Sermon Trials

"the wise and the powerful are neither of those things"

August 19. 2018

Genesis 25:19-34

What are we doing here? Why do we do this? Every now and then it’s important to back up and take a larger, broader view of the meaning and purpose of what brings us to this peculiar room with its peculiar practices.

Peculiar because, while not humanly unique, this singing, listening, eating, speaking; nonetheless what we do here is peculiar because of why and how we do it. Part of the peculiarity is found in what we give particular attention to, which is the reading of an ancient document that does not possess immediately obvious connections to our own lives, identities and tasks. As Robert Jenson says so well, “Outside the church, no such entity as the Christian Bible has any reason to exist. Interpretation of the Bible outside the church must be arbitrary, uncontrollable, and finally moot. The volume we call the Bible is a collection of documents,” he says, “that are extremely diverse—literarily, culturally, religiously. What Christians call the Bible exists as a single entity only because the church gathered these documents for her specific purpose: to aid in preserving her peculiar message, from the apostles to the End, that the God of Israel has raised his servant Jesus from the dead.” And this peculiarity is particularly true of the story of Jacob and Esau at first glance.

Another peculiarity that fills our moments together with meaning, is when we meet. We don’t meet on a Sunday because it’s a convenient time, because it’s part of what we now call the weekend. Sunday, though part of the “weekend” in our society, is really the week “beginning” because in the Jewish world, Saturday was the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, and therefore the next day, what we now call Sunday from the Anglo-Saxon usage, was the first day of the week. A workday. Worship created Sunday, not the other way round.

And since it was the First day of the week on which Jesus was raised from the dead, and subsequently appeared to the disciples on that day, the practice continued of gathering on the day of the Resurrection, the first day of the week, as can be seen in the book of Acts, for it’s the new day of a new world, the day our hope of Resurrection was born.

But the reading of the text is tied to this arrangement of time as well. The apostles gathered on the first day of the week to celebrate and acknowledge Jesus’ risen presence among them through the Holy Spirit, through the meal that they shared in his name, his body and blood that embodied his presence, and through the public reading aloud of the Word of God in the scriptures, the revelation of God through the second person of the Trinity, often referred to as the Word of God, as in John 1.

This practice of reading the scriptures aloud in gatherings had begun long ago. An early example in the historical record is Jesus’ visit after his baptism and temptation, to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth. Luke 4 says that “he stood up to read, and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah.” He then goes on to read a passage from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, 19 to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

What Luke tells us next is interesting for the detail it gives us, rhetorically highlighting what comes afterwards through its gratuitously detailed description of the small ceremonies of synagogue practice, for after that we read a precis of Jesus’ sermon, where he reminds them that Elijah was sent to the widow in Sidon outside of Israel, and Elisha to the Syrian General Namaan: Luke says: “And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The text speaks, the sermon elucidates, reinforces, directs. Sometimes a sermon wrestles with a text, like wrestling Jacob, but the worth of the wrestling is always grounded in the primacy of the text. It is part of the sacred writings, and we must confront it, understand it, receive it, be transformed by it. The sermon points to the ways in which these goals may be accomplished, and ideally aids in their accomplishment.

And this tradition of text and sermon hearkens even further back. One could make a case that the book of Deuteronomy is an extended sermon on the prior texts of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Its name, Deuteronomy, means “second law,” and it certainly serves as a restatement of and meditation on the prior law given through Moses.

The setting in Deuteronomy is more amorphous ceremonially, than the synagogue of Nazareth, being stretched out over the whole book. It’s described as the last gathering of the people before they finally, after 40 years of wandering, cross into the Promised Land over the Jordan River. In Deuteronomy Moses very sternly reminds the people, of the covenant entered into with the Lord by their parents 40 years before.

There’s a later, perhaps more sermonic example found in the book of Nehemiah ch.8, a description of the reorganization of the Jewish people after their return from Babylonian exile. Though the Persians defeated the Babylonians and released the Jews to return home in 539 BC, it was nearly a century later that enough Jews had returned from the Dispersion that they were able to begin rebuilding Jerusalem and its walls under the leadership of Nehemiah and Ezra in the 440s. What is described in ch 8 of Nehemiah is a new beginning for them. A public reading of the Law of Moses in a public square in Jerusalem. It’s as if the Law of Moses had not been heard for generations.

“And Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month. 3 And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. 4 And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden pulpit which they had made for the purpose…And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, and when he opened it all the people stood. 6 And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God; and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands; and they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground…And they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly; and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

Here is an example, or at least a reference to an example, of an interpretive sermon and an acknowledgment that a text, centuries old, must be interpreted, applied, oriented, established in what it means today, for its contemporary hearers. Verse 7 says, “Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebi′ah, Jamin, Akkub, Shab′bethai, Hodi′ah, Ma-asei′ah, Keli′ta, Azari′ah, Jo′zabad, Hanan, and Pelai′ah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places.”

So we are similarly gathered to ponder this odd and disturbing story of Isaac and Rebekah and Esau and Jacob. We are met on the first day of the week because we’re people of hope in the Resurrection, taking Jesus’ life into our bodies as we look forward to the new life he will give us on that last day, the Judgment Day, the Day of the Lord. We seek to hear this story of Jacob and Esau in that context, and to further strengthen our faith in the coming of God’s kingdom.

Though some may not, I’ve always appreciated this story because for the first 14 years of my life I was the younger brother. Yay Jacob, I always said. But then the little sister was born, and then even another brother was born and my privileged position was somewhat diluted. I became, of all things, an older brother. Change Diapers. Carry the diaper bag. Hold the baby, feed the baby, babysit the baby.

