If there is a point to the Jacob and Esau narrative that we read from Genesis today it might be this: Even scoundrels and scalawags have a place in the reign of God. Some of you will find that good news. In fact, most of us probably will because I doubt there are many of us who feel as though we’ve done our part to earn full sainthood. To hear that a rascal like Jacob has made it into the first book of the sacred scriptures for both Jews and Christians and that he is there, not as a villain, but as a character used for God’s own purposes…well, to hear that seems like a pretty hopeful thing. Maybe God does have a use for people like you and me after all.
If we take away nothing else from this reading today, I guess that will be alright. We come to church looking for a little good news and, in a story as difficult as obscure as this one, a word of hope for the little degenerate who lurks within us all probably fits the bill for gospel. But I’m not satisfied and it’s my job as the preacher to get below the surface of this text, to explore its seamy underbelly, to expose its troubling darkness and to take you with me. I’m also going to try to do something really amazing with a text that is this challenging – I’m going to try to say a few things about how to deal with family conflict. That’s not an easy thing with a story that is mostly about how NOT to deal with family conflict, but we’ll see what we can do.
A few years ago Bill Moyers did a PBS series in which he reminded us that the book of Genesis is one of the greatest treasures we have. Not only does it give us an introduction to the Bible and to God, but it also gives us some of our most memorable stories and fascinating people. This is a book with magic gardens and talking serpents, giants and floods, skyscrapers built to the heavens and cities leveled to the ground, a God who gets elbow-deep in mud to create a human being and who argues, angers and despairs. And throughout the book there is one constant – conflict…the lifeblood of good stories and a staple of our lives. Particularly in Genesis we get stories of family conflict. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and his ten half-brothers, and our own happy family today. Given all this conflict it seems incredible that God’s promise to Israel somehow makes it to a second book – Exodus!
So let’s look at this passage. Chapter 25 starts with a preface that tells us that what we’re about to hear is a preface to a cycle of stories about Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, who were the first ones to receive the promise of blessing for the nation that is to come from them. But if this is about Isaac, it’s about Isaac in a very odd way. Isaac has very little to do with these stories that are to come, just like he’s had very little to do with the stories that came before.
Isaac’s greatest moment came on the mountaintop as his father Abraham is about to slay him on an altar dedicated to Yahweh God. He is the child of promise. We know that because God calls him that. But after this episode, Isaac becomes a pretty marginal figure. He doesn’t even arrange his own marriage. A servant makes all the arrangements for his wedding to Rebekah. And later on, when he finally decides that the time has come to impart the great vision of what Yahweh has promised to his sons, Isaac himself has lost all vision and is at the mercy of Rebekah and Jacob who manipulate his weakness to take the blessing he intends for Esau. Isaac may get the first mention here, but it’s Jacob who gets the top billing from here on out.
As in all good stories, there has to be a complication to make this story move along. The complication here is that Isaac and Rebekah, the couple on whom the promise of descendents, land and nation has fallen, have no children. If you’ll remember, it is the same complication that Abraham and Sarah faced when they were told they were going to enter geriatric parenthood. They had the good sense to laugh when God told them that they were going to have a child. Abraham fell on his face laughing. Sarah laughed behind the tent flap. God had the last laugh and the result was Isaac, whose name means Laughter.
But Isaac doesn’t laugh here. He prays to Yahweh, the God of his parents and before verse 21 is over, Rebekah is pregnant, though the text suggests that it took twenty years before the prayer was answered. Isaac becomes a father at the relatively young age of sixty.
There is another problem here, though. There’s not one child, but two, which is not a problem except that they don’t get along. Even before they are born, they don’t get along. This is sibling rivalry in the extreme. Then something amazing happens for a story written by men – (you know it’s written by men by the description of the birth that’s about to happen) – amazingly, we get a glimplse of Rebekah’s thoughts about this pregnancy. She’s thinking, “It’s like a war zone in there! They’re beating on each other! I’ve got a knee over here, an elbow over there.”
I know, I know. This sounds like a normal pregnancy. But Genesis says it was worse than normal, so much so that Rebekah finally says something that is very hard to translate. The King James Version says that Rebekah said, “If it be so, why am I thus?” My translation is, “If it’s going to be like this, why do I even exist?” However you translate it, this is a prayer and so Rebekah turns to this God who has granted her the gift of this pregnancy and asks, “What’s going on?”
It’s then that God makes the only appearance in this text. We are told God answered Isaac’s prayer, but the only words God speaks are the words to Rebekah and they are a bit of prophecy. God says, “It’s not two children but two nations that are in your womb.”
(You can just about hear Rebekah saying to herself, “Well, it sure feels like it!”)
God says, in effect, “This is about more than a pregnancy. This is about a long-term conflict that will seem never-ending. These two children will be ancestors of nations that will always be in a contest of might. But as in all the stories of God, the older will serve the younger.”
Now notice something here. Rebekah knows the end of the story now. We don’t know that anyone else ever does, but she does. The reasons why God chooses as God chooses are no clearer now, but Rebekah knows the conclusion and she decides to be an agent for bringing it about. She, like God, will favor the younger child for no discernible reason.
The birth is unusual, to say the least. The first of the twins is a red, hairy baby and because he is hairy they decide to call him…Hairy. In Hebrew that would be Esau. And then…and this is where I think a man must have reported this story because I don’t think this is an obstetrical possibility…anyway, the story is that the second child was born grabbing hold of the heel of the first. And for this miraculous feat he earned the name “Heel-holder”, which is Hebrew for Jacob.
With the birth the stage is set. The characters of these two are pretty well set. We know from this point on that Esau will be the earth-child, defined by the hair of his body as somebody close to his animal nature. Sure enough, when he is grown, he is the hunter, the outdoorsman, beloved by his father because he brought home the game Isaac loved so much. They are very close, Isaac and Esau. They make decisions with their stomachs, not based on grand promises of future blessings.
