Mixed Blessings Selections from Psalm 78 (Sept. 28, 2014) My thanks to the choir for orienting us to the blessing of the animals, which follows this service. You re all encouraged to join us outside, as you are able, at the conclusion of the postlude. With carefully selected pieces, the choir so often orients us within the flow of our worship together on Sunday mornings. And of course it is, in part, orientation that we seek. This is one of the lessons of the psalms, as we consider them this fall. When we are disoriented by the world around us, we are blessed by the reorientation offered in the context of this gathering each Sunday. We receive, and hopefully accept the blessings presented by a community committed to the betterment of our city, our nation, and our world. But the blessings offered here are not uni-directional they are not one-way streets, which those of us living in Seattle know often move in the exact opposite direction we want to go, trapping us in a maze of left-hand turns that force us to travel in a flow manipulated by the street signs and stop lights populating already congested avenues. No, blessings move in all directions and should enhance and enliven the complex web of interconnectivity that is our lives together, friends. So we should not be passive while blessings are gifted in the confines of this sanctuary. As blessings are offered to us and we accept them, we also accept responsibility to borrow a phrase we accept responsibility to BE the blessings we want to see in the world. This responsibility carries its own moral weight, and that weight can be confusing, daunting yes, blessings, when considered carefully can be intimidating if we take them seriously.
With this weight of responsibility, they are often in a matter of fashion mixed blessings, aren t they? Psalm 78, our psalm for today, speaks of blessings. The psalmist reminds us to keep our hearts from becoming hard and to pass our blessings on to our children and our children s children. This psalm is a much longer rolling poetic narrative that clearly illustrates Pastor Tim s use of Walter Brueggemann s notion of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. In it, the psalmist offers truths about the mercurial nature of love love for self, love for others, and love for God. We are at first oriented, using the words that we shared in the responsive reading at the beginning of the service, and then disoriented, within the difficult passages that Gretchen shared during her prayer, and then reoriented by the closing verses of the psalm verses 69 and following: O God, you built your sanctuary like the high heavens, like the earth that you established forever; you chose David, your faithful one and took him from the sheepfolds; you took him from tending nursing ewes to be the shepherd of your people. And David tended them with a blameless heart; leading, or orienting, them with skillful hands The 78 th psalm is a historically-based poem a shortened history of the Israelite people. There are references to the parting of the Sea of Reeds, and the plagues befalling Egypt. It was written as a reminder of what had come to pass, and uses (as I learned in my studies) more past tense than any other psalm a technique used to remind a people to honor and cherish lessons learned from their history together. The psalmist recalls that blessings abound, but in order to actually receive those blessings, we must recognize
them, accept them, and eventually pass them on to our children, to the community, and to the world. If you read all 72 verses, you ll find the flow is fascinating. Time and again the community is blessed with wealth and riches, while their enemies, or the foreigners are smote to crumbling ash. But the community never recognizes its own blessings time and again they turn their backs on God and on each other. It is not until calamity falls on them, and their good fortune is wiped clean away, that they then turn toward God to ask for help. It is within the context of destruction and despair that their hearts are softened in a way that their attention shifts from their inward focus to an outward gaze. It s a narrative that resonates these millennia later. Do we not find parallels with the present state of things? O God, you blessed us with prosperity and with health while the foreigner was sick with disease, but our hearts were hard and we did little. But then Ebola came within the gates of OUR nation, and our eyes were opened. Our people became sick and we realized we realized that the plight of the foreigner is the plight of our neighbor, and our neighbor s plight is our own Our eyes were opened So many Sundays we have sung together: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me I once was lost, but now am found; Was blind but now I see Sometimes we have to be lost in order to be found. Sometimes the inability to see leads to seeing in a whole new way. The darkness eventually surrenders to light and when dawn comes we see clearly communities that long for us to live into the blessings that we are and to receive the blessings that we can offer.
