IMMODEST PROPOSALS
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Text: Genesis 24
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
Now there’s a proposal of a relationship, romantic or religious. Anybody who has ever got past the proposal in either case, in any relationship, knows that there will be way more than sentiment and feeling involved if it’s going anywhere. You move in, move on, in a wedding or marriage, or participation in an actual religious community and behaviour, and the proposal leads to commitments and company. Relationships come with inlaws, outlaws, ex-laws and next-laws – not just romantic partnerships, but in business partnerships, and religious involvement.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
Have you ever heard such a proposal made to you? God makes the proposal, Jesus does – but most of us in our culture recognize the proposal from romantic couples’ stories, rather than religious conversions. God knows how it goes – no, really, God knows our fumbles and foibles in living out our initial moments of offer and acceptance, honorable intentions and statements of commitment. And God keeps offering, and inviting, and forgiving – a model for our own love. God knows the proposals we’ve made and received, the commitments and company they led to.
We’ve been listening to stories from Genesis, given by the revised common lectionary, but extended and amplified so we get a fuller sense of the toledot, the generations of Adam and Abraham – the myths moving into saga and legend, and toward historical narratives and elaborations, etiological or etymological. These are ancient tales from a strange culture, with cultural assumptions that differ from ours. Last week, we had to struggle with the unfamiliar archaic language of pride and sacrifice, honour and duty, from our preferred utilitarian individualistic ethic of freedom.
Lest this all seems esoteric and irrelevant, I have tried to draw connections between the Torah tales and our own issues of zenophobia and homophobia. Today, I acknowleged our changing cultural assumptions about gender and marriage, with the story of how Rebekah became Isaac’s wife and partner. Donna Martin, chair of worship on council, read the lesson, and asked me how long we had to keep this up. I said a while yet: in the next couple of weeks, we’re looking at sibling rivalry and ethnic conflict and competition, then polygamy and tribal loyalties!
Our culture pushed the ethic of freedom and autonomy a long way in love and marriage when I was a young guy. In the 1970’s, we kicked the state out of our bedrooms, and the Family Law Reform Act re-imagined marriage as easily dissoluble by free adults. The results were lots of single moms raising children in poverty, and men ducking responsibility freely. Our culture revisited the mutual obligations of support owed between common law or traditional couples, and of both parents to children regardless of marital status. Pendulums do swing.
Our nation welcomed a variety of cultures through immigration during our generations, too. My first church council of ten elders included two members enjoying their arranged marriages: one Christian couple from Amritsar in India, the other couple Lutherans from Ethiopia. Those women challenged my naïve assumptions that they had less power than the liberated women enjoying the autonomy of our Family Law Reform Act, wed ‘as long as they both shall love.’ They showed me some of the power of commitments and company after the first proposal, whether that initial proposal was made by a matchmaker, extended family, or at a rock concert.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
Another decade or more passed, and I enjoyed a season serving a Japanese congregation, and was taken aback when elders confessed to me how upset they had been when their children chose to marry ‘hakujin’, Caucasian partners. After all, it’s one thing to live among a barbaric culture, but the risks to their children of marrying outside their culture and ethnicity were obvious. I’d heard the same things from our own community as more than half of my protestant peers married Catholics – but had rejected it as bigotry. I was getting older, and able to hear the universal parental concern to reduce risks and maximize the odds of compatibility as the next generation builds households. In the end, everybody loves the grandchildren, who embody our hopes.
I know that our congregation is committed to women’s equality and freedom, and anxious about bible stories of patriarchy about powerless women or even children being coerced, bought and sold in slavery and arranged marriage. I know that our denomination prefers to read scripture progressively, claiming that we have become better than our primitive patriarchal ancestors. Personally, as you are learning, I prefer to work at hearing the unfamiliar culture, and trying to respect its integrity and learn its lessons, without taking it as a set or role models to be copied in our own social norms. I hope that this is good practice for us getting beyond cultural imperialism and assimilation, and past multiculturalism, to intercultural coexistence and respect.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
So who romanced Rebekah? Not Isaac, her husband to be. Abraham was getting old. He was 99 when Isaac finally came, and Sarah was no spring chicken. It was time for succession planning – for a patriarch head of a whole economic unit much bigger than a nuclear family. He calls Eliezer, his servant, his chief operating officer, and his executor, to make plans. Eliezer put his hand under Abraham’s thigh to make what the Schocken translation calls an ‘oath/curse’. There’s a moment of male bonding, vulnerability and intimacy! The mission is to make a deal, like a headhunter seeking key executive talent, or a rainmaker looking for merger or acquisition.
