How I Became a Baseball Fan

On Monday morning, August 4th, I was listening to the local Atlanta sports radio station, when I heard of the death of Skip Caray, the longtime Braves broadcaster and icon of sports in this city. I never met Mr. Caray, and he certainly had never heard of me, but I was deeply saddened by the news of his death, because it was Skip Caray's voice, that made me a baseball fan.

I began following and playing baseball in the spring of 1993, when I was in the first grade. My dad had always been a Braves fan, and the franchise had really turned the corner in 1991, going "from worst to first," and going to consecutive World Series in 1991 and 1992. Because of this, it could be expected that at 7:05 or 7:35 almost every week night, if you drove by our house, you could see the likes of David Justice, Ron Gant, Otis Nixon, Mark Lemke, Jeff Blauser, John Smoltz, Tom Glavine (I could go on and on) on our tv screen, as we watched each game on TBS.

Each night the Braves played the same inspirational opener before going to the broadcasters who would introduce the starting lineups for that night's game. I, as a new baseball and Braves fan, had the opener memorized, and most of it has come back to me in the last two weeks. With the appropriate images on the screen, I would hear "Back goes Nixon up on the wall....and he's got it! Unbelievable catch," (cut to Ron Gant hitting a homerun), "Kiss this one goodbye it's a slam!" And the grand finale, possibly the greatest Braves call in history, a video and audio replay of Sid Bream's ninth inning slide into home plate in 1992 (click on the link to listen to Skip yourself), which won the game for the Braves, making them National League champions.

Now I had a nightly ritual that accompanied this opener which involved our hallway which led into our den, a pink exercise mat, and some new carpet my parents had recently purchased. Each evening I would head to the end of the hallway and listen to Skip Caray's voice narrate the opener. When I heard "one run is in, here comes Bream" I would take off from the end of the hall headed toward the den. When I heard the line, "here's the throw to the plate," I would dive, head first, onto the pink mat and slide across the carpet just as Skip said, "he is....safe!" Then, rolling onto my back, I would kick my arms and legs with each "Braves win!" Skip exclaimed with excitement.

Skip Caray made baseball exciting, and his voice has always made me think of summer, of mosquito bites, of sunscreen, of suicides (the drink) after baseball games, of father/son trips to Turner Field, of vacations to the beach. Thank you Mr. Caray, for helping me understand baseball, for helping to make it exciting. Thank you for being there when I became a Braves fan.

Online Sermon Post

This week's selection comes from the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, Illinois. If you don't take the time to read the entire thing, at least read the final story. If you have RealPlayer you can listen here.

WHEN GOD CHALLENGES US
Sunday, August 3, 2008

John H. Boyle
Parish Associate
Fourth Presbyterian Church


Psalm 34:1–10
Exodus 16:1–8
Matthew 14:13–21

“You give them something to eat.”
Matthew 14:16b (NRSV)

An older man, who was both wealthy and suspicious, invited Jacob to dinner in order to test him. When the dinner was served, Jacob was given an empty plate and cup while his host’s plate overflowed and his cup had wine draining past its brim. Jacob said nothing but sat there and watched the man devour his sumptuous meal. When the man had finished, Jacob stood, said thank you for his dinner, and prepared to leave. Unable to resist Jacob’s silence, the host asked, “Weren’t you angry because I gave you nothing?” “No,” said Jacob, passing through the door.
“You gave me what you had. If I had expected more from you than I received, then I was filled with my expectation and not your offer.”

Noah ben Shea
Jacob the Baker

---

“Life is a miracle.” So states Wendell Berry, prolific writer on many subjects, including human ecology, in his book with those words as its title. Agreed. When you consider the phenomenon of birth, the complex intricacy of the human body as well as other organisms, the many processes by which life is sustained, the wonder of the whole creation, the resilience of the human spirit in spite of its fragility and our own carelessness, you cannot honestly avoid marveling at the miracle of life.

But for many people the world over, and for anyone at a particular time in one’s life, life is not a miracle to be wondered at and enjoyed. It is a mess to be lived in and endured and perhaps one day to be cleaned up. I don’t have to offer a litany of the woes that befall us as human beings, even the more fortunate among us, for us to realize that in spite of the marvelous and miraculous in life, as the psalmist once put it, “all our days pass away; . . . our years come to an end like a sigh. . . . Even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:9–10).

