A Taste of His Own Medicine

A Taste of His Own Medicine

Genesis 28:15-30

“Oh, no,” you’re thinking to yourself, “Didn’t Mark talk about Jacob last week?  Wasn’t that our Old Testament sermon for the summer?  Where’s he going with this?” Fair questions…let me try to offer a beginning answer.  Jacob matters because he was the “founding father,” both figuratively and literally, of the nation of Israel.  Our ancestors in faith all trace their roots to him.  As with all founding fathers, how his story is told matters.  National identities are grounded in such stories.  

We are in the midst of our own turbulence around our national identity.  Who is included and who is excluded?  How do we wield power?  What is the social contract by which we are held together?  How is it that we need to change to become the more perfect union that we have imperfectly sought to be?  In the midst of that discussion, questions have arisen about our founding fathers and the stories that we tell about them.

My point last week was that one of the truly unique things about the Old Testament is that it is unflinchingly honest about the broken humanity of even the most admired leaders.  Abraham and Sarah start laughing when God tells them they are going to have a child.  Jacob is a con man before he is the father of Israel—swindling his own family members.  Moses grabs the prizes of war for himself.  David can’t resist Bathsheba and sends her husband, a loyal soldier, to his death so he can have her.  Solomon, the great, wise king, enslaves people to build his temple and fortifications and makes the nation a war power.  He even marries Pharaoh’s daughter.  In the end, he looks a lot like the Pharaoh who had enslaved the people in Egypt in the first place.  If the Old Testament tells us anything, it tells us that God works through broken human beings, broken human beings who remain broken and vulnerable every step of the way.

Thank God for that honesty!  Seriously!  If you have a problem with the brokenness of any of these figures, that doesn’t make you a faithless person or a traitor.  It means that you have the vision to see the truth and the courage to speak that truth.  The fact that God can work through and love broken human beings doesn’t mean that we have to worship the human beings.  It means that we ought to truly worship the gracious and loving God who also loves us.  It also means that any time we feel that one of us broken human beings is being “deified,” then it is probably time to remind ourselves of the truth.

This is where I believe our faith tradition stands at odds with our national tradition.  Eddie Glaude, a Princeton scholar whom I deeply respect, put the matter this way:  “America is not unique in its sense as a country. We’re not unique in our evils to be honest with you. I think where we may be singular is in our refusal to acknowledge them and in the legends and myths that we tell about our inherent goodness to hide and cover and conceal so that we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our innocence.”  Hear that last phrase again:  “The willful ignorance that protects our innocence.”  To put the matter in my own words, it is a messy business to become a nation, to prosper as a nation, and to lead a nation.  It probably does not serve us well to gloss over that messiness.  In fact, the longer we do so, the more distorted our sense of ourselves becomes and the less stable our foundation is as a people.

It’s not difficult to make this abstract notion concrete.  Our original ancestors who eventually founded this nation did not arrive at an unoccupied land.  Native Americans had lived in harmony with the land for centuries and had developed amazing cultures and tribal histories.  The cost of our taking over this land was the blood of those people.  That blood is a stain on our nation.  At the same time, in order to settle a vast land like this, we needed vast resources for physical labor.  That labor force was created by enslaving people from Africa.  Our ancestors owned people and worked them to death in many cases.

Talking about this may make some angry but really these are just indisputable facts.  The White House was built in part with slave labor.  One-fourth of all the United States presidents owned slaves, eight of them while holding office.  Washington owned 300 slaves.  Jefferson owned 175 slaves.  Only John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, didn’t own slaves among the early presidents.  Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, owned at least a half dozen slaves in Tennessee and lobbied Lincoln to exclude Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation.  Ulysses S. Grant, who served two terms, was the last president who owned a slave prior to taking office.  Ten years before assuming office, he freed his slave, William Jones.  Grant would later sum up his evolving views on slavery in 1878, when he was quoted as saying that it “was a stain on the Union” that people had been “bought and sold like cattle.”

Again, becoming a nation and remaining a nation and leading a nation are are a messy business.  However, the dominant narratives that we tell ourselves about the noble and pure founding fathers and tales of American exceptionalism blind us to the complex story of who we actually are.  There were great things about those founding fathers and the original settlers but the tale that we need to tell has to be told against the backdrop of genocide and slavery.  Every nation has its moments of reckoning, its times for truth and reconciliation. For the most part, Americans in our dominant stories that we tell ourselves have either run from those truths or distracted ourselves when they are being told or just become angry at the people who tell them and questioned their patriotism.  Like the individual who can never own their mistakes and express genuine remorse and make amends, our “stuff” keeps catching up with us.