Abraham says ‘don’t let Isaac marry some local girl’. It’s one thing to live among these Canaanites, but he’s going to need somebody like my wife Sarah, like his mother, with the shared values and culture of my home country. Go back to northern Syria, and fetch him a wife. Eliezer says ‘what if she won’t come, do I have to take Isaac back to Syria’? Abraham says ‘then you’re off the hook – I don’t want him to go back.’ Remember ‘lech lecha’, get up and go, leave the old country and seek to build something new? We’re not going back, just trying to honour the best of our roots and values and cultures, and improve the odds by arranging a match.
Eliezer is not a slave, and Rebekah’s consent is required and not coerced. Re-imagine this story in another culture, not as a romantic dating service, but as ancient business. Don’t underestimate Eliezer or Rebekah, or you won’t understand the tale. Here’s a contemporary parallel: “Do you want to talk with the man in charge, or the woman who really knows what’s going on?” “Do you want to meet the guy in the boss’s office, or the one who really runs the place?”
Eliezer sets out with ten loaded camels. Think about container loads, the kind of shipping scale that move from rail to tractor-trailers in our local Vaughan shipping yards. He shows up at the well or the spring in Syria, like the next freight yard or market terminal, and parks. He prays to God to show him somebody who will not only give him a drink, but will water his camels too. That initiative and generous hospitality is the character he is looking for in a partner for Isaac.
Rebekah arrives with her 3 gallon jug, and sure enough, takes care of Eliezer, and his 10 camels and crew. Camels, I read, can drink 25 gallons each – 250 gallons. This is not a girl on an errand for her mother. This is a young woman in charge of client management, customer satisfaction and service, shipping and receiving in the marketplace. When Eliezer asks, she delivers, and agrees to put him up with his whole caravan. She doesn’t ask permission of her elders or any man before accepting his proposal, and committing her family to negotiations.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
This is less like our sentimental romance than like business mergers or headhunting, proposals seeking partners, demanding commitments of wider companies of people. Eliezer and his caravan opens conversation with Rebekah and her maids. He puts a ring in her nose, bracelets on her arms, and home she goes to her mother’s household, while he goes to her father and brother’s place (that’s polygamy and non-nuclear family talk). That’s like somebody coming home with the big diamond ring on her finger, like the young hockey draft pick coming home with the signing bonus – and the rest of the inlaws and next-laws meeting the new partners!
Eliezer retells the story to Laban and Bethuel, her brother and father, and asks them to take a position for or against his proposal. He doesn’t have a lot of time to waste, since Abraham’s not getting any younger, and they have veto. On the other hand, they don’t have control, and say as much. It’s up to God to propose and dispose, and up to Rebekah to consent. Eliezer has already satisfied them. So they call Rebekah, and ask her if she’ll go, and she consents. It’s a deal, and the truckloads from the camels are spread around the family, like a contract closed after last week’s hockey draft, paying out the big front end payments.
It’s not quite over, or not yet begun. Eliezer wants to get on his way. Rebekah’s family counter-offers a delay of ‘ten days’, which should be read in cultural context as asking about a year delay so that they can prepare for the transition of management as they lose Rebekah. It’s a bit like last week’s negotiations among the banks and the buyers and the board of BCE, haggling timing and terms to close the purchase by Teachers’ pension plan and others. The lenders get a date and a dividend suspension later , and the buyers get the new management in place now, distributing the risks and the benefits. After the initial proposal, the offer and acceptance, it’s not quite over, and not yet begun – these will be long term relationships, commitments and wider company:
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
There’s a proposal of a relationship, romantic or religious. Anybody who has ever got past the proposal in either case, in any relationship, knows that there will be way more than sentiment and feeling involved if it’s going anywhere. You move in, move on, in a wedding or marriage, or participation in an actual religious community and behaviour, and the proposal leads to commitments and company. Relationships come with inlaws, outlaws, ex-laws and next-laws – not just romantic partnerships, but in business partnerships, and religious involvement.
