We don’t do a lot with sermon titles at VSF, but I wanted to say something about the title for this one, because I stole it. This goes back to Regent’s fall retreat in 1997—and yes, it was only a month or so later that Dr. Provan preached the sermon on Abraham that I referenced a few weeks ago, if you were here then. Dave Diewert, who taught Hebrew, preached at that retreat, and he began by telling us that when he was asked to speak, he agreed, and then asked in turn what the theme was for that year. The organizers said, “The family of God.” His immediate response was “Heaven help us.” His sermon was a longer-form response; its title, which I have taken for this morning, was The Dysfunctional Family of God.
As such, I’d like you to think of our text from Genesis 25 as something akin to the thumbnail on a video, or perhaps a free sample at the supermarket. It’s just a moment in time taken from a story that has many, many more moments much like it. If someone heard the phrase “the family of God” and wanted to know what that family was like, this passage would do about as well as any to give them a feel for the answer; but then, so would a lot of others. Not to put too fine a point on it, the history of God’s chosen family runs the gamut of military acronyms from SNAFU (to use the pulpit-appropriate version, “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up”) to FUBAR (“Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition”).
You want sibling rivalry? Cain and Abel give us the archetype in Genesis 4—that one gets so bad that Cain murders Abel out of jealousy and spite. Here in Genesis 25 we see Jacob and Esau. In Genesis 37, the only reason Joseph’s brothers don’t kill him is that Judah convinces the rest to make themselves some money by selling Joseph to slavers. In Numbers 12, the jealousy of Aaron and Miriam toward Moses reaches such a pitch that God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (Only Miriam, though, not Aaron; I have no idea why.) Then there’s the whole epic of King David’s disaster children, which runs from 2 Samuel 13 through 1 Kings 1; through the multiple stories of his sons rebelling against him, the reality of rivalries and hatred among them is painfully clear.
Parental favoritism? Well, we considered the whole story of Ishmael and Isaac a few weeks ago, and that’s another theme we also see in Genesis 25. Then in Genesis 37, a lot of the sibling rivalry is driven by Jacob’s favoritism toward Joseph, as the son of the woman he actually wanted to marry—though Joseph contributes a fair bit himself to their resentment and loathing. Or how about manipulation, deceit, and fraud? Consider the matched sibling set of Laban and Rebekah: in Genesis 27 Rebekah conspires with Jacob to deceive Isaac into blessing Jacob instead of Esau—Jacob carries it out, but Rebekah is the instigator and planner. To save Jacob from Esau’s revenge, she sends Jacob to her brother Laban, who cheats and swindles him at every turn. Jacob’s response? Swindle him back—with the help of his wives, who of course are Laban’s daughters. Jacob succeeds over Laban because God favors him, and so God blesses his swindling.
Now, some of this might seem funny; honestly, some of it is funny, if you’re inclined to a particularly cynical style of comedy. But then you turn to look at the sexual and relational misconduct we see over and over, and not even the most hardened cynic would be moved to laugh. Again, we’ve looked at the whole story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, and at Abraham trying to protect himself by passing Sarah off as his sister—which was such a terrible idea that Isaac does the exact same thing with Rebekah in Genesis 26. For that matter, the story of Sarah and Hagar finds its own echo in the rivalry of Leah and Rachel—a sibling-spousal rivalry—when each of them has their husband father children with her handmaiden in an effort to increase the number of children for whom Jacob will give her credit. Among the many things this family is not is a group of people who learn from the mistakes of others.
And that’s the smaller stuff. Genesis 38 gives us the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar—let’s call her Tamar I. Tamar is married to Judah’s son Er, until God judges Er for his evil and kills him. Tamar is then married to Er’s younger brother Onan to give Er an heir. Onan won’t cooperate, so God kills him for his sin as well. Judah betroths her to marry the third brother, Shelah, then never lets the marriage happen, because he figures Shelah would die too. Tamar disguises herself as a roadside prostitute; Judah sees her and asks to sleep with her, promising to pay her a goat for the pleasure. As collateral, she takes his staff, his signet ring, and his cord—think his passport, driver’s license, and Social Security card. Judah gets her pregnant, but of course he didn’t know who he was sleeping with, so when he finds out she’s pregnant, he sentences her to death. She gives him back his stuff and says, “Don’t forget the man who got me pregnant. Recognize these?” To his credit, Judah admits his fault, and she bears him twins—one of whom, it’s worth noting, will be an ancestor of King David, and thus of Jesus.
Now, that story at least has a heroine; there’s worse to come in the life of King David. For one—and I appreciated Emily calling a spade a spade on this one—in 2 Samuel 11 we have David shirking his kingly duty, staying home when his army went to war, then raping Bathsheba. To give this its full weight, David was a married man, and Bathsheba was a) the wife of one of the Thirty, which was his army’s elite squad, b) the daughter of another of the Thirty, and c) the granddaughter of David’s most trusted adviser. No, this doesn’t make his rape of Bathsheba any worse, but it means in order to rape her, he has to first violate several other close, important relationships which are important to the well-being of the kingdom he rules. To violate her, he has to destroy a family to which he owes a deep debt of gratitude.
This is why, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, David’s family is a disaster from that moment until the day he dies; and that disaster begins in 2 Samuel 13 with the rape of David’s daughter Tamar by his eldest son, her half-brother Amnon. Here again we have the deep evil of rape compounded by the violation of other relational obligations—which are then compounded again when David refuses to punish Amnon! The biggest difference between David’s sin and Amnon’s is that David marries Bathsheba, while Amnon throws Tamar out after raping her, even as she begs him not to send her away.
