Impounding the Blessing ~July 5, 2026

‍ A Sermon for America’s 250th Anniversary | Emmanuel Church, Dublin, NH | The Very Rev. Gideon L. K. Pollach | P9A ‍

I am deeply aware that the blessing that is this church did not begin when I got here.

Yesterday morning, I was honored to welcome a couple to Emmanuel, one of whom walked through the doors of this church for the first time in nearly fifty years. He grew up here and spent 20 summers here.

Their names are  Owen and Sidsel Thomas. And I am honored that they are with us again this morning.  Owen’s father served as the Rector of this church for over two decades.  He taught systematic theology at EDS in term time, and came here every summer. He wrote some of his ten books here and found refreshment for his ministry of shaping students and the church for two decades.

Owen grew up here. Here and on the shores of the lake. And then life moved on, as it does and fifty years passed. He came back yesterday to show his wife where his earliest memories of his father lived. To stand in the place where the blessing of his life began for him.

He brought a copy of his father's memoir. He left it with me for the rectory library.

I've been treasuring that interaction. Its a rare thing. I have been thinking about what it means to return to a place where you received something so great that you spend the remainder of your life trying to pass it forward. About the chain of hands that holds a thing like a community or congregation across generations. And as I sat down with this morning's text the same thing appeared.

I am deeply aware that the blessing that is this church did not begin with me.

The blessing that we enjoy didn't begin with George, who handed me the keys — literally and figuratively — to Emmanuel's summer ministry.

It didn't begin with Jamie, or with Cathy, who held it before Jamie did, and tended this beloved community through decades of Sundays just like this one.

It came to Cathy from someone before her, and to that person from someone before that, in a chain that goes back further than any of us can name. What I received, I received from other hands. What I offer this morning, I offer from a vessel I did not fill.

That's what the reading from Genesis is about. Not the greatness of Abram. Not the specialness of his descendants. Not the real estate transaction that some have tried to make of it. It's about the architecture of blessing: how it moves, what it requires, and what goes wrong when someone decides to hoard it.

Listen to the grammar of what God says.

I will bless you. That's the first move. The promise of blessing is offered. Abram did nothing to earn it. He was living in Haran, seventy-five years old, going nowhere in particular, when the word came. The blessing of God is prior to any merit. It is given before it can be deserved. The scholars call that prevenient. A fancy word for - before we have earned it.

Next: So that you will be a blessing. That's the second move, and it's the one we skip. The blessing is not intended to land and stop. The blessing is offered in order to be given again. Abram is not the destination. Abram is the conduit,  the terrain through which the gift moves on its way to where it's going.

In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed — that's the third move. And it is vast. Not some families. Not the families who deserve it. Not the families with the right bloodline or the right passport or the right theology. All of them.

The blessing that begins with one man in Haran is meant to reach every family on earth.

We are so accustomed to reading this text as the founding charter of a chosen people that we miss its purpose. Chosen, in this case,  doesn't mean favored. It means responsible. It means privileged. It means called.  This kind of choosing is a vocation of blessing.

God didn't bless Abram to make Abram great. God blessed Abram to make the world blessed.

II. What the Lake Knows

Last year, I preached about the magnetic pull Dublin lake has on me. And I know tht it is true that many of us are drawn here  by Dublin lake.  Deep, cold, mysterious. There is something about the water that pulls us back, summer after summer, generation after generation. We may not be able to say exactly what it is. But we come.

Dublin Lake begins right outside this door. Not visibly, but we are in its vast watershed.

From its watershed, the lake receives from the hills around it — rainfall, snowmelt off Monadnock, the quiet seepage of a thousand upland springs feeding it through stone and root and soil. It does not generate what comes to it. It gathers. And then, because it is a lake and not a reservoir, it releases — through its outlet, into the Mountain Brook, into the Ashuelot, into the Connecticut River, into the Sound. A journey of refreshment and blessing. Dublin Lake does not keep what comes to it. It moves.

"This is what grace looks like when it is shaped by a landscape and moves."

I have spent 10 years watching a different body of water, the the pond near St. John's in Cold Spring Harbor.  Fourteen acres of water with a rotting wooden weir at the northern edge that impounds it, and American eels pressing against it from below.

The eels hatched in the Sargasso Sea, crossed the Atlantic, moved up the harbor and up the brook, and arrived at the base of our dam, following an instinct so ancient no instrument we have built can measure it, toward water they have never seen but know. They press. Not frantically. With the patience of creatures that have been making this journey since before the parish existed, since before the dam was there to stop them.