Have you ever heard such a proposal made to you? Sure! God makes the proposal, Jesus does – but most of us in our culture recognize the proposal from romantic couples’ stories, rather than religious conversions. God knows how it goes – no, really, God knows our fumbles and foibles in living out our initial moments of offer and acceptance, honorable intentions and statements of commitment. And God keeps offering, and inviting, and forgiving – a model for our own love. God knows the proposals we’ve made and received, the commitments and company they led to.
I tried to make these immodest proposals to you today, about our own relationships, with God and with one another. These were not totalitarian impositions and demands, but invitations and offers, in the spirit of the biblical narratives of the patriarchs. I did not intend them to be sexist or misogynist – but I did hope to challenge the parochialism of much of our liberal ethic of freedom and individual rights. This new cultural imperialism and assimilation in the name of a particular multiculturalism misconstrues traditional cultures, and disrespects the integrity and justice within traditional religious groups, too often including the whole of Islam, and any number of ethnic minority communities newly established in Canada.
In the congregation served by Egerton Ryerson, we don’t want to go back in time to old ways – those with get up and go have long since got up and went from those social norms or religion. However, we might learn the intercultural spirit of his indiscriminate proposals to new partners, which led to great commitments and wider companies he could no more imagine than we can imagine our own futures. Imagine to whom you might extend that proposal next – and from whom you might yet receive the same invitation to relationship and respect?
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
God whose love is unilateral,
Uninvited, uncoercive, forgiving and renewing
You shower us with gifts, like a new lover seeking approval
And we, here and now, offer our responses and intentions
Make something honorable of our intentions
Do something with the gifts we offer back
To build our relationships with you
To renew right relationships among us and others
To celebrate, teach, heal, and help
Bless us and all our gifts
And we in turn will bless your world.
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Text: Genesis 24
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
Now there’s a proposal of a relationship, romantic or religious. Anybody who has ever got past the proposal in either case, in any relationship, knows that there will be way more than sentiment and feeling involved if it’s going anywhere. You move in, move on, in a wedding or marriage, or participation in an actual religious community and behaviour, and the proposal leads to commitments and company. Relationships come with inlaws, outlaws, ex-laws and next-laws – not just romantic partnerships, but in business partnerships, and religious involvement.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
Have you ever heard such a proposal made to you? God makes the proposal, Jesus does – but most of us in our culture recognize the proposal from romantic couples’ stories, rather than religious conversions. God knows how it goes – no, really, God knows our fumbles and foibles in living out our initial moments of offer and acceptance, honorable intentions and statements of commitment. And God keeps offering, and inviting, and forgiving – a model for our own love. God knows the proposals we’ve made and received, the commitments and company they led to.
We’ve been listening to stories from Genesis, given by the revised common lectionary, but extended and amplified so we get a fuller sense of the toledot, the generations of Adam and Abraham – the myths moving into saga and legend, and toward historical narratives and elaborations, etiological or etymological. These are ancient tales from a strange culture, with cultural assumptions that differ from ours. Last week, we had to struggle with the unfamiliar archaic language of pride and sacrifice, honour and duty, from our preferred utilitarian individualistic ethic of freedom.
Lest this all seems esoteric and irrelevant, I have tried to draw connections between the Torah tales and our own issues of zenophobia and homophobia. Today, I acknowleged our changing cultural assumptions about gender and marriage, with the story of how Rebekah became Isaac’s wife and partner. Donna Martin, chair of worship on council, read the lesson, and asked me how long we had to keep this up. I said a while yet: in the next couple of weeks, we’re looking at sibling rivalry and ethnic conflict and competition, then polygamy and tribal loyalties!
