Can't We Just Get Along

Written by Ed Kauffman

Can’t We Just Get Along

Stampede Sunday, July 10, 2011

Ed Kauffman

 

When I was growing up, my family traveled 26 miles each Sunday to church – a small mission post to which my family and a number of others had committed themselves to attending.  We would pile in the car, Mom and Dad in the front seat and us three brothers in the back and head off.  As was usually the case we wouldn’t make it all the way on that long drive without some kind of trouble erupting in the back seat, and one of us would get a scolding or threat – not always of course the one who instigated the trouble. 

To make matters always a little worse, another of us brothers would often recall a line from an old gospel song that we often heard our Dad sing with his male quartet buddies. “Cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine, we’ll understand it, all by and by.”  Some of you have brothers, you can borrow that.

Brothers not getting along have a long history, all the way back to Cain and Abel, I suppose.  Today we want to begin a series of sermons exploring incidents from the life of Jacob, stories found in Genesis chapters 25 to 33.  Jacob’s story continues through the rest of the book of Genesis, over shadowed somewhat by the Joseph stories, but we won’t get that far. 

We are introduced to Jacob in Genesis 25, beginning at verse 19 with a brief genealogy listing both Jacob’s father, Isaac, and his mother Rebecca who came from the old country – the land that Abram left to follow God’s leading.  We are told that Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebecca but that she did not have children until Isaac was 60, some 20 years later.  We’re not told how old Rebecca was.  And I must admit, it gave me pause – I have twin grandsons, I can’t imagine if they were my children!

And what a pregnancy it was!  Two children already struggling in the womb.  It was bad enough that Rebekah wonders if she will survive and cries out to God, “If it is going to be like this, why do I live?”

The stories of Jacob and Esau and their troubled relationship form a great deal of the material about Jacob that we find in Genesis.  From their birth and naming onward, their conflict can be read on many different levels.  On the broadest scale, it can be seen as an explanation for the conflict between the children of Israel and the Edomites, a conflict that continues through history.  That is the inference of God’s explanation to Rebekah and the explanations for the names. 

But on the more immediate scale, it is a case of family dynamics and could be seen as the first case of conflict between the farmers and the ranchers.  Although we are told that the conflict was inevitable in some ways, the story with which we are concerned today is classic.

Esau was a hunter, a man of the field, and for that his father Isaac favoured him.  Esau roamed the wide open spaces, took his chances against the weather and the wild animals.  He was the proto-typical outdoors type.  A free-spirit, open range kind of a guy.

Jacob, on the other hand, was a quiet man who lived in tents.  A settler, a farmer who raised his crops, enjoyed cooking up a good pot of stew, maybe even a vegetarian.  And he was his mother’s favourite.  And that sets up the first conflict story in the series.

One day, Esau came in from riding the range, famished. His tale went something like this:

(to the tune: Cool Water)

All day I've faced the barren waste without a taste of lentils, red lentils.

Old Dan & I, about to die, we spurn our rights, for lentils, warm, tasty, lentils.

 

On the other hand, Jacob seemed in an advantageous position:

 

(to: The Farmer in the Dell)

Farmer Jacob had some stew, eyi, eyi, oh.

And brother Esau wanted some too, eyi, eyi, oh.

With a birthright here, and a birthright there,

Jacob seemed to want it, and Esau didn't care.

Farmer Jacob had some stew, eyi, eyi, oh.

 

And so the conflict and deceit began.  And the blame game can begin.  Who really was at fault here?  Clearly the author had their bias, as they end the tale with the comment, “Thus Esau despised his birthright.”  But was Jacob any less wrong?  While Esau may have traded his birthright, a future possibility, for an immediate quenching of his hunger, Jacob saw an opportunity to take advantage, and took it. The birthright had to do with inheritance.  As the oldest, Esau had a right to a larger share of his father’s wealth when Isaac died.  He would have gotten 2/3 to Jacob’s 1/3. 

But now Esau had traded it for a bowl of stew. “If I’m going to die of hunger,” he figured, “what good is an inheritance?”  And Jacob, true to his name as the grabber, sees and seizes his opportunity.  Whether his mother had told him of God’s message to her or not, we don’t know, although we do know that later his mother schemed with him in other plots.

And the conflicts between groups continued on from here.  In all cases it is sometimes hard to know who is most at fault, although that never seems to keep us from assigning blame.  An article in Eyewitness to History entitled “Ranchers and Farmers Collide in Nebraska, 1884” tells the following story:

It was written by one Solomon Butcher who kept a diary describing the homesteader's life and tells of an incident in which the homesteaders, faced with the ranchers' refusal to remove the fencing surrounding their grazing land, took matters into their own hands:

"Early in the fall of 1884 a few settlers located homesteads in the northeast corner of the Brighton Ranch Company's pasture, on Ash creek. This pasture was about fifteen miles square and extended several miles south of the Loup River almost to Broken Bow, and was enclosed with a wire fence. The land being government land, and subject to entry, these settlers served notice on the ranch company to remove their fence from about their claims within thirty days.

