9/22/19 “Have You Only One Blessing?” by Brian Crisp

Have you only one blessing?
Genesis 27:30-38

Scripture: 30 As soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob, when Jacob had scarcely gone out from the presence of his father Isaac, his brother Esau came in from his hunting. 31 He also prepared savory food, and brought it to his father. And he said to his father, “Let my father sit up and eat his son’s game, so that you may bless me.” 32 His father Isaac said to him, “Who are you?” He answered, “I am your firstborn son, Esau.” 33 Then Isaac trembled violently, and said, “Who was it then that hunted game and brought it to me, and I ate it all before you came, and I have blessed him?—yes, and blessed he shall be!” 34 When Esau heard his father’s words, he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry, and said to his father, “Bless me, me also, father!” 35 But he said, “Your brother came deceitfully, and he has taken away your blessing.” 36 Esau said, “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright; and look, now he has taken away my blessing.” Then he said, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” 37 Isaac answered Esau, “I have already made him your lord, and I have given him all his brothers as servants, and with grain and wine I have sustained him. What then can I do for you, my son?” 38 Esau asked Isaac, “Have you only one blessing?” And Esau lifted up his voice and wept.

For me, new social situations can often invoke a bit of anxiety when smiles and handshakes have subsided and the line of questioning associated with polite conversation unfolds. “So, what sort of work do you do, Brian?” The question seems innocent enough, but I am well aware that I will never produce the answers most desired by the inquisitor. At this junction, I assume my dialogue partner has employed a social acumen that pronounces me a member of the belletristic tradition, a designer of brightly-colored interiors, or a performer in a traveling theater troupe. I shatter these hopes and state simply, “I am a minister.” It is at this juncture that confusion crawls across the person’s face as they cannot make my untamable curls, my somewhat piquant vocabulary, and my carefully coordinated patterned socks and shoes correlate with their understanding of a minister. This trepidation tears at their throat wrestling with the mannered necessity of continuing the small talk. By this point the apprehension is palpable, and the space between us gets filled with a question that I am sure they will regret, “What kind?” My response is as subtle and as soft as I can make it, “Baptist.”

