A Holy Land: A Scarcity of Blessing (Genesis 25:19-34)
Ordinary Time
These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham’s
son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, 20 and Isaac
was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of
Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. 21 Isaac
prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and
the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. 22 The
children struggled together within her, and she said, “If it is to be this way,
why do I live?” So she went to inquire of the Lord. 23 And
the Lord said to 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.”
24 When her time to give birth was at hand, there
were twins in her womb. 25 The first came out red,
all his body like a hairy mantle, so they named him Esau. 26 Afterward
his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel, so he was named
Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.
27 When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful
hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. 28 Isaac
loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
29 Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came
in from the field, and he was famished. 30 Esau
said to Jacob, “Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!”
(Therefore he was called Edom.) 31 Jacob said,
“First sell me your birthright.” 32 Esau said, “I
am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?” 33 Jacob
said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore to him and sold his birthright to
Jacob. 34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil
stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his
birthright. (NRSV)
They say
that sometimes the answer to prayer is “no.”
For Rebekah, in the soap opera-worthy familial drama that is Genesis,
the answer is twins.
We drop in today in the middle of the
show’s season, as it were; Sarah has laughed from her own barrenness into
having a child that Abraham almost killed, while Hagar and Keturah bore
children Abraham publicly disowned.
Isaac has been paired off with Rebekah, ready to start the cycle over
again, and start over again they do; Isaac and Rebekah, too, struggle to have
children for twenty years. When the
answer to their repeated prayers becomes “yes,” it is with a caveat so fierce
that Rebekah asks why she even continues to live; Jacob and Esau fight before
they even breathe, and will continue to do so as Esau gives up Isaac’s blessing
along with his birthright. This newest
generation is foolishness and manipulation as an answer to prayer, a scarcity
of fellowship in pursuit of the perceived abundance of blessing.
There are plenty of lessons of God’s
presence in these stories, including good news about standing with the
forgotten and blessing those barren of hope and societal approval. But as I was reading this over and over this
week, I could not get past how exhaustingly dreadful so many of these
characters are; they are liars and cheats, swindlers and cowards, hapless fools
with faithless hearts.
They are so devastatingly human.
Some of you may remember that I went
on my first trip to Israel and Jordan this past February. I joked about how I had to go because it’s a
square on Pastor Bingo, but it is important for those who preach this holy text
to take the opportunity to see it. Our
faith, for all that it’s global now, is deeply rooted in specific geographical
spaces and mindsets, and it aids those of us who dig deep into the text to see
what the writers are referencing and how that space affected the ways they
understood the world. Christianity would
look a lot different if Jesus were from Sault Ste. Marie.
With that said, I had never expected
to take a trip like this. It landed in
my lap via a friend of mine, which is a good way to avoid packing expectations alongside
one’s socks when traveling. I’ve had
five months to figure out how to talk about how the trip went and I’ve spent
three weeks wrestling with the reality that I wanted to anchor this sermon—and
those of the next two weeks—in it and honestly, I’m still not sure what to say.
The thing is, the land we call holy is
a very, very weird experience. It is
history stacked like Jenga blocks, just as haphazard and just as unsteady; it
is a never-ending swarm of tourists like locusts that devour the wheat-gold-covered
churches built on every site that might even possibly have a connection to
Scripture; it is the boredom and the tension of people going to the dry
cleaners in some of the most contentious places on the planet; it is absolutely
beautiful and depressingly ugly; it is, like the religions we have crafted over
thousands of years, not at all the same thing it was when the people of our
texts walked its soil. I had so many
people kindly pray for a transformative experience for me when I went there,
and I had some, but perhaps not in the mountaintop-type way they’d had in mind.
You will hear several anecdotes of
mine over the next few weeks in my sermons, but the thing is, the land we call
holy is full of people. It may seem
obvious, but those of us from so-called Christian lands have painted Israel and
Jordan and Palestine as somehow otherworldly, connected to the faith in a way
that changes the land itself; we call it the Holy Land as though every inch of
this earth wasn’t made holy by the very fact that it was made at all. There is a sense that I didn’t even realize
had been instilled in me that Jerusalem or Gethsemane or Nazareth being somehow
different.
This is a doubly foolish idea
considering the lengths our Scriptures go to to show the humanity of God’s work
in the world. Top to bottom, these texts
are about people attempting to live together in the world as people,
full of foibles and fear and faith. This
tale of the fractured fraternity of Jacob and Esau is no different; there is
battle for the finite assets at hand from the beginning. “Two nations are in your womb,” says the
response to Isaac and Rebekah’s prayer for children. Professor Juliana Claassens remarks that, “This
account may be a type of etiological story explaining why the brothers Jacob
and Esau and the nations they represent (Israel and Edom) are at odds with one
another. This birth story seems to say: They were born fighting. We are not
told whether Rebecca is satisfied with this answer; however, the narrative gap
that omits her response could well be filled with all the unspoken emotions of
mothers and other relatives standing helpless in the face of violent conflict.”[1] It has always been this way, the story
seems to say; just accept that there will always be fighting, even God is
resigned to it.
