Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Genesis 27:1-10, 18-29
Let me launch right into this with a story that is so perfect….so fitting….so right….it would be a crying shame if it turned out not to be true. It concerns a young man who went off to college. Upon reaching the dormitory, he began to unpack his suitcases. Apparently, his mother had done his packing for him. In the process of putting clothing into drawers, he discovered two long narrow pieces of cloth among the shirts, socks and underwear. They were neatly folded and ironed. At first he didn’t know what they were. But when he looked at the design, he recognized the pattern as being one that he had seen before. At last it came to him. These were the strings of his mother’s favorite apron.
That’s a powerful message. It is also a wonderful gift. It embraces everything the Bible means when it talks about “the blessing.” To some of us it comes easily, graciously, and in the natural course of things. To others of us, it doesn’t.
Consider John Claypool (who will spend a weekend with us in the spring). John Claypool made it big. He also made it fast. He was like a ministerial meteor, flaming across the skies of his denomination. “Watch him,” they said. And he was worth watching. He landed a church of 2,800 members before he was thirty. Ultimately, he became senior minister of a church with 5,000 members. He wrote books worth reading. He delivered the prestigious Beecher Lectures on preaching at Yale University. Today, John Claypool is divorced, remarried, serving a church a fraction of the size of his former cathedral, and is working under the banner of a different denomination. He writes as well as he ever did….but less often.
Allow me the privilege of retelling just a bit of his story. He begins….well….at the beginning, journeying back to that pre-rational stage of childhood development where all of the tracks are being laid down, but the child is not conscious of any tracks being laid down.
What was my earliest perception? It was the sense that I possessed no worth. Emptiness! Zero! A vacuum! These are the images that come to mind as I recall the way I felt about myself then. Why did I feel that way? I have but one clue. I remember a statement that was often repeated by members of my family: “If you are ever going to amount to anything, you must make something of yourself.”
So Claypool decided he had better make something of himself. This was done by competing. He became “homo competitus” (man the competitor), entering everything….winning most things…. acquiring significance by outdistancing others….becoming the first with the most. But the road to high achievement, while seemingly straight and easily run, tossed enough pebbles into his shoes so as to leave him limping. He writes:
I can still recall the anxiety that was my constant psychic companion. There was hardly a time in my childhood, adolescence or young adulthood when I did not experience feelings of uncertainty and fear when faced with certain challenges. Success depended upon my performance, and this only served to heighten my tension.
The amazing thing is that John Claypool was raised in an intensely religious home. The language and symbols of faith came with his mother’s milk, and participation in the Southern Baptist Church was as much a part of his growing up as was grace at every family meal.
How could I have heard from birth that I was created by God and loved so much that Jesus would die for me….how could I have heard that and still have thought I had no worth? I cannot say. All I can report is that those two realities never touched each other, even after I entered the Christian ministry.
Why is that? Sometimes it comes as a result of hearing speech from your family that contradicts speech heard from God. In John Claypool’s case, the issue centered in his relationship with his mother. He continues:
Most of all, I craved the approval of my mother. I longed to see a twinkle of delight in her eye and feel that she was really proud of me, something I had never felt before. There was an atmosphere of marked anxiety in my mother’s attitude toward my sister and me. She seemed quite uneasy about how we were going to turn out. But being a seasoned manipulator by this time, I knew exactly what held the most promise of gaining this particular reward. My grandfather had been a minister and the church was the only institution that mattered to my mother. So in my calculating heart of hearts, I reasoned that becoming a minister would get my mother’s approval. When I made my choice of career public and wrote my parents about it, I remember licking the envelope and saying with genuine anticipation: “Now, at last, I will be sparkled on by mama.”
You would be surprised how many ministers have, in their background, a strong-willed and emotionally-withholding mother. It has been suggested that a great many male clergy heed the call of their Heavenly Father as a way of working out a relationship with their earthly mother. Ironically, when John Claypool finally experienced the reality of God’s grace in his own life (many years and much pain later), one of the phrases he used to describe the feeling was to say: “It suddenly dawned on me that there had been worth in me from the very beginning.” Well, not everybody knows that. And not everybody feels that. Some of you don’t know it now. Some of you haven’t felt it ever.
