“Wrestled Blessings: More to Us Than meets the Eye”
By “wrestled blessings” I mean that being “blessed,” biblically speaking, is
not always the easy, gentle, joyful experience for which we are gushingly grateful
forever. Biblical life, much as we love it, is struggle. It is full
of changes and challenges. God often comes out of nowhere, when we least
expect God, when we are least prepared for what God has to say or to do in our
lives and our relationships. Biblically, God is not all comfort and convenience,
all affirmation and assurance. God can be a real pain in the hip, at least --
as Jacob here attests, limping off – one more gimpy preacher-patriarch!
With an ego adjusted by God. With a painfully wrestled blessing.
And with a new name that means – we have striven, have struggled – in
Jacob’s biblical story, have hustled, and rustled, and wrestled – with God.
And yet! We have prevailed, or at least endured, to fight again another
day!
Wrestling was not my favorite high school sport. It was much too “up close
and personal,” as we say. There was no team to fall back on, no time-outs
to speak of for rest along the way. You were out there on this cold, hard
mat, in front of God and everybody, with one other person, literally putting
everything into what felt like fighting for your life, for nine minutes (as
I recall) of pure hell. I was not very good at it. Give me a team
sport any day – and lots of time-outs! The point seems to be, Jacob gets
himself into this mess, which includes meeting his brother Esau the next morning
– each of us has an “Esau” to meet the next morning! -- for the first time since
Jacob cheated his brother, not only out of his birthright for a bowl of porridge
when they were young, but also out of his father Isaac’s blessing, by dressing
up as if he were Esau, when they were older. You look at the combination
of desperate bravado and imminent doom with which Jacob lives his whole life,
and you just know he has lots to regret and feel guilty about. Don’t we
all! Lots to want to fix up and start over.
The blessing is whenever we get another chance -- a chance to make things right
between us, to restore ourselves to a right relationship – whether that means
with one other person, often a family member or close friend or colleague (We
so often hurt the ones we love!) – or with a whole congregation, community,
nation or world of people from whom we have grown divided and alienated.
The struggle is to acknowledge there is more to us than meets the eye!
Julie and I quickly learned to observe how much there is to Reno than meets
the eye! We are still learning how much more there is to this congregation
than meets the eye! We are capable of more than we have seen in
ourselves – more even than anyone else perhaps ever has seen in us! Keep
looking beyond every surface.
That is what the God of Jesus is there for, to bring out the best, even the
hidden and unexpected best in us, and to help us to see and build on the best
in each other! That is just what Jesus says in this story of feeding the
thousands on just a few loaves and fishes! We do not have to send anyone
hungry away! The needed resources are already here! Already within
and around, between and among us! There is much more to us than meets
the eye! You can do it, Jesus says to us. You can end this hunger
– now! The genius of Jesus is not just to multiply loaves and fishes for
any one occasion. In us, if we let him, Jesus multiplies the multipliers
-- fit for every occasion to meet the needs of the people!
As Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace is always reminding us, “Peace begins
with respect!” What is the history of movements for civil and human rights
in our times – among peoples of color, of gender, of age, of sexual preference,
of disability, of minority status of whatever kind, and even of the environment
– but the history of some folks wrestling others for a blessing, for the chance
to face a new day, to start over right where we are? And we all think,
like Dylan’s song, that “God’s on our side!” Whereas God may be to all
sides more like the poem that arrived so fittingly in The Progressive
magazine this week.
It’s called “Angel Dreams,” by Michael Glaser, Poet Laureate of Maryland! –
“In my dreams, angels / are wrestling with
me,
trying to tell me / something I must not
want
to hear because they seem / to be getting
nowhere.
“I see myself arguing eloquently / though
I do not know what I am saying,
and from the distance, / as I watch in my
dream, we seem to be dancing,
“but suddenly the camera zooms in / and from
behind me
a large staff, hard as rock, / whacks against
the back of my right calf
and breaks my leg.
“’Don’t go there,’ a voice booms.
/ ‘You are as stubborn as salt
rising to the crust of the earth’
/ and then, as if for good
measure,
the staff comes round again / and breaks
my other leg.
