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Jacob Part 1: Gen 25:21-26
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Understand that God is always willing to listen. That sometimes proper protocol simply gets in the way of honest inquiry. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1:But, my name is Jeremy. I'm one of the people who hang out here around commons and we're excited to have you particularly as we start this new series today. Every year, we lay out all of our teaching in our annual journal project. Hopefully, you've picked one of those up. There's copies available at the connection center.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that we try to do every year is to try to make sure we have a balanced diet as a community. And that means that every year, we intentionally engage with a longer narrative from the Hebrew scriptures. We spend some time directly with the gospels and the words of Jesus, and then we try to tackle a New Testament letter somewhere along the way. Well, today, we begin our extended Old Testament series for the year, and we are looking at the life of Jacob. This is a fascinating character, and I think this is going to be a lot of fun for us.
Speaker 1:But before we jump into Jacob, I do want to look back at Jeremiah quickly. Because we started this new season with a three week series that we called our next steps. And this was all about getting aligned together behind our next big adventure, the launch of our Inglewood Parish. Now, there's still time to join the Inglewood core team. We are actually meeting next week on October 10 for a launch party.
Speaker 1:You can go to commons.church/launchparty to register, be a part of that if you can. But to get behind this new vision, all of us, we needed to talk about the importance of local life. And one of the really compelling parts of the Jeremiah narrative is this somewhat surprising advice that God gives through Jeremiah to his people as they've been taken into exile. God essentially says, love where you are. Build a house, plant a garden, celebrate weddings.
Speaker 1:And if you do this, God says, you will participate in the repair of the world by helping to create the peace that you pray for. And so last week, we talked about this idea that building, planting, and celebrating became a manifesto for nonviolent social resistance in Babylon. See, the whole point of exile was that the Babylonian Empire knew they couldn't just occupy Judah or Israel forever. They didn't have enough soldiers. It would cost too much money.
Speaker 1:And so what they would do is essentially forced immigration. They would take all the surviving Israelites, and then they spread them out throughout the empire. And their thinking was that if we can get them separated from community, if we can spread them out, it will break their spirit, and eventually, they will just conform to our empire. But when God says, build community where you are, and plant life wherever you happen to be, and celebrate the good even though you are in the midst of the difficult, that's not just advice of how to get along. It's a call to resist the empire, and to resist the tendency toward despair, to resist a negative narrative that threatens to color all things in our imagination.
Speaker 1:And it's why this same strategy and that same nonviolent social resistance is so important for us today. As I said on Facebook this week, when you feel isolated by social media, have a conversation with a real person. And when you feel oppressed by the bad news around you, go and make something beautiful. When you feel worthless, go out and tell someone near you just how valuable they are to you. Because when you feel like a very small cog in a very large city, you resist that narrative by planting something that only you care to cultivate in the world.
Speaker 1:And that is the hope that exile was designed to kill. And when the church finally stops pretending that God needs us to defend him, and we start building new homes, and planting new lives, and celebrating new stories. This is when the church will finally bring peace to our city. And given everything that is happening in our world today, living peacefully and lovingly and generously in the midst of a violent world, that is nonviolent social resistance. Now, today is Jacob, and we have eight weeks in which to explore this story.
Speaker 1:So we have four weeks to look at Jacob to dive in. George Snyman, the founder from Hands at Work in Africa, will be here to share a week with us, and I'm excited for the chance to hear firsthand about what's happening in the communities that we are partnered with on the ground in Zambia. Then after that, we'll come back with four more weeks of Jacob, which will take us right up to Advent as we prepare for the arrival of Christ. That's our fall plan. But first, let's pray, and then today, we have the first steps, the birth of Jacob.
Speaker 1:God, we come today ready to learn, ready to be transported by your word back into a world that is very different from ours. A world shaped by different customs and traditions, different norms practices and language, and yet a world inhabited by human beings made in your image. Humans who bear the same potential for good and beauty and art and compassion that we do. Humans who also possess the same tendency toward greed, and selfishness, and grasping that we sometimes fall prey to. And so we ask, and as we dive into this story today, That we attempt to place ourselves in the center of these tales to feel their pathos, to laugh at their humor, and to sense what it is that you have perhaps preserved for us in them.
