision. God’s promise amplifies the stolen blessing from Isaac. Then, God seems to work with Jacob in particular (v.15) Upon waking Jacob makes a worshipful action. The name, Bethel, means house of god. I do note that Jacob’s response is a conditional one at v. 20. A tithe seems to be the price. It echoes the prayer of Abraham’s servant looking for the woman who will become his mother.

Like his parents, Isaac had a childless marriage for a good while, but his prayer is answered more quickly.

The infants are kicking so hard, it seems that they are fighting within the womb, so she crises, hwo can things be all right when I feel like this inside?

Even in the womb conflict ensues here.

Jacob means grabby, for being the firstborn yaquob grabs at the eqeb, heel

Easu=hairy (se-ar) we ar enot sure what Easu means, but in the region another story mentioned a similar name as a great hunter (Int. Bible)

Like so many brothers and sisters, even twins, they are different .

Jacob is tam, In Job it means integrity, but here it is thought to be quiet, plain,

Janzen (p. 97 ITC Comm) thinks it means that he is a mature human being, a more cultivated breed. Esau is an outdoorsman, a “natural person”. thin of the ego v. the id.

As in many families father and mother have different favorites. Something has happened in their choice of different favorites.

Notice that for the mess of red stuff he gets a name as the father of rival Edom (red)

What a remarkable introduction to the father of the nation, he is not painted in gloiwing, idealistic terms at all. We don’t know exactly what rights the firstborn would have at this time; it could be a double share, or more of the estate.

Spiritual practices are in vogue. In the recent collection by Dorothy Bass, honoring the body is a primary spiritual practice. That sounds odd, as the church is about life in the spirit, no? We do speak about the body a lot in church, but it is mostly limited to illness. This is unfortunate, as we are not people who only claim some spiritual portion of our lives apart from the rest of life. Our faith seeks to keep body and soul together; it is an unbalanced spirituality that lifts one above the other, in attention or importance. We would do well to celebrate our body in good health. We can take the time to marvel at the intricacy of its systems.

Of course honoring the body can turn us toward vices too. When Laban spies the jewelry of his sister, he is suddenly hit by desire for wealth. In the sixties, birth control removed the great impediment to pre-marital physicality or shotgun marriages. Later, we made war against all sort of perceived impediments to our liberty. Now called hooking up, we disentangled sexual activity from relationship a de-emphasized technique above all. We lift it out of all proportion to other elements in love, so all we did was swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Years ago, the Confession of 1967 worried about anarchy in sexuality. Yes, human intimacy is more than procreation but pleasure and bonding for the couple. On the other hand, we hasten its arrival in the outfits of pre-teen girls, obsessions about body image, and billions and billions spent on plastic surgery and its botox offshoots. I love that the same people who worry about any chemicals in their food willingly inject themselves with botulism to ease worry lines caused by worrying too much about where to find organic food.

Honoring desire is made clear in the Song of Songs. Over the years, the church has spiritualized its talk of love. Bernard did sermon after sermon on it comparing it to the love of Christ and our love for God. At its core, it is a song of young love.

I love the end of the Genesis passage. Marriage helps assuage the grief of Isaac over the loss of his mother. With the embrace of his new bride, he finds some healing. In marriage, in the embraces of his bride, in the filling of his mother’s tent, some hole within him is healed.

The Song is about young lovers, its yearning and infatuation. When we get older, it seems less natural to honor our bodies. Still, we can marvel at what we are capable of doing. We can honor our bodies by taking care of them, from going to the doctor, to eating right, to getting our exercise. A simple thing like taking a shower can be a reminder of our baptism and a time of gratitude for this embodied life. We can turn them into spiritual moments in seeing the intricacy of our creation. On vacation, the girls got a kick out of one of the books I was reading, Your Inner Fish, about the traces of evolution in all of us. Not only are we connected by our genes to one another; the history of life itself is encoded in our cells and our bodies. One more idea would be to take each of our senses, as does the love poem in Song of Songs and make it an instrument of forms of prayer. Monday through Friday, take one sense and celebrate it, lament its problems, praise god for what it leads us. What connects us to life more than our senses? No wonder the Song of Songs celebrates them within the passion of love. Praise the one you love with every one of your senses. Praise the God who made them and you with every one of your senses.