Our culture pushed the ethic of freedom and autonomy a long way in love and marriage when I was a young guy. In the 1970’s, we kicked the state out of our bedrooms, and the Family Law Reform Act re-imagined marriage as easily dissoluble by free adults. The results were lots of single moms raising children in poverty, and men ducking responsibility freely. Our culture revisited the mutual obligations of support owed between common law or traditional couples, and of both parents to children regardless of marital status. Pendulums do swing.
Our nation welcomed a variety of cultures through immigration during our generations, too. My first church council of ten elders included two members enjoying their arranged marriages: one Christian couple from Amritsar in India, the other couple Lutherans from Ethiopia. Those women challenged my naïve assumptions that they had less power than the liberated women enjoying the autonomy of our Family Law Reform Act, wed ‘as long as they both shall love.’ They showed me some of the power of commitments and company after the first proposal, whether that initial proposal was made by a matchmaker, extended family, or at a rock concert.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
Another decade or more passed, and I enjoyed a season serving a Japanese congregation, and was taken aback when elders confessed to me how upset they had been when their children chose to marry ‘hakujin’, Caucasian partners. After all, it’s one thing to live among a barbaric culture, but the risks to their children of marrying outside their culture and ethnicity were obvious. I’d heard the same things from our own community as more than half of my protestant peers married Catholics – but had rejected it as bigotry. I was getting older, and able to hear the universal parental concern to reduce risks and maximize the odds of compatibility as the next generation builds households. In the end, everybody loves the grandchildren, who embody our hopes.
I know that our congregation is committed to women’s equality and freedom, and anxious about bible stories of patriarchy about powerless women or even children being coerced, bought and sold in slavery and arranged marriage. I know that our denomination prefers to read scripture progressively, claiming that we have become better than our primitive patriarchal ancestors. Personally, as you are learning, I prefer to work at hearing the unfamiliar culture, and trying to respect its integrity and learn its lessons, without taking it as a set or role models to be copied in our own social norms. I hope that this is good practice for us getting beyond cultural imperialism and assimilation, and past multiculturalism, to intercultural coexistence and respect.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
So who romanced Rebekah? Not Isaac, her husband to be. Abraham was getting old. He was 99 when Isaac finally came, and Sarah was no spring chicken. It was time for succession planning – for a patriarch head of a whole economic unit much bigger than a nuclear family. He calls Eliezer, his servant, his chief operating officer, and his executor, to make plans. Eliezer put his hand under Abraham’s thigh to make what the Schocken translation calls an ‘oath/curse’. There’s a moment of male bonding, vulnerability and intimacy! The mission is to make a deal, like a headhunter seeking key executive talent, or a rainmaker looking for merger or acquisition.
Abraham says ‘don’t let Isaac marry some local girl’. It’s one thing to live among these Canaanites, but he’s going to need somebody like my wife Sarah, like his mother, with the shared values and culture of my home country. Go back to northern Syria, and fetch him a wife. Eliezer says ‘what if she won’t come, do I have to take Isaac back to Syria’? Abraham says ‘then you’re off the hook – I don’t want him to go back.’ Remember ‘lech lecha’, get up and go, leave the old country and seek to build something new? We’re not going back, just trying to honour the best of our roots and values and cultures, and improve the odds by arranging a match.
Eliezer is not a slave, and Rebekah’s consent is required and not coerced. Re-imagine this story in another culture, not as a romantic dating service, but as ancient business. Don’t underestimate Eliezer or Rebekah, or you won’t understand the tale. Here’s a contemporary parallel: “Do you want to talk with the man in charge, or the woman who really knows what’s going on?” “Do you want to meet the guy in the boss’s office, or the one who really runs the place?”
Eliezer sets out with ten loaded camels. Think about container loads, the kind of shipping scale that move from rail to tractor-trailers in our local Vaughan shipping yards. He shows up at the well or the spring in Syria, like the next freight yard or market terminal, and parks. He prays to God to show him somebody who will not only give him a drink, but will water his camels too. That initiative and generous hospitality is the character he is looking for in a partner for Isaac.
Rebekah arrives with her 3 gallon jug, and sure enough, takes care of Eliezer, and his 10 camels and crew. Camels, I read, can drink 25 gallons each – 250 gallons. This is not a girl on an errand for her mother. This is a young woman in charge of client management, customer satisfaction and service, shipping and receiving in the marketplace. When Eliezer asks, she delivers, and agrees to put him up with his whole caravan. She doesn’t ask permission of her elders or any man before accepting his proposal, and committing her family to negotiations.
