Before we turn it over to the panelists, I know that that you would want to join me in thanking Katie Cannon for her splendid lectures. You've certainly Katie. You've honored the lectureship by your presence and by the presentations today, and we are all very grateful to you. So. Someone come in and tell me that it did look a little strange to have three males responding to Katie, but then the three of us say that the three of them said that we understand it would take at least three males to stand up to Katie Cannon. So I think I think justice has been done. Katie, so by a by vote up here. Chuck Campbell is been elected to be the first respondent. You want to do it from your chair. If you are welcome to stand up.

I'll just do it from my chair if people can hear that. All right. I stayed outside talking too long and I came back in and the two of them had voted for me to go first. So. Obviously, along with everybody else, I want to thank Dr Cannon for the lectures and for her writing as well, and I'm going to say a little bit more about that from my particular angle. Two or three things that I want to lift up in in relation to the lecture. First of all, I want to thank you for the emphasis on archeology and autobiography, and you're embodying that and walking through some of your own archeology and autobiography. It stimulated me to start doing some digging and some brushing and some chipping. And as a person who was born in 1954 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and grew up there, I got a lot of digging to do. And as someone who is having to come to terms with growing up in a in terms of class, growing up in a family where neither of my parents had been to college and we were at best middle working class but still had an African-American woman in our home with the cleaning and the help. And there's digging to be done there too. And so I can remember, I mean, I can remember the Little Rock piece very much growing up and and but it's amazing how late you came to name the privilege and and how much you dealt with the shame of being from Little Rock. So I'm I'm got a lot more work to do there, but I think you're both inviting us to do that and then you're actually doing it. Some of it showing us how it's done. Embodying it was very, very helpful for me personally, and I'm grateful for that. Now I teach preaching, and so I'm going to come at things a little bit from that angle. I noticed in your first lecture there were some terms that kept coming up sermons, preaching sacred rhetoric, Christian rhetoric over and over. And you focused, of course, on King's preaching in in that in a second lecture, it was interesting. You said I would rather see a sermon than hear one any day. So the sermon piece was there, but it was broadened and and and shifted a bit. Now what what a lot, what some of you in the room may not know, though everybody may know, is that while Dr Cannon is known very much for her worth and work in ethics, she has also written a lot in the field of Hammer Latics, and she has written a lot about preaching and some very important work related to preaching. And she made the mistake last night at dinner of telling me that she would really like some time to teach a Hamel ethics class. So I wanted to say a few of things and raise some issues for you in relation to preaching this is a church and I'm coming out of this particular congregation. This is a congregation for whom preaching has traditionally been really, really important. Some of the things you said about preaching, they were just really powerful to me, where the row about specifically about the role of preaching and unmasking and debunking those myths out there that get internalized that those are you. You talked about invisible transcripts. And one of your articles, you you say that you are concerned about how sermons made visible the invisibility of of the interior world of African-Americans. Well, I would like to shift that and add to that my concern about the way sermons make visible the invisibility of the entire interior world of privileged, upper class white people who you also named themselves suffer from the racism and the classism. So something I would like to hear you talk more about. And I'm going to put it very concretely give you a chance to do your home analytics class. You've been asked to teach a marmalade class at Columbia Seminary, or maybe Union Seminary in Virginia, primarily white privileged Presbyterians, who are going to go in many instances to white, privileged Presbyterian churches. How would you teach this class? How would you help us to do the kind of unmasking the kind of naming the kind of debunking, making visible the invisible so that we might be in nibs? I'm getting this from a conversation with nibs so that we might be invited, as you said, and I would maybe even put a challenged to begin that conversation and begin the Sandpiper. Does that question make sense? So I'd really like I'm just here basically asking you to help me teach a course of selfishness here, folks. I've got some other things, but I think I will stop at that and thank you for the really helpful insights into the the role of preaching and then in the second, some of the limits of just speaking. But how you would take that from from your your particular story in context to help those of us in the privileged white upper class context? How would you challenge us and work with us on doing those same kinds of things? And you're going to respond to this

after more now.