Speaker 1:That we would be able to engage our imagination and put our intellect into these conversations. But more than that, we ask that you would bring your spirit to bear as we read, So that new facets and images and truths would jump off the page and into our experience of faith. Be present to us as we read today. And as you are, might we begin to see ourselves, not just for who we have been, but for all the ways that you continue to invite us forward to travel with you. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Alright. Jacob. Well, before we can jump right into the story of Jacob's birth, we have to backtrack a little bit to gather some context here. Now, two years ago, we took a couple months just like this to look at the story of Abraham.
Speaker 1:And you can find that on our website at commons.church/teaching or go to youtube.com/commonschurch or look it up in the iTunes podcast store because all of our series are recorded and cataloged for you to go back to as a resource. But Abraham is the most famous of what we call the patriarchs. And these were the archetypal figures of the Hebrew story. Primarily, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now, Abraham in particular is the character that Jews and Christians and Muslims all draw back to as the source of their story.
Speaker 1:He is the one who is first called by God. He is the one through whom God begins his plan to repair the world. But the major figures in the book of Genesis are Abraham, his grandson Jacob, and then his son Joseph. And we are planning to get to Joseph at some point in the future as well because that's a great story too. But you might be asking when I say that, well, what about Isaac?
Speaker 1:After all, the phrase that gets repeated over and over again in scripture is that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Well, the simple fact is that Isaac is very much a transitional character in the story between Abraham and Jacob. In fact, Isaac's two big moments are a story where his father almost kills him in a sacrifice, very difficult story known as the Akedah in Judaism, and one which we did address in our Abraham series if you're interested in that. But his second big moment is where Abraham sends one of his trusted servants to go and find a wife for Isaac. And so if you go to Genesis chapter 24, there's this unnamed servant of Abraham who is sent to a man named Bethuel.
Speaker 1:And he negotiates with Bethuel's son, Laban, to acquire Bethuel's daughter, Rebecca, as a wife for Isaac. Now what that means is that Laban is Rebecca's brother, and when Rebecca and Isaac do marry and do have children, that makes Laban their uncle, which means we are going to see Laban in this series because uncle Laban has some dealings with nephew Jacob. But the point being that Isaac isn't even really part of his own wedding narrative. In fact, at the end of chapter 24, this is all we read about Isaac. That one night he came home and he went out in the field to meditate.
Speaker 1:And as he looked up, he saw camels approaching. Rebecca also looked up and saw Isaac. So the servant told Isaac all that he had done to bring Rebecca to him. And Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her. Now, as far as Old Testament courtships go, that's actually quite a nice tale.
Speaker 1:There are certainly a lot of cultural elements relating to male and female relationships that are uncomfortable at times, but Rebecca has a surprising amount of agency in her story. She really shows herself to be a strong character in her own right. And so when it comes time for Jacob and his brother Esau to come on the scene, it really is their mother Rebecca who overshadows their father Isaac once again. I think there's something really interesting here. First of all, that these stories come from an ancient patriarchal society.
Speaker 1:Yes. There are those elements that are uncomfortable for us today, but we should not assume that the women are insignificant in these tales. In fact, sometimes in small and subversive ways, the women loom very large in these ancient stories. And we will see that with Rebecca today and throughout the Jacob story. But second, even though Isaac is, for all intents and purposes, a transitional character that doesn't get much of the spotlight in Genesis, He is still listed among the patriarchs in the Hebrew imagination.
Speaker 1:And sometimes the things that we do and the ways that we contribute outside the spotlight or off the page behind the scenes are just as important as the rules that do get the recognition. I'm not saying that you want to go to work and stay in a job where you are underappreciated. But if at the end of my days, when I look back, the most significant thing I contributed to was my wife and my son, I would like to think I would be satisfied with that. Sometimes, it's okay to dream small. But that brings us to Jacob.
Speaker 1:And Jacob is a fascinating character. As we've seen in the artwork for this series, he is the one who wrestles with God. And as we heard in the theme song for this series, he is the one who is constantly misbehaving. Yet, he has also one of the best character arcs in all of the Old Testament. And ultimately, it is Jacob whom God first calls Israel.
