Genesis 28:10-17
Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
September 26, 2021
Sometimes I like to read the book of Genesis because it makes me feel better about my own life, you know? No matter how much drama most of us have in our own families, we can turn to the book of Genesis and say, “You know, at least I’m not telling my younger kid to dress up in animal fur so they can go in and trick their dying father into giving them the best blessing that’s supposed to be going to our older child.”
We can all be so hard on ourselves. Most of us want to be better friends, partners, children. Being in long-term loving relationships with other humans is wild, wonderful, rewarding, and ridiculous….sometimes all before breakfast. And so, there’s something so very comforting about turning to these ancient stories and seeing messy families.
By the time we journey with Jacob to Bethel and rest our weary heads on a rock, there has been so much loss and pain. It can be hard to find ourselves in this story because the cultural rules at play are so very different from our own. But if we allow ourselves to inhabit this family’s world, we can get in touch with the pain they are bearing.
You know, the experts say it’s not a great idea to cement our kids into specific roles, but poor Jacob was literally named, “the supplanter.” What does it do to a kid to come up knowing that your role is to be the one who steals your brother’s thunder? Like Jacob, we are no strangers to feeling trapped by the expectations of everyone around us.
And Rebekah. We sometimes get grumpy with her because she plays the role of the trickster in this story - playing favorites and working behind the scenes to deceive Isaac. But Rebekah is the only one who is told that it’s meant to be this way. While she is pregnant, she receives a word from the Lord. And this prophecy is hers alone to bear. She carries it to full term and does her part in the cosmic drama unfolding through her own family.
Like Rebekah, we are no strangers to bearing the weight of secrets.
And Isaac. He’s got this one good blessing to give. It is supposed to be his gift to his eldest son. But he is deceived and messes up. And when he realizes what he’s done, there’s simply no way to undo it. It is what it is. Like Isaac, we are no strangers to the shame we feel when we miss the mark, wish we could have a redo.
These ancient, messy stories invite us to pull up a chair and sit a spell. They invite us to more fully inhabit our modern, messy world, too - don’t they? When we practice sitting with the discomfort of these long-ago-and-far away people, I think we’re building up our compassion muscles so we can also sit with here-and-now people in their own pain. Sometimes those pained people are family, friends, neighbors, strangers. Sometimes those pained people are us.
Having a place to share painful stories is fundamentally a part of what it means to be human. One of our kids recently had a classmate go through a traumatic experience. They came home and told us about it and we explained how we were very proud of them for listening to their classmate’s story. We talked about how, often, when we go through something really painful, it can be so healing just to have a place to talk about it. A container for the grief and anger and fear.
That’s one of the things that has made the past year and a half so challenging, I think. Typically, ourr family might be experiencing something awful, but our friends and family are in a better place. They can make a big, wide, welcoming container to hold our pain. We lean into their strength and they help us carry our grief together.
But when the whole entire world is struggling? When literally every single person is dealing with loss upon loss, grief upon grief? It gets harder to find those containers, doesn’t it? Especially when so many of us are prone to comparing grief. Sure, we say, I’m grieving the loss of my favorite exercise class or a little stressed out because I’m worried about catching a deadly virus at the dentist BUT IT COULD BE SO MUCH WORSE. Sure, we say, my grandma died alone in a hospital while we facetimed BUT AT LEAST SHE LIVED A FULL LIFE.
We could go on and on, right? Grief upon grief. Loss upon loss. And we look at everyone else around us and think, “Oh, gosh. I don’t want to bother them with my sad story. Everyone is struggling right now.”
As we walk with Valarie Kaur into the second chapter of See No Stranger this week, she takes us back to another time when grief piled upon grief and our containers stretched to try and hold it all. Everyone who was alive on September 11, 2001 can probably remember the way they felt shock and loss and fear and grief explode beyond what all our containers could hold on that day.
Our friends and neighbors who are Muslim or Middle Eastern or brown carry extra layers of pain. One of my friends who is Muslim was 18 in the fall of 2001 - away at college as a first-year student. That morning, she was the only person wearing hijab in her class and her professor asked her to leave class so that the other students could “safely process” their grief. [1] She was later screamed at, spat on, harassed just for existing on campus. Eventually, the university assigned her a security escort and she was followed everywhere by photographers. A photo of her ended up in Time magazine and her first thought upon seeing it was terror because she was caught smiling after 9-11. [2]
The grief and pain of September 11th hit Muslim and brown folks differently. Kaur writes about this extensively in her chapter on grief as she describes what it was like for her, as a young Sikh student, to discern how to respond to the waves of violence that shattered her community. On September 15, a close family friend, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was murdered in Phoenix in an act of white-and-Christian-supremacist hate. This murder changed the course of Kaur’s life, as she and a cousin began to travel all over the country to sit with friends and strangers who were grieving. Together, they created a container for these sacred stories of pain and fear and loss. Kaur writes candidly about how difficult it is to sit with others who are suffering.
Nothing about what she describes sounds easy and yet, she invites us into the work with her. Kaur says, “Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guard rails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. It is an act of surrender. . . . When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.” [3]
Grief is the price of love, Kaur reminds us. Being with another in their grief - tenderly being with our own selves - doing this hard thing is only possible because of love. Kaur says that when we’re not sure how to care for another who is grieving, especially for someone who may feel like a stranger, the first step is simply to show up. She reminds us that love is not necessarily something we always feel. Instead, Kaur says, “The good news is, you don’t have to feel empathy all the time [to show up]. Love is not a rush of feeling. Love is sweet labor.” [4]
And so we keep showing up. And sweetly laboring together. We do so because the Spirit of Revolutionary Love lives and breathes within us.
God, be with us as we create containers for all the grief in your beautiful, hurting world. Together.
NOTES:
[1] https://twitter.com/SexProfSofia/status/1436688537005461512?s=20
[2] https://twitter.com/SexProfSofia/status/1436732993784229891?s=20
[3] Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger. Chapter 2.
[4] Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger. Chapter 2.
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