The Land Where Our Fathers Had Lived
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle A
The story begins innocently enough. The writer of Genesis simply sets the stage with a reference to geography: "Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan" (37:1).
He settled in the land where his father had lived.
Jacob is the third generation of patriarchs by whom Israel's God was henceforth known. Several centuries later at the burning bush, for example, the Lord introduced himself to Moses as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6). Jacob, his father, and his grandfather were the honored primogenitors of God's chosen people.
Abraham, you remember, was the Mespotamian man with whom God first initiated this covenant. Abraham's descendants would be God's people, and he would be their God. The covenant was not one of mutual exclusivity, however. For while God did intend to be their only God, and therefore exclusive in that sense, he did not necessarily intend to have them as an exclusive chosen people. Rather, he expressed to Abraham a more global purpose and mission: "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3).
A key element of God's covenant with Abraham was the issue of land. Abraham was living in the land of Mesopotamia when God called him, but God required him to leave that land (Genesis 12:1). At several points along the way, God assured Abraham that he intended to give a different land to him and his descendants (Genesis 12:7; 13:14-17; 15:18-21; 17:8).
Abraham lived out his days as an alien there in that land of Canaan. By the time he died, the only plot of land that he could claim as his own was a field he had purchased so that he could acquire the cave within it as a burial ground for his wife, Sarah. But while only an acre or two may have been registered in his name at the county courthouse, God had promised to give his descendants possession of that whole land, as far as the eye could see.
Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, was the child of God's promise and the heir of God's covenant with Abraham. He, too, lived out his days as an alien, a sojourner, there in the land of Canaan.
We do not see much of Isaac in his own right. His character, it seems, is always as a supporting actor, never the star.
First, he plays the part of Abraham's son: the fulfillment of God's promise, the object of Ishmael's antagonism, and the symbol of God's great test of Abraham's faith and obedience.
Isaac's next major role is almost entirely offstage. Like those occasional television characters (Carlton, the doorman on Rhoda, Norm's wife on Cheers) who are recurring in their series and yet never actually seen, Isaac is invisible during the marvelous story of how God provided a wife for him.
And that marriage, then, leads to Isaac's third costarring role: dad.
Isaac married a woman named Rebekah, and she gave birth to twin boys. They were not identical twins, however. In truth, they could not have been much more different.
The firstborn was Esau. He came out conspicuously red and uncommonly hairy, and his appearance gave rise to his name, "Esau," which meant "hairy." At first blush, the name seems disappointing. In the preceding stories from Genesis, we have been introduced to marvelous and meaningful names. The baby Noah was named with profound expectation. Abraham's original name, Abram, was noble, and his new name from God was full of promise. Isaac's name was marked by good humor and joy. But "Esau"? How unimaginative. How ignoble.
And yet, Esau's name was a sight better than his younger brother's.
When the second child was born, in dramatic contrast to Esau, he was smooth skinned (see Genesis 27:11). And because he came out right on Esau's heels -- literally -- his parents named that second boy "Jacob," meaning "heel holder" or "supplanter." While Esau may have been named for a rather superficial trait, Jacob, it seems, was named for a character flaw.
As they grew up, the two young men were as different as their appearances. Esau was an outdoorsman -- a hunter -- a man who smelled like animals and fields. Jacob, however, was more manicured and genteel. In one episode, when Esau comes in from the fields, he finds Jacob in the kitchen. That snapshot captures each man in his own natural habitat.
With boys as different as Jacob and Esau were, it's easy to imagine that parental preferences and prejudices formed early. Unless parents are vigilant to avoid it, reputations in the home harden quickly, as each child stakes out exclusive claim to some territory. The smart one. The athletic one. The troublemaker. The clown.
Esau was out in the fields; Jacob was inside in the kitchen. Jacob was brains; Esau was brawn. And Jacob was mama's boy; while Esau, the man's man, was his father's favorite son.
What is it like for a boy to grow up knowing that his father prefers someone else? A growing boy so deeply and so naturally needs the approval and affection of his father. Young Jacob must have lived his childhood in a constant but futile effort to get the same kind of smile, the same rapport, the same approving slap on the back that Esau enjoyed from Isaac.
Finally, one day Jacob got from Isaac precisely the kind of treatment typically reserved for Esau. Indeed, Jacob quite literally took something that had been reserved for Esau: Isaac's special blessing. That moment of deception -- that one final, desperate, heel-grabbing effort to come out first -- was the last straw. Jacob had to run away from home, while Esau stewed, murmuring threats, and promising himself revenge.
