Isaiah 55:1-5
Genesis 32:22-31
Common lectionaries were one of the last outcomes of 20th century ecumenism, a half century more or less when Christians sought unity rather than division. Our United Church of Christ, and similar denominations in other countries, were also an expression of that commitment.
The Revised Common Lectionary, which I and many other UCC pastors use in worship planning, was the third iteration of this schedule of readings, hence the name “Revised.” It follows the traditional liturgical seasons of Advent/Christmastide and Lent/Eastertide, then fills in ordinary time with a three-year cycle of texts intended to balance sequential and thematic reading. It is not always successful, especially when a pastor is faced with more readings than they intend to use, as is the case this morning. So we arrive at two seemingly dissimilar readings, one from Genesis and one from Deutero-Isaiah.
Let us begin with Genesis, which seems appropriate all things considered.
Genesis is a patchwork of at least two separate traditions, along with additions from the editors who combined the texts, and a couple of centuries of later redactors with different agendas. The result is a book with duplications, contradictions, and a disjointed narrative.
Today, we find ourselves in the middle of the story of Jacob, the third great patriarch of the Jewish faith after his grandfather, Abraham, and his father, Isaac. It is an episode in which Jacob wrestles with God who, in this text, is in the form of a man. Because this comes from what we know of as the Elohim source, God is never called Yahweh, as that name remains unknown to the Jewish people until Moses encounters the burning bush.
This is a story that is meant to explain, in this case the origin of the name of the nation. It is a little bit of myth dropped into a larger framing narrative about blessing and resources.
Jacob is a trickster, an archetype that occurs in many other religious traditions, including the broad category we call “indigenous” religion, which snobbishly means anything not from Eurasia.
Jacob’s mother prefers him over the first-born twin Esau, a burly redhead, and conspires to help Jacob steal his brother’s rightful blessing as the eldest. Or maybe Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils. Doesn’t matter. This is all about scarcity.
Esau promises to kill Jacob in revenge as soon as their father dies, so his mother sends Jacob away to the house of her brother, Jacob’s uncle Laban. There, he falls in love with his cousin, and asks for her hand in marriage in exchange for seven years of labor. His uncle agrees, but on the wedding night, swaps out his older daughter Leah. The trickster is tricked, and there is an agreement that he can marry his intended, Rachel, in exchange for seven more years of labor.
By the time we get to the God-wrestling story, Jacob has fathered eleven children by his two wives and their two handmaidens, which is to say slaves. He would eventually have at least twelve sons who will nominally become the twelve tribes of Israel. There is also one named daughter.
Having completed fourteen years of service and accumulated his own wealth in flocks and servants, Jacob is returning to Canaan, and this wrestling with God is inserted pretty randomly in the middle of yet another conflict between brothers, the third in Genesis to this point. In this case, the brothers are reconciled, and both become prosperous. The scarcity that drove the conflict was never real, and no one is murdered, like Abel, or cast out, like Ishmael. We will see the same pattern again with Jacob’s youngest son, Joseph with his coat of many colors, betrayed by his brothers and sold off into slavery, only to reconcile with his brothers and save their people, another tale of scarcity as famine drives the Jews to seek relief in Egypt. But that is a story for another day.
If this story is about scarcity, birthright, heirs, divine blessing, all in short supply, our reading from Isaiah promises the exact opposite.
This is from the final portion of a text we know as Deutero-Isaiah, written in the tradition of the original prophet, but centuries after his death. It was, in fact, written during the Babylonian Captivity, when the most useful Jews were deported to Babylon by that country’s conquering army. It is written in and for that captive community, a text that calls for a highway across the desert on which the newly liberated will return to Jerusalem and flourished in renewed covenant with God.
Divine abundance is not only material in the form of wine, milk, and bread. Other nations, seeing how the Jews have been blessed, will turn to them.
The Jews in Babylon were liberated when that country was in turn conquered by Persia, whose king is referred to as a messiah in Jewish scripture. Cyrus released the Jews, and even funded the reconstruction of Jerusalem. But there was socio-economic unpleasantness in that part of the story too, the continued construction of in-group and out-group, the manufacture of scarcity in the name of ethnic purity. Those left behind in Judah, defeated, left behind, raided by neighbors, had settled whatever land they could, land the returnees demanded back, the family portions so critical in the Jewish small-hold economy.
Still, our prophet in the Isaiah tradition is promising abundance. You will soon go home, she promises, free in the pursuit of happiness. Well, after paying taxes, of course.
Scarcity is sometimes real. There are famines, supply disruptions, crops rotting in the field because you’ve deported everyone willing to work for low wages in brutal conditions. But it often is not real. Put two toddlers in a room with dozens of toys, all exact pairs, and inevitably one will desire the toy the other toddler is playing with, even if there is an exact duplicate in sight. This is the heart of mimetic theory, the way we mimic the desire of others, so that there is a scarcity of happiness, and violence unfolds, among the toddlers who will soon be crying, among the nations at war.
Don’t believe me? Ask the parents of tween boys and the not so tween boys who chased the IcePop flavor of the social media influencer driven Prime energy drink in 2023, paying exorbitant prices to resellers online. Prime’s prime has passed, and it has disappeared completely from some markets. Then there is the latest color of the Stanley Quencher, also driven by social media influencers. Simply a large insulated cup, it went from $70 million in annual sales in 2019 to $750 million in annual sales in 2023. It is particularly perverse that the spin identified these as environmentally-friendly products, despite manufacture being moved overseas, despite the fact that they created artificial scarcity with limited edition colors, resulting in collectors purchasing more quenchers than they could ever use.
You don’t need to buy a dozen different Quenchers to have more Stanley Cups than the Maple Leafs have in my lifetime. You only need one.
Now, I am not suggesting that material goods are an obstacle to a spiritual life. If we all dropped our careers and gave everything away like Jesus or Francis of Assisi, society would collapse. Those Buddhist monks with their bowls have to knock on the doors of people who plant crops or go to the grocery store. And in this time when end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism has succeeded in state capture and is literally killing people, when every trip to the gas station is impacted by another forever war supporting racism and genocide, the last thing I am saying is that we should find happiness in social collapse.
But I am saying that the same zero-sum game of scarcity and manufactured desire, the same system of values that says your worth is what you have not who you are, is at play, whether you are chasing down the Lionel Messi Limited Edition Quencher on GOAT Pink, though good luck chasing down anything Lionel Messi, or you are renting out Madison Square Garden for your wedding.
Esau was ready to kill his brother over a birthright. Jacob was willing to steal it. Turns out, there was enough for both of them.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? The word of the prophet from Babylon twenty five centuries ago. A word for today. May we insure that everyone has bread. Or tortillas, because Taco Tuesday is awesome. And may we come to the table, where no one is turned away, and love is served. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
we live in abundance,
this good creation,
our own ability to find efficiencies
as perfect animals with cooking fires
and plows.
We create scarcity,
deciding this metal means status
and that product means happiness
and that success must be in short supply.
Everything in the gospel of Jesus
challenges this false consciousness,
demands that we refuse that game,
refuse the scapegoating that goes with it,
the arrogance that thinks we have earned anything
when all we have is good gift.
Help us turn to his words,
praying as he taught us saying:
Our Father