DO PEOPLE REALLY EVER CHANGE?

Scripture Lesson: Genesis 25:19-24
For Additional Study: Romans 7:21–8:4, Genesis 27–33.

 

COMMENTS ON THE SCRIPTURE LESSON

 

The Old Testament lectionary passage assigned for today’s sermon is the story of the birth and early years of Esau and Jacob, twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah. Before we turn to their story, let me tell you another story from another time and another place: the New York City borough of the Bronx.

 

Many moons ago, when I served a church just outside of New York City, I was asked to officiate at a funeral in the north Bronx for a very old Italian lady who, with her late husband, had come to this country many years ago. She had lived a long and healthy life into her 90s and, in her final years, had been cared for lovingly and devotedly by her two children, both sons, both unmarried, whose names were Joey and Johnny America. What good luck it must have been to arrive as an immigrant with a name like that! With a name like that you’d never have to worry about wearing a flag pin in your lapel. The favorite song of that family was probably God Bless America.

 

Having a name like that would be like being Jewish and having your name be Israel – which is exactly what happens in today’s Bible story, that is, if you stay with it until its later scenes, in one of which God gives Jacob a new name: Israel. The descendents of Jacob become the nation known by this new name, and this story of the long and turbulent relationship between Esau and Jacob comes to us from the “children of Israel.” Because of this, we can guess ahead of time that their version of the story will be one in which Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, will be viewed as the “good guy.” Thus, by knowing that God gives Jacob the new name, Israel, we are given the interpretive key for interpreting this story.

 

The stormy relationship between Esau and Jacob lasts many long years beyond their life times. The descendents of Esau come to be known as the Edomites, while the descendents of Jacob become the Israelites – and these two tribal groups become enemies – just like their progenitors, Esau and Jacob. We can very easily understand, therefore, why the telling of their story reflects the hostility of a later time between these two peoples. Regardless of what actually may have happened between these twin brothers, Israelite writers will tilt the story in favor of Jacob.

 

Today’s story can be understood, therefore, as an etiological tale, a story that interprets the present in terms of distant past events. Thus, in this story, we are being told of how the differences between the two nations that descended from Jacob and Esau – how those differences were there from the very beginning, even from the time when they were in their mother’s womb.

 

This heavily weighted interpretation of the story of Esau and Jacob becomes even more intensified in ancient rabbinical commentaries. I refer to various commentaries upon these stories made by rabbinical scholars beginning away back in 200 BCE, even before what we call the Old Testament had been officially canonized as Holy Scripture. Those ancient rabbinical scholars could always find some hidden truth in every Bible story, some deeper insight which they would then read into the interpretation of that story. For example, in today’s story they found hints proving that Jacob was always God’s favorite. When they read that “Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents,” the rabbinical interpretation was that the tents were really schools where Jacob was studying the Torah, while his wild, violent older brother was off in the field, wasting his time hunting. Thus, Jacob is viewed as an obedient “yeshiva boy” who always attends Sabbath services, while Esau appears as the possible founding father of the National Rifle Association.

 

Of course, we can’t read the story of Esau and Jacob as Jews did in Jesus’ day, because we can’t experience the national sentiments and tribal emotions that they brought to these stories. But because these are not the folk tales of our tribe, we may have the advantage of being able to read them more objectively. After all, we are reading them many centuries later, conditioned to some extent by Christian scripture, but maybe even more by modern psychology, which has taught us to look for that complexity of character development that we find in our literature. Thus, as we read these stories, we will give both Jacob and Esau a fair hearing. We will look for something more than a simple a good guy/bad guy theme in the story. We may even ask, despite what the story seems to indicate, whether Jacob and Esau ever did change. Indeed, we will find ourselves asking, “Do people ever really change?” Listen now for God’s word.

 

 

SCRIPTURE LESSON

 

Genesis 25:19 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 [a play upon the Hebrew ‘aqeb, bq,[e meaning
“heel”]. 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 [a play upon the
Hebrew ‘adom, ~Ad)a/, meaning “red”].) 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.

 

SERMON

 

In my days at Princeton Seminary, the study of homiletics was a major requirement. There were required homiletics and speech classes for each of our three seminary years, plus weekly attendance at practice preaching sessions in which we had to endure listening to one another preach trial sermons – and most of them were a trial! (We were being taught how to get it down on paper, how to get it off the paper in delivery, and how not to do it!) With all of this homiletical emphasis, I can never remember hearing the term that characterizes nearly all preaching nowadays: lectionary preaching. We were never expected to preach upon an assigned weekly text from a common lectionary. Decisions upon what we would preach were left to us. For the rest of our years in the pulpit, the subject of every Sunday’s sermon would be our decision.

 

Because of that, whenever Elizabeth phones to ask if I can preach on a given Sunday, before I say “yes” I want to know what obscure, arcane, or seemingly barren text will be assigned on that Sunday. So, because this was my only available Sunday,
I quickly checked the lectionary to see what my assigned texts would be for July 13^th – and was encouraged to learn that one of them was a Jacob/Esau passage. What good luck! Because, as some of you know, my sons, David and Dwight, are twins. Somehow or other, there must be some amusing or heartwarming twin story that I could somehow force into the text. However, the only one that came to mind was one I had already used in a previous sermon here at Peace Presbyterian Church.

