Inheritance: Blessing & Curse

Gospel reading: Luke 12:49-56 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

My parents' garage looks a lot like mine. Only bigger. And older. And fuller. Dad makes no attempt to conceal his pleasure when he retrieves something useful from his accumulation. That one relevant object somehow validates the whole garage project - a project that has rarely included the housing of an automobile.

My garage is a miniature version of my parents'. Apparently the you-know-I-might-just-find-a-use-for-that-one-day gene is not recessive.

For me and for my children I have tended to think of inheritance in terms of garage contents rather than beach houses and holdings in successful companies. Possibly because we actually might inherit the contents of a garage one day.

Inheritance is always a mixture of blessing and curse. Kathleen Norris says that it's easy enough to accept the more savory characters in the communion of saints. Who wouldn't want St. Theresa (of Avila or Calcutta) among their spiritual forbears. "But it's far less pleasant--it can feel like a curse--to include in my welcome the difficult ancestors: the insane, the suicides, the alcoholics, the religiously self-righteousness who literally scared the bejesus out of me when I was little, or who murdered my spirit with words of condemnation. Abel is welcome in my family tree, but I'd just as soon leave Cain out." (Amazing Grace, p. 23)

The messy reality of inheritance is that we don't get to sift through our past beforehand. We get the whole garage.

In the rural South, some consider religious and cultural inheritance to be nothing but curse. We think that tent meetings and revivals are put on by lunatics at best, con men at worst. Some of us would rather just walk away from it all, declaring it cursed. But if we do, we probably haven't even given our honest attention to that old time religion, much less the rest of the culture.

At a workshop once I was made to stand face to face with another person and talk about the culture that formed us. I'm a white Protestant male from small town Arkansas. My partner for the exercise was an African-American woman from Manhattan. It wasn't hard to dredge up some of the sinfulness of the culture that formed me. But it wasn't hard to name some blessings as well. I talked about the music that has been passed down through generations not on recordings, but first hand. On porches and in churches. Songs meant to be sung, not heard. I told of gatherings in which everybody present made some of the music. In all the plucking, thumping, strumming, and singing the stories were passed along more as energy than information.

Along with the bigotry was the music. There with the violence and oppression were the stories. Denying our inheritance is futile. Reclaiming and refashioning the gifts from our past is what it means to be alive.

In Sunday's gospel reading Jesus seems to be saying that people will be cut off from what they have inherited if they follow him. Fathers and sons and mothers and daughters will be divided. But what Jesus speaks most forcefully is that we are called to attention to the present. "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" he asks. If our heritage keeps us trapped in the past, we may need to be cut off. But maybe that past contains keys to understanding present as well.

Maybe my dad had it right when it comes to the life of faith. The Christian tradition is a big old garage. Some see only rusty lawnmower blades and broken skateboards and would rather walk away from the whole pile. But some of us know there is great treasure here. Not treasure from another time to make us nostalgic or embarrassed, but treasure to be brought into our lives today. Ways of seeing and being that help us interpret the present time.

So open your mind and dig around a bit in the faith. Soon you too might emerge with an unexpected treasure that actually helps us make some sense of today. You may not be able to contain your pleasure either. Which, by the way, is called praise in this old garage. You'll find it over in the corner just past the judgment and condemnation, underneath that pile of grace.