Jacob, we know from birth, will be the fighter, the one who scrapes and scraps, always reaching ahead for the blessing and bedeviling his brother in the process. When he is grown, he is described as a pretty man who dwelt in tents. He made his way on the favor of his mother and the favor of God, though Jacob can’t seem to recognize a gift that doesn’t involve an attached string. He struggles for everything and even ends up wrestling God on the banks of a river, for which he earns a new name, Israel – one who strives with God.
The scene with the stew is very predictable once we know these characters. Who knows if Jacob planned the thing from the beginning or not? He is boiling a pot of lentil stew when his brother returns from the hunt, tired and famished. Esau sees and smells the stew and speaks from his stomach, “Quick, Jake, let me guzzle down some of that red stuff because I am really hungry.”
Jacob is direct and to the point, “First, sell me your birthright.”
“Look I’m dying here, Jake! Am I going to eat my birthright?”
“First, swear to me, Esau.”
“Whatever.” So he swears and he eats and he drinks and he stands and he leaves. Esau will not figure in the blessing from here on out, but his confrontations with Jacob will continue until the day they bury their father and go their separate ways.
Now I guess I don’t need to say that this is not a model family. You’ve got two brothers who fight, parents who pick favorites and a family blessing that can only be passed along to one of the children. This is a recipe for disaster.
We can relate to this story because it is so much like our families. Have you ever noticed this? You get together with your family and it seems like everybody has these…quirks. Everybody but you, of course. And even when it’s going well there are little reminders of simmering conflicts and unresolved tensions that go back to birth and probably beyond. Every family lives with these deep complexities that are part of the nature of human community.
We can also see things in the life of Isaac and Rebekah’s family that make us wince because we know that they are making mistakes that will haunt the family down the road. When love is channeled instead of spread freely, something is going to wrong. If any member of the family feels devalued and unloved, conflict is inevitable. So when Isaac and Rebekah choose up sides, something bad is going to happen.
When the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways, they begin to be expressed in unhealthy ways. The narrative this family lived with was that only one child was going to inherit this blessing. The other child was going to have to settle for something less. This is the way things were for much of human history. Inheritance was usually limited and passed along to the oldest son. But this not healthy for families. How many families have been torn apart because there are some children who have not felt love and who have equated the stuff that’s left behind after death as a symbol of the parent’s love? Every child needs to share in the family’s blessing. Or you have manipulations over stew or worse.
Bishop Gregory Palmer, in his closing sermon at General Conference, used this [i]text and said, “[It is] incumbent on you and me as people of Christian faith that we not become stingy with the blessings—stingy with what we have received from God..Naked we came into this world. We brought nothing with us, and we will take nothing with us. Everything we have—every good and perfect gift, comes from God.” And it is to be shared, both within families and within churches to the world.
So when love is not expressed to all the members of the family…when the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways…something bad will happen. But when unhealthy behavior is not confronted early, it can lead to major problems down the road. In this family it led to death threats and exile and divisions. When we explain it away and say, “It’s just a phase. It’s just a small thing. It’s something I used to do and I got over it”…when we explain away bad behavior in our children or our siblings or our extended family and fail to draw necessary lines…we often see major consequences down the road.
As Jeremiah Wright puts it, “God will forgive you for sowing wild oats. But God's forgiveness don't stop the crop. Them oats you sowed will bring a crop. You will reap what you sow. But stop calling your crops your cross. [mocking] "Well... that child is just my cross." No, that child is your crop. A cross is a sacrificial vehicle of redemption that you voluntarily pick up; a crop is the result of something you sowed. Our choices have consequences, our behaviors have consequences.”[ii]
A corollary to this is that parents should be parents. Not passive and disconnected like Isaac. Not manipulative like Rebekah. But engaged and on the same page - engaged with their children and on the same page with their spouses or other caregivers on the approach to take with their children. Too many of us are trying to do it on our own.
But finally, the good news again. I know there are all kinds of families out there and all kinds of arrangements. There are all kinds of ways that our families – every family – are not what we’d want them to be. But God works through imperfect families. Indeed that’s the only kind of family God has ever worked through.
Does you know this story of Hairy and the Heelholder? Does it feel familiar? For as long as human beings have been instruments of God’s grace, Jacob and Esau and their descendents have lived within us. We know this story, because it is our story. And yet God became human to live in this mess and to show us the way to redemption and resurrection. Thanks be to the God who loves messy families and wants them to be whole.
Genesis 25:19-34
These are the stories of Isaac, son of Abraham:
Abraham bore Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan-Aram, and sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. Yahweh answered his prayer and Rebekah, his wife, conceived.
The children struck one another within her and she said, “If it is thus, why do I exist?” So she went to consult Yahweh and Yahweh said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
And two peoples from within you will be divided;
One people will be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger.”
When her time to give birth came about, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red and all of him was like a great mantle of hair, so they called his name Esau. After this, his brother came out with his hand grasping the heel of Esau, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.
The boys grew up and Esau became a man skillful in the hunt, a man of the fields. Jacob became a pretty man, a tent-dweller. Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
One day Jacob was boiling up some stew when Esau was coming in from the fields. Esau was famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Quick, let me guzzle some of that red stuff because I am famished!” (On this account they also called him Edom.)
Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”
Esau said, “Look, I am dying here! What good is this birthright to me?”
Jacob said, “First, swear to me.”
So Esau swore an oath to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank and then stood up and walked away. So Esau despised his birthright.
