In high school I had a classmate who was a real
smooth-talking charmer. He could be the
kindest and most cheerful kid in the school at times, but at other times he had
a real difficulty knowing who to listen to and often chose the wrong
person. Sometimes the wrong person to
listen to was himself.
Now in Grade 10 Chemistry class, one of our labs included
using sulphuric acid and common, everyday sugar.
It seemed harmless enough back in the seventies, and my teacher had
walked many students through the lab quite carefully and successfully.
The idea was to take a small amount of sulphuric acid, which
the teacher had warned us considerably about proper handling procedures, dilute
it with so much water, then gently add a few drops at a time of the solution to
a teaspoon of sugar in a glass beaker.
We were also warned not to put our faces over the beaker, and to have
our gloves, lab coats and safety goggles on when we did so. Pretty straightforward, right?
Except that my classmate decided to see something
dramatic. While the teacher monitored
the careful students who were quite impressed with the result, a beaker full of
what looked like two cups of molten lava, my classmate decided to use a cupful
of sugar and why bother diluting the acid, right, bigger bang for the buck and
all that.
Well, the sulphuric acid hit the sugar with great
gusto. One minute everything was
peaceful, the next there was a bubbling gurgle like the loudest upset stomach
in the world and whoosh! The foaming,
fuming concoction turned into a geyser foaming ever upward, so high that the
last time I was there, you could still see the brown spots where it indelibly
stained one of the tiles!
Not only that, but this was sulphuric acid, right? So you can
imagine the effects of that much sulphur released into the air at that
speed. I have never seen my teacher move
so fast, opening the windows, cranking up the fans and the fume cupboard as
high as it would go, and despite it being a cold day, with snow on the ground,
we opened the emergency room door to the outside and took turns sticking our
heads out until we got cold. And of
course the sulphur experiment made us popular with the rest of the school. Kindergarten to 12 if I remember correctly,
and everyone had always known when the chemistry class was using sulphuric
acid.
It became an experiment that the teacher demonstrated after
that. And the teacher could have labelled
the kid a trouble-maker that would never amount to much. Except that the boy was such a good sport,
truly embarrassed by the result of his testing, and both the teacher and the
student had a good sense of humour. We
all learned a lot about listening to the right voice, and careful
experimentation with dangerous substances.
For the most part anyway.
I wonder if Jacob was like my friend. Listening to the wrong person at the wrong
time. When I heard this story in Sunday
school as a kid, I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Esau, who seemed to
get a raw deal, or to be cheering Jacob on as a clever lad who fooled a grown
up.
Now I tend to read it as a family tragedy, mother and father
taking sides, having favourites. I didn’t
notice as a child how much Rebekah got involved in the whole scheme. Now as a mother of grown children, I shudder
at this messy situation. Like Lady
Macbeth egging on her husband to a dark deed and going mad because of it,
Rebekah didn’t realize that she had pushed one son into considering murdering
the other. Murder was punishable by
exile or worse, and so she had lost both her sons in her scheming.
Jacob lost any trust and reputation and relationship he may
have had with his father. He also had
pulled one too many tricks on his brother, stealing not just Esau’s inheritance
but also his role as future leader of the tribe. If you look carefully at Isaac’s blessing, it
was about leadership as well as a relationship with God, and people don’t
respect someone who can be fooled. The
old saying, ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ was as
true then as now.
One also wonders why Isaac left it so late to transfer his
leadership to his son, waiting until he couldn’t see well or go outside in the
fresh air. Was he like his eldest son,
not a good leader who would plan for the future or what was best for his
family? Was that why Rebekah forced the
issue? Could she have been considering
what life would be like if she had to depend on Esau for her old age? We don’t know. We do know that this family was a messy bit
of chemistry and one day there was too much acid poured on the sugar and
phoom! A messy explosion changed the
world.
Why is this important to us today? I think it helps to remember that this was
the scripture that Jesus grew up hearing, and may have been partly the
inspiration for the prodigal son and the story of the people hired for the
vineyard harvest, and his famous saying, ‘the last will become the first and
the first will become the last’. Jesus
reminds us that we may not have the most peaceful of lives, but that God cares
about us even in our messy lives. And
this is not the end of the story. Even
in a disastrous and stinky situation like this, God is the one who will have
the last word, one of healing and reconciliation. To God, chemical reactions and con artists
alike can be redeemed, and God is there in our messiness with healing love. May you find that love in your lives in the
messy times and the good. Amen.
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