What Does It Mean To Be Blessed

Genesis 12:1-3

          Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ²I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. ³I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

Luke 6:20-26

Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
²¹ ‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

22 ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. ²³Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
²⁴ ‘But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
²⁵ ‘Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

²⁶‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

          It has been a lot of fun, and no small challenge, working on this sermon series, and I hope it proves valuable to all of you.  Or at least to some of you.

          This morning’s request comes from Joanie, who asked me to do some thinking and speaking about blessing.  What is a blessing?  What does it mean to be blessed? 

          They’re great questions, because the idea of blessing, or being blessed, is one which we find throughout scripture.  There are 490 occurrences of “bless,” “blessed,” or “blessing” in the Bible.

          So we ought to be able to get a clear picture of what it means to bless and to be blessed…right?

          Sure. 

          It means a lot of things.

          The first occurrence of blessing is in the first chapter of the Bible.  When God created human beings, Genesis tells us, “God blessed them, saying ‘be fruitful and multiply.’”

          So the first blessing is a promise of tiny humans.  And I will say that I now know definitively that tiny humans are the best blessing there is.  At least that’s how it works in my house.

          And blessing is often tied to fruitfulness, by which the Bible means first “procreation.”  Fruitfulness comes to mean bearing the fruits of the kingdom of God, which is a more inclusive blessing.  But in Genesis, it means “have children.  Have lots and lots of children.”  

          The blessing to Abraham and Sarah, for example, reiterated a few times, is that they will be the parents of a nation.  In Genesis 15, God says to Abraham, “‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ ⁶And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”  That final part, which Paul recounts in Romans 4, hints at an important facet of “blessing” in scripture.  It is often transactional.  We will talk more about that in a moment.

          First I want to review a few more ways that blessing happens in scripture.  Blessings are bestowed by lots of figures.  By God, for sure.  But in the stories of our parents in the faith, in Torah, especially, children are blessed by their parents, or whole families.

          When Rebekah leaves her family in Aram to go to Canaan and marry Isaac, her family blesses her with these words:

‘May you, our sister, become
   thousands of myriads;
may your offspring gain possession
   of the gates of their foes.’ 

          Okay, so maybe not the words we would use, but it’s a blessing.  May you have a large family and safety.

          One of the great blessing stories from the time of the patriarchs and matriarchs comes from the next generation.  Isaac and Rebekah have twin sons, Esau and Jacob.  Esau was born first, but Jacob had a hold of his heel when he came out—a harbinger of things to come. 

          Esau was the favorite of his father.

          Isaac was his mother’s favorite.

          When Isaac reached the end of his life, it fell on him to “bless” his oldest son.  By now “blessing” seems to have acquired a fuller meaning.  This blessing would confer the birthright to Esau, thus allowing him to inherit the bulk of his father’s considerable possessions.

          Rebekah conspires with her son Jacob to pretend to be Esau and receive the blessing, and Jacob does it.  He steals his brother’s blessing, and once it is given, it is permanent.  Jacob becomes Isaac’s heir, and the rest is history. 

          The story only becomes more interesting from there, but if we really want to understand “blessing,” as it is laid down in the foundation of our story of faith, we have to back up a couple of generations.  Back to Abraham, or in this case Abram.

          Our Hebrew scripture lesson for this morning is small-but-mighty.  The first iteration of the blessing given to Abram and Sarai, later Abraham and Sarah.

Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ²I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 

          I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and will make your name great.  HUGE promise from God.  You will be HUGE.  And the important part is right after that.

          Who’s reading it?  What’s the important part? 

          “I will bless you, and will make your name great…so that you will be a blessing.

          Abram is blessed by God SO THAT he can bless the world.  God’s not just showering him with gifts (and make no mistake, there is an implied showering to go along with the fruitfulness which takes a couple of generations to manifest).  God has hand-selected Abram, because God believes that with a little TLC, they can be the ones to plant the kingdom of God in earth.

          And a lot of things happen in the intervening time, but that is exactly what happens.  Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah, the parents of a people who make up over half of the world.  There are seven billion people in the world.  4.3 billion of them are the descendants of Abraham and Sarah—the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims.

          And we are all here because Abraham believed God, and moved from his homeland and did the things God commanded him to do, and God “reckoned it as righteousness,” and made of him a covenant.

          God’s part was to be God.

          Abraham’s part was to be God’s person.  To bless as God had blessed him.  To bless his family, to bless the world, to bless God.

          It wasn’t always easy, being a blessing.  As you might know, God tested Abraham’s fidelity to the covenant in some pretty tough ways. 

          This is where the “prosperity gospel” people have it all wrong.  Being “blessed” doesn’t just mean that you get all the great stuff you’ve always wanted.  God is not Oprah.

          Being blessed means that you give yourself over to the covenant.  You allow yourself to be God’s, and to adhere to God’s commands.  It ain’t all prosperity.  Look at the way Jesus describes what “blessed” looks like:

          Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, weeping, hated, and despised.  For you will be filled.  You will laugh.  And most important, you are worthy to enter the kingdom of God.

          Those who have never wanted are not fit for the kingdom.  Those who have never wept cannot enter.  Because those of you who have wept…and survived…have learned to laugh again.  To reach out to another person when you are in pain and say “help me, I am weeping.”  To rely on something more than yourself, and to understand that no matter how things look today, they can easily look differently tomorrow.  So we need each other.  And we need God.

          You can’t enter the kingdom of God until you realize that you need God.  That’s what blessing is.  It’s not God playing “you get a car.  You get a car.”

          It’s us realizing that everything we have comes from God.  If we have transportation, if we have food, if we have people who love us and are there to dry our tears—we are blessed.

          And if we realize that we are blessed, that God has allowed us to survive another day, then we are ready to enter into the covenant of the kingdom of God.  Perhaps even to bless someone who is still hungry, hated, weeping.

          God blesses us and grants us the kingdom…and we bless God and build the kingdom.  We create a world in which all who are hungry are fed, all who are weeping have someone to dry their tears.

          Think for a moment, about the ways that God has blessed you.  Take just one of those things and either say a little prayer of thanks to God, or share it with the people seated around you.

          We are blessed.  This church is blessed.

          Now let us bless the world.