Reclaiming our Stories: Rebekah

By Tobi Fleck 

Read more of Rebekah's story: Genesis 24; 25:21-34; 26:1-17; 27 

Genesis 24:57-61

They [Laban and Bethuel] said, “We will call the girl, and ask her.” And they called Rebekah, and said to her, “Will you go with this man?” She said, “I will.” So they sent away their sister Rebekah and her nurse along with Abraham’s servant and his men. And they blessed Rebekah and said to her, “May you, our sister, become thousands of myriads; may your offspring gain possession of their foes.” Then Rebekah and her maids rose up, mounted the camels. And followed the man; thus the servant [of Abraham] took Rebekah and went his way.

At the beginning of my internship, I had the wonderful experience of working with one of the local Jewish Rabbis on an interfaith project. After the project was finished, she told me that I was free to stay in touch, as she understood how difficult transitions to new cities could be. This prompted a continuing resolution to myself that whenever possible, I would attend Shabbat on Friday night. While there were many parts of Shabbat I loved, one practice stood out to me. During the Avot, not only are the male ancestors (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) named, but so were the women! Every Friday, we remembered Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. Naming them every Friday rekindled my curiosity as to the stories of these pillars of faith. 

So, here’s an overview of the beginning of Rebekah’s story. Abraham, being very old and having watched his wife Sarah die, sends out his trusted servant, whose name we do not know, with specific instructions to travel back to Abraham’s homeland in search for a wife for Abraham’s son, Isaac. It cannot be someone of Canaanite descent, but must be someone from Abraham’s own tribe. Once the Servant reaches Abraham’s homeland, he prays to God for success in his task and asks for signs. And, sure enough, almost as soon as he was done praying, a woman, our Rebekah, walks up and fulfills all of the signs he asked of God. Better yet, she was indeed of Abraham’s kin!

The Servant goes with Rebekah to her family home and shares his story with Rebekah’s family. The whole story, from Abraham commissioning him to go forth, to his conversations with God, and Rebekah’s role in fulfilling it all. 

And then, we get to the part that still amazes me. Rebekah is asked for her consent. We hear her voice said “I will.” Now, in today’s day, that might seem like a no-brainer. Of course it would be her decision if she’d go and marry someone she’d never met, who lives in a different country. But in scripture, rarely do we hear of women making these choices, let alone literally hear their voices say the words. Rebekah’s voice here is important, and important to acknowledge. 

There are tons of discussion questions that could take place around the story of Rebekah. Questions surrounding Abraham’s choice to find a kinswoman for his son’s wife. Questions around the rivalry between Israel and Canaan. And how that might relate to modern day rivalries. Or maybe questions about times you have asked God for help in a task- times you’ve asked for signs and have they been given to you. 

Often, we only hear one side of a story, particularly the dominant, privileged side, but today I want you to ask yourself: Whose voices do I hear often? What stories do they tell? Whose voices don’t I hear? What stories might they tell? And how has this played into the entrenched racism rampant in our own country? 

White folx: There are many resources out there to help you begin to hear other voices, other lived experiences. I would encourage you to take some time this week to pick up a book, or download an audio book, or visit a website, and listen to voices you’ve not heard before. 

The Trinity & Why It is Important

The Trinity is arguably the most important piece of theology that we talk about in the church.  The doctrine of the Trinity is the starting place for all other theology.  The doctrine of the Trinity is inherently biblical, was developed through many years of reflection and theological debate, and is relevant insofar as it is our salvation.    

The doctrine of the Trinity is biblically based.  The correct and only non-heretical way to speak about God is to say that God is “the sovereign Lord of all creation who has done a new and gracious work in Jesus Christ and who continues to be active in the world through the power of the Spirit.”  This truth is revealed throughout the bible.  We know through the creation story of Genesis, the Old Testament, and the first chapter of the gospel according to John that God is the the God of all [human]kind (Jer 32:27).  Throughout the Old Testament, we hear that the God of Abraham is one God, the almighty and all-powerful God (Deut 6:4).  As Christians, we profess our faith in the God of Abraham, a singular God.  

However, the language of God becomes confused with the New Testament writers.  Paul is first to help us truly understand that there is “a new meaning of the word ‘God.’”  With the revelation of Jesus Christ and the presence of the Spirit, we now understand the proper name of God to be “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”  We hear in much of the New Testament that Jesus and God are one (John 1, 10:30; Phil 2:5-8; Col 1:15-17).  Scripture also reveals that the Spirit is Lord (2 Cor 3:17).  Although there is talk about the “two-ness” (Father and Jesus) and even “three-ness” (Father, Jesus, and Spirit) of God in the New Testament, it remains that “there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6).  It is through this and other biblical evidence that God is revealed as the Triune (three-in-one) God.  The doctrine of exactly how God is able to be three-in-one has been disputed for many centuries in order to come to a profession of faith that is slightly more understandable and non-heretical.

