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Fifth Sunday after Pentecost July 13, 2014

Genesis 25:19-34 “The Struggle for Blessing”

Matthew B. Reeves Jacob came into the world trying to hold on. That’s how he got his name: Jacob means, “he grasps the heel.” When Jacob’s twin brother Esau came out first, there was a little hand gripping Esau’s heel, the tiny fingernails digging in just above the Achilles. The struggle to hold on and try to get ahead would mark much of Jacob’s life.

We too spend time and effort in life trying to hold on and make some kind of headway. The problem is, life keeps moving and changing sometimes so fast and sudden that holding on feels impossible while letting go sounds terrifying. It is wearying trying to keep a grip on life. A high school student ties to hold on to their GPA in order to get a grip on the life they’ll have in college. Someone else is tries to hold on to a marriage. Most of us know someone trying to hold on to their health. There are stretches of life where we’ve tried to keep a grip on our job, on our sobriety, on the family schedule that moves at such a pace that we’re just holding on for dear life. We don’t wait in line to get on this hold-on-tight ride of life. We just suddenly find we’re on it. Sometimes, the life we’re grasping for feels far out of hand. It can seem that all we’re holding onto is an intangible hope that we can get a handle on things. This summer we are traveling with the family of Abraham. Abraham left home holding little more than hope and trust in God’s promised blessing. God came and said, “I will bless you with a land and make your name great. In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” But as the years passed, what Abraham had in hand showed little evidence of the blessing. Then finally, after 25 years, God came through and Abraham held his hands a baby boy named Isaac. As he held the child God gave Sarah and him, he didn’t have to try to get a grip on life because the child he held said that all along he’d been held by God, which was blessing in itself. The start of this week’s text from Genesis is a rare moment in which life was going fairly smoothly for the family of Abraham. You don’t find many instances in which life is going smoothly for people of the Bible. So if you feel that life is working you up and down, take comfort because that means your life has a place in the story of Scripture. But at the start of Genesis 25, things with Abraham’s family were going as smoothly as they ever would. Abraham’s wife Sarah had died at a good old age and Abraham married again. Their son Isaac fell in love with a woman named Rebekah and Abraham lived long enough to be at their wedding. At the end of his life, Abraham gave his entire estate to Isaac, and when he died, the old bad blood between Isaac and his half-brother Ishmael was set aside so Isaac and Ishmael could bury their father together. There was a moment of uncertainty when, like his mother Sarah, Isaac’s wife Rebekah couldn’t conceive. “She was barren,” Scripture says. But Isaac prayed to the Lord for Rebekah, the Lord granted his prayer and Rebekah conceived, so things were looking up. But it turned out, Isaac’s answered prayer was the start of a wild ride. It can the blessing of answered prayer is accompanied by struggle we didn’t ask for. If you asked Rebekah at 6 months how the pregnancy was going, she would have said that her womb felt like the venue of an ultimate fighting match. Some kind of terrible struggle felt to be going on inside her. How is it that even God’s gifts can have us holding on for dear life? The gift of children can come with some of life’s

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greatest challenges. The gift of a job can come with stress that feels like life going down the drain. The gift of medical treatment can comes with side effects so awful there are moments you wonder if it’s worth it. When an ailing parent or spouse passes in peace we say this is a blessing, but then comes that empty place in our hearts. How many families prayed for the troops to come home? But since they have developments abroad show that this blessing is accompanied by struggle.

The pregnancy was so hard that Rebekah went to God and asked, “Why is this happening to

me?” When we ask God “why,” it’s because we’ve lost our grip on what makes sense in life. When Rebekah asked “why,” God didn’t understand Rebekah to be asking a medical question. We can tell this because God gave a non-medical answer, which may have seemed to Rebekah like hardly an answer at all. But then, when we ask God, “Why,” we don’t tend to expect a thorough explanation. We’re just looking for how God is there with a purpose in the midst of our trouble.

The Lord gave Rebekah a word of purpose regarding the struggle going on in her womb. God

said, “Two nations are in your womb, Rebekah, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” How much sleep did Rebekah lose trying to figure that one out? Two nations at war in her womb. All social convention broken, with the younger child asserting authority over the older. With a word like this, it was no surprise that family life got out of hand.

These days we would call Isaac and Rebekah’s family “dysfunctional.” Firstborn Esau came out

as though wrapped in a blanket of hair. He grew up big and brawny, able to take down a deer with a spear at forty yards. Father Isaac favored his man-child Esau. They sat around the fire at night roasting meat and belching as they drank the stout beer. But Jacob was momma’s boy. He liked to stay home and help in the kitchen where he diced vegetables with mom and learned to make artfully seasoned food. Rebekah was always mindful of Lord’s special plans for her younger, and so she coddled Jacob without thinking.

