Tries and Is Messy: Genesis 29:1-14
Ordinary Time
Sermon series: Genuinely Curious
Jacob got to his feet and set out for the land of the
easterners. 2 He saw a well in the field in front
of him, near which three flocks of sheep were lying down. That well was their
source for water because the flocks drank from that well. A huge stone covered
the well’s opening. 3 When all of the flocks were
gathered there, the shepherds would roll the stone from the well’s opening,
water the sheep, and return the stone to its place at the well’s opening. 4 Jacob
said to them, “Where are you from, my brothers?”
They said, “We’re from Haran.”
5 Then he said to them,
“Do you know Laban, Nahor’s grandson?”
They said, “We know him.”
6 He said to them, “Is
he well?”
They said, “He’s fine. In fact, this is his daughter
Rachel now, coming with the flock.”
7 He said to them, “It’s
now only the middle of the day. It’s not time yet to gather the animals. Water
the flock, and then go, put them out to pasture.”
8 They said to him, “We
can’t until all the herds are gathered, and then we roll the stone away
from the well’s opening and water the flock.”
9 While he was still
talking to them, Rachel came with her father’s flock since she was its
shepherd. 10 When Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of
Laban his uncle, and the flock of Laban, Jacob came up, rolled the stone from
the well’s opening, and watered the flock of his uncle Laban. 11 Jacob
kissed Rachel and wept aloud. 12 Jacob told Rachel
that he was related to her father and that he was Rebekah’s son. She then ran
to tell her father. 13 When Laban heard about Jacob
his sister’s son, he ran to meet him. Laban embraced him, kissed him, and
invited him into his house, where Jacob recounted to Laban everything that had
happened. 14 Laban said to him, “Yes, you are my
flesh and blood.” (CEB)
There’s
a painter I particularly like named Anthony Hurd who recently posted a lament
about social media. “The performance of
social media,” he wrote, “is fake AF most of the time. We’re all trying to present our best sides
and stay in the good graces of the algorithm…Life isn’t meant to be constantly
curated and fed to us in a perfect presentation.” Because social media is what it is, he
finishes by admitting that “I don’t have any solution to the problem…[but] felt
like I should share that for whatever stupid reason. If even just for other to know their [sic]
not alone in this feeling.”[1]
` We’re
in week three of our series on building bridges and having difficult
conversations and so far we’ve learned that some conversations are more harmful
than helpful and need to be lovingly set aside.
We’ve learned that all conversations have to be rooted in trust between
the conversers that recognizes and respects each other’s boundaries and
sacredness as part of the discourse. This
week, let’s talk about how building bridges means that we have to allow the
process not to be a beautiful Instagram reel of success but a messy, awkward
reality.
Jacob,
our main character today, is…a lot, as a character. He’s one of the main patriarchs of the
Pentateuch in the lineage of Abraham and Isaac, three generations of men making
wildly outlandish mistakes and yet somehow still building a nation under God. When we meet Jacob in today’s reading, he’s fresh
off of having tricked his father Isaac into giving him his older brother’s
inheritance and blessing and, with the help of his mother, hightailed it out of
town to go make his fortune with a different familial branch before his brother
killed him in retribution. The chapter
right before today’s is the dream we now call Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob’s vision of
holy beings moving between earth and the heavens and God’s reassurance that
Jacob was not written out of the promised covenant even if he was a thief. Jacob lives in a space of failing upward, it
seems, and then arrives at a well covered by a huge stone.
The
scene starts out well: Jacob has some small talk with the shepherds by the
well, stopping just short of commenting on the weather. Then Rachel arrives, and Jacob promptly loses
all of his cool and does a strength show-off move, kisses Rachel without even
greeting her first, and cries.
Hebrew
Bible scholar Robert Alter identifies this “as a betrothal ‘type scene’: a
scene which has been composed to adhere to a tick-list of literary motifs
(wells, drawing water, maidens, foreign lands) in order to raise and regulate
the readers’ expectations and understanding. According to Alter, there are (at
least) three of these scenes identifiable in the Pentateuch. As well as Jacob
and Rachel’s meeting, there is that of Jacob’s parents, Isaac and Rebekah
(Genesis 24), and Moses and Zipporah (Exodus 2). By way of a summary: in each
narrative, the male protagonist (or one of his representatives) finds himself
at a well in a foreign land where a local woman comes and offers him a drink.
The woman then rushes home with news of the man’s arrival, and this leads to an
invitation to stay with the woman’s family/community, and an eventual
betrothal.”[2]
But
Jacob ruins the script: he does not wait for a drink or suavely engage Rachel
in conversation. He is overeager, overconfident,
and overbearing. He is, to put it
lightly, ridiculous, a series of red flags and a YouTube fail video all unto
himself.
And
Rachel still runs to tell her father.
Laban welcomes Jacob in and honors him as family—and if you’ve read
ahead into the story, you know that also will get incredibly messy, but for
right now, even abandoning the script has turned out okay because Rachel,
Laban, and Jacob are all invested in staying in the conversation together—once
Jacob properly introduces himself, that is.