It did not take much time after the writing of the New Testament for early theologians to recognize the complicated traits and relationship of God.  Tertullian was the first to use the language of “substance” and “person,” arguing that the Father, Jesus, and Spirit (the persons) are distinct from one another in terms of their relationship to one another but are of the same substance.  Tertullian also taught that Son is subordinate to the Father, a teaching later rejected by the church.  

Arius’ teaching emphasized monotheism and wanted to protect God’s “one-ness” by teaching subordinationism: Jesus is a demigod or an angel.  Arius rejected the idea that Jesus was present as the Word when God created the universe (John 1).  

The work of Athanasius is where we see the most distinct beginnings of the Nicene Creed, which we profess today.  Athanasius taught that Christ was “eternally begotten” and not created, being of one substance with the Father.  Unlike his predecessors, Athanasius argued that Father and Son are homoousias, or of one substance, and not of a “like” substance as other theologians thought.  The Council of Nicaea adopted Athanasius’ teachings, but still needed to solve the issue of the Spirit.  

Following the Council of Nicaea, the Cappadocians developed the doctrine of the divinity of the Spirit and taught that God is “one being, three persons.”  The Council of Constantinople affirmed and elaborated on the teachings of the Cappadocians and the result was the Nicene Creed.  We profess a version of the Nicene creed in many churches every Sunday without much thought.  

Knowing that it took hundreds of years to come to a decision about the nature of the Triune God, we must recognize that something is “at stake in affirming that God is triune, that God is communicated to us in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.”  In essence, we acknowledge that we worship a Triune God, but what does this mean for our faith?  It means a great deal about our faith.  What we “claim about God impacts the way we think about our relationship to divine life and to each other.”  

It is only through belief in the Triune God that we have hope in salvation.  It is through the monotheistic God of the Old Testament that Judaism claims salvation.  We, too, share in that salvation because of God’s work in Christ Jesus and the continuing work of God through the power of the Spirit.  God made the promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 and 17 that God would bless all the nations of the earth through the offspring of Abraham.  We are told in Romans 11 that Gentiles, thus we, are grafted into this promise through Jesus Christ.  We know that in Christ Jesus there is no longer a distinction between the people to whom salvation belongs (Gal 3:28).  If God and Jesus are not one being, then this grafting of Gentiles into the promise makes no logical sense.  It is only “through our Lord Jesus Christ” that we are to “obtain salvation” (1 Thess 5:9).  

Moreover, it is the overflowing love that joins and unites the Trinity into one being that brings salvation to the world.  God, in God’s very nature as the Triune God, is communal and relational.  God is the perfect example of communion and mutual indwelling that is found nowhere in creation.  Each person of the Trinity is completely of the same substance and completely distinct from each other person.  

God created humanity and all of creation to be in communion with all the rest of creation and with God.  Because of the Fall, creation is no longer in complete communion with God.  It is God’s inherent desire, as a relational God, to be in communion with creation and thus demonstrated God’s self-giving love in the person of Christ Jesus on the cross.  Our salvation is the very essence of God’s triune and relational nature.  We find that in the Trinity there is “difference without division, self-giving without self-loss, and eternal life in ceaseless harmony and peace.”

Our only hope is in the Lord of all creation, the God that promised to Abraham blessing for the entire world.  It is through God’s fulfillment of God’s promise in Jesus Christ and the continuing work of God through the power of the Holy Spirit that we are able to witness the incredibly self-giving love that defines the Triune God.  It is only through our belief in this Triune God that any other doctrine or theology is grounded.        

                  

Sources: 

Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publihsing Co., 2004), 66. 

N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publihsing Co., 1997), 67. 

Dr. Daniel Bell, “Doctrine of God: The Trinity” lecture, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University, September 22, 2014.

Kathleen A. Cahalan, Introducing the Practice of Ministry (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010), 156. 

Humanity, God, & Sin

There have been several conversations among the members of our church concerning humanity and sin.  While some sinful people are excused as “only human,” others are dismissed as “pure evil.”  These statements are theological in that they are very real statements about God’s creation, the purpose of humanity, and the nature of sin and salvation.  Our theology on these matters is important because it is related to how we understand salvation and ultimately related to our own salvation.    