Oh, if you she's responding after something, I want to get in one more game on, this was real quick, real quick. The words about the war at the end were We're just deeply moving and and I appreciated your honesty and your vulnerability. I think your name got a lot of us are feeling. I would like to hear you say a little more in relating your discussion of class and race and what role they are playing in this war, because that somehow that often is not mentioned. It's just these things up here and the deep, invisible, invisible realities and myths are at work. And I'm wondering how you see class and race involved or even driving a lot of what's going on.

$1. Dr. Katie Cannon, we love you. I appreciate the challenge you laid before us to call our attention to justice issues and how justice is at the center of our faith and on God's heart in a special way. Appreciate the fact that you have given us some bones to chew on when we go home and to challenge us to remember our colleagues and that God is challenging us to participate in God's kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven. I want to raise two questions. One. You talked about the privileges of being white and defining that as racism, enjoying the privileges provided by a system. You also talked about suggested reconciliation. And in terms of dialog, you've been honest with the fact that they are benefits for being white in the world, not only in America, and that many people may not accept that. And our daughter, Tatum said that it's like being on an airport walkway and it moves from one terminal to another terminal to be in Atlanta. And some people walk on that terminal. And those who walk are actively realizing that they are. Impacted by a system of racism, but those who are not walking don't realize that they are moving and it's in the fabric, it's in the heart and soul of the country, they may now realize they've been moved by racism impacted by racism. I would like for you to speak to how. Africans in America can begin to deal with racism as a pastor, as a pastor who feels that the Afrocentric perspective as a model is a way to reconciliation and multiculturalism. I think that there has been a lot of talk about. Helping whites understand that they are racist because of the system, there has been some great efforts in our Presbyterian. We have a committee to combat racism. The ABS is the chairperson and we require sessions to entertain the committee passes go to session. But I've heard a lot of talk about the internalized oppression you said, so I can lecture that it takes three generations to deal with class class elitism, but also. Could you say something about how long it takes to deprogram all those centuries? I feel that a lot of us still the programing getting on the air going through the wall of no return in the castle in Ghana. And what will it take for us to begin to realize that we are creating God's image, that we have a part to play in the body of Christ that is like that? Paul's analogy to the first Corinthians 12 we are part of by of Christ and the less each person make their contribution to the body of Christ than the body suffers. So in in in the process of reaching out to others to help them be honest and the of their racism, how do we help African-American persons who have been oppressed realize the seriousness that it and I'm suggesting it takes more than three generations for that. So I want to speak to how long would that take an idea as an African proverb that says nobody builds on this with another bird's right? The second question is, I wonder, raised the preaching, I was also impressed that you reminded us of the. Just as issues immigration, it seems like people are now preaching, they're forgotten about the that, that prophetic preaching, they're preaching peace and prosperity, forgot about the beloved community. What can I do to get rich? How can I make people feel good on Sunday? How can I let them know that God is going to fight to balance and do all this? But but how can we move justice to the forefront of a Sunday morning experience? Every, every Society, every time. And what do you think it's going to take for our preachers to to be bold and for congregations to hear this? Good news?

