Esau's Blunder

And so, Esau despized his birthright.
                                                      Genesis 25:34

"I am going to another church."

"But why?" I asked. "Why are you leaving?"

"I just went to a Bible study and felt that God wanted me to go…"

And so the conversation goes. I find it so hard when someone decides to go somewhere else to church, but our back door must be open as our front door is open. This is not a cult and I cannot force people to stay. But it does break my heart.

It is not uncommon for the new member, feeling so moved and inspired at first, will one day come to church and find it so so, and it is at that point that they begin to look for another church home, a place where they can find that emotional high again. And they will move from church to church, seeking that feeling of being inspired. They will leave whenever someone disappoints them, when they have a disagreement, when they get bored.

The divorce rate is at an all-time high in this country. More and more people are falling out of love just as easily as they fell in love. They will come and tell me that they no longer love each other, but what they really mean is that they don’t have the in-love feeling anymore. And without that exciting feeling, they just don’t want to stick it out. From this new perspective, marriage is much less romantic and much more like hard work.

Jacob and Esau were brothers, twin brothers. They fought all the time. They even fought in their mother’s womb (Esau won that battle and came out first). And they were so different. Esau was read and hairy. Jacob was bare and pale.

Their parents made this competition worse by playing obvious favorites. Their father loved Esau best, their mother loved Jacob. Esau was a practical man, an impatient man. He was a hunter, used to being on the move. His brother was quieter, more thoughtful. It was Esau’s impatience that was his downfall.

One day, Esau came back from hunting and he was famished. And I don’t mean normal hunger, I mean the hunger of a growing young man who had just finished at least one full day of strenuous exercise. Esau could think of nothing but food.

I can just imagine the tent. The smell of sweaty exhausted Esau must have competed with the smell of the cooking. Esau would drop down on the floor of the tent in pure exhaustion. All he would want is some food. His mind would be totally focused on that one thing, food.

And Jacob had soup. Not just soup, stew, the red lentil stew. The kind whose scent can fill an entire house while it is cooking, making your mouth water and your stomach ache. Jacob had the stew. There was not enough for both of them.

“Give me some of that red stuff,” Esau says. He was a man of few words, and he meant what he said.

Jacob asks for Esau’s birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew and Esau, thinking only of the surface of life, agrees. He gives up the line of the patriarchs, the favor of God, for broth and vegetables.

In American culture, we believe that the faster something is accomplished the better. But fast is not always best. And those who seek results quickly may give up their birth-right for stuff.

Think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan said, “Just take it. Don’t think about it. I know God said not to, but don’t think about that too much. Just take, just do it!”

How often the greatest mistakes in our lives are made because we did not give ourselves time to spend with God, time to wrestle with God, time to absorb and grow. The spiritual life is not like McDonalds. You don’t pull up to church in your car for McEucharist. We ask you to come week after week, month after month, to pray and to give regularly. This is a way of life that takes time to foster and grow. It is not instant gratification. It is called discipleship.

When Jesus speaks to us about the spiritual life, he speaks to us in terms that come from nature. He knew that the people of the Galilee would know about rain and harvest, plants and vines. He knew that this was their language and when he used these images, they would relax, open their hearts, and listen.

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses images of seeds falling on the ground. The seeds are made by God and they are good stuff. The seeds are the presence and love of God, which God showers upon you like rain, upon the good and the evil, the children and the elderly, the strong and the weak. God showers love and grace upon us all in equal amounts. The question is not whether or not God loves us, it is what we will do with that love and grace.

We are the soil. We are the ones who receive his grace, his love, his patience and kindness. But our soil varies a great deal depending on the kind of life that we have led. And good soil takes time to become rich and fertile.

Do any of you have compost piles? If so you know the process. God takes the experiences of our lives, our mistakes and our failures, and God lets them distill down within us, decomposing down into rich, fertile soil. The process takes time. Christians are baptized once and for all, but disciples take years to be formed.

I want to encourage all of you not to sell your birthright. You are a child of God, baptized and beloved. This world will ask you over and over again if you would like to trade in that birthright for a successful career, for romance, for respect. Just tell a lie, the snake will say. Just make fun of that person, don’t think about it, just do it. Just take that drug, that drink. Just gossip, cut someone down, hurt. It’s not that serious. Don’t think too much about it. Everybody else is doing it.

And before you know it, you have traded God in for popularity, for some money, for a good time. And you are left with nothing.

Seeds cannot live for long in shallow ground. They may spring up, but they will wither and die if they are not deeply rooted in the soil of life. Life with God takes time and it takes commitment. It takes years of love and generosity, prayer and community. It takes time.

God causes us to grow, not just in the inspired moments, but in the humdrum, the day in and day out faithfulness of life. Don’t chase the high, even if you are hungry for excitement or think that you must have something now. Be patient.

You have been given the most precious gift in the world. Don’t hand it off for ANYTHING.

This fall, we are not going to do a pledge drive. Instead we are going to ask you to make a life pledge. I am going to get you to think of your life as a gift to God, a long-term gift. How will you pray? What will you do to form a small group that meets weekly? What will you give? How will you devote time to your loved ones? How will you care for your body?

And you will say, why. Why are we being asked to pledge all these parts of our lives? Because true discipleship takes a long time. It takes consistency and devotion. It takes a lifetime of prayer and a true community of people who know you intimately and meet with you regularly. It takes commitment.

And so, Jacob became the father of nations while Esau gave all that up for STEW.

God bless poor Esau. Let us not make the same mistake.

