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Good morning, Covenant Family. On Sunday morning, we considered the story of Jacob deceitfully getting Isaac’s blessing and, while on the run, receiving the blessing from God. Many of you likely noticed that our readings skipped over chunks of the narrative. This morning, I want to highlight something that Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, said as she sought to get Jacob sent back to her homeland to find a wife. Rebekah was central to Jacob’s deceit and is the controlling figure in the story. But, from our 21st-century perspective, her trickery may not be the hardest thing to understand about her. Something is going on in her heart that we’re going to explore in this Covenant Weekly for September 23.

In the story, after Jacob tricks Isaac into giving Jacob his deep soul-blessing, Esau is angry, and Isaac is distraught. Esau is, in fact, so angry that the bitterness grows, and he commits himself to killing Jacob after his father dies. Knowing this, Rebekah first sends Jacob away to save his life. But then she needs to convince Isaac to also send Jacob away. To do so, this is what she says in Genesis 27:46.

Then Rebekah said to Isaac, “I’m disgusted with living because of these Hittite women. If Jacob takes a wife from among the women of this land, from Hittite women like these, my life will not be worth living.”

Do you hear the level of disdain Rebekah has for those she lives near? I can imagine her spitting after she says the words “these Hittite women.” It is like she views them as subhuman. Even though I know that much of Canada is not far removed from speaking and acting like this towards some people groups, my 2025 Canadian sensibilities are shocked by reading this in the Bible!

Rebekah has been, by virtue of her marriage to Isaac, invited into God’s rescue plan for the world. She is a recipient of a blessing in order to be a blessing to all nations. But she throws up a bit in her mouth at the very thought of the people who live closest to her. And if her favourite son were to marry one of “them,” she says her life wouldn’t be worth living!

As I think about Rebekah, where she is in God’s story, and where her heart is, I find it sobering to think about our own time and our own reality. She is squarely in the middle of God’s story, but her heart is far from being aligned with God’s heart. How often might this be true of us?

In our Sunday Sessions this past week, we talked about the Biblical word, “Sin.” At its essence, sin means to miss the goal or fail. It isn’t, by its nature, even a spiritual word. When we think about humanity's sin, we have to consider what our “goal” is. And the ultimate goal, according the the Bible and to Jesus, is to love God and love people, each other - honouring both as we were meant to. With this understanding, sin is our failure to love God and each other properly.

There is an Anglican confession, prayed together as a part of their liturgy, that captures this understanding of sin. It says, in part:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. 

To acknowledge sin, failure to fully and properly love God and others, isn’t to see ourselves as outside of God’s reach. It is an invitation into humility, to an awareness of the greatness of God's grace and mercy, and to a repentance through which we can love more fully.

Rebekah, as far as we know, never developed this humility and never came to a place of repentance. But, by God’s grace and faithfulness, she was still a part of his work in the world. Jacob does eventually get to a place of repentance and humility.

We live in a world, in a context, that is increasingly divided. It sometimes feels like we are being forced to define ourselves against a “them.” Left or right. Conservative or liberal. Christian or non-Christian. Woke or unwoke. Caring or not-caring. Moral or immoral. And, at times, it seems like the voices for division are loudest in the church.

But for those of us who follow Jesus, the invitation is to see those we disagree with, even our enemies, as people created in God’s image and recipients of our love. I thank God that divine faithfulness is still there when we fail. But may God give us an awareness of when we “other” people like Rebekah did. And, while we are already firmly in God’s story, may we also find our hearts aligned with the heart of Jesus.