When our daughters were teenagers, which wasn’t too long ago but which seemed to last forever, whenever they got into a snit about something or because they were angry with us as their parents, their usual response was, and I quote: "This family is dysfunctional." My response always was, "Welcome to the real world." The truth is every family is dysfunctional. It goes with the territory.

It is even biblical. Read Genesis from which today’s first reading comes. Genesis is the story of one dysfunctional family after another, one dysfunctional people after another. It begins with the story of Adam and Eve, who have everything their little hearts can desire. But are they happy? Are they satisfied? Oh, my no. So they go and do something stupid and like dysfunctional people always do, blame their actions on someone else.

Then there are their two sons, Cain and Able. Cain is so jealous of Abel he kills him. Talk about dysfunction to the nth degree: there it is. Then come the dysfunctional people of Noah’s time. This is followed by the story of the Tower of Babel where the people are so foolish to believe they can become like God. All of this leads into the story of the Father of the Jewish people, Abraham. One would think that God would choose an impeccable person from an impeccable family who had impeccable offspring to be the founding fathers of his Chosen People. One would think.

What one gets is more of the same: one dysfunctional person after another. Again, it all begins with Abraham. When we read about Abraham, we discover that he was a rather self-serving individual. Twice, not once but twice, Abraham asks his wife Sara to lie about their relationship. He tells her to tell everyone she is his sister instead of his wife. Because if they know Sara is Abraham’s wife, the king might kill him and take Sara to be his wife. But if she were Abraham’s sister, the king would spare him even if he took her and made her one of his mistresses. Not a pretty picture is it? One would expect more from the father of the Chosen People.

Because Sara could not conceive, she tells Abraham to have a child by her slave, Hagar. Abraham does. But when the baby, Ishmael, arrives, Sara goes into a teenage snit because Abraham did what she told him to do and then she treats both Hagar and Ishmael even worse. Then when Sara does have her own baby, Isaac, she demands, demands that Abraham throw Hagar and Ishmael out. And Abraham does! Another not-so-pretty family picture.

It doesn’t get any better when it comes to Abraham’s sons. When Isaac grows up, he marries Rebecca. They have twin sons, Esau, the elder and Jacob, the younger. Isaac is fond of Esau, but Jacob is the apple of his mother’s eye. One day Esau is out hunting and comes back famished. Jacob is at home making a pot of stew. When Esau asks his brother for some of the stew, Jacob balks. He won’t give his brother any food but he will sell him some: the price is Esau’s birthright, which in this case means leadership of the family and a double share of the inheritance. So Jacob takes unjust advantage of his brother in a time of need. The dysfunction continues.

And continues. Isaac, who is old and blind and about to die, wants to impart his blessing as the father upon his older son. He asks Esau to prepare a meal for him and then receive his blessing so that he, Isaac, can die in peace. Rebecca overhears the conversation and connives with Jacob to steal the blessing. Esau has a lot of hair all over his body while Jacob is fair-skinned. Rebecca prepares the meal, dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes, puts goatskins on his arms to make him seem like a hairy man, and sends him off to Isaac. Isaac smells a rat because he hears the voice of Jacob. But he cannot see and has to take Jacob at his word that he is not Jacob but Esau. So Isaac blesses Jacob believing him to be Esau. The dysfunction continues.

Esau, of course, when he discovers what happened, is beside himself with anger. He vows to kill his brother. Rebecca, who overhears this threat as well, tells Jacob he better get out of town while the getting is good. She sends him off to her brother Laban’s place where he should be safe. When he arrives, the family welcomes him with open arms. He begins to work for Laban for free. Laban will not have this, as we hear in today’s first reading. So Jacob agrees to work for Laban for seven years if, at the end of that time, he will be allowed to marry Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, whom he loves. Laban agrees.

So what happens? Laban tricks Jacob. He thinks he is marrying Rachel when he is actually marrying Leah. He could be tricked because the bride comes to the bridegroom veiled. He cannot see her face, much as Isaac could not see Jacob’s face when Jacob came to him. At any rate, when Jacob wakes up the next morning in bright sunlight, he sees not the face of Rachel but the face of Leah. He is fit to be tied. What goes around comes around, the Bible seems to be saying. What is going around is more lying, cheating, deception. In a word, dysfunction.

And it does not stop there. The deception and dysfunction continue on in the story of Jacob and Laban. Before the book of Genesis ends, we read the story of Joseph and all the lying and cheating and jealousy that go on among Jacob’s sons and their offspring. If I were a biblical novice, if I had never read the Bible before, if all I had been told was that the first book of the Bible was the story of the founding of the Jewish nation, I think I would come away from that reading either thoroughly confused or thoroughly unimpressed or both. I certainly would not have a favorable impression of all these supposedly blessed and chosen people.

Well, to be sure, I think that is precisely the impression the book of Genesis leaves and precisely the impression all those stories are meant to leave. God did not choose specially gifted people, outstanding saints, well-beloved individuals to be his people, even be the leaders of his people. He chose ordinary, fallible, sinful human beings, as sinful and as dysfunctional as everyone else. God perhaps could have done otherwise. But then, giving what he had to work with, he did the best with what he had.

God always does. To me that is the message not only of the book of Genesis but of all of scripture itself. God always works with what he has and what he has is hardly ever the best and the brightest, Jesus being the lone exception. But, then, look at the motley crew Jesus chose to work with: not the best and the brightest either. Each one of them was a sinner in his own right and quite dysfunctional as well. But God the Father in the Old Testament and God the Son in the New each got the work done that needed to be done, sin, selfishness and dysfunction notwithstanding.

So you see, there is hope for you and me. There are two things to remember from today’s Old Testament lesson, from all of scripture, in fact. The first is that dysfunction, disease and disability notwithstanding, we cannot use our failings and shortcomings as an excuse for not doing the very best we can in living out our faith. The second point is that no matter how bad, how foolish, how sinful, how dysfunctional we are, God calls us and uses us anyway.

Think about that! In these days of so much bad news here is some really good news, thanks be to God.