Thank you, Dr. Khan, and appreciate your sharing with us like Chuck and Buddy and Lonnie and others have said it's very powerful and stimulating, I guess three three themes for me. One is I don't know if you put it like this, but I've received it like this the power of the imagination. And that has to do with our digging in our own stories and finding our own stories and finding where the categories of race and sex and class and others have captured our imaginations. And so we're not able. I think for many white folk like me, we're not able to imagine a world where black folk are brothers and sisters. We're able to imagine a world where black folk become like us, but we're not able to imagine a world where we might be becoming more like other folk. So I'm intrigued with that kind of story, and I guess I would, um uh, urge all of us to, I think, hear what I think, what you're saying on that to be to do some digging on our own. As Chuck said, I grew up in our attention and got two white guys from Arkansas, where I grew up in Arkansas, where I grew up in the Mississippi River Delta, where it was much clearer, perhaps in Little Rock and it's clear where I grew up still is clear who's in charge, who should be in charge. And one of the things that's always been striking to me that the deal with the imagination is that I was taught that white people are superior by really wonderful white people. I know when I started dealing with issues of race, we come to the point where white people have to own up to our racism. It means we're really bad people and we get to a point where, well, I've got to choose my parents or got to choose racism. I've got to. I don't want to have to make this choice. It's been helpful to me to understand that my imagination was shaped and formed by people who were really trying to teach me how to get along in the world. I guess I'll share one story with that. I taught a course at Racism at Columbia several years ago, and one of the white women I was in that course was really mad at her mother because when they came to Columbia Seminary, there was a Kroger, not very far down from Columbia, and there's a great divide there around Columbia seminars. The whole story about Columbia Seminary making that great divide. But there's a Kroger that mostly is populated by black folk. And so when this young woman first came to seminary, she and her mother went to the grocery store to get some staff to get her set up, and her mother told her she could never come back there again alone because she was a white woman and she couldn't come back there. And she, the young woman, was really mad at her mother and felt like her mother. And she was mad at her because she felt like she was really being a terrible person. And we had a conversation. And it turns out that her mother thought she had a conversation. Her mother thought she was protecting her just like she would tell her, if you go out in the street when you're going to get run over by a car. So I guess I would urge you to help us see those kinds of powerful categories in our lives that begin to reshape us and make us. I guess I'm intrigued and excited by your push to do this archeological work because it is the power of the imagination for us to begin to expand a sense that Lonnie really might be able to teach me something which all of my life just about. I've been learning that he can't teach me anything I might, can teach him something and bring him along, but my imagination has been captured by those categories. I guess the other thing, the second thing that goes along with that is you're talking about inviting folk, and you can't get very far and accept that they're invited. I guess I wanted I experienced that line, but I do want to. I don't know if Chuck was getting there on the sermons or not. But I think for many of us white folk, we resist the invitation greatly and I understand that we won't get anywhere until we have the AHA moment, but we still have to make the invitations and the urging. So as Lonnie was alluding to in this Presbyterian, we require ministers and educators to go through a little bitty workshop for three hours on racism. We don't do wonderful things there, but at least it. It's an occasion where somebody for a few hours has to think about race in their own story. So I guess I would, I would, I guess, ask you, what do you do in this kind of culture where there are so many choices, so many places you can go? How do you build a critical mass so that someone can have that moment and say, not so much? I feel guilty for being a white person, but my humanity has really been captured and I want to. I want to redefine and find out who I am. And I guess the third thing would be I too was moved by your your part at the end on the war. And I just asked you to continue that conversation. It seems to me that one of the things that those of us who opposed the war in that sort of thing have not done and I don't know if we can do it, is to build a critical mass and that's going to be very difficult. I think about the civil rights movement, there were plenty of working for civil rights throughout the history of this country, and a couple of times there came a critical mass one at the Civil War and in reconstruction and then after the Second World War and a lot of black men came back and said, We're no, we're not doing this anymore. So how do we build that critical mass of people that can begin to say, we want somebody to tell us the truth? And neither of the presidential candidates are telling the truth? We know that and we want one to get elected one. Not maybe, but I think neither one of them are fundamentally talking to us and telling us about the truth of American culture. So even if John Kerry gets elected, we're not going to have a whole lot of difference. So be a little shading. But I think we're going to be fooling ourselves to believe and don't take this as a reason not to vote. I want Kerry to win, but I think I'm not. I'm not campaigning for Nader either, but I think we face a fundamental critical divide. I think that we need some people to tell us the truth. I think you're one of them, and I think I would urge you to help us to develop a critical mass so that we could expect our leaders to tell us the truth. And again, I guess our close. We've been preaching emoji's and Miriam this fall. And I was struck by Ferraro just saying no to Moses, and I caught myself cynically saying, that's just the way people in power are. They do stuff like that. That's the way they see things. And then somebody in the congregation reminded me of Joseph and said, Well, he talked to Pharaoh and Pharaoh listened and said, You so think about what kind of a view you have in the American culture and the leadership in American culture that you're so cynical you don't believe your leaders can tell you the truth and that the biblical model is some pharaoh's good, some very rose could. And that ought to be our model. And how can we develop that way of telling the truth?

Well, we still have 15 minutes before we are supposed to serve. Is that right, Gary?

Yes. And. More Light, the.

