Blessing
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Thanksgiving Sunday, November 18, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“To be interrupted mid-stampede by a beautiful thing is a blessing indeed.”
– Garrison Keillor
“With a blessing, what you get is more than what you can see.”
– David Spangler
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is a few lines about gratitude by Garrison Keillor, from an interview with him four years ago in The Christian Century :
Gratitude is where spiritual life begins. Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black T-shirt. Thanks for black, and for other colors. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the wherewithal not to fix a half-pound cheeseburger right now and to eat a stalk of celery instead. Thank you for the wonderful son and the amazing little daughter and the smart sexy wife and the grandkids. Thank you that I haven’t had alcohol in lo! these many months and thank you that it isn’t a big struggle to do without, as I had so feared it would be. Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.
I could go on and on. One should enumerate one’s blessings and set them before the Lord. Begin every day with this exercise. List your blessings and you will walk through those gates of thanksgiving and into the fields of joy. – The Christian Century , 3/22/03, p. 21.
2. Our second reading is from 1 Peter 3:8-9:
Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called – that you might inherit a blessing.
Once upon a time, Irish peasants, walking in their fields,
would call down blessings for the land and the crops
as naturally as if they were shooting the breeze over a pint at the local pub.
Why was it so natural for them to call down a blessing?
These days, if we’re asked to say a blessing, many of us feel a little uneasy,
even when it’s something as common as the blessing before a meal,
much less saying a blessing for a crop or a newborn baby or a friend who’s in the hospital.
But such things were natural for those Irish peasants because once upon a time,
people felt much more connected with Spirit –
with the invisible, divine forces both in us and all around us.
So for them, calling on those forces to guide and bless us was like taking their next breath.
I think that is a way of living and being that we need to reclaim for our time.
So this morning I want to try to demystify the word blessing without diminishing its power,
and encourage us to return to calling down blessings for fields and for friends –
to make room for an old idea: that there is much more going on than we can see.
The best way I know of to do that is to look inside,
which may be a scary thing to do, but there in the back closet you’ll find holiness –
the oldest passage in the bible tells us that we are created in the image of God.
We are all chips off the divine block: our DNA is loaded with Spirit.
If divinity were radioactive, a Geiger counter would go wild around us.
So we were not designed to feel uneasy
about calling down a blessing whenever and wherever one is needed.
Still, a blessing does have a certain aura about it,
a halo effect that is part of its power but also may cause us to treat it with reserve,
with the result that we too often leave blessings to ministers and priests.
When I’m a dinner guest, I love it when, instead of looking to me,
someone else says the blessing – so I can just listen and receive the words;
but aside from grace before dinner, we do tend to associate blessings with special occasions.
I say a blessing when a baby is baptized.
When a couple gets married, I bless their rings.
But I try to include all of us in those blessings whenever I can.
At a baptism, when we have the children in our church school here with us,
I sometimes ask them to come forward and just touch the water in the baptismal bowl,
and as they do, make a wish for the baby.
In this simple way, they add their blessing to the water I will use to baptize the baby.
You can include that same idea in a wedding
by passing the wedding rings from guest to guest to begin the ceremony,
asking each person to hold the rings for a moment and say blessing for the couple
and then pass the rings to their neighbor.
In this simple way, the rings end up blessed by everyone at the wedding.
Community blessings like these are powerful things –
you can feel their energy in the room,
and they give us a chance to practice the art of calling down a blessing.
So what do you think we are really asking for when we bless a baby or a couple’s wedding rings?
I think we are asking the world to be that baby’s ally, that couple’s ally – to be on their side:
to help them, keep them safe, give them love, heal their wounds, quell their fears.
In other words, we want their life to be blessed.
And in their better moments, we want them to be a blessing for others.
A blessing is a gift.
And what you get is more than what you can see.
A blessing has a spaciousness about it.
You may believe in God or you may not, but that spaciousness is there either way.
And it is interesting to note that the Spanish expression, “Vaya con Dios,”
is a blessing – “Go with God” – and even the words adios and adieu,
which we think of as just the Spanish and French words for “goodbye,”
actually and literally mean “to God” – a - Dios; a - Dieu.
As a minister, I can’t help but like that!
