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[Music] Once Upon a Romance, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] Let us continue in worship by giving attention now to the second scripture reading of the evening.

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It is from the book of Genesis, the 29th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse number 1. "Then Jacob went on his journey and came to the land of the people of the east. As he looked, he saw a well in the field, and lo, three flocks of sheep lying beside it, for out of that well the flocks were watered.

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The stone on the well's mouth was large, and when all the flocks were gathered there, the shepherds would roll the stone from the mouth of the well and water the sheep, and put the stone back in its place upon the mouth of the well. Jacob said to them, 'My brothers, where do you come from?'

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They said, 'We are from Haran.' He said to them, 'Do you know Laban, the son of Nahor?' They said, 'We know him.' He said to them, 'Is it well with him?'

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They said, 'It is well, and see, Rachel his daughter is coming with the sheep.' While he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father's sheep, for she kept them. Now when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother's brother,

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Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the well's mouth and watered the flock of Laban his mother's brother. Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's kinsman and that he was Rebekah's son, and she ran and told her father.

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When Laban heard the tidings of Jacob his sister's son, he ran to meet him, and embraced him and kissed him and brought him to his house. Jacob told Laban all these things, and Laban said to him, 'Surely you are my bone and my flesh.'

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And he stayed with him a month. Then Laban said to Jacob, 'Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?' Now Laban had two daughters.

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The name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful and lovely. Jacob loved Rachel, and he said, 'I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.'

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Laban says, 'It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man. Stay with me.' So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.

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Then Jacob said to Laban, 'Give me my wife, that I may go into her, for my time is completed.' So Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast. But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went in with her.

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And in the morning, behold, he discovered it was Leah. And Jacob said to Laban, 'What is this that you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?'

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Laban says, 'It is not so done in our country to give the younger before the firstborn. Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.' Jacob did so and completed her week.

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Then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel to wife. So Jacob went in with Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and he served Laban for another seven years. And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of them.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. The Bible contains a marvelous series of love stories. There's Adam and Eve, the first romance.

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There's Sarah and Abraham, from whose love there came a whole people. There's Boaz and Ruth, who turned duty into beauty. There's Rebecca and Isaac. So today, in the Church of England, there is a question put to the bride and groom as they become one,

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'Will you be faithful to one another as Rebecca and Isaac?' And there is, of course, the Song of Solomon, which is most probably the loveliest song of love that ever has been written. Yet none of these are my favorite biblical love story. The story that touches me the most is the story of Jacob and Rachel.

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And it's that story which I would like to share with you tonight, a romance, if you will. Now, it may be that the person you're sitting next to is the person you love most in all the world. Or it may be, as you listen to me speak, that you are separated from the one you love, by circumstances or by many miles or perhaps even by death.

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Regardless of the particular circumstance which is yours, I think the story of Jacob and Rachel will speak to you. For new lovers, there will be something to learn. For older lovers, there will be good things to remember. And for those of you parted from your lovers by death,

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even for you, there will be that which will lead you to recall that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. So sit back and relax. And if you want to, take the hand of the person that you love.

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And let me tell you a story. Once upon a romance, there was a man named Jacob and a woman named Rachel. And they met at a well, and they fell in love. Now, deserts are very beautiful places.

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The contour of the hills, the folding of the mountains of sand dappled with light and with shadow, the wind chiseled dunes, all of these contribute to the stark loveliness of the desert. But the most beautiful thing to be seen in the desert is the oasis, the place where water is. Jacob approached a desert oasis on a very hot day.

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We know that it was hot because, well, there was a large stone used to cover the well when it was not in use. And on this particular day, it was so hot that the shepherds, and it took a number of them to move this large stone, refrained from taking the stone from the water until all were gathered

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so that they wouldn't have to take it off and put it back and take it off and put it back again. The heat was so great, they did not wish to exhaust themselves in such a way. They were sitting about the well then with their flocks, and as Jacob approached, the white of the sheep looked like snow against the brown of the seine.

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Jacob asked them where they were from. They said they were from Haran. "Do you happen to know Laban who lives there, the son of Nahor?" he queried. "Oh yes, we know him."

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"Is it well with him?" "Yes, he's very well, but see, here comes his daughter Rachel." "Ask her." And Jacob turned and looked upon Rachel.

