Genesis 25:19-34; Psalm 119:105-112; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
History can be troubling. Consider the founding fathers of America. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all owned enslaved people—hundreds of them. Thomas Jefferson even fathered several children with one of the women he enslaved, Sally Hemings, who was also his wife’s half-sister—talk about your family trees. Though John Adams never owned enslaved people, he was the first president to live in the White House, which was built in part by enslaved labor, as were the Capitol and many other government buildings in Washington, D.C., and throughout our nation.
There is a profound irony in a nation founded on the ideals of liberty and equality while relying upon the institution of slavery. That irony points to something even darker as we wrestle with how to understand our history. It has led to disagreement and division as we either try to ignore that history or feel threatened by its truth.
Of course, slavery was not the only injustice tolerated by our founders. There was the assumption that race determined a person’s value—consider the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a human being for representation while granting them none of the rights of citizenship. Think, too, of the treatment of Native peoples, who were driven from their lands through broken treaties, deception, and violence. There was the exclusion of women from political life—something some Christian Nationalists still advocate today. They believed that democracy itself should be largely reserved for educated, property-owning white men. Corporal punishment, public executions, rigid class hierarchies, and even dueling in defense of one’s honor were accepted social norms. Alexander Hamilton, anyone?
Certainly slavery and our treatment of Indigenous peoples remain among the darkest chapters of our history, but the other social and political structures also force us to wrestle with who we are as a nation. If we are willing to be honest, they call us to confront the injustices and contradictions woven into our founding while also appreciating the remarkable achievements of those who established this country. There are no easy answers. Nor should there be. And I wonder if it is precisely in our willingness to wrestle with these questions that our greatest growth and maturity as a nation might occur.
Maturity often comes through struggle. Remember when you were a child and got sent to your room? At first, you sulked and pouted, convinced you had been treated unfairly. But if you stayed there long enough to wrestle with those feelings, you often emerged wanting to be restored to the family. You apologized. You showed remorse. You tried not to repeat the same mistake. That is maturity.
If your parents never confronted your bad behavior, never gave you tome to contemplate it, you would have been doomed to repeat it over and over again—stagnating the possibilities of growth and maturity. Growth requires honest confrontation. Social maturity happens much the same way. And we see that truth in the story of Jacob and Esau.
Even before they were born, Jacob and Esau struggled with one another in Rebekah’s womb. At birth, Jacob grasped Esau’s heel as though trying to pull him back and beat him into the world. Jacob’s name means “supplanter,” and it sounds like the Hebrew word for “heel.” Frankly, Jacob is a heel. He is not a particularly admirable character. He deceives his dying father. He exploits his starving brother. Conflict and deception become defining features of his life. We hear part of that story today.
Jacob is cooking a pot of stew when Esau returns from the field famished. This is not the ordinary hunger we complain about when lunch is late. This is the kind of hunger that means you are on the edge of starvation. Esau even says he is about to die.
Imagine Jacob—lean, quiet, tending a pot of lentils from his mother’s garden. Then Esau arrives, usually the stronger brother, now gaunt and empty-handed after an unsuccessful hunt. This is not simply a story about impulsiveness or Esau exaggerating any claims of hunger. This is a story of life and death. It is about vulnerability. Esau asks the obvious question: What good is a birthright if you are dead?
Jacob sees his brother’s desperation and treats it as an opportunity.
One cannot help but wonder how many times Jacob had heard the stories of his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, welcoming three strangers, or how Rebekah, his mother,had shown generous hospitality to Abraham’s servant even before she knew he was looking for a bride for Issac. Hospitality and generosity were woven into his family’s story. Yet instead of offering bread to his hungry brother, Jacob names his price.
Whether it was years of sibling rivalry, parental favoritism, or simply a scheme he had long nurtured in his heart, Jacob chooses self-interest over compassion. His actions are profoundly unfaithful, and they will haunt him for the rest of his life.
This is how Israel’s story begins: with a stolen birthright and a fugitive running from the consequences of his own choices.
Years after the incident with Esau, Jacob’s name is changed to Israel after wrestling with God beside the River Jabbok. He neither wins nor loses. Scripture says he prevails, but perhaps it is more accurate to say he survives. He walks away with a blessing—and with a limp.
By then Jacob had deceived his father, cheated his brother, and swindled his father-in-law. Laban, his father-in-law, pursues him from behind while Esau approaches with four hundred men ahead. He is caught between the two men he has wronged; Jacob finally has nowhere left to run. That is the night he wrestles with God.
It is as though he has finally been sent to his room. He wrestles with his fear, his guilt, his identity, and perhaps even with the story he has been telling himself about who he is. By morning he limps toward his brother. Instead of revenge, Esau embraced him. The brothers who struggled in the womb are reconciled, and so are two peoples—two nations—whose stories began in conflict.
Israel tells its history with remarkable honesty. It begins not with flawless heroes but with flawed ancestors. Israel remembers itself as a people who struggle—with one another, with God, and with themselves and they have the strength to hang on to their existence and wrestle for their inheritance. That honesty does not always paint them in the best light, but they refuse to hide their story or settle for easy answers.
Our own history also begins with flawed ancestors who struggled with contradiction and inequality, realities that continue to shape us today. The question is whether we are willing to wrestle honestly with our past, or whether we will settle for denial and simplistic narratives that keep us from growing into the people God calls us to be.
I have never heard a theologian defend Jacob, though I have heard many try to understand him. For thousands of years Jews and Christians have wrestled with this story of deception and trickery. No interpretation fully excuses Jacob, condemns Esau, or resolves every tension. Instead, the wrestling itself becomes holy because it forms a people willing to tell the truth.
Perhaps that is God’s invitation to us. Not simply to confess the sins of the past, but to recognize the ways we still profit from another person’s vulnerability. Every time someone must choose between medicine and groceries, every time a family loses housing while others accumulate abundance, every time a child goes hungry while food is wasted, we are confronted with Jacob’s question all over again: Will we exploit another’s desperation, or will we respond with compassion?
Like Jacob, we may leave the struggle limping. But if we have truly wrestled with God as a people, as a nation, as individuals, we will also leave with a blessing: hearts made more honest, hands made more generous, and lives committed to building a world where no one is forced to surrender their birthright simply to survive.
That is what maturity looks like—not denying the truth, but allowing the truth to transform us into people of justice, mercy, and reconciliation because the gospel calls us not merely to wrestle with history but to be changed by it.
Amen