Paternal favoritism -- and being on the short end of it -- was the harmful environment in which Jacob grew up. Then Jacob himself settled in that place, that pattern, where his father had lived.
We fast forward to today's Old Testament reading, and we see Jacob as a father himself. He has twelve sons and a daughter. He had lived for two decades in northern Mesopotamia with his uncle, Laban, but now he was back in the same land where his father had lived before him, living the same way.
Though Jacob himself had grown up with the pain of paternal favoritism, he still introduced that same pattern into his own home and inflicted that pain on his own children. Joseph was Jacob's favorite, and everybody knew it. And as though the disproportionate affection and approval were not apparent enough, Jacob's preferential treatment one day took on a visual aid.
Jacob gave Joseph a coat. On first hearing, that seems like a small thing, but in a day when new clothes were not so commonplace as they are today, this gift was a big deal. Furthermore, in a family of twelve sons, one suspects that hand-me-downs were the order of the day. Yet, here was an article of clothing that bypassed the older brothers and went straight to the favored Joseph. To make matters still worse, this coat was a distinctive one: colorful, distinguished, and probably expensive.
In a world of browns and grays, Joseph's colorful coat was as conspicuous as his father's preferential love. With that coat on, the other sons of Jacob literally could not look at Joseph without being reminded that he was the favored one. That fact, combined with Joseph's own precociousness, gnawed at them.
How striking is the phrase "they saw him from a distance." For the prodigal's father, that sight on the horizon set him running to embrace his beloved son (Luke 15:20). For these under-loved brothers, however, that sight was enough to prompt a murder conspiracy.
We get a measure of the brothers' animosity toward Joseph both in what they did and in what they almost did.
What they almost did was kill their brother -- just as Esau had pledged to do to Jacob a generation before. What they did do -- their alternative to outright fratricide -- was to throw Joseph into a pit. Deep and dry, it would be a terrible and inescapable death. Reuben had a more merciful plan; but no one else, including Joseph himself, knew about it.
Perhaps the most telling image of Joseph's brothers came not in the moment when they threw him into the dreadful pit, but in what they did next. "Then they sat down to eat." It is a portrait of indifference and complacency. While their little brother cried out for mercy, they were filling their stomachs. Most of us find that our appetites are diminished by unpleasantness, tension, or strife, but not these boys. Nothing wrong with their stomachs; just something terribly wrong with their hearts.
Then, providentially, Joseph's life was spared by the arrival of a caravan. Judah reasoned with his brothers: "What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh." Here is the motto of selfishness masquerading as ethics: What is the profit to us of this action or that? And here is the utter poverty of their consciences: that they conclude Joseph ought to be sold rather than killed since, after all, "he is our brother, our own flesh."
Long before modern social scientists began to talk about family systems and dysfunctional family patterns, God referenced the terrible phenomenon of the parents' iniquity affecting their children "to the third and the fourth generation" (Numbers 14:18). We see the tragic pattern played out here in this unredeemed display by the sons of Jacob. Isaac had played favorites among his sons, and it eventually erupted into the one brother seeking to kill the other. Then one brother had to leave home. Then that fugitive became a father, who also played favorites among his sons, where murder was also narrowly avoided.
Jacob had settled, you see, in the place and the pattern where his father had lived.
The stories about Jacob come rather early in Old Testament history. Further down the road, in the era of the divided monarchy, we find quick sketches and summaries of so many kings who ruled in Israel or Judah along the way. The biblical author employs a telling standard for offering a quick, thumbnail evaluation of those kings: The kings are compared to their fathers.
Abijam, the son of Rehoboam and great-grandson of David, is summarized thus: "He committed all the sins that his father did before him; his heart was not true to the Lord his God, like the heart of his father David" (1 Kings 15:3). Later, the Bible reports that King Asa of Judah "did what was right in the sight of the Lord, as his father David had done" (1 Kings 15:11). Meanwhile, King Ahaziah of Israel "did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father and mother, and in the way of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin" (1 Kings 22:52).
What is the land where our fathers lived? What was the example, "the way," of our fathers and mothers?
Perhaps it was a life of faith, wisdom, and charity, and we do well to settle there, too. But perhaps it was not. Perhaps, instead, some of us are heirs to a legacy of addiction or abuse; of uneven love or misplaced priorities. Perhaps we have seen in ourselves how easy, how natural it is to settle in the same places and patterns -- in the land where our fathers had lived.
Each generation must hear God's call anew. For some of us, that will mean a deliberate departure from the land -- the life -- where our fathers had lived; a departure to go to a new and different land that God will show us (Genesis 12:1).
