Even when we forget

Genesis 12-21 

Episode 3: Hagar, Abraham & Sarah

I spent several days this week gathered in Maine with pastors who have been in a grant together for three years called “From Relevance to Resonance,” seeking to orient our lives and ministry work around the action of God. We gathered to talk about how fast our world moves, and how what keeps us human is not striving to keep up but receiving the resonant moments of uncontrollable aliveness that awaken us to the world and reconnect us to God and each other. And we discussed how we want to lead in the church to help each other pay attention to God. But even these people, who were literally there talking about trusting that God is real and really does stuff, found ourselves forgetting that God is real and really does stuff.  

It’s so easy to slip into thinking that it’s up to us – whatever it is. That we are supposed to make God’s work happen or bring about God’s future.  This is a foolish and dangerous mistake, but nevertheless, there you go. We all keep making it.

And with that, we turn to our ancestor, Abram.  God promises Abram that his descendants will number the stars, and through Abram’s line the whole world will be blessed.  But there is no way for Abram and his wife Sarai to fulfill this promise – they can’t create a multitude, let alone a single child. This blessing has to come from God. 

The covenant God made with all creation back with Noah, to never give up on the world, gets legs in the covenant God makes with Abraham. God chooses one family to know God and be in direct relationship with God, so that through them God might gather the whole beloved world into God’s Shalom, fullness of life.

So, leaving everything they know, all the ties and security they had, uprooted and wandering, Abram obeys. They go where God leads them, with only God’s promise holding them. 

But if you’ve read the whole scripture texts we’re covering today, you’ve seen that they keep on forgetting God is the one leading. And God has to keep reminding them that they are not in it to save their own skin; they are in this life to know and love God, and to let God make them a blessing to the world.  

God didn’t choose Abram and Sarai because of their great character or their unique skills. They were not especially worthy or extraordinary.  They became the people in whom God’s story is concentrated because God’s goodness and mercy can be revealed in any life, every life. God chose these people to be the ones through whom God would bless the world and so that is what happens. 

But it’s a really long wait. Really long, and even though God keeps reminding them their offspring will number the stars and will bless the world, instead of trusting God to fulfill the promise through them, Abram and Sarai get tired of waiting and take things into their own hands. They attempt to produce what God has promised to provide. 

A sure sign we’re NOT living in the covenant love of God is when we instrumentalize others.  When other people are not siblings in the human family who belong to God and to us, but obstacles to resist or despise, or objects to use or discard, we have turned our back on God and each other and made this about saving ourselves. 

So they make their slave-girl into a means to an end. They try to transcend their own limitations and their own embodiment by using her body to do God’s work for God.

Only once this thing they’ve schemed - that denies their belonging to God and violates their belonging to each other - achieves what they’d hoped it would, things get ugly. 

When the pregnancy begins to show suddenly it’s no longer like placing an order from an online shopping site. They are human beings, all, in this together. The way sin plays out, if we remember Adam and Eve, is that when we forget that God is God and we are in God’s loving care, when we violate our belonging in mutuality to one another, what comes next is shame, blaming, hiding and competing. We’ve moved ourselves to the center of our story, so the people around us become a threat. God cannot be trusted, we are lost in the consequences of our sin, unable to free ourselves from the cycles of fear, anger and selfishness that got us there in the first place. We are unavailable to God or one another, and the life-giving moments of resonance that reconnect us cannot be received. We are cut off from the life we are made for, life in relationship. Inaccessible and isolated, we only relate to the world through aggression. 

Remember, in the days of Noah, humankind became so violent, and ‘pursued only evil continually’ that they lost their humanity, and wreaked destruction on God’s beloved creation. This grieved God so badly that God almost wiped everything out, returning the world to nothingness to start over. But God’s deep love for creation and God’s mercy prevailed, and God committed to never give up on us. 

When Sarai abuses the girl she flees to the wilderness, which was like plunging into nothingness, into non-being. It’s the untamed wild where, centuries later, the Holy Spirit will drive Jesus, right after he is baptized. Barren, desolate and dangerous, the wilderness is the physical location of utter isolation. At that time deities were always attached to people and places, so to head to nowhere was to go literally into godforsakenness, to go where the gods don’t even go, to lose the groundedness in time and space that define us as creatures. She is fleeing to most certainly die.

But instead of becoming nothing, nowhere, we’re told exactly where Hagar is. “God found her by a spring of water in the wilderness- the one on the way to Shur.” 

God found her because God was looking for her. God looks for us. God goes where no decent god goes, into the wilderness and nothingness, to find us. God calls Hagar by name-  the first time she’s addressed that way in the story.  God says, Hagar, slave girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? 

Why does God ask questions? It’s not like God doesn’t know the answers. When Adam and Eve hide naked from God in the garden and God asks, Where are you?  Of course God knows right where they are. So why ask? God asks questions to invite us back into the conversation. God brings us back into relationship and response. God addresses us as persons, and summons us back to the belonging that holds us.  

 “I am running away,” Hagar answers God. 

God meets Hagar in her despair. Tell your story to me Hagar, so it will no longer be what has power over you.Let me bear with you your experience of nothingness so that I may heal you and restore you to your true identity as one whom I care for who is called to care for others.  

After God hears Hagar and ministers to her, God tells her to go back. Not to a place, but to a person, Go back to Sarai. Humbly submit to her.  Instead of Sarai forcing her slave girl to submit, Hagar, seen by God, is going to Sarai in freedom and offering to care for Sarai. It’s Jesus’ Turn the other cheek–  a self-emptying action that requires that you see me as a person with agency, choosing to address you, another person. 

