Our spiritual theme this month is blessing. Blessing.

Earlier in the service we blessed our graduating seniors. What a joy it is to do that every year. And maybe this year they need our blessing all the more. I feel for them. I recall the days when the seniors were here in the sanctuary, the future before them, and we as a congregation sending them off in love, imagining the future that lay before them. There was love in the air. Like so many things our rituals have had to be adjusted in these last many months. This year we needed to work harder to imagine that love as we send them forth.

So blessing. What comes up when you hear that word? What does that mean in your life? How often do we note the blessings in our lives? Or do we even feel blessed? When I asked our Board to reflect on this theme the other night, I heard many name spouses and other family members. I heard a number note that this COVID time has been one where we have been made more aware of the blessing of those closest to us and also those we haven’t been able to see in person. It has been a time when we have been asked to notice what we take for granted.

I wonder how it will be coming out of this COVID time? As we go through some process of returning to something that might be normal will that awareness of blessing, to the extent we have found that in this time, how will that remain with us, or not?

And what about our individual lives: Are we really able see ourselves as blessed?

The theme of blessing often calls up the story from the bible, in Genesis, about Jacob wrestling with the angel.  The story has always fascinated me. I remember as a kid looking at my mother’s big illustrated bible and looking at the image of this man wrestling with the angel. There’s big muscular Jacob in a fight for his life with the white-robed angel. The illustration seemed all too real. They really seemed to be in the struggle.

Life and the spiritual journey often involve struggle, we know. And those old stories from scripture bring a kind of literalness to them. And maybe that is why they have been around for so long—they speak to us about what it means to be human. In this case they speak to us about how it is we find our way to blessing.

We start with Jacob needing to find his way back home. Now Jacob from the beginning has had a bad relationship with his twin brother, Esau. They were rivals from the very beginning with Esau being born first. That came with all kinds of privileges and Jacob was not at all happy about that. But Jacob manages to trick their father Isaac into giving him the blessing due the first-born son. It was the first of many ways that Jacob manages to trick his way into getting what he wants. Jacob, through all this, becomes what we might call a self-made man. He seems to have it all. But when we come to the story it seems Jacob is wanting for something. He is wanting to come back to his roots. Something is missing.

He hears a call to come back to his home where his brother, Esau still lives. Jacob sets out, along with a huge caravan of people and animals and he reaches what is almost the final step, the Jabbok stream. The story says that the whole caravan makes it across the river, save for Jacob who stays behind, alone by the river. And he ponders what will await him the next day? What will he find when he encounters his brother from whom he stole his birthright? All kinds of thoughts go through Jacob’s mind.

And as it gets dark, the story goes, a stranger grabs him and begins to wrestle with him. That wrestling goes on the entire night and Jacob doesn’t give up. He is exhausted but he still doesn’t give up. Finally the stranger strikes Jacob and injures him, causing him to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. But in the end Jacob gets a new name and a blessing.

Your name shall be no more called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed. This seems to change everything for Jacob. It seems to put him on a new path. He seems to come back into relationship with himself and with his god.

I think there is resonance with that story for a lot of us. I think a lot of us have found ourselves in some struggle, what has sometimes been called the “dark night of the soul.” We have found ourselves at some juncture and not quite known what to do. It may come from something external or it may be something much more internal. But we find ourselves at a crossroad and it takes time to for to find a path forward.

And I wonder if a lot of us have found ourselves at some kind of juncture in these COVID times. To have life seemingly turned upside down overnight. Maybe facing death or serious illness. To find ourselves cut off from those we love, or having to suddenly take on roles we didn’t expect to take on. Maybe becoming full time teacher as well as parent. Maybe not being able to do some of the very things that have brought us joy and fulfillment in life. Maybe we have found our sense of identity questioned

I think that may be why that wrestling image is so resonant for me. So as I pondered preaching on this topic for the last few weeks that image of the angel throwing out Jacob’s hip has been with me. Just what is that supposed to mean anyway?

So let me digress for a moment. Gardening has been an important thing for me during this COVID time. It has been good to be able to be out and planting things and digging around in my yard. So I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to make some changes in my front yard and take some bushes out and add some other things. It needed some upgrading. Well the plants in the front yard, I discovered, were a little more established than I thought and making changes has not been as easy as I thought.

The plan was to make space for a Japanese maple in the front and that meant some of those more established things coming out and that included trying to dig out their root systems. So I’m out there digging away, very much aware that I don’t do thing kind of thing very often. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out that this is probably a bigger job than I first imagined. But the more those root systems resist, the more determined I become that they are going to go. I get one tool and then another from the garage. I try moistening the soil with water. Still not much give. My determination rises. It is at about this point as I try to leverage the shovel one more time when I first hear and then quickly feel this popping sound in my hip. On no I think. I momentarily wonder if I’m going to be able to hobble the few feet to a place there I can sit down. Wondering if I have done myself in. wondering in that very moment if the hip popping story from Jacob is for me. Maybe this is a sign I say to myself.

