The Rev. Dr. Patricia Ramsden First Presbyterian Church
A Stolen Birthright July 17, 2011
It is a nasty story, filled with lies, deceit, and heartbreak. It began long before this night, this final deception. You can almost hear them through the years, these two parents once so much in love being torn apart by their sons.
“You’re always taking his side! Why can’t you just for once see Jacob’s side of things and stop picking on the boy?”
“Me! What about you? You’re always coddling and spoiling him. You won’t even give him a chance to be a real man like his brother. Maybe I could see his side if he was ever right!”
And so it went over the years, until love grew dim, and they were no longer a team raising boys, becoming a family, but a father and a mother jockeying for position for the son who was their favorite, until family became not a term of warmth and affection but all out war and suspicion.
Did it have to be like that? Does it have to be like that? No. But love takes work and seeing the other person’s point of view and knowing that no one is always right --- or wrong. And parenting is a dance, taking both partners moving with grace to the tune of love. It takes listening, praying, loving, teamwork and those dreaded words “no” and “I’m sorry.”
But Isaac and Rebekah could not seem to find that way, so they fought over which child was the fair haired boy of the blessing, until it finally came to this --- betrayal on a death bed.
Isaac’s beautiful dream for a peaceful closure to his life is irreversibly shattered. In the end, he cannot bless his favorite son who is shattered without a blessing. In the midst of tears, lies, bitterness and hatred, it’s over. Jacob wins it all and Esau is left with nothing.
Rebekah sets it up. She comes up with the plan. She makes the meal. She covers her bases. She even makes sure that Jacob will carry the smell of Esau’s clothes and that his skin will not be smooth and gentle but rough and hairy like his brother’s.
And Jacob? He’s not concerned with the betrayal the scheme represents. His only concern is getting caught, and in the moment when the whole plot hangs in the balance, when Isaac asks, “Who are you, my son?” He screws his courage to the sticking point and lies like a trooper: “I’m Esau.”
The deed is done.
To be honest, all my sympathy in this story goes to Isaac and Esau, not Jacob and Rebekah, and I am left questioning God’s choice. And I don’t think I’m alone. This just doesn’t fit with our notion of fair play, with how the chosen of God should behave. We want our heroes in white hats, not black. But in the end, it doesn’t matter what we think. The story is in God’s hands and the frustrating thing is, God doesn’t explain His choices. He has chosen --- and uses --- Jacob and Rebekah, warts and all. There’s no attempt to clean up the story and make it pretty --- the way we would want it. Maybe that’s what makes the story ring true. Maybe that’s what gives us hope.
Their story is like our stories. They’re not always pretty. They don’t always have a happy ending. We’re not always on our best behavior.
God doesn’t use mythical heroes who ride into town on a white horse, with a silver bullet clutched in their teeth, solving all our problems, putting everything right and then riding off into the sunset with a “Heigh-ho, silver away!”
He uses a baby, born of a poor peasant woman in a town no one had heard of. He chose a rag-tag group of followers who doubted, questioned, grumbled, and complained, who fought among themselves and never did seem to get the point. He used the most shameful and –painful form of death ever devised ---- all to save the world.
And now, He has chosen us, with all our foibles and troubles, to carry on the story, to be His chosen, to be His love.
This is not the way we would have written the story. But it’s the way He did. It’s the way He does.
