Our Family Tree
Genesis 25: 19-34
July 13, 2014
I hear around me that family is important. Indeed some would say that it is the most important part of their lives and without family they would feel lost. We want to belong. We want to fit into a people, a history, and a memory. With the World Cup going on for the past few weeks you get some sense of how passionate folks are about country, identity and place. They may be proud Canadians or
Americans but when it comes to the World Cup they are cheering for the team they identify with their roots. Whether its Germany, Holland,
Brazil, or Argentina, or any one of the thirty-two countries that entered the competition, people who can trace their family tree to their land of origin are cheering for their clan. This identity with a country may lie dormant for most of the time. But when a World Cup is on stage suddenly those roots are passionately embraced. We need to belong.
Today there are all kinds of web sites, archives, and other sources to meet this demand. We call this exercise genealogy. I get e-mails every once in while from a site called Scotland’s People asking me to engage in the search for my ancestors. If I pay the fee I can find birth, baptism, marriage and death records for any decade I choose.
People spend money and time visiting countries of origin in order to map out their family tree. It has become a fascinating and popular exercise for many people. Many want to know where they came from.
Who am I? Where do I fit into the story of my people?
Diane Butler Bass in her book, Christianity after Religion , tells of her frustration at not being able to find her people. After her parents’ death she became obsessed with her family history, but the line was broken and she couldn’t discover the origins of one ancestor who came to America in 1876. Diane says: With the death of my own parents, I wanted to better understand myself by understanding

where we had come from as a family. I wanted to know my name. I wanted to find my people. I needed to belong.
In an earlier book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, Diane reminds us: Contemporary Western culture is marked by a sense of dislocation, the feeling of being lost in the universe, unmoored, without direction, without hope.
If this is who we are as a society then surely this is the context for all of our lives. These are the feelings that circle our lives and impinge on us every step we take.
But for me, and for all people of faith, we need to go beyond our family tree to discover our identity. We are asked to remember that our roots are found within the redemptive story of the bible.
As soon as I became a Christian this realization came home to me.
Because as Christians, our identity as Abraham’s children provides a really solid foundation for our lives. It connects our lives to a powerful, sweeping story that helps to provide a perspective for our lives. We become part of God’s amazing plan to rescue the world and link heaven and earth once more.
Let me take you on a brief tour of the origins of that story as we have it in the Genesis story of the Patriarchs. Brian McLaren has a unique way of understanding these stories. He sees them moving from
Creation to Crisis to Calling . At the heart of these ancient stories
McLaren sees God seeking ways to deal with the problem of human evil. In the stories of creation, of Cain and Abel, of the Tower of Babel and of Noah God seems to vary the ways to deal with human evil. At first he threatens Adam and Eve with death if they eat the fruit. Well that doesn’t work for they disobey and evil is unleashed on the world.
But they don’t actually die; they are simply cast out of the garden.
Then God says he is going to make it hard for the human family to survive as they will have to toil and only by the sweat of their brow will they eat. But that doesn’t work either as Cain kills his brother Abel, even though he has the hard life of a farmer. But then Cain is told he’s going to have to become a nomad just like his brother Abel and that scares him as he thinks he will be killed also. So interestingly
God protects him and puts a mark on Cain so he will not be killed.

The story moves forward to Noah and the ark. Now the people of earth have become unbearably evil and God decides that the only way of dealing with this evil is to wipe them all out and save only a small group of good people. And God finds one good man, Noah, and the human family is saved. But even this one good man, after the flood, does evil and so that didn’t work either. But God does say that he is never going to do that again! Then we come to the Tower of
Babel. And this time God deals with the evil differently again.
Because the human family is seeking to consolidate power through this one gigantic towered city God decides that this is ominous for the future. So G od scatters them by confusing their language. It’s sort of like the mother who says to her two kids, each of you get to your own rooms and maybe then you will settle down and stop fighting.
Sometimes that works, but in this case separating people from Babel doesn’t solve the problem of evil. It continues.
Then we come to the story of Abraham and now we learn that God is going to deal with evil in a completely different way. Abraham was originally from Ur, a great city in the Sumerian empire. It was a sophisticated centre of culture, arts and business. Abraham and his family were not told why God wants them to start walking, but they agreed.
I like what Barbara Brown Taylor says about this expedition. She says: The bible gives no reason for God’s choice of Abraham and
Sarah except their willingness to get lost. They were not young. They were not spiritual giants. All they really had going for them was their willingness to set off on a divinely inspired trip without a map, equipped with nothing but God’s promises to be with them.
Its surprising to think that none of the rest of the narrative of
Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Joseph, of Egypt and Exodus, would have happened if they had thanked God for the interesting travel plans but said no thanks!
Abraham finally has a boy called Isaac. He is the promised one and through him, not Ishmael, the family line will travel forward. Isaac seems a contemplative man who spends time walking in the evening

silence. His father gets him a wife from among their extended family.
We saw Rebekah last week as a fairly independent young woman who agrees to the match. Isaac will have to wait twenty years for a child. He was forty when he married and is sixty when the twins are born.
These boys are night and day. One is hairy, loves to hunt, and seems the more extrovert of the two. Jacob is quiet, smooth skinned, and likes to stay around home with mom and cook. Esau is the elder and would be the one to carry the line forward. But God apparently has other plans. Jacob, not our first choice for our descendent by the way, is God’s choice. His trickery wins the birthright and the father’s blessing. It will therefore be through Jacob that the rescue mission will progress. God’s plans are never straightforward it seems. But
Jacob, as we read on in the story, will be changed. He will encounter the God of his father Abraham several times and will embrace the faith of his father for himself.
This is the beginning of our family tree. They are like our human families in every way. They are a mixed bag. They are far from perfect; they make mistakes; they are not always moral and kind and religious. But what they have in common is their faith in Yahweh and their willingness to follow into unknown territory. Our spiritual family likes to keep on the move it seems. They are not people whose lives are set, their ideas fixed, or their behaviour consistent. They are people on the move. The book of Hebrews describes them: They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth…If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.
This is the story of our family tree. This is to whom we belong. And it is good to feel that we belong to a people so ancient and yet so committed to the journey into the future. I like that about our family.
Amen