Well, that's what I that's what I thought we might do if I may. I have a question. First, a perception in the perception is that most of us here are Presbyterian zero Presbyterian, we are Presbyterian, so we know something about the Presbyterian Church. My perception is that the Presbyterian Church is a primary example of your two lectures on the the divisiveness of racism and classism. My second perception is and this may be wrong, but it is that as I look at some of the megachurches on television that they seem to be doing a better job of crossing these boundaries than those of us in the Presbyterian Church. And it also occurs to me that they are growing more fast and at a bigger rate than we are in the mainline churches. The question is is how how serious is this division between fundamentalism, which I take it that most of the megachurch programs on television would be in that category. How serious is this divisiveness of this division between the historically the more liberal churches and now the very fundamentalist churches? And if they, in fact are doing a better job at crossing these boundaries, is there anything we have to learn from that? And having posed those questions, you've got enough enough to respond to until till midnight, I suppose. But if you want to, if you want to take Chuck's first question and step up here or take any, anywhere, any question that you choose, Chuck says.

First of all, I'd like to thank the respondents for listening, listening so attentively and giving me such excellent questions. This is more than enough to midnight. I mean, live from the making of a new book who says we just have a few minutes. I won't get into the specific answers to the questions right now. But one thing in common all the commentary for me is how important it is. And I think what that lining said he didn't say, but he and I were ordained and the same at the same knight same day. So he's my brother in ministry. April 23rd, we celebrated 30 years of Ministry of Word of Sacrament. So. It takes an incredible black man to be in solidarity with the first black woman ordained in Presbyterian terror. And so he's always in the shadow. He didn't seem to mind. He just goes on. Don't think so, but I wouldn't have done it without the brothers like Brother Oliver and Larry Hill and others. I think it's important. The common theme that I heard was understanding how isms are systems institutionalized systems, whether we individually say I've divested of white supremacy, what we individually say, I work every day not to oppress others based on class. The system is what gives us the privileges. The system is organized that way. And let me just delineate how the system works. First of all, this biological determinism when it comes to race a baby born this day in Fulton County and Fulton County as the baby is of European ancestry, that baby is considered superior. If the baby is born this morning, this day and the baby is of African ancestry, the babies are automatically given the status of inferior. The baby hasn't done anything to be born, but that's the world in which we live. Then we say that's the those are the what we call binary polar opposites and think about all the mixed race people, all the people from the continent of Asia, all be from Latin America. How do they fit into this, this race configuration? Well, what we have what we now call honorary whiteness and imposible blackness. OK, up until 1970, there were only two races of people white people, black people with Native Americans on the sat with black people. So in certain situations, a person of African of Asian descent or other Hispanic descent and the US Census Bureau also called the word Hispanic would either be in a situation unaware of whiteness of global blackness. The example that comes to mind when I was teaching and training priests for the Episcopal Church and it's a young woman came to my class and we were the first day and we were introducing ourselves. And she said, as a white person, so and so and so and so, so as the facilitator discussion, I said to her, Well, what makes you think you're white? Because I had relatives who were lighter in complexion. And then she was it would be like my saying to you all, as a white person, you go like, you are right. So she she went to her room and she cried all week and she almost left the seminary. She came back that money to the class, and she said she told me how my asking that question was so painful for her. Her mother was British England blond hair blue high. There are typically from England and her opinion and her father was from Beirut, Lebanon. No one in their firm had ever talked about race, and she gave, she wrote, one of the most brilliant master theses I've ever read on what it is to be honorary, white and impossibly black. How in one situation, she arrived somewhere and I said, Well, you not like the others, so you get to get the status of white and then the next moment you're not white. So you cast aside and blackness is imposed. I hope at some point she will publish that thesis. That's what we call biological determinism, where we just were born and people gave us privileges based on our ancestral lineage. The second level is what we call cultural hegemony, where you can be a Phi Beta Kappa Road scholar. Most brilliant person in the world and I've never read a book by a person of color, have never seen a work of art. Never dance, never nothing. Everything classical has to be Eurocentric. And so that culture the jeopardy. Because when cultural identity means that if it's on this side of the equation and it's coming out of