No longer as an object to use, or an enemy to despise, they must encounter one another as persons. From the nothingness of despair, Hagar is restored to personhood and agency, and sent to minister to Sarai, who is trapped in her own wilderness of regret and rage.  

 Then God makes a covenant with Hagar, giving her a future and a promise greater than any wrongs done to her. Her story will live on through generations too numerous to count – a promise mirroring the one given to Abram and Sarai. 

God pulls us out of nothingness and gathers us into the future God is bringing into the world. This is God’s future, not ours. So we don’t get to decide when or how it comes. We get to watch and join in as it comes.

Finally God gives Hagar the name for her son, swaddling him in promise before he’s even born. Ishmael means “God listens.” Then something quite marvelous happens: Hagar names God.  She is the first person in scripture with the boldness to name God. She calls God The God who sees.

Hagar returns to Sarai, and ministers to her in her despair. She shares the story of being found by God; she comes trusting in the promises of a God who sees us.   

Fourteen years later Sarai conceives, and at 90 years old her waiting finally end. God’s promised blessing is fulfilled through utter impossibility, because it’s God who acts, and not we who make God’s work happen or bring about God’s future. And Sarai, whose name meant ‘Princess’ will become Sarah, ‘Mother of Nations.’ alongside Abraham, “Father of a multitude of nations.”

And wouldn’t it be great if human beings just got it and stayed in right connection to God and each other all the time? But we don’t. Abraham and Sarah’s story continues, and they do a lot of dumb stuff with bad consequences. They keep forgetting God is the one leading. And God keeps reminding them that they are not in it to save their own skin; they are in this life to know and love God, and to let God make them a blessing to the world. And our bible includes all of that because this is not about extraordinary people doing great things, it’s about the God who chooses ordinary people to participate in God’s healing and trust in God’s promises together. 

So often in life things feel impossible and hard. But this God moves in impossibility. This God goes to the desolate places where the gods of this world will not go, and asks questions that set us free. This God listens, and sees, and calls us to minister to real people, and live into God’s future with hope. This God is so committed to loving and saving the world that God comes into this world as one of us, vulnerable and weak, and then plunges into the godforsakeness of death, so that not even that death separate us from God. 

God’s covenant with us means God’s grace comes first, before we mess up, claiming us for love. And God’s grace comes last, after all is said and done, claiming the world for love. And in the middle as we muddle, God’s grace continues claiming us for love. 

Humans can be horrible. And humans can be amazing. We can be courageous and loving, kind and brave. And we can be selfish and awful, calloused and uncaring. If the trajectory of the world were up to us, clearly, we’d be doomed. It’s easy to go down that path and assume that’s where it’s all headed. But God is real rightnow, and does stuff right here, in our very own lives, and way over there in the lives we can only watch from afar with sorrow and helplessness. God is real and doing stuff in the world.  We’re invited to trust this and join this.

Today we will baptize Imogen into the covenant family of God, this family that includes Isaac and Ishmael, Hagar and Sarah, Abraham and Noah and Eve and Adam, and you and me too. Her middle name already means “grace” in Japanese, and when we make the sign of Christ’s death and resurrection upon her, her new first name will forevermore be “Beloved, Child of God.”  

And the God who is real will really do stuff in Imogen’s life.  And we are here for it. We’re here to help her watch and join in. We’re here to listen to her stories, and encourage her in ministry, and be open together to those resonant moments we can’t control when we taste the fullness of it all. We’re here to live into the promises of God together, and practice trusting God to fulfill those promises through us. We get to practice living bravely into God’s reality even when it’s impossible, or especially then, seeing the world in all its beauty, and not shying away from its pain, because God comes into nothingness to minister to us and sends us there to minister to others.  

And because we all forget and remember together, one day, Imogen will undoubtedly remind you in some way or another of God’s grace, the love that claims us, and in this way, like those before us, we will continue to live in God’s covenant of shalom that gathers us and holds the world forever. 

Amen. 

 

God and the slave-girl

ADVENT 2: PEACE (Grace Embodied, Part 2. Go here for Part 1.)

Genesis 16

The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion.”  Saying Shalom as a greeting is to say, “May you be completed.”

Peace is not an ethereal idea. It’s an actual thing.
Conflict and division – they are real, heavy and dark and sharp, crushing and weighty things. Peace is not just taking that away, leaving nothing but a vacuum, shallow emptiness where squashed-down discord smolders or discontent breeds like mildew.
Peace is not an empty space of enforced silence between otherwise foes.  No. Peace has substance and girth. It exists in the world. It is something you can hold and touch and smell; Peace is tangible and real wholeness.  

It’s what God’s kind of life tastes like and feels like in your hands. 

We know the feel of peace.

It’s that thing that happens between people when forgiveness is slowly labored into,
and when love is discovered and shared. 

It’s when, drifting along untethered, someone sees you and values you.

To the drug-addled mind and listless soul, peace is clarity and grounding.

To the fearful and lonely person, peace is belonging and trust.

To the frenzied and chaotic life, peace is order and settled calm.

To the lost and abandoned person, peace is home and safety.

To the heartbroken and despairing ones, peace is solidarity and hope.

Between warring factions, peace is not just taking away weapons or working out a tenuous agreement to not set each other off.  It’s the building of bridges, the joining together, the solidarity of shared humanity.  It is whole instead of shattered. Harmony instead of discord.  Peace is fullness of life. Jesus said I came that you may life, and have it abundantly. Shalom.