Well it turns out that it wasn’t as bad as first thought. Turns out that my hip was pretty sore for a couple days but that I have more of less recovered, perhaps just a little more aware of my age than I was before this. Perhaps humbled would be a good word. And I will tell you that the roots did eventually come out. But that’s a story for another day. But suffice it to say I have more appreciation for Jacob and the fact that he stayed in the struggle. And what I know so far is that because of the struggle my connection, my commitment to that piece of ground is deeper and richer. My respect for the deep roots that I don’t see. I know that something has come out of all this.

And maybe that’s the point. That sometimes life is a struggle. A kind of wrestling. Ego gets in the mix. Frustration that maybe things don’t get worked out as quickly as we’d like. Or maybe not in the way we’d like. How maybe some humility is needed. Maybe some moderating of expectations. Maybe those are all metaphors for the pain that can come from the joints that have come to be a little out of shape.

Perhaps that is all part of the story. How we manage, hopefully, come ‘round right. To know that being human is to be in that struggle. And to know that others, maybe even God, is with us through all that.

And hopefully we come to know that part of what comes out of that struggle is our own sense of blessing. Some awareness of the things we have in our lives. Maybe the things we had lost sight of, maybe the things that we took for granted. That we come out of it with some new sense of ourselves. Maybe even with a sense of having been given a new name. A blessing.

We are, I think, in this interesting period of coming out of COVID. Or at lease hopefully we are at this place of coming out of COVID. Most of us have been vaccinated. Most of us are finding our way back into the world. But also finding that we may be taking steps back faster than we are ready. For others it can’t be fast enough. Are we ready for dinners with others? Are we ready for larger gatherings? And what about those around us who for, whatever reason, can’t be vaccinated?

What is that future that is emerging? What does that look like?

As easy as it would be to be back to normal I think we want to take our time. I think we want to give some space to make that way back. Could any of us have imagined back in January of 2020 what the next many months would be? The losses the world would see? Loss of lives, yes, but also of routines and livelihoods. The loss of contacts with family and friends? The losses of things that helped us understand who we are in the world? Maybe the privileges we have? And what does it mean to name the blessings that have also come out of all of this? How do we recognize and name those too?

And what does all that mean for these months ahead? What will return, yes, but what are those things that will be left behind? There is loss to recognize, but also opportunity to be mindful of too. To not be in too much of a rush to get back to where we were. To give it the time that it may need.

My struggle with that root that I thought had thrown out my hip was a reminder that I need to pay attention to my body and some of the routines that I have lost around care for my body. It was a reminder of aging and not losing sight of that either.

But a reminder too to not lose sight of the importance of the privilege I have of being able to dig in the dirt and to nurture things and to play a part in this small plot of earth that I have some responsibility for. To not lose ways to remind myself of how I’m connected to the earth and what a blessing that is for me. To see the value in taking time that is restorative, that is creative, that is nurturing. To take the time to dig a little deeper.

The story of Jacob is often seen to be about our own relationship with life, with god. Our own wrestling with who we are and where we are and where it is we are going. That sometimes life has a way of shaking us up and taking us to places we did not know we should be. The metaphor of wrestling is often thought to one way to think about prayer, that that struggle is really our working through whatever it is we find ourselves struggling with. A conversation with god we might say. That it is a back and forth, that we don’t always know how long that struggle will last, or how it is we might be changed in the process.

I think my prayer in this hopefully emerging post-COVID time is that it offers some space to do that. I think there is a kind of invitation before us right now. An invitation to ask where we have been and where we might be going. But also to remember how it is we have been blessed, how we continue to be blessed in our lives.

That Galway Kinnell poem about St. Francis and the Sow that was our other reading this morning is about that I think. Maybe in the midst of all that this covid time has been there is a need to be reminded of our own loveliness, of our own beauty, of our own blessedness. It says:

Sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

In these times of uncertainty. In these times of change and loss. These times of opportunity and hope. May we know—may we remember—our own loveliness. May we remember that basic story of blessing that is there, even in our struggles, even when we would despair, even when we would be fearful, even when we might lose our own way.

Amen.

Prayer

Spirit of life and of love. god of many names and no name, be with us. Be with us in our living. In our struggles, in our wrestling. Help us to remember too the blessings in our lives. So much that would be so easy to take for granted. Those around us. Those who love us. Those who challenge us and would ask us to wrestle with it all. And in our living help us to recognize the blessing of others and reflect that out. Remind us that we are not alone. Remind us of that love, that blessing, that will never let us go. Amen.

Benediction

As we have been blessed in our lives, may we be a blessings. May that be our promise. May that be our prayer.

Topics: Blessing