[i] http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=lwL4KnN1LtH&b=4017527&content_id={E590EA13-6F93-484A-9D00-B4E4455A25B6}¬oc=1
[ii] Jeremiah Wright, “Transcript of a Jeremiah Wright Sermon”, 1/27/08, The New Republic http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4808fe74-023d-417b-8537-33763c33e399
Hairy and the Heel-holder: Dealing with Family Conflict
July 13, 2008
Franktown United Methodist Church
If there is a point to the Jacob and Esau narrative that we read from Genesis today it might be this: Even scoundrels and scalawags have a place in the reign of God. Some of you will find that good news. In fact, most of us probably will because I doubt there are many of us who feel as though we’ve done our part to earn full sainthood. To hear that a rascal like Jacob has made it into the first book of the sacred scriptures for both Jews and Christians and that he is there, not as a villain, but as a character used for God’s own purposes…well, to hear that seems like a pretty hopeful thing. Maybe God does have a use for people like you and me after all.
If we take away nothing else from this reading today, I guess that will be alright. We come to church looking for a little good news and, in a story as difficult as obscure as this one, a word of hope for the little degenerate who lurks within us all probably fits the bill for gospel. But I’m not satisfied and it’s my job as the preacher to get below the surface of this text, to explore its seamy underbelly, to expose its troubling darkness and to take you with me. I’m also going to try to do something really amazing with a text that is this challenging – I’m going to try to say a few things about how to deal with family conflict. That’s not an easy thing with a story that is mostly about how NOT to deal with family conflict, but we’ll see what we can do.
A few years ago Bill Moyers did a PBS series in which he reminded us that the book of Genesis is one of the greatest treasures we have. Not only does it give us an introduction to the Bible and to God, but it also gives us some of our most memorable stories and fascinating people. This is a book with magic gardens and talking serpents, giants and floods, skyscrapers built to the heavens and cities leveled to the ground, a God who gets elbow-deep in mud to create a human being and who argues, angers and despairs. And throughout the book there is one constant – conflict…the lifeblood of good stories and a staple of our lives. Particularly in Genesis we get stories of family conflict. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and his ten half-brothers, and our own happy family today. Given all this conflict it seems incredible that God’s promise to Israel somehow makes it to a second book – Exodus!
So let’s look at this passage. Chapter 25 starts with a preface that tells us that what we’re about to hear is a preface to a cycle of stories about Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, who were the first ones to receive the promise of blessing for the nation that is to come from them. But if this is about Isaac, it’s about Isaac in a very odd way. Isaac has very little to do with these stories that are to come, just like he’s had very little to do with the stories that came before.
Isaac’s greatest moment came on the mountaintop as his father Abraham is about to slay him on an altar dedicated to Yahweh God. He is the child of promise. We know that because God calls him that. But after this episode, Isaac becomes a pretty marginal figure. He doesn’t even arrange his own marriage. A servant makes all the arrangements for his wedding to Rebekah. And later on, when he finally decides that the time has come to impart the great vision of what Yahweh has promised to his sons, Isaac himself has lost all vision and is at the mercy of Rebekah and Jacob who manipulate his weakness to take the blessing he intends for Esau. Isaac may get the first mention here, but it’s Jacob who gets the top billing from here on out.
As in all good stories, there has to be a complication to make this story move along. The complication here is that Isaac and Rebekah, the couple on whom the promise of descendents, land and nation has fallen, have no children. If you’ll remember, it is the same complication that Abraham and Sarah faced when they were told they were going to enter geriatric parenthood. They had the good sense to laugh when God told them that they were going to have a child. Abraham fell on his face laughing. Sarah laughed behind the tent flap. God had the last laugh and the result was Isaac, whose name means Laughter.
But Isaac doesn’t laugh here. He prays to Yahweh, the God of his parents and before verse 21 is over, Rebekah is pregnant, though the text suggests that it took twenty years before the prayer was answered. Isaac becomes a father at the relatively young age of sixty.
There is another problem here, though. There’s not one child, but two, which is not a problem except that they don’t get along. Even before they are born, they don’t get along. This is sibling rivalry in the extreme. Then something amazing happens for a story written by men – (you know it’s written by men by the description of the birth that’s about to happen) – amazingly, we get a glimplse of Rebekah’s thoughts about this pregnancy. She’s thinking, “It’s like a war zone in there! They’re beating on each other! I’ve got a knee over here, an elbow over there.”
I know, I know. This sounds like a normal pregnancy. But Genesis says it was worse than normal, so much so that Rebekah finally says something that is very hard to translate. The King James Version says that Rebekah said, “If it be so, why am I thus?” My translation is, “If it’s going to be like this, why do I even exist?” However you translate it, this is a prayer and so Rebekah turns to this God who has granted her the gift of this pregnancy and asks, “What’s going on?”
It’s then that God makes the only appearance in this text. We are told God answered Isaac’s prayer, but the only words God speaks are the words to Rebekah and they are a bit of prophecy. God says, “It’s not two children but two nations that are in your womb.”
(You can just about hear Rebekah saying to herself, “Well, it sure feels like it!”)
God says, in effect, “This is about more than a pregnancy. This is about a long-term conflict that will seem never-ending. These two children will be ancestors of nations that will always be in a contest of might. But as in all the stories of God, the older will serve the younger.”
Now notice something here. Rebekah knows the end of the story now. We don’t know that anyone else ever does, but she does. The reasons why God chooses as God chooses are no clearer now, but Rebekah knows the conclusion and she decides to be an agent for bringing it about. She, like God, will favor the younger child for no discernible reason.
The birth is unusual, to say the least. The first of the twins is a red, hairy baby and because he is hairy they decide to call him…Hairy. In Hebrew that would be Esau. And then…and this is where I think a man must have reported this story because I don’t think this is an obstetrical possibility…anyway, the story is that the second child was born grabbing hold of the heel of the first. And for this miraculous feat he earned the name “Heel-holder”, which is Hebrew for Jacob.
