ESAU EMBRACES JACOB A MODEL OF MALE WHOLENESS

(Preached on Sunday, June 17, 2007)

But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.                                       -Genesis 33:4

 

Today is Father=s Day, and while this sermon about male wholeness is clearly drawing on male experience, I hope and trust that the women present will draw some insights from it: both into the men you love and live with, and perhaps into your own lives as well, for in truth we are not as different as we often imagine ourselves to be.

 

Let me start with a question.  Who are the men you look to as role models?  Certainly the list would include men we know personally C a best friend, a father, a teacher, a pastor.  The list might also include mythological and historical men C King Arthur, Ulysses, Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.  If you look at the list, I think you will see that there is no ONE role model for a Agood@ man.  Good men are not ready made.  There is no easy formula for male wholeness.  In fact, we have received from the world, conflicting messages about how to be a man.  There is a parable from Native American lore which illustrates this struggle.  A tribal elder was teaching his grandchildren about life.  AA fight is going on inside me.  It is a terrible fight, between two wolves.  One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.  The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.  This same fight is going on inside of you, and inside every other person, too.@  The grandchildren thought about that for a while.  Then one of them asked, AWhich wolf will win?@  AThe one you feed,@ said the elder.

 

Another way to describe this struggle is with the images of the lonely warrior and desperate lover.  On the one hand we are taught as real men to be warriors C who fight wars, violent and economic, defend the home and family, carry the burdens and responsibilities of leadership, decision-making, planning and providing.  At the same time we have another side that does not often receive attention from the wider world, or it is belittled, and so we often don=t know what to do with that side.  This is our emotional side, our innate sense of justice and fairness, of compassion and kindness, our desire for beauty and joy in life.  This is our desperate lover side.

 

This becomes a struggle for most of us men because we are given very little guidance about how to integrate the two. This is not a new struggle.  One of the oldest stories in the Bible, the story of Esau and Jacob, the sons of Isaac and Rebekah, grandsons of Abraham and Sarah, is also about this struggle.  What we read this morning was the resolution of the struggle which becomes a guide for us today.

 

The struggle began before birth.  Rebekah was pregnant with twins and she felt them contending with one another within her belly.  When they were born, Esau came out first, but Jacob was right behind, holding onto his heel.  They were different as night and day.  Esau was a hairy, strong, wild man who loved to hunt and spent lots of time in the wild: a lonely warrior.  Jacob was a smooth skinned, gentle, quiet man who was very reflective, learned to cook and stayed near the tents: a desperate lover.  Their differences and struggles played out in deceptive, manipulative ways that ended up breaking apart and alienating the family members from one another.  As a result Jacob fled to his mother=s brother=s home. 

 

Their lives followed separate, yet parallel paths, until finally Jacob realized he needed to go home and seek a reconciliation.  All the way home, though, he struggled with that decision.  Finally, the last night before meeting his brother Esau, he had a dramatic wrestling match with God. He wrestled with his past, with the expectations placed on him by family, with his wounds, with his understanding of God.  In this all-night wrestling match he came face to face with who he was, with the wounds he had inflicted on others, and with the bargains he had tried to make with God.  Jacob was forced to stop deceiving himself about who he was, what he had done.  In coming clean and becoming honest, he learned that this God whom he had always feared would judge him, instead embraced him and accepted him as he was.  This grace, born from his vulnerability and honesty, changed him and made him a new man.  He stopped trying to control God and the world.  He was ready now to meet his brother Esau.

 

And when he met Esau instead of finding the worst he feared C anger, violence, revenge C he was instead surprised by another embrace.  He encountered grace from the warrior brother he had wronged and he was deeply moved.  As Jacob states: Atruly to see your face is like seeing the face of God C since you have received me with such favor.@

 

This story is a model for male wholeness.  We become new men when we embrace our differences and our diversity in honesty as brothers.  We discover that to be a sacred moment of acceptance which brings wholeness and new power into our lives.  We discover that what we feared did not need to be feared.  We learn that we can trust.  We learn that we can be honest.  We learn that we can be who we truly are and that we will be accepted.

 

Remember how different Esau and Jacob were?  In this forgiving embrace we see the union of empowering compassion and courageous humility C uniting the feeling of power with the power of feeling.  Imagine if you will:  What would it mean if the free-spirited side and the dutiful side within each of us could embrace?  What would it mean if our prodigal side and our perfectionist side were able to mine the treasures from each other=s experiences?  What would it mean for us to integrate the feeling of power with the power of feeling?

 

To live out this new model for male wholeness means embracing the warring or impoverished parts of our own souls, and simultaneously fostering relationships with men and women wildly different from us.  This is not a plea for accountants to become Renaissance men or for jocks to value liberal arts.  It is a call to embody the Incarnation of Jesus as Messiah, the Word made flesh, the divine-human One who came to reconcile and bless these competing parts of our souls and our society.  Like Jacob and Esau we can intentionally cultivate relationships with contrasting personalities and groups.  By valuing each other, in all our differences and diversity, we can embrace hidden parts of ourselves and thus become more whole.

 

To live in Christ is to begin living out this kind of risk-taking and redeeming faith, valuing other people and life experiences that the world wants to dismiss.  That is uniquely Christian.  After all, it is only in the cross that weakness becomes strength and foolishness becomes wisdom.  Nowhere else in the world do we learn that truth.  We see this integrity in Jesus who integrated in his own life the rugged male individualism of John the Baptist, with the virtues of wildness and withdrawal, with the intimacy of John the beloved disciple, with the virtues of gentleness and closeness.

 

Embracing our differences begins with awareness and ends in trusting the Spirit to use one=s distinctive genes and family systems, our own limps and warts, bumps and blemishes to create new vessels of God=s redemptive grace.  It is not so much a stance of self-confidence as it is God-confidence.  For it is God who will take the torn photographic scraps of our own Jacob-like dysfunctional family or church systems, present or past C our manipulation of others or our allowing ourselves to be manipulated; a wound created from an overly dominating or an overly passive parent C and integrate all that into a new male soul.