by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given December 9, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

There are some things I have to do every holiday season.  One of them is to watch the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, a man whose life has not gone as he planned.  In his youth he has big plans to see the world and build cities.  It turns out that most of his life has been spent in a small town and is not at all what he expected.  When a crisis comes, he finds himself in despair and considers taking his life.  It is about this time that Clarence, an angel second class still trying to get his wings, comes to the rescue.

Every year I watch this movie and every year I have a good cry.  I think it has to do with the ways that people are connected and how they look out for each other.  And I love Clarence.  I don’t know about you, but I kind of like the notion that when I might be in a state of great despair that a pudgy angel may be sent down to help me figure things out and get my life back in order.  I do hope I have a Clarence out there somewhere.  That just seems like the way it should be.

Now I’m not so sure that is how it works, but I still like the concept—someone to steer me when I might just be going off trajectory.

That said, so often in our lives, we don’t know what to do with those who might help us find our way. If you are familiar with the story, George Bailey doesn’t know what to do with the angel.  In fact, he keeps trying to get rid of Clarence when Clarence is trying to show him what life would have been like if he hadn’t been born.  Clarence wants to show him something but that something is strange and unwelcome.

And that is often the way it seems to be with angels.  They aren’t necessarily welcome.  Truth is, Clarence and other angels lead us to things we may or may not be ready to hear.  Most of the time we creatures don’t like change, and the beings I’m talking about can be harbingers of change.  We encounter someone or something and the revelation they bring may not be what we want to hear.  It may not fit into our plans for what is next. And often this creates a struggle.

This is how it is in scripture as well.  Just think about Jacob and his encounter with the angel.

So Jacob finds himself alone one night.  “A man wrestled with him,” the story goes.  But the wrestling match is no ordinary struggle.  Jacob wrestles with this shadowy figure all night.  And all this time Jacob doesn’t even seem to know why he is wrestling.  But he keeps going because he doesn’t seem to have a choice.  And what he finds is that he has strength like he has never had before.

Think about that.  That’s how it is sometimes.  In life we have our struggles.  I don’t care who we are we have our struggles.  And it is often in the night—in the midst of dreams, in the midst of wanting to be quiet and to sleep—it is in this context that we struggle.  But sometimes we just can’t get to that place of resolution.

Now this is where the Jacob story takes a turn—a very interesting turn.  Finally morning comes and the stranger says, “Day is breaking, let me go.”  It seems like Jacob would be glad to let this stranger go, but instead says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

And that is what happens.  The stranger blesses Jacob by giving him a new name and a new identity.  He named him “Israel, because you have been strong against God.”  Who or what Jacob wrestled with is a mystery.  It may have been an angel; Jacob himself said that it was God.

We don’t know who or what Jacob wrestled with.  But we do know that he came out of it not only with a limp but with a new name and a new identity.

And that is how it can be.  We go through life, one chapter after another.  Sometimes along the way we pick up some battle scars. Sometimes they can last for a long, long time.  And sometimes perspective doesn’t come easily.  But we bring all of that with us.  We bring all of that forward and with it new names, new identities, new perspectives.  We can even come to see those struggles as blessings.  And sometimes we find that we have even grown in size, in perspective.  We may not know exactly how we got there or who helped us, but we seem to get to where it is we need to be.

Rachel Naomi Remen tells the story of a young man named David.  He was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes two weeks after his seventeenth birthday and he responded with what Remen describes “the rage of a trapped animal.  Like an animal in a cage he flung himself against the limitations of his disease, refusing to hold to a diet, forgetting to take his insulin, using his diabetes to hurt himself, over and over.”  His parents were fearful for his life and asked him to see Remen for counseling.

He was reluctant but he came. Not much happened for several months but then he had a dream.  In it, he found himself sitting in an empty room without a ceiling, facing a small stone statue of the Buddha.  He was not a particularly spiritual young man, but he was at least a little familiar with the image of a Buddha.  In his dream he was surprised to feel a kinship toward the Buddha, perhaps because the Buddha was young like he was.

He struggled to describe how the statue had looked.  “Its face was very still and peaceful,” he said, but there was more that he was having a hard time putting into words.  He fell silent, and then he described how the Buddha seemed to be listening to something deep within himself.  The statue seemed to have an odd effect on him.  As he sat alone in the room with it, he seemed to feel more and more at peace with himself.

This sense of peace continued for quite a while when, without warning, a dagger was thrown from somewhere behind him and it buried itself deep in the Buddha’s heart.  David was profoundly shocked.  He felt betrayed, overwhelmed with feelings of despair and anguish.  From the depth of these feelings emerged just one question:  “Why is life like this?”

