Inquiring of the Lord
A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III
Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
July 12, 2020 Proper 10, Year A

May the Words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be ever pleasing to you O Lord, our Rock, and our redeemer. Amen.

During this Season after Pentecost, our Old Testament readings will carry us through the story of Abraham and his lineage. Starting today, we are going to spend a few weeks on the story of Jacob, the son of Isaac & Rebekah, the grandson of Abraham & Sarah. And this opening story, as Karen/Liz/Delle read it to us, is pretty straightforward. Rebekah can’t get pregnant. Isaac prays, and she gets pregnant. Then the twins are so rambunctious IN her womb that she says to God, “Oh so THIS is how it’s going to be??” What struck me when I was reading this out loud this week was that Rebekah goes to inquire of Lord. And God answers her. God reminds her that who she is carrying is symbolic of the future between them. We will get to that second point in just a few minutes.
What struck me in Rebekah’s inquiry to the Almighty is that the writers of Genesis act like this is a pretty normal thing to do, to take your concerns to the divine. And the writers also make it seem that it is perfectly normal for God to respond. Whether it is in the poetic form we see in this story or a prose response, Rebekah seems to, in some way, get the answer she seeks. The more I thought about this, I realized that this is the first time in Scripture that the human seeks God’s advice or insight. Prior to this, God was telling folks what they needed to know. Genesis is the recorded story of God’s people and how God interacted with those people. With Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, God is the one who starts the conversation. Those other people may have tossed back a question or two, but only after God opened the door, only after God started the conversation.
To be clear, the writers of Genesis do not say that Rebekah was the first person to inquire of the Lord, nor does it say she is the first woman to do so. Sometimes the Scriptures are a little more subtle than that. Several commentators point out that in the story of Hagar, just a few chapters back and a few Sundays ago, God calls Hagar by her name and is the only one in that story to do so. Abraham and Sarah just refer to her as “the slave girl” or the “Egyptian slave.” It’s a subtle nuisance that you might miss without a close reading. But Rebekah goes to inquire of the Lord. We don’t know much else about it. Did she bring an offering? Maybe. Was there a specific location she had to go? Most likely. Did she need Isaac’s permission? I’d like to think not.
The whole scene, just those two verses, left me thinking about the reasons we might inquire of the Lord. Do we go only when we need something? Want something? Do we wait until there is trouble? Rebekah bemoans her troubled pregnancy before her inquiry, but we don’t know what or how she inquired. Did she ask God to stop her misery or did she just want to know why and what it all meant? Could have been both. Many people in the ancient world sought meaning, even if it’s an unknown meaning, in everything. She may have just been wondering for what reason she was enduring this misery. Seems like a legit request to me!
What are the ways we inquire of the Lord? Do we just show up with a wish-list or a to-do list for God? Are we willing to listen to what God has to say to us? Even if we don’t like the answer? I wonder if Rebekah may have been hoping God would say, “Sorry about that! I can make all that wrestling stop!” Our own tradition tells us that prayer is responding to God, with or without words, through thoughts and deeds. Our actions and responsibilities do not end just because we have taken our inquiries to God. At the very least, we have to pay attention to the ways God is responding to us. It may be as direct and clear as the day is long. Or we may have to wait in silence. Or the answer may come in a manner that leaves us wanting more, leaves us with more questions than answers. It may be an answer that we have to wait around to see what it all means.
That’s what happened to Rebekah when she inquired about the bundles of crazy occupying her womb.
And the Lord said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger.”

The reality is that the people who wrote this story already knew how it ended. These stories had been around long before they got put together during the Babylonian exile. This episode is about 1700 years before then. So they understood the outcome of two nations in Rebekah’s womb and the elder serving the younger. They knew the early pattern of the story of God’s people where God favored the younger sibling (Issac over Ishmael and later King David), the farmer over the hunter (Look at Cain and Abel), the stories where God doesn’t do what is conventional. Esau and Jacob were both far from perfect. Jacob cheated and lied; Esau married outside of the tribe. Both paid for their sins. They reconciled with God and each other. The promise God made to Abraham was carried out through Jacob, who was renamed Israel, and we will hear that story in the weeks ahead.
But I have to wonder… as Rebekah watched them grow up and go out on their own, how often did she think of this oracle from God.
“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger.”

Sometimes when we inquire of the Lord, we get an answer that doesn’t always make sense. We can write it off as just not being in tune enough with the Almighty or maybe we aren’t praying the “right” way. But sometimes, we have to take what we hear, take what we receive and see how it plays out, trusting that God is continuing to work and shape the future, even if we can’t know right at this moment what that means or looks like. The important part is that we seek God’s guidance, that we inquire of the Lord, and we pay close attention to how God responds.

Let us pray:

We thank you, God, that we can come to you with those things that trouble us or excite us or weigh us down. Help us to trust you more and more each day to respond to those prayers as you know is best for us and for those whom we love. In Christ’s Holy Name we Pray. Amen.