 

However, my past experiences with my boys (who will be 47 this September) did give me, at least, an opening question. What I mean is that I often wonder if anything has changed since they were the little guys I could carry, one under each arm. From the beginning, even though they were (and still are) strikingly identical, their personalities were different. Dwight has always been more persistent and demanding; David has always been more easy-going and flexible. Whenever they call, even though we are many years and miles from those early days, beneath their adult voices, I still hear and see them as my same little guys.

 

In one sense, that’s a blessing in many of our relationships in life. It’s good to know that old friends will always be old friends - that some things never change. When we use that odd phrase, “Good old Bill,” we don’t necessarily mean that Bill is “good,” a paragon of virtue, or that he is old in years. We mean that it’s good that Bill is what we can always count on him to be. Even if he is the usual mixture of both good and bad traits, we’ve become comfortably accustomed to the way Bill is, and can count on Bill to continue being Bill. Thank goodness that some things in the world stay the same. So, when I see my good old buddy, Bill McDavitt, whom I haven’t seen since 1948 when we went to Mexico to study at the National University of Mexico – when I see him this summer after all these years, I’m not expecting any big surprises. We found one another by accident last year, and have been emailing and phoning ever since. So I know he’ll still be “good old Bill.”

 

But it’s not always that way. Sadly, there are other people in our lives who will never change, even though we wish they would. What we really wish is that they’d just go away. They’re not only the same as they always were; they’re even worse. What was aggravating in their childhood has become unendurable with the passing of the years.

 

One of the other lectionary passages for today is the parable of the sower in which the seed falls on different kinds of soil (Matthew 13). Jesus explains to his disciples that the “word of the kingdom” will fall on different kinds of soil. Their preaching won’t always produce results. It is raising one of the questions that I raise in this sermon, “Why is it that some people never get it?” In life, there are some who are “Good old Bill,” but there are those others who never seem to “get it.”

 

The real burden in life, however, is that of having to live with myself, because there is a Jacob/Esau struggle that seems to go on inside me, and it never seems to go away, no matter how long I live. That’s why a good lectionary match to our Old Testament passage is the one from Romans that I have recommended for your extra study. Paul finds an unending conflict going on within himself. Within the womb of his spiritual life, he discovers that he can will to do what is right, but that he cannot do it, so that he often ends up doing the very thing that he knows is not right. So he cries out, “Wretched man that I am!” – which is to say, Why do I have to have an evil twin? Why can’t I just be me, without him?

 

Back when I was very young, I never thought that when I reached the age of 80, I would still be fighting the same spiritual battles that were raging within me during my late teens and 20s. Even though I appear to be a nice guy to most people, there’s an undesirable character inside me that won’t go away. For quite a few years, I have kept in one of my devotional notebooks some searching lines by the Bengali poet, Sir Rabindranath Tagore. He describes an annoying shadow that accompanies him, even when he seeks the presence of God.

 

I came out alone on my way to my tryst.
But who is this that follows me in the silent dark?
I move aside to avoid his presence, but I escape him not.
He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger;
he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter.
He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame;
but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.

 

Is there no hope? Will I never get rid of this twin, this other me? Is there no hope in this story of Jacob and Esau? I think I find a quiet hope at its end, so let’s watch as the story continues.

 

The years move on from that beginning struggle in the womb and that odd story of Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of red stew. The conflict reaches its climax in the story of Jacob’s trickery in stealing his father’s final blessing.

 

Twenty years before his death, the old father has become a rather pitiful sight. He is blind and gluttonous. To elicit pity and favor, he asks Esau to hunt for some wild game from which to prepare his favorite savory stew, so that he may pronounce his final blessing over this favorite son. (It is almost impossible for us to comprehend the awesomeness of a patriarch’s final blessing in the ancient world of the Bible. The closest approach we can make to this moment is by imagining Isaac telling Esau that the family lawyer will be arriving so that his last will and testament can be signed today.)

 

In the next room, mama Rebekah is eavesdropping, and quickly tells her favorite son, Jacob, to get dressed up in Esau’s clothes, along with some goat skins as an added disguise, while she prepares some savory lamb stew for the old man. While it sounds like a ridiculous plan, it works, and upon eating the dish presented by the imposter (Jacob), Isaac, thinking that it is Esau, pronounces upon him that final blessing, the power of which will not only guarantee future prosperity, but also lordship over his brother. As a result of this trickery, Esau vowed to kill Jacob, so that Jacob had to flee to his mother’s former country to escape Esau’s wrath. Jacob gets what he wants, but can’t stay home to enjoy it!