There’s a friend of mine who is a
Presbyterian pastor who does a lot of work with the Palestinian people, and she
has taught me to look at the Israel-Palestine conflict in entirely new
ways. So when I went to Israel, I
looked; I looked at how all of the signs in Jerusalem were in English, Hebrew,
and Arabic except for the signs at border crossings and guarded gates, which
were only in Hebrew. I looked at the graffiti-covered
wall surrounding the West Bank and the Israeli military guards who looked as
young as my college students when I was still teaching, Tavor assault rifles
slung ready across their backs. I looked
at the corruption and bribery required to pass through checkpoints, and the way
that we clearly American tourists dodged so much because our money is lifeblood
to an economy that depends on it and is still reeling from the pandemic’s drain. I looked at the tension thrumming underneath
everything and the way that our tour guides said it is always this way, don’t
mind it, there has always been fighting.
I looked, and I wondered who had sold
what birthright for stew, and why every faith feels like it’s starving when it
stands on the ground we all call holy.
In the desert, every resource is
precious. Israel currently keeps about
80% of the potable water it desalinates and gives 20% to the Palestinians despite
the fact that Palestine’s population is 60% the size of Israel’s.[2] With its connection to both the Sea of
Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea, Israel sells water to its mostly-landlocked
neighbor Jordan—50 million cubic meters of it per year.[3] A country with roughly the population of New
Jersey knows that whoever has the resources, the blessing, the upper hand has
the power, and it gives safety, of a sort.
Here in Michigan, surrounded by the freshwater
Great Lakes and the mines and forests of the UP, it can be hard to think of
what resource scarcity looks like on this scale, but it becomes somewhat easier
to think of bargaining for birthrights over dinner as though they don’t matter
and as though they matter more than anything else. Over and over again, here in the pages of
Genesis and in the carefully-curated land of Israel and Jordan, I see the
promise of abundance and the relationship with scarcity, the fear that there
will not be enough for everyone, that God will not answer prayer this time,
whether prayers for children, or status, food, or water; direction, or safety,
or hope.
Dean Esther Menn of the Lutheran
School of Theology writes that, “God is generous to both brothers. Like Jacob,
Esau becomes the ancestor of a multitude (Genesis 36). Like Jacob, Esau is blessed
with abundance to meet his family’s needs (Gen. 33:9-11). In their reunion,
Jacob recognizes the face of God in the face of his brother, Esau, because of
the positive reception that he receives (Gen. 33:10). The brothers’
reconciliation continues as they bury their father, Isaac, together (Gen.
35:29). Ultimately, this story of sibling rivalry ends with reconciliation and
blessing.”[4] Professor Kathryn Schifferdecker says, “Jacob
is neither a moral exemplar nor a villain. He is a complicated figure. The
narrator here at the beginning of his story describes him as tam, a word
that means something like ‘whole’ or ‘complete,’ a person of integrity (25:27).
Most English translations translate tam here to mean ‘civilized’ or ‘quiet,’
because it is difficult to describe Jacob as a man of integrity.
“Ellen Davis interprets tam as ‘perfect
or loyal service’ or a constant awareness of God. Jacob displays that essential
religious quality of being obsessed with God’s blessing, mediated through the
blessing of his father Isaac. Jacob is obsessed throughout his life with that
blessing, ‘which he can never possess as fully as it possesses him.’
“Jacob is not an admirable figure, at least not
here at the beginning of his story. But he is one who is singularly focused on
obtaining the blessing of God passed down from his grandfather Abraham. And his
focus on that blessing will shape the rest of his life. The blessing will bring
wealth and children, but it will also mean exile, loss, and sorrow.”[5]
One of the most important things I learned from
going on this trip is that I, as an American, have a very limited understanding
from which I can speak about Israel or Jordan.
We who own the faith called Christian, we who live in the land billed as
one of opportunity and plenty even while we know there is a different kind of
scarcity here, we who read the texts of a holy God in a holy land and wonder
where that God is across seas and centuries do not have the same language of
scarcity and blessing, and yet we share the same human desire to stop being
afraid, to know there is enough, to have God say anything at all when we pray. We know what it is to have souls so hungry
that we give away priceless things just to make it stop; we know what it is to give
up any pretense of honesty to make sure we get the thing that will make us
comfortable enough in the long run.
Perhaps it is the good news, then, that Genesis
and Israel and Ann Arbor are all full of people and God is here. God is in the moment of Esau’s hunger and
Isaac’s scheming; God is in the Temple filled with rifle-carrying soldiers and
the Palestinian home rationing their water; God is in the torn-up streets of a
city halfway across the world filled with an entirely different kind of
blessing. And some days, that doesn’t
feel like enough; the scarcity of God can feel as real as the scarcity of
blessing. But the children become
nations, anyway, full of people, and God does not turn away from any of us, no
matter where we are. May the promise of
that be enough, just for today. Amen.
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