“Things are not always what they seem.” It is a phrase introduced to us by
Plato’s poet, Phaedrus, and it cautions us of the abundantly used signifiers that often fail as we navigate the world and her inhabitants. The poet seems to be warning us, “Appearances may be deceiving!” How we wish Jimmy Stuart would have used more than his eyes to judge Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Phaedrus cautions, “Language can fail us.” “Silkworm,” “prairie dog,” and “sweet bread” are cunningly deceptive words because they denote a caterpillar, a rodent, and a culinary dish that is most definitely not a sugary pastry. “Patterns can be altered without warning,” the poet counsels. At this moment, my partner, Charles, is sitting in the audience wondering how someone he knows so intimately who has a deep love for ancient Hebrew and the cultures of the ancient Near East could be exorcising a poet of Greek philosophy, the supposed pinnacle of Western thought! No, things are often not what they seem, and this can throw a person into confusion.
And this is where we find Isaac in our reading. Isaac, not the brightest of the Ammas and Abbas of Genesis, is blind, a quality that seems to parallel his mental capacity. For too long, Issac has relied on physical attributes to distinguish his two sons, Esau and Jacob. His favored Esau is a huntsman, burly, ruddy, and hairy. Jacob, a mother’s favorite son, is a shrewd trickster, an always troubled younger sibling, and prefers spending his time sewing in the tents. Unable to truly discern between the two twins beyond their physicality, Issac hastily pronounces his favor on the younger sibling who is in the drag of goatskins and his older brother’s clothes. This unleashes a maelstrom where the family is thrust into greater turmoil. The father stubbornly refuses to admit his shortcomings; the mother is worried about the safety of her children, and; siblings are pitted against each other, both filled with vitriol and agony. The reader becomes confused that the story holds so much condemnation and chaos when it proclaims to be about blessing.
The Blessing is now a thorny term in our current society. The word is so
ubiquitous that its meaning can be quite uncertain. It is used as a Twitter hashtag to prove that your “best life” has some type of heavenly approval. “Bless you” is still echoed across a room as an automated response to a person’s sneeze. In my younger days, I wrangled with some fierce drag queens who when viewing a lackluster performance would shake their heads, take a drag off their cigarettes, and mumble, “Gurl, bless.” And, last week, I had to explain to a volunteer from New Jersey the derogatory and netherworld-directed intention of the Southerner when we sigh, “Bless
their heart.” From social media to the drag bar, a commonly used term has lost its significance.
The stories found within the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible and New
Testament are precise in their use of blessing. When the physics of nature unfolds in the thunder, the rain, the sun, the sky, the earthquake, and the rainbow, these phenomena are pronounced as blessed. There are blessings for grapes, figs, wheat, barley, meat, pomegranates, olives, and wine, pronouncing that enjoyment and pleasure are sacred moments. The blessing can be found by mountains, rocks, trees, and rivers; it can be found amongst the rejoicing and dancing by the multitudes, and; it can be found between the two or three quietly gathered. In one of the penultimate moments of the gospels, Jesus blesses the poor, the hungry, the despised and the excluded. The sages of the Talmud explain that the blessing is a recognition of the divine presence found in the most mundane situations and in the fiber of all creaturely existence. The blessing is where the spiritual realm is infused into the physical and, as people of faith, we can witness the holy and the sacred in, around, and among us. With all of these blessings, Esau’s question “Have you only one blessing?” becomes more haunting, and we understand why he lifts up his voice and weeps. Issac not only suffers from a lack of sight, but he is handicapped by his lack of vision. Not only can he not see the traits of Esau and Jacob that reach far beyon the body, he cannot imagine a world where the essence of all children could b celebrated as sacred. He cannot imagine a world where the tradition of favoring one son could be transformed into the reality of loving everyone’s child. He cannot imagine a person being a well-formed and complex human that resists and defies a predetermined stereotype. Isaac cannot imagine a community where each person brings their strengths, talents, desires, fears, and vulnerabilities to create safety. He cannot imagine a life beyond one blessing. Issac cannot imagine. life beyond what he knows.
As members of the LGBTQIA+ community, we are all too familiar with this lack of imagination. Since our beginning, we have been in an imagination battle. Matthew Shepherd, Brandon Teena, Venus Xtravaganza, Sakia Gunn, Pebbles Doe, and so many others are dead because, in some straight imagination, they were pronounced dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of gender expression and sexual orientation, are rarely held accountable.
This imagination has empowered certain people in our society with such a staunch privilege that they believe they should deny LGBTQIA+ protections in the workplace, criminalize gender expression, and legislate access to public restrooms based on a definition of “biological sex.” This imagination turns transgender people into threats, HIV-positive people into sins, gay men into pedophiles, and lesbians into abominations. This imagination gives us a superiority that erects borders walls, disguises hatred as religious freedoms, and pronounces that gender is an indicator of ability and sexual orientation is a determiner of career. This imagination can never dream that a queer-identified, red-headed Baptist with a proclivity for foul language can be a minister.
Because queer-identified people have for too long felt trapped inside the mainstream’s capabilities, we have had to employ our own imagination t break free and create a more expansive and humane society. Our imaginations are not captured by how the world is, but our dreams are grounded in how the world could be. We have had to encounter countless societal pitfalls and problems and transform them into pathways and possibilities. We have had to imagine ourselves free from the confines of shadows, back alleys, glances, and whispers to walk upright and proud as our authentic selves on city streets and in the daylight. We have had to conjure up new media images that go beyond portrayals of us as buffoons, saboteurs, and menaces to see ourselves as laborers, lovers, caretakers, friends, comrades, and heroes. We have had to audaciously envision beyond the rejections, the denials, and the refusals to claim our places around the tables, in the neighborhoods, at our places of worship, and amongst our fellow human beings. We have refused isolation and birthed a community where leather-clad men and butch sisters lend a helping hand; where queens of all shapes and sizes teach us how large and lovely life can be; where our trans sisters and brothers craft a new and boundless reality; where our nonbinary and gender-nonconforming siblings remind us to go further; where we borrow the sass and grit from surviving on the street as a queer teen; we employ the magic and the dancing from a sweaty and eros-filled night at the disco; and we celebrate the pleasure and the palette of the body.
This is the sacred and the holy work where life goes well beyond what it seems and births the divine into the everyday. These lives are consecrated, venerated, revered, and blessed. And, as queer people, it is our job to bless and to keep on blessing each other. Blessing the people beside us in this walk, blessing the people around us, and blessing the people that paved the way for us now. So we Bless Marsha Pay-It-No-Mind Johnson for being a drag queen of color who was one of the vanguards of the Stonewall Riots. Bless Sylvia Rivera for being a transgender Latina concerned with gay liberation and the care of homeless queer youth. Bless Harvey Milk for paving the way for queer people to hold public office and to advocate for LBTQIA+ rights. Bless Bayard Rushtin for refusing to hide his sexuality as he taught Martin Luther King, Jr. about the role of nonviolent civil rights activism. Bless Edith Windsor for being the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and for being a founder of Old Queers Acting Up! Bless Pauli Murray for acknowledging her gender and her queerness as inspirations that aided her in breaking new ground in the arenas of law and ministry. Bless Divine for teaching us drag could be outrageous, and fun while it also subverted heterosexual norms.
Bless Audre Lorde for being a poet and creator who acknowledged that the mind, life, and body of the black lesbian is sacred space! Bless Desmond is AMAZING! for posting daily on Instagram showing the world that drag is an empowering tool for children who are bullied in schools. Bless Storme Weber for making us aware that the Two-Spirit Choctaw understanding is a timeless and venerated way of life. Bless Gilbert Baker for sewing the first Pride Flag in 1978. Bless Jahnabi Goswami for openly declaring her HIV status in India and for advocating for women of color with HIV/AIDS across the globe.
This is what a holy imagination feels, sounds, tastes, smells, and looks like. It dreams of a world that is vibrant and safe, and it imagines that the acronym that now defines our community can continue to grow and expand letter after letter and symbol after symbol. And when those who lack such sacred vision look with disapproval and disparagingly ask, “Have you only one blessing? “We straighten our backs, gather in and welcome and care for and empower those who are not yet with us, and very proudly and simply answer, “No.” Amen.

-Brian Crisp