With the birth the stage is set. The characters of these two are pretty well set. We know from this point on that Esau will be the earth-child, defined by the hair of his body as somebody close to his animal nature. Sure enough, when he is grown, he is the hunter, the outdoorsman, beloved by his father because he brought home the game Isaac loved so much. They are very close, Isaac and Esau. They make decisions with their stomachs, not based on grand promises of future blessings.
Jacob, we know from birth, will be the fighter, the one who scrapes and scraps, always reaching ahead for the blessing and bedeviling his brother in the process. When he is grown, he is described as a pretty man who dwelt in tents. He made his way on the favor of his mother and the favor of God, though Jacob can’t seem to recognize a gift that doesn’t involve an attached string. He struggles for everything and even ends up wrestling God on the banks of a river, for which he earns a new name, Israel – one who strives with God.
The scene with the stew is very predictable once we know these characters. Who knows if Jacob planned the thing from the beginning or not? He is boiling a pot of lentil stew when his brother returns from the hunt, tired and famished. Esau sees and smells the stew and speaks from his stomach, “Quick, Jake, let me guzzle down some of that red stuff because I am really hungry.”
Jacob is direct and to the point, “First, sell me your birthright.”
“Look I’m dying here, Jake! Am I going to eat my birthright?”
“First, swear to me, Esau.”
“Whatever.” So he swears and he eats and he drinks and he stands and he leaves. Esau will not figure in the blessing from here on out, but his confrontations with Jacob will continue until the day they bury their father and go their separate ways.
Now I guess I don’t need to say that this is not a model family. You’ve got two brothers who fight, parents who pick favorites and a family blessing that can only be passed along to one of the children. This is a recipe for disaster.
We can relate to this story because it is so much like our families. Have you ever noticed this? You get together with your family and it seems like everybody has these…quirks. Everybody but you, of course. And even when it’s going well there are little reminders of simmering conflicts and unresolved tensions that go back to birth and probably beyond. Every family lives with these deep complexities that are part of the nature of human community.
We can also see things in the life of Isaac and Rebekah’s family that make us wince because we know that they are making mistakes that will haunt the family down the road. When love is channeled instead of spread freely, something is going to wrong. If any member of the family feels devalued and unloved, conflict is inevitable. So when Isaac and Rebekah choose up sides, something bad is going to happen.
When the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways, they begin to be expressed in unhealthy ways. The narrative this family lived with was that only one child was going to inherit this blessing. The other child was going to have to settle for something less. This is the way things were for much of human history. Inheritance was usually limited and passed along to the oldest son. But this not healthy for families. How many families have been torn apart because there are some children who have not felt love and who have equated the stuff that’s left behind after death as a symbol of the parent’s love? Every child needs to share in the family’s blessing. Or you have manipulations over stew or worse.
Bishop Gregory Palmer, in his closing sermon at General Conference, used this [i]text and said, “[It is] incumbent on you and me as people of Christian faith that we not become stingy with the blessings—stingy with what we have received from God..Naked we came into this world. We brought nothing with us, and we will take nothing with us. Everything we have—every good and perfect gift, comes from God.” And it is to be shared, both within families and within churches to the world.
So when love is not expressed to all the members of the family…when the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways…something bad will happen. But when unhealthy behavior is not confronted early, it can lead to major problems down the road. In this family it led to death threats and exile and divisions. When we explain it away and say, “It’s just a phase. It’s just a small thing. It’s something I used to do and I got over it”…when we explain away bad behavior in our children or our siblings or our extended family and fail to draw necessary lines…we often see major consequences down the road.
As Jeremiah Wright puts it, “God will forgive you for sowing wild oats. But God's forgiveness don't stop the crop. Them oats you sowed will bring a crop. You will reap what you sow. But stop calling your crops your cross. [mocking] "Well... that child is just my cross." No, that child is your crop. A cross is a sacrificial vehicle of redemption that you voluntarily pick up; a crop is the result of something you sowed. Our choices have consequences, our behaviors have consequences.”[ii]
A corollary to this is that parents should be parents. Not passive and disconnected like Isaac. Not manipulative like Rebekah. But engaged and on the same page - engaged with their children and on the same page with their spouses or other caregivers on the approach to take with their children. Too many of us are trying to do it on our own.
But finally, the good news again. I know there are all kinds of families out there and all kinds of arrangements. There are all kinds of ways that our families – every family – are not what we’d want them to be. But God works through imperfect families. Indeed that’s the only kind of family God has ever worked through.
Does you know this story of Hairy and the Heelholder? Does it feel familiar? For as long as human beings have been instruments of God’s grace, Jacob and Esau and their descendents have lived within us. We know this story, because it is our story. And yet God became human to live in this mess and to show us the way to redemption and resurrection. Thanks be to the God who loves messy families and wants them to be whole.
Genesis 25:19-34
These are the stories of Isaac, son of Abraham:
Abraham bore Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan-Aram, and sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. Yahweh answered his prayer and Rebekah, his wife, conceived.
The children struck one another within her and she said, “If it is thus, why do I exist?” So she went to consult Yahweh and Yahweh said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
And two peoples from within you will be divided;
One people will be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger.”
When her time to give birth came about, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red and all of him was like a great mantle of hair, so they called his name Esau. After this, his brother came out with his hand grasping the heel of Esau, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.
The boys grew up and Esau became a man skillful in the hunt, a man of the fields. Jacob became a pretty man, a tent-dweller. Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
One day Jacob was boiling up some stew when Esau was coming in from the fields. Esau was famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Quick, let me guzzle some of that red stuff because I am famished!” (On this account they also called him Edom.)
Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”
Esau said, “Look, I am dying here! What good is this birthright to me?”
Jacob said, “First, swear to me.”
So Esau swore an oath to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank and then stood up and walked away. So Esau despised his birthright.