Europe, it has value is an asset to civilization. It is on this side of the equation. It's coming out of Africa, then it's considered a liability to civilization. And so when you live in a society that says we don't have enough food, clothing, shelter, health care for everybody. Why would you provide it to people who identified as liabilities? So that's when you start calling ketchup a vegetable. That's when you start saying we don't have we can't provide health care. That's why we have forty five million plus people in this country with no health care because it's like people who have been identified as a liability to civilization. Why should we provide resources for them? Why would we even keep them alive? And so what happens in that situation? Groups of people who identify as liabilities civilization is what I was sitting in the lecture. We then isolate. We build more prisons. Black men are not more criminal than white men. So why do we have almost two million black men incarcerated this state in the United States of America? Yeah. Like, isolate, alienate and then exterminate. OK, so we don't provide schools, we have schools. Those are people. Read the book Savage Inequality the schools where children don't have textbooks and there's supposed to be able to compete with other children. And at third level, so that's cultural germinated when the culture says that if you have European ancestry, you are assets of civilization. If you have African ancestry, your liability, says Enlightenment. We have decided the way we know you're a human being is that you can take the evidence that we can think it's that you can write so it moves like this thinking, writing. And yet African people in this country were the only people with this blessed, forbidden in law to read and write. So we begin to understand what what it means for two hundred forty four years of taboo slavery that people would be have their eyes gouged out and their fingers cut off if they learned how to read and write. If humanity is determined by whether you can think and the evidence you can think is where you can read, the evidence you can reason is that you can write. It means if you write, you have memory of your memory of history, the history. You have culture before culture, you have civilization and you have civilization in your part of humanity. So by cutting off an implicit loss, the ability to read and write means you automatically have said this whole group of people are not part of the human condition. OK. And in the last two years in the system, understanding system and structural oppression is to say the theological that God has ordained it this way. Okay. You did the same. There was sexism. Same thing with classism, they said. It's not biologically it's more material. And what Dr Rosemary Ruther says, if we don't debunk unmasked and disentangle theological law, then everything else stays in place. We can look at it in terms of psychology, sociology and the pathology, all the social sciences where you can look at it in terms of philosophy, everything. But until we can thank God that God has not ordained any group of people, God doesn't make inferior people. God doesn't make junk, God does not make any God makes and God says, and that's good. OK, that's what the Bible tells us. Literally, the got played, and that's OK. So when we understand how the system has systems work, so no matter how much a personal desire is to be divested of those common images, it's about mourning and mourning and day by day. We have to work with intentionality and consciousness to say I'm not going to allow anybody to tamper with the Margot and me or anybody else. And that's a conscious decision we have to work at. There is a 10 minutes, obviously, I keep going. When you got your role, you know, but I want it to lead us to the table tomorrow in second. So if we understand structural, systemic oppression, what we do in my teaching and ethics, there are four ways of doing analysis the first way theoretical. And those of us who are philosophers and trained philosophy will know, are we doing theoretical analysis? You would spend all the time talking about, but the concept race or the concept class or the kind you so you're dealing with concepts and a disembodied way. But you you're getting down to the what we call a lowest common denominator where you really have to define everything you're saying so that people can understand the second level of analysis call institutional structural analysis, which is what I just share with you. How systems work and how privileges accrued are not based on the powers that be decide the system. The third is what I was explaining in the class lecture, which is cultural disposition. It's not theoretical. It's not institute an institution on how it's got, how it gets played out in the minutes of life. You know, when I say when people can walk in and tell a class location of everybody in this room and get it right, it's they're looking at the beginning of life. And then the last is what we call collective action. When do we, as individuals, join with other people that remnant that cloud of witnesses the critical mass to do something differently? So those are the four types of analysis that we use. And so there are moments when in church meetings and fights that goes on in churches where one group is working from a theoretical now, the other group is working on institutional analysis. Another argument is coming from cultural disposition and other people moving from collective action and wonder why we fighting because we're not on the same page. You know, also in understanding