Last week we said that the first grace the human ever knows is our creatureliness itself, our embodied, fragile, mortality.  We are creatures connected to the earth, living inside bodies that are trapped inside the confines of time and space. And it is from within these vulnerable bodies, from within these confines of time and space, that God’s grace encounters us.  We were made for this conversation, a dialogue with the speaking, living God and with one another.  God ministers to us, and we, made in God’s image are made to minister to each other. To live Shalom, peace.

Now, all this talk of peace, and creatureliness gives us the perfect backdrop against which to hear again the story of Hagar, which at first glance is perhaps the strangest text ever paired with the second week of Advent. 

But, Abram and Sarai are a perfect case in point that, as we saw last week with Adam and Eve, as soon as we try to transcend our creatureliness, we run into problems. Whenever we reach for God’s role, when we deny our vulnerability, disregard our interdependence, and ignore our need for a minister, we’ve stepped outside of the grace of our creaturliness – we’ve stepped away from God and out of peace.

Decades earlier, God had given Abram a promise – that his descendants would number the stars, and through his line the whole world would be blessed. This is God’s grace.  God promised this; God will do it.

Only, a long time has gone by, and it’s not happening.  And the two of them begin looking at each other and thinking that between their lack of youth and utter barrenness, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of fulfilling this promise.  After so very long of waiting, they’ve forgotten that it’s God’s job to fulfill God’s promises and not ours.  

So Sarai hatches a plan.

Take the slave girl- she says to Abram. Have a baby by her and the promise will be fulfilled.

There are lots of red flags here, friends, lots of signs they are most assuredly notliving in the grace and peace of their creaturliness before God, not least of which is that Hagar is simply a means to an end, and object, and not a human being at all. They are seeking to transcend their own creatureliness, their own embodiment, by using herbody to do God’s work for God. They don’t even call her by her name – neither of them, throughout this whole narrative. They call her ‘the slave girl.’  She is her place, her station, her role that is subservient and disposable; she is a thing. 

So they do this.  And then, predictably, things between them get really tricky. 

Hagar conceives.  Presumably she will have no say over this child; it will be raised by Abram and Sarai, designated to be the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram. She was just a vessel. Except no human is that.  We belong to each other; we share humanity in common. So when her pregnancy begins to show, when the reality of bearing new life comes over her, Sarai sees it, and it’s suddenly not like placing an order from an online shopping site. It’s a young, fertile woman living in her house, walking around carrying her husband’s child inside her. Even before the child is delivered Hagar is giving him what Sarai never could. 

How can Abram not be dizzy with the promise of a coming child? 

How can Hagar, drawn into this thing against her will, not deeply resent and hate Sarai?  

And how can Sarai not be filled with rage and shame? 

Her plan - which seemed so perfect when she thought it up – turns out to be a poison to her, body and soul it does nothing but drain her of peace and fill her with nearly unbearable pain, regret and hopelessness. 

She lashes out at Abram and blames him. The slave-girl you knocked up looks at me with contempt and sees me as worthless now! (Now Abram comes across as the weakest of characters in this trio, and not just in this story, but throughout his whole life story, he doesn’t do a very good job of seeming worthy of the faith God puts in him, and frequently forgets to put his faith in God.  But again, God’s promises and God’s work are about God’s ability and God’s strength, not ours).  

Don’t blame me, woman! Abram shoots back, in his own shame and confusion at what has happened to them, I don’t care about the slave girl; do whatever you want with her!  So Sarai turns her humiliation and anger onto Hagar and “humbles her, forcing her to submit.”   She abuses Hagar so badly that Hagar flees to the wilderness.

Fleeing to the wilderness doesn’t mean she went on a spiritual walkabout or ran away to start a new life in a nearby city. It’s more like heading into nothingness, into non-being.  There are no roadside food stands or mile marker gas stations. It’s the wild – wild animals, the elements, at the mercy of the untamed.  It’s where the Holy Spirit, centuries later, drives Jesus, right after he is baptized.  Barren, desolate and dangerous.  At that time deities were always attached to people and places, so to head out to nowhere was to go literally into godforsakenness, to go where the gods don’t even go. She is fleeing to most certainly die.

Remember we are creatures, rooted in time and space? 

All the things that happen in our lives happen in a place and at a time.  And any stories we tell about those things, begin with – or at least eventually mention – these elements, “This one time, at band camp…” 

Hagar has left her home, her life, her identity and role; she’s exchanged all that to be nothing, nowhere.  Except she isn’t. We’re told exactly where she is. “God found her by a spring of water in the wilderness- the one on the way to Shur.” 

God found her because God was looking for her. God looks for us. God goes where no decent God goes, to the wilderness, into the nothingness to seek Hagar. Here her life begins again.  In this place, at this time, God calls her by name.  For the first time in the story, she is called by name.  Hagar, God says, slave girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?

Theologian Andy Root points out the God who speaks speaks to Hagar first with a question, then a command, and finally and most fully, with a promise. 

Here’s the question:  Where have you come from and where are you going?  This is like God’s words last week to Adam and Eve, when they were hiding behind a tree from the Creator of the world – Where are you? God doesn’t ask these questions because God doesn’t know the answer. God asks because answering God is part of the conversation we earth creatures are in with the Transcendent One.  We have to have a chance to tell our story, to claim our reality, to place ourselves in time and space. We have to confess our creatureliness if we are to receive the grace God has for us.