Freedom

One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, soldiers from this country fought against one another at the Battle of Gettysburg. On July 3rd of that year, the Confederate army charged the Union army on Cemetery Ridge in what would become known as Pickett’s Charge. The Union army fought off the Confederate soldiers with artillery fire. Young men died in droves. In the three day battle, 50,000 men died. Never has the United States lost more lives than we did in the war that we waged against ourselves.

I am from the North, a Yankee by ancestry. My husband is a Southerner, his family fought on the Confederate side. Sometimes I think about that Battle, how brother fought against brother and died. Blood soaked that field on that day. Men who could have loved one another were driven to kill one another.

Abraham Lincoln would later say that it happened so that the liberty of all people could be restored. And that is what we give thanks for today, for our freedom. We give thanks to God today for this country and for the freedom that we all enjoy, the freedom to argue and disagree, the freedom to make decisions move and live where we wish. The freedom to be able to gather here in church and worship God without fear. Unless you have visited countries where there is no freedom, you cannot even begin to understand what we have here. It is part of the air we breathe, the fact that we are free. We take it for granted.

God wants you to be free. God wants us all to be free, but there are many kinds of bondage. And the bondage that is worst of all occurs when we are unable to forgive.

In the gospel, Jesus tells us that we are to pray for our enemies, that we are to love them. “Be perfect,” Jesus says, “Just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

It is the highest form of love, the love of your enemies. I cannot say that I am very good at it. It is the stuff that makes the gospel unique in every way. It is at the heart of the message of Jesus. We are to pray for those people who hate us and persecute us. Pray for them and love them.

This means that, as a country, we must pray for Al-Quaida. This means that, as an individual, you must pray for the woman who hates your guts and tells everyone how awful you are. And you can’t just pray for her to fall into a deep pit. You must pray for her wellbeing.

Why must we pray for our enemies? Because if we do not forgive them, our hatred and resentment will drive us to pieces.

In the movie True Grit, a 14-year-old girl named Maddie goes on a hunt for revenge. Her father was killed by a man named Tom Cheney. She considers it her duty to hire killers and avenge her father’s death. This act of revenge will set her free from the hatred and grief that consumes her. So she makes her way through the dust and violence of late 1800’s West to find a man who will act out her aggression. And once she has found him, a man with what she calls True Grit, she rides with him out into the wild to catch and murder this Tom Cheney.

It is a story of despair. The man she has hired is a drunk who has shot more men than he can count. They are accompanied by a Texas Ranger who is also on a mad hunt for the same man. When they finally come across this enemy, Maddie succeeds in shooting him, but the kickback from her gun sends her flying backwards into a pit where her arm is broken and she is bitten by a rattler.

Maddie’s life is spared but her arm is amputated. She never marries and spends her life remembering her trip of revenge. But she is not free. She is never free.

Not forgiving someone, it’s like drinking poison and hoping that the enemy will die. Maddie sought revenge and she consumed her life with it.

Be perfect, Jesus said. As your heavenly Father is perfect. The word in the ancient Greek is complete. Be complete, be whole. Do not drive yourself into pieces over the wrongs of another person. Forgive them, love them, and gain your life, gain your freedom.


Who is it that makes you really angry? Who is it that treats you unfairly or makes you feel unworthy? Everyone has someone who rubs them the wrong way. And many of the people who treat us poorly are very close to us.

Whoever it is that really makes you angry, whoever it is that really gets your goat, it is that person that you must study and come to understand, because they will teach you something valuable about yourself. If you are to declare your independence from them, then you must know them and even love them.

Think back to the Revolutionary war and the Declaration of Independence. This country was defined by its enemy. We wanted freedom from the tyranny of Britain. We wanted to be a people who were free to elect our own rulers, free to make our own decisions, pay our own taxes. It was Britain’s rule of us, Britain’s taxation without representation that brought us to know ourselves. You could say that our enemy was our best teacher. Because of our vehement need to define ourselves as free, we created a democratic nation. Our greatness was influenced most by our enemy. If we hadn’t wanted so badly to be independent, if we hadn’t wanted so badly to be free, we might not have become who we are today.

Do you want to be truly free? If you do then you must declare your independence from the ones who treat you worst by praying for them and yes, by loving them. By love, I don’t mean feeling all warm and fuzzy towards them and I don’t even mean that you should not defend yourself. I mean that you should understand them and want what’s best for them. I mean that you should trust God enough to place them in God’s hands.

We are defined more by our enemies than by our friends. So we’d better get to know them well.

At our wedding, some of JD’s relatives flew up North. These folks had never been to the North. JD’s tone-deaf Uncle Homer from Tennessee danced at the reception and sang out loud. JD hired a Memphis funk band and the southern blues rocked the house in Connecticut. North married South and it was a blast.

My brother and father decorated our Jeep with all the normal just married stuff. We were to drive down to Kennedy airport just outside of New York City the next morning. As we got into the city, something incredible happened.

Normally nothing makes me more frustrated than driving in New York City. It is like being trampled. Everyone is honking, there are no lanes, people lean out their windows just to swear at you. Everyone hates everyone, it is just part of the deal.

We landed in a traffic jam at a toll booth outside of the city. “Oh, no,” JD said. “This is going to last forever.”

Then something amazing happened. A souped up BMW, blasting rap music, beside us, honked his horn.

“JUST MARRIED! COME ON!!YEAH!!”

He let us in. Then another old junky car, with Mexican guys all crowded inside started cheering. The cars began to move. Audis and Vans, trucks and beetles. Everyone understood what had happened to us, everyone was honking and cheering. The lines just seemed to part. Everyone was smiling and waving. It was like the Kingdom of heaven.

I had never seen anything like it. I had never felt more free than that day, in the middle of a traffic jam.


If you truly want to be free, then you must love your enemies. Love them and forgive them.