Someone stopped me this morning after one of the masses to tell me how surprised she was to hear in today’s first reading that Rebekah wore a nose ring. “I have never heard this story before!” she said, mostly joking but, I think, a little startled to hear that a matriarch of Rebekah’s stature would … wear a nose ring.
When I heard the story, I confess I noticed the nose ring, too. It’s an unsettling image for me as well, but not because I don’t approve of nose rings. They’re fine, of course! I do not wear one, for the ordinary reasons that I do not want to, and I do not think I could really get away with doing it. Earrings are about as far as I think I can go. (And I further understood this morning that our fellow member of St. Paul’s was being funny, and I’m sure she knows that her own joke was on her.)
In any case, I found the nose ring unsettling, too, because a thought flashed through my mind: Does the nose ring imply that Rebekah is now her husband’s property, to be led around like livestock? Maybe not, but in this story, the nose ring definitely is part of a betrothal rite, an item among the exchange of goods and gifts between two families when a marriage is formalized. It was probably a harmless symbol of Rebekah’s new family’s wealth.
Whatever the nose ring meant, Rebekah was never one to be led around by the nose, by her husband or anyone else. She is remembered as savvy, insightful, a step ahead of most of the people she knew, including and perhaps especially Isaac. Tradition tells us that when she was pregnant with twins – Esau and Jacob his younger brother (by a minute or two) – even then, Rebekah was becoming aware of their diverging destinies. And by the time Isaac was elderly and blind, ready to pass the mantle of paterfamilias on to one of his sons, Rebekah was complicit in Jacob’s plot to steal the honor from his older brother.
Rebekah is clever. She is quick. In my reading of today’s Torah passage, she discerns somehow that the stranger at the well can offer her a future, and a wealthy one at that. If I were blocking this for a film, I would add touches of eavesdropping and scheming to the scene: Rebekah has a friend who overhears the stranger reviewing the plan with one of his travel companions, and she plans to offer to water his camels as a sign that she is the one he is looking for.
And watering the camels: this is no small thing. One commentator notes that watering camels is a serious task indeed: To draw enough water for a small herd of camels, Rebekah would have to work her bucket furiously, almost comically, moving fast enough to be a blur of frantic activity. Now, there probably weren’t camels in the near East of that era (which is a problem with this text), and even if there were, nobody can move that fast: so perhaps we are just meant to know that Rebekah is quick. She’s no dummy.
And all of this puts me in mind of another Rebecca, a modern fictional Rebecca named Rebecca Manion, on the show Ted Lasso. (I hope I haven’t exhausted the number of times I can get away with mentioning this television program in sermons. I count this as my second offense.) Rebecca on Ted Lasso is true to her ancient namesake: she is savvy, quick, shrewd – even as she copes in the first couple of seasons with a devastating personal setback. In one memorable episode, Rebecca Manion demonstrates a technique she uses to motivate herself, to encourage herself, to buck herself up. “I have a secret,” Rebecca says. “I make myself big. Before I go into the room, I find somewhere private, I stand up on my tip toes, put my arms in the air, and make myself as big as possible, to feel my own power. Like this.” [Do the gesture.] [Readers, click here to see the clip.]
After Rebecca demonstrates this, another character, Keeley, gapes at her and says, “You’re amazing. Let’s invade France.”
And so we, too, are invited to learn from our matriarch, Rebekah, who looms larger than life in the story of our faith. She is quick, she doesn’t miss a trick, she anticipates what her situation requires. And even if my worst fears are correct, and her engagement to Isaac does involve a symbol of livestock being attached to her face, even then we can admire how she is everything and anything but a kept beast. She is active; she summons God’s own power; she conquers her fears.
I invite your reflections on matriarchs, patriarchs, or parents in the faith who have inspired you … if not to invade France, perhaps to attack and defeat powers of the world that require a robust response from people of faith. God in Jesus has bracing words for us today, along with words of comfort: in the Good News according to Matthew, Jesus expresses his disappointment in his contemporaries, but he also encourages them – and us – telling us that we can trust him to carry the weight alongside us, yoked with us in all that we do, in all that we are. And Paul, writing to the faithful in Rome, also has words of encouragement for those of us who all too often buckle under our own weaknesses and uncertainties. Perhaps Paul would admire Rebecca Manion, who feels keenly her own anxiety, but “makes herself big” in defiance of her lesser self, and in passionate love for those she is leading and serving.
Who inspires you? Who helps you “make yourself big”? Who is your clever forebear, your wise grandparent, your ancestor or mentor who inspires you to, well, invade France? I invite your reflections.
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Preached as a shared homily, a shorter reflection that invites responses from the congregation, on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9A), July 9, 2023, 5:00pm, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 45:11-18
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30