* * * * *
Esau knew the feeling. You remember the story. Esau was the firstborn, his brother Jacob, the second. A starving Esau returned from the field to find his brother cooking soup. Before the story was five verses old, Jacob had traded a chunk of bread and a cup of broth for Esau’s birthright. Much later in the story, old Isaac (the father of the boys) was dying. He sought an audience with Esau in order that he might bestow, upon his firstborn, the blessing of the family. But Jacob, at the urging of his mother, conspired to dress in his brother’s clothing, covered his skin with the hair of an animal, and even cultivated a scent that masqueraded as his brother’s smell. Into the tent of his half-blind father went Jacob under the cover of darkness. He emerged, moments later, with the blessing that was owed to Esau.
When Esau discovered the deception, he cried with a great and bitter cry, imploring his father: “Bless me, even me also, O my father!” Yet, in the primitive patriarchal family structure, there was but one blessing per family. And Esau had lost it. His pain was not over the loss of a theological concept, but over the deeply personal words from his father which he would never hear.
Now before we push this matter further, I need to explain something to you. And that concerns the difference between birthrights and blessings. A birthright is easy to understand, in that it was usually economic in nature. Who gets the money when dad dies? Who gets the farm? The fields? The sheep and the oxen? All the stuff in the barn? That kind of thing. That’s birthright business.
Blessings, however, were more personal….and covered a wider range of promises. The blessing was that gift of a dying father by which the powers that enhanced life (such as peace, prosperity, fertility, wisdom and victory in battle) were allegedly passed from one generation to another. More than money, houses and land, the blessing sought to pass the benefits of the good life. It was a way of saying: “Look, these are the fruits of life that I have worked hard to achieve. These are the gifts and the graces, the virtues and the lessons, that I have taken a lifetime to learn. Take them and run with them. They are yours now.”
Over time, however, the blessing was broadened to include all children, and became equated with what might be called “a rite of passage.” It was a way of saying: “May God go with you and look after you. My own hopes and best wishes go with you. You have my permission to get on with your life. Go with my blessing. Be who you are. Become who you will become. I am still vitally interested in everything you attempt. I may not understand everything you are. I may not approve of everything you do. I will still watch over you with a mixture of anxiety and expectation. But take my words as permission to get on with whatever life has in store for you…. or whatever you have in store for life.”
Friends, that’s important stuff. That’s what people tell me every time I raise this “blessing business.” In fact, people share the most amazing stories about getting the blessing or about not getting it. All of which tells me two things. First, this matter of the blessing can weight pretty heavily upon you, until you get it resolved. And second, it is extremely hard to give something to your children if you have never received it from your parents.
Earlier, in my story about apron strings, I gave you an example of an unspoken blessing…. a gift of cloth, packed away in a suitcase. But in the limited time I have left, I would like to make a case for words rather than gestures….suggesting that (where blessings are concerned) there is incredible power in the spoken word. When we were children, we used to stick our thumbs in our ears, wiggle our fingers, and return the taunts of our enemies by saying: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” How wrong we were. And how little we knew it at the time. Words do hurt. Words also heal. Words have incredible power to build us up or tear us down. Apparently the author of Proverbs 18:21 thought so too, for he wrote: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
Feeling backed into a corner in a marriage counseling session, a man whose twenty year marriage was coming unglued lashed out: “I told my wife I loved her on our wedding day and it stands until I revoke it.” Another, in response to his wife’s plaintive question, “Do you love me, John?” responded: “I’m here, ain’t I?” Well, I suppose there’s something to that. But not enough.