God signals in the question that God knows what’s up with Hagar; God knows who she has been, who she was seen as, this thing that was done to her, Hagar, slave girl of Sarai,God says. She’s first called by her name, her true self, and then invited to tell what it was like to be the object.  She’s invited to share her death experience with the living God.

 “I am running away,” Hagar answers God. 

In order for God to give us a new story, we have to own and inhabit the old one. We have to speak it, to give words to it, to say how it has shaped us so that it can be stripped of its power to continue to do so.  

God is a God who speaks our name, who seeks us out where gods don’t go, who invites us to share our story, to be known, to be vulnerable. Because remember? God is first minister. It is how God relates to us.  God cares for us in our real selves in our real circumstances. God arrives into our experiences and bears them with us in order to heal us, to bring us to peace – to our fullness, our place as ministers made in the image of the Divine minister.

So after God hears Hagar’s story, God gives her a command. 

Go back. Go back – not to a place, but to a person.  

Go back to Sarai. Humbly submit to her.  This is the same verb that drove Hagar away; but it’s the opposite action.  Instead of Sarai forcing her slave girl to submit to her, Hagar is coming to Sarai in freedom and choice, and offering herself to care for Sarai.  It’s Jesus’ Turn the other cheek– It’s a self-empting action that requires that you see me as a person, a person with agency, and I am choosing to use that agency to serve you, another person, powerfully humbling both.  Sarai is forced to see Hagar as a person. And in order to do this, Hagar must also see Sarai as a person, not an oppressive force, an object of hatred, an enemy.  A person trapped in grief and shame and rage, Sarai is in her own kind of wilderness.  So God tells Hagar to go and seek Sarai in her despair and nothingness; to go back and minister to her in that place as God has ministered to Hagar.

Question, command, and now promise. The longest part.

You have a future, God says to her. Your child will have a future. This promise is greater than the wrong that was done to you, it will shape you far beyond the things that were taken from you. Your story is not over, in fact, it will live beyond you in generations too numerous to count – a promise we’ve heard before. The self-emptying God who speaks, who seeks us, who ministers to us, makes promises and keeps them. God pulls us out of nothingness into the future God is bringing into the world.

Then God gives Hagar the name for her son, and the child who not yet born is swaddled in promise as well. The name means “God listens.”  This name will define him; it will follow him and go ahead of him. God saw him before he was born, heard him then, heard his mother when she was lost, sought and found her and made her a minister. Ishmael’s very identity will always reflect this story and truth: God listens.

Then something quite marvelous happens. Hagar returns the favor. Hagar names God.  She is the first person in scripture with the chutzpah to name God. She calls God, “The God of seeing” because God came looking for her, God saw her true personhood beneath the story she had been living in, God found her.  God sees her, and she sees God, and names the Source of all life, The God who sees us.

So Hagar returns to Sarai. And she ministers to her in her despair. She shares the story of being found by God; she comes bearing faith in the promises of a God who sees us.  And when Ishmael is born, Abram – who has heard God himself in the past, respects Hagar’s encounter with God and he names the child Ishmael, God listens.  

Fourteen years later Sarah will conceive, her Advent waiting will end, and the promised blessing will be fulfilled through the impossibility of a barren womb, because impossibility is how God does things. And when it is, Sarai, whose name meant ‘Princess’ becomes Sarah, ‘Mother of Nations.’

And Hagar becomes the matriarch of peace-makers, the mother of ministers. Having being seen by God, she can see others. Sharing in God’s fullness, she contributes to others’ fullness. Making peace is a form of active, humble submitting, as Hagar does; it’s being surrendered to God, who surrenders to us, and then surrendering to each other, to come alongside each other as God comes alongside us. It’s seeing one another in our shared creatureliness.  Peace-making is what ethicist Glen Stassen describes as “abandon[ing] the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of enemies. God comes to us in Christ to make peace with us; and we participate in God's grace as we go to our enemies to make peace.”  Blessed are the peace-makers, Jesus’ says, centuries later.  Blessed are the fullness-seekers, the ministers.

One day there will be no more darkness, but for now, we are found in the darkness by the light of the world that no darkness can put out. Advent is our invitation to be vulnerable creatures who speak of the darkness in which we find ourselves, to the God who speaks, listens, sees us, calls us by name, draws us by grace into God’s fullness, and sends us to each other to seek fullness for one another. 

We are promised peace; God will do this.  In hope we will trust that peace will be so, by joining in its coming.  

Come and let the God of grace meet you here and send you out in peace.

Amen.

To Live Blessed Lives

Genesis 12:1-9

My children and I have learned something about blessing from ARC Retreat Center.  Each meal there begins with a detailed description of every food item – Today’s lunch is a salad of fresh garden greens and ripe tomatoes picked this morning with a buttermilk herb dressing made with thyme and basil. Here we have homemade rosemary polenta hot out of the oven with the velvety tomato sauce from our cookbook.  And today’s tea and cookie pairing is vanilla rooibos tea with chewy almond cookies!” And everyone oohs and ahs in appreciation, and the whole thing is a kind of blessing, if you think about it.  Then together we share a spoken or sung blessing before we eat, and then another one after we’ve lingered with the flavors and conversation and food to end each meal. 

And when you awaken, before you leave your room for good, you are asked to change your sheets and pray a blessing for the next guest who will be staying there after you. So we make the bed carefully and then place our hands on the quilt and pray for the strangers who will get to come next.  Since they were tiny, everywhere we’ve stayed away from home, my children have asked to do this, even at hotels.  

