The 7th Sunday of Pentecost - Blessing!

How blessed are you?  How blessed are we?  How do you bless?  How do we bless?  One of the charisms of ordained ministry is to convey God's blessing to God's people at the end of the Eucharistic celebration and in other sacramental rites.  In the Episcopal Church priests pronounce God blessing on the assembled worshippers while making the sign of the cross.  Some people respond to that blessing by making the sign of the cross themselves: a blessing given and received.

But that does not mean that God's blessing is not be conveyed in other ways.  Sometimes we speak about how we blessed by the love and friendship of another person.  We pronounce God's blessing over the meal we are about to eat.  We might call an unexpected, positive happening a blessing. Sometimes we look back on a situation and find we received a blessing in a situation that seemed quite dire.

The church where I served as a seminarian experienced a devastating fire caused by carelessness on the part of some workmen making repairs.  Although the congregation of the Church of the Holy Apostles had to meet somewhere else for a couple of years, they were able to rebuild their worship space also to be the dining room during the week for a larger and larger soup kitchen ministry—about 1,200 served daily. The rector at the time of the fire was still there when I came.  He said it was very tough to deal with the situation, but so much good came out of their difficulty.  And the other part of the blessing was that not one day was missed by the soup kitchen ministry.

Our epistle reading from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians seeks to give a theology of blessing.  The opening sentence addresses the reciprocal nature of blessing: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.”  Paul declared that God loved humanity, blessing it in its pre-Creation state.  In the same way the writer of Genesis has God declaring each part of the created order good, Paul appears to be explaining some sort of “original goodness” for humanity in Christ. Our created purpose, from Paul's perspective, is to dwell in a holy and blameless state within God's love through Christ, as the second person of the Trinity.  Our response to this love should be to praise “God's glorious grace [another way to speak of God's love] that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved [Jesus].”

For Paul, as he expresses himself in this passage, blessing primarily is spiritual, not material. But like St. Thomas who demanded to touch the wounds of Jesus in order to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, most of us want or need a material manifestation of God's blessing to bolster our faith.  We can hear this expressed by psalmists. We hear this in Psalm 24: 4-5, “Those who have clean hands and a pure heart . . . shall receive a blessing from the Lord and a just reward from the God of our salvation.”

So we are not unbiblical, by any means, in longing for tangible evidence of God's blessing.  But if this is all we understand God's blessing to be, our view is too narrow.  Remember Jesus' explaining that rain falls on both the just and the unjust?  God's blessing is about relationship.  The real world is a fallen and dangerous place.  The only certain ground on which we may stand is God. Our relationship with God is through Jesus Christ. To switch the metaphor a bit, could God's blessing be like the rain, falling on us all, but not all of us at any particular moment are absorbent soil?  For us, coming to know Jesus perhaps may lead us to be more receptive to seeing God's blessing, to being in relationship with the divine.

In the reading from Mark's gospel there appears to be no blessing and no good news either.  One of my seminary classmates posted a picture on Facebook a couple days ago about this passage showing an open Bible and a pen resting on an empty legal pad. His caption said “Looking for the good news in this week's gospel.”

No good could be said about King Herod or the dreadful situation he created by his boasting about how generous he would be to his seductive, dancing daughter, Herodias.  And yet, there is one part of this vignette that caught my attention.  Keep in mind the image of the rain falling on both the just and the unjust. These words brought me up short: “ . . . Herod feared John knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.  When he heard him he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.”  John's testimony about repenting [again, changing one's mind] and turning to God was a blessing to Herod.  As we know from scripture and historical sources, Herod was not capable of responding to this blessing to become a blessing to others or to bless God.  But nevertheless God offered blessing to Herod through John's testimony.

Within the Christian community at Ephesus and within our own Christian community, God's blessing comes within the context of our faith.  Paul wrote:  “In him [Christ] you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit . . .”  Through our baptism and later adult acceptance of the baptismal promises, if we were baptized as infants, God has made us absorbent and fertile soil for receiving divine blessing that, as Paul noted, “ . . . we who . . . set our hope on Christ might live for the praise of his [God's] glory.”

So there it is.  God has reached out to us with blessing and we return the blessing by praising God's glory.  But there is more.  As John the Baptizer did, we must take what we have received and offer it to others.   Although our testimony about how our faith in Jesus Christ has blessed us may help others respond to God's blessing, we must also offer our deeds to those in need.  When we pack or cook food for the hungry, when we offer physical or pastoral care to others—these material forms of blessing flow from our being spiritually fed and cared for by God.  Paul understood all this in a spiritual way, not to earn salvation through our own righteousness—which would never be enough—but as a response to God's blessing that praises God's glory.

May God's blessing be ours; may Christ's peace be ours; may the Spirit's outpouring be ours—so we can be Christ's heart and Christ's hands each day for those we know and love—and for those to whom God sends us—even if they do not readily receive us!