"With God's Help"

 

Genesis 25:19-34

July 12, 2026

 

These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.

The children struggled together within her, and she said, "If it is to be this way, why do I live?" So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other; the elder shall serve the younger." When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb.

The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle, so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau's heel, so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!" (Therefore he was called Edom.)

Jacob said, "First sell me your birthright."

Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?"

Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

 

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            I ran into an awkward spot planning the service for this week.  We were going to have a handbell rendition of “O Beautiful, For Spacious Skies” last week, but it was bumped to this week.  That posed a problem because after hearing about how Jacob treated Esau from the moment of their birth and how he tricked him out of his place of honor it seemed out of line to ask God to “crown the good with brotherhood” if that is how brothers treat one another.

            Again, this is one of those spots in the Bible where you can tell it wasn’t all meant to be read in the short chunks we are used to.  Something like the Proverbs, yes.  Genesis, no.  In Genesis we watch Jacob – and to a lesser extent Esau – grow up and mature and escape the patterns of their early life.  Esau had been born first, which gave him precedence in the family and social order, but Jacob had grabbed him by the heel as they were being born, and that was taken as descriptive of their later relationship.

            You expect that toddlers will be self-centered.  You try to make sure that does not grow into becoming selfish.  When parents play favorites, that gets in the way, and Genesis tells us that the differences of temperament between the twins were allowed to go sour in part because of their parents’ attitudes.

“When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents.  Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.”  [Genesis 25:27-28]

This story tells of how Jacob tricked Esau out of his privileges as the firstborn, and the way the story is told blames Esau for falling for it.

“Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!’  (Therefore he was called Edom.)

Jacob said, ‘First sell me your birthright.’

Esau said, ‘I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?’

Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’  So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob.  Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way.  Thus Esau despised his birthright.”  [Genesis 25:29-34]

Again, though, this wasn’t going to be the end of the tale.   The lentil stew incident would be exactly that – one incident, worth remembering, but not the whole story.  

There was another aspect to the boys’ situation in the family.  There was this aspect of their social standing, where Esau had in fact shown poor judgment.  But there was also the question of who would receive their father’s blessing as the one whose descendants would be seen as being in full succession to their grandfather Abraham, to whom God had promised the entire land.  Since Esau was Isaac’s favorite, he was the leading contender.

            Rebekah’s favorite was Jacob, though, and when Isaac was bedfast and blind, she set things up with Jacob’s cooperation (or connivance, depending on how you see it) so that Isaac would bless Jacob, thinking that he was blessing Esau.  Now, Esau may have been big and hairy but he was not stupid and he figured out what had happened right away.  He was so angry that he swore to kill Jacob.  Jacob had to go on the run because he knew that Esau would do it if he could.

            That throws everything into a different light. Esau couldn’t be blamed the way he could the first time.  It all gets complicated.  Reading on, as we will over the next couple of weeks, those complications begin to come together – with God’s help.  All of this is the background for that.  Spoiler alert: Jacob will meet his match in the person of his (and Esau’s) uncle Laban.  Esau will go his own way and put this all behind him.  Jacob will have to struggle with his flaws eventually – with God’s help.  He will find the courage to face his brother years later and they will reconcile – with God’s help.  Their descendants will repeat the cycle in one way or another in later books of the Bible and will work things out for better or for worse, depending on their willingness to accept God’s help.

            Despite how much later generations may want to tell the story as if it were all black and white, they don’t ever manage to do that.  The only way that it ever works out for the best is when they reach the point where they stop trying to assign blame and set aside judgment, leaving it in God’s hands – with his help.

            This is not just about two brothers, or their descendants, or the nations that they formed and lost and re-founded and lost again across the ages.  This is about humankind itself.  We fail as people.  Maybe I should say, “As people, we fail.”  We sin.  We let God down, we let each other down, we let ourselves down.  But God’s help abides, as God abides.

            The first letter of John says:

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.  If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  [I John 1:5-9]

We are children of God, still and always growing in grace.

 

"Bethel" - July 19, 2026

 

Genesis 28:10-19a

July 19, 2026

 

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran.

He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.

And he dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

And the Lord stood beside him and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring, and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.

Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."

Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it!" And he was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.

