December 9, 2007

"Leah the Unloved"

Drivers licenses expire in 4 or 8 years; fishing and hunting licenses in a year.  So, why not marriage licenses?  There is a Bavarian German politician by the name of Gabriele Pauli who recently proposed the idea that marriage licenses should expire.  

She told reporters, "The basic approach is wrong ... many marriages last just because people believe they are safe.  My suggestion is that marriages expire after seven years." 

Now, I don't know all the details behind this story.  Maybe it was just a publicity stunt.  But, it does make me wonder whether Pauli, who herself was divorced twice, might have been seeking a way to ease her own fears about marriage and the pain that stemmed from her own broken bonds.

Last week I attended a seminar for pastors at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  The speaker, a Christian marriage counselor by the name of Doug Meske led us in a discussion of some of challenges facing marriage in our time.  In the context of this discussion we discussed sexually active couples living together without being married.  There were marriage counselors and pastors from many different denominations present (Presbyterian, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, Catholic, and Baptist).  And the general consensus in our group was that doing this was unwise and dangerous.  And many of us there believed that the Bible teaches that it is also morally wrong. Yet, why do people do it?  Certainly people do this for a variety of reasons. But, Dr. Meske said that some of the folks told him that they did this because they or their parents had been burned by marriage.  And they didn't want that to happen to them again.  (Yet, as much as they try to avoid such pain, 80% of people who live together without marrying will split up-almost twice the rate of those who divorce after marrying.)

But not only do some among us suffer from broken bonds.  Some people who remain together feel trapped in loveless relationships.  We probably all know people for whom this is the case.  Leah certainly is an example of someone trapped in such a marriage. 

And you don't have to be married to suffer from bad relationships.  How many of us have not been hurt and betrayed by those we thought were our friends.  I remember in 5^th grade, a boy named Ricky who I thought was my best friend turned against me and told me he didn't want to play with me anymore.  They say kids are resilient, but I remember it hurt a lot and it took me a while to get over it. If there are any here who have been hurt by relationships, who have experienced broken bonds, betrayal, or have been trapped in a loveless relationship, God's Word has something special to say to you this morning.  And it also has something to say to the rest of us about our responsibilities toward you.

Our scripture begins with the words,

When the LORD saw that Leah was not loved,

This was just the opposite of what the Creator intended.  In Genesis 2: 18 we read,

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

It is not good...In order for his creation to be good as God intended, his human creatures must have meaningful relationships with others.   God himself established marriage so that Adam and all his sons and daughters would not be alone, but would know the joy human intimacy.  But, in our mixed-up and broken world sometimes people can feel the pain of being unloved and alone within the bonds of marriage.  Such was the case for Leah.

Jacob did not love Leah.   He never did.  He was only married to her because he had been tricked by her father.  Undoubtedly it was a marriage that Jacob thought should never have happened.  And so, for the most part, especially in those early years, he often ignored her.  And as he thought about what Laban had done, he may have even resented her being in his house.  

Leah probably had never known what it meant to be loved. Verse 17 says

Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was lovely in form, and beautiful.

Now there is no agreement among commentators as to what the author of Genesis means here when he writes, "Leah's eyes were weak."  Some believe that she may have had some eye disease that made her unattractive.  But, what is clear in this verse is that she was very undesirable when compared to her beautiful sister. Probably Leah spent her whole life ignored, while her sister received all the attention.   Cousin Jacob was no exception.  He looked right past her and from the beginning fell head over heals in love with Rachel.

Surely one of the greatest hurts is the hurt of being ignored.  I remember seeing it happen to students in the high school where I taught.  Some people received all the attention.  Others just faded into the background.  They didn't even try to be noticed anymore.

Yet, as we noted the main person responsible for Leah's misery was her father Laban.  Certainly this was not the first time when a man's greed caused so much pain for others in his family.  Laban wanted to get all the free labor he could from Jacob; his daughter Leah paid for it.

  Yet there are three words in v. 31 that bring a ray of hope into this awful situation.   "The Lord saw"   Leah was not all alone.  The Lord was there.  He saw everything that happened and it moved him to action.

            In Psalm 31 the Psalmist speaks of his great sorrow and loneliness.  

           My life is consumed by anguish

            and my years by groaning;

            my strength fails because of my affliction,

            and my bones grow weak.

¹¹            Because of all my enemies,

            I am the utter contempt of my neighbors;

            I am a dread to my friends-

            those who see me on the street flee from me.

¹²            I am forgotten by them as though I were dead;

            I have become like broken pottery.

      Yet, in the midst of all of this, he finds comfort in the knowledge that he is really not all alone.  In verse 7 of that Psalm he declared,

           I will be glad and rejoice in your love,

            for you saw my affliction

            and knew the anguish of my soul.

