My children and I have
learned something about blessing from ARC Retreat Center. Each meal there begins with a detailed
description of every food item – Today’s
lunch is a salad of fresh garden greens and ripe tomatoes picked this morning
with a buttermilk herb dressing made with thyme and basil. Here we have
homemade rosemary polenta hot out of the oven with the velvety tomato sauce
from our cookbook. And today’s tea and
cookie pairing is vanilla rooibos tea with chewy almond cookies!” And
everyone oohs and ahs in appreciation, and the whole thing is a kind of
blessing, if you think about it. Then
together we share a spoken or sung blessing before we eat, and then another one
after we’ve lingered with the flavors and conversation and food to end each meal.
And when you awaken, before
you leave your room for good, you are asked to change your sheets and pray a
blessing for the next guest who will be staying there after you. So we make the
bed carefully and then place our hands on the quilt and pray for the strangers
who will get to come next. Since they
were tiny, everywhere we’ve stayed away from home, my children have asked to do
this, even at hotels.
And when it is
time to leave ARC, the staff there gathers in a circle around you and sings,
“May the long time sun shine upon you, all love surround you, and the pure
light within you, guide you on your way home.” And then they gently lay their
hand on your shoulder, and then you are ready to depart. And the blessing – even if
it’s at first seems silly or cheesy, you can’t help tearing up a little because
it seeps into your soul. The touch, the gift, being seen and sent. It somehow grounds us again in our humanity.
Last week we heard the story of God and Noah, where God was despairing, angry and brokenhearted at the
people who keep turning on one another, insistent on destruction. And at the very center of that story, and
those before it, was God’s persistent and stubborn longing for relationship
with these ones created in God’s image, created for God and one another and the world.
And when all was said and
done, God promised, no matter what, to never give up on humanity. Part of never
giving up on the world is also never letting the world give up on itself – helping us see
life as it truly is, as God sees it, instead of through the lens of selfishness
and destruction.
So God decides to pick one
family, and through that family, to bless all the families of the whole
world. God wants to draw one family so
close into God’s heart, to share God’s purpose and God’s vision and God’s love
for the world, that others would be drawn in, would be cared for, and enabled
to live fully and wholly who they were meant to be.
So we’re introduced to
Abram. And the blessing of Abraham and
Sarah.
And in a powerful and
far-reaching promise, God plans to create from this family a whole nation that
will bless the rest of the world.
But just in case we miss
what blessing actually is, let us take note of who God has chosen here: They
are barren. There is no way for them to
fulfill this promise. No way for them to create a nation, let alone a single
child, no way for them to be a blessing to the whole world.
This blessing has to come
from God. God calls them and promises them, I will be with you; I will guide
you. I will bless you. And through you all the families of the world will be
blessed.
So, leaving everything he knows, all the ties he has, any previous blessings that were his, such as family and clan, Abram obeys, and he and Sarai set out with God’s promise holding them. The covenant God made with the world that God’s love would never give up on us gets legs in the covenant God makes with Abraham. God’s love will reach out actively to remind the world of its blessedness, of its purpose and its beauty and all people of their place and their blessedness.
And God is going to use people to help do this. Now we are being pulled into something. Now there is a charge on us. The chosen people of God are never merely recipients. We are participants. We are blessed to be a blessing. God wants to draw us so close into God’s heart, to share God’s purpose and God’s vision and God’s love for the world, that others will be drawn in, will be cared for, will enabled to live fully and wholly who they were meant to be. We get to be the ones who notice and celebrate their true nature, their possibility and their hope and their gifts.
So how do we share in this?
How do we receive blessing? How do we bless?
Blessing first acknowledges that everything comes from God– it
exists in God’s world and is part of this whole that God has put together. And then blessing sees a
thing as it is, in its fullness, the darkness and the light of it, and embraces
it. It holds it up to God’s care, and it
enjoins it to be even more fully itself, to live as it was created to
live. Hi there Squirrel! You are
beautiful in all your nose-twitching, nut-burying, tree-planting,
traffic-dodging squirrely-ness! Keep on squirrelling, making more squirrels and
living out your squirrely part in this symphony of life!
Blessing recognizes
something and names it as valuable. It thanks God for its place in the whole.
One of my favorite moments
of blessing was this last Spring – the Presbyterian Women did a house blessing for
Marge. We began in the living
room, gathering all together in her space and speaking aloud the hopes and
intentions for the space – people began tentatively, “This room has such lovely
light! Look at the view! What comfortable space for gathering!” And then it
began, may this room bring people
together, may it be a place of laughter and conversation, of quiet thoughts and
sunlit reading.
We moved to the bedroom and
gathered around her bed, “For restful sleep!” one person said, we all grunted
and nodded and sighed our agreement, for
peace and comfort. For dreams and memories and waking refreshed to new days.
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| a view from the toilet |
The kitchen, for sharing
food and welcoming guests, for nourishing our bodies and holding treasures
passed down and gifts baked up. The
women amped up as they went, thinking of more blessings, getting into it, and
Marge beamed, and the moment itself felt so blessed.
