Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: A Slice of Pie (Genesis 32:13-33:4)
Date: September 15, 2024
I grew up in Independence, MO. My hometown has several claims to fame, but the most recent and well-known is that it was the hometown of President Truman. Truman still looms large over the medium-sized city that still feels like a small town in many ways. The First Baptist Church I grew up attending has an address on Truman Road. It is just a couple of blocks up from the Truman Home where he lived before becoming President and afterwards until his death in 1972. If you look down another street that goes out from the church you can see the Truman Library about a mile up the road. My high school and undergraduate institutions were both named for him. Reading about half of his classic biography by David McCullough was required in my college history class. It was pretty much all Truman all the time for me.
And that really wasn’t a bad thing. Truman was a pretty colorful character. He started small and worked his way up the political ladder the old fashioned way. He shook hands and kissed babies and kept his word. He was an accidental president. Franklin Roosevelt chose him as his Vice Presidential candidate in what would be his final term for purely political reasons. The two were basically strangers, and even during the years he was in office as Vice President, Truman almost never saw FDR. And yet—as we are seeing today—when the current President is either term-limited or cannot run for a second term for some reason, it is very often the Vice President who runs after him. Because Truman was a political nobody from a podunk town in the Midwest nobody had ever heard of, the expectations of his victory were pretty low. He was running against Thomas Dewey, the Republican governor of New York. Everyone knew Dewey was going to win. In fact, on the night of the election, The Chicago Tribune went ahead and printed up their papers for the next day with the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman’s proudly holding up that front page the next morning when celebrating his victory is one of the classic pictures from American history.
Because everyone who knew anything about politics was so convinced that Truman was going to go down in defeat, one journalist, Westbrook Pegler, announced that he would eat his hat if Truman won. He stayed nearly true to his word. He didn’t eat his actual hat, but he did go on to eat a cake that was in the shape of a hat. Owning up to a mistake or otherwise being in the wrong takes a lot of humility. In the case of Pegler’s prediction of Truman’s political demise, the stakes on his being wrong were fairly low. He was a journalist. He was paid to do that kind of prognostication. His job wasn’t going to be threatened if he was wrong. In fact, he really didn’t stand to lose much of anything. His colleagues even let him get by with eating a cake hat rather than the real thing. Sometimes, though, our willingness or not to admit when we are in the wrong carries a great deal more weight. It can be the difference between sailing successfully through some stormy seas of conflict and sinking along the way.
Well, this morning we are in the fourth part of our series, Stormy Waters. The whole idea for this journey is that we all face conflict from time to time. More than that, we face conflict in our families. Family conflict is different from regular conflict. Unlike normal conflict that we often have a means of escaping in some form or fashion, family conflict is something we can easily find ourselves stuck with indefinitely. Rather than resolving it, we often find ourselves needing to know how to merely navigate through it…and maybe more than once. With the help of some of the major families we meet in the Genesis narrative, each week in this series has found us receiving wisdom from God’s word on how to do just that.
So far we have talked about the conflict that can come from personality differences, denied rights, and favoritism. Through the stories of Cain and Abel, Abram and Lot, and Jacob and Esau, we have learned that while differences can divide, righteousness holds us together, that when we can’t get what’s ours, we should trust God to provide, and that when we play favorites, everybody loses. The secret to navigating each of these areas of conflict is found in something fairly simple to do, but remarkably challenging to execute because of a whole variety of factors. But if we want to sail successfully through these seas of conflict, the effort to manage them really is worthwhile.
Sometimes a family is complicated enough that it can furnish multiple life lessons for those who are willing to take the time to learn them. Isaac’s family, through the incredible tension in the relationship between his twins, Jacob and Esau, is one such family. We spent some time with them last week. We’re going to come back to their story this week. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to Genesis 33. Stick a thumb there because we’re going to wind up in that part of the story. But our story for today picks up several years after where we left off last time. Let’s fill in the gap just a bit, and then we’ll see how Jacob and Esau found some resolution to their long-simmering conflict.