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
This is less like our sentimental romance than like business mergers or headhunting, proposals seeking partners, demanding commitments of wider companies of people. Eliezer and his caravan opens conversation with Rebekah and her maids. He puts a ring in her nose, bracelets on her arms, and home she goes to her mother’s household, while he goes to her father and brother’s place (that’s polygamy and non-nuclear family talk). That’s like somebody coming home with the big diamond ring on her finger, like the young hockey draft pick coming home with the signing bonus – and the rest of the inlaws and next-laws meeting the new partners!
Eliezer retells the story to Laban and Bethuel, her brother and father, and asks them to take a position for or against his proposal. He doesn’t have a lot of time to waste, since Abraham’s not getting any younger, and they have veto. On the other hand, they don’t have control, and say as much. It’s up to God to propose and dispose, and up to Rebekah to consent. Eliezer has already satisfied them. So they call Rebekah, and ask her if she’ll go, and she consents. It’s a deal, and the truckloads from the camels are spread around the family, like a contract closed after last week’s hockey draft, paying out the big front end payments.
It’s not quite over, or not yet begun. Eliezer wants to get on his way. Rebekah’s family counter-offers a delay of ‘ten days’, which should be read in cultural context as asking about a year delay so that they can prepare for the transition of management as they lose Rebekah. It’s a bit like last week’s negotiations among the banks and the buyers and the board of BCE, haggling timing and terms to close the purchase by Teachers’ pension plan and others. The lenders get a date and a dividend suspension later , and the buyers get the new management in place now, distributing the risks and the benefits. After the initial proposal, the offer and acceptance, it’s not quite over, and not yet begun – these will be long term relationships, commitments and wider company:
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
There’s a proposal of a relationship, romantic or religious. Anybody who has ever got past the proposal in either case, in any relationship, knows that there will be way more than sentiment and feeling involved if it’s going anywhere. You move in, move on, in a wedding or marriage, or participation in an actual religious community and behaviour, and the proposal leads to commitments and company. Relationships come with inlaws, outlaws, ex-laws and next-laws – not just romantic partnerships, but in business partnerships, and religious involvement.
Have you ever heard such a proposal made to you? Sure! God makes the proposal, Jesus does – but most of us in our culture recognize the proposal from romantic couples’ stories, rather than religious conversions. God knows how it goes – no, really, God knows our fumbles and foibles in living out our initial moments of offer and acceptance, honorable intentions and statements of commitment. And God keeps offering, and inviting, and forgiving – a model for our own love. God knows the proposals we’ve made and received, the commitments and company they led to.
I tried to make these immodest proposals to you today, about our own relationships, with God and with one another. These were not totalitarian impositions and demands, but invitations and offers, in the spirit of the biblical narratives of the patriarchs. I did not intend them to be sexist or misogynist – but I did hope to challenge the parochialism of much of our liberal ethic of freedom and individual rights. This new cultural imperialism and assimilation in the name of a particular multiculturalism misconstrues traditional cultures, and disrespects the integrity and justice within traditional religious groups, too often including the whole of Islam, and any number of ethnic minority communities newly established in Canada.
In the congregation served by Egerton Ryerson, we don’t want to go back in time to old ways – those with get up and go have long since got up and went from those social norms or religion. However, we might learn the intercultural spirit of his indiscriminate proposals to new partners, which led to great commitments and wider companies he could no more imagine than we can imagine our own futures. Imagine to whom you might extend that proposal next – and from whom you might yet receive the same invitation to relationship and respect?
I love you – I’m yours – Will you be mine?
God whose love is unilateral,
Uninvited, uncoercive, forgiving and renewing
You shower us with gifts, like a new lover seeking approval
And we, here and now, offer our responses and intentions
Make something honorable of our intentions
Do something with the gifts we offer back
To build our relationships with you
To renew right relationships among us and others
To celebrate, teach, heal, and help
Bless us and all our gifts
And we in turn will bless your world.
Amen
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