My father, who departed this earth just two months after my firstborn son entered it, was a very intelligent man. It did not take a genius to realize that he may have been a genius. But he lacked the credentials to prove it. He dropped out of Northwestern High School one semester before graduating. He never went back. He never went on. It handicapped him all his life. My father never worked one day in a job that taxed even a quarter of the ability he possessed.
When I went on to college and seminary, I think he felt proud. I also think he felt mocked, envious and more than a little embarrassed. My academic success at Albion and Yale was a visual replay of a future he could have had, but chose not to. The further I went in higher education, the worse it made him feel about himself. He never said so, at least not in so many words. In fact, he never said much of anything about my schooling, which was one of the ways I could tell it bothered him. Occasionally, he would find a subject on which I knew little and he knew much. After correcting my ignorance he would say: “Well, I guess you don’t know everything.” Or he would compliment himself with a put-down by saying: “I guess your old man isn’t as dumb as some people seem to think he is.”
It hurt to hear him say things like that. It hurt not to hear him say other, more positive, things about my progress. It hurt even more when he didn’t feel up to making the trip to New Haven in June of 1965. The occasion was my graduation from Yale. He sent my mother and sister. He stayed in Detroit.
Very early on a Saturday morning, in August of 1967, the phone rang in my parsonage in Dearborn. Half awake, I answered it. It was mother saying that she thought my father was dead. She was right. He was. I told her to make the necessary calls. I told her I would be right over. I got there after the police and before the coroner. Not knowing what to do at a time like that, and not really wanting to talk to anybody or sit and look at his body, I thought I would go through his papers. I figured that I might find something that the coroner or the funeral director might need. I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was looking for. I didn’t even have the faintest idea why I was looking.
But I started with his wallet and struck a strange kind of pay dirt. There, tucked away behind a few dollar bills, I found several worn sheets of copy paper. They were tissue thin and deeply creased by much folding and unfolding. I removed them, opened them, and quickly realized that I didn’t need to read them. For I had seen them before. They were copies of my grades from all four years at Albion and all three years at Yale. I knew why he’d kept them. I found myself wondering how many times he’d pulled them out and shown them to somebody, speaking of his son, the student, with pride. I only wish that he’d been able to tell me.
* * * * *
And Isaac said to his son: “Come near. Kiss me. Your smell is that of a field which the Lord has smiled upon. May he give you the dew of heaven. May he give you the fatness of earth. May he give you plenty of grain….plenty of wine. May peoples serve you. May nations bow down to you. Cursed be those who curse you. Blessed be those who bless you.”
And God, who was not nearly so poetic in speaking to His son as Isaac was in speaking to his, came no less powerfully to the point when He was overheard saying to Jesus: “You are my beloved son. I am pleased with you.”
Well, whether it was the voice of your mother’s apron strings in the suitcase, God’s voice in the cloud, or something far more ordinary but no less beautiful, I hope the words once came to you. But I am not overly concerned this evening with the words that came to you. My primary concern is with the words that need to come through you. For there are people near you who may very much need to hear them.
Ted Turner is a household name in the state of Georgia. He is equally well known across the nation. He is, by everybody’s definition, a high achiever. He is a multi-millionaire, a businessman extraordinaire, a cable television entrepreneur, and the owner of numerous other enterprises, including the Atlanta Braves. He has also made his mark in the world of yacht racing, achieving an international reputation as a sportsman. For gosh sakes, the man was once even married to Jane Fonda. One wonders if there are any mountains left for Turner to climb. But he tells an interesting story about himself. Riding the crest of his numerous triumphs, he went out alone in his boat one day, journeying well beyond the sight of land. He dropped anchor, cut the engine and sat quietly for a while. He was trying to sort out what was happening in his life, factoring the rewards earned against the energies required to earn them. He wondered what he had been trying to prove. He also wondered who he had been trying to prove it to. At last he stood on the deck, looked out at some far distant point where the sea and sky meet, and cried out to his father: “Is this good enough?”
My friends, there are people close to you….some of them sharing a home with you….who may very well be wondering the same thing and waiting for an answer.