The husband of a dear friend of mine who died recently told me of how shortly before her death he was standing at her bedside, talking on his cell phone to someone who had called inquiring how things were going and to express his concern. Trying to be as upbeat as possible, the husband kept repeating, “Fine, fine. Everything is fine.” Somehow his wife, known for her honesty and candor, marshaled enough of her ebbing energy to say in a loud voice, “Don’t lie, Bob. Everything is not fine. Everything is in shambles.” It was her “last lecture,” and it said, “Don’t whitewash life or death. Tell the truth!”

The truth is that whether miracle or mess, whatever else life is, it is a challenge, at the least, to survive. And it has its challenges, some innocuous and easily dealt with; others more formidable and daunting. Someone recently observed that a burgeoning industry is emerging in this country centering around dealing with disaster, natural and otherwise. Think of flood, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, oil spill, 9/11, to say nothing of war, widespread hunger and poverty, random shootings, domestic violence, sexual abuse, murder and mayhem. Talk about shambles! Then there are the inevitable challenges wrought by illness, death, sorrow, pain, and loneliness.

There are some who assume that the challenges that life poses are one and the same with those that God sets before us. After all, there has to be someone to blame. Often these challenges are thought of as crosses we must bear. But it seems to me that such thinking trivializes the cross, if the cross referred to is the one Jesus bore, as it often is. The cross was Christ’s deliberate choice, and he bore it for the sake of the welfare of the world. Many, if not most, of the challenges we face in life are either thrust upon us or are the result of our own folly or that of others. They are burdens to be borne, not crosses we bear, unless we do so voluntarily and for the sake of the welfare of others.

We live much of our lives in relationship and response to what might be referred to as “-mand behavior” that takes the form of demand, command, reprimand, and countermand. All comprise some kind of “should” that we are called upon to conform to and act upon. There are those who have become so intimidated by the plethora of “shoulds” that they perceive to be imposed upon them by others, by themselves, and by life itself, that they live life constantly under what one therapist called “the tyranny of the shoulds.”

It was a command Jesus gave his disciples and a demand he laid upon them. Nothing ambiguous about that. He put the challenge squarely before them. In the account of this event in John’s Gospel, Jesus puts the challenge in the form of a question to one of his disciples, Philip. “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” Philip responded that there was not enough money available to buy food for the crowd and that the donation of five loaves of bread and a couple of small fish offered by a young lad would surely not be sufficient among so many people. It was an understandable response based upon a realistic assessment of the situation.

In Matthew’s account, it is clear that the disciples had been around Jesus long enough to know that because of his great compassion he would want to do something to meet the need of a hungry crowd of people who were enthralled by his words and awed by his deeds of healing. So they were quick to come up with what must have seemed to them to be the only logical and pragmatic, though conventional, thing to do, namely, to tell the people to go into town, buy their own lunch, and come back later if they wished. “Send them away.” Let them fend for themselves.

“Make it go away” is sometimes our first reaction, if not response, when we are confronted by a challenge we would rather not have to face, especially one that seems to have God’s mark on it. Life poses enough challenges without God piling on with still another one, especially one as daunting as feeding several thousand hungry people. By extension, think Darfur, think Sudan, think Zimbabwe, think Chicago, think Chicago Lights, think the Elam Davies Social Service Center, think the mission programs of Fourth Church. Until one may want to cry out, “For God’s sake, God, enough already! Get out of my face and off my back! I don’t need another mouth to feed, another challenge to face. I’ve got enough mouths to feed of my own, enough challenges that life has dumped on me. I have barely enough to handle them without you dumping on me too.”

When I consider the people I know, both in this congregation and elsewhere, who have been and are now bombarded by bumper-to-bumper challenges regarding health, finances, relationships, feelings, you name it, and when I remember similar experiences in my own life, I can understand and appreciate how a cry of protest might arise within us when the demands of the gospel and our desire to be faithful become the tipping point that puts us over the edge.