[i] http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=lwL4KnN1LtH&b=4017527&content_id={E590EA13-6F93-484A-9D00-B4E4455A25B6}¬oc=1
[ii] Jeremiah Wright, “Transcript of a Jeremiah Wright Sermon”, 1/27/08, The New Republic http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4808fe74-023d-417b-8537-33763c33e399
If we take away nothing else from this reading today, I guess that will be alright. We come to church looking for a little good news and, in a story as difficult as obscure as this one, a word of hope for the little degenerate who lurks within us all probably fits the bill for gospel. But I’m not satisfied and it’s my job as the preacher to get below the surface of this text, to explore its seamy underbelly, to expose its troubling darkness and to take you with me. I’m also going to try to do something really amazing with a text that is this challenging – I’m going to try to say a few things about how to deal with family conflict. That’s not an easy thing with a story that is mostly about how NOT to deal with family conflict, but we’ll see what we can do.
A few years ago Bill Moyers did a PBS series in which he reminded us that the book of Genesis is one of the greatest treasures we have. Not only does it give us an introduction to the Bible and to God, but it also gives us some of our most memorable stories and fascinating people. This is a book with magic gardens and talking serpents, giants and floods, skyscrapers built to the heavens and cities leveled to the ground, a God who gets elbow-deep in mud to create a human being and who argues, angers and despairs. And throughout the book there is one constant – conflict…the lifeblood of good stories and a staple of our lives. Particularly in Genesis we get stories of family conflict. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and his ten half-brothers, and our own happy family today. Given all this conflict it seems incredible that God’s promise to Israel somehow makes it to a second book – Exodus!
So let’s look at this passage. Chapter 25 starts with a preface that tells us that what we’re about to hear is a preface to a cycle of stories about Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, who were the first ones to receive the promise of blessing for the nation that is to come from them. But if this is about Isaac, it’s about Isaac in a very odd way. Isaac has very little to do with these stories that are to come, just like he’s had very little to do with the stories that came before.
Isaac’s greatest moment came on the mountaintop as his father Abraham is about to slay him on an altar dedicated to Yahweh God. He is the child of promise. We know that because God calls him that. But after this episode, Isaac becomes a pretty marginal figure. He doesn’t even arrange his own marriage. A servant makes all the arrangements for his wedding to Rebekah. And later on, when he finally decides that the time has come to impart the great vision of what Yahweh has promised to his sons, Isaac himself has lost all vision and is at the mercy of Rebekah and Jacob who manipulate his weakness to take the blessing he intends for Esau. Isaac may get the first mention here, but it’s Jacob who gets the top billing from here on out.
As in all good stories, there has to be a complication to make this story move along. The complication here is that Isaac and Rebekah, the couple on whom the promise of descendents, land and nation has fallen, have no children. If you’ll remember, it is the same complication that Abraham and Sarah faced when they were told they were going to enter geriatric parenthood. They had the good sense to laugh when God told them that they were going to have a child. Abraham fell on his face laughing. Sarah laughed behind the tent flap. God had the last laugh and the result was Isaac, whose name means Laughter.
But Isaac doesn’t laugh here. He prays to Yahweh, the God of his parents and before verse 21 is over, Rebekah is pregnant, though the text suggests that it took twenty years before the prayer was answered. Isaac becomes a father at the relatively young age of sixty.
There is another problem here, though. There’s not one child, but two, which is not a problem except that they don’t get along. Even before they are born, they don’t get along. This is sibling rivalry in the extreme. Then something amazing happens for a story written by men – (you know it’s written by men by the description of the birth that’s about to happen) – amazingly, we get a glimplse of Rebekah’s thoughts about this pregnancy. She’s thinking, “It’s like a war zone in there! They’re beating on each other! I’ve got a knee over here, an elbow over there.”
I know, I know. This sounds like a normal pregnancy. But Genesis says it was worse than normal, so much so that Rebekah finally says something that is very hard to translate. The King James Version says that Rebekah said, “If it be so, why am I thus?” My translation is, “If it’s going to be like this, why do I even exist?” However you translate it, this is a prayer and so Rebekah turns to this God who has granted her the gift of this pregnancy and asks, “What’s going on?”
It’s then that God makes the only appearance in this text. We are told God answered Isaac’s prayer, but the only words God speaks are the words to Rebekah and they are a bit of prophecy. God says, “It’s not two children but two nations that are in your womb.”
(You can just about hear Rebekah saying to herself, “Well, it sure feels like it!”)
God says, in effect, “This is about more than a pregnancy. This is about a long-term conflict that will seem never-ending. These two children will be ancestors of nations that will always be in a contest of might. But as in all the stories of God, the older will serve the younger.”
Now notice something here. Rebekah knows the end of the story now. We don’t know that anyone else ever does, but she does. The reasons why God chooses as God chooses are no clearer now, but Rebekah knows the conclusion and she decides to be an agent for bringing it about. She, like God, will favor the younger child for no discernible reason.
The birth is unusual, to say the least. The first of the twins is a red, hairy baby and because he is hairy they decide to call him…Hairy. In Hebrew that would be Esau. And then…and this is where I think a man must have reported this story because I don’t think this is an obstetrical possibility…anyway, the story is that the second child was born grabbing hold of the heel of the first. And for this miraculous feat he earned the name “Heel-holder”, which is Hebrew for Jacob.
With the birth the stage is set. The characters of these two are pretty well set. We know from this point on that Esau will be the earth-child, defined by the hair of his body as somebody close to his animal nature. Sure enough, when he is grown, he is the hunter, the outdoorsman, beloved by his father because he brought home the game Isaac loved so much. They are very close, Isaac and Esau. They make decisions with their stomachs, not based on grand promises of future blessings.
Jacob, we know from birth, will be the fighter, the one who scrapes and scraps, always reaching ahead for the blessing and bedeviling his brother in the process. When he is grown, he is described as a pretty man who dwelt in tents. He made his way on the favor of his mother and the favor of God, though Jacob can’t seem to recognize a gift that doesn’t involve an attached string. He struggles for everything and even ends up wrestling God on the banks of a river, for which he earns a new name, Israel – one who strives with God.