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And in the moment that he saw her, he fell in love. It was a case of love at first sight, but also second sight and third sight and fourth sight and fifth sight, because it is to be noted that Jacob never, in all the many years that were his, he never forgot Rachel. It's one of the most beautiful things about love that it sometimes takes only a second to come about,

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but it then goes on to last forever. Now I know there are those who will argue against such a thing as love at first sight. They will suggest that courtship should be an arduous time, a time of examination and a time of regulation, and I'm sure that that is most often true.

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But there are some times when two people meet, and in the moment of their meeting, they know. There are times when so much examination and reflection and all of the things that are associated with courtship do nothing other than to dry up the fountain of love. It is possible, you know, for principles to get in the way of progress.

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We can become so analytical about what we are doing that we fail to accomplish our goal. Here's a bee and a botanist. The botanist studies flowers. He learns about nectar and pollen and all those things.

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And here's the bee, just a dozen old honeybee, and he comes flying by and just loses himself in the sweetness and the color of the blossom. And the bee knows much more about the floral geography of an area than a botanist will ever know. The one, you see, is lost in knowing about something.

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The other is lost in knowing the thing itself. Now, if you ask me to distinguish between knowing about something and knowing the thing in itself, well, I can't do that. But I think all of you understand the point I'm trying to make, that there are occasions when the serene inner beauty of a person so incandesces their spirits

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that two hearts in an instant become one. You don't have to work at it. It just happens. And that's the way it was for Jacob and Rachel. How much did Jacob love her?

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Well, you remember I told you about that stone they used to cover the well and that it took three or four men to move it, and that they weren't moving it at all that day until everybody got there because it was so hot? Well, it says in the narrative that immediately after Jacob saw Rachel, let me quote it directly,

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"Jacob went over and rolled the stone from the well's mouth and waters Rachel's flock." And he did it all by himself. Love, you see, magnifies our potentialities. There was a marvelous chivalry in that, of course, and I think that touches us, and it must have touched Rachel.

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In last month's issue of the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, there's a long article in which they discuss the nature of love. It seems that someone sat down and reviewed the material in 132 texts on anthropological behavior, that's our behavior, and found in all of those texts only two index references to love.

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Isn't it strange that love, something which controls so much of our lives, is so difficult to define? I'm very much reached by the definition of Peter Sorokim, the Russian sociologist. He says that love is freedom from loneliness, a force toward goodness, a new perspective, a drive toward that which is noble, and an overwhelming freedom to be found in service.

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Now that's such a large definition we could discuss it all evening, but we might sum it like this. Love is that which occurs within a person that leads that person to find greatest joy in sacrificing and serving the one loved. And that's what Jacob did for Rachel. He immediately ran over and did what others would have found quite impossible.

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I had a young lady come to me once and tell me that her husband loved her unbelievably. And I said, "How does somebody love someone unbelievably?" And this was her answer. "Every time I wash the dishes or polish the furniture or scrub the floor, he kisses my hands."

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What he was doing, you see, was responding to her service. And she went on to tell me how he served her. "I married those two, and you know, he stood before me in a blue serge suit. But as I looked at him then and I remember him now, I see him like a knight in shining armor, tall and sun-crowned.

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And Camelot is where the two of them live, and they're both busily engaged in serving one another there. And when they look at each other, it's like those knights of old who used to fasten their lady's scarf on their chain mail before they went into battle. Only those knights of old just struggled for 20 minutes in some tournament. I know knights and ladies who live today who have battled for one another for 40 years.

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Not just the men you see, but women too, who have nobility of spirit, who go out every time the flag is called for, who respond to every trumpet of need. They outdo each other, these men and women, in love. That's the chivalry of the spirit, which is of the very essence of love.

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It's suffering for each other and making payment for each other and enduring all the things that love is called upon to endure. It's longing for each other so that no stone is too heavy and no day is too hot. This is the kind of love that mirrors the very love of God. My favorite picture of the crucifixion is in a little gallery in Paris.

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I don't remember the name, but I could take you to it. The cross is to the right side of the picture lying on the ground. There are two burly Roman soldiers standing beside it with fistfuls of nails and a heavy iron hammer. And Jesus is being held, his arms pinned back, by a Roman legionary.

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And he's struggling to get free. But as you look at the picture, you suddenly recognize that he's not struggling to get away. He's not struggling to escape. He's struggling to climb onto the cross.

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So anxious to offer himself in love, he has to be held back. This is love at its highest and its uttermost. And the greatest of lovers know this, to yearn for the sake of the one you love to move the stone. Now, you don't have to be much of a student of the life of Jacob to know that he was a fast mover.

