![]() Yet what God tells the expectant mom can hardly be reassuring. So she turns to the God who graciously granted her those children. It, after all, uses a word that it uses in other places to describe people smashing others’ skulls.Īll of this makes Rebekah’s pregnancy so miserable that she basically wonders if there’s any point in going on living. But the Bible’s original language suggests that this is more than just roughhousing. In fact, I picture those unborn twins as elbowing and kneeing each other. They’re also jostling, perhaps bruising or even crushing each other. However, Rebekah’s pregnancy turns out, after all, not to be just a gift it’s also, in Brueggemann’s words, “problematic.” Once Rebekah can begin to feel her unborn twins moving around, she senses they aren’t just tumbling around in her womb. So now nothing can possibly go wrong, can it? Rebekah and Isaac will have a son through whom God can also keep God’s promise God made to Grandpa Abraham. God says “yes!” to their prayers by graciously empowering Rebekah to become pregnant. Any children they have will be, in John’s words, “born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”Īnd, in fact, God does smile on Isaac, Rebekah, their father Abraham and God’s promise. He appears to realize that if Rebekah and he are to have the future that is children, it will only be through God’s “yes” to his prayers. Our text’s Isaac Abraham seems to recognize that. However, we profess that every good thing we have is a gracious gift from God’s loving and caring hand. Certainly we carefully use the gifts and talents God has given us to plan and provide for ourselves and those we love. Yet we profess that our lives are no less precarious than Isaac and Rebekah’s. And if we don’t, we’ll always have safety nets to catch us when we fall. We’ll retire at about age 65 after carefully preparing for it through things like contributions to various pension plans. ![]() We’ll have the good education, as well as marriage and children for whose college education we’ll save. ![]() We, after all, naturally assume that if we just plan things carefully, things will turn out the way we want. It’s a reliance that few of us easily embrace. So once again, Abraham’s family must learn to embrace what Walter Brueggemann calls “precariousness.” It must depend entirely on God for its very survival. That means that Isaac and Rebekah, as well as Abraham’s whole family and God’s promise, will survive only if God intervenes. They have no way of providing themselves with children or the future they provide. So Isaac and Rebekah, as well as their parents and God’s promise, have no natural guarantees for the future. Yet the child of the promise’s wife, like his mother, has not been able to have children for twenty years. That son of God’s promise, Isaac, and his wife Rebekah have fallen in love and married. After all, old Abraham has finally found a good wife for his son. It certainly seems like nothing can go wrong as the Old Testament text the Lectionary appoints for this Sunday unfolds. Thankfully, then, God is graciously present in and to such things, always providentially bending them toward God’s good and loving purposes. ![]() Sometimes it’s precisely when we assume nothing can go wrong that things, in fact, do go quite wrong.
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