Red Stuff

Genesis 25:19-34
First Reading for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)

Esau comes in from the field. He’s hungry. Famished. Starving so much that he’s near death, he says. Anyone who is a parent will roll their eyes at that familiar line. His brother Jacob is cooking up a stew. “Let me eat some of that red stuff.” That’s what it says in the NRSV translation: red stuff. Esau doesn’t always come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Jacob on the other hand is probably too sharp for his own good. Jacob says he’ll give his brother the red stuff if Esau sells off his birthright. We go from red to Burgundy because, boy, that escalated quickly. Yet Esau is unaware of the elevated stakes. Again, he just thinks he’s about to die and thus sells off his birthright for some of the red stuff. Esau sells off his leadership of the family, the carrying on of Abraham’s responsibilities for a quick meal.

Red stuff. That’s a really evocative image. Red connotes power, passion, and violence; that’s stuff for which people will readily sell out who they are. Red is the easy shortcut. Red is the stop sign we fly past. There are these things that in the moment seem like they will make life so much easier, they will satisfy us, but they never do.

I think about the horrible damage done to the witness of the Christian church in the United States because of the way certain sectors have aligned themselves to obtain political power. But that power never satisfies. You’ve got to hold onto it. You can’t relinquish it. And so you compromise and compromise. You eat bowl after bowl of the red stuff and it never satisfies. Faith gets sold out for a flag.

I think about how quickly we culturally jump to violence and glorify it. We believe there’s no problem that can’t be fixed by wiping out one’s enemies. It leads to war. It leads to looking the other way when someone from a different race is needlessly gunned down. It leads to broken relationships. We fight until the streets run red forgetting the call to love our enemies. We become so consumed with winning that we forget what it does to us and our neighbor.

Of course I have to point a finger back at myself. There’s red stuff in my life too. Just one example: I hate conflict. Even though I know that sometimes I have to stand up for what I believe to be right, I will drag my feet when I should be getting up on them. If I speak up, people may not like me or think I’m wrong or stupid or not a Christian or whatever else. I may be misunderstood. I may unintentionally hurt someone. Silence is sometimes a delicious looking bowl of red stuff. What is forfeiting what I believe I’m called to do? But then it upsets my stomach because deep down I know what I was supposed to do.

Red stuff could be self-centeredness. It could be indulging your appetites without thought. It could be doing whatever it takes to get ahead. It could be neglecting the hurt of your neighbor because caring means you have to do something. It could be ignoring the voice of God steering you in the right direction. Really it can be anything that compromises who we are or who we’re supposed to be.

All of us do this. We all have these Esau moments. Thankfully there is grace for those moments when we find ourselves walking away from a table at which we should not have eaten. But I would like to have less of those moments. So maybe it’s just a matter of slowing down and asking God for guidance. It’s a matter of valuing the faith and the ethics instilled in us. It’s a matter of realizing that sometimes, many times the better way is the more difficult way. And then we might realize the red stuff is not worth it.