Expecting Rachel, Finding Leah

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Expecting Rachel, Finding Leah

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Thanksgiving for Marriage: Genesis 29

Drew and Allie—

I did not preside at your wedding ten years ago, but if I had the question I would have had asked you then is no less relevant today. Quite possibly, it’s an even more timely question now that your marriage has some mileage on it. What were you thinking?

Are you crazy?

Even after a decade of practice, how can you be ready to offer such promises to each other? As Robert Capon wrote, with their marriage vows bride and groom give each other a dangerous dose of self-confidence.

Trust. Fidelity. Intimacy. Self-denial- forever!

These are enormous, outrageous promises to make. To call it a leap of faith is an understatement. Marriage is risky business, for a life lived together can— strike that— will expose the worst in people, all the intricate flaws and foibles that come with human nature. Let’s just name the elephant still in the room shall we? What if you’re not the right person for the other? I mean, I know Drew at least well enough to question Allie’s judgment. I usually tell engaged couples that it’s called “Jason’s Rule” only Drew knows it’s really Hauerwas’s Rule:

“You never marry the right person…

because you never know who it is you’re marrying.”

In other words, ten years ago today the two of you said not just “I do” to the person standing next to you; you also said “I do” to whomever or whatever that person is going to become, something that is still unknown and yet unseen to the both of you.

And if that sounds scary, just consider that Hauerwas’s Rule has an even more frightening corollary: You are never as fully known as you are known by the person to whom you’re married.

Marriage isn’t just a process in which you discover who the stranger is that you’ve married.

Marriage is a process in which you discover who the stranger is that you call “you.”

If the fullness of what it means to love is to know the other with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, then to be loved means that our heart and mind and soul and strength are fully exposed and seen and known by another.

Even, eventually, by your children (just wait until Hannah’s fourteen).

And by God, it’s scary.

Because it’s not often that our heart or mind or soul or strength measure up to our own estimation of them.

Maybe now you’re able to guess why I read this strange Jerry Springer story from Genesis 29. It wasn’t just because Drew is an aficionado of Old Testament typologies for Christ. Those of you not from the Bible Belt might even be surprised such a tawdry story is even in the Bible. Of course, I can’t speak for the Almighty Himself, but allow me to do so anyway.

This trashy story is in the Bible because you can’t understand God’s cosmic plan for the overcoming of Sin and the healing of the world apart from the particular lives through which that plan unfolds.

The God of the Bible works through ordinary people like you and me, like Drew and Allie. The God of Jesus Christ works through ordinary families like yours and mine, warts and all. This odd, cringe-worthy story in Genesis 29 about intense romantic love and even more intense duplicity and deception is bound up with God’s most important work and ways.

That’s why it’s in the Bible.

Why did we read it today?

Because that’s what happens when Drew leaves the selection of the scripture up to a smart-ass like me.

Leave it up me and I’ll choose 1 Corinthians 13, with its pablum about love being patient and kind, never out of 10 times.

I chose this passage, and I did so because I believe it not only belongs in scripture, but I believe it belongs to the sacrament we call marriage.

For those you who, like the FBI agents in Raiders of the Lost Ark, forgot your Sunday School, Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, who along with Jews and Muslims, Christians claim as a father in the faith.

To put it more than a little euphemistically, Abraham is a guy whose story is not free from moral complexities. Abraham has moments of great faith, breath-taking faith. I mean, I’d rather build ten arks or interpret the dreams of a dozen pharaohs compared to what God asks of Abraham. But Abraham has moments of stark doubt, grave hubris, shifty opportunism and bald deception. Jacob appears to have inherited Father Abraham’s opportunistic and deceptive genes. His opportunism eventually alienates him from his brother, and he has to flee the household and make his way in the world on his own.

This is the Jacob we discover in Genesis 29.

Jacob heads East knowing he has an uncle and some cousins that way. Eventually he finds some shepherds who know his Uncle Laban and things begin looking up.

Then it happens.

Over the horizon, Jacob sees “her,” Rachel, looking almost as beautiful as Allie today.

All he could ever want in a woman and more, or so it seems. And Jacob doesn’t just see Rachel. He sees sheep. Now, don’t get any strange ideas about the sheep. There’s no banjo music in Genesis 29. Jacob doesn’t have a strange fascination with farm life, it’s clearly the woman he’s attracted to here.

But the sheep are an important detail. In the ancient near east, livestock represent wealth. It’s as if he sees this woman with a truck of cash in tow. And she’s even tending the sheep. She’s productive, not a bad thing in any age. Jacob’s life seems to be taking a turn for the better.

Like a top-of-his-class William and Mary graduate, Jacob makes a bold first move here.

First he rolls away what is clearly a pretty heavy stone all on his own, showing Rachel a feat of strength no vocal major could muster. Then Jacob goes and kisses her, a move which is followed by a passionate outburst.

This is a dramatic love story. It gets even more romantic when we overhear the conversation between Laban and Jacob. Jacob wants Rachel’s hand. “No problem,” says Laban, “it’ll just cost you seven years of hard labor.” A little more difficult than online dating or swiping right. But to Jacob seven years of hard labor seemed like a day, so love struck was he by Rachel. Now at the end of this prolonged engagement, Jacob appears ready, willing, and able to consummate this marriage. He asks for his bride, a request Laban honors, or so it seems.

