You know, sometimes some of these Bible stories just don’t make a whole lotta sense. At least, not in the way we want them to. I mean, even as a kid, long before I knew what it was that Jacob and Leah were doing at night other than sleeping, it still seemed odd to me that they could spend a whole night together and he still not recognize her. Hearing this story of how Jacob works for his uncle Laban for seven years in order to marry his daughter Rachel always left me with a complex mixture of emotions, something between agonizing confusion as to how Jacob didn’t recognize his new wife to be Leah, moral outrage at the injustice of the trick Laban had played upon him, and a deep frustration with the absence of any sort of possibility of a simple annulment to resolve the whole situation. After all, seven more years of laboring for your uncle is a long time! And that’s not even to say anything about the issue of polygamy!
So when I saw this story come up in the lectionary, I felt I had to return to it to figure out what it was about. I mean, what it was really about, as in, what’s the lesson or deeper spiritual truth that this story can teach us in this moment? To tell the truth, when I turn to the lectionary in such a way, I’ve often been surprised by how common it is that, with God’s inspiration, something appears to me that relates almost directly to something else going on in the life of the gathered community at that moment. But not this time; this time, my quest came up dry. At least, it did until I remembered how this story originally came to be.
Like much of the Hebrew Bible, the book of Genesis is filled with folk tales. These were tales that were told from one generation to the next, passing on stories that often had multiple functions in the communal context. These stories were important to their group identity, or they explained why they believed things were the way they were, or maybe they were simply funny and entertaining. It’s this latter category that I think it is so easy to forget, especially when we so often turn to the Bible for some serious moral teaching or deep spiritual meaning. Once I remembered that, it became clear that what’s going on here is quite simply a joke!
Of course, to get the joke, you have to go back two chapters before, where, with the help of his mother Rebecca, Jacob tricks his blind father Isaac into thinking that he’s Esau, in order to receive his father’s blessing and his family’s inheritance. Jacob succeeds, and flees the scene, only to have a similar switcheroo pulled on him, after he worked for his uncle Laban for seven years for the hand of Rachel in marriage. That’s when Leah and Laban conduct a plot similar to that of Jacob’s own, and he is married to Leah instead of Rachel; the trickster has now been tricked!
But nothing is ever as simple as that. Now while the core of the story was and remains a joke, a comedic story illustrating how what goes around comes around, each oral retelling of the story would allow for additional embellishments and layers of meaning to be added on. In an oral culture like that of the Ancient Hebrews, each retelling of a famous story allowed for different details, different embellishments to be added on or shaved off that changed or added to the meaning of the story for its listeners. Maybe, in one telling, Leah refuses to take off her veil until they are in the utter darkness, or in another, Jacob becomes too drunk at the feast to be able to notice the difference. Maybe Rachel was in on the plot, too, and happy for her sister Leah to be married first; or maybe she was away that evening and didn’t know what her sister and father had cooked up until it was too late, just like Esau had been earlier.
You see, this short little story can have all sorts of different meanings to it, depending on what details are added. Unfortunately, as so often happens when oral stories are written down, the embellishments that add meaning are shaven off and all we’re left with is the core. But the core is still powerful, and remains a vehicle for transformation that people of all ages can relate to and understand different layers of meaning. The proof is in the fact that we wrestle with this millennia-old story still to this day, trying to make meaning and find truth in it and come a little closer to God. Young and old alike find varying meanings and connections, and often one who encountered the story when young can continue to find deeper meaning and truth in it even when they’ve grown old.
Stories like this one are powerful. After all, as a child, this story was my first image of polygamy; heck, it was my first image of incest, too, with Jacob marrying his two cousins. Whenever I am confronted with similar examples of these things, through media thankfully more often than in real life, my experience is shaped by this and other primal stories that I and, I’m sure, many of you grew up with. Even if I still don’t get all that this story is about, my daily experiences add new layers of meaning to it each time I return to it.
Our Western minds don’t like to give much value to stories, unless there’s some clear moral or grand meaning. We privilege rationalization over narrative, written word over oral, and cognitive theology over lived experience. But just because we value one thing over the other doesn’t mean that that other ceases to affect us just the same. Who we are is profoundly shaped by the stories we tell, the stories we treasure and relate to and return to both in the quiet moments of personal reflection and in the more public moments of great gatherings, when the community is all together.
Why, one of the things that has been most important for me, as I’m coming to get to know the Saint Gregory’s community, and for which I’ve been so grateful, are all the stories that so many of you have shared with me about this place and its history, the people who have been here and left or the people who have stayed. The stories of your lives, who you were before you joined this community and what it is that keeps you here, are part of the architecture of this community, as surely as the walls the of church building and the lives of the many saints painted onto them. There are so many stories I have yet to learn, and each time one is shared with me I’m grateful for the way it means that I am able to become that much more connected to the overarching story of this community as a whole.
Human beings love to tell stories. We tell stories, not merely to convey information, but far more importantly to interpret the narrative of our lives, whether individually or as a community. We tell our own stories, in the hopes that these stories also intersect and become entwined with God’s story. In so doing, we find and spot out the connections between what appears to be just a mundane existence, and the Divine. When Paul rightly speaks to God’s incarnation in the self-sacrifice of essential workers, he tells a story of faith in God’s presence among us, intertwining our narratives of the mundane and the Divine. When Faith in Action and those of you involved with its work speak of God’s compassion for seniors without homes, you are telling a story of God’s justice on earth, intertwining our narratives of the mundane and the Divine. When those running the Food Pantry speak of the experience of loaves and fishes to meet the rising need, they are telling a story of God’s abundance, intertwining our narratives of the mundane and the Divine. It is these connections between our story and God’s story that gives our lives purpose and meaning. And with each retelling, new layers of meaning are added on that develop, change, or deepen the story’s meaning.
A way that one of the stories in our communal life that was given some new meaning this past week was in the way that a single protester in Portland earned the title, “the Naked Athena,” or, as others were calling her, another Lady Godiva. Completely naked, she walked up to and stood across from a wall of fully armed federal officers. Like the saint painted on our church building’s wall, she used her nakedness to display both her physical powerlessness as well as the greater power of her truth. And it is that combination of power and powerlessness in the face of violence that makes her witness so powerful, and I would say, truly Christian. The story of Lady Godiva, like the stories of so many other saints the Saint Gregory’s community has chosen to venerate, are stories that are now a part of this community; regardless of where or when these stories might have occurred, and despite even the fact that we’re now temporarily unable to gather together in person in the space of the building, these saints inspire us, and their stories are now a part of what it means to belong to this community and what worshipping in this community says about who we are and who we want to be. As time goes on, these stories become richer and richer, both because of what happens in the world, and because of the way that we relate to them. The more time we spend deepening our connection with these stories, the more meaningful these stories our community has chosen to tell will become; the more our community ages and grows to include varieties of experiences and connections, the richer and more deeply layered these stories our community has chosen to tell will become; the more we recognize the way these stories are repeated in one way or another throughout the events of the world, the more vibrant and powerful these stories our community has chosen to tell will become.
The stories that belong to the people of our community are young, and still developing. But the stories we choose to remember, in the saints on our walls and in the scripture in our Bibles, are often old and incredibly rich. Even when these stories don’t always have a clear meaning from the get go, they shape us and mold who we are, both individually and as a community. And, by God’s grace, they help us to see the many ways that our own stories intertwine with God’s story. It is nothing less than this which gives our lives meaning. Let us thank God for the power of stories.
Peter Levenstrong 