And when it is time to leave ARC, the staff there gathers in a circle around you and sings, “May the long time sun shine upon you, all love surround you, and the pure light within you, guide you on your way home.” And then they gently lay their hand on your shoulder, and then you are ready to depart. And the blessing – even if it’s at first seems silly or cheesy, you can’t help tearing up a little because it seeps into your soul. The touch, the gift, being seen and sent.  It somehow grounds us again in our humanity.

Last week we heard the story of God and Noah, where God was despairing, angry and brokenhearted at the people who keep turning on one another, insistent on destruction.  And at the very center of that story, and those before it, was God’s persistent and stubborn longing for relationship with these ones created in God’s image, created for God and one another and the world.

And when all was said and done, God promised, no matter what, to never give up on humanity. Part of never giving up on the world is also never letting the world give up on itself – helping us see life as it truly is, as God sees it, instead of through the lens of selfishness and destruction.

So God decides to pick one family, and through that family, to bless all the families of the whole world.  God wants to draw one family so close into God’s heart, to share God’s purpose and God’s vision and God’s love for the world, that others would be drawn in, would be cared for, and enabled to live fully and wholly who they were meant to be.

So we’re introduced to Abram.  And the blessing of Abraham and Sarah.

And in a powerful and far-reaching promise, God plans to create from this family a whole nation that will bless the rest of the world.

But just in case we miss what blessing actually is, let us take note of who God has chosen here: They are barren.  There is no way for them to fulfill this promise. No way for them to create a nation, let alone a single child, no way for them to be a blessing to the whole world.

This blessing has to come from God. God calls them and promises them, I will be with you; I will guide you. I will bless you. And through you all the families of the world will be blessed.

So, leaving everything he knows, all the ties he has, any previous blessings that were his, such as family and clan, Abram obeys, and he and Sarai set out with God’s promise holding them.  The covenant God made with the world that God’s love would never give up on us gets legs in the covenant God makes with Abraham.  God’s love will reach out actively to remind the world of its blessedness, of its purpose and its beauty and all people of their place and their blessedness.  
And God is going to use people to help do this. Now we are being pulled into something. Now there is a charge on us.  The chosen people of God are never merely recipients. We are participants. We are blessed to be a blessing.  God wants to draw us so close into God’s heart, to share God’s purpose and God’s vision and God’s love for the world, that others will be drawn in, will be cared for, will enabled to live fully and wholly who they were meant to be. We get to be the ones who notice and celebrate their true nature, their possibility and their hope and their gifts.

So how do we share in this? How do we receive blessing? How do we bless?

Blessing first acknowledges that everything comes from God– it exists in God’s world and is part of this whole that God has put together. And then blessing sees a thing as it is, in its fullness, the darkness and the light of it, and embraces it.  It holds it up to God’s care, and it enjoins it to be even more fully itself, to live as it was created to live.  Hi there Squirrel! You are beautiful in all your nose-twitching, nut-burying, tree-planting, traffic-dodging squirrely-ness! Keep on squirrelling, making more squirrels and living out your squirrely part in this symphony of life!

Blessing recognizes something and names it as valuable. It thanks God for its place in the whole.  Noticing and speaking truth, recognizing and appreciating, and saying aloud the gifts and benefits, the hopes and intentions of other people and things, this is blessing.

One of my favorite moments of blessing was this last Spring – the Presbyterian Women did a house blessing for Marge.  We began in the living room, gathering all together in her space and speaking aloud the hopes and intentions for the space – people began tentatively, “This room has such lovely light! Look at the view! What comfortable space for gathering!” And then it began, may this room bring people together, may it be a place of laughter and conversation, of quiet thoughts and sunlit reading. 

We moved to the bedroom and gathered around her bed, “For restful sleep!” one person said, we all grunted and nodded and sighed our agreement, for peace and comfort. For dreams and memories and waking refreshed to new days.

a view from the toilet

Then all eleven or so of us crowded ourselves into the otherwise spacious bathroom.  We noted how bathrooms see us as we really are, and how they are an intimate space where we are alone with our thoughts and we care for our bodies, a room of honesty and vulnerability.  These ladies had practical blessings, such as a blessing for not slipping.

The kitchen, for sharing food and welcoming guests, for nourishing our bodies and holding treasures passed down and gifts baked up.  The women amped up as they went, thinking of more blessings, getting into it, and Marge beamed, and the moment itself felt so blessed. 

We ended by gathering in a circle in the living room once again and thanking God for Marge, and for her home, and for the chapter closing and the chapter beginning and for what God had in store for her in this new space, and we gave her a plant, part of the whole Peace plant- a tangible and visual blessing and reminder of her belovedness. And we all left feeling blessed.

Because blessing others blesses us.  Reminding others of their belovedness makes us live out our belovedness.  

Blessing can be as simple as pausing and noticing the noisy world waking up, the birds and and sunrise and crisp morning air and giving thanks. It can be laying a hand quietly on your son’s head as he sleeps, or hugging your friend. It can be speaking out about someone to them- recognizing their strengths, celebrating their humor or their honesty. Or giving a gift for no reason at all.  This week I was blessed over and over again as I recovered from surgery with friends stopping by with a bowl of soup and a piece of chocolate, bringing me a book they enjoyed, giving me a call to see how I was feeling, making a lasagna for my family. 

Barbara Brown Taylor says those who become very practiced at blessing might tell you that

“Pronouncing a blessing puts you as close to God as you can get.  To learn to look with compassion on everything that is…to make the first move toward the other, however many times it takes to get close; to open your arms to what is instead of waiting until it is what it should be, to surrender the justice of your own cause for mercy, to surrender the priority of your own safety for love – this is to land at God’s breast.” 