At the same time, it is important to realize that even when our plate is not that full and there is room on it for one or more of God’s challenges, we may find ourselves hurling a challenge or two back at God. The human genius for holding God at a distance, stubbornly daring God to overcome our resistance, is not to be discounted. There is, for example, the challenge of our retreat into nostalgia, into the good old days of Eden and of that spot, not to be forgotten, which for one brief shining moment was known as Camelot. The Old Testament prophets and Jesus himself were constantly running into it. It’s our bondage to the past and how things used to be done, even our preoccupation with the pragmatic (“Send them away”) and the conventional, that sometimes gets between us and the future.

Then there is the challenge of our own goodness that God has to deal with. Our pointing to our piety and parading our virtue, as if to try to convince God that we are doing all we can, as it were, to feed the people. The point is, we are, many of us, even as we spend billions to support a war the purpose of which seems to have gotten lost somewhere in its own fog. Like the boy in the nursery rhyme (remember little Jack Horner who sat in a corner?) we put our thumb into life’s pie, pull out a plum, and say, “What a good boy (or girl) am I!” Perhaps that is the point at which audacity morphs into arrogance, as in such audacious assertions as, “We will change the world!”

If we are not careful, the money we give, the service we render, the kindness we show, and the effort we make to try to overcome intractable personal and world-wide problems we face, can become what we hide behind to keep God from getting into our inner world, into our hearts. Our attention to externals, however necessary, can become the way we avoid the internal world of our attitudes, ideas, and feelings. I can give generously to our tutoring program and still harbor prejudice against people who look different from me, and pride myself that I am not a racist. It’s a bit like some people who enter therapy or counseling convinced that there is no need for them to change because they are doing the right thing by coming to counseling. Christ on the cross was God’s bid for the totality of our beings, not the outside only where we do justly, but the inside, too, where we try to love mercy and to walk humbly.

Then, of course, there is the ultimate challenge we put before God and behind which we may hide, the challenge of our inadequacy. Five loaves and two fish, but what are they among so many, as if it all depended on us. I know this one well, for I am tempted to wonder whether my five loaves and two fish are enough. And that’s the point Jesus was making. It doesn’t all depend upon us, and it doesn’t all depend upon God, either. It depends upon both God and us. We and God working together to get the job done. Today we are all called to be not only disciples of the Lord, but also co-laborers with God and with one another, to care for the creation, the world, and one another.

So Jesus took the bread and blessed it and gave thanks for it, and gave it to the people. And the miracle of multiplication happened with amazing results. You see, it is not about me and my scorecard. It’s about God and God’s grace. To those who are hungry, a little can be a lot.

It is out of the abundance of our poverty that the power of God to do a lot with a little is revealed. That is, if we put our poverty in God’s hands and dedicate it to the task of meeting human need beyond our own. The miracle of multiplication is not to be found in the quantity of resources given to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, educate the untutored, heal the sick, comfort the sorrowing and, as the gospel hymn puts it, “rescue the perishing (and) care for the dying.” The miracle lies in the transformation of the human heart, our hearts and minds, from grabbing and grasping in greed to giving and sharing in love, compassion, and gratitude.

I saw him out of the corner of my eye, walking toward me on that cold day in April, 1945 as I stood before the box-cars piled high with the corpses of the inmates of the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Germany, shortly after we had liberated it. They had been machine-gunned to death in a last gasp frenzy on the part of the guards when they heard that American forces were coming. I stared in horror and disbelief at the carloads of carnage, the
inhumaneness of it all, confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt the rumors we had heard about such places of detention and death.

Instinctively, I reached for the .45 caliber pistol on my hip as he approached me, just in case. Then I noticed his tear-stained face as in a combination of German and broken English he began to speak. “Danke, danke,” he said. “Thank you, thank you.” He was trying in the only way he could to express his joy and gratitude for what he thought would never happen to him, to be freed, to be spared, to be saved.

Then this Lithuanian Jew, who had been a prisoner at Dachau for over three years, reached into the pocket of his threadbare shirt. Once again, like Pavlov’s dog, I automatically let my hand drift toward the holster on my hip. (The Army had trained me well.) Out of his pocket he slowly brought forth a dirty looking crust of bread and held it out to me. I took it and he told me that on the day before his friend gave it to him as he was being led off to be executed. He had realized that he would no longer need it and that since bread was a coveted item among the prisoners, he wanted his friend to have it. Now this man was giving me what had been given him, so as to show his gratitude.