Speaker 1:So Jacob is this very important figure in the Hebrew narrative, but this is how he arrives on the scene. So we're in Genesis 25 today. We're starting in verse 21, and we're gonna make our way to the end of verse 26 today. Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife because she was childless. And right off the bat, this is part of how things go in Genesis.
Speaker 1:Abraham and Sarah had fertility problems. And if you go back and you read that story, Sarah even laughs at the prospect of ever having children because she is so old. In fact, according to Genesis, she is 90 at the time she conceives, which, let's be honest, that does seem pretty old to have a baby, at least in my granted limited experience of what it takes to have a baby. And so we are likely dealing with hyperbole as a literary device here. The point is to show that Isaac, is eventually born, is a gift from Yahweh.
Speaker 1:Well, here, the story may not be as dramatic, but the intent is the same. Jacob, just like his father Isaac, is a gift. And so Isaac prays and the Lord answers Isaac's prayer and his wife Rebecca becomes pregnant. But something interesting happens here Because in verse 22, it says that the babies jostled each other within her and she said, why is this happening to me? So she went to inquire of the Lord.
Speaker 1:Now, whatever mojo Isaac has working for him, be it divine or otherwise, it is obviously really working for him here. However, the English is so sanitized here that it almost completely obscures the intent in this story. In English, Rebecca feels this jostling, and she thinks, oh, this is interesting. And she prays and God responds, surprise. It's not indigestion.
Speaker 1:It's twins. The problem with that is jostled each other is just a terrible translation of the Hebrew, which is used here. Because means to crush. Fact, it is the same word that the poet uses in Psalm 74 to say that God is the one who crushed the head of the monster Leviathan and fed it to the creatures of the desert. This is not a cute little jostling baby.
Speaker 1:It's a very powerful word, and it's a violent image. This word actually means to oppress, crush, suppress, mistreat, bend, snap, break, shatter, or smash. And, of course, we look at that and we say, well, a baby can't do that. We'll just say they jostled each other because that makes more sense. Except that's not the point.
Speaker 1:The ancient Hebrews knew as well as we do that babies in utero were not hook smashing each other, but the writer wanted to use this word for a reason. Now, when my son gets upset, he will sometimes just look at me and say, angry, Which is then usually followed by him yelling out, smash. Clearly, he has watched too much Incredible Hulk, but this is something we've brought on ourselves. However, this is how we use language, isn't it? It's not forensic, it's cathartic.
Speaker 1:And whether the writer is trying to imagine the experience of this mother with two babies smashing themselves into her kidneys, and like I can only imagine is terrible. Obviously, I have no idea, but I did have an upset stomach one time, and it felt like I was going to die, so I think I can relate. Or whether this writer is trying to actually foreshadow the very difficult and tortured relationship between these two brothers. Let's give the author some proper credit here and understand that this language has been chosen very carefully to communicate something to us. His babies crushed each other.
Speaker 1:And the next line says, Rebecca said, why is this happening to me? And that is also a less than great translation. Because a more literal rendering would be something like, if it is like this, why am I here? Point being that Rebecca is at the place of feeling so discouraged by this difficult pregnancy that she is actually beginning to wonder if any of it is worth it. And anyone here who has ever experienced the pain of parenting, either a difficult pregnancy or struggles with infertility or, let's be honest here, just the ups and downs of raising kids.
Speaker 1:You should see something of a kindred spirit here in Rebecca. In fact, in a book called the narrative art of Genesis, Jan Fockelman writes, how cruelly the sweet expectations of children. All the greater after twenty years of hope and despair are dashed for Isaac and Rebecca. As early as the pregnancy, their parental happiness is threatened. What shall I do?
Speaker 1:Rebecca wonders in desperation. Yeah. Thankfully, however, in the midst of this depression, she goes to inquire of the Lord. Now, this again is interesting because where Isaac prays to the Lord, Rebecca inquires. And the reason for the different language here is that these are two different words in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:The first is more straightforward. It means to ask or entreat. Essentially, this is the Hebrew that gets used for to pray. And so Isaac sees that his wife Rebecca is childless and he says to God, listen, can you help us out? The language for Rebecca is more complicated.
