Family functions and Dysfunctions
A sermon by Carol Howard Merritt, Pastor
Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
July 13, 2008

Text: Genesis 25:19-34

I had just been a pastor for a couple of weeks. My husband and I were both serving separate country churches in South Louisiana. One of his members died. It was so soon into his job there, so I was a dutiful wife, and stood by his side during the funeral.

It was a small affair. Ms. Daisy was old, over 100, and she had outlived all of her friends, and all of her children. There was just one surviving nephew. We drove with him in the funeral limousine to the cemetery, which was located over twenty miles from the church.

Making through the sugar cane fields, the nephew was full of stories about how he was king of Mardi Gras, and he was going into a detailed explanation of all the parades in that area, his krewes and costumes. As entertaining as his stories were, I felt a little uncomfortable talking about Mardi Gras during Miss Daisy’s funeral. And so when there was a moment of peace, I remarked, “Well, your aunt must have been a wonderful woman, a woman with such a full and long life.”

His affect changed completely, and he said, “Oh no. Not at all. She was just too mean to die.”

That was my first lesson about families as a pastor, and it has been enlightening ever since. I have learned how family dynamics shape us and mold us. I have noticed how much stress that family functions can cause during holidays, and I have realized how much family dysfunctions can cause in our daily lives. I have watched how a loving and accepting parent can equip a child for a lifetime. And I have seen how abuse can keep harming an adult decades after it occurred. 

And I have learned that so many issues, so many arguments, can bubble up when a parent dies, when siblings are left to sort out an estate. I have seen brothers and sisters going through a barn full of rusty nails, old auto parts, and yellowed papers, and emerge as mortal enemies because they are fighting over the stuff.

There is so often one person in the family who has an over-developed sense of entitlement, a sister who thinks that she actually deserves all of the possessions.

Or there might be a brother, who doesn’t need the inheritance at all, but he’s willing to go to court and battle for as much as he can. He keeps saying, “It’s not the money, it’s just the principle of the thing.”

Or there is completely unfair favoritism, where a parent gives a son or a daughter much, much more than anyone else.

Or there is the daughter who stays near the mother when she is dying, and then assumes that every possession in the estate is rightfully hers.

Out of all the times when families get really dysfunctional, the peculiar nature of sorting out an estate can be the worst. The grief, anger, jealousy, and depression can mingle together and cause huge rifts. The things themselves might not even have monetary value, but they begin to symbolize even more than that. They begin to represent a great narrative, a history, and often love. All of a sudden, a person’s life is reduced to the things that he or she leaves behind. And when the complex nature of a person’s life becomes reduced to things, then the situation can become very tricky.

I guess the only comfort that we might be able to take is that this sort of struggle has been happening for thousands of years. We see it happening with Jacob and Esau, in the first book of the Bible. Jacob and Esau are twins, and ever since they were in the womb, they were fighting. Their mother wasn’t sure if she even wanted to survive the pregnancy.

When the twins were born, Esau was born before Jacob, but Jacob was grasping for Esau’s heel, wanting to hold him back, wanting to get ahead of him. And all of that grasping did not stop as they grew up. As they get older, we read how the two brothers were so different. Esau was red-headed, hairy, and loved to hunt. He seemed a bit clueless, while Jacob was conniving.

From the earliest age, Jacob decided that he wanted Esau’s birthright, his inheritance and position in the family. Jacob’s name means “grabber,” and he lived up to his position in the family.

According to the ancient customs, the first-born son was the heir. Jacob was so close to the honor, but not close enough. And so he spent time with his mother, cooking in the kitchen and trying to cook up ways to get his hands on the inheritance.

According to the Jewish Philosopher Emanuel Levinas, the problem with Jacob was that he could not see Esau for who he was, as a brother, but rather, he saw him as a means to an end. Jacob could only see Esau as something to be consumed, a step stone in the way to what he really wanted.

For this passage that we read is just the beginning of the story. It gets a lot uglier. And I think the worst moment is when Jacob’s father is on his deathbed, blind and feeble, getting ready to take his last breath, Jacob sneaks into the tent and pretends that he is Esau. He goes so far as to put animal skin on himself so that his skin feels hairy. Taking advantage of his father’s sickness and inability to see, Jacob lies to his dad, until his father gives him his blessing. And in this ritual, his father hands over everything to the wrong brother.

Jacob gets what he wanted. But he has to run away from the family, because his brother now wants to kill him.