The dam was built to power a mill. The mill is gone. The dam remains. And the eel, which was always meant to pass through, waits at the foot of the dam longing for the pond 12 feet above it.

Blessing impounded is not a blessing preserved. It is a blessing withheld.

III. The Nation at 250

We gather today on the fifth of July. A day after we celebrated the 250th anniversary of this nation.  A nation built on an idea. Not on blood. Not on soil. Not on a common ancestry or a shared religion. On an idea that all people are created equal, that liberty is not the inheritance of kings, but a blessing to all. A blessing flowing from God to all. A blessing that moves from the hightest heaven to the lowest station. Free. A blessing of freedom that is itself free.

Two hundred and fifty years in, the question to my mind  is not whether that idea is beautiful. It is. The question is whether it has been moving to all— or whether that blessing has been impounded. Held by the few from the many.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men in Philadelphia tried to write down a watershed vocation: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights.

That is a genesis third-move idea. Its an idea that says that freedom should move like water - unimpeded, never stopping, flowing to the lowest place.

It doesn't say we are endowed. It says all people are. The blessing  of freedom does not stop at the borders of this  nation. Instead, this nation was meant to prove, by living example, that human beings could govern themselves freely and with dignity, that the gift of freedom was meant to move like water.

We have been, at our best, a watershed. A watershed of blessing. At our worst, we have been a dam.

And the honest reckoning at 250 — the one that requires courage rather than ceremony — is that we have been both, often at the same time. The declaration that all are created equal was signed by men who enslaved other human beings. Counting them as property.

The nation that took in the world's refugees can also close its doors. Many still argue about who deserves to receive the blessing of freedom.  Meanwhile the eel at the foot of the dam presses, patient as water, waiting to pass through.

The prophetic tradition within scripture, and within our own history, Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Jefferson, Lincoln, King, they all looked at a nation that claimed God's blessing and asked one question: Is the blessing moving, or is it impounded

This is not a comfortable reckoning. It was not comfortable for Isaiah. It was not comfortable for Dr. King. It was not comfortable for Jonathan Daniels, who grew up not far from here, in Keene, who went to Alabama because the blessing wasn't moving, and who gave his life stepping in front of a shotgun so that Ruby Sales, a young Black woman threatened by an angry racist, could live.

These are not partisans who complained, but patriots who corrected. They loved their country enough to tell us the truth about the promises we impounded.  About a blessing that had ceased to flow.

Closing

But back to Abram. Back to scripture.

Watch what Abram does when the blessing arrives.

He doesn't build a city. He doesn't declare sovereignty. He doesn't plant a flag. He pitches a tent — the most temporary structure a person can inhabit — and he builds an altar. At Shechem, an altar. At Bethel, an altar. And he journeys on.

The altars are not monuments to Abram. They are receipts. Markers that say: the blessing passed through here. Not: the blessing stayed here. It passed through here.

What Dr. Owen Thompson built here across twenty years of summers — that was a movement, not a monument. What each succeeded generation does here, lay and ordained together, Ginger and Bill, Me and Yank and Ellen, and KC and Jack,   Jamie and Cathy and Dede, all the saints known and unknown, we are  building  movements, not monuments. Each one receives from hands before them, and passes it on. What I receive from their hands, I will hold only long enough to pass on. The blessing was never ours to keep. It was given to move.

Owen is here this morning. So are others - Bill, Kathy, Ellen, all who serve in positions of common trust. The chain of blessing is visible in this place. We see its past, but not yet its future.

I will go to the lake after the service - if not immediately then eventually. I will stand at the water's edge and watch what the lake does. I can do this for hours without interruption.

Dublin lake receives from the hills and moves toward the outlet. It doesn't deliberate. It doesn't hold a committee meeting about who deserves what it's carrying. It moves toward the lowest place, because that is the only law water knows.

That is its vocation. Not greatness. Not possession. But Movement. A willingness to receive without stockpiling, to pass on without accounting, to trust that the blessing knows where it's going better than we do.

We can learn to live like Water, to flow, not stand. To move lower, to enliven as we go, to carry without complaint, to pass forward without reservation, to be willing to join without fear of erasure, and to bless along the way.

Jesus calls this the easy yoke. The burden that is light. Not because it costs nothing — but because it moves with the grain of what we were made for.

The same invitation to be a conduit of blessing is open to all of us as individuals, as a community, and as a nation.

The blessing was never ours to keep. It was given to move Amen.