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As a matter of fact, he kissed her on the very first date. And she was all excited and took him home to introduce him to her father, who happened to be Jacob's uncle, though they had never met before. And after he spends some time with Laban and in the tents of Laban and with Rachel, he asks for her hand in marriage. And he offers Laban for Rachel seven years of labor.

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That seems very difficult for us. We can hardly imagine that. But in that time, such an offer was not altogether unusual. And it must be remembered that throughout all of this time, Jacob and Rachel were working side by side. And love enables you to do things.

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The presence of the one loved gives you a patience and endurance that comes no other way. There were many nights, I am sure, when Jacob and Rachel walked to that well alone together and he moved the stone. Love, it seems to me, is much like dominoes. Now, dominoes was a game, the game we played most frequently in my home when I was growing up as a boy.

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It's a very old game and a very simple game in which one of those in the game puts down a counter with a certain number on it, and you must match the number. If she plays a six, you must play a six beside it. If he plays a four, then you must play a four beside it. And if you are unable to match the number, then you miss your turn, which is a very heavy penalty, for the object of the game is to get rid of all of the pieces that are yours.

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Now, love, it seems to me, is very much like that. Love is that circumstance in which when someone weeps, you, the lover, weep with them. Love is that circumstance when someone rejoices, you, the lover, rejoice with them. It is that blessing that comes when everything that you do is responded to exactly by the one that you love.

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And you seek not to lose a turn because, you see, victory in both love and dominoes lies not in accumulation but in exhaustion. The emptying of the self wins everything. Please turn your cassette to the other side. So Jacob labored for Rachel for seven years, and the writer of Scripture, noting that,

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scribed one of the most beautiful lines that appears in all of the Old Testament. He writes, "And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her." You know, some things make time go very slowly. Hatred and greed and ambition make days drag by.

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But love, oh, there's never enough time for lovers. And it was during that time, during that time that they spent together, that Jacob and Rachel discovered that the course of true love never runs smooth. You know, Gilbert Hyatt, who's one of the great educators of our century, says that there are four sovereign experiences that a person can have.

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The time when as a child they discover the world, when as a youth they discover love, and when as an older person they discover faith and art. Well, I sometimes wonder why it is that just when you're at the age where you're to be deriving your education, you also discover what it is to love. It seems to me that half the minds on campus are always occupied at least half the time with nothing other than love.

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And that is good if this helps to indicate to you that, well, the course of true love never runs smooth. That's what I tell couples when I marry them here. They stand on this spot and I say to them, it's usually on a beautiful afternoon in the summertime, "You are gathered here with your friends, your family, your loved ones.

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The groom has the man he thinks best of, the woman the maid she wants to honor. And the place is filled with the sound of beautiful music, and the candles give a soft glow, and there are puddles of color that come via beams of sun down into the room. It's all very lovely."

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But I say to them, this is where you're married, but not where you live out your marriage. This is the oasis, but you live out there in the desert. And sometimes your friends aren't there, and sometimes there is no music, and sometimes there is no color, and the best man and the best girl and family

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and those you count on most are not close by. That's where marriage is lived out. It's important that everyone learn that, just as Jacob and Rachel did. It happened to them this way.

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After the seven years, Jacob went and asked for Rachel's hand, and Laban said, "Of course," and they had a big wedding, and they brought the girl over to him, all wrapped up in her veil, and Jacob took the girl into his tent, and when he unwrapped her, it was Leah. Now, the Bible says only two things about Leah.

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It says that she was older than Rachel, and it says that she had weak eyes. That's not very much to say about a girl. But that's really what it says. Let me quote. "Now Laban had two daughters, and the name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel,

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and Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful and lovely." Now Jacob goes and protests to Laban, and Laban's answer is, "Well, in our society, the oldest girl has to be married first." And then, seeing the love that is still in Jacob for Rachel, he says, "Work seven more years for me, seven more years,

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and as soon as your honeymoon is over with Leah, I'll let you marry Rachel, too." So that's what happened. He spent a week with Leah, and then he and Rachel were married. But following that, seven more years of labor. The Song of Solomon says, "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."

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But this episode with Leah was a real deluge on Jacob and Rachel. But the promises they'd made held fast. The promises you make here, if they're meant and held to, make all the difference out there. Marriage, you see, is a future-oriented thing.