So, the last time we left the brothers, Esau had basically sworn vengeance on his twin. From Genesis 27:41: “Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his father had given him. And Esau determined in his heart: ‘The days of mourning for my father are approaching: then I will kill my brother Jacob.’” Apparently he didn’t keep that determination only in his heart because in the next verse we discover that Rebekah heard about his threat and took swift action to speed her favorite son away to safety. “When the words of her older son Esau were reported to Rebekah, she summoned her younger son Jacob and said to him, ‘Listen, your brother Esau is consoling himself by planning to kill you. So now, my son, listen to me. Flee at once to my brother Laban in Haran, and stay with him for a few days until your brother’s anger subsides—until your brothers’ rage turns away from you and he forgets what you have done to him. Then I will send for you and bring you back from there. Why should I lose you both in one day?’”
Rebekah then concocts yet another scheme to justify to Isaac their sending Jacob to visit Laban, and off he goes. On the way to Haran, which is where Abraham originally came from, Jacob has an encounter with God which took the form of his famous stairway to heaven vision. Once he gets to his uncle’s place, he meets the girl of his dreams, Rachel, and agrees to work for seven years in order to be able to marry her. Then, after he fulfills his end of the bargain, Laban tricks him and slips Rachel’s sister, Leah, into the bridal chamber, and tells Jacob he needs to work for another seven years and he’ll really let him marry Rachel this time, which he immediately agrees to do. Poor Leah winds up the victim in this whole back and forth. Finally, after nearly two decades, Jacob decides to make a permanent break from his deceptive and manipulative uncle in order to return home. Rebekah’s “few days” have become something else entirely.
In traveling back home after almost twenty years, though, Jacob knows he’s going to have to pass through territory controlled by Esau and his family. What’s more, Jacob learns that Esau knows he is coming and is on his way to greet him with a force of 400 men. The younger twin is understandably concerned. Esau wasn’t exactly shy about his intentions the last time they were in the same place. Now Jacob has a great deal more to lose than he once did. What’s he going to do?
Well, he starts out with a series of bribes to butter his brother up. He splits his camp up into multiple different groups, and then spaces them out with his most valuable assets (that is, his family) in the last group. In the front groups were the parts of his holdings he was most willing to part with in pursuit of peace. That is, he planned to give them to Esau in hopes that it would change his mind about murdering him. Check this out in Genesis 32:13: “He spent the night there and took part of what he had brought with him as a gift for his brother Esau: two hundred female goats, twenty male goats, two hundred ewes, twenty rams, thirty milk camels with their young, forty cows, ten bulls, twenty female donkeys, and ten male donkeys. He entrusted them to his slaves as separate herds and said to them, ‘Go on ahead of me, and leave some distance between the herds.’ And he told the first one, ‘When my brother Esau meets you and asks, “Who do you belong to? Where are you going? And whose animals are these ahead of you?” then tell him, “They belong to your servant Jacob. They are a gift sent to my lord Esau. And look, he is behind us.”’ He also told the second one, the third, and everyone who was walking behind the animals, ‘Say the same thing to Esau when you find him. You are also to say, “Look, your servant Jacob is right behind us.”’ For he thought, ‘I want to appease Esau with the gift that is going ahead of me. After that, I can face him, and perhaps he will forgive me.’”
That all brings us at last to chapter 33 and the results of Jacob’s efforts. “Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming toward him with four hundred men. So he divided the children among Leah, Rachel, and the two slave women. He put the slaves and their children first, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last. [Obviously he didn’t learn not to play favorites…which would eventually result in his family’s own set of issues.] He himself went on ahead and bowed to the ground seven times until he approached his brother.”
