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“Family Ties,” Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 7/13/14

“Family Ties”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

Genesis 25:19-34

July 13, 2014

For some, preaching is the “family business.”  There are families with multiple generations who have sensed and answered a call to ministry.  My family isn’t one of those, but I have a colleague whose father was also a pastor, and he had this policy:  If he used a story about his kids as a sermon illustration, he’d pay them $25.  Easier than allowance money for sure, but the arrangement had its purpose: to make their father think twice before using his kids as subject matter for sermons. It was his way of creating accountability to both his kids and his congregation; considering the privacy of the former and the sensibilities of the latter.  He wanted his kids to know that he valued their stories and wasn’t in the business of using them indiscriminately, and he didn’t want his congregation to feel like his sermons were a family scrapbook.

There are a variety of ways for our family stories to be told.  Maybe not a Sunday morning sermon, but there are these:  family reunions, weddings, funerals, the dinner table, the coffee shop, anywhere where two or three grandparents are gathered, and, today, this thing we call the Internet; more specifically, social media.

Sometimes, if we have a particularly ambitious member of the family, we might even have our family stories across generations complied in the form of a genealogy.

I’ve been hesitant to use the metaphor of family to describe congregational life, given the complicated dynamics of family life for many and the church’s calling to be community that transcends even family ties, as Jesus wasn’t shy about teaching.  And yet the metaphor of family does have some value.  I’d consider the history of Heart of the Rockies that Jeff just compiled and published a “family story” in the best sense – and much in the same sense we read family stories in scripture – a collection of correspondence, genealogy, and significant milestones that when stitched together create a powerful narrative.

A narrative that captures both what we cherish and where we were challenged in our past, and – as the best stories do – incites us to an even more faithful future.

Today we read a family story – a story from the family of Abraham, which is to say, our family story as Christians.  These stories were first told orally around a campfire – one whose spark illuminated many generations in the telling and re-telling of these stories before they were ever written down.

Here is the story, as it was written.

READ GENESIS 25:19-34

As far as family stories go, this is a pretty juicy one, but to our ears today, perhaps not an exceptionally humorous one.  Here are these two brothers – twins, biologically; but symbolically, two different nations – Jacob, the father of Israel and Esau, the father of Edom.  There’s struggle from conception to life in the womb to delivery.  For those who have dealt with reproductive difficulties, stories like these can’t be all that easy to hear.  For those who are parents, stories like these could just touch the nerve that is directly connected to your desire for your kids to love each other, or at the very least not hurt each other.

All of that to say – there’s a lot that’s heavy about this story.

Now imagine for a moment that you’re around that campfire, and that Jacob is your great-great-great grandfather.   A story always seems to become a little more colorful when it’s told against the backdrop of the darkness night provides.  In that setting, when your whole life you’ve been told stories about how great your family and your nation are, the difference between Esau and Jacob are almost cartoonish – Jacob, already known to be the father of the 12 tribes of Israel, and Esau, the hairy, brutish, ruddy-complexioned, blue-collar dunce who sold his most valuable possession for a bowl full of beans.  Yep.  The great-great-great granddaddy of the Edomites was a red face that that sold out for a bowl of red stuff.

It’s a story of relentless tragedy and great comedy, depending on who is telling the story.  It’s easy to see how, based on which campfire you were sitting around, the legend could be bigger than the reality. [1]

This story, as most do, has two layers of meaning – it was told as the story of a nation, and as a family’s personal story.

Did you see the Newsweek article this week about past President Warren G. Harding?  In it, they billed him as a better erotic letter-writer than a President of the United States.  Aren’t those the kinds of honors one just hopes to receive?  It may be a news story, but it isn’t a new story.

These letters, excerpts  from which were published in The New York Times Magazine, were sealed up by the Library of Congress in 1964 as part of an agreement between Harding’s family and the historian Francis Russell, who had uncovered them. That agreement stood for 50 years—and just now expired.

Sherry Hall, the site manager for the Harding home, says the former president’s adulterous relationship with Carrie Fulton Phillips, who was the wife of one of his closest friends, has never been much of a secret—even in his hometown of Marion, Ohio.

“What we try to do here at the [historical] site is give people the most accurate information we can,” Hall said. According to Hall, the affair was a popular gossip item in Marion when Harding was alive. “He was a human being like anyone else,” she said. “It’s nothing that anybody tries to hide or anything. It’s part of the fabric of his life.”[2]

And yet now it’s a national story, in as much as it involves the highest elected official in our country, even as it remains a family story that deals with the very real and very painful issue of infidelity.  Our own family stories, and yes, our faith family story that we find retold from Genesis to Revelation, are not without these painful chapters.  Infertility, jealousy, conflict – and that’s just a few verses spanning a couple of years here in the beginning.

So what do we do with these difficult stories – and, perhaps more importantly, the feelings and situations they create?

There’s a town in east Tennessee that exists today only as an historical site that attempted to deal with one of the challenging legacies Esau and Jacob inherited. Or should I say one of them inherited, which was just the problem.  This practice is called male primogeniture, and while the story we heard this morning for Genesis is believed to be one of the earliest recorded accounts of the practice, it’s pretty safe to say that this was happening – and was accepted – widely throughout the Middle East.

Male primogeniture continued and was practiced among the upper classes during the Roman Empire. It then experienced resurgence during the Middle Ages in Europe.

But back to the town of Rugby, Tennessee. Founded in 1880 by English author Thomas Hughes, Rugby was built as an experimental utopian colony. The Rugby experiment grew out of the social and economic conditions of Victorian England, where the practice of primogeniture and an economic depression had left many of the “second sons” of the English gentry jobless and idle.

Hughes envisioned Rugby as a colony where England’s second sons would have a chance to own land and be free of the social and moral ills that plagued late-nineteenth-century English cities.

The colony would reject Late Victorian materialism in favor of the Christian ideals of equality and cooperation.

From the outset, however, the colony was beset with problems.  There was the typhoid epidemic of 1881, lawsuits over land titles, and a population unaccustomed to the hard manual labor required to extract crops from the less-than-ideal soil of the Cumberland Plateau. By late 1887, a mere seven years since its inception, most of the original colonists had either died or moved away from Rugby.][3]

Rugby was a fascinating human attempt to subvert the norms of the day – norms that no doubt created some very painful family stories, especially from the perspective of those non-firstborn sons.

Even when our human efforts miss the mark, we know that God’s don’t.  In the midst of the “family values” we see at work in the Bible – the brokenness, the anger, the jealousy, the deceit that Isaac and Rebekah’s family is going through, God shows up.  Why did God carry out God’s plan for human redemption through one and twin and not the other?  Was it a conscious choice, favoring one over the other, or was it using what God had to work with, even if it wasn’t perfect –  a son with a stolen birthright?

Each of these characters was flawed in his or her own way, as are we, and so we can be quite confident that God isn’t in the business of making choices based on merit. We call that grace.

Even nations can be an example of this.  Consider Israel at that time.  Small and insignificant at first, clueless if not downright disobedient throughout much of the Old Testament, and yet God still uses them, shaping their identity as God’s covenant people.

The Old Testament doesn’t always seem to be laden with Good News; this preacher, at least, turns more often than not to the gospels for that.  And yet, in these stories – our stories – that are filled with some of the most strange and awkward people, how can this be anything but Good News:

We don’t have to be perfect and have everything figured out and flawless in order for God to not only show up but even bless us and use us in the midst of the mess. [4]

If that’s not Good News, I don’t know what is.