The scene with the stew is very predictable once we know these characters. Who knows if Jacob planned the thing from the beginning or not? He is boiling a pot of lentil stew when his brother returns from the hunt, tired and famished. Esau sees and smells the stew and speaks from his stomach, “Quick, Jake, let me guzzle down some of that red stuff because I am really hungry.”
Jacob is direct and to the point, “First, sell me your birthright.”
“Look I’m dying here, Jake! Am I going to eat my birthright?”
“First, swear to me, Esau.”
“Whatever.” So he swears and he eats and he drinks and he stands and he leaves. Esau will not figure in the blessing from here on out, but his confrontations with Jacob will continue until the day they bury their father and go their separate ways.
Now I guess I don’t need to say that this is not a model family. You’ve got two brothers who fight, parents who pick favorites and a family blessing that can only be passed along to one of the children. This is a recipe for disaster.
We can relate to this story because it is so much like our families. Have you ever noticed this? You get together with your family and it seems like everybody has these…quirks. Everybody but you, of course. And even when it’s going well there are little reminders of simmering conflicts and unresolved tensions that go back to birth and probably beyond. Every family lives with these deep complexities that are part of the nature of human community.
We can also see things in the life of Isaac and Rebekah’s family that make us wince because we know that they are making mistakes that will haunt the family down the road. When love is channeled instead of spread freely, something is going to wrong. If any member of the family feels devalued and unloved, conflict is inevitable. So when Isaac and Rebekah choose up sides, something bad is going to happen.
When the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways, they begin to be expressed in unhealthy ways. The narrative this family lived with was that only one child was going to inherit this blessing. The other child was going to have to settle for something less. This is the way things were for much of human history. Inheritance was usually limited and passed along to the oldest son. But this not healthy for families. How many families have been torn apart because there are some children who have not felt love and who have equated the stuff that’s left behind after death as a symbol of the parent’s love? Every child needs to share in the family’s blessing. Or you have manipulations over stew or worse.
Bishop Gregory Palmer, in his closing sermon at General Conference, used this [i]text and said, “[It is] incumbent on you and me as people of Christian faith that we not become stingy with the blessings—stingy with what we have received from God..Naked we came into this world. We brought nothing with us, and we will take nothing with us. Everything we have—every good and perfect gift, comes from God.” And it is to be shared, both within families and within churches to the world.
So when love is not expressed to all the members of the family…when the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways…something bad will happen. But when unhealthy behavior is not confronted early, it can lead to major problems down the road. In this family it led to death threats and exile and divisions. When we explain it away and say, “It’s just a phase. It’s just a small thing. It’s something I used to do and I got over it”…when we explain away bad behavior in our children or our siblings or our extended family and fail to draw necessary lines…we often see major consequences down the road.
As Jeremiah Wright puts it, “God will forgive you for sowing wild oats. But God's forgiveness don't stop the crop. Them oats you sowed will bring a crop. You will reap what you sow. But stop calling your crops your cross. [mocking] "Well... that child is just my cross." No, that child is your crop. A cross is a sacrificial vehicle of redemption that you voluntarily pick up; a crop is the result of something you sowed. Our choices have consequences, our behaviors have consequences.”[ii]
A corollary to this is that parents should be parents. Not passive and disconnected like Isaac. Not manipulative like Rebekah. But engaged and on the same page - engaged with their children and on the same page with their spouses or other caregivers on the approach to take with their children. Too many of us are trying to do it on our own.
But finally, the good news again. I know there are all kinds of families out there and all kinds of arrangements. There are all kinds of ways that our families – every family – are not what we’d want them to be. But God works through imperfect families. Indeed that’s the only kind of family God has ever worked through.
Does you know this story of Hairy and the Heelholder? Does it feel familiar? For as long as human beings have been instruments of God’s grace, Jacob and Esau and their descendents have lived within us. We know this story, because it is our story. And yet God became human to live in this mess and to show us the way to redemption and resurrection. Thanks be to the God who loves messy families and wants them to be whole.
Genesis 25:19-34
These are the stories of Isaac, son of Abraham:
Abraham bore Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan-Aram, and sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. Yahweh answered his prayer and Rebekah, his wife, conceived.
The children struck one another within her and she said, “If it is thus, why do I exist?” So she went to consult Yahweh and Yahweh said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
And two peoples from within you will be divided;
One people will be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger.”
When her time to give birth came about, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red and all of him was like a great mantle of hair, so they called his name Esau. After this, his brother came out with his hand grasping the heel of Esau, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.
The boys grew up and Esau became a man skillful in the hunt, a man of the fields. Jacob became a pretty man, a tent-dweller. Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
One day Jacob was boiling up some stew when Esau was coming in from the fields. Esau was famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Quick, let me guzzle some of that red stuff because I am famished!” (On this account they also called him Edom.)
Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”
Esau said, “Look, I am dying here! What good is this birthright to me?”
Jacob said, “First, swear to me.”
So Esau swore an oath to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank and then stood up and walked away. So Esau despised his birthright.
[i] http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=lwL4KnN1LtH&b=4017527&content_id={E590EA13-6F93-484A-9D00-B4E4455A25B6}¬oc=1
[ii] Jeremiah Wright, “Transcript of a Jeremiah Wright Sermon”, 1/27/08, The New Republic http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4808fe74-023d-417b-8537-33763c33e399
Hairy and the Heel-holder: Dealing with Family Conflict
July 13, 2008
Franktown United Methodist Church
If there is a point to the Jacob and Esau narrative that we read from Genesis today it might be this: Even scoundrels and scalawags have a place in the reign of God. Some of you will find that good news. In fact, most of us probably will because I doubt there are many of us who feel as though we’ve done our part to earn full sainthood. To hear that a rascal like Jacob has made it into the first book of the sacred scriptures for both Jews and Christians and that he is there, not as a villain, but as a character used for God’s own purposes…well, to hear that seems like a pretty hopeful thing. Maybe God does have a use for people like you and me after all.
