Legacy

FROM CHAOS TO COMMUNITY: Legacy

Preaching

I need to confess to my own bias as I begin these notes. Even though I have been wrestling with these Hebrew texts over the past few weeks, none has caused me more anguish than this one. As a twenty-first century American feminist woman, no matter how much I try to avoid reading my own worldview into this story, I cannot do it. I read this story as yet another example of an abusive family system that has become part of the legacy of my faith tradition.

Two weeks ago, the abuse was initiated by Sarah against her slave Hagar and Hagar’s son, Ishmael, who were cast out of the family and left to make it on their own or die trying in the wilderness. Last week, the abuse was rendered by the father of the Jewish faith, Abraham, against his teenage son, Isaac. And now, this week, it is the abuse of a teenage girl by a now thirty-something-year-old Isaac.

I know, of course, that the point of these narratives is not to establish a legacy of abuse, but to tell the stories of the founding patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel. It is to establish the lineage of God’s chosen people. And I know that during this period in history, women and children were the property of men. They did not have equal rights. People understood their place in the culture, and they did their best to function in the world in which they lived. Finally, I am fully aware that it is unfair to judge behaviors by my own cultural norms and characterize these situations as abuse.

SIDEBAR: GEOGRAPHY, TIMELINE, AND GENEALOGY
by Taylor Burton-Edwards
A lot has happened since the end of the story of the binding of Isaac. Abraham had returned to Beersheba (Genesis 22:19), but without Isaac. When Sarah died, she was apparently no longer living with Abraham in Beersheba, but further north in Hebron (Genesis 23:1). She was buried somewhere east of Hebron between Hebron and Beersheba (Genesis 23:19). Meanwhile, when we get to today’s story, which starts in Beersheba, Isaac was apparently well south of Abraham in or near Beerlaihairoi, a place also identified as where “Sarah’s tent” was located (Genesis 24:62, 67).

This is not the first occurrence of Beerlaihairoi in Genesis, however. [continue reading]

But knowing all that doesn’t make it any easier. It feels to me like a pattern of abuse that has become entrenched and repeated, generation after generation. And it is part of our family legacy as followers of Jesus Christ.

What is a legacy? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives us a couple of definitions:

1. A gift by will especially of money or other personal property
2. Something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.
   

In the case of the legacy of Abraham and Sarah and of Isaac and Rebekah, part of the transmission from the past that we have received is that deporting a woman and child because of anger or jealousy toward them is acceptable behavior; not questioning God’s command to kill and sacrifice your son is acceptable behavior; and an older man taking a teenage girl for a wife is acceptable behavior.

Abuse is often a part of family legacy. It is a legacy that can remain hidden, existing and continuing in the background of a family that, on the surface, appears normal and healthy. Unfortunately, keeping this truth hidden can have dire consequences for generation after generation in a family system. The abusive pattern is protected by a family commitment to silence or by passive compliance. The abused victim grows up to repeat the pattern, taking on the role of the abuser. The system of abuse thus gets passed down to each new generation as accepted, if not acceptable, behavior.

I believe that because some of our sacred stories that attest to abusive behavior patterns are often treated uncritically by preachers and teachers has served to normalize abusive behaviors. It may make abusive patterns seem acceptable, be it in the families in the Bible or the families in our churches. Commentaries tend to focus on the lack of trust in God as being at the root of Sarah’s abusive behavior, or Abraham’s unswerving faith as justification for his willingness to kill his son. In today’s story, Rebekah and her servants come across as not just complicit in the new arrangement, but downright excited about the gifts of silver, gold, and rich garments, and the promise of adventure in another land.

But I refuse to accept it as normal that a man in his mid-to-late thirties would take a teenage girl fetched from a relative by his abusive father’s servant as his wife.

Perhaps I would not be flinching so much if this legacy of acceptable behavior inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition were not so obviously alive and well, and maybe even enjoying a resurgence, in our own day and time. Only a couple of months ago I read a story in the newspaper about the number of child brides married each year in the United States. While some states specify eighteen years of age as the legal minimum, all states allow for people younger than eighteen to marry with parental consent or judicial approval. In twenty-seven states, there is no specified age below which a child cannot marry.

Unchained at Last is a nonprofit organization established to help women resist or escape forced marriages in the United States. Data collected by this group reveal that between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children, almost all females, and some as young as twelve years old, were married. Many of these girls were married because it was deemed the best solution for teen pregnancy.

Girls who marry below the age of nineteen are fifty percent more likely to drop out of high school and four times less likely to graduate from college. These women have a higher likelihood of spending life in poverty and are three times more likely than average to suffer abuse from their husbands. And this is just in the United States. When you look at this issue from a global perspective, you can see that the systemic oppression of women, the trading of daughters for livestock or dowries, and forced marriages arranged by families or communities, continues to be detrimental to women’s health and women’s lives around the world.

But of course, this isn’t really about underage marriage. This is about the objectification of women’s bodies by most cultures. This about the oppression of women globally. And the continued suppression of women’s rights to equality by the institution of the church of Jesus Christ specifically.

The legacy of the patriarchal system established by the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continues to be a challenging aspect of our faith. Its endurance is at the root of women not having equal rights with men, women not having access to higher education for most of human history, women not being allowed to vote or participate fully in civic life, women being held back and discriminated against and sexually harassed in the workplace, women being refused ordination in the majority of Christian communions around the world, and decisions about women’s health being made primarily by governing bodies made up of a majority of men.

Did God intend for it to be this way? Did God intend for God’s people to hurt, abuse, and kill one another? Did God intend for one gender or one cultural group or one religious community to have privilege over the other? Is inequality between human beings simply an acceptable part of the legacy of God’s creation and ordering of the universe?