We see from the very beginning of the creation story and creation stories throughout the scripture that God created all things (John 1:3) and everything that comes from God is good (Genesis 1).  Therefore, all of creation is created good.  God did not create evil, nor did God create humanity to be anything less than “ very good” (Genesis 1:31).  God is pure goodness and humanity is good in association and relationship with the Creator.  Because there is nothing in the world that God did not create (thus nothing in the world was created bad), there is nothing in the world that is pure evil.  If everything is good, nothingness is evil.  It is impossible for creatures to be so consumed by evil that they diminish into nothingness.   To say that something is “pure evil” is simply untrue.  This is not to say, however, that there is no evil in the world.  Sin causes evil, but sin was not created by God because God created all things - especially humanity - as good.  The goodness of creation and the goodness of humanity is innately related to the purpose of humanity.       

We see from the Genesis story that God created humanity to be in full communion with divinity.  Before the Fall, God was in such full communion that God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:8).  Creation was created by God as an act of outpouring love so that creation might be in relationship with one another and with God.  It is impossible to deny the fact that God created humanity to be relational with the divine.  The very Trinitarian nature of God is relational.  The truly human are the ones who are caught up in the Trinitarian relationship with the divine.  The theologian Augustine said that “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.”  It was through the Fall that relationships were corrupted and divided.  The Fall, original sin, and evil were not supposed to happen.  God did not create humanity to be separated and constantly longing for God.  Fundamentally social, we were created to be in communion with God, the rest of creation, and other human beings.  In fact, we see that the only thing “not good” about the creation story was that the first human being was without a companion (Genesis 2:8).  We know that through sin and death, there is separation from God that is not natural and not indicative of our created human nature.   

So the question remains: where does evil come from if it was not a part of creation?  Sin and the Fall are a complete surd.  There is no explanation for why the first human beings would turn away from God and toward themselves.  God created everything for humanity and offered everything, including full communion, to humanity, and humanity turned away.  The Fall put humanity in bondage to sin.  The entire world is enslaved by sin and we cannot change this enslavement by simply trying to become better.  We have fallen and it is impossible for us to be redeemed and turn back to God without God’s redeeming power.  But God, being so merciful and completely loving, longs for humanity to be in communion with God.  In the same way, creation continues “its groaning, and its longing to be renewed and perfected.”  Thus God became incarnate in the person of Christ Jesus in order to redeem creation to its original intent.

It is only through Christ that humanity and all of creation might become reconciled to God’s self once again.  Church doctrine claims that Jesus is the perfect human being.  If sin were a natural part of humanity, then Jesus would have to be a sinner in order to be the perfect human being.  On the contrary, Jesus does not sin.  Through this doctrinal statement, we realize that to be perfectly human is to be perfectly in communion with God.  To be perfectly human is to be without evil and without the sin that separates us from our Creator.  Jesus is “God’s proclamation, revealing who we are not and who God created us to be.”  What we think of creation and sin is directly related to how we understand salvation.      

Salvation is to “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  Our salvation is not the abandonment of our humanity, but the chance for us to become truly human by participating in communion with God through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  Through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus, all of creation has been released from the bondage of sin.  Salvation is the chance for us to be exactly as God created us to be: in full communion with the divine.  Humanity is now completely free to turn toward God.  Theologians such as Athanasius described salvation as God becoming “human that humanity might become divine.”  It is our humanity that longs to be in communion with God.  As the Westminster Confession states, the “chief end of humanity is to worship and enjoy God forever.”  

Saying that a person is “just human” is to say that she or he is longing to be in communion with God.  To say that a person is “purely human” would mean that the person is in full communion with God, the way God intended she or he to be from the beginning of creation.  Statements such as these are indicative of our core beliefs about creation, humanity, and the nature of salvation.  Thus, it is important that we understand and portray such theology adequately.

Sources: 

Dr. Daniel Bell, “Creator, Creation, and Communion” lecture, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University, September 29, 2014.

Dr. Daniel Bell, “Sin, Death, and the Devil” lecture, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University, October 6, 2014.

Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publihsing Co., 2004). 

Jann E. Boyd Fullenwieder, “Proclamation: Mercy for the World,” in Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission, ed. Thomas H. Schattenauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999).

I, the Woman

On Friday, I picked up a couple of journals from the library at the Lutheran Church in Malaysia headquarters. I was delighted to find some called In God's Image: Journal of Asian Women's Resource Centre for Culture and Theology. I immediately took the latest three journals they had (2000, 2001, and 2002). Disappointed they had apparently stopped ordering the journals or they stopped printing them, I flipped through them, savoring the black and white picture of women in "tribal clothing" and headlines such as "Laws Regarding Women's Sexuality in India." I had found my reading for the month.

