Blessing: Nothing to Sneeze At

Last week, we held the St. David’s Staff Retreat where we focused on the “Way of Love” journey that was the cornerstone of the Presiding Bishop’s General Convention message. If you don’t know about it, you can check it out here. The Way of Love asks us to reflect on seven practices that allow us to live more fully into a grace filled life - turning, learning, praying, worshiping, blessing, going and resting.  Blessing, in particular, stood out for me as a practice par excellence, especially in light of what I understand to be one of Jesus’s most profound blessings “Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30)

What is it about a blessing that we seek to give and receive them, set special days out of our year to invoke them into our lives and upon those we seek to lift up?  In addition to the Blessing of the Animals, we have the Blessing of Backpacks, the Blessing of Bicycles, the Blessing of New Ministry, and the Blessing of a Marriage, for example. We talk about blessing, we pray for blessing, we read in the Bible about blessing, but have you ever stopped to ask – what does it really mean? Things going well, or in the right direction? Prosperity – health, wealth and whatnot? God’s favor? What is it exactly? We can easily agree that it’s a very positive thing, but when we try to pin the concept of blessing down to a definition, it suddenly seems surprisingly slippery. We talk about blessing all the time as believers, but is it possible that we don’t really know exactly what we’re talking about?

“I’m so blessed because I finally got the car I wanted.” Or “My child just made honor roll. What a blessing!”.  We speak of blessings as something achieved, as a lovely pat on the back from a God who dispenses blessings in the form of material goods or worldly achievements, as though God was some kind of cosmic ATM machine. I suspect that, in many cases, we view blessings as a thing we need to achieve or work towards, and that it is something only someone else can bestow on us.

What if we flip it around?  What if we view ourselves as blessed from day one?  What if we are so full of, and overflowing with, God’s blessing that it simply can’t be added to by the acquisition of material goods, or the escaping of some life-threatening illness? When we use the term “blessed” or “blessing” as an result, rather than as a beginning, as a means rather than an end, we are setting ourselves up to be deeply disappointed with life because then we’re operating from the scarcity standpoint that we are not blessed enough, and never will be.

And to be sure, we are exceedingly blessed, and we live and breathe, and make our way through this world as blessed beings, and nothing can increase or decrease our status as the blessed beloveds of God.  The book of Genesis says that God created humankind in God’s image.  Do you recall what God did after that?  The text says “God blessed them.”  In Psalm 148, the Psalmist says that the response to this creation blessing is the giving of thanks and praise!  Language is important here.  We have already achieved God’s blessing, and if we can claim that in its fullness, then we can be joyful in the goodness and mercy that God bestows on us in hundreds of ways, every day of our lives.  At the same time we can be comforted and convicted that God loves us even in the depths of our brokenness and sorrow.  We are blessed in spite of, not because of.  God only waits for us to perfect our gratitude.

If being created and blessed by God is not enough for us to be grateful, God bestows another blessing on us, the ultimate blessing if you will, in the form of his son, Jesus Christ. And each Sunday our response takes the form of the Eucharist, which is Greek for “Thanksgiving”.

Blessing and thanksgiving is the call and response of our love song with God.  At times there is a lot to be thankful for and it is easy to remember that we are blessed creatures of God.  At other times, our own sorrows or the sorrows of the world weigh so heavily on us that God’s call is all but too faint to hear.  It is at those times that Jesus reminds us of our status as God’s blessed children: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Being blessed by God is not contingent on whether or not we lose that extra 10 lbs, or on the color of our skin, our abilities or disabilities, our political affiliations or our gender or sexuality.  The implication of Jesus’s invitation is that we are all blessed from the beginning of time and we are all blessed until the end of days because God has deemed it so.

As we are blessed, so we bless. If God blesses us by loving us, how do we bless one another?  In the same way, I imagine.  I think many of us already do that in small, intimate ways – when someone sneezes, we say “bless you!”; we bless our food and one another around our mealtimes.  Secure in the knowledge that we are blessed by God means that we have the freedom to do God-like things.

And what could this freedom look like? The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in his work titled “Meeting God in Paul”, says:

“It is a freedom for new kinds of relationship in which we are able to contribute to each other’s life and well being instead of threatening and feeling threatened by each other.  [I]t is also a freedom to bring good news to each other.  [T]o give life, to promise forgiveness and reconciliation, to communicate hope in word and action.” These are the blessings we can bestow on one another.

The blessings we offer are indeed powerful but they are not magical. On our own, we do not have the power to cause that which we yearn for, nor do we have the power to compel God by the force of our invocation. No, like our other prayers, the blessings of humankind are aspirational; we express in word and gesture our deepest yearnings. Our blessings are an expression of hope.  And in a world wracked by natural disaster, political unrest and dis-ease, and evil acts perpetrated upon one another that are beyond our comprehension, sometimes the only thing we can offer one another with certainty is hope for a new creation, a new beginning.  

In this light, perhaps we can understand Jesus’s invitation in Matthew’s Gospel as the bestowal of yet another blessing of hope that is both supremely divine in its affirmation and squarely human in its aspiration:

“May you come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

May you take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

What a blessing, indeed.