Everyone knew who the favorites were and where the conflicts would lie. Esau thought Jacob a

sissy boy, while Jacob knew that Esau wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Rebekah couldn’t hang around Esau long for the odor that came off that kid. Isaac didn’t know what to make of Jacob and gave up on having quality father-son time with that boy.

It was only a matter of time before this dynamic came to a head, which it did when, one day,

Esau came in from hunting so famished he couldn’t see straight. Jacob was cooking a pot of something luscious on the fire. He was also cooking a plan to buy his older brother’s birthright for a bowl of chili. The birthright is the inheritance and family authority the oldest brother is entitled to by virtue of birth. It turns out, when the midwife pried Jacob’s little hand off of his brother’s heel, Jacob never actually stopped grabbing.

That day, when Esau came in starving after the hunt, Jacob duped Esau into trading his rights as

firstborn for a bowl of chili with a side of cornbread. He even had Esau swear to the deal. It was the ultimate act of impulse buying as Esau sold younger Jacob the rights of the older for a bowl of stew. Thus, concludes our text, “Esau despised his birthright.”

At which point, we have to say, “Hold on! For goodness’ sake!” We could even say, “For God’s

sake!” because, after all, it’s for God’s sake and for the sake of God’s blessing of the whole world that this family has been chosen. Good gracious, is a family in which an entire inheritance is swindled and despised over a bowl of chili the best God can do?

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Has God lost a grip, that this is the family on which hangs God’s blessing of the nations? How does God end up with a conniving swindler and a dense ingrate as the options for moving forward with the promise to Abraham? Both Jacob and Esau come off looking pretty bad in this chiligate scandal. And then, some months later, when Jacob pulls the wool over on Isaac, passing him himself off as Esau and duping his dad into blessing him, the whole thing looks even more like soap opera, not the makings of a holy people.

But that’s where this story about Jacob and Esau is about more than just them, just as the story of

our lives end ups being about more than just us. Our desire to get a grip on our life comes from thinking that we are the ones who need to hold ourselves in life. That what we have in life is from what we go out and get. If we think that we can hold ourselves in life, then we are duping ourselves, and swindling ourselves of the life God is giving us by grace.

This text expects we’ll look at the crazy drama in Isaac and Jacob’s family and say, “Ai-yi-yi,”

because then we can hear its background message that God’s blessing and purpose that hold us only come by grace. That God relates to the world by grace means that God can make the way straight in the midst of what seems bent out of shape. As the saying goes, God writes straight with crooked lines. This means not only that God is able to take Isaac’s bent-out-of-shape family and work out God’s salvation in them. It also means that when God looks at where we feel we don’t have a grip, God graciously says, “I can make a way, I can make a blessing, even where things are bent out of shape.” God says this even when we ourselves are the ones who have done the bending.

This is kind of grace is what Apostle Paul was talking about this when he called the cross of Jesus

God’s saving scandal. He told the Corinthians that when God saved and blessed all the families of earth in Christ, it looked like foolishness to Gentiles and weakness to Jews. On the cross, God’s only begotten Son traded his heavenly birthright for the awful stew of sin, our shame, and all the ways we are duped in to turning form God. As Jesus gave up his birthright and relinquished his life, God took hold of the ugly, crookedness of the cross and made it a path of love straight from God to us. When Jesus let go of his life on the cross, he was struggling to redeem us of all the ways we try to keep a grip on ours.

The story of Jacob and Esau leads directly to the cross because it’s a story of God working out

salvation in the midst of the crookedness of our sin. God’s grace is so big that even things that would seem to thwart God’s purpose get folded into God’s plan to bring blessing and fulfill his purpose. If God’s grace is this big, if God can really write something straight where the lines of our lives feel bent out of shape, it means that we don’t have to try so hard to hold on. Because it matters more that we are held by the God who blesses and who is the blessing.

The story of Jacob and Esau will continue with plenty more twists and turns. Jacob will become

still more of a trickster and will tighten his grip on life before he it loosens it. But God will be patient with him, which is another meaning of grace. God is patient with us. And so when we, like Rebekah, ask God, “Why is this happening to me?” which is to say, where seems to slip from our grip, grace means that we can be patient with God––patient enough to hold on to God for dear life.

This is what Jacob, the Bible’s great grasper after blessing, finally learns: if you are going to hold

onto anything for dear life, hold onto God. For when you hold on for dear life to God, you are already holding the blessing. Amen.