I thanked him and put the crust of bread in the pocket of my field jacket, where it stayed for several weeks. From time to time I would finger it, as though it were a talisman of some sort. It soon was reduced to crumbs. Then one day, as I sat on a bench before the cathedral in Saltzburg, Austria, the site of our divisional headquarters after the war had ended, I emptied the crumbs into my hand, stared at them for a minute, and then fed them to the pigeons gathered round my feet.

Over the course of nearly sixty years in ministry I have officiated at and participated in and partaken of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper more times than I can remember. What I do remember is that whenever I have done so, I remember that survivor of the Holocaust, that Lithuanian Jewish man, and a dirty looking crust of bread. It was not much, but it was all he had to give, and with which to give thanks. I have been feeding on the twelve baskets full of the leftovers ever since.

It was enough. It was more than enough.

Danke. Danke.

Amen.

Paul's In the Hall

I received a newspaper article from my grandparents this weekend. The article talks about my grandfather, Paul Whaley, and his induction in the Sevier County High School Hall of Fame for football. I've posted the online article below. It can also be found at the Mountain Press webpage. In the picture below, my grandfather is number 31.

SCHS Hall of Fame Class of 2008: Paul Whaley
By: Cobey Hitchcock

SEVIERVILLE - Sevier County High School 1947 graduate Paul Whaley is an Alabama fan in Tennessee and has been playing catch-up for most of his life, but at least now he's an SCHS Hall of Famer.

As a young child new to Sevier County, Whaley missed out on a couple of elementary school years. "My father didn't send me because he didn't like the teacher," said Whaley, already chuckling in anticipation of his punchline. "I got two years behind, and I've been trying to catch up ever since."

Being a little behind in the classroom didn't end up hurting Whaley's football career, however, and he went on to star for the Smoky Bears at the offensive and defensive tackle positions his junior and senior seasons ... his only two years of football before high school graduation.

"We played both sides of the ball," said Whaley. "There wasn't platoon football at that time."

They were not only iron men in those days. They also still played the violent sport in leather football helmets. "I've watched it evolve through the years, and I'm still interested in football," he said. "I've just watched the changes through the years, and it's a lot different these days."

Whaley played in a high school era that didn't bother naming players to All-District and All-Conference teams, because the important thing to them was the team's outcome. The Bears were a good team with Whaley in the line-up, posting a quality 8-2 record his senior season ... although he isn't quick to brag about his team's success. "We won about 50-50, about half the time," he insists.

Whaley played well enough at SCHS to earn a football scholarship to play for the Carson-Newman College Eagles, where he continued his on-field success. Whaley lettered all four years at C-N, playing tackle and guard on both sides of the ball for coach Sam "Frosty" Holt. He was also named to the All-Conference Team his senior season with the Eagles ... the same year C-N made it to the Tobacco Bowl against Westchester, Pa., in Johnson City. The Eagles lost 20-6, but it is still a fond memory for Whaley.

Although he loved his days at C-N, Whaley would have rather played for his favorite college team Alabama instead, "because coach Paul "Bear" Bryant (who coached the Tide as an assistant in the late 1930s and later as head coach from 1958-82) was an inspiration to me," said Whaley. "But I've heard a lot of stuff from a lot of people around here about my choice of teams."

If he could have went on to play for an NFL franchise, his choice would have been the Green Bay Packers, "because they play tough teams in a tough league, and they play were it's cold. I like the cold, outdoor games." Years later, he would also admire their legendary coach Vince Lombardi, who coached the Pack from 1959-67.

But Whaley's football career came to an end with the Tobacco Bowl loss in late 1950, and he went on to marry his SCHS high school sweetheart Ellouise Ariail in December of 1950 and then enlisted in the Army upon his 1951 graduation from C-N. Whaley was posted to the special services for two years during the Korean Conflict, and although he never went overseas, he coached an Army baseball team during that time.

Following the Army experience, Whaley and his wife moved back close to home in the Karns area for the next 40 years. Whaley worked in the life insurance business for the rest of his career, including his first seven years with Home Beneficial and then as an independent agent with Nationwide Insurance Company for more than 30 years, before retiring in January of 1989.