These are the hard questions with which we must wrestle as we unpack the legacy of our founding families and the communities of our faith established from their lineage. We must face these challenges head on, with a critical eye, and with trust that God has always been with us, and is with us still, even when we lack clarity about the meaning of God’s words and actions in our faith tradition.

Today’s story brings to a kind of completion the legacy of Abraham and Sarah and the promise of their continued blessing and multiplication. Like families, communities of faith also have to pass on who they are to the next generation. They have to invest in the continuation of the community. Who are we as members of a faith tradition that began with these families and communities? What inherited traditions from their legacy are vital to our identity as followers of Jesus Christ? What are not?

Each generation of faith communities, from Abraham on down to the present day, have the same struggles. All people must deal with the human lifespan of its members: children being born and weaning, growing and leaving. Young people maturing and needing to know salvation in God. Grown people who are prone to war, and who neglect the poor and the suffering in their midst, and who wish the rain to fall only upon them and not upon their enemies.

Each generation has teenage girls and boys who are willing and eager to launch out on their own, even before they are fully ready. Each generation gives birth to people who are willing to do harm, or even take the lives of others. Nothing has really changed in the cycles of human living.

The difference we have, the good news we can proclaim, is that in Jesus we see a turning on the head of some ways of being human in the world. We hear his call to value the lives of women and men, slaves and free, Gentiles and Jews. We see him living out God’s kingdom values by feeding the hungry, visiting the imprisoned, healing the sick, caring for the widowed, and offering hope and grace to all. But even in his time, people had a difficult time changing. Even Jesus’ own disciples didn’t fully get it. So there is work to do.

It has been quite a journey from the chaos of creation to the establishment of God’s beloved community. We have followed some of the pillars of the Judeo-Christian tradition as they wrestled deeply with the reality of their humanity and the challenges it brought. We listened with them as they heard astonishing news from God: news that brought joy, and news that led to painful separation. We bore witness to the deportation of a mother and child. We watched as a father made a life-changing decision about his son. We journeyed with a teenage girl and her female servants as she made a life-changing decision about not just her future, but the future of God’s beloved community.

Into each of these stories of jumbled, chaotic mess we heard the voice of God speaking light and life and love and hope into difficult situations. The presence of God has been a constant in the lives of our forebears in the faith, just as the presence of God is a constant in our own lives, through the good times and the bad.

And while we end on a fairly positive note, with a marriage and a promise of the continuation of the family chosen and blessed by God, we know that the individual lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs of our faith, and the formation of the community of faith itself, has not been without trials.

Likewise, we have inherited a community of faith fraught with all the marks of human sinfulness. There has been disorder and messiness, violence, anger and abusive behavior in communities of faith down through the generations. There have been relationships formed and relationships broken. And there has also been love, and purpose, and promise, and deep relationship with our creator God.

Like all human families, the first families of our faith tradition were not perfect. They had their share of failure and struggles, just like everyone else. But throughout it all, they knew the abiding presence of the Lord God was with them—perhaps most clearly known during moments of difficult decision, rites of passage, and periods of painful transition.

And while God didn’t intervene in such a way that God’s people were spared from the pain of being human, God never abandoned them.

Just as God never abandons us.

The good news is that God is with us.

God is our refuge and our strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of the city,
It shall not be moved.
God will help it when the morning dawns.
The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
He utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our refuge.

Come, behold the works of the Lord;
See what desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
He burns the shields with fire.
“Be still and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations,
I am exalted in the earth.”
The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Psalm 46, NRSV

Geography, Timeline, and Genealogy

by Taylor Burton-Edwards

A lot has happened since the end of the story of the binding of Isaac. Abraham had returned to Beersheba (Genesis 22:19), but without Isaac. When Sarah died, she was apparently no longer living with Abraham in Beersheba, but further north in Hebron (Genesis 23:1). She was buried somewhere east of Hebron between Hebron and Beersheba (Genesis 23:19). Meanwhile, when we get to today’s story, which starts in Beersheba, Isaac was apparently well south of Abraham in or near Beerlaihairoi, a place also identified as where “Sarah’s tent” was located (Genesis 24:62, 67).

This is not the first occurrence of Beerlaihairoi in Genesis, however. We hear of it earlier (Genesis 16:14) as a place near which Hagar had fled when Sarai started treating her harshly after it was known she was pregnant with Abram’s child. So this place has connections not only with Sarah and later, Isaac, but initially with Hagar and Ishmael as well. It will also become “home base” for Isaac and Rebekah and their twin sons (Genesis 25:11).

In terms of timeline, if Sarah was 127 at her death, this means Abraham was 136 or 137, and Isaac was 37 at that time. This puts Isaac at roughly half the age of his father Abram when Abram set out from Haran for Palestine (Genesis 12:4), perhaps twenty years or more after the binding incident at Moriah, assuming the binding incident took place when Isaac was about seventeen years old. Isaac had settled and was farming in the outskirts of Beerlaihairoi, but apparently still had no wife. If he had a household at all, it may have consisted of servants and farm workers. We learn later that Isaac was forty when he married Rebekah (Genesis 25:11). So an additional three years had lapsed between the burial of Sarah (which Isaac did not attend) and the marriage of Rebekah to Isaac.

Genesis 22:20-24 sets up the events of Genesis 24. This is the story of the family Abraham and Sarah had left behind in Haran when they began their journey into Palestine. Notice that the only female listed as a legitimate heir of the family line is Rebekah, granddaughter of Abraham’s brother, Nahor, and so first cousin once removed of Isaac. This made Rebekah the most eligible member of Abraham’s father’s family to become a wife for Isaac, according to Abraham’s conditions given to his servant (Genesis 24:4).