HP7 Part 2

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 opens this coming Friday, July 15 with stroke-of-midnight showings across the country. No surprises for those of us who followed the series and faithfully read each book soon as it came out. All the same, the movie will be exciting, seen and heard, experienced externally instead of only in the imagination of reading. But reading also is exciting, though while the movie is never as good as the book, the story is more fun in a crowd.

Track One of the Revised Common Lectionary is reading and hearing Bible stories from the Old Testament. The stories stir imagination, also stirring memories for those of us who heard and read them as children, and likely colored pictures and did crafts about them in Sunday school class. In today’s Bible story, Jacob sells his brother Esau a bowl of red bean stew. The price is dear: Esau’s inheritance as firstborn son. Perhaps the most expensive bowl of stew ever cooked and sold, bought and consumed.

Esau was a simple man who trusted his brother. Jacob was a greedy schemer. A good lawyer could have gotten Esau out of the birthright contract on the basis that the bowl of stew was not Jacob’s property to sell. Besides, the contract was not written down, and apparently there were no witnesses, so it could have been one brother’s word against the other. But then, Esau would not have lied in court. Still, surely, no jury would have found for Jacob in such an outrageous deal.

As it happened, Jacob later fled the scene anyway before he had a chance to claim Esau's inheritance.

Most of us have waited ten years for HP7 Part 2. We won’t be at the midnight showing of HP7 Part 2 at the IMAX theater, PCB. We’ll be there later though.

And we’ll be at church this morning to hear the Jacob and Esau story. With the crowd.

TW+