Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Genesis 25:7-34; Romans 8:1-2, 6-9; Matthew 13:3-9

Let me eat some of that red stuff!

                      -Genesis 25:30

     Esau despises his birthright for a mess of pottage — the fool! It was the custom in Israel that the eldest son would get most of Dad's estate; that was Esau's birthright, no matter that he was born only moments before Jacob. Firstborn is firstborn. But Esau is the kind of fellow who allows his immediate appetites and urges to control him. In fact, he's altogether something of a lout here, isn't he: rough, red, hairy, noisy, a man's man and a huntsman, whereas Jacob is a quiet fellow, a good cook, a Mama's boy, and smooth in every sense of the word.

     Sometimes, in my clumsier and more impetuous moments, I think of myself as Esau, but I know that to all three of my elder brothers I was the loathsome, evil Jacob of the family. That's one of the things I do with Bible stories: I try to locate myself in them, and it's instructive. You might find it instructive for yourself too.

     Of course, when you start finding yourself inside a Bible story, pretty soon you're going to be looking at yourself in relation to God, since that's what all the characters in Bible stories have in common. And when I look at Esau and Jacob in relation to God, I find myself amazed that God would have much to do with either one of them when they are both so obviously greedy, mean, and small. These two guys are going to father nations? If I were God, I would have looked for slightly more promising candidates.

     But I'm not God, and God just doesn't seem to care about that. In that respect God resembles the sower in the parable, who is supposedly trying to grow a crop but isn't paying any attention to where he tosses the seed that he's sowing, and hasn't done anything to till the ground before sowing it, either.

     But this is one of Jesus' parables about the Kingdom of God, so we can assume the sower is meant to tell us something about the ways of God. So then is God an indiscriminate flinger of goodies? Many a learned commentator has said, Well, now, you have to understand that in Jesus' time and place this was how all farmers did it. There's even a word for how they did it. It's called broadcasting. Broadcasting seed. That's what broadcasting meant before they had radio and TV. So the fact that this sower broadcasts isn't necessarily some kind of huge commentary about God's attitude regarding the human race.

     But I found another learned commentator who disagrees. He says the whole point of the Gospel parables is to use absurd situations to invalidate everything we think we know about God, to dislodge all our preconceptions and open us up to new ways of understanding. So the point is precisely that God does indeed broadcast indiscriminately the things that make for life, just tosses them everywhere and anywhere. God doesn't calculate the yield in advance; God is not concerned with cost-effectiveness. And that is what God is like, and we'd better get used to it.

     I think this is absolutely right, but if so, it creates more puzzles than it solves. What does it mean? Does it mean God has so much seed to sow that God can afford to fling it around in this profligate fashion and it'll never be used up, or does it mean that people are so perverse and unpredictable that there's no way even God can tell where the fertile soil is, or does it mean that God loves the sowing so much and loves the soil and the growing and the harvesting so much that God just gets carried away? We don't have to choose among these possibilities. They could all be true That's the thing about parables: their meanings multiply, they're never exhausted, they keep on messing with your mind forever if you let them. So let them. It's good for you.

     But be sure of this one thing: The parable is about God. It's not supposed to get us worrying about ourselves and speculating about each other: Am I the rocky ground or the thorny patch or the path where the birds hang out or the good soil? And look at her, sitting in the next pew: She's as thorny as they come. And him, that guy over there, he's definitely for the birds.

     Jesus isn't the least bit interested in classifying people. He's full of the good news about God. God the big spender. God the risk-taker. God the enthusiastic Creator. If we focus on our own response or lack of response, or if we start looking sidelong at each other, we're missing the whole point.

     There's altogether too much religion that pays too much attention to us people. Religion isn't about us, what kind of experience we have in worship, what prayer does or doesn't do for us, whether or not we're better or happier if we believe in God or go to church. Religion is about God. And faith is living a life centered on God. And worship is coming before God and into the presence of the holy in thanksgiving and also in fear and trembling. Religion, worship, faith is our best and greatest opportunity to stop obsessing about ourselves.

     Somebody wrote that the default option, the default state, the default belief of this post-modern age is atheism. Atheism is the overwhelming if unspoken attitude of the whole culture. And the same writer said, well, so what? Atheism "is no longer the badge of a courageous free spirit." Rather, atheism "is the 'do not disturb' sign hung out by the intellectually inert." I love that, and I truly believe that the worship of God, when it is not being perverted by self-seeking humans, is the one thing that situates us appropriately in the universe.

     So back to Jacob and Esau. From them we can conclude that the kingdom of God doesn't have very high entrance standards. God doesn't mind if God's chosen people are jerks. I think this is good news for all of us.

     But bear in mind that we have only heard the beginning of Jacob's story this morning. He has a long journey through most of the rest of the Book of Genesis, and you can watch him as he goes and be amazed at what happens to him, what becomes of him.

     He's the one who sleeps and has a vision of angels on heaven's ladder and awakes to say — Surely the Lord is in this place, how on earth did I fail to see it! He's the one who wrestles all night with God and won't let go until God gives him a blessing, and he emerges with a new name, Israel, the one who struggles with God, and he gives that new name to a whole people who make their communal identity out of struggling with God, but he limps for the rest of his life as a result of that struggle. He's the one who loses Joseph and many years later is found by Joseph.

     And in the process, we see him becoming what nobody had any reason to expect him to be, least of all himself. He becomes one of the great souls. And if that can happen to a smooth operator, a clever con artist and heel-grabber like Jacob, then truly the God we worship is awesome and full of wonders.

     God is continually messing with the natural order of things. The elder shall serve the younger; there will be no dominance based on seniority; but what's even more startling and even more against the natural order of things is that throughout it all the elder and the younger shall love and forgive each other, and the war between Jacob and Esau ends in reconciliation, unlike the first war between Cain and Abel, which ended in murder.

     By the grace of God alone Jacob became God's chosen child, and that changed him. He didn’t change in order to receive the gift. The gift transformed his life. Pray that that is the way it works for us all.

     Amen