A Reflection for II Lent All
Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.
March 1, 2015 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Schlemiel, Schlimazel and Mensch.
I had some trouble getting into these lessons and after
struggling with them, I went to read one of my favorite authors, Frederick
Buechner, a Presbyterian Minister who is almost 90 years old, has authored 36
books, and still puts out a weekly blog. After looking at his stuff for this
reflection, three Yiddish words came to mind: schlemiel, schlimazel, and mensch.
Our first lesson is about the man we call Abraham, but this lesson
calls him Abram. Frederick Buechner, in his book Peculiar Treasures, had
this to say about this character: “If a schlemiel is a person who goes through
life spilling soup on people and a schlemozzle is the one it keeps getting
spilled on, then Abraham was a schlemozzle.
It all began when God told him to go to the land of Canaan, where he
promised to make him the father of a great nation, and he went.”
It all began in the mythic city of Ur which, depending on
your sources, was either in Southern Iraq or Northern Syria, or Armenia, or on
the Anatolian Plain in Turkey. In this city lives a man called Abram. Now I
want a show of hands of men: “If you are 75 years old, like Abram when he was
called, or if you are close to it, or if you can imagine reaching 75, do you
think you will jump up and down at the prospect of leaving your house on which
the mortgage is paid, leaving your medical plan and savings behind, giving up
everything you hold dear, packing up some donkeys and walking hundreds of miles
across the desert and wastelands for the thrill of being a father for the first
time in your life?”
Now for women, a show of
hands: “If you are 65, ten years younger than your husband (who also may
be your half-brother), you have already gone through menopause, and your husband
(or half-brother or cousin) says he heard a voice calling him out of the Ether
waves to leave the house, do without the paid servants, the friends you made
all your life and all the rest, and walk for hundreds of mile across deserts
and wastelands so you could be a mother for the first time in your life, would
you be happy about doing it?”
I am not a woman, but before Pat and I got married and she
was around 50, she did agree to move a whole 50 miles from Roanoke to
Lynchburg, but for a few years she kept returning to see her dentist, her
doctor, her auto mechanic, her hair dresser, even her dry cleaner. When I
suggested that it would be nice if we had a red-headed little boy, she looked
at me like I was crazy.
Now Abram starts to wonder about putting up with being a schlemozzle
after about ten years of wandering around, getting into a fight with his nephew
Lot (in which Lot gets the better land), going through some good years and then
bad years of warfare and famine, having his wife confiscated by one of the
local rulers of the land in which they were refugees, and then being sent
packing when his wife is finally returned to him - and there is still no child is sight. Finally Sarai, now 75, gets the bright idea of
fixing up the old goat Abram, who is now 85, which a buxom Egyptian beauty
called Hagar, and she gets pregnant. Well that took care of the child part of
the trip, except Hagar gets “uppity” and puts Sarai down. Sarai, in retaliation,
gets Abram to kick the Egyptian baggage out into the desert, but she comes back
and has the child.
Another 13 years pass and Abraham, now 99, comes home from a
journey and says that the voice he has been listening to has told him that all
males in his household need to be circumcised, that a child would be born to
him and Sarai, and their names would be changed from Abram which means “My
Father (my God) is honored” to Abraham which means “Father of Many Nations”,
and from Sarai which means “Princess” to Sarah meaning “My Princess”.
Don't you think that someone in these 24 years might have
said, “No! God might have a plan but it is not my time table, it is not
rational; thank you, NO. It is not feasible and it doesn't make sense. Thank
you very much, NO. If it were really God calling us, don't you think that the
road would have been a tad easier? I say
NO thank you.” I would not have waited 24 years, I would have started off
casting my negative vote at the beginning.
There is a schlemiel
in the Gospel story with Peter. Again I go back to
Buechner's Peculiar
Treasures where he talks about Peter: “The first time
Jesus laid eyes on him, he took one good look and said, "So you're Simon,
the son of John", and then said that from then on he'd call him Cephas,
which is Aramaic for Peter, which is Greek for "rock." A rock isn't
the prettiest thing in creation or the fanciest or the smartest, and if it gets
rolling in the wrong direction, watch out. . .” Peter lives down to his name
and becomes the rock in the Jesus path when he says that Jesus just doesn't get
this Messiah business. “After all if you are the Messiah and God is behind you,
then everything is supposed to work out for my satisfaction as well as God's.”
In Paul's letter to the Romans, Paul reexamines Abram, and
in other places Peter, and moves them from schlimazel and schlemiel to mensch. A mensch
is a person of respect and integrity, a person you can count on. We might
be tempted to see Abram and Peter as people who kept messing up, and they both
do, but when God looks at them, they are seen by God as mensch, people
who God holds in respect. God respects us by giving us freedom, over and over
again, and is with us as we mess up and never turns the divine back on us.
We started this service with a Penitential order where we
acknowledge that we have fallen short of God's dream for us, and still we ask
the energy that created us and who gives us energy for another chance. That
next chance is given before we ask. It is a gift of Grace which alone has the
power to change a schlimazlel and schlemiel to mensch.
Grace is another word that I go back to Buechner, but in his book Wishful
Thinking:
“Grace is something you can
never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring
it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or
earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
A good sleep is grace and so
are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody
loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love
somebody?
A crucial eccentricity of the
Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's
nothing you
have to do. There's nothing you have
to do. There's nothing you have to do.
The grace of God means
something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the
party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and
terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever
separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.
There's only one catch. Like
any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and
take it.
Maybe being able to reach out
and take it is a gift too.”
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