Only Fools Run at Midnight - Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

The dog days of summer usually refer to hot weather in August, if I’m not mistaken. But it sure feels like we’ve been in them already. One of my coping strategies for the heat has been to reminisce about the first time I visited Alaska, which was around the 4th of July. I was newly engaged to Jason and flying up to Juneau to meet some of his friends and family. I will never forget the views from the airplane as the plane flew over snowcapped mountains and the spectacular waterways of southeast Alaska. I hope you feel cooler just picturing that. I was excited to see glaciers and whales and even bears, from a safe distance. Juneau delivered. I could have done without a black bear walking a few feet away from us on a downtown street, but the locals seemed unfazed.

I was also surprised by a local custom that happens this time of year. As part of my introduction to Alaskan life, I found myself signed up for a quirky 5k run. It’s an annual event called “Only Fools Run at Midnight.” So, after a sporty dinner of deep-dish pizza and cheese dip, we put on our running shoes and headed downtown, close to midnight. Even though it was still light out, the race organizers gave us glow in the dark tee shirts, and off we ran.

The race is part fundraiser for good causes and part celebration of all things Juneau. There is also a costume contest. Special prizes go to a category called centipedes, or groups of runners that complete the course while connected in some way. The grand prize that year went to a group of young men who raced as a six-pack of Alaskan amber beer bottles, running together in a giant cardboard case.

It was a glorious event. Some people were running to win, some were in it to express their creativity, and some were struggling with runner’s cramps after pizza. It was delightful and eclectic, and full of joy about being Alaskans. It’s a tradition I never would have imagined experiencing. But you never know where an engagement will take you.

So it was with Rebekah, who, according to the book of Genesis, agreed to an engagement to Isaac, a man she didn’t know, via a stranger she ran into at a spring of water, and began a whole new life. What’s interesting to me is that we could have just gotten a genealogy report, as in Isaac married Rebecca and beget Esau and Jacob. But instead we get details of how those two came to be married. The details must be important to the telling of the story, so we should savor them for a moment. Abraham’s servant prayed to God for guidance in his matchmaking efforts to find Isaac a wife. The sign that he had found the right one would be that a woman at the spring would give him a drink of water. And she would also water the camels, proving I suppose, that she would be a useful and thoughtful wife. Such an encounter is not much to go on for a marriage, but these things came to pass. Approached about the marriage, Rebekah agreed to leave her family and marry this unknown Isaac. And in the best detail of the story, perhaps against all the odds in such an arrangement, this turned into a love story. Isaac loved Rebekah, and she was a comfort to him when his mother died.

Like any marriage, Rebekah had no idea where this engagement would take her. I’m sure she didn’t know how much was riding on her saying yes. By marrying into Abraham’s family, she took on the responsibility of making sure that the covenant that was struck between God and Abraham would keep going and make it to the next generation. Even the survival of monotheism was in her hands. The idea of a single creator God making a covenant with a chosen people was an extremely fragile, new idea. And it would be up to Rebekah, through her sons, to make sure it survived. That would take some deception of Isaac in his old age to make it happen, but that’s a story for a different day. Today we start at the beginning by the spring of water when Rebekah said yes, not knowing how much was riding on her answer and where this engagement would take her. She didn’t yet know that it would be a love story.

The book of Genesis, from Abraham on, is a saga of four generations of a family we might now call dysfunctional for all of their misdeeds and drama. The book is not a simple history of righteous people doing good things. But through all of its twists and turns, there is a larger vision - that the family trusted in a covenant with God, which took them places they wouldn’t have imagined and held them together. For all of their triumphs and failures, they managed to pass on the covenant to future generations.

When you think about it, the larger story of the covenant between ancient Israel and God also became a love story. God and God’s people got to know each other, and real affection grew. The covenant turned out to be a gift of grace and blessing. God promised land, descendants, salvation, and a faithful partnership. Fortunately along the way, the covenant has not dependent on us mortals getting things right or perfect. Like our ancestors in Genesis, we break our end of things all the time. And every time we wander off, God starts again, renewing the covenant and staying in this relationship. One of the attributes of God throughout the scriptures is that God is faithful. God chose a covenant as a means to express that divine fidelity to us. This arrangement also tells us that God’s purposes can be accomplished through our lives, no matter how imperfect the details. I think this is why Genesis zooms in on the lives of Isaac and Rebekah and so many others. If they can be the carriers of the covenant, so can we.

This is a helpful reminder to us in a season of master planning. Our work right now as a parish is not only about equipment upgrades and more welcoming spaces. In all that we do, we are responsible to see that the covenant survives for another generation. Like any new engagement or new ministry, we don’t know yet where this will take us. But as we say yes, we open ourselves to the possibility of God working through us. I like to think that we are a bit like those fools running at midnight. As a group, we could be described as eclectic, creative, maybe crampy at times. And like those centipede runners, we carry the covenant with God as a group, running with joy, and knowing that we are passing on a tradition of grace and blessing.