What does Blessing Feel Like?
Generative, Relational, and Responsible is the Heart of Blessing
March 5, 2023, Lent 2 RCLA
What does blessing feel like? Is it a warm drink in your hands after shoveling mountains of snow? Is it a deep genuine laugh, not at anybody’s expense, but like a child discovering something for the first time? Blessing is a powerful generative word – rather like a seed. It’s the kind of utterance that is on the creative edge of our very being. Blessing is the kind of word that reminds us that there is something other than the circumstance of dread we might be in. It is strange how even our casual utterances to one another after a sneeze manage to carry this deeper meaning of hopeful mutual wellness. The word may be overused and appallingly misapplied, yet it is still a potency.
In our first lesson today forms of the word blessing are repeated 5 times. The Hebrew is actually two different words. One time it is about the body: it is a word about kneeling the posture appropriate to that time and place for one receiving a promise. Otherwise, today, bless is a generative word. It is about life force and generosity and relationship. Bless as in the word that is used in the 7-day creation story. It is like a seed, life-giving – with so much potency on the inside. It’s a call of responsibility, a duty bestowed. Blessing isn’t politeness,it is to be a force for wellness and life abundant. To be people of this blessing is to be responsible for far more than ourselves alone.
Abraham is a big deal. He is the spiritual ancestor of 55% of the religious persons on this planet: Jews Christians and Muslims. Yet this Genesis introduction to him is understated, and rather like entering in the second act. There is much unknown and unwritten, and I suspect many of you are acquainted with only the children’s bible and lectionary broad brush strokes of the life of Abraham, who today is still named Abram. Children’s bibles typically begin his story with our lesson today: the invocation of blessing and the telling Abraham to pick up everything and go to somewhere entirely new. Then they share the divine visitation and Sarah’s laughter and the late-in-life children. This is overall, an example of what it is like to live in deep friendship with God: the relational part of the blessing. But that is only a fraction of the Genesis texts about Abraham. Which isn’t the most coherent story.
Scholars believe it is stitched together from a wide array of oral traditions. In the whole text as we have it, what we have is at times embarrassing and, awesome mixed with difficult tales of the patriarch. His family is barren and he is lost. God tells him to go in one direction and he goes in the other. He shamefully casts out his own child Ishmael. He gets entangled with royal courts and thinks he can manipulate the situation, which nearly ends in disaster. Again and again, he is not an all-star in the way we might want him to be, instead, he is just barely holding on. I think this small start of his sacred journey we heard today points us toward Abraham’s entire story. This is a very Lenten acknowledgment that we are intended to be a lifegiving force – and how each of us messes it up, all the time – yet God sticks with us. For all of his” creativity” and legendary-ness Father Abraham is not chosen to represent God as an icon, but is called to carry on in a particular story in his place and his time. He carries the story on, not by doing things as they had been done, but by living into a process Of extra lifelong learning, falling down and getting back up. It seems to take him forever to show that this blessing is an ethic and a wisdom. It is the call to follow the will of heaven on earth.
Lent is a time of self-examination and so I ask you today to take a moment and look at the ways that you might not be embodying the life-giving potency of this blessing. On our blooming cross are many ways in which we trample the promise, that we mess up the ways in which we are intended to be a blessing for all others. Take a flower that we are imagining as potent generative seeds – and bury it in one of the boxes that make up the cross.
In this and other Christian traditions, we set the meaning of blessing in our bodies with the sign of the cross. It is a reminder of a deep and real life giving + and liberating relationship with God who is always planting seeds, generating hope and moving us towards well-being, even in the context of tragedies, those of the chaos of the world, and those we have concocted for ourselves and all our neighbors. I wonder if every time you notice the feeling of blessing you could make the sign of the cross. Or if that is more out loud than you are used to a smaller sign – mark a cross on your palm, or put your hand over your heart center.
The One Lord of the Universe keeps walking beside us – not silently – but as a holy friend would. To be blessed in the religious sense isn’t a tea towel synonym for lucky or I like what I’ve got. It is being one with God’s motion and heart: blessing is a duty and community on a journey. Every era, everywhere, the holy way we inherited through Abraham trusts that all that is is of ONE generative meaningful lifeforce – not distant or cold. In Abraham’s primordial time and ours, the blessing is powerful, and it is not for ourselves alone. The promise is not completed on our own, and we cannot remain where we are to bring it to bloom. Blessing looks like seeds sprouting through the soil: it is revolutionary. Blessing feels like being held in love by a friend: it is a relationship. The call to Abraham, and to us, is to be a blessing – to listen, trust, and go.
(Image cropped from PBS Media)