Genesis 25:19-34

We've started to develop the ancestry now so we can trace the promise that God made to Abraham about his descendants. So much division has been based on scripture like this. It is painful to me to even review it. The theme of being barren and needing God's help is repeated, and we have some drama right there in the womb. The story of Jacob will fill much of the remainder of this book and he will remain a part of the genealogy up through Jesus. Esau will indeed get a nation, but not fair quite as well. The “elder shall serve the younger” is a flip of the usual birthright, similar to the way Isaac, the second son of Abraham became the important one. Again here we have the woman favoring the right one.

We find out from God that all this will happen, but we still need to have Jacob play his part and trick his brother into giving up what is his. These stories are so old, there is little certainty to their meaning, but the image of the father liking the hunter and the mother liking the quiet young man in the tents still resonates. How does our clever trickster pull off the coup? He just gets lucky and Esau shows up starving, almost to death apparently according to verse 32. Esau swears off his birthright. No paperwork was needed in this age. Nor is there much consternation. In the one brief final verse, it's all done.

A birthright is a golden ticket, but responsibility comes with. We don't see much desire for hanging around temples and participating in rituals coming from Esau. He doesn't seem to be thinking much past his next meal, let alone starting a legacy that will result in God reconciling himself to the entire human race. He wouldn't know about that, but surely he has been told what God had promised Abraham. Jacob on the other hand, lost the lottery of life, grabbed onto his brothers ankle then negotiated his way to the top. You usually don't hear preachers putting it like that. That's not supposed to be the legacy of the chosen people. They are supposed to be noble and righteous. The reality this time is, the Biblical story describes us perfectly.

Romans 8:1-11

We're not condemned by the laws of God? Cool! This was explained a few weeks ago in chapter 6. We're free, thanks to Jesus. All those prophets talking about God's wrath causing the downfall of the kingdoms, over and over again, they were right, but they didn't have Jesus. It was human failing that caused that. Humans are weak and can never live up to the law. But now the requirements of those laws are fulfilled if you walk “according to the Spirit”. So we get another bit of poetry about how good equals God, bad equals flesh. I hope it sounded better in the original tongue.

There is some better stuff coming in a couple months from this book. Romans is a mixed bag. Once, a couple decades or so ago, I set out to find what a Christian community could accomplish. I saw them as an enriching part of my neighborhood, working toward peace with justice. Not all of them, but South Minneapolis had some pretty decent choices in the 1990's. I found story tellers and artists using ancient symbols to heal divides in a city torn apart literally by bad planning of highways and figuratively by unequal treatment of its children. But it only worked as long as I stayed within the 200 or so friends I had made and the brief encounters with some of the 2 million others around us. We edited the stories by neglecting certain passages, to make the narrative work for us.

What I really wanted, I didn't find. And the deeper I looked into how Christianity worked, whether it was the theology or administrative structure, the more I realized it was a dead end. Paul talks of finding freedom in Christ. It is the freedom of duty that Bonhoffer speaks of. Once you choose to accept the call of duty, you give your considerations of self over to it. You are free from worrying about good and bad choices because someone else is making them for you. Your only risk is in the initial choice, and not giving yourself over so fully that you can't recognize if you made a deal with the devil.

Paul was almost on to something, but he was not aware, or at least didn't espouse to, the ideas of reason and rationalism that were developing in the very country he was writing this letter to. 1,200 years later Saint Aquinas would try to reconcile that philosophy with Paul's religion. He failed, and a man like Bonhoffer, brilliant and valiant as he was, in 1944 also fell back on the theology of Romans 8.

What they missed, and what we now benefit from is 800 years of improvement on the Greek. It's the freedom found in commitment to our fellow humans and the planet, based on reason. You don't give yourself to reason, but you can have freedom within it, including the freedom to change as you acquire new information. If you commit to fairness and compassion, then the deal you make with each person you meet is to treat them as you would like to be treated. That might even include treatment that is not your personal preference, as long it does not violate basic principles of personal sovereignty. I don't have the space to go into the details of ethical systems like moral realism, but I'm not suggesting anything radical here, anything that isn't enshrined into constitutions of the modern democratic nations.

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

This is a pretty straight forward parable as far as I can tell. And just in case you don't get it, in a rare moment of clarity, Jesus will explain it next week. Unfortunately the explanation has more obscure symbols, like “the harvest is the end of the age”. It's too bad, because the symbolism of farming, or for most of gardening, is so accessible. If you haven't gardened, find someone who does and give it a try. It is a spiritual experience if there ever was one.

One thing you will find when your seeds first begin to sprout and pop out of the soil, they look a lot like the weeds. This parable doesn't mention that, but those hearing it would have known. The other analogies of rocky soil or a thorny patch mean pretty much what they say.