Whaley was an assistant football coach for Karns High School for two seasons in 1962-63, and he remembers losing the Smoky Bowl to SCHS in 1962.

Whaley, who moved to Sevier County at the age of seven, was born in a farm house were Farragut High School now stands, and now he's really back home after moving from Karns back to Farragut in 2001. "I made a round trip from Farragut to Sevier County to Karns and back to Farragut," he said. "I made a full circle in my life." Although Whaley hasn't been to Sevier County in years, he still has family here ... four of his six brothers, including Roy, Glenn, Alvin Jr. and Cleo. "I'm very excited about coming back home," said Whaley, who plans to attend the August 28 HOF event. "I was surprised about the Hall of Fame induction, and oh, yes, yes, I'm excited and I'm honored by it."

Olympic Reflection

Today has been a wonderful conclusion to the work/school week. With some rain yesterday, Atlanta has cooled off to highs in the mid-80s with very little humidity. The children at the seminary are all outside riding bikes, pretending, doing science experiments with bugs. On my run this afternoon I saw elementary school teachers unloading cars full of supplies, decorations, books, getting ready for learning to take place on Monday. Tonight Rebecca and I are going over to our neighbors' house for a cookout, a thank you for helping them move apartments last week. And then the opening ceremonies for the Olympics begin at 7:30. These are the kinds of days that give you energy, that remind you how tied your life is to what happens around you, how, despite our best efforts, we are part of creation, not controllers of it.

And this leads me to thoughts on our Olympics this year. There has been a lot of controversy around the Olympics being held in China, and everyone has seen the protests and such as the torch traveled to Beijing. But days like today I hope can focus us on the bigger picture of the Olympic games.

In these anxious days when economies are sliding, we are fretting constantly about security risks, and spending countless hours denouncing or defending wars, we need the Olympics. The Olympics are above the fray of rival governments and call us to recognize how closely tied we are, how capable of cooperation we can be. The Olympics are a celebration of creation. Individuals from different cultural, religious, ideological backgrounds come together. Those of us who marvel at our television sets watch the strongest, fastest, most agile bodies on our planet push the limits of the human body and show us just what amazing creatures we are.

The Olympics allow us to recognize the humanity in all people and see how artificial and man-made boundaries of nation can be. We see "our" people standing next to the "other," and we realize how remarkably similar that "other" looks and behaves like us. We have different worldviews, religions, political allegiances, fears, and hopes. But the Olympics cause us to recognize that we are all parts of a complex and beautiful creation. Days like today give me hope; we need more days like this.

Online Sermons

I listen to a lot of sermons during the course of the week when I run in the mornings. I find them more engaging than music and give me something to think about other than the pain in my legs or the fact that I am literally blazing a trail through the humidity with a visible imprint of my body lingering in the ear. It is somewhat difficult to find sermons that are in audio format, so my selection is limited, but I have decided to post some particularly good ones that I hear. I plan on doing this once a week. I'll copy and paste the text below and create a link in case you wish to listen to the audio. This week's selection is by Rev. Sarah Segal McCaslin of the First Presbyterian Church of New York City. Listen Here.

THE NARRATIVES OF OUR FAITH: A STORY OF DECEIT
Rev. Sarah Segal McCaslin
July 27, 2008
Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39

Let us pray:
O God, you have brought us here this morning to a time of reflection and rest. Calm our souls
within us, and give us a sense of your peace that will refresh us. Keep us close to Christ that we may be closer to one another because of his wondrous love. In his name we pray. Amen.

For some reason, I am finding lately that faced with a handful of biblical texts to choose from, either for a sermon, a bible study, or my own reading, I tend to gravitate towards the most difficult and obscure in the bunch. Perhaps this was trained in to me as a graduate student in seminary, where we were encouraged to tackle all that is problematic in theology and biblical studies. Or perhaps, and I think this is a more likely explanation, it reveals my kinship for that which is enigmatic, subtle, and complicated in our faith. While I crave an easy answer for a problem, I know better. I know that there are rarely easy answers in life, and any easy answers we receive in the context of our faith ought to be looked at with a critical eye. And so I find both comfort and challenge in discerning God‟s presence in the chewier stories of the Bible.

