“Our Story and God’s Story”                                                 July 10, 2011
Genesis 25: 19–34; Matthew 13: 1–9                                   Rev. Deryl Fleming

A New Yorker cartoon featured a couple hiding behind strategically placed fig leaves with the caption: “Adam and Eve, the original dysfunctional family.” They all are, those biblical families, and none more so than Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Esau.

In a book of Stories of God Stephen Shoemaker offers a song about Jacob (to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies).

Come listen to the story of a man named Jake
As a young man he acted like a fake
Esau his brother he made an enemy
Jake belonged to a dysfunctional family.

All God’s children got dysfunction in their DNA. The sins of the fathers, and don’t forget those of the mothers, are visited on the third and fourth generations.

For me, one of the most convincing realities of the Bible is its candor with its characters. The biblical writers and editors resist any temptation to prettify, to make the players in their stories look better than they are. They simply tell it like it is and like we are.

A Jewish scholar has written a book on Self, Struggle and Change: Family Conflict Stories in Genesis and their Healing Insights for Our Lives. Biblical figures are not so much models of morality as they are mirrors of identity, in which we can see ourselves if we look.

Today’s story is about a con artist who will eventually become the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. In the beginning of our story Rebecca was barren, and Isaac prayed that she would bear a child. God granted his prayer and then some. She conceived twin sons who were into sibling rivalry while still in the womb. So severe was her pain as they struggled within her she said, “If it’s going to be like this, why should I live?” The answer she got was that she was going to give birth to two nations, one stronger than the other and the elder would serve the younger. Thus she lived, surviving the troubling pregnancy. When the time came to give birth to the twins the first one out was so ruddy and hairy they named him Esau, which means the red one or the hairy one. Meet my son Red, the hairy one. My wife told me that when she was born her mother said, “She’s so red and look at all that hair.” Thankfully they didn’t name her Esau. Then out came the second one holding the heel of the first, and they named him Jacob, which means the heel holder or one who overreaches. Later Esau would call his brother the supplanter.

If, as Maya Angelou believes, we are more alike than different, we are also quite different. When the twins were growing up Esau, the hunter and outdoorsman, read Field and Stream. Or at least, he looked at the pictures. Jacob, the quiet one who preferred the indoors, read the New Yorker. Esau played linebacker, Jacob played Mozart (Shoemaker). As a young man, Esau operated largely out of his amygdala, the primitive emotions of the brain. Jacob, the thinker, operated more from his left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that keeps the emotions in check. “Isaac loved Esau. Rebecca loved Jacob.” Family dysfunction right here in the Bible, as in our lives.

Favoritism is a reality I have heard about both from favored and not so favored children. Sometimes it’s a mystery. Did Isaac love Esau only because he enjoyed the game he brought home? Or did he see in Esau something he wished he had had and was living vicariously through his favored son? Could it be that Esau reminded him of his long lost brother, Ishmael, who was also a hunter? We don’t know.

Did Rebecca love Jacob because he spent more time at home with her? Did she favor Jacob because she knew that Isaac favored Esau? We don’t know.

Why, in my mother’s eyes can I do almost no wrong and my sister has a hard time getting it right? Why did my father favor my sister, though he never mistreated me? I don’t know, though I have some guesses and I’m sure my sister does. Something about mothers and sons and fathers and daughters?  Probably, but I suspect that we will never know the whole answer.

One day when Jacob was listening to Mozart and cooking some stew Esau came in from the field famished. He asked for some of the stew. Perhaps they played a sibling game. What do you want? What will you give me? I’m so hungry I’ll give you anything. How about your birthright, which was the preeminent honor belonging to the elder son and a lion’s share of the inheritance. In a hurry ever since he was first out of the womb and not given to delayed gratification, Esau said, “What good is a birthright when I’m starving to death?” “Swear to me first.” So he did. Jacob gave him stew and a chunk of bread. “He ate and drank and rose and went out.” Just like that he shrugged off his rights as the firstborn.

In a later story in the Jacob cycle God will change Jacob’s name to Israel, and afterwards Jacob and Israel will be interchangeable. Jacob is Israel and his story is Israel’s story and the new Israel’s story, i.e. yours and mine.