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            Jacob was on the run from his brother, who had sworn to hunt him down and kill him.  If he could reach Haran, the town in the north where his family first came from, and where his uncle Laban lived, he would be safe.  Until he got there his life would be in danger.  Remember how, not long ago, there was a man who escaped from the county prison?  Remember how he was hunted for almost a week and hid out while the police were combing the woods and fields from Longwood to Nantmeal, from Chadds Ford to Warwick?  Picture Jacob in that sort of situation.  But there comes a time when exhaustion overcomes fear, and that is where Jacob was.

“He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.”  [Genesis 28:11]

Imagine being so tired that you can use a stone for a pillow and still nod off.

            Would you sleep well?  As much as your body would shut down, do you think your mind would do that?  I’ll just speak for myself here.  I’m one of those people who falls asleep easily.  I can sleep on a train or a plane with no problem.  Generally, 10:00 or so comes around and no matter where I am, my eyes droop.  Once I’ve had some kind of rest, though, whatever the previous day has held or whatever I expect for the coming day will filter its way into my thoughts and I start dreaming.  It doesn’t have to make sense, as long as there’s some kind of connection.  If I’ve had a flat tire I might dream about donuts.  If I got stuck on a crossword puzzle hours before I might dream about playing scrabble or about being in a room with black and white tiles on the floor.  Sometimes I will wake up with a to-do list on my mind and ten minutes to go before the alarm clock, which I really resent because it feels too soon to get up but too late to go back to sleep.

            So, yes, I am projecting my own stuff onto Jacob, but I don’t see how he could have slept and dreamt without turning his situation round and round in his head no matter how tired he was.  What lay behind?  What lay ahead?  Would he survive the middle?

            One word of caution here: not every dream has a deep significance.  A man I knew was a psychiatrist who worked at a Veterans’ Administration clinic where it would not be unusual for a patient to walk up to him, describe a dream, and ask, “What does that mean?”  His standard answer was, “It means don’t eat ice cream right before you go to bed.”

            At times of severe stress, though, it may be that only when that the physical necessity to sleep are we able to make any kind of assessment of our own situation.  It may be, as I think it’s safe to say about Jacob, that only when he had to slow down whether he wanted to or not, would he be paying enough attention to anything other than his fear to hear what God was saying to him over the noise of his thoughts.

“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’" [Genesis 28:15]

In the midst of external danger and internally a potential nightmare of fears, God found the one opening he had and used it, telling Jacob, “Get a grip.  You’re safe with me.”

            Apparently, Jacob had never fully realized that God is God not just of the beginning and the destination, but the God of the entire journey.  When that light dawned on him, he was amazed.

“Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it!’  And he was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’" [Genesis 28:16-17]

That’s a far cry from, “Oh, no!  I’m going to be caught and killed!”  Jacob named the place where he had his dream-vision “Beth-El”, which means “the House of God”.   

It’s not an accident, by the way, that a lot of AME churches, at least the older ones in this part of the country, are named Bethel.  In the decades just before the Civil War, fugitives from slavery, running for safety and refuge in Canada, could generally find a protected place to rest, as had Jacob, at a place called Bethel.  Such a place is not the destination, but a gateway, and a place where it becomes visible that there are others traveling the path so that no one heading in the right direction would travel alone.

Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, tells of a time when she was mourning the loss of a close friend.  She and her son, then two-and-a-half years old, had a chance to take a brief vacation in a Mexican beach town where there was a circus school.  (As Bishop Peggy Johnson used to say, “You can’t make this stuff up.”)  Anyway, here’s what Ann Lamott wrote about that trip:

“There was a man here this time with just one leg.  I’d seen his prosthetic leg lying around him by the pool a few times before I actually saw him, and when I did, he was climbing up a trapeze ladder in the circus grounds. …

He climbed the ladder with disjointed grace, asymmetrical but not clumsy, rung by rung, focused and steady and slow.  Then he reached the platform, put on his safety harness, and swung out over the safety net, his one leg hooked over the bar of the trapeze, swinging back and forth, and finally letting go.  A teacher on the other trapeze swung toward him, and they caught each other’s hands and held on, and they swung back and forth for a while.  Then he dropped on his back to the safety net and raised his fist in victory.  ‘Yes,’ he said, and lay there on the net for a long time, looking at the sky with a secret smile.

I approached him shyly at lunch the next day and said, ‘You were great on the trapeze.  Are you going to do it again?’  And I had this idea that he might so that I could do some serious writing about spirit and guts and triumph.  But all he said was, ‘Honey?  I got much bigger mountains to climb.’”[1]

By the way, the chapter where Ann Lamott tells this story is called “Ladders”.

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[1] Ann Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 2000) 74-75.