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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.
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