A Man Of The Moment
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Do you remember the movie 1988 movie, Twins? It was comedy that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as, of all things, twin brothers. Even if you know nothing about the plot of the movie, the mental picture of those two actors standing side-by-side as twins is itself pretty funny.
The setup for the move is that the brothers are the result of an experiment to grow a perfect man, who is the Schwarzenegger character, named Julius. But in the course of manipulating his genes when he's in the prenatal stage, the scrap that is not used develops into the smaller brother, Vincent. Thus Julius is planned and grows to athletic proportions. Vincent is an accident and develops from the leftovers. While Julius is taken to a south sea island and raised by philosophers, Vincent is placed in an orphanage. Grown up, Vincent becomes a low life and is about to be killed by loan sharks when Julius discovers that he has a brother and begins looking for him. The plot takes off from there.
That movie was lighthearted and in the end, the twin brothers end up as good friends.
Take a similar scenario, where twins are born, destined not only to have unequal physical proportions, but also to have different fates, with the divine balance set against one of them. That's because of God's declaration to their mother while they are yet in her womb that the elder will serve the younger. Under those circumstances, the scenario is not funny, and the brothers go through years when there is great anger between them. Finally, they are reconciled, but it is an uneasy peace, and neither has much to do with the other. It's not a particularly happy ending.
That story is not a movie, but is the biblical account of Esau and Jacob, the twins born to Isaac and Rebekah. The part of their story we are considering today is when both brothers are still young men living in the family compound and before the great division developed between them. They are very different from each other, both physically and in personality. Esau, the twin born first, is a rugged outdoorsman and a hunter. He is his father's favorite, especially because the old man has a taste for the meat Esau brought home from his hunting forays. Jacob, however, is more of a homebody, and a quiet person more given to the pursuit of personal advancement than of wild game. Jacob is his mother's favorite.
There is also one more thing that sets them apart: the issue of primogeniture. That is the principle practiced in their society whereby the firstborn son -- Esau in this case -- is the one designated to take over leadership of the family clan when the father dies and also to receive a double portion of the inheritance. That is his birthright. It was a big deal in the ancient world.
Then comes the incident in today's reading. Esau has been out on a hunting trip and when he comes home, he is really hungry. In fact, he is so famished that getting some food quickly is all he has on his mind. It so happens that at that very moment Jacob is cooking up a pot of red lentil stew, so Esau asks for a plateful. Jacob is willing to give him some, but only for a price. "First sell me your birthright," he says. Esau reasons that he is better off with a full stomach and no birthright, than dead from hunger but in possession of his birthright. So without any more thought than that, he agrees.
Now this was a very shortsighted decision on Esau's part. In the first place, it was an exaggeration that he was about to die from hunger. He'd been out in the field all day and probably had not carried enough lunch with him, so that upon arrival at home, he was in one of those hungry stages where you say something like, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." Considering only how he felt at that moment, he agreed to exchange something of great value for bowl of red stew. It was a supreme example of short-range thinking, and even worse, it had long-range consequences; it set the stage for the later bitterness between the brothers.
One indicator that Esau was thinking only of his present moment is captured in the Hebrew language in which this story was originally written. Our NRSV translation has Esau saying to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red stuff," but rabbi and author, Burton Visotzky, says that a better translation of what the hungry Esau said is "Gimme some of that red stuff." In fact, Rabbi Visotzky points out that the Hebrew verb he translated "gimme" is generally employed in the Bible for the act of providing fodder to animals.1 That Esau used that word indicates that he was hardly being a connoisseur here. He just wanted something to fill his belly.
There are five more verbs that report that rest of Esau's behavior in this incident. They are ate, drank, rose, departed, and despised. The first four tell us that he did not savor his costly meal; he just shoveled it in and left. The last verb, "despised," is the narrator's comment on Esau's awful decision. In trading off his valuable birthright for a meal -- and a pretty ordinary one at that -- he, in effect, despised his birthright, treated it as though it wasn't worth much. There is a Yiddish folk expression that comes out of this biblical story. When someone is rude at the table or just "stuffs his face," it is said pejoratively that he "eats like Esau."2
I have called Esau a "man of the moment," and it is in that description that he is most like many of us today. It is quite natural and appropriate for little children to be focused on what excites them at that instant in time, but lots of people never seem to outgrow that. We continue to want what we want right now, even if fulfilling the momentary urge will affect our longer-term goals. We often seem to be unwilling to delay immediate pleasure even when it is in our best interests to do so.