It seemed in that moment that the statue began to grow, so slowly at first that he was not really sure it was happening.  But so it was, and suddenly he knew beyond doubt that this was the Buddha’s response to the knife.

The statue continued to grow, its face as peaceful as before.  The knife did not change either.  Gradually, it became a tiny black speck on the breast of this enormous smiling Buddha.  Watching this, David felt something release him and found he could breathe deeply for the first time in a long time.  He awoke with tears in his eyes. 

Remen writes that David saw the dream as the opening of a door.  It was a way for him to put his disease into the context of the whole of his life.  Yes, it was very difficult.  And yes, it was possible for him to move forward from the wholeness of his being.[1]

Have you ever found yourself asking that old question:  Why is life like this?  It might be the events of our lives.  It might be the events of our world.  But that is the human condition, asking why life can be like this sometimes.

How we find our way from one side of something to another side, a more settled side, more often than not comes down to mystery.  It is the workings of the spirit, it may be time, it may be a dream, it might be the right person we talk with, someone who listens, it might be someone we encounter, it seems like the encounter is designed just for us.

No matter how, we cross over a boundary, over a threshold, to some new place.  How we do that, how that happens, so often comes down to mystery.

And that might be where angels come into the picture.  They come in many forms.  They come in ways we might recognize, they come in forms that might not be recognizable at all.  For Jacob, at first it is described as a man, then as an angel.  Later he says that it was God he was wrestling with and came through.  In our lives they come in ways expected and unexpected.  They may come in the form of the other.  And they may ask of us things that we don’t want to do.  They might push us or they might bless us along the way.

In Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, the messengers come in a time of death and despair.  They come to a world that is in need of transformation.  It is at the end of the 20^th Century and people are dying from the plague—AIDS.  There is little hope.  It is into this context that the angels come.  And they don’t come to the people you would expect.  They come to a young man dying of AIDS who is afraid and to a woman addicted to valium who is married to a gay Republican Mormon lawyer.

Prior Walter is the name of the man dying of AIDS.  His lover has left him and he is afraid and alone.  An angel visits him in his dreams.  She comes with great noise and thunder.  She has a shaved head, is wearing a metal bodypiece and white flowing fabrics.  She speaks with a low commanding voice.  But she is not a welcome messenger.

But the angel keeps coming.  She will not stop visiting.  Prior resists at every point, but is called to be a prophet.  It is through the angel that he gains new insights into the world.  It is through the angel that he turns the despair he is feeling into prophecy.  He visits heaven and decides that he is not done living yet—that the world is too messed up and that he is one of those who are called to make it better.

But it takes him a while to get there.  While in heaven he yells at God for letting the world down.  The angels tell him that they can’t fix it either.  It is up to him.  There is nobody but him.

The angel tells Prior:

 "Heaven here reaches down to disaster

And in touching you touches the Earth.

In creating you, Our father Lover unleashed

Sleeping creation’s Potential for change.”

We live in times when the way is not always clear. It is, most of the time, anything but clear.  We might once again find ourselves asking the question about why life is like this.

And how are we to respond?  It is easy to want to live in that place that is safe and comfortable. That place where we know what the answers will be and what we can expect.  But that is not the place where the spirit lives, not most of the time at least.  The spirit lives in that place where angels surprise us and people surprise us and dreams tell us something we need to know and that it is OK even if we don’t have all the answers.

This is the season when there is enough oil for the lamp despite all the odds.  This is the season when a savior will enter the world and bring a message of love that will change everything.  This is the time of year when, in the midst of so much darkness, the light is revealed.  It is in the holy quiet, in the restlessness of this dark time—this is when the light is revealed—in the form of dreams, in the form of the imagination, in the form of angels of all kinds, of all shapes and sizes.  They open doors that help us walk to that next place and then the next and then the next.

And what is our job in all this?  To live with our hearts open, to welcome that place of not knowing, living in faith that the answers will come.  To see ourselves as blessed, and to see ourselves as blessings.  To always remember to live in the world, to remember that we are part of this vast and wonderful creation.  And we are asked to live in the world in such a way that we might be welcoming of those that appear around us—maybe even angels—whether we recognize them or not.

PRAYER

Great Spirit of Life, we give thanks this day for all we have.  In this season of possibility, help us to be open to what might come.  Help us to open our hearts.  Give us courage.  Give us faith that the way will be made clear.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

In this season, know that you are blessed.  And may you always be a blessing.  Go in love and in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.