Sojourning: The Well of Rebecca
God Calls Us in Our Work
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. July 5th, 2026
In the middle ages the most commented upon book of the Bible was not Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. It was not Romans or Galatians. It was not Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy. It was not Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. Daniel or Revelation. The most commonly commented upon book of the bible was Song of Songs. Or Song of Solomon. That might seem very strange to us because Song of Songs does not tend to figure much in our own devotional reading. This Sunday is the one Sunday out of three years the Revised Common Lectionary includes a reading from Song of Songs, and it is optional. But whenever it comes by I take my chance to preach on it.
The reason that it doesn’t figure too much in our own devotional reading today is the same reason it was so commented upon in the middle ages. The poem, at face value, in its literal sense, is an erotic poem. It is about a man and a woman. The man describes the woman in lurid detail. They poetically discuss their desire for each other. The man is absent and the woman yearns for him. Eventually they are united and praise the love they share.
The poetry of Song of Songs is also rather odd to our ears today. “Your teeth are like a flock of ewes” or “Your neck is like the tower of David” don’t hit the same way they did over two thousand years ago. It is an odd book for the Bible. And so we tend to put it aside and focus on the books we know how to deal with.
But the allure of Song of Songs for the medieval commentators was precisely because they didn’t quite know how to deal with it. It was because the book is so strange, because an erotic poem seemed out of place in Holy Scripture, that they couldn’t help but spill precious ink over it. Whatever this book seemed to be about, they thought, it has to have something to do with the desire Christ has for his Church, or the desire the soul has for God, and vice versa. Because they were convinced, by their own experience, that the desire of the soul for God and the desire of God for human souls was like erotic desire. Truthfully, they thought the fulfillment of erotic desire was actually found in uniting the soul to God in Christ.
So when they read, “The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.” They understood Christ leaping from on high to be with his Church, or the soul witnessing the arrival of her Lord. And when the beloved says, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away,” that is God calling the soul. That is what each one of us earnestly desires to hear. Deep down. Really, truly. All human desire finds its fulfillment in being carried away, going away with God.
I want to use this theme — our desire for God and God’s desire for us as the fulfillment of erotic desire — to read our old testament lesson this morning and maybe pick something up from it. This will be a sort of medieval reading of that passage, the way the monks would have done it long ago.
We read that Abraham sent his servant back to Ur to find a wife for Isaac from his father’s house. Abraham didn’t want his son to marry one of the gentiles in Canaan. But he also didn’t have much connection back home, so nothing had been arranged. When his servant makes it back to Ur he waits at the well. The well is often a site of erotic entanglement in scripture. This is a classic example of that. The servant tells himself that if a woman comes to draw water, and offers him and his camels water, he will know that the Lord had selected that woman to be Isaac’s wife.
Rebecca comes to the well as she would do every day. And while drawing water she sees this servant. He asks her for water, and she offers to give water to his camels as well. He knows she’s the one. As it turns out, she is the daughter of Bethuel, a member of the household of Nahor. That is, from Abram’s father’s house. He tells Rebecca and Bethuel about Abraham and Isaac. How Abraham has been blessed with great wealth, and Isaac is in need of a wife. She is given a choice whether she would leave everything she knew to go to this foreign land, much like Abram did so many years ago.
She agrees.
We can see here a similar theme as we were discussing in Song of Songs. We can interpret Rebecca as the soul, Isaac as the divine. We can see the promises of God given to us for a new home, a new heritage, and a joyful house. The detail I want to focus on is how it is that she even hears about this promise, why it is the promise is even offered.
Here I am borrowing from Origen of Alexandria, an ancient commentator who had a sermon on this passage. He liked to pick at details and draw lessons out of them. The detail he notices here is that Rebecca went to the well to draw water. She went to the well to draw water as she did every day. She was always about her work, and she never expected her work to amount to more than a few jugs of water a day. But because she was diligent in her work she was offered something far more than she could have guessed or imagined.
We too are given work to do. The work of forgiveness. The work of generosity. The work of mercy. The work of prayer. The work of scripture reading. The work of fasting. The work of worship. The work of love. God gives us so much to do. But all these things are not ends in and of themselves. They are opportunities. Opportunities to be called and swept away. Opportunities to meet God face to face. Opportunities to be called on our own journey like Abram was called. Opportunities to see God.