He settled in the land where his father had lived.
Jacob is the third generation of patriarchs by whom Israel's God was henceforth known. Several centuries later at the burning bush, for example, the Lord introduced himself to Moses as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6). Jacob, his father, and his grandfather were the honored primogenitors of God's chosen people.
Abraham, you remember, was the Mespotamian man with whom God first initiated this covenant. Abraham's descendants would be God's people, and he would be their God. The covenant was not one of mutual exclusivity, however. For while God did intend to be their only God, and therefore exclusive in that sense, he did not necessarily intend to have them as an exclusive chosen people. Rather, he expressed to Abraham a more global purpose and mission: "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3).
A key element of God's covenant with Abraham was the issue of land. Abraham was living in the land of Mesopotamia when God called him, but God required him to leave that land (Genesis 12:1). At several points along the way, God assured Abraham that he intended to give a different land to him and his descendants (Genesis 12:7; 13:14-17; 15:18-21; 17:8).
Abraham lived out his days as an alien there in that land of Canaan. By the time he died, the only plot of land that he could claim as his own was a field he had purchased so that he could acquire the cave within it as a burial ground for his wife, Sarah. But while only an acre or two may have been registered in his name at the county courthouse, God had promised to give his descendants possession of that whole land, as far as the eye could see.
Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, was the child of God's promise and the heir of God's covenant with Abraham. He, too, lived out his days as an alien, a sojourner, there in the land of Canaan.
We do not see much of Isaac in his own right. His character, it seems, is always as a supporting actor, never the star.
First, he plays the part of Abraham's son: the fulfillment of God's promise, the object of Ishmael's antagonism, and the symbol of God's great test of Abraham's faith and obedience.
Isaac's next major role is almost entirely offstage. Like those occasional television characters (Carlton, the doorman on Rhoda, Norm's wife on Cheers) who are recurring in their series and yet never actually seen, Isaac is invisible during the marvelous story of how God provided a wife for him.
And that marriage, then, leads to Isaac's third costarring role: dad.
Isaac married a woman named Rebekah, and she gave birth to twin boys. They were not identical twins, however. In truth, they could not have been much more different.
The firstborn was Esau. He came out conspicuously red and uncommonly hairy, and his appearance gave rise to his name, "Esau," which meant "hairy." At first blush, the name seems disappointing. In the preceding stories from Genesis, we have been introduced to marvelous and meaningful names. The baby Noah was named with profound expectation. Abraham's original name, Abram, was noble, and his new name from God was full of promise. Isaac's name was marked by good humor and joy. But "Esau"? How unimaginative. How ignoble.
And yet, Esau's name was a sight better than his younger brother's.
When the second child was born, in dramatic contrast to Esau, he was smooth skinned (see Genesis 27:11). And because he came out right on Esau's heels -- literally -- his parents named that second boy "Jacob," meaning "heel holder" or "supplanter." While Esau may have been named for a rather superficial trait, Jacob, it seems, was named for a character flaw.
As they grew up, the two young men were as different as their appearances. Esau was an outdoorsman -- a hunter -- a man who smelled like animals and fields. Jacob, however, was more manicured and genteel. In one episode, when Esau comes in from the fields, he finds Jacob in the kitchen. That snapshot captures each man in his own natural habitat.
With boys as different as Jacob and Esau were, it's easy to imagine that parental preferences and prejudices formed early. Unless parents are vigilant to avoid it, reputations in the home harden quickly, as each child stakes out exclusive claim to some territory. The smart one. The athletic one. The troublemaker. The clown.
Esau was out in the fields; Jacob was inside in the kitchen. Jacob was brains; Esau was brawn. And Jacob was mama's boy; while Esau, the man's man, was his father's favorite son.
What is it like for a boy to grow up knowing that his father prefers someone else? A growing boy so deeply and so naturally needs the approval and affection of his father. Young Jacob must have lived his childhood in a constant but futile effort to get the same kind of smile, the same rapport, the same approving slap on the back that Esau enjoyed from Isaac.
Finally, one day Jacob got from Isaac precisely the kind of treatment typically reserved for Esau. Indeed, Jacob quite literally took something that had been reserved for Esau: Isaac's special blessing. That moment of deception -- that one final, desperate, heel-grabbing effort to come out first -- was the last straw. Jacob had to run away from home, while Esau stewed, murmuring threats, and promising himself revenge.