If that is what blessing is, what is blessing NOT?

The story of Abram and Sarai, who become Abraham and Sarah, can tell us something about What a blessing is NOT.  Because sometime after God makes this promise they begin to doubt the blessing and their own blessedness. Instead of trusting God to fulfill God’s promises to the world through them they get tired of waiting and take the blessing into their own hands and try to make something happen. And so comes Hagar and Ishmael, and the human attempt to earn or produce what God has promised to provide. 

Blessing is NOT something we manufacture or coerce. It’s something we receive and participate in and pass on. 

This scheming on the part of Abraham and Sarah does not disqualify them from blessing, though.  God still blesses them and fulfills God’s promise to bless the world through them and eventually they have Isaac, child of human impossibility and God’s intention.  Because blessing begins with God and not with us.

And “blessed” does not mean “lucky.” It can be the same circumstances, the same good thing happening to you, but to call it lucky focuses on your worthiness or unworthiness to receive this gift.  It compares you to others who do or don’t get good things, and questions their worthiness or unworthiness.  And makes the gift itself arbitrary.  It’s a way of rejecting the gift even as you accept it – wow, that was lucky!  Subtext, it’s a fluke and I shouldn’t count on it!

But Blessed always goes back to the source.  To say something is a blessing is to say, “I accept this gift as a reminder of God’s good intentions for the world and of my belovedness in God.”

My daughter is happy at school, that is a blessing. My test results came back negative, what a blessing! We were able to get together with friends for a such lovely evening! I accept this gift as a reminder of God’s love.

Blessing is not magic.  Blessing does not make something holy – blessing recognizes the holiness that is already there, it reminds us that this place, this person, this opportunity is from God – by existing, it shares in God’s holy purposes, and thus it doesn’t matter what we think of it, whether we think it is worthy or not, God can use everything.  That means that by blessing we give up being able to prejudge what is good or bad for us, Taylor says, “You may say a blessing when you break a bone the same as you do when you win the lottery. The two events may be more alike than you know. Live with either of them very long and you may discover that neither of them is as bad or as good as you first thought it would be.” 

So Blessing makes us pay attention, it says of any experience, What might I miss if I don’t take notice? What can I appreciate that might open me to more?  What might come of this?

And Blessings are NOT something only special, holy people can give. Since blessings begin with God, we are all recipients and sharers of blessing.  Orthodox Jews are to give 100 blessings a day.  And they all begin with Blessed be our Lord God, King of the Universe,

Who gave us this bread to nourish our bodies…

Blessed be our Lord God, King of the Universe,

Who gives us this bright, chilly day in which to live…

Blessed be our Lord God, King of the Universe,

For family and friends gathered here…

That means Blessings are not perfection blackmail.  We don’t withhold Blessing until something achieves the “best” version of itself, we don't wait until someone is free of fault and weakness, or some situation is the way we want it to be before we bless it.  That would imply that blessing is earned; but blessing is gift.

In the same way, we don’t refrain from blessing others until we are somehow holy or complete or in a good place.  You can't earn the right to bless, that too is a gift. We are called to continually receive life as a gift that speaks of God’s good intentions and how much God loves us, and then to continually give that reminder to others.

Henri Nouwen said,

"To bless means to say good things. We have to bless one another constantly. Parents need to bless their children, children their parents, [spouses their partners], friends their friends. In our society, so full of curses, we must fill each place we enter with our blessings. We forget so quickly that we are God's beloved children and allow the many curses of our world to darken our hearts. Therefore we have to be reminded of our belovedness and remind others of theirs. Whether the blessing is given in words or with gestures, in a solemn or an informal way, our lives need to be blessed lives."

Sisters and brothers, What would it be like to live blessed lives?  

What would happen to us if we started blessing all the time?  

What would happen to the world?

I wonder, this week, what blessings will you receive? I wonder, how will you bless?

Sarah's Story

At LNPC we're in a series, telling the old stories of our faith in many different ways. Today, we had a visit from Sarah, played by local performance artist, Julie Kurtz.  And Sarah shared her story with us firsthand...

From Genesis 16-18:15, 19-21:7

The promise wasn’t to me. It was to Abram. He was to be “the father of many” – Abraham.  Clearly I was not part of that.  I was the mother to none.

The strangers said I would have a son. Me.  They didn’t say he would. They said I would. 

Of course I laughed.

What did they know of my womanhood? My time was past.  Besides, my womb had been closed my whole life. My arms were never to hold a little one, my breasts long past the days when they awaited a purpose, ripe and ready.  My body had always been an empty, aching vessel - once agile, but now deflated, comfortably worn and finished.  I had accepted my fate.  I always did. Even in the days when there was still some hope. The days when we would wander, always at the word of God – get up and go here, pack up and move there. 

And in some places, Abram, the spineless coward, would pass me off as his sister, and I would comply.  Because I love him. Because I trust him. Because I don’t want anything to happen to him.  He always was a worrier. 

And his God kept intervening.  Punishing the men who would take me as their own, driving them mad in one way or another until they would demand to know from Abram the truth and he would have to tell them I was really his wife and they would return me to him and we’d be on our way.  You should have seen the pandemonium it caused when I was taken into the Pharoah’s house!  Oh the misery on that household that would not let up until Abram and I were restored to one another!  Because I belong to Abram, and Abraham belongs to God.

Of course, It never occurred to us to just trust this God who had sent him there in the first place and be who we were without taking matters into our own hands, but then, that was never our strong suit.

