Don't Trade It Away - Genesis 25:29 34
Have you traded or sold something off
without realizing just how valuable it was, or would be? Have you had a trade that you wish you could
go back and undo, but it was too late?
I’m sure it has happened many times
during my life, but as I was reflecting, one of my occasions was an Ebay
transaction. Back in early 2000, when we
were living in Rich Square, we did a lot of shopping online because it was a
good thirty minute drive to the nearest Wal-Mart, and forty minutes to the
nearest mall. At that point in my life,
I had stopped collecting comic books. At
the same time Ebay was rising in popularity as a way to find good deals and
make some good sales of things you did not want any more. I decided, because at that point I had moved
three times in seven years, that I would sell off stuff that I did not want to
move any more. Unfortunately, as I see
now, I started with parts of my comic book collection. I was doing pretty well that spring, actually
selling enough of my comics to purchase an entire season’s wardrobe for Anita
and Natalie—and the clothes were not generic Wal-Mart/Kmart clothing but top
line name brands. Among the comics I
sold was the 100th issue of Uncanny X-men. I had paid $32 for it a few years earlier,
when I was reading comics and wanted it for my collection. I had thought it would sell high being a 100th
issue, but was only relieved when, after starting at ninety-nine cents, it sold
for about $36, so at least I got my money back from the purchase. This was early spring 2000. Folks that know comic books know what happened
in the summer of 2000—the release of the first X-men movie. With Marvel’s successful movie franchise,
that comic valued then at around $35 now sells on Ebay in the neighborhood of
$150-$185—about five times the value of what I sold it for.
If you think I feel bad about that,
think of the folks who had stock in this little computer company called
Apple…some of them purchasing it at its opening price of $2.75. Then when it looked like Apple was going to
be a flash in the pan and the home computer market was going to be ruled by the
Windows world, sold off their stock in 1997 after watching the value climb to
$72 a share and then fall below $13. Now
with the overwhelming popularity of iPods, iPhones, and Macbooks, those same shares
closed Friday at $492.81.
What was it for you? Was it something as small as Clayton
Kershaw’s rookie trading card during his second year in Major League Baseball? Was it something as large as trading in your
1976 Maverick for a 1985 Yugo? Maybe
you’re a high school or college student and you have one class or professor
that you had planned to take but find out it has tons of reading and so you
drop that class and add another, only to learn you have a fifty page paper to
write. Maybe you trade jobs, giving up a
nine to five leave it at work when you come home job to find out that the new
job, with slightly higher pay, demands you to be on call 24/7 even when you are
on vacation.
Hopefully, it was nothing like Esau’s
trade. Esau and his brother Jacob were
twins—not identical twins, but twins nonetheless. These two had been tangling with each other
for position since they were carried in their mother, Rebekah’s womb. They even tangled as they were born. Esau was born first, but Jacob was grasping
his foot as Esau emerged. The fact that
Esau emerged first, though, was significant.
In today’s time, a parent making out
their will can distribute their property in any way they like. They may consider their offspring and divide
the property out equally. They may have
a child that has been difficult and decide to give that child less, or in some
way restrict that child’s access to their inheritance. They may consider their children and decide
that they are going to donate all their worldly possessions to some charity
because either their children have no need of an inheritance, they have deemed
the charity to be in great need, or they have deemed their children to be
completely unworthy of an inheritance and want to make sure that they get
nothing, and others who deserve to be helped will be helped.
In the time of Isaac, Rebekah, Esau,
and Jacob, though, that is not how it worked.
The firstborn son, even in the case of twins, received a special
status. Among the rights of the first
born was to be understood as head of the family and entitlement to a double
portion of inheritance upon the death of his father. How would that work in the case of Jacob and
Esau? Let’s say, Isaac had 300 acres of
land—Esau, being the firstborn would inherit 200 acres and Jacob 100 acres; 600
sheep would result in 400 for Esau, 200 for Jacob; 750 denarii would end up
being 500 denarii for Esau and 250 for Jacob.
As head of the family, Esau would be in line to be part of the covenant
that God established with Abraham that was carried out through Isaac and his
offspring:
Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this
is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.
No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I
have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you
exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from
you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after
you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you
and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your
offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of
Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”[i]
The scriptures tell us that Esau was a
outdoorsy kind of man who loved to hunt while Jacob was more of a homebody, a
stay-at-the-tent- avoid-roughing-it-type of guy. One day Esau had been out in wild hunting, probably rising before dawn and quietly moving
out and sitting in his deer stand all day—or possibly tracking a tower of
giraffes over rough terrain. We don’t exactly know what he was hunting, and it
really doesn’t matter. What we do know
is that he comes in from a long day of hunting and is extremely hungry. As he makes his way back home, he comes upon
Jacob who is preparing lentil stew—a thick bean soup kind of dish. Esau comes up to Jacob and says, “Jacob, let
me have some of your stew for I am starving.”