A different world. A different perspective. In my day, you did something wrong, Dad took his belt off. In my youngest sibling’s day, there were two plastic spatulas, a green one and a blue one. “Green or blue, Jason?” was usually as far as it went. A spatula, after all, no matter what color, feels nothing like a leather belt. Nobody ever asked us, “Brown belt, or black belt, Chuck and Steve?” for somehow we always got into trouble together.

The story of Esau and Jacob bothers some of us because the choice of Jacob as the favored one, seems arbitrary, and we live by fairness at all costs. If William Wallace shouted “Freedom” with his last breath, our cry is certainly, “that’s not fair.” We prefer procedural precision, over righteousness of results.

Whenever Chuck and I had to share one of those 2 stick popsicles, fairness and procedure ruled the day. According to Mom, one of us could break it apart, but that meant that the other one got first choice of which half he wanted. Because it never broke evenly.

We were so consumed with fairness we eventually got to the point where we sawed the popsicle apart with a bread knife because breaking it apart was too unpredictable, and neither one of us wanted to do the breaking. Because that meant the other one got to pick.

But something different is going on here. Isaac is the son of the promise. Abraham heard God’s promise of many descendants, and land, and blessing, but he had no children and he and Sarah were old, very old.

Abraham at first hoped his steward Eliezer could be his heir in God’s eyes, but no. And then, in their impatience, Sarah had Abraham father a child on her maid Hagar, who gave birth to Ishmael, but God said nor was this Abraham’s heir. The heir of the promise was Isaac, born when Sarah was 90 years old, unable to have children, except God said she would bear a son, and she did.

Now Abraham, who went to great lengths to find a Bride for his son Isaac from among his relatives back in Haran, in SE Turkey today, remarried in ch. 25, after Sarah died. The writer gives us the descendants of Abraham’s second family, and the descendants of Ishmael, and then says, “These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham’s son.”

He tells us Isaac married Rebekah when he was 40, but she was unable to have children as well, and so Isaac prayed and the Lord granted his prayer, and she conceived twins.

It was what we might call a problem pregnancy, as vs 22 says: The children struggled together within her; and she said, “If it is thus, why go on living?” It was rough.

So she asked the Lord what’s going on, and we read this Oracle in vs. 23: God told her,

“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger.”

Which is what stirs up our uneasiness, that God is picking winners and losers here, playing favorites, interfering with our obsession with cutting the popsicle exactly in half, fair and square.

The irony is that we have so much of this backwards, because the general direction of the preponderance of the Biblical story is the way in which God works mercy for the world while bringing the lowly to the fore, the forgotten to remembrance, the rejected to the place of favor, the dead to new life, eternal life.

The ancient world was the world of the Fortunate Son, the Favored one, the First born. In Isaac’s day, primogeniture was everything. The oldest son received the bulk of the inheritance, the younger son or sons played catch-up, with the leftovers.

Even in Deuteronomy 21 we read: “If a man has two wives, the one loved and the other disliked, and they have borne him children, both the loved and the disliked, and if the first-born son is hers that is disliked, 16 then on the day when he assigns his possessions as an inheritance to his sons, he may not treat the son of the loved as the first-born in preference to the son of the disliked, who is the first-born, 17 but he shall acknowledge the first-born, the son of the disliked, by giving him a double portion of all that he has, for he is the first issue of his strength; the right of the first-born is his.

It was written in the law, but this is one of those passages we wrestle with, and even the Bible here wrestles with itself. Isaac is son of the promise, not the eldest Ishmael, Jacob receives the inheritance, however underhandedly it’s done, not Esau, the eldest. Joseph is the beloved son of Jacob, 11^th of 12 sons, not Reuben the first born. Samuel the last born is the prophet of the Lord, not the older sons of Penninah.

David is the seventh of seven sons of Jesse, and it is David upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests.

The first shall be last, Jesus says, and the last shall be first.. Abel’s offering is received by God, but the elder Cain’s is rejected. Mary’s song of praise is all about the unexpected: “My soul magnifies the Lord,

47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

48 for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.

For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;

49 for he who is mighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

50 And his mercy is on those who fear him

from generation to generation.

51 He has shown strength with his arm,

he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,

52 he has put down the mighty from their thrones,

and exalted those of low degree;

53 he has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent empty away.

54 He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

55 as he spoke to our fathers,

to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.

God chose Israel to be his people that the world might know that grace and power and righteousness are from the Lord, not from us. “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, But to Your name give glory, Because of Your mercy,

Because of Your truth.” Says Psalm 115.

Jacob and Esau in vss 29-34 enact their part in the story, perhaps not even knowing how. Esau is impulsive and seizes the immediately available, the pottage, some sort of stew, and Jacob looks to the future in hope, the deferred gratification of waiting for the inheritance, the birthright, the blessing.

Now the writer asserts no moral qualities in this story, and in later chapters Jacob proves himself a bit of a trickster, a conniver. But man proposes, God disposes.

God knows our heart, the heart of the whole human race. God uses what’s weak and despised in the world for his purpose to remind the wise and the powerful that they are neither of those things. Humanity is good at many things for we are created in God’s image, but we cannot save ourselves from ourselves, we cannot lift ourselves into the presence of God. In our condition, there are not even any bootstraps to grab onto.

All the ancient stories and myths that introduce the tragic flaws of the hero, the curse of the witch in the nursery, the hubris of the beautiful and the powerful that leads to their downfall like Helen of Troy and Achilles, all of these are humanity’s dim perception of our inability to be who we were created to be, but instead, without God we are more like WH Auden’s unhappy crowd in his poem September 1, 1939:

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

As Hebrews 11 says: By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come. By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff. By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the departure of the children of Israel, and gave instructions concerning his bones. Not seeing the future, but trusting in faith.

God elected the son of the unmarried woman, from a hometown of no importance, who died a shameful death, and was raised for our salvation, so that all might know that God works “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”