Proper 9 / Year A
Genesis 24:34ff
What
is the first prayer you ever said? While
I don’t remember the exact moment, I am sure it was either at the dinner table
- “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our food” – or going to
bed – “Now I lay me down to sleep. I
pray the Lord my soul to keep…” I
suspect I am not the only person whose life a prayer began in this way.
While
one of these two may have been our initial prayer, neither is the first prayer
recorded in the bible. Surprisingly this
event does not appear in the text until the 24th chapter of
Genesis. Up until now, God appears on
the scene and initiates conversation with a specific human being. The person may or may not respond, but the
response does not constitute a prayer.
It is either an answer to a question or part of a dialogue.
Equally
as surprising, the bible’s first recorded prayer is not offered by one of its
main figures – not Adam or Noah or Abraham.
In fact, the person who offers the first prayer in the bible is not even
named. He is identified only as
Abraham’s servant. This trusted helper
is given the task to return to Abraham’s ancestral homeland to find a suitable wife
for Isaac (you may recall I mentioned in last week’s sermon it is curious Isaac
himself does not make this journey or participate in the process).
When
the servant arrives at the village of Abraham’s birth, he rests at the town’s
well and prays:
O Lord,
God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today and show steadfast love
to my master Abraham. I am standing here by the spring of water, and the
daughters of the townspeople are coming out to draw water. Let the girl
to whom I shall say, ‘Please offer your jar that I may drink,’ and who shall
say, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels’—let her be the one whom you have
appointed for your servant Isaac. By
this I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master.”
As
soon as the prayer is finished, Rebekah appears and the rest is history.
The
prayer contains several oddities. One is
its specificity. There are many other
ways to identify a bride-to-be… a light, an inner voice, or some other kind of
sign. The plan of the prayer has a lot
of moving parts and hardly seems like a process God would propose.
Notice
how the servant identifies himself to God.
He addresses the prayer to the God of Abraham and he describes Isaac as God’s
servant. In the mind of the person
praying, each possesses a special relationship with God; one which he himself
seems not to enjoy. He never describes
himself in relationship to God, only to his master… Abraham.
The
opening address in the prayer tells us much: “O Lord, God of my master Abraham”. The Hebrew word translated here as O Lord is “El Shaddai”, which literally means “God of the mountain.” It carries a sense of greatness and power and
most often is translated as “Almighty God”.
In the polytheistic world religions of the ancient middle east, this
would be the greatest of the gods – powerful, aloof, to be feared, and
certainly not to be bothered with trifling matters like who says what to whom
at a well.
But
the servant does not end his address to God with El Shaddai, he adds to it “God of my master Abraham.” Again, in middle-eastern religions, there
were the big gods who had control over things like the skies, fertility, and
natural disasters and then there were personal gods whose interests were more
focused on a specific individual, family, or clan. The role these gods played in a person’s life
was more like what we think of as a guardian angel. To pray to the god of person X or the god of
person Y was to entreaty a household god who was engaged with the day-to-day
operations of the family. In
polytheistic thinking, El Shaddai
would not be concerned with identifying a suitable wife for Isaac, but the God
of Abraham would be.
So,
in this first prayer in the bible, offered by an unnamed servant, we find
something truly revolutionary. This
person has come to see and sense how the Almighty God is intimately involved in
the personal affairs of his master. Now,
this may not seem ground breaking to us today.
We pray to God for any number of very personal and at times trivial
matters. Abraham’s servant is the first
person in the bible to recognize these two distinct functions of ancient
middle-eastern gods are in fact part of the makeup and personality of the one
true God.
In
this morning’s gospel reading we hear an invitation:
“Come to me, all you that are
weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for
I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
These words are
rooted in the personal nature of God’s Being.
We live in wearying times and we are carrying heavy burdens. Our Lord is concerned with our welfare. Our Lord knows our need. And our Lord offers help and comfort. El Shaddai – the Mighty One – listens
intently to every prayer, even “God is great, God is good” and “Now I lay me
down to sleep.” And this great God and our
God invites us to a place of rest and ease.