Back in the day, before this all began, before the promise that turned everything upside down and sent us packing, blowing across deserts like tumbleweed from one place to the next, we were so young and strong and sure of ourselves. We could make each other laugh, and oh, the schemes we’d concoct!  We’ve always been a great pair, a clever pair. Life was comfortable and we were in it TOGETHER.  Abram & Sarai, everyone would say.  Oh that Abram & Sarai… Did you see Abram & Sarai…? like it was one word.  We could finish each other’s sentences. It sometimes felt like we shared the same brain.

Then the damned promise.  That uprooted us and gave us a mission, a calling. Or, him anyway.  And the hope, the driven terrible hope that lived in his eyes and grew between us like a tangled weed.  Father of nations!  Offspring like the stars! 

I could not conceive.  My body stubbornly refused to fulfill his God’s promise, to agree to the arrangement they’d come up with.  And it’s not like Abram could keep quiet about it, either.  Oh, the fretting that man did!  Every year added to my age was anguish; I was standing in the way of what he was meant to be, what God was supposed to do.  The barricade to fulfillment was me, my useless flesh, my barren self.

But every time he despaired and nearly gave up, something would happen to him out there in his God moment and he’d come back all fired up about the promise again.  Believing again.  Do you have any idea the pressure that puts on a woman?  I knew it wouldn’t happen.  While my sisters had all raised children, and their children had grown, married and conceived, I remained empty, yearning and ashamed. 

How was I to live in this belief of his?  This faith of his that pulled him somewhere I couldn’t follow?  I was not the one hearing these promises.  And I knew I could never be the one to fulfill them.  At least not in myself.  I was a liability, an obstacle.  And we’ve always trusted one another, through thick and thin, across more miles than could be counted, through more adventures and disasters and struggles and celebrations than I could ever describe, we’ve been Abram&Sarai.  Even with his damn obsession and the drive of this promise I didn’t understand, we’ve always been there for each other, sacrificed for each other, or at least been willing to take a hit for the other. 

So I made up my mind.  I would not stand in the way of this promise any longer. There was something I could do to help fulfill it. So I gave him Hagar, my slave.  Hagar, with her young, strong body, full and firm, latent with potential; a warm, ready place for a baby to grow. 

Oh, if I could take back that moment.

Oh, to remove that day from existence like scooping a worm from the flour bag!

But we must live with our choices, musn’t we?  

It was never the same after that.  After he had known her, who had only known me, I no longer knew him in the same way.  Somehow he was stranger to me.  My Abram – a divide now yawned between us that I couldn’t have bridged if I had wanted to. 

And I didn’t want to.

And she! Oh, how she lorded it over me!  As her belly began to swell she looked upon me, her mistress, with such contempt, as though I were less than worthless. 

The two of them… I could barely stomach the thought of it; it plagued me relentlessly!  That she would give to him what I never could? 

This child wouldn’t be ours; it would be theirs. 

I couldn’t stand the sight of her; the pain burned inside me into a molten rage and I “dealt harshly” with my slave woman. 

After she fled from me I regretted what I had done. Not only was I useless, I was wicked.  I should never have behaved in that way.  No matter what has happened, I am still Abram’s wife, I said, and mistress of this household. And it is incumbent upon me to remember my place and the duty I have to uphold the dignity of my husband and position.  I am the one who did this.  And I will bear the consequences graciously if it kills me. 

She did come back, and I swallowed my pride and struggled daily to push past my shame and anger and the gnawing, constant grief, and keep my head high and my emotions restrained.  But after that, part of me was dead.

The years went on and we managed.  We found a way, our odd little family.  Abram doted on Ishmael, his son, and I fulfilled my duty and cared for the boy for Abram’s sake and the sake of this project we were now in, living the dream for this God who had settled him here, anchored him in this boy, leaving only me to drift through the desert alone. 

For a while, I fought the hostility inside me every day; the regret, pain and confusion, and mostly the loneliness and isolation.  We were still together, he still reached for me in the darkness of the night, there was still some comfort in the familiarity of his arms and the daily patterns and unspoken rhythms of a lifetime side by side; we still shared language and even occasionally laughter, but what we’d had was gone. And sometimes I’d gaze at him and realize with a start that I’d no more know his thoughts than a perfect stranger’s.  We were closed to one another.  

But over time, the anger softened into defeat, and I accepted the life we had grown into.  I was no longer young, and my old age had worn away regret and gradually filled in the places with a not-unpleasant mixture of gratitude and resignation.

Then it happened again, this promise giving, this sudden burst of belief, and Abram returned one day, like he had the first time, seventy years before, flushed and luminous and filled with purpose.  He set about circumcising all the males in the whole place and going on about the promise once again.   He said God had changed his name, that he was to be Abraham now, ancestor of a multitude of nations, for through him were to come nations and kings.  And he announced that there was now a covenant, God claiming them all as God’s people forever. And this was fine. I’d grown accustomed to accepting this spectacular direction our lives had become oriented to and his breathless reports of God’s words, only a few days later he started in again on me. 

He stood as we were finishing dinner -  Ishmael, the continuously in motion teenager, had gone off somewhere in his usual flurry, and I was about to clear the meal, and Abraham grabbed my hands and pulled me down to sit beside him.  Sarai, he said, with a strange mixture of sadness and hope in his watery eyes, Ishmael is not the promise. 

Then he stood over me and laid his hands on my head, closed his eyes and said, You are now to be called Sarah, the princess of a people, for God will bless you and give to me a son through you. God will bless you and you shall give rise to nations, kings of people shall come from you.  Sarah you are and Sarah you shall be. 