Here was the moment. How was Esau going to respond? You could cut the tension with a knife. “But Esau ran to meet him, hugged him, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Then they wept.” The brothers were brothers once again and enemies no more. So then, what changed? How did they get to this point? What was it that bridged the divide that had once seemed permanent? Well, it could be a lot of things if we’re going to be fully honest. The text doesn’t spell it out here for us. Rebekah seemed to think that given a bit of time, Esau would forget why he was angry in the first place. Maybe that happened. Perhaps Esau had just worked through his issues and was in a really healthy place. It could be that Jacob’s gifts sufficiently buttered him up such that he decided not to kill him after all. Can I suggest one more thing that seems like it probably played a role in this as well? Jacob’s humility.
Jacob was returning from his uncle’s place a much, much wealthier man than he had arrived. It is entirely reasonable to think he could have furnished a pretty decent fighting force from out of his own household if push came to shove. After all, in that day, you needed well-trained—not to mention armed—shepherds to successfully watch the kinds of large flocks and herds he had without losing all kinds of animals to predators and theft. He could have marched into this meeting with Esau confident in himself and what he had, and ready to throw down with his brother if things came to that. Besides, Rebekah had always hated the fact that Esau had chosen to marry local women who were going to pull him away from faithfulness to the God of their family as opposed to marrying within the tribe and continuing to honor his father’s faith by sharing it. Jacob, on the other hand, had done that. He had been the good son in this case. He could have gone in with much self-righteousness, and belittled or berated Esau for his failure as a son. But he didn’t do either of those things.
Instead, Jacob came in with humility. He presented himself as a humble servant of his brother. He offered him hospitality. He shared his family. He was just himself with all his warts and wrinkles. I wonder if perhaps this didn’t have a more profound effect on Esau’s attitude toward Jacob than any of these other things. That’s what humility can accomplish. Humility unleashed in the midst of conflict, especially family conflict, can have a powerfully healing effect. It can be just the thing we need to still those stormy seas. A slice of humble pie really can make a difference. After a feast of conflict, humble pie always tastes best.
Okay, but what does this look like? Well, in order to understand that, we have to understand what humility is in the first place. Culturally speaking, we often imagine humility to be little more than thinking less of ourselves than to which we are otherwise inclined. This is an understanding of humility that goes back a very long time. It’s why what we consider a virtue today has at various times, especially in the ancient world, been considered a vice. After all, if you don’t toot your own horn a bit (or lot), who else is going to do it for you? You have to tell people how great you are, not to mention being confident in your own worth, or else you are just going to be walked all over. Humility on this understanding, is really just a weakness that leaves us open to be taken advantage of or otherwise abused.
That, however, is not what humility actually is at all. Humility is most fundamentally a taking up a posture of honesty. A humble person is honest about who God is and who he is in light of that. When we are able to properly acknowledge God’s character and where we stand in relation to that, building ourselves up for the sake of our image in the minds of the people around us ceases to matter. Investing undo efforts in defending ourselves or our reputations becomes less significant. Admitting when we are wrong and the broader allegations of fallibility that come along with such an admission becomes a much easier thing to do. Our ability to do this can bring great relief to the woes of family conflict. After a feast of conflict, humble pie always tastes best.
In the context of a conflict, humility brings us to the place where we are willing, for instance, to trust in God’s ability and willingness to provide for us rather than feeling the weight of grabbing everything we can get for ourselves. This means we can let other people get wins rather than worrying about claiming them all for ourselves. When we are humble and thus willing to trust in God’s character, we can freely give up our rights for the sake of advancing the Gospel in that moment. This is something the apostle Paul talked about with the Corinthian believers in 1 Corinthians 8-10. When we embrace humility, we can walk a path of righteousness—that is, of being rightly related to God and to people. This helps to stem the tide of divisive differences. When we walk a path of humility, we can love the people around us equally knowing that God does too. He loves them just the same as He loves us. Humility can see that. Humility allows us to weather the arrows of anger and hatred the person on the other side of the conflict might throw at us because we know what’s true about ourselves and about the God we serve. If we are deeply rooted in and content with what’s true, very little can shake us from that foundation. Humility allows us to acknowledge when we have erred in such a way that contributes to a conflict. Humility precedes repentance. It allows us to forgive the other person for their part in the matter. All of this points us toward a resolution to the conflict. At the very least, it allows us to navigate these stormy waters without losing ourselves along the way. Humble people can’t lose themselves because they know so fundamentally who they are. After a feast of conflict, humble pie always tastes best.
