University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

BLESSING, a.k.a. RECONCILIATION

Psalm 133

Genesis 12:1-4; 13:1-12

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Second Sunday in Lent February 17, 2008

(This sermon draws substantially from a paper on the text by Chandler Stokes, presented to the January 2008 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Louisville, Kentucky.)

            Wednesday’s New York Times carried a heartrending story of two seriously wounded young boys being treated side-by-side in an Israeli hospital’s intensive care unit, both the victims of violence not of their own making. One was eight-year-old Osher Twito, an Israeli boy from the town of Sderot, who was struck last weekend by shrapnel from a rocket fired from Gaza by Palestinian militants. The other was Yakoub Natil, almost seven, a Palestinian boy who was brought to the hospital from Gaza City after he was badly hurt by shrapnel from an Israeli Air Force strike on January 18. 

Here, the conflict’s pain has been compressed into an improbable intimacy. There is pathos. “The Palestinian boy on one side, Osher on the other — it’s something that gets to your heart,” said Gideon Paret, the director of the [unit].

But there is anger and repudiation as well, and the proximity of the two boys has not brought reconciliation. Osher’s parents… are outraged at the thought of comparing the boys’ cases. They refuse to allow them to be photographed together.

“The Palestinians aim to hurt our sons and rejoice at their injuries,” they said in a statement issued Tuesday, “while neither we, nor our army, intended to hurt them.” The statement…continued: “The State of Israel took the decision to treat the boy. That is its right. We protest the fact that he is lying here [next to] our son….”[1]

            The intensity of such feelings is understandable and yet hard to fathom. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter reported several years ago about an interview he had with a Palestinian official living in a refugee camp in the West Bank.  The official asked, “Do you know what it means that four consecutive generations have lived here? Two generations held onto the hope that they would once again see the land where they were raised. The next [generation] was raised in the camp and lost hope… As for the fourth generation, even I am afraid of them.”[2]  On both sides, the anger seethes, but the conflict goes back well beyond the last four generations. It goes back literally thousands of years.

            Back in the fourth chapter of Genesis Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” In the field, as you know, there was a murder. Cain killed his brother Abel in the field, and the curse of fratricide was loosed upon the land.  Now, from that time until the call of Abram, there were fourteen generations of the curse. Fourteen generations before Abram.

            And for a while the story of Abram and his nephew Lot looks like it might go the same way. The writer of Genesis says, “The land could not support both of them living together; for their possessions were so great that they could not live together, and there was strife between the herders of Abram’s livestock and the herders of Lot’s livestock.” The family conflict is at a flash point when Abram says to Lot, “Let us go out to the field.” And though fourteen generations have passed since the curse of Cain’s sin, anyone could see what was coming next. Only it didn’t. It didn’t.

            Instead, Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herders and my herders, for we are family. Why don’t we simply separate? If you take the land to the left, I will take the right. If you take the right, I will take the left.” After fourteen generations, there finally arrives a measure of sanity and blessing… not jealousy and violence, but deference... and peace.[3]

            “I will bless you,” the Lord said to Abram, “and you will be a blessing.” After fourteen generations of curse, Abraham initiates the generations of blessing… blessing also known as reconciliation. From this point forward the history of evil and curse will be transformed by a history of good and blessing. Evil will not disappear, of course. Humankind will forever bear the tragic curse of the first fourteen generations. But history will be ameliorated. Humans from Abram forward will have the opportunity, by acknowledging the blessing of Abraham and his heirs, to turn toward the future with hope.[4] And the blessing will take the form of deference and reconciliation. 

            Not everyone will choose the blessing, and it won’t take right away, as we see in the story of Abraham’s sons, Isaac and Ishmael: Ishmael born to his wife’s servant Hagar out of Abraham’s attempt to take God’s promise of descendents into his own hands… and Isaac, the child of blessing and promise by Sarah.  Hagar and Ishmael were cast off by Sarah after Isaac’s birth, and there was no reconciliation.  It has been true of their descendants as well, given that we understand Isaac as the father of Israel and Ishmael as the progenitor of the Arab peoples.

