Sermons

"Through Leah’s Eyes"

A Sermon by Mary Garner
Emmanuel Church, July 24, 2005

“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”

When I was younger, I thought this line from Genesis was sort of-romantic. Imagine someone loving you so much that seven years of weary labor in the desert sun tending sheep and goats seemed like only a few days. At first glance, this is a romantic story. It has all the necessary components. The hero, Jacob is a quiet man, living in tents, beloved of his mother Rebekah. He sounds like a man in touch with his feminine side-something we modern women are supposed to value in a man. He is clever and smart, tricking his brother Esau out of his inheritance and blessing. Now, he is on the run, afraid that his brother will try to kill him for what he has done. Romances should always have an element of danger. Jacob has come to his mother’s brother, Laban to find sanctuary and a wife. And he finds Rebecca, who as heroines should be, is graceful and beautiful. It looks like the perfect match. Laban agrees to the marriage-everyone should live happily ever after.

But they don’t. Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Leah. And Jacob has to toil for seven more years to marry Rachel, his beloved. Rachel and Leah feel bitter jealousy towards each other. Leah is unloved and Rachel is barren. You can imagine that the seven extra years Jacob had to serve didn’t seem like only a few days as they did when he first labored for Rachel.

The Hebrew says that Leah’s eyes were rakhot. Translators have struggled over this word because it can mean lovely-it can also mean weak or delicate or soft. Perhaps Leah’s eyes weren’t perfect-they were flawed in some way. Perhaps in time her eyes came to be clouded by tears that came from knowing she wasn’t loved by Laban or Jacob or Rachel. Leah is unloved. She isn’t beautiful and graceful. In this morning’s reading, there is no mention of how she feels about deceiving Jacob or how she came to marry him. Was she forced by Laban? Did she agree to the deception because she loved Jacob and hoped everything would work out in the end?

What does this story look like if we look at it through Leah’s eyes? How often do we see the world through the eyes of the beloved, the beautiful, the rich or the powerful? We want romantic stories about beautiful people. We want happy endings. We want to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they’ve gotten. We avoid looking at things that are unpleasant or upsetting. We are taught not to stare at the homeless, the disabled, people who talk to themselves. Soon not staring becomes not looking. We don’t even see the Leah’s of our world.

In her book, Down and Out in Providence, Bishop Wolf recounts what it is like to live as a Leah in a world that would rather see a Rachel. For one month she lived as a homeless person. Initially, she was concerned that she would be recognized. But, Bishop Wolf recounts over and over how she becomes unseen. Almost no one recognizes her because no one really sees her when she looks like a homeless person. She even attends the ordination of another Bishop, in a church filled with colleagues and friends and no one saw who she was. She visits churches and ushers and greeters pretend she isn’t there. She is ignored at coffee hour. She comes to see the world through the eyes of the unloved.

She meets a homeless man who tells her,” Now I measure my sense of worth by the simple fact that someone looks me in the eye.” Bishop Wolf sees the unloved at close range, the poverty, the homelessness, the addictions, the violence and the pain. She also sees the caring they show for each other, the value of the simple things in life that we often take for granted; the sacrament of sharing a coat or a meal or a story. She writes about how social services and churches are unable to deal with the root causes of poverty and homelessness. But at the same time, she shows a profound understanding of the words from Paul’s letter to the Romans, “neither death, nor life, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God sees the Leahs who are down and out in Providence and God loves them.

Later in Genesis, it says, “When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb.” God saw Leah’s pain and gave her children. She believes that her four sons are given to her by God as a kind of compensation for being unloved. God sees the unloved and as Christians we are called to see them too.

I think that there are "Leahs" everywhere. They work with us or go to school with us. They are a part of our neighborhood or even a member of our own family. They are unloved or unseen because they are difficult or different or maybe they are just so familiar that we don’t even see them anymore. We forget that the kingdom of God is like the smallest things and the simplest things; mustard seeds and yeast-pearls and fish. There are treasures everywhere just waiting to be discovered. There are Leahs everywhere just waiting to be seen. There are Leahs everywhere just waiting to be loved. Amen