Think of it as eating our dessert before we eat our vegetables. That's okay occasionally, but always filling up on dessert so that there is no room for vegetables is very bad for our health. Going outside to play instead of doing our homework is acceptable now and then, but make it a habit and it likely will doom you to low-paying jobs when you grow up. And the same is often true of other things that give their rewards immediately but keep us from reaching our longer-term goals later.
Psychiatrist/author, Scott Peck, points out that life presents us with a series of problems, some of which are painful to deal with. Nonetheless, to avoid a miserable existence we need to deal with them, because most of them do not go away on their own. One of the basic tools that we need to solve those problems is the willingness to delay gratification. He defines delaying gratification as "a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live."3 Another way to define delaying gratification is simply as "putting off pleasure until your work is finished."
In my own life, one of my personal rules is "Do the hard stuff first." I have not always lived by it, but when I have, it has made my life better and has let me encounter fewer problems.
David Laibson, a professor at Harvard University who was a researcher and collaborator on a brain study in 2004, sees the matter as a battle between emotions and reason: "Our emotional brain has a hard time imagining the future, even though our logical brain clearly sees the future consequences of our current actions. Our emotional brain wants to max out the credit card, order dessert, and smoke a cigarette. Our logical brain knows we should save for retirement, go for a jog, and quit smoking."4
Of course, both Dr. Peck and Professor Laibson describe this matter of delayed gratification in behavioral terms, but you didn't come here this morning to get a lesson in human behavior or psychology, so why talk about delayed gratification in church?
One reason is simply that this scripture reading itself brought the subject up. In Esau, it gives us a clear example of someone who lived so fully in the moment that he messed up his future. Another reason to think about this in church is that for spirituality and Christianity itself to have their full effect on us, we need to be able to link to the future. Christianity does have a great deal to say about how we live in the present. In fact, the Bible doesn't say very much about the future in its meaning of the time ahead on earth in a person's life. In the old King James Version of the Bible, the word "future" does not even occur. Nonetheless, underlying Christianity's focus on serving God in the present is the confidence that God's kingdom will eventually come. And living morally and spiritually today sometimes means delaying or even rejecting some pleasures in favor of receiving a heavenly reward.
We don't often talk about the Christian life that way -- living God's way to inherit the kingdom of God. We'd rather talk about commitment and loving God as their own reward, but we don't all function the same way, and it is not wrong to work for a spiritual long-range goal. We are saved by God's grace, not by any good works on our part, but good works are essential to our faith. As James wrote in his biblical book: "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?" (James 2:14). Sometimes that means doing good that is inconvenient or unpleasant in the present moment but which is in line with the promise of God's kingdom.
We've been talking about Esau as a man of the moment, but let's think for a moment about his brother. Jacob wasn't a model of righteousness either, but he clearly did have the ability to delay gratification and to work for long-term goals. If you follow Jacob's story, you'll see that he worked for seven long years to obtain the wife he wanted. After his father-in-law pulled a sneaky trick on him, he worked another seven. It could not have been easy, but he did it. Jacob was the brother through whom the people of Israel descended, and in part, he was able to fit into God's plan because he was willing to take the long view.
•
It is good to remember that about Jacob when we are inclined to be impulsive with our spending or to take our present good health for granted. Recall the proverbial old person in poor health who said, "If I had known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
•
It's good to remember that about Jacob when there's schoolwork to be done at the same time there is an entertaining program on television or a new video game on hand.
•
It's good to remember that about Jacob when we are tempted to take moral shortcuts or to get away with something shady "just once."
•
It is good to remember that about Jacob when the choice is between doing a good deed today and putting it off to a more convenient time. That's when we need to be people of the moment in the positive sense, doing the thing that helps and heals right now rather than putting it off.
We need to practice our faith moment by moment, very much in the present, and to that end, we should not confuse delaying gratification with delaying to do what will help others or what will fix a troubling situation. But we also need to keep the long view -- the kingdom view -- in mind so that the ways we spend ourselves today are not just for the immediate kick, but also as an investment in God's kingdom to come. Amen.
____________
1. Dr. Burton L. Visotzky, The Genesis of Ethics (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996), pp. 131, 138.
2. Shlomo Riskin, "Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Vayetze," November 24, 2001, www.ohrtorahstone.org.il/parsha/5762/vayetze62.htm.
3. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, A Touchstone Book, 1978), pp. 15-19.