If we take away nothing else from this reading today, I guess that will be alright. We come to church looking for a little good news and, in a story as difficult as obscure as this one, a word of hope for the little degenerate who lurks within us all probably fits the bill for gospel. But I’m not satisfied and it’s my job as the preacher to get below the surface of this text, to explore its seamy underbelly, to expose its troubling darkness and to take you with me. I’m also going to try to do something really amazing with a text that is this challenging – I’m going to try to say a few things about how to deal with family conflict. That’s not an easy thing with a story that is mostly about how NOT to deal with family conflict, but we’ll see what we can do.
A few years ago Bill Moyers did a PBS series in which he reminded us that the book of Genesis is one of the greatest treasures we have. Not only does it give us an introduction to the Bible and to God, but it also gives us some of our most memorable stories and fascinating people. This is a book with magic gardens and talking serpents, giants and floods, skyscrapers built to the heavens and cities leveled to the ground, a God who gets elbow-deep in mud to create a human being and who argues, angers and despairs. And throughout the book there is one constant – conflict…the lifeblood of good stories and a staple of our lives. Particularly in Genesis we get stories of family conflict. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and his ten half-brothers, and our own happy family today. Given all this conflict it seems incredible that God’s promise to Israel somehow makes it to a second book – Exodus!
So let’s look at this passage. Chapter 25 starts with a preface that tells us that what we’re about to hear is a preface to a cycle of stories about Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, who were the first ones to receive the promise of blessing for the nation that is to come from them. But if this is about Isaac, it’s about Isaac in a very odd way. Isaac has very little to do with these stories that are to come, just like he’s had very little to do with the stories that came before.
Isaac’s greatest moment came on the mountaintop as his father Abraham is about to slay him on an altar dedicated to Yahweh God. He is the child of promise. We know that because God calls him that. But after this episode, Isaac becomes a pretty marginal figure. He doesn’t even arrange his own marriage. A servant makes all the arrangements for his wedding to Rebekah. And later on, when he finally decides that the time has come to impart the great vision of what Yahweh has promised to his sons, Isaac himself has lost all vision and is at the mercy of Rebekah and Jacob who manipulate his weakness to take the blessing he intends for Esau. Isaac may get the first mention here, but it’s Jacob who gets the top billing from here on out.
As in all good stories, there has to be a complication to make this story move along. The complication here is that Isaac and Rebekah, the couple on whom the promise of descendents, land and nation has fallen, have no children. If you’ll remember, it is the same complication that Abraham and Sarah faced when they were told they were going to enter geriatric parenthood. They had the good sense to laugh when God told them that they were going to have a child. Abraham fell on his face laughing. Sarah laughed behind the tent flap. God had the last laugh and the result was Isaac, whose name means Laughter.
But Isaac doesn’t laugh here. He prays to Yahweh, the God of his parents and before verse 21 is over, Rebekah is pregnant, though the text suggests that it took twenty years before the prayer was answered. Isaac becomes a father at the relatively young age of sixty.
There is another problem here, though. There’s not one child, but two, which is not a problem except that they don’t get along. Even before they are born, they don’t get along. This is sibling rivalry in the extreme. Then something amazing happens for a story written by men – (you know it’s written by men by the description of the birth that’s about to happen) – amazingly, we get a glimplse of Rebekah’s thoughts about this pregnancy. She’s thinking, “It’s like a war zone in there! They’re beating on each other! I’ve got a knee over here, an elbow over there.”
I know, I know. This sounds like a normal pregnancy. But Genesis says it was worse than normal, so much so that Rebekah finally says something that is very hard to translate. The King James Version says that Rebekah said, “If it be so, why am I thus?” My translation is, “If it’s going to be like this, why do I even exist?” However you translate it, this is a prayer and so Rebekah turns to this God who has granted her the gift of this pregnancy and asks, “What’s going on?”
It’s then that God makes the only appearance in this text. We are told God answered Isaac’s prayer, but the only words God speaks are the words to Rebekah and they are a bit of prophecy. God says, “It’s not two children but two nations that are in your womb.”
(You can just about hear Rebekah saying to herself, “Well, it sure feels like it!”)
God says, in effect, “This is about more than a pregnancy. This is about a long-term conflict that will seem never-ending. These two children will be ancestors of nations that will always be in a contest of might. But as in all the stories of God, the older will serve the younger.”
Now notice something here. Rebekah knows the end of the story now. We don’t know that anyone else ever does, but she does. The reasons why God chooses as God chooses are no clearer now, but Rebekah knows the conclusion and she decides to be an agent for bringing it about. She, like God, will favor the younger child for no discernible reason.
The birth is unusual, to say the least. The first of the twins is a red, hairy baby and because he is hairy they decide to call him…Hairy. In Hebrew that would be Esau. And then…and this is where I think a man must have reported this story because I don’t think this is an obstetrical possibility…anyway, the story is that the second child was born grabbing hold of the heel of the first. And for this miraculous feat he earned the name “Heel-holder”, which is Hebrew for Jacob.
With the birth the stage is set. The characters of these two are pretty well set. We know from this point on that Esau will be the earth-child, defined by the hair of his body as somebody close to his animal nature. Sure enough, when he is grown, he is the hunter, the outdoorsman, beloved by his father because he brought home the game Isaac loved so much. They are very close, Isaac and Esau. They make decisions with their stomachs, not based on grand promises of future blessings.