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When you promise to become one, you do not know the economic challenges you will confront. You have no way of knowing what health or lack of health will be yours across the years. Those children that you may or may not bring into the world, you do not know if they will be well and healthy in every way. But when you make your promises and your commitments,

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you say to one another that regardless of what comes after, we will remain one. In the old liturgy of the service, there was a line called the "Plighting of the Troth," in which both the bride and the groom would say, "I pledge to you my troth."

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Troth means trust or faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, deep and abiding commitment. And that's what the wedding service is all about, and that's what marriage is all about. And that's especially important to remember in a time like this, where we are so ill-disciplined in our relationships,

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where we do not often work at our loving, or where we make commitments which we casually cast aside when they become inconvenient. I was reading the other day about the pilgrims. In the first 17 years, 70,000 pilgrims came to the Plymouth Bay Colony.

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And in that 17 years, there were only six divorces. Now this wasn't because the pilgrims were so wonderful to live with. Someone wrote of them that on Sunday morning they fell on their knees in prayer, and on Monday morning they fell on the Indians in massacre.

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They were tough people. But they had a sense of aughtness about their promises. When they made a promise, they remained committed to it. And that's what marriage and love is.

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It's an act of will. You can make it go if you will to make it go. The noblest lovers have always understood that. The noblest lovers love that way still. Like Jacob and Rachel.

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I've often thought to myself, why was it that Jacob was willing to enter into this deal with Laban? I mean, why didn't he just take his staff and knock the old man down, and then scoop Rachel up in his arms, jump on their camel, and ride off to the West? Of course, in those days, elopement was not yet known.

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But there was something else here. I think it was a matter of conscience with Jacob. You see, in his earlier days, Jacob had been quite a cheat. He had cheated his brother Esau, and he had cheated his father Isaac.

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And now in this, the deepest and tenderest relationship of his life, he was himself being cheated by Laban. I think he thought that he was being paid back in the same kind of coin which he himself had minted. The scriptures say, "As a man soweth, so shall he reap."

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And so Jacob accepted the seven years, and Rachel accepted the seven years, because she accepted Jacob. That's a very important thing to remember. Whenever you love someone to marriage, each person brings a past, a history. Here's an interesting statistic.

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We have two parents and four grandparents, but if you go back six centuries, you have more than two million ancestors. And each of them have, to one degree or another, influenced the way you are. You have come to be through the mesh of all of that ancestral experience.

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And that means when each of us enters into a relationship, into a marriage, we bring with us all the clouds of our past, all of the history which is ours. Jacob came into his relationship with Rachel, and he brought with him all that ugly history. Rachel changed him.

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After he married Rachel, there is never again an experience of cheating on Jacob's part. He lived a scrupulously honest life. We are not determined by our past. The things that have happened to us yesterday do not so cripple us

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that we cannot separate ourselves from that determination. But many times, to break away from the past is hard, and sometimes virtually impossible. Always remember in love, yesterday's bills have to be paid. That's the reason it's very important when two people decide to commit matrimony together

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that they have to remember that they're also marrying a bundle of pathologies and experiences. There's really three sets of rules that you need in a marriage. You need the rules that are assumed, that is, who will get up first and who will keep the checkbook and so on. Then you need rules that are agreed upon.

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Those are the rules you make when you find out you can't do it with one checkbook and you agree that you're going to have two. And then there are rules about how you change the rules. It's important, you see, as the relationship deepens and you discover different things about each other,

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when you discover all these old bills that have to be paid, it's important that there be deep communion at those times, and that kind of communion not only takes rules but also, well, agreement on how those rules can be changed. I'm talking about communication.

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A fellow on this campus said to me on one occasion that there was a certain girl he liked very much but that every time he held her, he always ran into an elbow. That's a subtle way of saying no communication. Contrast that with a woman who, to this very day,

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operates a lighthouse on Robbins Reef off the coast of New York City. Her story is in a New York newspaper. She married a man who was a lighthouse keeper at a place called Sandy Hook, and it was a beautiful place and she had a garden and there were many friends about,

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but sometime after they were married, they were transferred to Robbins Reef and there was a rock of nothing but stone separated by the sea from the land, and she was isolated from all of the things that she prized very highly, and she went but she said she would never unpack her bags and stay.