"You saw my affliction; you knew the anguish of my soul"  Beloved in the Lord, in the midst of loneliness and grief, we can find comfort, if by faith, we have the same knowledge that the Psalmist had....Others may ignore us, but we can know that God continues to see us.

Verse 31 says he opened her womb and gave her 4 sons right in a row: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah.

She had sons. Her loneliness had ended and she now was given some of the love she so desperately needed-- a love that even made her sister jealous.   In chapter 30: 14, there is a touching story of the time when Reuben went into the field and found mandrakes and picked them for his mother.  Oh, how Rachel longed for a son who would do this for her. 

Her sons also gave her a sense of security.  Sons, especially the oldest son, were obligated to care for his mother after his father died.  A woman with no sons faced an uncertain future.

Now, at this point I wish I could say to you who are suffering from loveless relationships that the Lord who sees you will provide for you in your loneliness just as he did for Leah.  I do believe he will, but it may not be soon. Don't forget that Leah bore the pain of being unloved for years.  And what the Lord does may not take away all the pain in your spirit.    Genesis tells us that Jacob still favored Rachel and Rachel's sons. 

Yet, the Lord who saw her grief had planned to do more than merely provide for her immediate need.  He was going to give this unloved one an even greater blessing.  Indeed, he was planning that from her all the lonely and hurt people of the world would be blessed

This blessing came years later, after she died.  Her husband, surely moved by the Spirit of the Lord, would give the blessing and responsibility of leadership-- not to a son of Rachel-- but to her son Judah, to whom he would say,

¹⁰            The scepter will not depart from Judah,

            nor the ruler's staff from between his feet,

            until he comes to whom it belongs^„T

            and the obedience of the nations is his.

King David would come from Leah through her son Judah.   David would be the great king who would conquer all the nations around and rule over them.  But, there's more to it than that.  David would begin a kingly line from whom our Savior King Jesus would come.

Jesus came to rule a kingdom where there will be no more loneliness or tears.  In fact, he will come to bring justice to all who are unloved.  Isaiah says of him,

¹              A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; (Jesse was David's father)

            from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

²              The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him-

            the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,

            the Spirit of counsel and of power,

            the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD-

³              and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.

            He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,

            or decide by what he hears with his ears;

⁴              but with righteousness he will judge the needy,

            with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.

But, in order to establish his rule over that kingdom, he first needed to come to this earth and share our loneliness.  King Jesus first came as a suffering servant.  He came as one who shared Leah's pain and the pain of all who have known what it is to be lonely.  Isaiah also said of him,

          He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

            and like a root out of dry ground.

            He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

            nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

³              He was despised and rejected by men,

            a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.

            Like one from whom men hide their faces

            he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53: 2- 3)

And not only did our Savior experience our sorrow and loneliness, he ministered to those who were friendless and lonely.  Please turn with me to Mark 5: 21

²¹When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. ²²Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet ²³and pleaded earnestly with him, "My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live." ²⁴So Jesus went with him.

Now Jesus was on an important mission-to save a little girl's life.  But, then there's an interruption.

A large crowd followed and pressed around him. ²⁵And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years.

While her disease was certainly not contagious, it made her ceremonially unclean. 

No mention is made of this woman's husband.  If she had been married, according to the law of Moses, because of illness her husband certainly could not be intimate with her. In fact, nobody could really touch her without having to ceremonially wash themselves.   It seems in the text is that she was alone and anonymous.

²⁶She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.

All her money was gone.  She was probably a beggar on the street.  You know the kind of person you find in almost any major city, "Hey, can you spare a dollar!"  The kind of person that sadly we walk past and pretend not to hear.

²⁷When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, ²⁸because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." ²⁹Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

³⁰At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"

³¹"You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?'"

³²But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it

Jesus could have ignored her and just let her quietly be healed.  But, he knew she needed more than that.  She needed to be pulled out of the shadows and be recognized.  She needed to hear his loving tender words.

. ³³Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."

   This Christmas, let us certainly express our joy in knowing the one who came to set us free from our loneliness and suffering.  Certainly, we long for the day when his work will be complete and we will be in a new heaven and earth.  But, as those who await that day let us also remember that he left us on earth to carry on his work with the Leah's among us-with those who are unloved and lonely-  with those are those who suffer from broken bonds and unloving relationships-- . with those who like that woman suffer silently- with those who are rejected and ignored. Jesus has placed these people in our churches, in our families, and in our neighborhoods.  Certainly they are on the street corners, but they are also classmates and fellow workers. 

King Jesus who came as a suffering servant still identifies with their pain.  Someday, he will come to bring mercy and justice to all who suffer.  On that day he is going to ask us to give him an account for how well we have carried on his work.  Someday he will say to us I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a stranger, I needed clothes, I was sick, I was in prison.  How will we answer on that day? 

Someday he will say ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'

 Brothers and sisters let us look around for his face among us.  AMEN!