Speaker 1:In Hebrew, it's the word dorosh, and inquires is fine, but what complicates it is that this is the word that's usually associated with ancient forms of divination. So this is things like hepatoscopy, where you would slaughter an animal and then you would try to look at the liver to discern the will of the gods. Kinda weird, but it was a thing back then. Or libinomancy, where you would observe different shapes of smoke that would rise off of incense. Or lecanomancy, where you would pour oil into water and observe the different shapes that it made, and this is how you would discern what the gods were saying to you.
Speaker 1:And the thing is, these practices are never endorsed or condoned in the Bible, but we do know they were very prevalent in the surrounding cultures at the time. And so what we may have here is Rebecca being brought into the family of Abraham through marriage, and maybe even bringing some of these outside practices with her. Now, the biblical writer doesn't want to endorse this. Hence, the fact the writer never explains how she inquires. But by using this word, the writer seems to be hinting at something perhaps through this and acknowledging the graciousness of God in it.
Speaker 1:That God will listen and God will speak even with those who don't know how to approach the Lord. If you have ever found yourself in a moment of desperation, about to pray, but you stopped because you didn't know how, As if you didn't know the proper etiquette or the appropriate language, understand that God is always willing to listen. That sometimes proper protocol simply gets in the way of honest inquiry. Because here, Rebecca inquires the Lord, but next we read that the Lord said to her. And for some of us here, maybe that's all that we need to know today.
Speaker 1:And if the God who created the universe is willing to listen, then his ear does not depend on proper protocol. But God says, 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. Now it's nice that God responds here, but let's be honest, this response is at least a little cryptic. However, this is also the first real twist in the story that emerges.
Speaker 1:God says, two nations are in your womb, two people from within you will be separated. One will be stronger, and the older will serve the younger. And what we're dealing with here in the background is the practice of primogeniture. Now this was the assumed reality in the ancient world that the oldest son automatically inherited the largest portion of his father's estate, but also that the family lineage would be carried on through that eldest son. However, what is fascinating about the Bible is that primogeniture is the assumed backdrop in almost every story we read.
Speaker 1:And yet, in almost every story, that expectation is subverted. Remember this summer, we looked at David, the eighth son, the forgotten son who ends up being anointed king. Or if you go back to the story of Abraham, his first son is Ishmael, but his promised son is his second son Isaac. And if you read ahead through Jacob's life, you find out that his son Joseph becomes a star of the story, but Joseph was the eleventh son for goodness sake. Father Jacob had a busy life.
Speaker 1:And so the Bible has this strange relationship with primogeniture, where it is the assumed reality in almost every story, and yet it is almost always subverted. Even here, when we're told one is stronger and the older will serve the younger, I think our first instinct, at least mine, is then to assume that the younger one is the stronger one. And the older one's gonna serve him after all, but even that doesn't seem to be the case. Because as we read and we'll find out next week, Jacob seems to be the one who hangs out around the house, and Esau is the one who goes out hiking and hunting and fulfilling all the stereotypically masculine tropes. And so something is going on in this story already, where the writer wants to subvert our expectations of leadership and strength and destiny and what God's plans are all about.
Speaker 1:Now, Jacob will give us lots of opportunity to explore the unexpected nature of God's leading in our lives. And also, everything in this story will play against type. But for today, understand that these are not throwaway statements. This story has been constructed with a level of artistry and care. And the writer is doing something here.
Speaker 1:He's foreshadowing the story that is about to come. And you are being invited slowly and steadily even from these introductory words into the realization that society's expectations of you have no bearing on God's imagination for you. So maybe you're not the oldest. Whatever that means in your family. And maybe you're not the strongest, whatever that means in the culture that surrounds you.