Jacob, who, though enjoying his mother’s favor, has most likely always
envied the status Esau had gained by pushing his way through the birth canal
first, sees an opportunity—that is if his brother is really as hungry as he
appears to be.
Picture Jacob preparing a bowl of the
stew and sitting there, maybe a spoon in hand, saying, “so you want a bowl of
this stew, huh? You’re about to starve
to death, huh?” He scoops a spoonful of the soup and plays it up, enjoying the
aroma. “Just how hungry are you? Are you hungry enough to sell me your
birthright for this bowl of stew?”
Break from this image for a
minute. How many of you have ever said,
“I’m starving” or “I’m starved to death”?
Now keep your hand raised if you were really at the point of physical
danger when you said it. Keep that in
mind now as we consider Esau’s response.
Esau looked at Jacob like he was
crazy, “What are you talking about, I’m starving here, what good is my birthright
to me if I die from hunger right here.
You can have whatever you want, just give me a bowl of that stew.” Picture it, Jacob starts to hand over the
steaming bowl of stew and then draws it back, “swear it to me first.” Esau, stomach growling, “Whatever you want,
I, Esau, do hereby swear that as far as my birthright goes, I give up my
position of firstborn, and in exchange for of a bowl of that red stuff, my
brother Jacob is to be considered firstborn of Isaac’s sons.”
“Preacher, that’s a nice history lesson,
but what does that have to do with us if we don’t inherit things the same way?”
The thing is, my brothers and sisters,
we must be careful that we do not trade away our birthright, our inheritance,
for something as temporary, in the scope of things, as a bowl of bean soup.
What inheritance?
Consider these words from 1st
Peter, chapter one, beginning at verse three:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his
great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is
imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being
protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be
revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice,
even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so
that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though
perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and
honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love
him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice
with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of
your faith, the salvation of your souls.
This is the inheritance, that we need
to guard carefully—the salvation that we have received in being joined to Christ
the firstborn of the resurrection.
“But preacher, don’t we believe that
once we have been saved, once we have confessed our sin, and surrendered our
lives to the saving grace of God found in Christ, that we are forever more
saved—that we cannot lose that which God has given us? In other words, don’t we believe ‘once saved,
always saved?’”
Actually, no we do don’t. As Methodists, in the tradition of John
Wesley, we believe that along with the undeniable gift of our salvation that is
a pure gift from the God who loves us enough that He gave His only Son for
us—that His love for us was so great that He didn’t turn us into robots with
our salvation and remove the gift of free will from us—God loves us enough that
He still gives us the ability to walk in His grace or walk away from it. We can choose to trade our salvation away for
a bowl of lentil soup.
That bowl of soup may be our hunger
for pleasure and we decide indulge in drugs, sex outside of marriage, or
deciding that our bed is more comfortable that the pew on any given Sunday
morning.
That bowl of soup may be our hunger
for power and prestige and we decide it doesn’t matter who we have to step on
to get to the top, or that those who are not like us are less than us, and are
there to serve us.
That bowl of soup may be pride in
which we decide that we are the standard by which everything must be judged.
That bowl of soup may be anger and
vengeance and we try to get even with those who wrong us or we rejoice at
seeing someone else getting what we think they deserve.
That bowl of soup may be money
flavored either by an effort to make a profit regardless of whether what we
sale is overpriced or immoral or by and effort to save as much as we can on our
purchases, regardless of ethical conditions under which our stuff is made or
harvested.
That bowl of soup may be served in any
number of additional ways that we face every day…and we have to ask, are we
willing to trade away our new birthright—what will we sell out our salvation in
order to have?
Have we traded it away?
If so, there is hope, there is good
news. While Jacob never offered Esau his
birthright back, and later own, under the encouragement of his mother, took not
only Esau’s birthright, but the blessing Isaac intended for Esau as well, God’s
desire is that we reclaim our inheritance.
Just as God pursued the faithfulness
of His people over and over again through the Old Testament, having chosen
them, refusing to walk away, and like Hosea pursing his unfaithful wife, God in
Christ came, not to call the righteous, but to call the sinners to repentance…we
are invited daily to give up that bowl of lentil soup we have taken and
surrender once again to the redeeming grace of God, allowing Him to cleanse us,
and fill us with what will truly satisfy us, His very presence and an
unbelievable inheritance.
My friends, let us not trade our
inheritance for a bowl of lentil soup—for with our inheritance, more than a
bowl of soup awaits us—there is a full-fledged wedding banquet in store.
In the name of the Father and the Son
and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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