The bridge is built not because Jacob was any good at first
impressions—or second, or third, or seventeenth, given the familial wreckage
he’s leaving behind—but because he was genuine, earnest, and absolutely
delighted to be with family who hadn’t yet decided that he could only be one
thing.
You
see, there’s a reason—several reasons—that Jacob was at such odds with his
brother. They were twins, Esau and
Jacob, and Esau was older by only a couple of minutes. Esau was the manliest of men; Genesis 25
tells us that he “became an outdoorsman who knew how to hunt, and Jacob became
a quiet man who stayed at home.”[3] The New International Version translation is
rather more judgmental: “Esau became a
skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at
home among the tents.” You know who
stayed in the tents? The women. Throughout the story of Esau and Jacob, there
are phrases and words that underscore that Esau was a man’s man and Jacob—well,
Jacob was effeminate.
It
is an entirely different sermon to talk about gender roles and the way that
Jacob becomes the one in Jesus’ family ancestry instead of Esau and what it
means in our spiritual history that masculinity has never been only one thing,
but for this sermon on this day it matters to see that Jacob, who had spent his
entire life being told he was lesser, is over the moon to come to this well and
haul a stone aside and kiss a pretty girl and be accepted as himself, as
Laban’s flesh and blood.
It is so
easy in a world of curated imagery and targeted algorithms and ever-deepening
partisanship for us to approach all conversations, all bridge-building, with
the entire roadmap already in our minds.
This person likes this or wears this or is this and therefore will think
this, value this, not realize this. We
are constantly sifting through layers and layers of assumptions that we make
about each other, categories we’ve been taught to create so that we know who is
worthy of our engagement, our time, our connection.
And some of
that’s true. Stereotypes are always
grounded in something, however twisted they become along the way. But if we’re serious about building bridges
with people and we make the assessments we’ve been talking about already—is
this person someone I can trust to see me as a full human? Is this person someone with whom I want to
build a bridge, with whom I want to have a conversation? Is this person earnestly and honestly showing
up to this moment and not just looking to score a point?—then we have to be
willing to be awkward and a little weird about it because we are not wired to
be alone.
“The
shepherds were unable to carry out their duties until Rachel arrived,” writes
journalist Belle Tindall. "But their
eager expectation of her arrival (v.6) reflects a wider atmosphere of
expectancy at this point in the biblical story. Rachel’s entrance is keenly
anticipated by various people for various reasons. Jacob cannot continue his
life without her. And we too, as followers of the larger biblical narrative of
Israel’s patriarchs, are aware that this unfolding story must be on hold until
she appears.
“…It is
noteworthy that Genesis makes clear that the presence of both Jacob and Rachel
was necessary for the water to be distributed. Rachel’s presence was required
according to a societal agreement, and it seems as though Jacob’s anomalous
strength (apparently a result of his dramatic reaction to Rachel’s entrance)
was required to remove the stone obstructing the well (vv.9–10).”
If we go
into a conversation, a bridge-building, an understanding with someone else, we
might ask ourselves is it important for both of us to be part of this? Is the difference between us something that
can enhance us both, even if sharing that difference gets uncomfortable? If things get uncomfortable—maybe not to the
point of kissing someone without even introducing oneself, but in the plethora
of other awkwardness we can offer when we’re learning in real time—can I trust
that the other person will hear me say, “Hey, that made me a feel a way, can we
talk about it?” or “oh, that doesn’t match my understanding at all, can you
help me see how you got there?” Can we
show up to an interaction without bringing a whole well full of predetermined
ideas about who and what the other person is, beloved child of God that both of
us truly are?
Reading Scripture
is always a wild ride because the story is so much more than the verses we get
to. This moment of Jacob showing off
like a teenager as he gets to start over is about to be completely overshadowed
by the mess of his marriages as Laban tricks him into wedding both of Laban’s
daughters. The rivalry of the children
born from this fracture will create a pivotal timepoint in the story of the
people of Israel entirely, setting up the reason the Exodus is needed. It’s ugly and uncomfortable and messy, what’s
coming, but right here in this moment, Jacob the outsider is invited into a
house even after making a fool of himself at a well. Rachel welcomes him in even though she could
have pushed him into the well and been done with it. The story is not polished or pretty. God’s people remain, at the heart of it, people.
As we
consider the people with whom we wish to build bridges, are we willing to be
uncomfortable—not harmed, not deliberately wounded, but embarrassed, weird, not-fit-for-social-media
awkward? Are we willing to try
again? Are we willing to set aside all
the things we think we know and hear the person in front of us saying I want
to talk, to learn, to be in relationship with you? Are we willing to say the same? We should not have every conversation with
every person, but some—some are worth some mess.
May God
give us the discernment to see which relationships we can hold onto and build;
may we give ourselves the grace to be messy and human with each other; and may our
imperfections be God’s tools to mend the fear we have learned of each other as
we build community in love. Amen.
[1]
Anthony Hurd 7-slide carousel, August 12, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1749486397177044&set=pcb.1749486483843702
[2]
Belle Tindall referencing two works by Robert Alter, https://thevcs.org/rachel-and-jacob#romance-literal-ages
[3]
Genesis 25:27, CEB
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