The company paid no attention to this request, and at the expiration of the time the settlers made a raid on the fence and appropriated the posts to make roofs for their sod houses. Roofs in those days were made by laying a large log, called a ridge log, lengthwise of the building at the top. The fence posts were then laid up to form the rafters, to which brush was fastened, the whole being covered with one or two layers of prairie sod, coated with several inches of yellow clay procured from the canyons, which turned the water effectually.

In a short time after the appropriation of these posts the foreman of the ranch had the settlers arrested and taken to Broken Bow for trial. The sheriff had no sooner departed with the prisoners than the second foreman of the ranch rigged up two large wagons, drawn by four mules each, and proceeded to the houses of the settlers, accompanied by a number of the cowboys. They drove up to a house, took a team and large chain, hitched onto the projecting end of the ridge log, and in about three seconds the neat little home was a shapeless mass of sod, hay, brush and posts mixed up in almost inextricable confusion. The ranchmen then culled their posts from the wreck and loaded them into the wagons, when they went to the next house and repeated the operation, leaving the occupants to pick their few household goods out of the ruins at their leisure. The boys were having great fun at the expense of the settlers, cracking jokes and making merry as the work of destruction went on. After destroying several houses in this manner they proceeded to the claim of a Mr. King, and Mrs. King, seeing them approaching, met them with a shotgun and dared them to come on. Had it been Mr. King, the invitation would possibly have been accepted, but the cowboys were too gallant to enter into a quarrel with a lady, and withdrew without molesting her.

In the meantime a boy of the settlement had been dispatched to Broken Bow on the fastest pony that could be procured, to secure help, and quite a posse of men from the town started for the scene of action. The foreman of the ranch, who was in Broken Bow at the time as complaining witness against the settlers, heard of this and sent one of his cowboys in haste to warn the second foreman of the impending invasion. This messenger arrived at the settlement in advance of the citizens and gave the alarm. The housewreckers were thoroughly scared, and turning the heads of their mule teams towards the South Loup, applied the whip freely. As the mules began to run over the rough prairie the posts began to fall off the wagons, and as the teams began to show signs of weariness the cowboys began to heave off more posts to lighten the load as they bumped along, leaving a trail behind them like that of a railroad construction gang.

Arriving at the ranch, they turned out their mules, secured their Winchesters and made a break for the hills on the south side of the river to await developments. When the posse of rescuers arrived at the little settlement and found the invaders gone, they did not follow them, but returned to Broken Bow. The cowboys remained in the hills two days, watching for the approach of the enemy in vain.

The ranch company failed to make any case against the settlers, it being shown that the ranch pasture was government land and that the claims were lawfully held by the homesteaders, who had a perfect right to remove the fence which enclosed their property. The prisoners were accordingly released and were not again molested. The second foreman of the ranch was subsequently arrested for tearing down the houses of the settlers, tried at Broken Bow, found guilty, fined $25 and costs and confined one day in the county jail"

 

Such conflicts became the stuff of stories and even musicals.  Rodgers & Hammerstein immortalized the conflict between farmers and ranchers in their classic tale “Oklahoma” and suggested a solution with this piece:

“The Farmer and the Cowboy should be friends”

Yet despite such admonition, the conflicts continued.  So what does this story of Jacob and Esau have to do with us, or with the account of God’s dealings with God’s people? 

Aside from family dynamics, which we will explore further over the next weeks, the stories of Genesis have to do with God’s promise to Abram that Abram would become the father of a great nation that would in turn bless other nations.  Yet how God’s promise was to become a reality seems always in the balance.  For a long time it was unclear how God’s promise would become a reality, since Abram and Sarah had no children.  And now that that issue was resolved, we are faced with a family that hardly seems like the ideal candidate for becoming a blessing to anyone.  From the beginning of Jacob’s story we are faced with conflict, theft and deceit, and the upsetting of the regular order of things.  Younger children are simply not supposed to become the heads of family. 

And yet, it is through this family, with all its quirks, conflicts and downright shenanigans that God continues to fulfill God’s promises.  While the story may serve to explain the ongoing conflict between the Edomites, descendants of Esau, and the Israelites, descendants of Jacob – it also serves as a reminder that God’s purposes are sometimes carried out through means and people that we would hardly choose – sometimes even through you and I, whether we are farmers or ranchers, or whatever.