One thing I’ve noticed about the way we use the word “blessing” in ordinary conversation
is that we almost always qualify it –
we talk about “mixed blessings” and “a blessing in disguise.”
Progress is a mixed blessing.
Speaking about the invention of the airplane,
the Clarence Darrow character in the play, Inherit the Wind, says:
“Yes, you can fly – but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”
Old age is a mixed blessing.
On one hand, we’re glad to be alive, and we probably have a thought or two worth sharing,
but we also have some aches and pains that will never go away,
and there are some things we once loved to do that we can’t do anymore.
Winning big in the lottery is a mixed blessing.
You don’t have to worry about money,
but some of your friends start treating you differently,
and you get a lot of calls from strangers who have a bridge to sell you.
For the people of Israel, the exodus was a mixed blessing.
They weren’t slaves in Egypt anymore, but for forty years they were homeless, living in the desert.
People died, babies were born.
And they had to wonder whether the promised land was real or just a mirage.
A cousin of the mixed blessing is the blessing in disguise.
You’re driving somewhere, you make a wrong turn, you get lost,
and you see something beautiful that you might never, otherwise, have known about.
You’re rejected by the college that was your first choice and so you go to one that said ‘yes’,
and after a year or two you’re saying, “Thank God my first choice didn’t take me!”
Because you can’t imagine anything more right for you than the friendships you gained,
the teachers you’ve had, the girlfriend or boyfriend you’ve met, all of what’s happened:
it’s as if the invisible forces sent you to the exact place where you were supposed to be.
Another blessing in disguise is what happens when the power goes out during a snowstorm.
We slow down, all of us, because we have no choice.
We collectively go back to an earlier time, a time of candle light,
of chatting with a neighbor while we dig out,
of making sure someone we know is warm enough and has enough food on hand.
My hunch is that we feel a certain comfort with blessings in disguise and mixed blessings
because we’ve all experienced them at some point in our lives – we know they’re real.
But if you or I were to call down a blessing for someone we know,
we wouldn’t call down a mixed blessing or a blessing in disguise –
we would ask for the undiluted pure thing.
Even though we know that life is a mix of light and shadow.
Which brings us to the leading edge of any blessing.
The bible is full of stories about God asking ordinary people to do something – to take it on.
And they never think they’re up to it.
But time and again, God tells them: I will bless you – and I will make you a blessing for others.
William Cantwell Smith said that the bible is not a text, it’s an activity.
It’s a living thing, we are writing new verses for it every day,
and God is still speaking, still saying: I will bless you, and I will make you a blessing for others.
Every time you perform an act of kindness, you are a blessing to someone else.
It may seem, to you, like no big deal – just a simple kindness.
But believe me, it often feels, to the person who receives it, like a blessing.
A college student was not sure how to help a friend
who was so depressed about her life that she was thinking about suicide.
Not knowing what else to do, she showed up in her despairing friend’s room one night
with a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
and she said: we’re going sit and listen to this, because it can save you –
“because in it you will hear what wonders humans are capable of giving each other.”
Because “you will hear what is possible in life – you will hear goodness and hope.” (1)
So they sat together and listened.
Did you know that after the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth,
he turned around to see what he could not hear: the applause –
the audience was standing, all of them, and people were in tears – tears of joy.
So that young college student sat with her despairing friend and they listened.
God said, “You will be a blessing.”
Even if you feel you have nothing very helpful to say.
And even if your friend doesn’t get better.
What matters is that you were there.
In our first reading, Garrison Keillor gives us our instructions for the week ahead.
“Gratitude is where spiritual life begins.
One should enumerate one’s blessings and set them before the Lord.
Begin every day with this exercise: list your blessings
and you will walk through those gates of thanksgiving and into the fields of joy.”
This Thanksgiving week is a perfect opportunity to practice the truth of those words.
List your blessings.
Starting today, write a new one down every day for the whole week.
By next Sunday, you’ll have seven.
And you’ll have something more – because what you get is more than what you can see.
Almost without knowing why, you will feel more resilient, more settled.
You will feel both more quiet and more strong.
You will, in Mother Teresa’s words, be more able “to love without getting tired.”
Enumerate your blessings and set them before the Lord.
Amen.
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