Along with all this ugliness, we also see a spiritual dysfunction—and I want to say this carefully, because it would be easy to make this just another way in which we can look down on Jacob and the rest when it should be something we recognize from our own lives; I want to call this functional atheism, and it’s the lived reality of Flannery O’Connor’s observation that “it is much harder to believe than not to believe.” I don’t know if all Christians have times when we look up and realize that right that moment, we’re not sure we believe any of it, but I know a lot of us do; and when we hit those moments, it doesn’t mean we’re losing our faith—I think O’Connor is right that working through such moments is “the process by which faith is deepened,” because I’ve seen that in my own life—it’s just part of the reality that faith is hard. And so in this dysfunctional family of God we see his chosen ones trying to make his promises come true as if he who made them didn’t exist—Abraham and Sarah trying to fulfill God’s promise through Hagar, Rebekah trying to realize God’s promise by her own scheming—and if we see ourselves truly, we will recognize that we have done much the same, and more than once. Faith is hard, brothers and sisters. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
That’s a big reason, I think, for one of the most striking facts about Scripture: it pulls no punches and whitewashes nothing. These are the people and this is the family God chose—David’s even called “a man after God’s own heart”!—and yet his word makes no effort to defend, justify, excuse, or even apologize for them. We see evil done, again and again, by the ostensible heroes of the story, and we see God’s rejection of their evil. David’s destruction of a family to which he owed particular protection and blessing brings ruin on his own. Jacob and Rebekah swindle Esau, and though Esau and Jacob make peace, his descendants will become the nation of Edom, which will be perhaps Israel’s longest-running and most implacable enemy. Jacob of course couldn’t know that, but the readers of Genesis down through the centuries would.
But here’s the thing we need to understand and hold before our eyes: God knew all the sordid details of their lives before any of it happened, before he chose any of them, and indeed, even before he said, “Let there be light.” It wasn’t that they turned out to be disappointments and he buckled down to work wth them anyway. He wasn’t surprised they turned out to be flawed, broken, screwed-up, self-interested, and only semi-committed. Rather, God willingly, deliberately, intentionally chooses to use flawed, broken, screwed-up, self-interested, semi-committed people. And you know what? There’s a word for that. You know what it is? Grace. Or at least, that’s one word for it. Another one, those of you who’ve been around a while know this word geek’s favorite Hebrew word: hesed. God’s covenant faithfulness, his relentless, unyielding pursuit of his children, his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love,” to quote Sally Lloyd-Jones.
Maybe this sounds foolish to you, I don’t know. Then again, maybe that’s the point. Paul certainly thought it was. He wrote to the Corinthians, “The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. He said it: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ And where is the wise one? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Hasn’t God shown up the foolishness of the wisdom of this world? In the wisdom of God, the world did not come to know him through its wisdom, so he was pleased to save those of us who believe through the foolishness of our preaching. Jews demand signs, Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called—both Jews and Gentiles—Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
“Brothers and sisters, remember what you were when you were called! Not many of you were acclaimed as wise by the world; not many of you were powerful or influential; not many of you were rich and well-connected. But God chose the foolish to shame the wise; God chose the weak to shame the strong; God chose the nobodies, the no-accounts—the nothings—to nullify those who think they’re really something, so no one would dare to think they could boast before him. That’s why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us God’s wisdom, justification and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, just like he said, ‘If anyone would boast, let them boast in the Lord.’”
Every church I’ve ever entered in my life had 1 Corinthians 1 in their Bibles, but vanishingly few had anything like that vision for what it means to represent Jesus Christ to the world. And as for family—well, let’s just say there’s good reason Dr. James Dobson went from providing parenting advice to playing political kingmaker. My brother-in-law calls it “familiolatry,” and I think he’s right. For many churches even now, the be-all and end-all is the “good Christian family”; on the one hand—Jeremy’s complaint—that marginalizes those who are single and those couples who don’t have children, and on the other, it powerfully reinforces the idea that Christian faith is about conforming to a particular model of life and living up to a particular standard of behavior. But God’s family in Scripture doesn’t! Their stories aren’t fit for Touched by an Angel—they’re more akin to an episode of Criminal Minds.
No, being the people of God, being the family of God, isn’t about projecting the image of a “good Christian family” or “better Christian woman” or what have you; it’s always and only about the faithfulness of God. God doesn’t ask us to look like we deserve to be his children, he calls us to live in the truth—which means not just the truth of who he is, but also the truth of who we are. As a preaching team this season, our focus is on what love looks like, and I freely admit it doesn’t much look like Jacob and Esau, but I don’t think that means we should skim over their story, or the others I’ve mentioned this morning, on our way to more comfortable parts of Scripture. Rather, I want to suggest to you that love looks like this: that God knew Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, Moses, David . . . you and me . . . all of us, in the full motley of our flawed, broken, screwed-up, self-interested, semi-committed selves—and he chose us, and he called us, and he loves us, and he uses us, all of us, anyway, as we are. Even in the worst of our dysfunction, we’re still God’s, and he will never give up on us; he will never write us off; he will never leave us or forsake us; because he doesn’t just love us as we are now, he loves us as we are in Jesus. He knows us as he’s making us to be, and what he has begun in us, he will bring to fulfillment, in his good time. Let’s pray.
Esau and Jacob, ©2014 Andrey Mironov; painting has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
