Have you ever been over at a friend’s house and they get into a spat with their spouse or their parents, or their kids? What begins as a little dust up turns into a larger argument and you just want to shrink away, embarrassed that you’re witnessing their “dirty laundry?” Sometimes, when reading the “family stories” of Genesis I’m feel the same way.
Adam and Eve gets us started off on the wrong foot, then their son Cain murders his brother Abel. Then we get Noah (a very unlikely person to save the world from the flood to end all floods), Abraham and Sarah who, as Pete mentioned a couple of weeks ago, weren’t candidates for the parent of the year award and finally, today, a grown up Isaac and his wife, Rebekah whose twin boys are born fighting!
Jacob and Essau are very different people with very different personalities, very different world-views and very different connections to their birthright. Hard to believe they’re related at all, let alone twins! Like their forebears Cain and Abel, one is refined and the other is a brute. Not that anything is wrong with either of those two, it just seems that, biblically speaking, that’s a bad combination.
A tragic combination.
Here’s what we need to remember about our Bible stories---they weren’t written down as they happened--- they were tales told over campfires, passed down through the generations long before they were ever written down. In these stories, the tragedy is relentlessly tragic and the comedy is overwhelmingly funny [if we can get past their stilted and stained-glass English translations.]
But, to really get the joke (and the insults) of this story we need to take a look ahead, to the nations each man established. Esau is the father of the Edomites, folks who lived just south of the Dead Sea in the land of Edom. Jacob fathered the people who became ancient Israel, the Israelites. Needless to say, neither nation had much use for the other. Most famously, it was the Edomites who refused to give the Israelites passage through their land as they ran for their lives after escaping Pharaoh’s tyranny in Egypt.
The Israelites and the Edomites did not like each other.
One thing about telling stories over a campfire—they need to hold interest, they need to have some spice to them. Obviously the cartoonish differences between Esau and Jacob were part of the oral tradition that the descendants of Jacob, the Israelites, told to laugh at the descendants of Esau, the Edomites. The punch-line is that the great-great-grand-daddy of the Edomites was a hairy, brutish, dunce who sold his most valuable possession for a bowl full of bean stew, what Esau refers to as “red stuff.”
You better believe that always got a raucous laugh every time that line was fed out over the crackle of the bonfire.
In the big picture, this is more of a story of two nations and their distaste of the other. Like a good college basketball rivalry, the legend is bigger and better than the reality.
As long as you’re on the winning side.
My guess is that the Edomites had similar stories that they told around their campfires. Maybe they were about how much of a mama’s boy Jacob was.
Regardless, it’s the dysfunction of this family that peaked the interest of this former psychotherapist. Holy Cow!
Think about how much energy we spend projecting to the world–and certainly to the neighbors–that our family, our home is “normal.” That everything is all right.
But here’s the truth, our lives aren’t always hunky dory. We have our share of dysfunction and embarrassing behavior. And that’s ok, because
our lives don’t need to be neat and tidy and holy for God to do God’s work.
Things can be awful and embarrassingly messy–and God can still move. God can still do great things. And God does.
Here’s what we can learn from these stories of dysfunction replete throughout our sacred scripture: God does things---amazing, incredible, astounding things-- through the lives of the strangest and most awkward of people.
When the God looked out over the whole world to find people to carry God’s message--God chose what often times looks like the “b” team. The ones who behave badly, the ones who rebel and reject, the ones who doubt and despair and dither about.
God chose people—Just. Like. Us.
And deep down between all the guffaws and mockery of the campfire, that’s the message that our forebears got night-in and night-out: We don’t have to be perfect and have everything figured out and in flawless order before God can visit us, and bless us.
In fact, we can, in the midst of our reality—the good the bad and the ugly-- be a blessing to the whole world.
If God can work through the wacky households of Genesis, then God can work with us too!
The lesson here is clear---you don’t need to get your house in order before inviting God in. You don’t have to put on your Sunday best before inviting God in. You don’t have to look good, act well, or be polite and neat and orderly to invite God in.
Don’t wait for the right time, don’t wait for a better time. Open your life, dysfunctional, messy, loud and crazy as it is, to God. Invite God in, and don’t worry, God won’t be shocked, for God as seen it all.
Amen.
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