The Once and Future Legacy

July 6th, 2014
5th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 9, Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick

Three years ago, when these scripture readings were last heard in an Episcopal church on Sunday, we were blessing a bride before her wedding on the 4th of July.  After hearing the reading from Genesis today, I thought it necessary to assure her that during the bridal blessing, no one was going to put a ring on her nose.  Legacies are funny that way.  Some legacies we just smile and say -- That was nice -- and go on our merry way as if nothing ever happened.  Other legacies we try to bury in some cobwebbed corner of our mind, but occasionally they come out when we least expect them.  Some legacies we hold onto long after they have outlived their usefulness.  Some legacies remind us that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.  Finally, the best legacies don't leave us nostalgic for a long lost past that cannot be recovered, but call us to remember the best parts of ourselves, and point to a future that is rooted in the past, and is eternal.

This weekend, we have called to mind the best part of our legacy as Americans, when thirteen colonies realized that they must unite or die, and came together as one.  They pledged themselves to a set of ideals.  And they pledged to those ideals, and to each other, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.  We celebrate that legacy this weekend.  And yet, I also remember living and driving in Alabama along the same road that the Cherokee tribe was forced to march to board boats that would begin their Trail of Tears.  That too is part of our legacy, not to be buried underneath waves of nostalgia and good feeling.  For how can we make real Thomas Jefferson's belief that all are created equal under God if we ignore those times when we have treated other people as unequal.  Such examination makes the ideals we Americans pledge allegiance to a goal that we recommit ourselves to achieving this weekend.

In today’s episode of the Abe and Sarah show, Sarah has died.  In one Jewish midrash, Sarah drops dead as soon as Abraham and Isaac return from Mt. Moriah, and she realizes what Abraham almost did to their son.  Soon Isaac will be the heir to the most important legacy ever handed down -- Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  That legacy is this family's purpose in life, to bring all the families of the earth into the blessedness of life with the one God of the universe. 

But for Abraham, who left his family in modern day Syria behind for the sake of this legacy, it must be fulfilled though his own personal legacy, his blood, his own family.  Go find a wife for my son from my own clan, Abraham told his servant, but don't dare take Isaac with you, he also warned, lest he be tempted to stay with his family and forget the legacy he is inheriting from his father.  And so the servant went, no doubt wondering how he was going to find a suitable wife for Isaac, from his clan, when he would be a stranger in a strange land looking for the needle in the haystack.

Like many of us, he comes up with a test of God’s will, and hopes it actually works.  The shock is that it does.  Rebekah’s gift of hospitality recalls Abraham’s hospitality to the three mysterious visitors in the 18th chapter of Genesis.  And her courage to say, yes, she will go to an unfamiliar land, to marry a man she does not know, to embrace this outlandish claim that through her uncle Abraham, all people shall find blessing, shows that God’s purposes for this family will be fulfilled.  Rebekah has inherited her uncle's legacy of courage and hospitality.

Of course, Rebekah is also taking on a less lofty legacy than being the source of blessing for all people.  One can only imagine how complicated Isaac feels about his father.  By the time Rebekah arrives at Isaac’s tents, there is no mention of Abraham.  He is probably dead, along with Sarah.  There was a cousin who came with Abram in chapter 12, Lot.  But Isaac doesn’t have much a relationship with Lot.  The same visitors who visited Abraham and Sarah then went to Sodom and Gomorrah.  Lot showed hospitality to those strangers.  But he did so by offering his daughters to the men of the town when they all wanted to rape the visitors.  After their escape from those cities destroyed by God, with Lot’s wife turned to salt, and their own husbands dead, the daughters got even with Lot by getting him drunk and seducing him, so that they would have children.  According to Genesis, they are the ancestors of the Moabites, a nearby tribe that the Israelites particularly detested, even though they were related.

There is a way of drawing family trees in which you use symbols and different kinds of lines to indicate the emotional relationships between relatives.  What you usually find is that you have inherited some of the dysfunctional patterns in your own relationships from your ancestors.  Isaac certainly has a legacy of dysfunctional relationships.  At the end of today’s episode, Isaac has found comfort with Rebekah.  In scenes from next week’s episode, we are introduced to their sons, Esau and Jacob, over whom they will contend with each other, and hand down those legacies of favoritism and estrangement that poison so many human relationships. How will this family preserve the legacy of being a blessing to all people?  Stay tuned.