In the December 2000 journal, I found this poem by J Jonmoni D Shira. She is a Garo woman of what is now Meghalaya, India and wrote this poem in 1940. They call themselves A-chik Mande, literally "hill people" and are one of the few remaining matrilineal societies in the world. The poem was translated from Garo by Caroline R Mark. Nothing else is said about the author in the journal.

A Garo tribal couple in traditional dress.

I did a quick Google search to see if this poem is well known or published online and found nothing. I think J Jonmoni D Shira's voice deserves to be heard.


I have been born a woman
To bear all kinds of difficulties,
Though I lament my misfortune
I cannot alter it.

Poor Eve committed sin
Before the world;
Bringing heavier burdens and worries
Upon the woman.

From birth, her strength is less
Her face is lovelier,
But I am taught
To be under male domination.

From tender age
I have to live under the control of man,
At the slap of my younger brother
I weep loudly.

I cannot act as I please,
There's not a day of happiness for me
I cannot dream of
Even proposing to travel.

I know and understand
The truth,
The bad and the good, the consequences
And the subject matter.

Yes I cannot
So much as open my mouth
Due to the words,
'Silence, you stupid woman!'

To sit in the dumping place of chaff,
To eat the leftovers, is my lot;
I get ridicule from my fellow human beings
Because of my lowliness.

Though I fall in love
With an eligible young man,
I have been forcibly made to give my consent
To one whom I dislike.

When I fall in love with a young man
I get into trouble,
For a trifling error
They jilt me.

O Young Man, beware,
Deeds do not simply vanish,
Some time, you too,
May fall into a night of sorrow.

Now I am a married woman,
My difficulties have multiplied;
It is now my duty
To suffer agony in bearing children.

For a slight mistake
I am slapped;
The crying child
Keeps me awake at night.

My husband knows not
My hardship and pain,
I succumb
To more diseases.

In the small hours of the morning
I get up and cook,
I spend the whole day
In the field.

I return home carrying a heavy load
And then I work at home,
Though it is very late at night I cannot rest,
For I have to husk rice.

Out of exhaustion my body becomes thin,
I am no more attractive,
It occurs to my husband
To look for someone else.

Nevertheless, my mind
Has pure thoughts,
Though my husband does me wrong
I bear it patiently.

Souls do not keep silent,
You shall not remain superior,
As a reward for your deeds
You will not escape from hell.

You, man, therefore,
Beware,
You must surely look into
The grievances of women.

If my word is wrong,
Refute it,
If you yourself are at fault
Repent now.

Our Kingdom

You have probably heard me say that I can express my feelings best in song and in the written word.  This is my favorite song right now. And the fact that they just sat down in her bedroom and sang it just gives me shivers. Everything about this is amazing. And I think it says a lot about who I am, whose I am, and where I am right now. It's called "Our Kingdom" in the video, and is now titled "Sons and Daughters" by Allman Brown and Liz Lawrence. 

My favorite line is "it's all to come, for now we're still young, just building our kingdom, but it's all to come."  I've been a worrier my entire life.  I have always lived in my plans for the future and I am finally to the point in my life that I don't want to do that anymore.  (See my previous blog post.) 

But I don't think this song is a love song between two people.  This is a love song between me and God.  Listen to it again.  It is a promise that no matter where I go or what I do, God is with me and will wrap his arms around me "like the moon in the arms of the sky."  

I believe in a God that will put a fire in my soul and be proud of it.  I believe in a God that "will build a fire" within the house to keep his people impassioned.  

The chorus gets me the most: 

"And I'll build a fire, you fetch the water, and I'll lay the table." 

A fire brings to mind sacrifices from the Old Testament- an incredible testament of faith from Abraham, a sacrifice of thanksgiving from hundreds of God's people.  God asks us to bring the water.  She is asking us to fetch the water and baptize her people.  And she will lay the table.  She will feed us with the sustaining, life-giving bread and wine of Christ. 

And knowing that we came from many generations of faithful people, we will pray that those generations continue.  "We still pray for sons and daughters."  

Of course the garden imagery is everywhere in the Bible.  Jesus goes there for refuge, strength, and questioning.  A garden was the very first place God knew her people.  She is inviting us back into the garden to share the "red, red wine." 

And no matter what happens or where we go, God will always "keep the light on to call [us] back home."  She wants us to continue to come back home to her, where she will wrap her arms around our hearts and keep us safe. 

And God knows that "it's all to come."  Everything we could ever hope for is to come in the eschaton.  But "for now we're still young, just building our kingdom."  For now, God has given us the mission of building the Kingdom, God's Kingdom, with her.  

It is almost as if God is giving us permission to live into our youngness.  God wants us to follow our bliss and commune with her in the garden, let him hold you tight, and be open to him building a fire.  Because we're still young and it's all to come.