It’s an old story, but it’s that gets played out over and over again in our present context. And I wonder, what makes matters of inheritance so difficult?

I think it’s because things begin to signify relationships, things take the place of the person, and we want to own them because we want a part of that person. Material possessions begin to represent the whole of a person’s life, and so fighting over the house, or the dishes, or the jewelry is ultimately a fight over bits and pieces of that person.

I’m making it sound negative, but it isn’t always a bad thing. Yesterday my husband, Brian, received twenty quilt squares from his great grandmother. They were beautiful, hand-stitched, log-cabin squares that she had given to him when he was a boy. Delicately, the feed sack pieces were sewn together into amazing patterns. She put in hours making them. And as he unwrapped them, all of those stories about his great grandmother, surviving in a sod house on the harsh Nebraska prairie, became a bit more real to me.

There is nothing wrong with that sort of sentiment. No. I’m to point to something else. I’m trying to point out the tendency that we have as humans to reduce relationships to selfish gain, the brutality that can happen in a transaction, when a person becomes reduced to something to be consumed. It does not only happen when someone dies. More often, it happens when someone is living. And it does not just happen in our families, it happens throughout our society.

In our pop-culture, we have watched it with rising super stars, who catapult to fame. They are young, beautiful, full of life and talent. One moment they have their own billboards covering the sides of entire buildings in New York City, and the next moment, they seem to be a shell of their former selves, and we watch news footage of them, going off to their next stint in a rehabilitation facility somewhere. We look at their gaunt, pale faces, and we know that they have been consumed.

We see it in our stores. I am always amazed when I go to the farmer’s market, or to a local hardware store, because there are people there to help me. I mean, there are actual human beings there, wanting to know if I need anything. If I have any questions. It’s so different from my usual shopping experiences, where I walk around massive aisles, staring at my thousand choices, but if I want to talk to another human, then I’m out of luck. I don’t even talk to a cashier any more. I usually go through the self-service check out.

In those cases, when there is no personal interaction, there seems to be an intentional goal of the corporation to get the customer’s money as quickly as possible, without the messiness of human relationship.

We see it in the mortgage industry, where there has been little thought put into the long-term sustainability of creative loans. There has been little evaluation into whether a customer can actually afford to borrow that huge amount of money. Instead, mortgages have been made to people who could not afford them, which results in housing prices going up even when salaries have remained stagnant. It created a cycle where economic growth was fueled by empty loans.

And now that those loans are coming due, we are beginning to see foreclosures. We are beginning to realize the long-term effects of what happens when we do not look at the whole lives of people. When we become too concerned with short-term profit. 

We see it in politics, when a person’s deepest-held belief gets translated into polling data.

We see it in war. Oh, do we see it in war. As the complex life of a soldier who becomes injured translates into an additional number, a statistic. Or the loss of a civilian becomes a casualty. We justify the torture of an individual because we assume that it will lead to better information faster. In all of these cases, lives are reduced. The become a simple means to an end.

This week, we saw Wall-E, a Pixar animated film. Pixar has always been very adept at illustrating the fears and strengths of people. They have among their characters a teenage girl, named Violet, who seems to represent the shrinking nature of so many people in adolescence.  She can disappear whenever she is embarrassed. Or there is the mother who has super-elastic flexibility. There is a father fish, who loses his wife, and shows that he will do anything to make sure that he does not lose his surviving son.

This time, they imagine the future. They begin to wonder what it will be like for us, if we continue to consume at the same level. They imagine what it will do to our planet, what it will do to our wills, what it will do to our bodies. The result is a very bleak fairytale. A stark realization of where we could be heading.

The story of Jacob and Esau’s relationship does not end with Jacob running away with all the family’s possessions. It’s a long one, and I won’t go into all of it right now, but I will tell you that the two brothers reconcile. And it’s really beautiful what happens. Because the Scriptures say that when Jacob sees Esau’s face, it was like seeing the face of God.

And I think that is the very simple solution to so many of our dysfunctions of our society. If we can begin to see people, to see their faces and appreciate them as the complex individuals that they are, rather than an entertainment industry, or a check in the bank, or a consumer, or a casualty. We can begin to see them as individuals, made in the very image of God. 

It is such a simple concept. It is the heart of our faith, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. But imagines what could happen if we began to live it out in every area of our lives? Imagine what that simple concept could do to our economy, our environment, our international relationship, and within our families.

May God give us the strength and the courage to love.

To the glory of God, our Creator,
God, our Liberator,
And God, our Sustainer. Amen.