 

Many years pass, during which Jacob prospers, takes two wives, raises a large family, accumulates an estate of many slaves, plus herds on herds of cattle. But finally the day comes when he learns that he must meet Esau. He sends messengers ahead to gain Esau’s favor, but the messengers return with the bad news that Esau is still approaching – with a host of 400 men (the usual size of a war party). Fearing for his life and that of his family, he makes every possible strategic preparation by dividing his caravan into two separate camps.

 

As a next step, he sends a series of peace offerings, hopefully to purchase his pardon: a combined herd of 550 animals which he sends on ahead to prepare for this “high noon” confrontation with his alienated brother. Look at the list: 200 female goats, 20 male goats, 200 ewes, 20 rams, 30 milch camels and their colts, 40 cows, 10 bulls, 20 female donkeys, 10 male donkeys. Somehow Jacob can never stop scheming.

Finally, they meet, face to face after all these wasted years of estrangement. But something – someone – has changed, and the changed person is Esau.

 

First, we read (Gen. 33:4) that “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” (Was Jesus thinking of this story when he told a parable in which a father welcomed home a prodigal son? “He ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” Luke 15:20.)

 

Next, Esau looks at all the “stuff” that Jacob has sent and asks, “What do you mean by all this?” Jacob answers, “It’s for you, my lord, to find favor.” But Esau replies, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”

 

Jacob still doesn’t get it; he wants to be sure that he has bought his forgiveness, and insists, “Please accept my gift,…because I have everything I want.”

 

Which of the two has learned what life is about, Jacob who has spent his life accumulating so large an estate that he can say, “I have everything I want,” or Esau who has learned the wisdom of saying, “I have enough, my brother”?

 

I find hope in the ending of Esau’s story. If Esau can change, maybe I can too.

 

I

Maybe I can learn to call Jacob “my brother.” Maybe I can learn to accept life as it is - life in a world of imperfect brothers and sisters. Maybe I can learn what Esau must have learned: that forgiveness is far more enriching for the one who does the forgiving than for the one who is forgiven. The best favor I can do for myself is to forgive my impossible brothers and sisters. Even more, maybe I can learn to forgive the world for it imperfections, just as God has forgiven the world: in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. If we live in a world that God has already forgiven, then maybe I can simply forgive the entire world because of God’s forgiving love. Maybe I can learn that it is a waste of precious time and a terrible burden to carry a grudge for many years. Maybe I can learn what a great relief it is when we relinquish our long-held resentments, and learn to say “enough is enough.” Maybe I can learn that a forgiving, accepting spirit is worth far more than any inheritance, any birthright I could ever have received.

 

And if I can learn this lesson from Esau, then I can learn to be forgiving and accepting of that part of me that I wish would go away. If I have a troublesome inner brother, a dark twin-like tendency within myself that thwarts my highest aspirations and best intentions – that causes me to cry out in anguish with Paul, “Wretched man that I am,” then I can learn from Paul that God has justified me, just as I am. I can learn to accept the whole person I am, warts and all, just as God has accepted me in Christ.

 

If I can learn to embrace a world of imperfect brothers and sisters, and to embrace my own imperfect self, then I will have learned that a forgiving spirit is the most accurate measure of true, personal wealth.

 

II

And if I can learn that from Esau, then maybe I can also learn a second lesson. Esau has been cheated out of his birthright, has lived as a less-than-favored son of his family, but at the end of the day, he has learned to say, I have enough.” So maybe I can learn that I don’t need to accumulate a great pile of stuff, that I don’t need to spend my years acquiring everything I want. Maybe I can come to the end of my story, like Esau, as a better, truly wealthier person who has learned to say “I have enough.” So, how will it be at the end of your story?

 

Not too long ago, a New York Times reporter interviewed Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Set within a neighborhood scarred by drugs, crack houses, prostitution, poverty, homelessness, gang warfare, and many related social ills, the congregation carries on many healing ministries. The reporter inquired, “Do you think your church is making a real difference?” The pastor said that he really couldn’t tell. “So why do you keep doing it?” asked the reporter. And Calvin Butts responded, “Because we read the Bible, and we know how the story ends.”

 

Do you know how the story ends? It ends with the victory of God’s kingdom of justice and peace. And that means that the only things in life that have any lasting worth are those that help build that kingdom. Do you know how your story will end? I ask that because I realize that there are many things in my life that won’t matter much on that day when I stand before God. God won’t care about the car I drive or the lovely home in which I live. God won’t care about the games I play, the clubs I join, the exotic cruises or the fine cuisine I have enjoyed. God won’t care about my degrees or titles or positions of prominence. God will only say, “Did you seek first my kingdom? Did your entire way of life utter the prophetic cry, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream?”

That’s why coming to the end of my story and having everything I want is not a worthy goal. Having everything I want isn’t going to build the kind of a world that looks like God’s dream, God’s kingdom. Because the Bible tells me how the story ends, I know that what matters more than anything else in life is being able to share whatever I have with those I learn to call “my brothers and sisters.” That’s why the surest way to a life of spiritual wealth and peace is simply by learning to say what Esau finally learned to say, “I have enough, my brother.”