This is where I want to pick up today.  Last week, we ran through the “stains” that were haunting Jacob:  how he swindled his brother and lied to his father and conned everyone into getting what should have been his brother’s.  He’s running but just like any of us, we can run but we can’t hide.  The reason for this is simple:  no matter where we run, the stuff we are running from is still with us because the remorse and shame have been inside us the whole time.  In the midst of running, in the middle of nowhere, with his head on a rock pillow, God speaks to Jacob in a dream.  The bottom line is that God is going to bless him and his children and his children’s children.  No one knows better than Jacob how little he deserves that blessing.  Yet, God essentially says, “I’ll be right here with you!”

Now, a lot of people have a humbling experience of God’s grace and love, sometimes in a dream but more often in the grace and love that comes form another human being in our worst moment.  The moment could have been a giant, “I told you so!”  The person could have just “teed me up.”  I would have deserved whatever they threw my way.  Yet, what they did, instead, was they threw their arms wide open and embraced me.  That moment is like finding an oasis with a cool spring in the midst of a desert.

However, the miracle that you are loved rarely means that everything is going to get easy.  There is still tough stuff ahead.  There are still truths to be faced.  However, you will not face such things by yourself.  A lot of times, it takes us time to catch up to the fact that there are still consequences to our actions, even when we are loved, even when it is God who loves us.

That’s the next part of Jacob’s story, today.  Remember, Jacob is on the run from his brother.  You think encountering him would be the next part of the story.  However, that’s not going to happen for years!  That’s one of the other truths that the Old Testament tells:  things happen in God’s time, not ours.  A lot of life is “hurry up and wait.”  A lot of a journey of faith is about patience (and don’t we all hate patience?)

Jacob makes it a long way from home, all the way to “the people of the east.”  He arrives at a well where the shepherds water their flocks.  The shepherds are from Haran.  Jacob happens to have distant family there.  So, he strikes up a conversation by asking about his relative, Laban.  Of course they know him.  In fact, here’s his daughter, Rachel.  The music begins to swell and cupid’s arrows fly and Jacob falls in love at first sight.  In fact, he ends up kissing her on the spot.  Laban is thrilled and puts Jacob to work. 

 Eventually, Laban says that he ought to be paying Jacob something for his work.  He asks Jacob what would be fair.  Jacob’s suggestion is that he will work for seven years for Laban.  The, at the end of seven years, his pay will be to marry Rachel.  The text tells us that the seven years seemed like but a few days because Jacob loves Rachel so much.  At this point, anyone who knows how a conman works knows that Jacob is in trouble.  The key to being a conman is that you can’t care too much about the people involved.  Jacob is dropping his defenses here.  This whole “head over heels in love” thing is throwing him off his game.

In fact, after seven years, the conman gets conned.  Laban pulls the old “switch-a-roo” on Jacob.  Laban’s older daughter, Leah, was supposed to get married first.  (Do you catch the “birthright” twist of this after Jacob cheated Essau out of his birthright?) So, under the cover of darkness, when Jacob, like his elderly father Isaac, can’t see clearly, Laban sneaks Leah into Jacob’s bed.  In the morning, the word to Jacob is, “Too bad for you!  You’re married now!”  The conman has received a tase of his own medicine.  Eventually, Jacob ends up married to both Leah and Rachel which not only ensures lots of kids but also lots of favoritism and conflict among the family.  Yet, you can’t help believe that a big point of the story is the question:  “So, Jacob, how did it feel to be on the receiving end of the con?”

I want to leave you with this thought today.  We have all done things that we regret.  If we have integrity, eventually we own up to what we’ve done.  If we are lucky, we receive grace and forgiveness.  However, almost always, sooner or later, what will come our way is a moment when we are on the receiving end of some form or what we dished out—not in a vengeful way but in that sense that what goes around usually comes around.  This is that second moment of horror when, having previously apologized for our actions, we now have a first-hand experience of the pain that we caused.  It’s that moment when we see with enough clarity and feel with enough openness that we honestly exclaim, “I really had no idea of the pain I caused.”

As long as we minimize our own brokenness or the brokenness of our ancestors, we rob ourselves of seeing the deeper truths.  The same person can do really wonderful things and really awful things.  That person can be me, or you, or George Washington.  We need to feel empathy and speak honestly and mostly listen to the people whom I have hurt or you have hurt or our ancestors hurt.  We need to wrestle with the truths that hurt us and break our heart.  Then, we need to figure out together what in the world it would mean to move forward.  Human beings are rarely consistent but our efforts at healing should be.