Subvert the System

Genesis 25: 19-34. 

This is the account of the family line of Abraham’s son Isaac. Abraham became the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean from Paddan Aram and sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was childless. The Lord answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant. The babies jostled each other within her, and she said, “Why is this happening to me?” So she went to inquire of the Lord. The Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau. After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when Rebekah gave birth to them. The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob. Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished. He said to Jacob, “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!” (That is why he was also called Edom.) Jacob replied, “First sell me your birthright.” “Look, I am about to die,” Esau said. “What good is the birthright to me?” But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright.

So the reading of Esau and Jacob reminds me of me and my sister. Like these two brothers in Genesis, my sister, Catherine, and I are cut from the same cloth but we are sewn differently. You can tell we come from the same place and we value a lot of the same things. We both cherish family and love music. We both were in the marching band and sang in the choir. We both held leadership positions in multiple arenas. We both have a celebrity crush on Adam Driver. However, I’m a maximalist. She’s a minimalist. I’m loud. She’s typically quieter. I love to read, write, listen to podcasts, and consume academia in the social sciences. She’s more facts and figures. She’s a better dancer.  She wants to move to Hawaii and I’m pretty content with North Carolina. I’m a millennial and she’s Gen Z. All that to say even though we come from the same dynamic and similar upbringing, we are very different people. Throw in a brother between us and you’ve got a family dynamic that’s been around forever. 

I like to imagine Esau and Jacob as a similar situation. These twins were born into a lineage that would one day span generations and give rise to three of the world’s major religions. Abraham, their grandfather, was alive and influential in the family camp and in the land. Isaac, their father, was next in line for inheritance after Ishmael, Isaac’s older brother was sent away. The twins grew up surrounded by their parents and extended family, who I imagine watched the boys closely to see how the next generation would turn out. Esau was a man’s man. He was strong and had thick hair. He was boisterous and assertive. He is your loud older brother. In a society that valued firstborn sons immensely, Esau was perfect. His grandfather and father must have loved Esau for his strength and ability to bring back game and provide food for the camp. We all know someone who is pure charisma and attracts attention from friends and family and is just a force to be reckoned with. But opposite of the perfect firstborn, was Jacob, his quiet younger brother. Genesis 25:27 says that Esau was a cunning hunter but Jacob was a plain man who dwelled in the tents. I can understand why Jacob might’ve felt overlooked. Esau was loved by their father and Jacob was loved by their mother. While Esau went hunting with the rest of the men, Jacob stayed behind and learned how to cook. He probably did other female-oriented tasks like making clothes and tending a garden. I bet Jacob was always being teased by the men and even the women in the family. Why are you doing women’s work? Shouldn’t you be out hunting? Why are you so quiet? You have scrawny arms. Why can’t you be like your brother?

It’s in this context that we come into the reading from today. Jacob is at home fixing a lentil stew. Esau has been out hunting, like always, and comes back famished. It was probably not the first time that this happened and once again, Esau demands food from his weird, younger brother. But I imagine this time was a little different.  This time, tradition says, Jacob was fixing food for Isaac, his father who was grieving the death of Abraham, his father, and in comes Esau with no regard to the delicacy of the situation. “Give me some stew!” “Sell me your birthright!” Jacob responds with his own dose of ridiculousness and sass. After some contentious back and forth, Esau sold his younger brother his birthright for a pot of lentil stew and with that, Jacob was on the road to becoming a greater patriarch over his older brother. The birthright entitled Jacob to the political and economic position of the firstborn. Once Isaac passed, Jacob would legally be the leader of the family and would determine the direction of the entire clan. The holder of the birthright would be the judicial authority for the whole tribe and would receive a double portion of the inheritance. In later chapters of this story, Jacob in collusion with his mother would trick Isaac into giving him the family blessing over his older brother. Esau did receive a blessing as a consolation from Isaac but with the addition of the familial blessing to his bargained for birthright, Jacob was cemented as the more successful patriarch over his older brother with all the legalities and finances that it entailed. The younger brother subverting the older? What a scandal!

But is it? Is it really a scandal when you read the other stories in the Bible? I don’t think so! Looking at the Bible and the stories in it as a whole, we, the reader, can pull out a pattern of behavior. This is not the first story in the Bible where the younger son is favored over the older. This is not even the first contentious brother relationship in the Abrahamic lineage. Abel is favored over Cain, Abraham is favored over Haran, Isaac is favored over Ishmael, and now Jacob is favored over Esau. These stories were told by oral tradition, passed on through family and friends and through different camps as people started to move around. Storytellers would have sat down around a fire at the end of the day or during a trek through the desert and the stories coming out of Abraham’s camp were like nothing people had heard before. The culture that these beloved characters lived in was what is called patrilineal primogeniture. It was built into the society and standardized that the oldest son would be the most favored of all the offspring but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob kept favoring the younger, the weaker, the unexpected. 