‘Don’t even think about it,’
the voice says.
“I see a body belonging to the voice, / moving
as if in shadow,
walking into the distance, into the dark.
/ It does not look back.”
It does not look back! The moving finger, having writ, moves on!
The world will not wait forever for us. Nor Jesus, forever wondering,
what more do they need? What more can I say or do? What else can
I give them, to show them, to show us, there is so much more to us than meets
the eye! Is that not what Paul is feeling here? A huge sorrow for
his “own people?’ His family? We who have everything going for us?
Family, glory, covenants, revelation, worship, promises – what more can we ever
need? “To say nothing of being the race that produced the Messiah!”
And that goes for all of us today! For all who are of any family of faith!
The world is too small, too volatile and to fragile, for us to quibble over
who has accomplished what in the sight of God. It is enough to know, we
ALL are “of the race,” the HUMAN race, that has produced the Messiah!
The very living possibility and opportunity that we can yet yet learn to live
and relate in new ways! The Messiah is that pressing presence of the God
who makes all things possible!
Paul makes me think of Kathleen Norris’ meditation on “Inheritance: Blessing
and Curse.” She begins, “Human inheritance is both a blessing and curse.
And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. [Remember: we live
no longer in the age of orthodoxy but of paradoxy!] For many of us religion
is heavy baggage. [Can I get a witness?] Stories of love and fear,
liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences,
and our family’s past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition.
What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up?” Norris asks.
“What can we hold onto as blessing?”
These are the questions asked by these scriptures this morning – What curses
do we need to shed? What can we hold onto as blessing? And how are
we to know the difference? And to live with the difference -- no matter
the struggles?
Norris says it’s one thing to stand with the saints we have known. “But
it’s far less pleasant – it can feel like a curse – to include in my welcome
the difficult ancestors: the insane, the suicides, the alcoholics, the religiously
self-righteous who literally scared the bejesus out of me when I was little,
or who murdered my spirit with words of condemnation. Abel is welcome
in my family tree,” she concludes, “but I’d just as soon leave Cain out.
Yet God has given me both . . .” Thanks, God, thanks a lot! Thanks
for all the mixed and wrestled blessings, all the civil and human rights movements,
the struggles for life and relationships -- There is so much more to us than
meets the eye! You have such hopes for us!
Norris goes on to describe what I can just see our own children doing – “When
I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to
walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit
I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance.”
Can we “have it both ways,” as we say, or not? Can we accept and support
the full mix of who all that we are? Norris comes to the end of her meditation
– “Converting a painful inheritance into something good requires all the discernment
we can muster, both from what is within us, and what we can glean from mentors.
The worst of the curses that people inflict on us, the real abuse and terror,
can’t be forgotten or undone, but they can be put to good use in the new life
that one has taken up.” Surely, like the compulsive activist Paul, Jacob
can put his whole life to good use in new ways! Surely the God of miracles
can use all of who we are!
“All the baggage comes along;” Norris says, “nothing wasted, nothing lost.
Perhaps the greatest blessing that religious inheritance can bestow is an open
mind, one that can listen without judging.” May we hear that part again?
Perhaps the greatest blessing that religious inheritance can bestow is an open
mind, one that can listen without judging! I close with an image from
the musical service of praise-worship here Friday night, presented by (of all
people, to my biased mind!) CrossWinds Assembly of God, invited by our sister
Claire Berry. I attended mostly in support of Claire. “Praise music”
and the theology I associate with it (There can be more to it than meets the
eye – or even the mind!) are not what I would choose for a Friday night.
Just a few lights were on. I kept wondering why the family window behind
the chancel was not lit. Then, at a moment following the song “The Potter’s
Hands” and preceding a song about the hands and feet of Jesus nailed to the
cross out of love for the world, the lights, except for the words of praise
on the screen, went off and the family window came on! There they were,
in vivid juxtaposition – the “new age” screen, the ageless window – together.
In that moment I heard again the words of Jesus after the parables as he told
them last Sunday – “The kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household
who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Thanks for
the new, thanks for the old, thanks for the new again! Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
