Rev Chris Roth

Jacob’s name comes from the word for “heel”. Jacob was a twin and when he was born he was grasping his brother Esau’s heel, as if he was hoping to pull him back into the womb so he could be the firstborn of the twins. That moment defined his relationship with his twin brother. He desired to supplant and to overtake his brother. We spoke last week about how Jacob manipulated his starving brother, Esau, into selling him his inheritance for a bowl of stew. Then we spoke about how Jacob stole his brother’s blessing by cooking a meal and tying goat hair to his arms to fool his nearly blind father, Isaac, into believing he was his brother, Esau. Isaac gave him the blessing reserved for the firstborn to be spoken before he died. Esau was rightly furious to have all of his birthright pulled out from under him by his trickster brother, so Jacob fled for his life because Esau was planning to kill him. Jacob flees under the guise of finding himself a wife.      ...

Hear the sermon here Gen 28 :10-19 When we meet up with Jacob in our Old Testament reading we find him at a very low point. His twin brother Esau was technically the firstborn and so he was the one who had the claim on the inheritance of their father Isaac. The two brothers were very different, even though they were twins. Esau was an athletic hunter. He was a hairy man. He was an outdoorsman and seemed to be someone who had intense emotions and was perhaps a bit of an extrovert. Jacob was a quiet man and was more comfortable indoors cooking and sticking closer to home. There seems to have been a bit of competition between them. One day Esau came back from being in the field and was very hungry. We don’t know how long he was gone. He may have been out hunting for a week, or maybe he was just out for the afternoon, but either way he felt like he was starving. He smelled what Jacob was cooking and asked for some. But instead of offering his starving brother some of the s...

Read the Scripture here Hear the sermon here Deciding to move to Toronto so I could go to seminary was a big decision that came with lots of things to plan and lots of things we could worry about. We had very little money, and we weren’t completely sure how things were going to work. We had a yard sale and sold most of our furniture and a lot of our belongings.  We weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do about furniture once we got to Toronto. I was pretty sure that was what God was calling me to do, so we moved ahead in trust. One day about a week before we were flying to Toronto I got a phone call. The voice on the other line said, “I understand you are moving into one of the apartments at Wycliffe College. Well the previous renter left a lot of furniture in the apartment. Did you want us to move it out so you can move yours in, or can you use any of it?” So we let him know that anything he wanted to leave we would use because we were coming with nothing. Befor...