This story resonates with people, then and now. Why? I believe it’s because in a way, this story is hopeful. When you feel like the world is going against you, God tells us that this (whatever this is) is not God’s ultimate plan. God is telling us through these stories that God’s work does not fit into our humanly expectations. It was expected that Esau would get everything and Jacob would get the leftovers. But not in this story. God upended the whole system. We see that God’s expression of love and covenant to Abraham’s people is radical and unexpected. And to some, that may be uncomfortable. We are living in a moment of radical change. Our daily lives have been altered drastically since the onset of the coronavirus. We have to isolate and quarantine for the sake of community health. We wear masks to protect our neighbors and we grow introspective as we see what the pandemic is teaching us. I do not believe that God sent this coronavirus to us as a punishment but since it’s here, I believe that it is an opportunity to lean on God to stretch self-imposed boundaries. I’m uncomfortable because this pandemic is teaching me that the systems that I thought were stable and pragmatic are not healthy and sustainable. 

I see these systems even within the church. Church used to be a place. Church used to be a physical place where you could go and be with people of a similar faith. Church used to be a place that was separate from home and work. My identity as a church-goer and as a Christian was wrapped up in the act of going to the physical building. I scheduled my week around being at church and on church grounds. I loved being in the thick of things surrounded by people but I felt like I couldn’t do church things in non-church spaces. My excuse was that my home was too distracting and it didn’t have the right energy. The act of worship together is still very important and I cried the first time I re-entered a sanctuary but removing the church from the building has granted me an opportunity to reassess what church means to me. Before, church was a thing that I did but now, it is clearer to me that church is a part of who I am. Worship in a pandemic has made me wrestle more with what it means to be a disciple of Christ. With all the boundaries I put on myself removed, I can be still and focus on my relationship with God. The beginning of my seminary journey started in a pandemic and it was like God said to me: You’re doing the right thing but there are a couple of things you need to learn about yourself and your place in the church. Quarantine has given me the opportunity to create a spiritual space in my domestic sphere which in turn has taught me that my spirituality exudes from what I make it to be, not constrained by four walls. 

In quarantine, I’ve had the opportunity to join different virtual Bible studies and small groups that were not available to me before due to scheduling and time constraints. Shout out to my Monday morning Bible study. We, the church, have a calling to serve and be disciples and when the world shut down, the church stepped up. Church offices and sanctuaries closed but when the call for food donations went out, the church fed the 5000 and more. When it was deemed not safe to convene in person, people of the church set about finding new ways to engage in worship. We all learned new skills in order to connect from the safety of our homes. As new research about the coronavirus came out, the church had to be more creative in finding ways to connect outside in a lower risk environment. And when the pandemic revealed more disproportionate effects of racism on our siblings of color, people of the church stepped up and took a stand in protesting the systems that do not honor the divine image of all human beings, regardless of their race, creed, orientation, and national origin. 

It takes a lot of bravery to enact change especially in a system that we think is good and just. The church can be a leader because our ultimate allegiance is to Jesus Christ who challenged the religious and political leaders of His time. The love of God through Jesus Christ unites us as we move towards a better future that erases the divides between us. Jacob and Esau were twins born of the same womb but became enemies. Like them, humanity was born of the same womb labored over by our Creator. Jacob and Esau’s story ends after years of separation and mistrust. Like them, humanity is separated and pitted against each other by our own making. Before Jacob and Esau reconciled with each other, Jacob wrestled with God and was left with a limp as a physical reminder of that encounter. To be able to reconcile with others, we must have an honest encounter with the divine. How do we do that? We can wrestle with God through devotion, prayer, song, and service. We worship God through introspection and action. By engaging with the divine image of others through conversation, reading, writing, and worshiping together, we can subvert an unfair system and favor the younger brother alongside the older.

This is not how I imagined my ministry would begin. I imagined that I would be preaching at the river side. I saw myself in Oriental, NC and at the Coffee Bean and in the sanctuary and serving alongside the community. But I’m preaching at my computer. I’m grasping at straws to make connections with people. I am lamenting. But maybe. Just maybe, God wants me to learn and grow. God wants us all to learn and grow. In the madness and chaos, God swept over the waters and created. I pray that God is using this moment to create something, maybe just a little subversive.