When you were younger and fighting with a friend or sibling and you drew an imaginary line on the backseat of the car or used an entire roll of masking tape to create a border in the middle of your bedroom, I bet you had no idea you were acting out the biblical story of Jacob and Laban.

Though Laban is actually Jacob’s father-in-law, they have been fighting like siblings for years. When they meet, Jacob is on the run from his brother whom he’s tricked out of his blessing and birthright. Laban asks Jacob to work 7 years before Jacob will be allowed to marry Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel. But on the wedding day, the father-in-law switches the bride out for her older sister. After Jacob works another 7 years and marries them both, Laban agrees to give Jacob all of the speckled sheep and goats from the flocks he has been tending. But immediately he goes and hides them all. Jacob uses some ancient animal husbandry magic to make sure that all the strongest animals give birth to speckled babies and leaves Laban with all the weakest offspring. These guys are jerks.

By the time they meet at this heap-making spot, both men are furious. They feel cheated and wronged, and they are right. A deep resentment has built up over the years, and finally it seems the only thing to do is destroy one another or separate.

Sometimes when I’m not sure what scripture to use for a worship theme, I’ll do a search of the bible for a certain keyword to see how it’s used. That’s what I did for today with the word “witness.” I looked through all 127 occurrences, (you’re welcome) and I was surprised to see how many times the word was used of inanimate objects. Not only can pillars and heaps be witnesses, but books, and songs, and altars, and heaven and earth, are all called to witness different stories.

And that makes some sense because the other most common use of the word was in referring to false witnesses, those who lied about where a border was, or who dug a well, or whose ox gored whom. Unlike human witnesses, who were known to change their stories or accept bribes, a heap of rocks doesn’t lie. It’s always in the same place, always marking the same border, always bearing witness to the argument that happened in this very spot. And that’s an advantage when you’re trying to remember. But the strength of the witness heap is also its weakness, because once you’ve piled up the stones, they make it hard to forget the fight.

If you did tape that line down the center of your bedroom, you probably also pulled it up at some point. But a stone heap is not as easily removed. I found myself wondering about the heap, what happened to it and to the people it divided as they looked at it day after day, year after year? The first thing to say is: it worked. We never hear from Laban again. His name only shows up in a few genealogies.
But then I dug a little deeper and learned that this heap didn’t just divide a son-in-law from his wife’s father. It divided the peoples they represented: for Jacob, Israel; and for Laban, Aram. And searching for Aram, I learned that while the fight between these two men ended at the heap, the wars between Israel and Aram were just beginning. And going even a step further, to a map of the ancient near east, I saw that the capital of Aram was Damascus, and it was situated more or less where Syria is today. And I realized that in some ways, the fight between Jacob and Laban is still going on.

Pain and anger that we fail to deal with become heaps of stones that divide us, memorials to remind us of our difference. It’s a reality we have become painfully aware of again in America this summer. On June 18th, one day after Dylann Storm Roof murdered 9 people at a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, the journalist and social critic, Ta Nehisi Coates published a piece on The Atlantic blog entitled, “Take Down the Confederate Flag – Now.”

In it, Coates illuminates the way in which this battle flag has become a memorial to white supremacy. “The flag that Roof embraced,” he writes, “does not stand in opposition to this act – it endorses it.” Coates ended his article with a call to action, “Take down the flag. Take it down now. Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.”

The flag has been removed, and our own Confederate memorial will be relocated as soon as the money is raised. (See Jackie Davis if you want to help with that.) But the lesson remains: the pain and anger that we do not address become a memorial to divide us, a heap of stones that threatens to destroy us.

As part of my premarital counseling, I ask couples to create family trees and to mark on them all the relationships between people. To note where there is closeness, distance, conflict, or cut-off; to mark abuse, marriage, divorce, infidelity, addiction and adoption. If the couple knows enough about their families and are willing to share, patterns always emerge, patterns of resiliency, and patterns of trauma. A great-grandmother who disowned her eldest daughter, produces a family full of women who eventually cut-off from one another. Or a grandfather who was orphaned, has grandchildren who choose to adopt. Or an experience of abuse which is covered up slowly destroys a family over generations, causing all kinds of issues that don’t seem related.

Our families, like our landscapes, are marked by heaps of pain and anger. And until and unless we face them, the trauma from which those heaps originate continues to wound and divide us. In August, a team of researchers published a study that showed that trauma and stress can actually be transmitted from one generation to another in a family. The study compared the genes of 32 Holocaust survivors and their children with those of Jews who were not in Europe during World War II, and as the study’s author, Rachel Yehuda said, “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in parents.” (Helen Thompson, The Guardian, August 21, 2015) We carry within us the traumas of our ancestors. The stones of pain and anger that pile up in us become a memorial within our families.

And within ourselves. When I revisit some argument or insult, not to heal it but to stoke the fire of my anger; when I continue to replay a story of pain, not to take it’s power but to give it mine, I am slowly and methodically piling stones within my soul, creating a memorial I will visit again and again and again. I pile the stones and I mark a boundary in myself that I am soon trapped inside.

In the poem that we heard from Robert Frost, he talks about a witness tree. At first I thought that was just a poetic term, but it actually comes from the world of surveying. When surveyors mark the boundaries of properties, if one corner is inaccessible for some reason, they may pick a large tree that is close to the corner to witness to the boundary, hammering in a sign that tells where the true corner lies. What strikes me about the poem is how sad the narrator is about the tree. It becomes witness, he says, “by being deeply wounded.” The tree tries to hold its place while surrounded by darkness and doubt. And the narrator says the tree stands as “my proof of being not unbounded.” The tree, in its painful work, also marks the boundaries of the speaker. He is trapped by the tree, as unhappy as it seems to be. This for me captures the experience of piling stones within myself.

A Buddhist parable, provides a different image. The story says two monks were preparing to cross a river. A woman in a beautiful dress was standing on the bank, and not wishing to get her dress wet, she asked one of the monks to carry her across. Touching the woman was against the monk’s vows, but he agreed to do it anyway, to the consternation of his companion. The three crossed the river, and the monks continued on their journey. After many miles, the second monk could no longer hold in his anger. He turned to his brother and demanded, “Why did you pick up that woman when it is not allowed?” And the first monk replied, “Are you still carrying her? I set her down hours ago.”
This story feels familiar to me. There are many things I carry around long after others have put them down. The mistakes I make. The mistakes others make. The careless words we use, the careless actions we take. There are heaps within me that I need to dismantle, before they become borders I cannot cross. Of course, letting go of my pain and anger does not mean ignoring it or even necessarily forgetting it. There may still be a few stones piled together to remind me of those pivotal and painful experiences. But looking at the pictures Andy Bachmann has been posting of his pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, I realized I have a choice. Will those piles become a memorial to my anger, a border that cuts me off from others and from other parts of myself, or will they be cairns, the piles of stone that mark a trail, piles that show me how far I’ve traveled, piles that don’t separate me from others but connect me with those who have traveled this way before and those who will come after.

A witness is one who can tell us the story because they were there. They can remind us what we’ve experienced and how it felt at the time. But we have a choice, to allow that witness to bind us to an old way of telling our stories, to trap us within ever shrinking boundaries. Or to bless that witness as one who reminds us where we have been and, in the words of Ta Nehisi Coates, to “move forward…drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.” Amen.