Now the moment when we begin to turn to address the distress of our neighbor and by turning to our neighbor, turn also to God when we come together with each other to rebuild the community and to love one another isn t that a blessing? The moment when our hearts are made soft by the, albeit, coarse balm of reality isn t that a blessing, in its own way a mixed blessing? Many of you know that I was in an accident nine years ago. I was hit by a car while riding my bicycle in Western Massachusetts. I spent eight days in the trauma ward at Bay State Medical Center in Springfield with multiple injuries to my body, and, I might add, to my spirit. At one point, during those days of convalescence, my mom took my hand and looked into my eyes with tears in her own and said, You survived. Just think of what you re supposed to do; just think of what s in store for you She offered these words as a blessing, as a way of acknowledging the potential I might have with this second lease on life and indeed her words her blessing left me to wonder what I would do, what I could do as a survivor. Six weeks to the day after my own accident, a friend of mine was also hit while riding her bicycle in Western Mass, but she lost her life. The moment I learned of Meg s death, the words I had accepted from my mom as a blessing twisted, instead, into a curse. Meg was kind and generous and beloved by her friends. She was a brilliant artist. She put her bicycle to good use, raising money and awareness year after year in her rides for the PAN Mass challenge run by the Massachusetts AIDS Action Collective. Why was I spared and she was not? My appreciation of my own worth spiraled slowly down
the drain of despondency. The deaths of amazing and talented friends and family rested like heavy punctuation marks on the questions about my purpose I could not seem to answer. The darkness that surrounded me only added to the depth of my insecurity and enhanced the guilt of survivorship that plagued my spirit. I wrestled to comprehend how I was meant to do anything of value as I found myself encapsulated in the dark vessel of my being. Eventually slowly cracks formed in the vessel. Light crept into the darkness. My advisor in seminary offered me compassionate wisdom as she spoke candidly about what she thought I was capable of in the context of ministry. Conversations with my parents about their belief in my work and my worth began to soften my heart. And then I found myself here in a sanctuary in every sense of the word, a sanctuary and I believed, I really and truly believed and continue to believe that I had been blessed not just by a disembodied heavenly hand resting on my shoulder, but by that something bigger represented by the words and actions of those that surrounded me. And that belief encouraged and empowered me to do my very best to offer and, in fact, to be the blessing that I had seen and experienced through the ministries of wonderful people. You see, there came a time when I recognized that my mom s blessing came with an obligation of sorts, even though she offered it unconditionally that being blessed was not inherent in the act of receiving a blessing - but that I had a responsibility to live into the blessing that was offered. The blessing wasn t automatically a present reality, but a potential that rested deep within, which required me to accept that, yes, I really could be - that I could do
something with my life, that I could offer others blessings in response to and as a result of the blessings offered to me. We ve seen this giving and receiving unfold a number of times in bittersweet ways as we ve watched members of this community move away for work and other life circumstances. Saying our goodbyes to Kim, Charles, and Howie Cates, who moved to Virginia, and to Lindsey and Erin as they prepared to move to California both stand out for me. In these cases what we say to our friends as they go is that we bless them in their departure, because they have been blessings to us in their presence among us. We offer them blessings in the hopes they might recognize in a tangible way that our love goes with them. We bless them to acknowledge who they are and who they have been, and we bless them as a way of empowering them to continue to be the wonders they are to the world. Having received and offered blessings we recognize that they unfold as gifts in a variety of ways ways we have named today and ways that will go unnamed. We offer blessings, understanding that they might not lead to perceptible change in a person or relationship, but that they in very real ways allow us to call attention to those whom we love. They provide a means by which we honor and cherish and uphold those things and people and places that change us by softening our hearts, by giving us perspective, by making us believe in ourselves, by administering justice, by making the world around us seem somehow whole or at least less fractured. We bless even when we don t necessarily know where that blessing will lead or what the outcome will be.
When I was in elementary school we had a Lahsa Upsu named Pugsley. Every day when I arrived home to our second floor apartment outside of Philadelphia I heard Pugsely s paws padding quickly over the hard wood floor of the dining room. He barked and yapped and jumped at my feet. I would pause momentarily to pet him and scratch his ears before going into the kitchen for my afterschool snack. It wasn t until the day that we had to put Pugsely down, and that I arrived home to silence, that I realized his scampering, and barking, and excitement were some of the things that made home feel like home. Unlocking the door and walking up the stairs to complete and utter quiet was disorienting and home no longer felt like home at all. gone. His welcome was a blessing that I never recognized or appreciated until it was Mary Oliver writes of her dog Percy: For there was nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there was nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For he was of the tribe of the Wolf. For when I went away he would watch for me at the window. For he loved me. For we have been loved. Because we have been loved, and experiencing that love, have been blessed, we offer our own blessings in return. There is a fount of blessing within each of you ready to spring forth and hydrate a parched globe a fount of blessing that tunes our hearts to the rhythmic needs of this place that surrounds us. Indeed, may we be inspired to be the blessings we want to see in the world. May that be so.