As great as that all sounds, though, how do we actually get there? It’s not like we can just will ourselves into humility in a moment. Humility is a character trait that is developed over time. We start practicing it in fits and starts and gradually grow into it. Or, to put that in a way that rings more truly with what humility is, we start a journey of coming to a greater and deeper understanding of who God is and who we are in light of that, and over time we become more and more comfortable living in light of reality. So then, the real question we need to answer is not, “How do I become more humble?” but rather, “How do I come to a better understanding of who God is?”
We see the answer to this question put on display in Jacob’s life. You see, there’s another little story located between his preparing the gift that was intended to ameliorate Esau’s rage, and their actual reunion. Remember that Jacob already had one dramatic encounter with God in his vision of the stairway to heaven. Here, before the reunion takes place, he has another encounter with God, and this one is even more dramatic than the last. From Genesis 32:24: “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he could not defeat him, he struck Jacob’s hip socket as they wrestled and dislocated his hip. Then he said to Jacob, ‘Let me go, for it is daybreak.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ ‘What is your name?’ the man asked. ‘Jacob,’ he replied. ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob,’ he said. ‘It will be Israel because you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he answered, ‘Why do you ask my name?’ And he blessed him there. Jacob then named the place Peniel, ‘For I have seen God face to face,’ he said, ‘yet my life has been spared.’ The sun shone on him as he passed by Penuel—limping because of his hip.”
Do you see what’s going on here and how it connects? Jacob had a profound experience with God. He came to know more fully who God is and learned something more about who he was in the process because of this profound experience he had with God. And because of this, he was prepared to walk a path of humility with his brother that he likely would not have been willing or even able to walk before. His relational palate was clean and ready for a fresh approach. After a feast of conflict, humble pie always tastes best.
The same kind of thing is true in our own lives. If you want to get to know someone more fully so that you can interact with them in light of who they really are, you have to actually engage with that person. Reading about them in a book or magazine or newspaper won’t do. You can read every headline about William and Kate in the grocery store tabloids, but unless you actually interact with them personally, you don’t really know anything about them. You can engage with another person on social media all you want, but until you have had a personal encounter with them, you don’t really know them.
If we are going to develop the virtue of humility in our lives, it is only going to happen when we have actual experiences with God. In order to do that, we have to go to where He is. And just where is He? He’s in His word. The more you study the Scriptures, the more and better you will come to know the God they reveal. But just like if you try to get to know someone while assuming you already know all about them, going to the Scriptures with preformed ideas whether positive or negative, will prevent you from engaging with God as He actually reveals Himself.
God is also in His church. The church is the body of Christ. We are the people through whom Jesus continues to advance God’s kingdom in this world. Well, God’s kingdom is wherever His rule and reign are recognized and received. So, when we are invested in God’s kingdom ourselves and are seeking to advance it everywhere we go and in everything we do as a church, God is right there with us. If you want to grow in humility, being willing to serve in and through the church can be a great help toward that goal.
God is out in the world, on the front lines of our efforts to advance His kingdom as well. If you want to have a powerful and profound encounter with God, find somewhere to serve the advance of His kingdom out in the world. Whether that is somewhere local or entirely farther away than that, serving others in Jesus’ name is a great way to experience Him.
Those are just three good places to experience God to get you started. As you seek to follow Jesus, He’ll show up in surprising places along the way as well, kind of like He did with Jacob in this last bit of the story. These experiences, whatever form they take, will help you come to better know who He is. And the more you know Him, the more you will be able to know yourself in light of who He is. That knowledge is what yields humility. And humility is one of the most important navigational tools we have when sailing the storms of family conflict. It brings refreshment and life where things have gotten hard. After a feast of conflict, humble pie always tastes best.