His hands still heavy on my head, he knelt back down in front of me, and then gently slid them from my head to my face, cradling it before him.

I sat like a stone. 

I could feel his breath on my face, he was so close.  Finally I raised my eyes and looked into his crazy, hope-filled face and I felt nothing. 

There was nothing. 

I gave him nothing.

How could he? 

How dare he? 

I reached up and gently took him by the wrists, removed his hands from my cheeks, and lowered his arms away from me.  Then I turned away from this man, and slowly rose to my feet and walked out of the tent.

I was finished.

Some time later three visitors appeared in our camp in the heat of the day.

We don’t often have visitors, and Abraham was turbulent with hospitality, caring for their animals, offering them rest and shade, setting the whole camp into motion to provide respite and welcome to these travelers stopping in.  He rushed into our tent and told me how to do my job, always a sure sign of his nervous energy, and I set about making cakes for his guests, while Abraham, all ninety-some years of him, hiked up his robe and ran to the herd to select a calf and have it prepared for a feast. 

Once all was ready and they were eating in the shade of the tree, one of them said to him, “Where is your wife, Sarah?”

Inside the tent, my heart skipped a beat.  Abraham had not spoken my name; I had declined to come out of the tent and meet the guests.  (I had made it silently and unmistakably clear that these little projects of his no longer included me). 

I drew near the entrance to hear what they were saying.

“She’s there, in the tent.” Abraham answered. He seemed embarrassed.  Good.

Then one of them said, “I will return in due time, and I will find your wife Sarah with a son.”

When I heard that, I laughed to myself.

Oh, I am so beyond that! I thought.  WE are so beyond that.  He’s old, I’m old; he and I are FINISHED, and NOW, in my old age, when my life has been riddled with disappointment beyond words, NOW I am to have pleasure?  I highly doubt it, strange sir.  Nice sentiment, but you seem to have caught the illness that touches folks around here…there is to be no great happiness for me.  What you say is IMPOSSIBLE.

And I ask you, truly, What else could I do but laugh? 

The tears dried up long before my womb.  I had nothing left to weep. Nothing.

But somehow they knew. Somehow God knew.  I may have been hiding there in the tent, but these strangers had read my mind. 

Why did Sarah laugh? was the question. Why did she laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear a child now that I have gotten old?

I slipped outside the door, my heart pounding in fear.  They looked over at me and I at them, trembling.

Is anything too wonderful for God? 

And the visitor turned back to Abraham and repeated, louder this time, “In due time I will return and Sarah will have a son.”

“I didn’t laugh.” I blurted across to them.

And he stood and looked at me once again.  And a shiver went through me.

“Oh yes. You did laugh.” he said.

More time and drama came after that.  More moving, more of the same adjusting to the new. Lot came back into our lives for a time, we even had another “pretend you’re my sister” incident, like the good old days, complete with another household in upheaval until God alerted them that I belonged to Abraham and we were once again on our way, wondering at how we’d managed to repeat an old mistake so egregiously.  But it was nice to feel desirable again, anyway, to get back into the groove with Abraham, a little like our young selves, all this adventure and motion. 

And something within me had come back to life.  I could feel it healed over, like fresh, fertile soil in my soul, willing to begin anew with Abraham, willing to open myself to the possibility that life might hold something promising.  Even if I didn’t understand it.

That strange day with the visitors lived always in the shadows behind everything that happened.  It hovered there, without explanation, but also without disappearing.  And I had grown to treasure it for its inexplicable warmth.  If nothing else, for what it felt like to finally be seen. To hear my name as the opening to a stranger’s promise. To have my very self laid so bare for such a brief and shocking moment.  And to find, in some strange way, solidarity with Abraham in the holy, in the place he had always stood alone and told me of later. To feel the mystery electrify the air between us all, hear the voice of God together - it seemed to burn away the hardness between us, to fill the gulf that divided us and draw us close, and we could see each other again, reach each other again. 

And then one ordinary day, God did as God had said. 

One regular, uneventful day, unremarkable day, the Lord did for me as the Lord has promised.

I conceived.

And in due time, I bore Abraham a son in his old age,

just as God had promised. 

On the day he was born, when I held his tiny life against me, and felt the tapping of his new little heartbeat against the timeless thudding of my own, when I lowered him to my breast and gazed at the downy softness of his impossibly beautiful head, I said in my joy, the hot, fresh tears streaming down my face, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me!  Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?  Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”

Abraham called him Isaac. Which means “laughter.”

 And on the eighth day he circumcised Isaac, to bear the mark of one held in the covenant of God, one belonging to the God who will never forsake the people of God’s promise. 

Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

And I not much younger.

Is anything too wonderful for God? 

How could I not laugh?

I held in my own arms the promise itself, the sign of a God who will never forsake the people of God’s promise. The joy pours out of me yet, for my body bore the promise made flesh, and my breasts nursed not just my own fulfillment, but the future of God’s people: nations and kings, numerous as the stars, a people chosen and brought forth by God.  A people of God’s blessing, with God’s purpose.

This promise of Abraham’s, that guided our whole lives, it never belonged to him. 

Or to me.

We belonged to it.

The plan of God doesn’t come from what is possible; it comes from what is promised.

And nothing we do can hinder it or break it, can prevent it from coming. 

One could, I suppose, decline the invitation to participate, and I suppose I almost did, for a while.

But God is relentless and committed;

God will do what God will do. 

And blessed, oh so blessed, are those through whom God does.