Jacob, we know from birth, will be the fighter, the one who scrapes and scraps, always reaching ahead for the blessing and bedeviling his brother in the process. When he is grown, he is described as a pretty man who dwelt in tents. He made his way on the favor of his mother and the favor of God, though Jacob can’t seem to recognize a gift that doesn’t involve an attached string. He struggles for everything and even ends up wrestling God on the banks of a river, for which he earns a new name, Israel – one who strives with God.
The scene with the stew is very predictable once we know these characters. Who knows if Jacob planned the thing from the beginning or not? He is boiling a pot of lentil stew when his brother returns from the hunt, tired and famished. Esau sees and smells the stew and speaks from his stomach, “Quick, Jake, let me guzzle down some of that red stuff because I am really hungry.”
Jacob is direct and to the point, “First, sell me your birthright.”
“Look I’m dying here, Jake! Am I going to eat my birthright?”
“First, swear to me, Esau.”
“Whatever.” So he swears and he eats and he drinks and he stands and he leaves. Esau will not figure in the blessing from here on out, but his confrontations with Jacob will continue until the day they bury their father and go their separate ways.
Now I guess I don’t need to say that this is not a model family. You’ve got two brothers who fight, parents who pick favorites and a family blessing that can only be passed along to one of the children. This is a recipe for disaster.
We can relate to this story because it is so much like our families. Have you ever noticed this? You get together with your family and it seems like everybody has these…quirks. Everybody but you, of course. And even when it’s going well there are little reminders of simmering conflicts and unresolved tensions that go back to birth and probably beyond. Every family lives with these deep complexities that are part of the nature of human community.
We can also see things in the life of Isaac and Rebekah’s family that make us wince because we know that they are making mistakes that will haunt the family down the road. When love is channeled instead of spread freely, something is going to wrong. If any member of the family feels devalued and unloved, conflict is inevitable. So when Isaac and Rebekah choose up sides, something bad is going to happen.
When the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways, they begin to be expressed in unhealthy ways. The narrative this family lived with was that only one child was going to inherit this blessing. The other child was going to have to settle for something less. This is the way things were for much of human history. Inheritance was usually limited and passed along to the oldest son. But this not healthy for families. How many families have been torn apart because there are some children who have not felt love and who have equated the stuff that’s left behind after death as a symbol of the parent’s love? Every child needs to share in the family’s blessing. Or you have manipulations over stew or worse.
Bishop Gregory Palmer, in his closing sermon at General Conference, used this [i]text and said, “[It is] incumbent on you and me as people of Christian faith that we not become stingy with the blessings—stingy with what we have received from God..Naked we came into this world. We brought nothing with us, and we will take nothing with us. Everything we have—every good and perfect gift, comes from God.” And it is to be shared, both within families and within churches to the world.
So when love is not expressed to all the members of the family…when the needs of family members are not met in healthy ways…something bad will happen. But when unhealthy behavior is not confronted early, it can lead to major problems down the road. In this family it led to death threats and exile and divisions. When we explain it away and say, “It’s just a phase. It’s just a small thing. It’s something I used to do and I got over it”…when we explain away bad behavior in our children or our siblings or our extended family and fail to draw necessary lines…we often see major consequences down the road.
As Jeremiah Wright puts it, “God will forgive you for sowing wild oats. But God's forgiveness don't stop the crop. Them oats you sowed will bring a crop. You will reap what you sow. But stop calling your crops your cross. [mocking] "Well... that child is just my cross." No, that child is your crop. A cross is a sacrificial vehicle of redemption that you voluntarily pick up; a crop is the result of something you sowed. Our choices have consequences, our behaviors have consequences.”[ii]
A corollary to this is that parents should be parents. Not passive and disconnected like Isaac. Not manipulative like Rebekah. But engaged and on the same page - engaged with their children and on the same page with their spouses or other caregivers on the approach to take with their children. Too many of us are trying to do it on our own.
But finally, the good news again. I know there are all kinds of families out there and all kinds of arrangements. There are all kinds of ways that our families – every family – are not what we’d want them to be. But God works through imperfect families. Indeed that’s the only kind of family God has ever worked through.
Does you know this story of Hairy and the Heelholder? Does it feel familiar? For as long as human beings have been instruments of God’s grace, Jacob and Esau and their descendents have lived within us. We know this story, because it is our story. And yet God became human to live in this mess and to show us the way to redemption and resurrection. Thanks be to the God who loves messy families and wants them to be whole.
Genesis 25:19-34
These are the stories of Isaac, son of Abraham:
Abraham bore Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan-Aram, and sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed on behalf of his wife, because she was barren. Yahweh answered his prayer and Rebekah, his wife, conceived.
The children struck one another within her and she said, “If it is thus, why do I exist?” So she went to consult Yahweh and Yahweh said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
And two peoples from within you will be divided;
One people will be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger.”
When her time to give birth came about, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red and all of him was like a great mantle of hair, so they called his name Esau. After this, his brother came out with his hand grasping the heel of Esau, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.
The boys grew up and Esau became a man skillful in the hunt, a man of the fields. Jacob became a pretty man, a tent-dweller. Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
One day Jacob was boiling up some stew when Esau was coming in from the fields. Esau was famished. Esau said to Jacob, “Quick, let me guzzle some of that red stuff because I am famished!” (On this account they also called him Edom.)
Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.”
Esau said, “Look, I am dying here! What good is this birthright to me?”
Jacob said, “First, swear to me.”
So Esau swore an oath to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank and then stood up and walked away. So Esau despised his birthright.
[i] http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=lwL4KnN1LtH&b=4017527&content_id={E590EA13-6F93-484A-9D00-B4E4455A25B6}¬oc=1
[ii] Jeremiah Wright, “Transcript of a Jeremiah Wright Sermon”, 1/27/08, The New Republic http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4808fe74-023d-417b-8537-33763c33e399
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