We ended by gathering in a
circle in the living room once again and thanking God for Marge, and for her
home, and for the chapter closing and the chapter beginning and for what God
had in store for her in this new space, and we gave her a plant, part of the
whole Peace plant- a tangible and visual blessing and reminder of her
belovedness. And we all left feeling blessed.
Because blessing others
blesses us. Reminding others of their
belovedness makes us live out our belovedness.
Blessing can be as simple as
pausing and noticing the noisy world waking up, the birds and and sunrise
and crisp morning air and giving thanks. It can be laying a hand quietly on
your son’s head as he sleeps, or hugging your friend. It can be speaking out
about someone to them- recognizing their strengths, celebrating their humor or
their honesty. Or giving a gift for no reason at all. This week I was blessed over
and over again as I recovered from surgery with friends stopping by with a bowl of soup and a piece of
chocolate, bringing me a book they enjoyed, giving me a call to see how I was
feeling, making a lasagna for my family.
Barbara Brown Taylor says those who become
very practiced at blessing might tell you that
“Pronouncing a blessing puts
you as close to God as you can get. To
learn to look with compassion on everything that is…to make the first move
toward the other, however many times it takes to get close; to open your arms
to what is instead of waiting until it is what it should be, to surrender the
justice of your own cause for mercy, to surrender the priority of your own
safety for love – this is to land at God’s breast.”
If that is what blessing is,
what is blessing NOT?
The story of Abram and
Sarai, who become Abraham and Sarah, can tell us something about What a
blessing is NOT. Because sometime after God
makes this promise they begin to doubt the blessing and their own blessedness. Instead
of trusting God to fulfill God’s promises to the world through them they get
tired of waiting and take the blessing into their own hands and try to make
something happen. And so comes Hagar and Ishmael, and the human attempt to earn
or produce what God has promised to provide.
Blessing is NOT something we manufacture or coerce. It’s something we receive and participate in and pass on.
This scheming on the part of Abraham and Sarah does not disqualify them from blessing, though. God still blesses them and fulfills God’s
promise to bless the world through them and eventually they have Isaac, child
of human impossibility and God’s intention. Because blessing begins with God and not with us.
And “blessed” does not
mean “lucky.” It can be the same circumstances, the same good thing happening
to you, but to call it lucky focuses
on your worthiness or unworthiness to receive this gift. It compares you to others who do or don’t get
good things, and questions their worthiness or unworthiness. And makes the gift itself arbitrary. It’s a way of rejecting the gift even as you
accept it – wow, that was lucky!
Subtext, it’s a fluke and I
shouldn’t count on it!
But Blessed always goes back to the source. To say
something is a blessing is to say, “I accept this gift as a reminder of God’s
good intentions for the world and of my belovedness in God.”
My daughter is happy at school, that is a blessing.
My test results came back negative, what a blessing! We were able to get
together with friends for a such lovely evening! I accept this gift as a
reminder of God’s love.
Blessing is not magic. Blessing does
not make something holy – blessing recognizes the holiness that is already there, it reminds
us that this place, this person, this opportunity is from God – by existing, it
shares in God’s holy purposes, and thus it doesn’t matter what we think of it,
whether we think it is worthy or not, God
can use everything. That means that by
blessing we give up being able to prejudge what is good or bad for us, Taylor
says, “You may say a blessing when you break a bone the same as you do when you
win the lottery. The two events may be more alike than you know. Live with
either of them very long and you may discover that neither of them is as bad or
as good as you first thought it would be.”
So Blessing makes us pay
attention, it says of any experience, What might I miss if I don’t take notice?
What can I appreciate that might open me to more? What might come of this?
And Blessings are NOT something only special, holy people can give. Since blessings begin with God, we are all recipients
and sharers of blessing. Orthodox Jews are
to give 100 blessings a day. And they
all begin with Blessed be our Lord God,
King of the Universe,
Who gave us this bread to
nourish our bodies…
Blessed be our Lord God, King of the Universe,
Who gives us this bright,
chilly day in which to live…
Blessed be our Lord God, King of the Universe,
For family and friends
gathered here…
That means Blessings are
not perfection blackmail. We don’t
withhold Blessing until something achieves the “best” version of itself, we don't wait until someone is free of fault and weakness,
or some situation is the way we want it to be before we bless it.
That would imply that blessing is earned; but blessing is gift.
In the same way, we don’t
refrain from blessing others until we
are somehow holy or complete or in a good place. You can't earn the right to bless, that too is a gift. We are called to continually receive life as a gift that speaks of God’s good intentions and how much God
loves us, and then to continually give that reminder to others.
"To bless
means to say good things. We have to bless one another constantly. Parents need
to bless their children, children their parents, [spouses their partners],
friends their friends. In our society, so full of curses, we must fill each
place we enter with our blessings. We forget so quickly that we are God's
beloved children and allow the many curses of our world to darken our hearts.
Therefore we have to be reminded of our belovedness and remind others of
theirs. Whether the blessing is given in words or with gestures, in a solemn or
an informal way, our lives need to be blessed lives."
Sisters and brothers, What
would it be like to live blessed lives?
What would happen to us if
we started blessing all the time?
What would happen to the
world?
I wonder, this week, what blessings will you receive? I wonder, how will you bless?
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