There’s a wild party, probably like the one you’re wishing we could on with today. In the tradition of Christ at Cana, Jacob probably has a few drinks more than he should, and then has a few more. Then, likely inebriated, Jacob enters the honeymoon suite, I mean, the marital tent. Things take their course, and in the morning Jacob rolls over and there is.....LEAH!

Confused and enraged Jacob goes to Laban wondering what is going on here. Laban’s retort silences Jacob immediately. “I don’t know where you’re from, but around here the older isn’t superseded by the younger.”

And Jacob shuts up, his own sin having been thrown in his face. Jacob, after all, was the younger who had stolen his older brother Esau’s inheritance.

Jacob still gets Rachel, but in the process he gets a lot more than he bargained for: a second wife who he doesn’t find nearly as attractive or alluring and seven more years under Laban’s thumb.

It’s not exactly Happily Ever After. But, truth be told, it’s not The End.

The story of this young couple (or young triangle rather,) is far from over.

Jacob would have a great future and a great legacy, one that would forever change the world. But it wouldn’t come through that vision of beauty which inspired so much passion in him at the beginning of the story.

But all of that would come to Jacob instead through the one with “weak” eyes, the one less lovely, maybe less love-able, and certainly the one harder for Jacob to love.

Yet, virtually all of Israel’s priests, a good portion of her prophets, and many of her best and mightiest kings all come from the womb of Leah, through her sons Reuben, Simeon, Judah and Levi. And most importantly, Israel’s hope and consolation, Jesus the Messiah comes through Leah, not through Rachel.

God’s work in Jacob’s life, work that leads to the redemption of the world, is contingent on Jacob making a place for Leah, on his learning to live with, to love and cherish her, as well as his first love Rachel.

Why this story, for this occasion?

Because, surely after ten years, Drew and Allie have learned what they could not have possibly known this day a decade ago.

This story is the story of every marriage.

Take it from me, the difference between happy marriages and the marriages that get torn asunder is that the former know this is the story of every marriage and so they don’t freak out and leave when this story becomes their story.

This odd story is the story of every couple crazy enough to pledge I do to the stranger whom they love.

One day you wake up, and you expect to find Rachel, the person that made you say and do things you never thought you’d do or say, the person who you dreamed dreams about and dreamed dreams with, and what do you find: Leah.

Someone strangely unfamiliar.

Someone who surprises you.

Someone who shocks you, maybe even scares you.

Someone who disappoints you.

But there’s been no bait and switch, no midnight chicanery. The fact is that you married both of these people. You married their best self and their shadow side. You married the person who melts your heart, and the person who will break it. You married the person whom you deeply admire, and the person with whom you will often be deeply ashamed. You married the person whose admirable qualities shine in the light, and the one who hides their flaws and foibles in the darkness. And they married you.

This reality is inevitable because of the Gospel’s only empirically verifiable doctrine: original sin.

It’s why everyone in this story participates in duplicity and deception. There are no moral exemplars in our text. Just broken people with broken lives whom God has chosen to redeem that they might be a blessing to the world.

The good news is that God still works through broken people just like those in our text, just like each one of us gathered here today.

I didn’t know you then, but I can tell you who got married ten years ago today: two sinners.

And that’s who you still are today.

But, you are sinners saved by grace.

You are sinners for whom your Redeemer lives.

That’s not to say you’re not wonderful people. Allie at least is a wonderful person. And I believe your marriage is destined to be a great one. Not because you’re both attractive, though you are. Not because you’re both bright and interesting, though you are. Not because you come from wonderful families, though you do. Not even because you are committed to the hard work of knowing and being known by one another, as wonderful as that is.

I think your marriage is destined to be a great for decades to come because you two know what it means to be forgiven. You know what it means to be saved by grace, and to live and stand, day by day, on that grace.

Show that grace to one another, knowing that Leah will come, knowing that your shadow selves will emerge.

But remember it’s through Leah’s womb that Jesus comes, and it’s when you are Leah to one another, when the self you’ve practiced hiding away emerges, that Jesus will be born most deeply in and through your life together.

It’s when you make space for Leah that the shadow self can step into the light and be conformed the image of Leah’s son: Jesus the Lord.

When your shadow selves emerge, when you are Leah to one another, remember that you know a different bridegroom.

He’s a son of Jacob but in many ways he couldn’t be more different than Jacob, at least the Jacob we find in this story.

Remember you’ve got a bridegroom that labored not in the field with sheep but on a hill with a cross and in the darkness of a tomb.

And he did it for Leah, not for Rachel.

He loved the self that you don’t show to many people if you can help it, the self you’re even squeamish to show each other. He loved and labored for your shadow self that it might come into the light and be transformed by the power of His resurrection life.

That’s what Jesus did for you.

Let the true bridegroom’s work be the foundation of your marriage, and your marriage will become a foretaste of the wedding supper of the Lamb.

That will be a feast to end all feasts, a party that never ends.

The good news is that we’re all invited, invited to a party where forgiven sinners can forever dance in the light of love. AMEN.

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