how ethics works with the issues that have been raised here. And what I was talking about is that we divide the philosophical, the theoretical between the ontology and reality. Now, even though every field, all of you who are professionals know every field of work has its own language, well, theology wouldn't be any different. You know, we have to have the mystifying language like everybody else. It can't be clear and get a movement because people wouldn't value it. So we have to have this language that we have in a given business have a language. People in every field of work, there's a language. So the ontology simply means we move from principle to reality means we move from consequences. And examples that come to mind that will help you understand is that we are now an underground railroad. This is the period of slavery and not comes. Do you have any runaways? Our principal is we always tell the truth, the ethics, and we have some runaways among us. So the ethical point would be, yes, we do. And you don't worry about what's going to happen to them if you remember from a till illogical position and not comes. Do you have any runaways? And, you know, if they take taken back, they may be killed, raped, lent, burned, beaten with salt, put in the wounds and you say, no, they're both correct. So every day of our lives, we make an ethical decision some day to logically, some physiologically. Sometimes we just move on principle. We could care less about the consequences. Other times it's the consequences, like should we pass out clean needles to drug users? For people who don't know anybody who's using drugs to people who've never buried people once a week where people die from bad needles and from using drugs, it's very easy to move from principle. But the consequences when you know, week by week by week, you bury somebody in the community who's if they just had clean needles, they may still be alive. There's a whole different reality. I tell people my mother is a Tilly allergist, and she was at a conference when she said, What do you mean? I said, when I was 16 as a mom, can I go on a date? She said there's many a slip between the cup and a lip. So I always think of the latter, and it's better to be safe than sorry. But by the time she get through with all these proverbs. I I'll just stay home and watch Ed Sullivan, you know. It's not worth it. I mean, Mrs. Ayawaso, she was the consequences of the behavior. I mean, what's the latter? And, you know, so so the fact that we are called to do as moral agents of what we call to be as people of faith is to be conscious when we're moving from principle and when we're moving from consequences purely logically begin without. Because I don't want to deal with the specific questions until after dinner. OK. OK in.

I greet you this morning in the name of our creator and sustainer from the Book of Genesis Chapter 25. And I invite you to listen with my ears and with an open mind as I tell the story that supports our symphonic texts doing this service of worship. The background for our sermon this morning as a story in Isaac has taken Rebecca to be his lawful and wedded wife. Now this couple, Isaac and Rebecca had not yet given birth to a child who I'm sure gave them a great deal of concern. Eventually, Isaac and Rebecca were blessed with a set of twin sons. One twin was named Esau, and the other twin was named Jacob and its Esau and Jacob through the represented two distinct individuals. Even though there are very similar, extremely close as a matching pair of identical twins, they were distinctly different, both physically and mentally. Now, Esau was the outstanding outgoing athletic kind of person Husky and Harry and broad chested, always trying to prove himself physically. And Jacob was the thinking, intellectual kind of person clever, scheming, conniving and always figured on how to beat someone out of something mentally. However, is I had one advantage over Jacob, namely that Esau was the firstborn, meaning the Esau as the firstborn twin was supposed to enjoy the rights and privileges of the family inheritance. According to Hebrew custom but inside, as we said before, it was not the most clever person in the world, even though he could throw a rock a great distance due to his strong physical muscles and thus the trickster actually what the rights and privileges of the family inheritance. Eventually, because the schemer could outfox with sly, slick ways this non-thinking brute of a brother. So let us see how the scheme outfoxed the athlete in our texts once again in a modern day paraphrase amplified expression that goes like this one day when Jacob was boiling, boiling some porridge, thus possibly warming up some pork and beans, Esau came in from the field and Esau was famished. That's real, real, real hungry, and is babe Jacob saying, Let me eat some of those pork and beans for I'm famished. And Jacob, the perennial schemer, said the Esau first, give me your birthright. In other words, go find daddy's insurance policy, the wheel the deed and sign it over to me. So Esau said, I'm about to die from hunger of great use as a birthright to me, a person who needs physical strength after. So I came back with the insurance policy, the will, the deed, the official documentation, Jacob said. To ease swear to me that is, raise your right hand before God and declare to me that you will never come back for these documents that justify your inheritance. So if I swore to Jacob Esau raise his hand before God that he would never, never, no, never, ever come back after his inheritance documents and therefore sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau the pork and beans and something to drink in, saw and drink all that was set before him. Then Esau got up and went away from the table. Thus, Esau despised his birthright. That is, Esau considered this insurance policy that required his waiting for a period of time to be of less value than the pork and beans there were right there in front of him at that moment. Therefore, dearly beloved, the title of our sermon this morning is the patience to wait, the patience to wait on the Lord. In our day to day hustle and bustle, we to wake up and discover haunting contradictions in the core of our beings. That is, that is God fearing women and men, that is Christian laity and Christian clergy and youth and adults. We to find ourselves both loving yet hating, forgiving yet resentful, committed yet indecisive, conservative yet radical physical yet mental. Seeing the future yet absent minded a blank about what to expect next. Thinking high and noble thoughts. Yeah. Low down and nasty towards all at the same time, which often boils down to us being so busy taking and being taken that we cannot really live. Our concern this morning, as is how we often lack perseverance. We seem to be short on tenacity. We have only appearance of steadfastness when it comes to holding on to those things which cannot come into being at the present time like our brothers, Esau and Jacob. Let us keep our memory green, but bring it to the forefront of our minds. Those times in our lives, when we do have soul, our birthright. Let us pause and we call those times in bygone days or in yesteryear is when we, by hook or by crook, manipulate other folk to give to us what? Why they belong to someone else. Think back to when we heard ourselves sounding just like Brother Esau. When we heard ourselves saying, I'll die, I'll die if I don't get it now. Have you ever had such a day a day when we acted hastily and didn't realize the consequences are grabbing and gobbling down those symbolic pork and beans in our own lives? Yes, I'm talking about a day when we wish more than anything in the world that after one hastily act of foolishness that we could just turn back the hands of time. In other words, sisters and brothers. What I'm saying here this morning is that increasing numbers of Christian in today's world live, impatient lives, whether it's at home or work, whether it's here at church or while living as authentic disciples in our local communities. Far too many of us give away our God given rights. All we spend our life energy trying to cash in on someone else's inheritance, all because with tangled up in an impatient knot of isolation, alienation and frustration, sometimes on impatience with time is expressed by throwing temper tantrums. When we as fat, we roll our eyes and pop our lips huffing and puffing as we go into a deep freeze of silence until we manipulate those people around us to give us exactly what we want. Other times, as women and men, young and old alike, we find ourselves either on the giving are receiving ends of all kinds of blood, blood boil and foot stomping, loud talking mucho changes where we end up selling our God given birthright every which away. Simply because time is something that gives us a hang up, especially especially when it comes to waiting on the Lord for our divine blessings. Like Esau and Jacob, we shout or we hear others around us shouting, I'll die, I'll simply die. I'll die if I don't get it now. So what we're saying here is that too many Christians in contemporary society often live out our days without being torn asunder by quickly cashing in on external resolutions. When our lives require long range internal solutions due to the lack of knowledge about how to maintain our basic loyalty to our God, particularly as it relates to knowing how to wait for tomorrow's blessings. And the first lesson in our text that we must embrace related to the patience to wait. The patience to wait on the Lord is found by studying the socio historical context for our scripture lesson this morning. The place where we can deepen our knowledge concerning our divine birthright is by revisiting this particular periscopic. So let us turn on the televisions of our minds and see Isaac as a man in his twilight years. Let us imagine that the day is coming to a close and Isaac is sitting inside of his goatskin tent. His head is trembling under the weight of many seasons of life. His eyebrows look sort of like cobwebs, and there are numerous wrinkles on his face. In fact, Isaac EyeSight is fading, so much so that he could only make out shadows of light whenever the front of the tent flaps open to the sky as it think at the stage of his life and his film where the death is drawing near. So for the sake of his family and his family's destiny, there are some things that Isaac must do in order to tie up loose ends. And one of the things on Isaac's unfinished agenda is a task that will not let him sleep until he takes care of that last bit of earthly business. His responsibility of calling his firstborn son to him so he can bestow upon him his divine blessing. Now, this blessed birthright that Isaac must present to Esau is not a pious formality. This kind of blessing is more than a vague expression of good world. The some of us might say to one another when we are going on a short journey or even a long trip. We in turn say to the traveler, God bless you. May you have safe traveling mercies or even Bon Voyage know the blessing that Aussies must give it to his firstborn child is a divine gift of great power. It's a birthright to convict.