Speaker 1:But maybe God has some surprising plans in store for you. It's happened before, And I'm convinced it's happening right here in this room because God seems to have a thing for the underdog. And if you haven't gotten that impression in church, maybe you have come and you felt ignored, or you felt like you had something to offer to the community, but due to some obscure circumstance beyond your control, you just couldn't get anyone to listen to you. Understand that this is only ever because culture and church have not yet learned to take seriously the God of the underdog. No.
Speaker 1:We are in the story of Jacob. And so far Jacob has not yet even been born. And so we will finish our time today with these last three verses. This is verse 24. When the time came for her to give birth, there were two twin boys in her womb.
Speaker 1:The first to come out was red and his whole body was like a hairy garment. And so they named him Esau. And after this, his brother came out with his hand grasping Esau's heel, so he was named Jacob. Now, when my son was born, we named him Eton, which is my father's middle name, and that is actually Eton's middle name. His first name is actually his birth mother's name.
Speaker 1:We named him after her. So And there's a lot of meaning behind the names that we chose for our son, but as you can see here in the Hebrew culture naming conventions were a little different. Esau is not named after his father. He is named after his hairy red body. Jacob is not named after his mother.
Speaker 1:He is named after his heel grasping antics. And sometimes what happens is that when biblical names are anglicized into proper names in English, we miss out on a lot of the story, and we lose a lot of the context to it. Here we have Esau named for his hairy red body. And we're told that Esau is red. The word is Edmoni in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:And we're told that he is hairy. The word is Saar in Hebrew. And if you read through to the end of Esau's story, you will find that Esau eventually leaves and he settles down in the land of Seir and he becomes the father of the Edomites. So this man who is born Edmoni and Sa'ar becomes the father of the Edomites in Seir. Assuming that you are actually a reader living in the ancient Near East, and you know about the Edomites, you've been to Seir, and you read the description of Esau's birth, you probably have a good sense of where this story is going.
Speaker 1:Or at the very least, you start to put the clues together once you look back. It's a well constructed story that's pulling you into the narrative. So what about Jacob? Well, the Hebrew word heal is the word, and Jacob is the name. So at its basic level, this is a pun on the word heal.
Speaker 1:But the full form of the name Jacob in Hebrew is Yaakob Allel. And Yaakob Allel means something like God will protect or maybe even God will travel with him. This is the really fascinating thing about the Jacob story. That will travel with us as we read for the next eight weeks that this undeserving, underachieving, kinda shady underdog that constantly messes up and slips up and bypasses all the expectations placed on him by the culture that surrounds him. Can still somehow factor into God's plan for the world.
Speaker 1:You see, you can read this story just like you can read your life fatalistically. As if Jacob never had a choice and your choices don't matter and that's what his name implies. But I'm not sure that's the point we're meant to receive here. See, I think the Bible is inviting us into the realization that no matter who we are or what we've done or where we started from or what's been expected or not from us. And at some point, when we are finally ready to look back on our lives, what we will notice is all of the surprising ways that God has been in and through and with us as we traveled through our lives.
Speaker 1:Is the point of the Jacob story is the twists and turns. Story of Jacob is meant to remind us that life is not determined the moment you are born, but instead that once you look back, you start to notice God's fingerprints everywhere. That's the point of the pun. And Jacob is the one who grasps, but he is also the one who owes everything he grabs a hold of to the God who journeyed with him. And so over the next eight weeks, may the story of Jacob begin to invite you to recognize that there are twists and turns ahead in your story, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Because the God that will travel with you is near you as you face them. Let's pray. God, help us as we begin this story of Jacob. And we put ourselves into the shoes of this character and those who we will meet. Help us to see ourselves here, both in the failings, the underachieving, and the grasping that we see in Jacob to recognize all the ways that we grab for things that aren't ours.
Speaker 1:And yet God also to see ourselves in your grace and your kindness towards Jacob. The ways that you continue to invite him and guide him to walk beside him. To show him that in the end, all the things he thought he grabbed for are the things that you have graciously provided for him. God, might we recognize our flaws just like Jacob, and might we see our courage and strength just like Jacob. Might we come to know ourselves better through this story so that we could hear more clearly your voice, calling us forward into the best version of ourselves, a version that you imagined when you put us together.
Speaker 1:You're a great God. And in the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.