Over the next few weeks, I will be focusing my sermons on the narratives of our faith. Story-telling in the Bible. Romance, mystery, drama- it‟s all here, bound together inconceivably into a single text that tells who and whose we are, from the very beginning of history through this moment. There are many stories that are already inscribed upon our hearts, so familiar are they to our ears. And there are others, like the one I will tell today, that are less familiar. And each has a truth to tell about God.

It can be frustrating at times to detect knowledge and truth from a story. Like the ancient story of the blind men standing around an elephant- each man offers a unique and equally true description of the elephant, but none can agree that they‟re talking about the same thing. Such is the challenge of our faith- to read the narratives of our faith and attempt to discern a common truth about who God is and how God is present in our lives. I believe the more we read these stories, as many as we can, the broader and deeper our context becomes for understanding our faith. I believe the more we enjoy these stories and become familiar with them, the richer and more meaningful the entire Bible becomes as the Word of God. And I believe that the more we share these stories with one another, in the context of worship, the more clarity is revealed about who we are as a community of faith.

And so we embark, entering the cycle of Jacob stories midway, arriving at an odd juncture that will surely leave us all contemplating how this story of deceit fits into the broader narrative of our faith.

The Jacob cycle- comprising the stories about Jacob and his family, is found in chapters 25-35 of the Book of Genesis. It is quite possible that the Jacob cycle is some of the very oldest material in the Bible. Stories of Jacob may have been circulating orally in parts of Israel before the invention of writing. Really, really old stories. Yet the themes are ageless, and we are still shocked and entertained by the saga of this trickster, this underdog, named Jacob. His name literally means "heel grabber," named thus because he came out second from his mother's womb, holding on tight to his brother‟s heel- already a troublemaker in utero. Before we meet up with him in today‟s story, much has already taken place. We have learned that he is his mother's favorite, just as his brother Esau is his father‟s favorite. We know that Jacob has a plan for his own upward mobility, grabbing his brother‟s birthright in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew and some bread. And finally, following his mother‟s own suggestion, he grabs also his brother‟s blessing, reserved for the firstborn child, by deceiving his blind, elderly father.

Jacob has shown up at his maternal uncle Laban‟s door in flight from his bloodthirsty brother, hoping to find amnesty and a wife from his mother‟s clan. In the text just preceding what we‟ve read today, Jacob encounters Laban‟s younger daughter, Rachel, by her father‟s well, and the sparks of romance fly. Jacob kisses Rachel, presumably a chaste kiss on the hand or cheek, and bursts into tears. Can you hear the music swell? And thus we enter our reading for today:

Having been in his uncle‟s home now for a month, Jacob finally hears the words he‟s been waiting for, “Just because you are a kinsman, should you serve me for nothing? Tell me,” Laban says, “what shall your wages be?” And Jacob, confounded by his good fortune says quickly, “I will labor seven years for you, if you will give me your younger daughter Rachel‟s hand in marriage.” And Laban agrees. So happy is Jacob about the promise of marrying his soul mate that the seven years pass as if only a few days, so deep is his love for Rachel. And at the stroke of midnight of the final night of his seven-year contract, Jacob knocks on Laban‟s door and says, “Give me my wife, for my time is fulfilled.” As the wedding day approaches, Jacob, used to grabbing for all that he has, is giddy at the prospect of receiving the love of his life without the trickery or deception that has characterized his life up until that point.

The night of the wedding, Laban threw a great feast. It is perhaps important to note for the story that the Hebrew word for feast, „mishteh,‟ translates literally as „drinking party.‟ At the appointed hour, Laban‟s daughter enters her new husband‟s abode, her face covered in a traditional veil… The next morning, Jacob rolls over to see his beautiful wife, only to discover that it is Leah lying beside him, not Rachel! The trickster Jacob has been tricked. The deceiver has been deceived. And poor Leah, eldest daughter with the „weak‟ eyes, must look into the disappointed face of her new husband.

