“When Life Doesn’t Follow Your Plan” [Following God in Real Life Summer Series #8] - Fr. Pete's Sermon for July 26th, the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 29:15-28

I don’t do any cooking these days—Dan does such a fabulous job in the kitchen that I am always glad to clean up! We’re excited right now because our landlord had a new stove installed for Dan to wear out!

But years ago when my kids were young, I made them dinner many evenings. Hamburgers, Hamburger Helper, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Mac & Cheese, Beanie Weenies, all the good, healthy well-balanced meals!
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One time I found a simple recipe in a magazine that looked delicious in the picture. And yes, it had hamburger in it. Thought I’d try it out.

Well, I learned that recipe pictures are not always reliable witnesses. They show you the golden-brown, perfectly arranged, beautifully garnished result. They do not show you the reality: the sink full of dishes, pots and pans, the bits of food dropped on the floor, the ingredient you forgot to include, or the moment when you realize that “simmer gently” does not mean “boil aggressively while you answer the phone.”

This recipe had looked simple enough. I followed the instructions—or at least I believed I was following the instructions. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong (yes, kind of like my home repair project of a couple weeks ago!) I don’t remember whether I missed a step, used a wrong ingredient, or just overestimated my own culinary skill. What I do remember is looking at the resulting dish and thinking, “That’s not what the picture promised.”
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Most of us know that feeling. Not just in cooking, but in life. We have an image in our minds of how things are supposed to turn out. We imagine the career, the family, the retirement, the relationship, the church, the nation, the future. Then life comes out of the oven looking rather different from the picture on the box. This seems to happen over and over again in Genesis. This morning, Jacob finds out how that feels.

We are continuing our Summer Sermon Road Trip through Genesis, and by now Jacob is becoming quite familiar to us.

Two weeks ago, we met him as a young man bargaining with his brother Esau over a bowl of stew. Last week, we saw him running away from home and waking up to discover that God had been present all along in a very ordinary place. Now Jacob arrives at the home of his uncle Laban, and for a while it seems as though life may finally be turning in his favor.
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Jacob falls in love with Rachel, Laban’s youngest daughter. Genesis tells the story with some tenderness. Jacob agrees to work seven years for the right to marry her, and the text says those seven years “seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.” That’s one of the more romantic sentences in the Bible. It’s almost enough to make you forget this is still Genesis, where family dysfunction is never more than one paragraph away.

Because then comes the wedding. And then comes the next morning. And then
comes one of the most devastating and darkly comic lines in Scripture: “When morning
came, it was Leah!”

Jacob, the trickster, has himself been tricked! The man who deceived his father
now discovers what it feels like to be deceived. Laban has switched daughters, and
Jacob wakes up not beside Rachel, the woman he had worked seven years to marry, but
beside Leah, her older sister.

It is shocking. Painful. Almost unbearable. And, if we’re honest, there is also a certain biblical irony to it. As we’ve seen, Jacob has spent much of his life manipulating circumstances to get what he wants. Now he meets someone even better at the game.

Laban tells Jacob, in effect, “Oh, didn’t I mention? Around here we don’t marry off the younger daughter before the older one.” You can almost hear Jacob thinking, “Now you tell me?”

This story is not only about deception, though deception is certainly part of it. It is also about what happens when life refuses to follow the plan we had carefully constructed. Jacob worked for Rachel. Jacob expected Rachel. Jacob loved Rachel. But in the morning, it was Leah.

​I think we can relate. We expected one life, but another life arrived. We thought the relationship would heal, but it did not.

We thought the job would last, but it ended. We thought the move would solve everything, but it brought new complications.

We thought retirement would feel simple and free, but it came with its own questions and doubts and fears. We thought the future would look one way, and in the morning, there it was—something else entirely.

That doesn’t mean the life we receive is bad. It does mean that sometimes we have to grieve the life we imagined before we can receive the life that is actually before us. That grief is hard work and shouldn’t be rushed.
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Genesis does not pretend this is simple. Leah is not a consolation prize. Rachel is not forgotten. Jacob is not instantly mature. The family remains complicated for years. The wounds are real. And yet God continues working in the life that actually unfolds.

That may be the surprising grace in this story. Not that everything turns out neatly, because it doesn’t. Not that deception is excused, because it isn’t. Not that disappointment disappears, because it doesn’t. The grace is that God does not wait for a perfect family, a perfect plan, or a perfect set of circumstances before continuing the story.

God works in the life Jacob actually has. God works through Leah. God works through Rachel. God works through this messy, imperfect family. The tribes of Israel will come through these women and their children. The story of God’s people will move forward not through the life Jacob carefully imagined, but through the complicated life that actually happened. Dear ones, that is worth holding onto.

Then, in Romans, Paul gives us one of the great promises of Christian faith: nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not hardship. Not distress. Not things present. Not things to come. Not the life we planned. Not the life we did not plan. Nothing.

Paul does not say that everything will be easy. He doesn’t say that every disappointment will make sense. He doesn’t say that we will always get the life we wanted. He says something deeper: that no version of our life is ever outside the embrace of God’s love.

That does not erase disappointment, but it does invite hope. Because many of us are living some version of “the life we actually have.” Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is hard. Some of it is exactly what we hoped for. Some of it is not what we would have chosen. Most of it is a mixture.

And faith does not require us to pretend otherwise. Faith is not looking at Leah and calling her Rachel. Faith is not denying disappointment. Faith is learning, slowly and honestly, that God is still able to bring blessing from the life in front of us, not just the one we imagined.

You know, when I tried to follow that recipe for my kids’ dinner, the final dish didn’t look like the picture. Not even close. If Gordon Ramsey or Padma Lakshmi were there, I would’ve been sent home immediately.

But here is the thing: once I stopped comparing it to the picture, it was not as disastrous as I first thought. It was not what I planned. It was not what I expected. But it was what I had. And my kids and I ate it up!

And sometimes, that’s where grace begins. Not in the perfect picture. Not in the imagined life. Not in everything turning out exactly as we hoped. Grace begins in discovering that God can still work with what is actually on the table.

Jacob’s story is not tidy. Neither is ours.

But God is not limited to the life we planned.

God is already at work in the life we actually have. Amen.