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And then he explained to her that this was all he knew. All he'd been trained and all he understood to do was to tend the lighthouse. And he explained to her that she knew that and he remembered for her the commitments they had made and she remembered too that she had understood this of him,

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and so the two of them, well, they set up some new rules. And her bags were unpacked and the two of them tended that light for 40 years. And then one day he contracted pneumonia and they took him to the Staten Island Infirmary, and a few days later she saw a small boat being rowed to her little island,

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and she knew the news was bad and they told her that he was worse and she knew at that moment that he was gone and said so, and they didn't answer. And they buried her husband on the mainland, but she could see the place from the lighthouse, and sometimes it was green and sometimes it was brown and sometimes it was white, covered with snow.

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But every time she looked at it, she remembered the thing they talked about the most. She remembered that thing that she had come to understand as the two of them worked together and deepened their relationships. She remembered to mind the light. And that's just what Jacob and Rachel did.

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They worked for seven more years while Jacob cleansed his conscience and all his bills were paid. And all that time they loved and loved and loved and kept the light. They long desired a child, but they had to wait 15 years for one. It's a funny thing in the Bible, you often find that God's chosen ones have to wait a long time for a child.

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Sarah had to wait a long time and Hannah had to wait a long time and Rebecca had to wait a long time and Elizabeth had to wait a long time. It's as if God wants faith to be born in them before any children can be born of them. But eventually Jacob and Rachel had a son named Joseph, one of the grandest figures in all of the Old Testament.

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The whole nation was later saved by the merciful acts and the wisdom of Joseph. That's the richest fruit of a marriage, the children that come of it. I had a couple tell me within the last year that they were going to get a divorce, but that, they said, is not what we've come to talk about. That's really only our business.

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And I got angry then and I'm angry now. A divorce is everybody's business. Kids are like tiny seismographs. And when there are earthquakes within a marriage, those children record every one of those psychological or emotional seismic shocks.

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Psychologists tell us that children with disintegrating personalities come out of homes that are breaking up. Mothers and fathers who make war on each other and the kids get wounded and scarred and crippled. And those children are the richest heritage of the nation. So when a child is made weak, to that degree the nation is made weak.

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A few years ago I sat at Lausanne in Switzerland and as I sat by the lake I thought of Edward Gibbon who in the late 1700s wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire there. And Gibbon said there were five principal reasons why the Roman Empire fell. High taxes, a craze for pleasure, an uncontrolled arms production race,

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the decay of religion, and most specifically, the breakdown of family life. Weakened families, weakened children, weakened nation. Joseph stood strong. Many people consider him to be the most Christ-like figure in all of the Old Testament. And he was what he was because of the healthy love that existed between Jacob and Rachel.

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But you make a mistake if you think that I came into this pulpit tonight just to talk to you about your love and your loving. I came to talk to you about that, but about marriage and family and about this nation and the destiny of this nation. For they are all one. Out of your love and out of your loins comes the future for all of us. And how you love is everybody's business.

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A few years later, they had one other son. His name was Benjamin. And Rachel died as he was born. Jacob reared a pillar over her grave. And he should have. To his house she brought love and made it a home. To his home she brought faith and made it a temple.

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And he never forgot her. For years and years later, when he was blessing the grown-up children of his son, that is his grandchildren, the scriptures say that Jacob said, "When I came to Paddan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan, in the way. We were just a little distance from Ephrath, and I buried her there in the way of Ephrath."

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Ephrath was the Old Testament name for Bethlehem. Generations later, another mother would bring forth the mightiest of Jacob's descendants. In that very place. And they would call his name Jesus. Well, that's the end of the story.

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A romance of long ago that blessed us all. Jacob married again and had many other sons. But none of them, no wife, ever took the place in his heart of Rachel. Years later, when he died in Egypt, he asked that his body might be taken back and buried in the land of his fathers and in the land of Rachel.

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And I think that as he closed his eyes in death, the last thing he looked out upon was the desert. And he saw the contour of the hills and the gently folded dunes dappled with light and shadow. And the wind chiseled sands and an oasis where flocks were settled white against the brownness of the sand. And I think he saw waiting shepherds and that face, that face that the moment he saw it, stole his heart away.

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And in that instant of remembering, I think all the years disappeared away for him. They became but a few days because of the love he had for her. Let us pray. Our Father, what will we remember?

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Will we remember some time, some years from this night? Will we remember how we spoke about love and trust and promises and faith and hope and commitment and beauty and patience and endurance? Will we remember that we talked about the kind of love that never dies? Grant that it might be so.

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Grant that somehow by the movement of thy spirit, what's happened in this room this night might become part of that which teaches us how and why. And when to really love. We pray it in the name of the greatest lover of them all. Amen.