Paternal favoritism -- and being on the short end of it -- was the harmful environment in which Jacob grew up. Then Jacob himself settled in that place, that pattern, where his father had lived.
We fast forward to today's Old Testament reading, and we see Jacob as a father himself. He has twelve sons and a daughter. He had lived for two decades in northern Mesopotamia with his uncle, Laban, but now he was back in the same land where his father had lived before him, living the same way.
Though Jacob himself had grown up with the pain of paternal favoritism, he still introduced that same pattern into his own home and inflicted that pain on his own children. Joseph was Jacob's favorite, and everybody knew it. And as though the disproportionate affection and approval were not apparent enough, Jacob's preferential treatment one day took on a visual aid.
Jacob gave Joseph a coat. On first hearing, that seems like a small thing, but in a day when new clothes were not so commonplace as they are today, this gift was a big deal. Furthermore, in a family of twelve sons, one suspects that hand-me-downs were the order of the day. Yet, here was an article of clothing that bypassed the older brothers and went straight to the favored Joseph. To make matters still worse, this coat was a distinctive one: colorful, distinguished, and probably expensive.
In a world of browns and grays, Joseph's colorful coat was as conspicuous as his father's preferential love. With that coat on, the other sons of Jacob literally could not look at Joseph without being reminded that he was the favored one. That fact, combined with Joseph's own precociousness, gnawed at them.
How striking is the phrase "they saw him from a distance." For the prodigal's father, that sight on the horizon set him running to embrace his beloved son (Luke 15:20). For these under-loved brothers, however, that sight was enough to prompt a murder conspiracy.
We get a measure of the brothers' animosity toward Joseph both in what they did and in what they almost did.
What they almost did was kill their brother -- just as Esau had pledged to do to Jacob a generation before. What they did do -- their alternative to outright fratricide -- was to throw Joseph into a pit. Deep and dry, it would be a terrible and inescapable death. Reuben had a more merciful plan; but no one else, including Joseph himself, knew about it.
Perhaps the most telling image of Joseph's brothers came not in the moment when they threw him into the dreadful pit, but in what they did next. "Then they sat down to eat." It is a portrait of indifference and complacency. While their little brother cried out for mercy, they were filling their stomachs. Most of us find that our appetites are diminished by unpleasantness, tension, or strife, but not these boys. Nothing wrong with their stomachs; just something terribly wrong with their hearts.
Then, providentially, Joseph's life was spared by the arrival of a caravan. Judah reasoned with his brothers: "What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh." Here is the motto of selfishness masquerading as ethics: What is the profit to us of this action or that? And here is the utter poverty of their consciences: that they conclude Joseph ought to be sold rather than killed since, after all, "he is our brother, our own flesh."
Long before modern social scientists began to talk about family systems and dysfunctional family patterns, God referenced the terrible phenomenon of the parents' iniquity affecting their children "to the third and the fourth generation" (Numbers 14:18). We see the tragic pattern played out here in this unredeemed display by the sons of Jacob. Isaac had played favorites among his sons, and it eventually erupted into the one brother seeking to kill the other. Then one brother had to leave home. Then that fugitive became a father, who also played favorites among his sons, where murder was also narrowly avoided.
Jacob had settled, you see, in the place and the pattern where his father had lived.
The stories about Jacob come rather early in Old Testament history. Further down the road, in the era of the divided monarchy, we find quick sketches and summaries of so many kings who ruled in Israel or Judah along the way. The biblical author employs a telling standard for offering a quick, thumbnail evaluation of those kings: The kings are compared to their fathers.
Abijam, the son of Rehoboam and great-grandson of David, is summarized thus: "He committed all the sins that his father did before him; his heart was not true to the Lord his God, like the heart of his father David" (1 Kings 15:3). Later, the Bible reports that King Asa of Judah "did what was right in the sight of the Lord, as his father David had done" (1 Kings 15:11). Meanwhile, King Ahaziah of Israel "did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father and mother, and in the way of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin" (1 Kings 22:52).
What is the land where our fathers lived? What was the example, "the way," of our fathers and mothers?
Perhaps it was a life of faith, wisdom, and charity, and we do well to settle there, too. But perhaps it was not. Perhaps, instead, some of us are heirs to a legacy of addiction or abuse; of uneven love or misplaced priorities. Perhaps we have seen in ourselves how easy, how natural it is to settle in the same places and patterns -- in the land where our fathers had lived.
Each generation must hear God's call anew. For some of us, that will mean a deliberate departure from the land -- the life -- where our fathers had lived; a departure to go to a new and different land that God will show us (Genesis 12:1).
