| Blessed to be a Blessing
Below is text taken from the book I'm reading called "The Story We Find Ourselves in" by Brian McLaren. I'm enjoying it so far and thought I'd share a little clip of it. Let me know what you think about all this.*Linds
'Then Neo opened a bible to Genesis and set the stage for a story about a quiet moment that took place some four thousand years ago in a remote area in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, in modern day Iraq, then one of the cradles of what we call civilization. This obscure Semite received a message from this one true and living God: The Lord had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people, and your father's household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all the people on earth will be blessed through you." So Abram left, as the Lord had told him.
"Here we are on La Aventura," Neo said, "and when God makes contact with Abraham, God invites him to launch out on an aventura too." To leave the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Neo explained, was to leave security of civilization and to enter the unknown. Abraham didn't even know where his journey would lead, and there were no maps to show him the way, so it truly was a journey of faith, a sense, a hunch, a wild dream that there was something out there for him, and that Someone would guide him there...although he had little idea who or how or where.
But Abraham did have an idea why. Neo launched into a long explanation of ancient Hebrew poetry, because, he said, God's promise in the story was recorded as a poem. Ancient Hebrew poets loved parallelism: in parallelism, the poet repeats a sentence structure, with slight variations, for various purposes, maybe for restatement, or intensification, or clarification, or elaboration, or contrast. In this context, Neo drew out some of the parallelisms:
"I will make you into a great nation...I will make your name great." This restatement intensifies the sense that Abraham is being given a wonderful promise and is entering into an inspiring destiny.
"I will bless you...you will be a blessing." The great status promised to Abraham, however, is not exclusive. He is not blessed to the exclusion of others, but rather, he is blessed instrumentally. In fact, being blessed is elaborated on in the second phase, Neo explained: the kind of blessing that Abraham will receive is the blessing of being a blessing to others.
"I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse." Oddly, Abraham's blessing won't exempt him from conflict. In fact, the promise suggests that conflict- being cursed at times by others- will be part of the identity of this blessed people.
"All peoples on earth will be blessed through you." The English translation here, Neo said, obscures the fact that the same single Hebrew word underlies the different English words "people" and "nation". In that light, God says, "Leave your people. Leave your identification and status as a member of a certain known people. Now, step out into the unknown, from a certified somebody who is a member of a people and step into a journey where you don't know who you are anymore. As you do this, I will give you a great new identity: you will become a new kind of people in the world; you will have a new identity. And that new identity- as a people blessed by the one true and living God- will bring blessing to all the other peoples."
"...[Neo] said that one of the greatest heresies for both the Jewish people and Christians is a failure to take seriously these important lines of poetry. When religions assume that their adherents are chosen only to be blessed, and forget that they are blessed to be a blessing, they distort their identity and they drift from God's calling for them. When they assume that they are blessed exclusively rather than instrumentally, when they see themselves as blessed to the exclusion of others rather than for the benefit of others, they become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
Then Neo became very personal. He told the group of people crowded into the cabin of La Aventura- Ecuadorians and Americans, Christians and Jews, believers and agnostics, and some atheists too- his own story, how he had once been a pastor, feeling himself called in a special way, like Abraham, to bless others. But he discovered that "being a blessing" was harder than he anticipated, and he had become very discouraged and disillusioned, and eventually left church work. He went back to college for advanced studies in science, and eventually became a teacher, a high school science teacher. But even in that role, he said, he realized that he was no less possessed by this identity, someone whom God had blessed so that he could be a blessing to others.
He told them about the death of his father, and his decision to leave teaching to care for his mother, who was very ill. "It was all the same," he said. "Different jobs, different titles, different cities, but the same calling: to enjoy God's blessing so that I could be a blessing to others, whether to a church, to a classroom, or to my mother. Or to be here on La Aventura with all of you tonight."' |
