The God of Our Ancestors [Proper 11A - Genesis 28:10-19a]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Genesis 28:10-19a

 

The God of our Ancestors

 

I never met Lemuel Menear.  And I never will.  Because he died a long time ago.  He died far away from home and family.  He died in Andersonville, Georgia, in Camp Sumter.  Lemuel was one of 13,000 Union soldiers, prisoners of a civil war, who died surrounded by unbearable human suffering, amidst sickness and starvation.  He died in a prison historians have called “hell on earth.”  He was fifty-five years old.

 

Lemuel left behind his wife and daughters and all he loved.  To fight.  For his nation?  For unity?  For the ideals of freedom and equality?  For the future?  Because he had no other choice?  I’ll never know his reasons.  But I do know that he departed the rugged mountains of West Virginia never to return.

 

I never met Lemuel, but when his great-grandson died, I wept.  James Hartley was a kind man.  He worked hard and he carried a mischievous twinkle in his eye.  On a cool Flushing, Ohio night, not long before Thanksgiving, in the year 1989, he suffered a stroke and died.  And I wept because, to me, he was Grandpa Jim.  The great-grandson of Lemuel Menear was my great-grandpa.  And when I was nine, I attended his funeral.

 

And at the funeral I thought about a story from the distant past, the story of a man named Lazarus, and how that story suddenly felt so unfair.  Because love makes it hard to accept death.  And I was having a hard time accepting the death of my great-grandpa.  On that sad day, I sat beside his daughter, Judy, my grandmother, and together we cried. 

 

We call Judy Nanny.  And she loves me.  She is not shy about her love.  I know that she has prayed for me every day, since even before my birth, since the moment she discovered her unwed teenage daughter was with this child.  I know she prays for me still.

 

I stayed with Nanny often during my childhood.  And on the rare occasions I would wake up early enough, I would find her reading her Bible and saying her prayers in the small sunroom of her farmhouse.  She always talked to Jesus before the sun climbed above the verdant Ohio hills outside her window, the hills that stand not far from her great-great-grandfather Lemuel’s birthplace.

 

Family: these beautiful, imperfect people who shape us in countless ways.  Perhaps there has never been a more efficient conveyor of the mucky mix of love, stress, frustration, and contentment.  For reasons that God only knows, God has populated this world through these messy families, generation after generation.  And while, it has worked, it has never been the easiest plan.

 

According to the first chapters of the Bible, even the very first family was a mess.  Folks like to celebrate biblical family values, but the truth is: family is an immensely complex concept in the Bible.  This complexity is very apparent in the life of Jacob, the star of today’s Old Testament reading.  Jacob is at odds with his family from the womb.  He wrestles with his brother so intensely in utero that his mother longs for the sweet release of death.  Jacob tricks his father; Jacob tricks his father-in-law; Jacob marries a pair of sisters; Jacob swindles his brother out of the family inheritance.  In today’s text from Genesis, he is estranged, alone, and being hunted by his own kin. 

 

With a rearview full of burnt bridges, Jacob rushes out of town.  It is exhausting to be on the run.  And so Jacob finally falls asleep, on the rocks.  And God takes advantage of Jacob’s stillness.  You can’t run while you are asleep – not from family and not from God.  God meets Jacob where he lies, on the ground, in his dreams.

 

And though this man is so distanced from his family, God speaks to Jacob in the language of his ancestors: “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac.”  And God reminds Jacob, this despised fugitive, that, though at odds with his family, he carries on the dreams of his fathers and mothers.  He now holds the promise given to his grandparents.  There are things that cannot be escaped.  There are things that we just carry in our bones and in our souls.

 

On that barren ground, in his barren place, Jacob was undeniably a total mess.  And Jacob’s family was a mess – in no small part because of Jacob.  And yet, on that barren ground, in his barren place, Jacob saw God, a God who refused to give up on him – the same God who loved his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac, despite their flaws and their mistakes.  Jacob found, when he least expected it, that God is always and forever present in the mess.  The sins of the past and the struggles of the present do not scare God off. 

 

Neither do they negate the promise of the future.  Human though we are, we are the dreams of our ancestors.  We are the hope they sent out into the world of the future.  We are the flawed offerings of flawed people.  We carry the stuff of the dead, our dead, trying our best to refine what needs refined, redeem what must be redeemed, and realize what has only before been dreamed.

 

I am a product of the hill people of the Ohio Valley.  I am made of their stuff.  Like you, I have inherited, from my family, the good with the bad; like weeds and wheat they grow up together in our hearts and lives.  We don’t choose our family.  And yet God chooses to bless this world through these twisted histories, to write salvation’s story on the leaves of our family trees.  God chooses to meet us in the mess.

 

It feels like a miracle that any of us are here.  God created each of us over centuries, bit by bit, through the generations.  Our stuff survived wars and plagues and atrocities.  We are dreams that were passed through a broken history of humans.  I think about Lemuel, in his horrid prison.  And I wonder what it means to him that something of him still survives here, that his dreams – for his family and for this world – are still being dreamed.

 

I have two children.  And I hope they learn to love a gentler world into existence.  I hope that they might find something in me worth carrying into the future.  I hope they look back on our history and see God in that mess.  I hope when they look into the future, they find that the same old God is calling their names.

 

The name Lemuel means “belonging to God.”  And I hope that gave Lemuel Menear some comfort in his final days.  I hope he realized God was with him in the mess. 

 

We belong to God – every one of us.  That is the truth that makes a family history into salvation history.  We belong to the God of our Ancestors: to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the God of Lemuel, James, and Judy, to the God who cradled our past and calls forth our future.  We belong to God.  At our best and at our worst, on the run or on the rocks, checkered past or promised future, in the weeds and in the mess: God never leaves our side.  God never lets us go.  The God of our Ancestors never forgets.  We are always on God’s mind, have always been and will always be, because we belong to God.