“True Blessedness: A Gift of Loss, Not
Gain”
Genesis 32:22-31
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
8/6/17
“I feel so
blessed.”
“You’re such a
blessing.”
These
affirmations, as well-intended as they may be, are often as hollow as most of what
one hears on religious broadcasting. The very idea of blessing has been
co-opted by the moralizing and self-serving distortions of the prosperity
gospel in which blessing is synonymous with possessions or personal security
and happiness. Getting used to that mindset is understandable, but it can all-too-easily
become our truth, even when it’s far from true. To white landowners in the
south, slavery was once blessing and truth. To the robber barons of the late
1800’s, so was child labor. So are the greedy and violent conquests of nations driven
not by national defense, but by the Machiavellian siblings of divine right of
kings and Manifest Destiny. Before the dust settles on those battlefields, the
victors turn their backs on the desecration and say, in the name of some god or
gods, “We’re so blessed.”
When blessing
gets reduced to wealth or power, when it gets reduced to the preservation of one
group’s privilege, it inevitably gets twisted into entitlement. It belongs only
to those who deserve it, those who earn it, because God helps those who help themselves. That distortion breeds a
callous vanity that is antithetical to everything Jesus teaches and lives.
All this makes
me wonder if First World cultures in general, and First World Christians in
particular have the spiritual, moral, and ethical courage to recognize and
embrace true blessedness.
So, what is
blessing?
Today’s story
has to do with Jacob in his later years. At first glance, he may remind us of
Job. He has a large family – two wives and eleven children. All his livestock
and other possessions place him among the elite of his day. Looking at Jacob
through First World eyes, one might say that he should consider himself
“blessed.” He has lots of stuff.
Jacob is on his way to meet his brother,
the firstborn twin, Esau. Remember, through premeditated deceit, Jacob stole the
family birthright and Isaac’s blessing from Esau. Jacob’s trickery landed him
in the lap of luxury, but as he prepares to face his brother, Jacob feels
anything but blessed.
Reaching the
Jabbok River, Jacob sends his family and all his possessions across the river, into
Esau’s territory. Not only do the women, children, sheep, and goats go first, Jacob
stays behind, terrified of Esau. Jacob is alone, vulnerable, and completely
divested of everyone and everything for which he has either worked or connived.
He has sent his whole life, his very identity across the river. That’s when it
begins.
“Jacob was
left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”
All night long, Jacob and “a man”
are locked in a kind of struggle for which words like wrestling match, or
fight, or combat seem inadequate. At the Jabbok, Jacob experiences a fierce
spiritual and existential crisis. To me, this scene feels descriptive of
someone weeping through the night, or someone raging at God, casting questions
and curses for hours. At the Jabbok, we all confront our brokenness, and that
of the creation. The Jabbok where we face the truth that the stuff we had once considered
blessing has been revealed as fleeting
and empty, maybe even a burden.
Jacob makes a
curious demand. “I will not let you go,” he says to the man, “until you bless me.” Jacob seems to realize that he
hasn’t been struggling to win or protect anything. This long, dark night of the
soul is revealing Jacob’s true self. The
man blesses him with a new name: Israel.
You will be called “Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and
you have prevailed.”
“Prevailed.”
That word does not convey a sense of victory over anything, but of having
survived. Through this experience, Jacob dies and rises to a new and different
way of being alive in the world. Jacob prevails
because, at long last, he accepts defeat. He has been humbled into his deepest
and truest self. Only when he has lost,
only when stripped of his stuff, and of his inflating and inflammatory ego, is
Jacob ready to recognize and embrace the fullness of blessing.
Richard Rohr calls this the path of descent.1 Over the
centuries, sages in the Church have called that narrow and lonely path “the way
of the cross.”
“The path downward,” says Rohr, “is
much more trustworthy than any path upward, which tends to feed the ego…[On
some level,] Authentic spirituality is…about letting go…letting go of our small self,
letting go of our cultural biases, and letting go of our fear of loss and
death. Freedom is letting go of wanting more and better things, and it is
letting go of our need to control and manipulate God and others. It is…letting
go of…our need to be right.”2
Referencing
the stories of the prodigal son, and of the Pharisee and the tax collector,
Rohr writes that, “Those who are proud of how they have done everything right –
but also feel superior to others – are not open to God’s blessing…Fortunately, life
will lead us to the edge of our own resources through…[pain, mistakes, unjust
suffering, tragedy, failure, and the general absurdity of life]. We must be led
to an experience or situation that we
cannot fix or control or understand. That’s where faith begins. Up
to that moment it has just been religion!”3
Rohr could
have used the story of Jacob, as well. Jacob, meaning all of Israel, and by extension
all of us, discovers true identity, purpose, and blessing not by gaining, but
by losing. Jacob prevails not through victory, but through what Frederick
Buechner calls The Magnificent Defeat.4
Recently, a
friend emailed me at 4:00 in the morning. She was struggling with the imminent
and untimely death of a long-time friend. She’d been up all night crying, yelling
at God, questioning, praying. I wrote back trying to say that I understood. I
asked her to consider the possibility that her tears, shouts, and questions
were the prayers that really mattered. Maybe they were even prayers the Holy
Spirit was praying for her, “in sighs too deep for words.” I told her that
grief was a process that always changes us.
It seems to me that she was on the
banks of her own Jabbok, hanging on for dear life, and crying out for blessing.
She was on a path of descent where the blessings of a deepened and deepening faith
were possible.
I don’t know
how much I helped. But I do trust that for her, as for all of us, true
blessedness is the gift of loss, not of gain. Only there do we really learn to
trust, follow, and love the one who “emptied himself…humbled himself…and became
obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:6-8)
As we come to his table today, may we
come as a community who is willing to lose all for the sake of true blessing,
for the sake of receiving and sharing the unearnable welcome of grace, and the eternal
belonging that is the household of God.**
2Ibid.
4“The Magnificent Defeat” From:
The Magnificent Defeat, Harper/San Francisco, 1966. Pp. 10-18.
**While preaching this sermon, I knew that it was not complete. (They seldom are.) So as the charge, I added
something similar to the following:
Guilt is not a
good place to start on the path of
descent. Guilt sends us on journeys of resentment, not of discovery and transformation.
Having said
that, without thinking critically as well gratefully about our material/physical
situation, we may become complacent and self-satisfied. We may associate what
we have with our efforts alone and interpret them as God’s particular reward
for good behavior. And those who don’t have enough must not be as diligent in their
faith and work as we are. At that point (and please pardon the cliché), we don’t
own our possessions, they own us.
The path of descent is most certainly the
way of humility, of letting go. And along this path, we discover that all we
have and all we are is gift from God. We discover that for us to recognize and embrace
such things as true blessings, requires sharing them. Only when gratefully and
freely share do they reveal their lasting value. Only then do they transform private
enjoyment into interactive discipleship. AH
No comments:
Post a Comment