Last Sunday we encountered the severe and challenging story of the binding of Issac. Now we come to a detailed story of a search for a bride, a tale almost placid by comparison, but filled with interesting detail. This morning, let us look at it together for a time. This is the story of the finding of the woman Rebecca who will be the bride of Issac, Sarah and Abraham’s son. And with this story, the cycle of stories of the patriarch Abraham and the people of his generation will come to an end.
Sarah has died in her 127th year. Abraham is described as well advanced in years. He knows that his own time is coming to an end and he enlists the help of the oldest servant to find a bride for his son. Abraham is concerned about two things. First, he wants to make sure that the bride comes from his people, the H’biru people. He fears that it will be too easy for Issac to marry one of the people of this new region, the Canaanites. To marry someone from his own people necessitates going to Haran, the place from which Abraham has come. This is Abraham’s first concern. His second concern is that Issac not go there himself. Abraham fears that if Issac goes he will not come back. If Issac does not come back, the promise of the land made by YHWH to Abraham and his future generations will not be fulfilled.
It is easy to see that the servant is the most important character in the story even if he is nameless. Nameless people often carry a big burden in this society. Here is a man burdened with a huge responsibility of seeking and finding. He brings ten camels. He carries gifts. He travels the long distance to the city of Nahor called Haran.
He prepares, he travels, he prays, he waits, he discerns from among the women who come in the cool of the evening to draw water.
This Rebeccah whom he encounters is quite a prize. Not only is she young and pretty but she also must have been very active and strong. Drawing water for 10 camels from a deep well would be quite a task, since each camel would drink between 10 and 20 gallons of water each day. That 200 gallons of well water being drawn. This girl’s in shape! The servant puts jewelry on her and the servant eventually shares his mission with her brother and others in the woman’s family. And the young woman who drew all the water and wears the new jewelry does not hesitate but commits herself to traveling back to Abraham’s dwellings in a distant land. He is unknown to her. Her future husband Issac is unknown to her as well. The land and all of its people has not been seen. But she exhibits courage and strength and faith. She does not hesitate but joins the servant in the return trip.
What is it like to face challenges in a distant land? To journey with faith and with perhaps also a sense of adventure? As they set out, we can see in the journey of Rebeccah and Abraham’s servant a recapitulation of the initial journey, the journey that brought Abraham and Sarah and all of their people into this new land.
Here is a woman of faith, traveling by faith to a new land. At the end she meets Issac in the region of the Negeb out walking in the evening. Our story ends: Then Issac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent. He took Rebecca and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Issac was comforted after his mother’s death.
This weekend we remember the birth of our nation. Long before the War for Independence and the decision by the colonists to strike out for independence, both men and women had taken the long, arduous and sometimes deadly journey to what was described as the New World. With this weekend celebration in mind, I am constrained to think of other Rebeccas—other women who faced long odds, who exhibited strength and courage, who traveled into strange places on faith. Some of these were physical with the great vast continent of the New World stretching west. Others were social, religious and political strange places.
Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in Northhampton England in 1612. Her father managed the estate of a wealthy Puritan landowner. The girl had access to the estate’s library and she read and wrote under the encouragement of her own father. At the age of sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet, a Puritan associate of her father’s. Anne and Simon and Anne’s parents all became involved in the Massachusetts Bay Company and together sailed to North American in 1630 on the Arabella, the flagship of the Puritan migration led by John Winthrop.
Bradstreet survived the 76 day voyage on stormy seas and the primitive living conditions in the colonies. She survived the birth of eight children and the frequent absence of her husband, an administrator of the colony. She survived the devastation of the fire that took their home in the distant town of Andover. And somehow in the midst of this challenging new life in a distant past she wrote poetry. The result was the first book published by any one—man or woman—living in the English colonies in North America. Strength and courage. Faith in the midst of strange places. Ann Bradstreet died in the New World in 1672. Her collected work, although much admired in her own day, was not published until 1867.
We are familiar with the great passion for justice that was the hallmark of the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, another woman of strength, faith and courage. We know her for the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a work that ignited the anti-slavery movement when it arrived on the scene in 1851, appearing in fifty-three installments in a magazine called ERA. Stowe’s writing resulted in a new awareness of the evils of slavery. Coming from a deeply religious family which also valued education, Stowe put her talents to work and journeyed with strength and faith and courage into a new land that had never been fully seen—the landscape and the land of the anti-slavery movement. She did this despite a number of obstacles and challenges. Harriet had six children, she raised them in a home without central heat, electricity or much money. She fought depression and ill health. One writer described her life:
Torn between babies to nurse, diapers to change, overturned chamber pots to clean up after, untrained servant girls to instruct, half-written stories to finish, puddings to make, children to mind, comfort and teach, dishes to wash, and bills to pay, Harriet seems to have led the most fragmented and harried existence imaginable.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 500,000 copies in 5 years.
What we may not know about Harriet Beecher Stowe was that she came from an American family that influenced American in the 19th century more than any other family. Her father was Rev Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister known for his evangelism. The family was large. The children including especially the girls were well educated. They founded schools, participated in the campaign to stop the removal of the Cherokee nation during the Andrew Jackson administration. One son served as president of a college in Illinois and was active in the abolitionist movement there.
Catherine Esther Beecher was the eldest and was known for founding a school for women in Hartford Connecticut—a school that eventually expanded to become Hartford Female Seminary. This is Catherine speaking to us from one of her essays:
It is to mothers and to teachers that the world is to look for the character which is to be enstamped on each succeeding generation, for it is to them that the great business of education is almost exclusively committed. And will it not appear by examination that neither mothers nor teachers have ever been properly educated for their profession?”
— Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education,
The list of Rebecca like women in the New World—educating, writing, exploring, advocating—is a long one. Includes Eva Booth, the daughter of Willliam Booth, the founding of the Salvation Army in England. Eva held the first Salvation Army meeting in 1879.
And here are some other names, names of American women who ventured forth as leaders.
Olympia Brown: The first woman to pastor in a Unitarian church, serving the church in Racine Wisconsin. Prominent advocate for woman’s suffrage.
Anne Hutchinson: Advocate for religious liberty
Catherine Spaulding: First leader and founder of the Sisters of Nazareth in the frontier region of Kentucky. She founded orphanages and schools as she and others reached out to the poor and the orphaned children in Kentucky.
Elizabeth Anne Seton: Elizabeth Seton founded the first religious community of women in the United States, the Sisters of Charity. Her mother died when she was only three. She began as an Episcopalian from an ardent Episcopalian family. She became Roman Catholic later in her life, attracted to the doctrine of the Real Presence. Her work among the poor in the new nation eventually resulted in sainthood. Pope Paul VI canonized her on September 14, 1975. She was the first native-born saint of the United States.
And so we see that Rebecca was not the only woman of faith to take journeys, both physical and otherwise. On this weekend of our nation’s independence we are most always mindful of the men of our nation’s past. Many Biblical accounts mention and focus upon mostly men. But the lives of people like Rebecca, Sarah, Miriam, and Ruth – not to mention Mary, Mary Magdalene, Elizabeth and many others—are also paralleled in our nation’s history by other individuals—women of strength and faith and courage who waded into conflicts and controversies; who journeyed into strange lands; who accomplished so much in challenging us to be better as Americans.
Today we mention a few. Women of faith. Women who blazed a path for all of us to follow.
Let us take upon us the yoke of Christ and his gentle burden of love. And let us as persons of faith take our own journeys and follow Him.
In the name of God—Father Son and Holy