After a story of promise, the Abraham story moves in much more melodramatic direction. Family intrigue turns into exile, with the threat of death, for Hagar and Ishmael. Now Abraham is being asked the impossible, to give up his surviving son, the one long promised. He is told that the promise would die at his own hand.

In its way this is a story of multiple testings. Is Abraham almost daring God to go through with the test? Would God allow him to sacrifice his future, the child of the promise? Notice that Abraham’s answer to his son’s questions are almost a taunt: God will provide. How is God testing Abraham? I wonder if this is more than a test of loyalty. After all, Abraham will bargain with God over the lives of the strangers of Sodom. He was troubled, but he did not bargain for Hagar and Ishmael. Is the binding of Isaac a teaching of compassion for them as he contemplates the sacrifice of his son? What did this incident do to Isaac? Later, he would refer to God as the Fear. Is it any wonder? Maybe he sailed through life as nothing could scare him after that incident.

Maybe Abraham’s prayers were all pleading for a change, as he journeyed into the heart of darkness. Maybe they included prayers of lament. After all the years of waiting, the promise was fulfilled, but for how long. How long would God hold the promise away and then snatch it back? How long would he be able to hold his son? Lament is a proper response when we think that God is asking too much of us. We are free to speak to god openly, in praise or lament, in adoration or in desperate pleading.

Christians believe that God directed sacrifice for his son, his only son. It is entirely possible that it was near the sight of the binding of Isaac. God would fully enter into the pain of Abraham and past it as Jesus went to the cross. No last minute substitute would be in the offing. Apparently only a representative of the divine and the human would suffice. How can we doubt our significance when we recall that Jesus Christ offered himself up for all of us?

We rightly recoil from this story, but we manage to sacrifice our children to the dogs of war. To a lesser degree we sacrifice out children to gang violence. So far this year, guns have killed almost 3 dozen children this year. We think we are so far advanced from this primitive story. Yet, this weekend, the smoke will rise from a million barbeques. The smoke from fireworks for 1776 will light the sky and ascend to the heavens. We make lesser sacrifices. Sometimes, we offer our children to our own dreams, such as stage parents and those parents determined that their child will become a professional athlete. We could imagine Abraham and Isaac as part of the self. Sometimes we impose a dream on our children, even if they don’t have the interest or inclination toward that dream. Maybe we too willingly sacrifice parts of ourselves. As we mature, we are too quick to sacrifice the child within, the Isaac-laughter within. Maybe we sacrifice dreams to quickly to the gods of realism and making a living. To fit in maybe we sacrifice too much of our own vision of ourselves. We sacrifice alternative futures for the one we select or refuse to change. We bind ourselves to ways of behaving that inhibit us over time. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, so we are freed from the compulsion to sacrifice others on altars of our own making. We are freed to live life unbound by the burden of expectations of others.

First, please consider this as a comic tale, perhaps. Some rabbis look at Isaac’s name, laughter, and see him as that stock character, the schlemiel. All sorts of bad things happen to a schlemiel, but they end up having the last laugh. For instance, some rabbis said that Abraham had to send a trusted servant for a wife because one look at Isaac would ensure that no wife would be found. Instead of being generous with water, Rebecca is foolish in offering to get water for so many camels; she’d be exhausted. When he is off meditating in the field, off by himself, it could be that he is going to the bathroom. When Rebecca slides of the camel quickly, it could be that she falls off. Laban’s later greed with Jacob is given a clear start in the negotiation for the bride price. Rebecca may be related to a word to fetter, an interesting choice for Isaac who is bound by his father in ch. 22.

On the other hand, this story has so many good moments, we can well on them.

1. The trust placed in the servant is remarkable.

2. The prayer of the servant is bold and looking for clarity

3. The servant has to figure out how to proceed with a perfectly answered prayer

4. The bridal negotiations can easily be linked to the negotiations over family styles we all go through

5. For me the poignant moment comes at the end, when they are married, but they go into his mother’s tent, and he finds comfort.

6. Do you think we are fated to be with our besheret, our true love?