Jacob, in a rage, storms up to his father-in-law, demanding an explanation. And Laban, with a wicked grin, points out that custom requires the eldest must marry before the youngest, and how could anyone expect him to marry Rachel off before her elder sister. How bitterly familiar these words sound to Jacob, himself so recently run out of his own home for sabotaging the privilege of the firstborn. In the end, a compromise is struck, allowing Jacob to marry Rachel also, in return for seven more years of work on Laban‟s property. The second wedding feast, just a week after the first, can not have been so joyful. What the narrator says next, just outside today‟s reading, foreshadows the new sibling rivalry that will begin between Rachel and Leah: “And Jacob cohabited with Rachel also; indeed, he loved Rachel more than Leah.”

This is not a feel-good story about the morally upright chosen one of God. This is a story of deceit that plays both ways. The deceivers- Jacob and Laban. The pawns- Rachel and Leah. The noticeably absent figure in the story- God. This is not the most likely cast of characters for the narratives of our faith. But this is what we get. And by now, that should not surprise us in thebook of Genesis. It is of such messy stuff that „beginnings‟ are made.

God has chosen a trickster and a morally ambiguous figure to carry the promise of Israel. We know this because just prior to Jacob‟s first encounter with Rachel at the well, Jacob dreamed a dream of a ladder to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending the ladder. And the Lord stood beside him and said:
“I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

What are we to make of this odd association between Jacob and God? Well, we know that God is partial to marginal people. God is drawn to those on the fringe, those traditionally lacking power and influence. As the second born in a society that privileged the firstborn, Jacob definitely fits into this category of those lacking traditional power and influence. So, on some level, it may be true that God is the God of tricksters- those who must use guile and deceit to overcome the structures of power. It is this earthly man, Jacob, with all his faults, through whom the resilient purposes of God are being worked out. The purpose of God is made operative in the places even
of scandal and deception. Perhaps it is precisely because of Jacob‟s doubtful character that God chooses him to fulfill the promise of God‟s chosen people.

Jacob is not the only chosen one in this story. The women, too, are chosen as the bearers of God‟s promise. Though the story‟s patriarchy is hard to listen to, God is also on the side of Rachel and Leah. Like Jacob, they are marginalized, and like Jacob, they are not without their character flaws. Yet Leah and Rachel, even their maidservants Zilpah and Bilhah, will serve as the creators of transition and transformation for the people of God. Through their wombs the tribes of Israel will be born. Their power is circumscribed, but their influence in the private realm cannot be overstated. God‟s work through these women is hidden in these texts, yet it is there, as the creative blessing of the family of Jacob with children of the promise.

Even though God does not appear as a character in this story, God is most definitely present. God is in the midst of us, even in conflict. Within the dynamics of a dysfunctional family system such as we witness in this story, God is present. Within a story of deceit, God is working in and through the conflict to reveal God‟s greater promises for humanity. God is looking out for Jacob and his family.

The truth to be told is that God is looking out for us, in the same way, in the midst of our own dysfunctional family systems and conflicts. God promised Jacob, “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go… for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” And God kept that promise. We are the descendants of that promise, and God is still present with us.

Paul‟s letter to the Romans heightens and expands this motif of God‟s presence among us, in light of Christ‟s appearance on earth and the revelation of the Triune God- Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. The promise of God‟s presence remains the same:
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

It is impossible to be separated from the love and presence of Christ. No outward circumstance,
no inward fault or failing, can push God away. God is a keeper of promises, and God has promised to abide with us. We will not be left alone to our own resources to bear the burdens of this time. Our God will be in our midst, even when God seems absent from the story, or when the story seems too lascivious or violent or deceptive to have a place for God. Even there, especially there, God is present, promising never to leave us, wherever we go.

Let us pray:
God of wonders, you work your will and claim us to serve your purposes as you have revealed
them in Jesus Christ. Take us and all we are and all we do; forgive what is imperfect and flawed
and show us how to make amends, so that our lives may be better witnesses to the presence of
our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Bibliography
Brueggemann, Walter et al. Texts for Preaching, Year A. (Westminster, John Knox Press:
Louisville, KY, 1995).
Fretheim, Terence E. The Pentateuch. (Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN, 1996).
The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume I (Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN, 1995).
Newsome, Carol A. and Ringe, Sharon H., editors. Women‟s Bible Commentary with
Apocrypha (Westminster, John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 1998).