Meet the People of the Bible: Jacob's Story
		Hello!  As Grandma Sarah said, my name is Jacob.  Thanks for that great introduction, Grandma Sarah!  I am also called Israel because even though my mom and dad—Isaac and Rebecca—called me Jacob, God changed my name to Israel.  Here’s how that happened— one night I wrestled with an angel and God changed my name to Israel which means “one who has contended with the Lord.”
	Like many people in the Bible, I’m a very unlikely person to be God’s instrument and carry out his will.  You see, I had an older brother named Esau and I connived with my mother to take advantage of my blind father and steal my older brother’s inheritance.  Not very nice, huh?  That made Esau real mad so I ran away and lived with my relative Laban.  Then I worked for 14 years to marry his daughters.  You see, back then we thought that it was okay to have more than one wife so I had four!  Let me tell you, just be thankful that God later revealed the truth that marriage should just be for two people, because it is very hard to keep four wives happy, especially when two of them are sisters!  Anyway, after I had labored for many years in God’s service, I became pretty wealthy and I knew that I had to be reconciled to my brother Esau.  I offered to be his servant and offered my whole house to him and he forgave me for stealing his inheritance from our dad. So from my four wives came twelve sons and one daughter and the twelve sons fathered the 12 tribes of Israel.  Over the next few months you will learn how hundreds of years after my death, 10 of these tribes became lost to history when their land was conquered by the neighboring empire.  But two of those tribes remained and their descendants are with us today.  In fact, all ethnic Jews alive today claim their descent from me through my son Judah.  From Judah’s line, many generations later, came David, Israel’s greatest king, and many generations after that, Our Blessed Mother, Mary, and Our Lord, Jesus.  The woman your church is named for?  She is my great, great, great (… many greats… deep breath)… grand-daughter. But we are getting ahead of ourselves for the moment.  You thought it was bad that I stole from my brother?  Well, I wasn’t the best father, either.  Instead of loving my children equally and fairly, of all of my 12 sons, I loved Joseph most of all and that made his other brothers jealous.  I gave Joseph the most love and affection and special gifts, including a beautiful coat of many colors.  Anyway, Joseph’s brothers were so angry they sold him into slavery and he ended up in Egypt.  And then they told me that a wild beast had eaten him!  (What people need to understand is that the greatest soap opera ever written is contained in the pages of the Bible).  I grieved for the loss of Joseph, but God’s will was at work here, too.  Joseph rose up from slavery and imprisonment in Egypt to be Pharaoh’s greatest steward and advisor.  When famine struck the land, Joseph was prepared for it because of a vision God gave to pharaoh that he interpreted.  Eventually the famine brought my family to Egypt and we were reunited with Joseph and he forgave his brothers.  Andrew Lloyd-Webber even made a Broadway musical about that whole story.  My family settled in Egypt for hundreds of years, where we prospered, but eventually the Hebrew people, my descendants were enslaved by a new Pharaoh and forced to build the great monuments of ancient Egypt. Well, my Grandma, Sarah, told you about God’s Covenant with my grandfather, Abraham.  The Covenant is the promise of God’s relationship to his people.  And I am here to tell you that the people of God are really one family.  Though we number in the millions, even billions, we are all the family of God.  And when we worship together as church, we are coming together just as a family does.  Sometimes we fight with people in our family, sometimes we think we hate them, but we always have to love them and forgive them, just like Esau forgave me and Joseph forgave my other sons.