4. Steve Bradt, "Brain takes itself on over immediate vs. delayed gratification," Harvard University Gazette, October 21, 2004, www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/10.21/07-brainbattle.html.
The setup for the move is that the brothers are the result of an experiment to grow a perfect man, who is the Schwarzenegger character, named Julius. But in the course of manipulating his genes when he's in the prenatal stage, the scrap that is not used develops into the smaller brother, Vincent. Thus Julius is planned and grows to athletic proportions. Vincent is an accident and develops from the leftovers. While Julius is taken to a south sea island and raised by philosophers, Vincent is placed in an orphanage. Grown up, Vincent becomes a low life and is about to be killed by loan sharks when Julius discovers that he has a brother and begins looking for him. The plot takes off from there.
That movie was lighthearted and in the end, the twin brothers end up as good friends.
Take a similar scenario, where twins are born, destined not only to have unequal physical proportions, but also to have different fates, with the divine balance set against one of them. That's because of God's declaration to their mother while they are yet in her womb that the elder will serve the younger. Under those circumstances, the scenario is not funny, and the brothers go through years when there is great anger between them. Finally, they are reconciled, but it is an uneasy peace, and neither has much to do with the other. It's not a particularly happy ending.
That story is not a movie, but is the biblical account of Esau and Jacob, the twins born to Isaac and Rebekah. The part of their story we are considering today is when both brothers are still young men living in the family compound and before the great division developed between them. They are very different from each other, both physically and in personality. Esau, the twin born first, is a rugged outdoorsman and a hunter. He is his father's favorite, especially because the old man has a taste for the meat Esau brought home from his hunting forays. Jacob, however, is more of a homebody, and a quiet person more given to the pursuit of personal advancement than of wild game. Jacob is his mother's favorite.
There is also one more thing that sets them apart: the issue of primogeniture. That is the principle practiced in their society whereby the firstborn son -- Esau in this case -- is the one designated to take over leadership of the family clan when the father dies and also to receive a double portion of the inheritance. That is his birthright. It was a big deal in the ancient world.
Then comes the incident in today's reading. Esau has been out on a hunting trip and when he comes home, he is really hungry. In fact, he is so famished that getting some food quickly is all he has on his mind. It so happens that at that very moment Jacob is cooking up a pot of red lentil stew, so Esau asks for a plateful. Jacob is willing to give him some, but only for a price. "First sell me your birthright," he says. Esau reasons that he is better off with a full stomach and no birthright, than dead from hunger but in possession of his birthright. So without any more thought than that, he agrees.
Now this was a very shortsighted decision on Esau's part. In the first place, it was an exaggeration that he was about to die from hunger. He'd been out in the field all day and probably had not carried enough lunch with him, so that upon arrival at home, he was in one of those hungry stages where you say something like, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." Considering only how he felt at that moment, he agreed to exchange something of great value for bowl of red stew. It was a supreme example of short-range thinking, and even worse, it had long-range consequences; it set the stage for the later bitterness between the brothers.
One indicator that Esau was thinking only of his present moment is captured in the Hebrew language in which this story was originally written. Our NRSV translation has Esau saying to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red stuff," but rabbi and author, Burton Visotzky, says that a better translation of what the hungry Esau said is "Gimme some of that red stuff." In fact, Rabbi Visotzky points out that the Hebrew verb he translated "gimme" is generally employed in the Bible for the act of providing fodder to animals.1 That Esau used that word indicates that he was hardly being a connoisseur here. He just wanted something to fill his belly.
There are five more verbs that report that rest of Esau's behavior in this incident. They are ate, drank, rose, departed, and despised. The first four tell us that he did not savor his costly meal; he just shoveled it in and left. The last verb, "despised," is the narrator's comment on Esau's awful decision. In trading off his valuable birthright for a meal -- and a pretty ordinary one at that -- he, in effect, despised his birthright, treated it as though it wasn't worth much. There is a Yiddish folk expression that comes out of this biblical story. When someone is rude at the table or just "stuffs his face," it is said pejoratively that he "eats like Esau."2
I have called Esau a "man of the moment," and it is in that description that he is most like many of us today. It is quite natural and appropriate for little children to be focused on what excites them at that instant in time, but lots of people never seem to outgrow that. We continue to want what we want right now, even if fulfilling the momentary urge will affect our longer-term goals. We often seem to be unwilling to delay immediate pleasure even when it is in our best interests to do so.
