Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way.

How many of you remember photo albums? Not the ones on your phone–heavy volumes of thick pages filled with faded pictures of family vacations and milestones. Turn the pages back to black and white or even sepia images of grands and great-grands, or even greater. 

We gaze at them and wonder what they were thinking as they sat, so still and unsmiling. 

We were but a gleam in their eye–a gleam of promise of generations to come. 

The Storyteller of Genesis offers us a kind of photo album of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the children of God. Many of the images are informal shots of a profoundly dysfunctional family.  But we don’t see that right at the beginning.  First, we see a picture of Abram and Sarai outside the tent at Mamre, their faces a glowing with joy and disbelief; in the background the retreating backs of three strangers who have just left them with the news that they would at long last be parents. Turn the page to Abraham years later, gazing at a sky brilliant with stars; reassured by God that he would be the father of nations, a Promise that God would be faithful in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Flip the pages of the album forward, past Hagar and Ishmael (the dysfunction shifts into high gear), quickly past Abraham and Isaac (that’s for another day), past Rebekah when she tumbled from her camel, having literally fallen for Isaac at first sight. Then flip through twenty years of images of just the two of them. No pictures of proud pregnancy; just a gleam of Promise in their eyes, gradually fading.

Until we see the Promise again revived out of barrenness, twin boys who cannot be more different and who have been at each other from before their beginning. (Rebekah, in this picture, looks exhausted.) 

Today the Storyteller points us to Jacob as he cons Esau out of his birthright, and Esau letting him do it, walking off without a backward glance at his empty soup bowl. 

Thus Esau despised his birthright.

And it all began with a Promise.

I asked a friend the other day, “What do you think is God’s Promise?” They said, “To whom?” 

Good point. God made a Promise to Adam and Eve that, in spite of their disobedience, God would not abandon them. God’s rainbow was a Promise to Noah that God would never again destroy the Earth by flood. God made a Promise to Abraham that his heirs would be as numerous as a sky full of stars. God promised through the resurrection of Jesus that death would never have the last word. 

All are different promises, with one thing in common. No matter what, 

God goes all in.

God’s promise is faithfulness.

Holding that thought, we’re returning to Esau. Today we’ll leave Jacob in the background, 

cheerfully savoring his victory. His story will have many twists and turns, but it’s Esau who shouts from the page today, challenging us to confront the striking parallel between his story and our present moment. 

So today we are going all in on Esau.

He was drawn to Jacob’s fire outside the cooking tent by the smell of red lentils in a savory goat broth, studded with tender bits of meat, flavored with coriander and cumin. And he decided he wanted it. Now. It wasn’t any more complicated than that. 

Smell stew, want stew, get stew, eat stew, move on. He had no interest in letting something as intangible and indefinable as his future get in the way of… his appetite. So, he sold his birthright–his future standing in the family–to Jacob, for a proverbial “mess of pottage.”

Birthright was the formal understanding of inheritance in the ancient world. The eldest son assumed the birthright upon the death of the father, receiving the lion’s share of the property and control of the estate. The next sons (yes, sons) in line got pretty much nothing. Jacob was crafty–he knew his brother’s weaknesses and played on them. 

And Esau didn’t care until it was too late–until he had lost it all.

This image of Esau as a slave to his obsession with instant gratification 

leaps from the page, pointing us directly to our present ecological moment. Our precious planet is literally on fire because humans cannot give up their desire for what we want when we want it. Amazon Prime Days are the perfect example–“Stock up for cheap and our overworked drivers will fuel up their smiley trucks and have it at your door in an hour because we know you can’t wait another minute for your discount Roomba!” Our addiction to the mess of pottage that is our reliance on fossil fuels is heating our oceans and choking them with plastic, burning our forests, and killing off our fellow creatures and children of God. How long has it been since you’ve seen a field illuminated by fireflies? A sky prodigiously strewn with stars? A flowering bush with more than a couple of bees dancing in the blossoms? The Earth is not a resource to be used up and thrown away when we’re no longer interested. She is our Mother who sustains us and all life, and we are killing her because we don’t know the meaning of the word “enough.”

Well, that was a rant. Perhaps more of a lament, which is necessary as part of a process of turning, repenting, and making change. Lament articulates the pain, making room for what comes next.

So where do we go from here, in this precarious moment?

Precarious moments are where God does God’s best work! Precarious moments are where God met Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Mary. It’s where God met Adam, Noah, and Abraham. And Daniel, Joseph, Jonah, Job, Peter, and Paul. And everyone who, at their very depths, finally realizes that everything we hold tightly to and try to control is no match for the gift of God’s grace. God remains faithful, and present, even, and especially, in precarious moments. That’s a Promise. 

This isn’t a platitude–“God loves us so everything will be okay”. Words without root in the heart are hollow vessels for cynicism and inaction. Rather, articulating and internalizing God’s promise is a necessary remembering of our foundational grounding in God’s Promise of faithfulness, and of our gratitude to the Earth for all that She provides. A mutual relationship that is based on our deep knowledge of who and what sustains us pulls us into the circle of our faithfulness to the One who has been faithful to us. This enables us to let go of our need to control, to hoard, to exploit, and to want what we want when we want it. We can’t afford to do that anymore –business as usual is simply not sustainable.

Writer and activist Wendell Berry writes: “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

Easier said than done, right? The Storyteller’s family album shows us that God has yearned for humankind to mirror God’s faithfulness back to God and into the rest of Creation since the very beginning, and we’ve kept going two steps forward and ten steps back. In this precarious moment we can begin moving forward with those things that we know we can do today: Go to a farmer’s market, start composting, buy local honey, contribute to an environmental advocacy group, support local efforts to get rid of gas-powered leaf blowers, eat meatless once a week (I have a great recipe for lentil soup). And when we do these things, do them, not out of guilt or fear, but out of love and gratitude for the grace that we have received from Creation, and out of hope for our children and fellow creatures. Because, just like fear, hope is contagious. So, why not choose the latter?