Soup

 This morning’s Old Testament reading sits in solidarity with dysfunctional families all over the world. It’s your first piece of Good News today–no matter how nutty things get on a bad day in your house, your family will always be better off than the families we’re introduced to in Genesis. 

That Old Testament passage, and all the stories that follow it about Jacob and Esau, poses this question for us: how far do we chase after what isn’t ours, and how much harm do we create in the process? What enemies do we make along the way, and how do we treat them? By contrast, in today’s Gospel message, Jesus shows us how easily we can find him, and how to reconcile with our enemies even when all hope seems lost.

First, Jacob and Esau, the twins who put the “fun” in “dysfunction”. Isaac prayed that he’d be lucky enough to be a dad, and when Rebecca finally conceived the twins had a Battle Royale in her womb every night. This distressed Rebecca so much that she regretted being alive, but it was also the shape of things to come. She then gave birth to two babies: the furry red one, and the handsome one. Based on what Genesis tells us, I can only imagine that Esau looked like Elmo, if Elmo was a skilled hunter. The twins, in competition from birth, divided the house, and Isaac was Team Esau, and Rebecca was Team Jacob.

The non-stop in-fighting reached its peak one day when the twins were young men. Esau was busy hunting; Jacob was getting his Emeril Lagasse on in the kitchen. Esau came home exhausted, and meanwhile Jacob was daintily sprinkling seasonings on his lunch. There’s nothing at all wrong with Jacob cooking, but we need to take note of the huge difference in work between the twins. The text says that Esau was “famished”, and he tells Jacob he’s “about to die”, all while Jacob was casually taste testing his recipe. There’s no need to come down real hard on Jacob just yet, but the text makes it clear that the hard working brother was Esau. Jacob wanted what Esau had, but not if he had to work for it. He tricked and manipulated his way into it instead. 

Esau came over to Jacob and said, “Oh thank God, food, I don’t even care what’s in that pot, I’ll take 2.”

Jacob replied, “Sure, I’ll give you this meal–if you give me your birthright.”

Well that escalated quickly.

Not picking up on the manipulation, Esau conceded that if he was about to keel over from exhaustion his firstborn inheritance rights would be of little use to him, and he sold his future to Jacob, in exchange for a bowl of soup and a piece of bread.

That must have been some soup.

If you’ve read more of the story, you know that this was only the beginning of the trouble for Jacob. On Isaac’s deathbed, Isaac still wanted to give Esau, his firstborn, and the kid whose side he took, a special blessing. Rebecca, still firmly on Team Jacob, put a bunch of Elmo fur on Jacob so that if you were only holding his hand and touching his arm you might believe he was Esau. Then Jacob impersonated Esau on Issac’s deathbed, and stole that blessing from Esau. He had the inheritance, and he had his father’s last dying “I love you”, and Esau couldn’t do anything about it…except threaten to kill his brother.

Like I said: no matter what’s been going on at your house, I guarantee y’all look like the Brady Bunch next to these guys.

Jacob went on the run, and the narrative followed him as the main character, not Esau. After all, Jacob stole that. Estranged from his family, Jacob worked for a man named Laban, and fell in love with his daughter Rachel. He asked to marry Rachel, and worked for Laban for 7 years to earn her hand, but Laban switcherooied out Rachel for her sister Leah so Jacob would end up married to her instead. Laban was quite the David Copperfield pulling that off, and Jacob was so self absorbed–and drunk on party favors–to the point of self destruction that he didn’t notice the ruse until it was too late. And, sadly, this is the patriarchy of the Old Testament, and neither Rachel nor Leah had any say as to which of them married whom and when. That sewed enough resentment to power the next generation of GENESIS SIBLINGS WHO HATED EACH OTHER. Jacob worked for Laban for another seven years so he could marry Rachel for real this time, then when Laban still wanted to keep a hold on his daughters, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah stole everything worth money from Laban’s estate and ran.

You have to read through a whole lotta Genesis to get through all of that, so I saved you some time there. But the point is, after a solid fifteen years spent being a lying, manipulative, selfish rat, Jacob found himself on the run from two different angry relatives, in the middle of nowhere with two wives who were getting pretty sick of him. 

Things do get better for Jacob, with God’s help, and we’ll talk about that next week–stay tuned–but we can learn from him that we cause ourselves and others an abundance of misery and pain when we go against God’s plans for us, and we steal what isn’t ours. Jacob could have been sitting at the kitchen table, happily sharing a bowl of soup with his brother. When we find ourselves at life’s crossroads, like Jacob did, and our choices come down to starting a war or sharing our soup, we need to get out the ladle and share the soup.

We see Jesus solve disputes regularly this way in the Gospels, and this choice is highlighted in this morning’s story from Matthew. Jesus summons his next disciple, Matthew the tax collector–maybe, but not necessarily, the Matthew this book is named for–and invites him to sit and eat with him and the other disciples. We’ve heard that label, “tax collector” enough times that it’s lost meaning for us in contemporary discourse, but a tax collector to Jesus’ neighbors was what a payday loan shark, or a used car salesperson, or an ambulance chasing lawyer would be to us. A dude who traded in human decency to make a quick buck off of someone else’s suffering. Matthew was no angel, and the folks who shunned him weren’t being petty, they were betrayed and justifiably angry. And Jesus’ move, in the face of rising tensions, was to invite Matthew to have some soup with him. 

Jesus had a standing lunch date with the social riff raff no one else wanted to get anywhere near–the tax collectors, the lepers, the folks vaguely labeled “sinners”...and the rogue women that had fallen off society’s radar. After he recruited Matthew, and gave him a new job, he gave him a path toward working off his debt to society, and Matthew got to witness two miracles: a woman cured of twelve years of bleeding by reaching out and touching the hem of Jesus’ tunic, and then a young girl revived from death by touching Jesus’ hand. Those are unnamed characters, and they only get a few verses each, but it matters that their stories still get told, and they’re hard stories to read, especially as a mom. In Jesus’ subversive new social order, no one is left out, and everyone has value. Even tax collectors. Even people with mysterious health problems that give us The Ick. Even the children that others let die. Everyone gets a seat at the table, with priority seating going to the ones most in need of his attention. And he finds people who were taught to hate each other, and invites them to talk it out over lunch.

Have we found ourselves at a crossroads like the one Jacob was at, when he was making his soup? A fork (or spoon, since it’s soup) in the road where we could either start a fight, or make one worse, or alienate a sibling…or we could share a meal instead? For Jacob, it was his twin brother. For some of us it might be family, or a friend, or a classmate, or a coworker. Or that rivalry might look vaguer and more detached–the neighbors who vote differently, or who watch the other news channel, or who drive the car with that one bumper sticker on it. We’re more divided than we’ve ever been, even with the folks right in front of us. What are we going to do? Keep up the division? Or serve up some soup?

Jesus is inviting the hungry to lunch. Let’s eat together.

Amen.