Think of it as eating our dessert before we eat our vegetables. That's okay occasionally, but always filling up on dessert so that there is no room for vegetables is very bad for our health. Going outside to play instead of doing our homework is acceptable now and then, but make it a habit and it likely will doom you to low-paying jobs when you grow up. And the same is often true of other things that give their rewards immediately but keep us from reaching our longer-term goals later.
Psychiatrist/author, Scott Peck, points out that life presents us with a series of problems, some of which are painful to deal with. Nonetheless, to avoid a miserable existence we need to deal with them, because most of them do not go away on their own. One of the basic tools that we need to solve those problems is the willingness to delay gratification. He defines delaying gratification as "a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live."3 Another way to define delaying gratification is simply as "putting off pleasure until your work is finished."
In my own life, one of my personal rules is "Do the hard stuff first." I have not always lived by it, but when I have, it has made my life better and has let me encounter fewer problems.
David Laibson, a professor at Harvard University who was a researcher and collaborator on a brain study in 2004, sees the matter as a battle between emotions and reason: "Our emotional brain has a hard time imagining the future, even though our logical brain clearly sees the future consequences of our current actions. Our emotional brain wants to max out the credit card, order dessert, and smoke a cigarette. Our logical brain knows we should save for retirement, go for a jog, and quit smoking."4
Of course, both Dr. Peck and Professor Laibson describe this matter of delayed gratification in behavioral terms, but you didn't come here this morning to get a lesson in human behavior or psychology, so why talk about delayed gratification in church?
One reason is simply that this scripture reading itself brought the subject up. In Esau, it gives us a clear example of someone who lived so fully in the moment that he messed up his future. Another reason to think about this in church is that for spirituality and Christianity itself to have their full effect on us, we need to be able to link to the future. Christianity does have a great deal to say about how we live in the present. In fact, the Bible doesn't say very much about the future in its meaning of the time ahead on earth in a person's life. In the old King James Version of the Bible, the word "future" does not even occur. Nonetheless, underlying Christianity's focus on serving God in the present is the confidence that God's kingdom will eventually come. And living morally and spiritually today sometimes means delaying or even rejecting some pleasures in favor of receiving a heavenly reward.
We don't often talk about the Christian life that way -- living God's way to inherit the kingdom of God. We'd rather talk about commitment and loving God as their own reward, but we don't all function the same way, and it is not wrong to work for a spiritual long-range goal. We are saved by God's grace, not by any good works on our part, but good works are essential to our faith. As James wrote in his biblical book: "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?" (James 2:14). Sometimes that means doing good that is inconvenient or unpleasant in the present moment but which is in line with the promise of God's kingdom.
We've been talking about Esau as a man of the moment, but let's think for a moment about his brother. Jacob wasn't a model of righteousness either, but he clearly did have the ability to delay gratification and to work for long-term goals. If you follow Jacob's story, you'll see that he worked for seven long years to obtain the wife he wanted. After his father-in-law pulled a sneaky trick on him, he worked another seven. It could not have been easy, but he did it. Jacob was the brother through whom the people of Israel descended, and in part, he was able to fit into God's plan because he was willing to take the long view.
•
It is good to remember that about Jacob when we are inclined to be impulsive with our spending or to take our present good health for granted. Recall the proverbial old person in poor health who said, "If I had known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
•
It's good to remember that about Jacob when there's schoolwork to be done at the same time there is an entertaining program on television or a new video game on hand.
•
It's good to remember that about Jacob when we are tempted to take moral shortcuts or to get away with something shady "just once."
•
It is good to remember that about Jacob when the choice is between doing a good deed today and putting it off to a more convenient time. That's when we need to be people of the moment in the positive sense, doing the thing that helps and heals right now rather than putting it off.
We need to practice our faith moment by moment, very much in the present, and to that end, we should not confuse delaying gratification with delaying to do what will help others or what will fix a troubling situation. But we also need to keep the long view -- the kingdom view -- in mind so that the ways we spend ourselves today are not just for the immediate kick, but also as an investment in God's kingdom to come. Amen.
____________
1. Dr. Burton L. Visotzky, The Genesis of Ethics (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996), pp. 131, 138.
2. Shlomo Riskin, "Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Vayetze," November 24, 2001, www.ohrtorahstone.org.il/parsha/5762/vayetze62.htm.
3. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, A Touchstone Book, 1978), pp. 15-19.
4. Steve Bradt, "Brain takes itself on over immediate vs. delayed gratification," Harvard University Gazette, October 21, 2004, www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/10.21/07-brainbattle.html.