            I was introduced last month to a poem written by the Israeli poet Shin Shalom, a poem that invokes the reconciliation of these brothers:

            Ishmael, my brother,

How long shall we fight each other?

My brother from times bygone,

My brother, Hagar’s son,

My brother, the wandering one.

One angel was sent to us both,

One angel watched over our growth -

Thee in the wilderness, death threatening through thirst,

I a sacrifice on the altar, Sarah’s first.

Ishmael, my brother, hear my plea:

It was the angel who tied thee to me.

Time is running out, put hatred to sleep.

Shoulder to shoulder, let’s water our sheep.[5]

            A generation after Isaac and Ishmael come the twins Jacob and Esau, who struggle with each other in their mother Rebecca’s womb and then struggle with each other in life and separate as bitter rivals for twenty years until a moment of tearful and glad reunion – the claiming of a blessing promised to Abraham…a blessing also known as reconciliation.

A generation later there is Joseph, sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, yet who finds his way to reunion and restoration through the intercession of a brother – a blessing, also known as reconciliation.

Chandler Stokes notes that after Abram, “Every time a situation arises, instead of murder, instead of sin, there is reconciliation. When one of them might say, ‘This town ain’t big enough for the two of us,’ there isn’t a standoff or a showdown…. Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between me and you, for we are kindred.’”[6]

            The Psalmist sings, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” (Ps. 133:1)

            How very good and pleasant it is, indeed. But in our day, and at the end of this violent week in our land, the psalm begs the question: has God withdrawn the blessing? We believe the promises of God are never abrogated, but kindred dwelling in unity seems like a lost dream in our time. Is the problem that we have chosen not to live into the blessing God offers us? So it would seem, much of the time. Maybe we have withheld the blessing from ourselves. Maybe in our separation, our selfishness, and our strife, we have refused to accept the gift God bestows on us. Maybe we have failed to learn from the simple thoughtfulness of Abram in dealing with his nephew Lot.

            Our friend Marcia Mount Shoop tells yet another story of two brothers who shared a plot of land. One brother had a wife and five children; the other lived alone. The brothers always split their harvest of grain exactly in half. One night the brother with the wife and children woke in the night and began to think about this arrangement of splitting the harvest fifty-fifty. He began to think this arrangement was not fair. He thought to himself, “Why should my brother get half of the harvest when he is alone? I have a wife and five children—they will always take care of me. My brother has no one to take care of him. He should get more than I, since he is alone.” So this brother began, in the dark of each night, to go and deposit additional scoops of grain into his brother’s granary.

One night the other brother woke in the night and he also began thinking of their arrangement. He thought, “Why should my brother get half the grain? He has a wife and five children, and I live alone. He should get more than I do; he has a whole family to feed. I have more than enough.” So the second brother began to go each night and put additional scoops of grain into his brother’s granary.

One night, they happened to get out of bed at the same time and they met each other, each with a sack of grain on his back. [As they met, it began to rain. The raindrops, it was said, were God’s tears of joy.] After these brothers died, their story began to be told in their village. When the people of the village were deciding where to build a place of worship, they chose the spot where those two brothers met that night. They decided there was no place in town holier than that place.[7]

            Is that not the place to which God called Abram? Is it not the place to which God calls us?  To a place of blessing… a place of shared abundance… to a place of peace and reconciliation and the greater good? 

            “Time is running out,” the poet warns, “put hatred to sleep.” We pray for that day. We pray for the day when children like Osher Twito and Yakoub Natil and all the children of Israel and Palestine can play together, free of fear. We pray for the day when the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael may share fully and gladly in the blessing God intended. “We pray that the Holy Land itself may one day be the place where kindred meet to sanctify and bless the land in reconciliation [after the example of Abram].  Then there would truly be no place holier than that.”[8] We pray the same for this place, this land we love, and for our own relationships.  And we pray confidently, for we know that our God is a God who blesses… and we know what God desires.

            How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! Oh, yes! How good, indeed! Pray for that day, friends. And in the meantime, why not live as though that day were already here?