We all recognize Jacob because his story is our story. All of us have a striving, conniving Jacob in us. Not of the proportion of a Bernie Madoff, but in a more modest or disguised self serving manner. One of the deceptions common in religious circles is in thinking that in our good deeds for others we are serving them only. I have come to believe that everything I do, I do for myself. On my better days it’s for God, for others and for myself. I extend myself toward others because that’s how I want to show up in the world, how I want to be seen and known.

Sometimes in the name of doing for others we meet our own need more than the other’s. One of our members went with her previous church on a mission trip to Tunisia. Two years later they returned to discover two truckloads of supplies they had left on their previous trip had not been unloaded.

In his recent book The Social Animal writer David Brooks says, “The human mind is an overconfidence machine. The conscious level gives itself credit for things it really didn’t do and confabulates tales to create the illusion it controls things it really doesn’t determine. Ninety percent of drivers believe they are above average behind the wheel. Ninety-four percent of college professors think they are above average teachers…Ninety-eight percent of students who take the SAT say they have average or above average leadership skills.” I suspect many of us overestimate our care and compassion for others, if only to ourselves.

We know Jacob because we are Jacob. His story is our story. One way to read the parable of the soils is to try and identify the kinds of people who represent the different soils. A better way to read it is to ask what about me is like a worn path, rocky ground, a thorny patch and rich topsoil?

Jacobs’s story is our story and it is also God’s story. God answers Jacob’s plaintive prayer, overcomes the barrenness of a middle aged woman, reveals to Rebecca divine purpose in all that struggling going on in her womb.

This story of God tells us that God doesn’t play by the rules of convention. God doesn’t always align with the first born. Special roles in salvation have been given to younger sons other than Jacob. Think David, Solomon and Gideon. “God is not even handed,” according to Desmond Tutu, “God is biased horribly in favor of the weak. The minute an injustice is perpetrated, God is going to be on the side of the one who is being clobbered.” If God is not fair, God is faithful. Thus a nun in Gail Godwin’s novel is devoted to “praising God even when he is behaving badly.”

Jacob is Israel and Israel is Israel because she, like Jacob, is chosen by God not because of her own virtue or behavior but because of sheer grace. How odd of God to choose the Jews, not to speak of you and me.

Divine election does not deny human freedom but it means that God is at work in the world sometimes through and sometimes in spite of family conflict and sibling rivalry. God has the power to make promises and keep them, human freedom not withstanding. Joseph, Jacob’s youngest son, will one day say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “You meant it for evil. God meant it for good.”

In a recent Sunday School class someone said, “The worst thing that ever happened to me turned out to be the best.” How often I have heard that testimony. That doesn’t mean that God makes bad things happen so he can trump them with good things, but that in everything good or bad God is working for good.

With Abraham and Isaac God seems to act directly. With Jacob God is no less at work but more mysteriously so. After Jacob we do well not to be so sure of what God does and does not do. And when. And where. Do you know the one about the Presbyterian circuit rider who was in an ongoing debate with one of his elders about predestination? As he was tying his bridle to the post the elder appeared and said, “See you were predestined to preach here today.” The pastor mounted his horse and rode away saying, “I don’t think so.”

In a later story Jacob will spend a night wrestling with God, then awaken saying, “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it.” Renita Weems, an Old Testament professor and pastor tells that her mother left the family when Renita was 13 years old. Thirty years later Weems said, “That God did not cause my mother to leave does not mean that God was not there when she left.”

God works with unworthy persons in unsavory situations his wonders to perform. He rides a lame horse and carries a crooked stick, mysteriously juxtaposing the warped human condition with redeeming grace.

When I worked in a psychiatric hospital I often quoted a line from an Emmylou Harris song in which she pictures “God with a smile saying, ‘You’re a mess, but you’re my child.’” Can you hear him saying, “Jacob, Israel, you’re a mess but you’re my child?” In Jesus Christ God says to all us Jacobs, “I love you already and always, and don’t you forget it.”  Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.