Blessings
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: Numbers 6:22-27
Series: Resources of the Church
At the end of this service, I will bless you. We will do so using the very words of our reading from Numbers today, which what is known as the Aaronic Blessing. Priests, first Israelite, then Jewish, then Christian, have been blessing the people with these words for some 3000 years. A lot has changed: after receiving this blessing you’ll go outside and mount a Buick, rather than a donkey. But the blessing itself is the same, the one God gave to Moses, to give to Aaron, with which to bless the people.
Today’s sermon is about blessings — which is a word we use all the time. Do y’all remember the days when the customary response to a person sneezing was not “Do you have COVID?” but “God’s bless you?”
Those were good days.
We ask someone at the head of the table to “bless the food.” Why? What does it accomplish? Does it make the food taste better? Do I say the blessing over you at the end of the service in the hopes of making you taste better? Bless your heart, no!
Blessing is a word has multiple adjacent meanings. If you’d open your bulletin to pages 1-2 this morning, you can see what I mean.
Our opening hymn was “Come thou fount of every blessing.” Here ‘blessing’ means the gifts of God in our life. This is #blessed. This is “count your blessings.” The good things we have that come from God.
At the bottom of page 2, Psalm 134 begins “Behold now, bless the Lord.” Here “to bless” means “to praise;” to attest to God’s glory, greatness, generosity, and mercy.
Then there is our Numbers reading, right above the Psalm. Verse 23: “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the Israelites.”
All three of these uses of blessing are related to the sense we have that our life, and everything in it, is a gift from God. But it is this last sense of blessing, the authoritative pronouncement of God’s grace and presence, that we are talking about today.
As it was for “Aaron and his sons” in Numbers, the ability to bless is a gift of God, chiefly to the Church, for the benefit of God’s people. That’s us. Blessings are a spiritual resource that, particularly if you came out of a tradition without them, you might not be taking full advantage of.
The Church has blessings for a lot of things. One day I had a couple, parishioners of the church, call the office and ask me to bless their new motorcycle. I said yes, they said they’d come by in an hour, and we hung up. Then I thought to myself: “Uhh, how do I do that?” There was no class in seminary on the blessing of motorcycles. But, in a collection of old blessings on my bookshelf, I found an entry entitled, “The Blessing of a Carriage or Motorcar.” And an hour later I was in the parking lot, with holy water, changing the word ‘carriage’ in the prayer to ‘motorcycle.’
And yet there is a danger here — the danger of superstition. As one translator of the pre-Vatican II Roman Rite put it, “Some are apt to be disedified rather than edified when they are made aware that the Church has a mind to speak a blessing on a horse, silkworm, bonfire, beer, bridal chamber, medicine, or lard.”
Indeed, the danger of dressing up magic in church robes is real. You’ve surely heard the magicians’ phrase “hocus pocus.” ‘Hocus pocus’ is a corruption of part of the Latin blessing over the bread in Holy Communion: The Latin for “This is my body” is Hoc es corpus meum — Hoc es corpus becomes “hocus pocus” — and the church’s sacramental blessing becomes reduced to made-up words practiced by charlatans and frauds.
And yet, mindful of this danger, there are still many blessings you encounter here today: The holy water has been blessed. All the liturgical vessels and furniture have been blessed. We have the birthday blessings, the blessing of the Eucharist, and the blessing at the end of the service. Once a year we bless the animals. The oils in baptism and healing are blessed. I’ve blessed some of your houses and some of your stores.
The English word blessing does not come from either the Latin or the Greek words it often translates. Those words benedictio (from which we get benediction) and eulogia (from which we get eulogy) — those Latin and Greek words have the same root meaning: “good words” — i.e. words of praise. The English word ‘blessing’ has a Germanic root, and it means “to consecrate, or set apart, with blood.”
And if we are to understand any sort of blessing — from the blessing of the bread and wine in the Eucharist to the blessing of a motorcycle in the parking lot — the first and chief thing we must remember is that we are the people God has set apart by the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. We are consecrated, holy — given a specific purpose in the world: to point to God and his mercy and love, and to bring others into communion with God. We have been blessed, and so given a special role in the world.
To return to our scriptural text, Aaron is not given the blessing to say over the people until after God has blessed them by calling them out of Egypt and making them his chosen people. Similarly, the priests of the Church do not bless the people prior to God’s blessing them through the saving work of Jesus, but only afterwards. Every blessing we say shines only in the light of Christ.
Blessings are an authoritative pronouncement that God’s saving grace be effective in the people’s life. When I say “the blessing of God almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with you now and always,” it’s not an expression of hope, but a statement of fact.
And that blessing comes with a bestowal of God’s grace. Grace is God’s undeserved power and love in our life. It changes things. Look again at the Numbers reading: The priest is to say these things, ”The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”
And then, God explains, “So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” The priests say it; God does it.
That’s a powerful thing. That’s why, when another priest is celebrating and blesses us at the end of the service, you will see me turn towards her and bow my head. God’s grace is a humbling things to receive.
The power of blessing is the Church’s power, and most forms of blessing are reserved to the priest. This is not because priests are better or more holy. This is because the church is ordered; different people have different responsibilities. And the power of the church to share God’s grace in the form of a blessing is usually reserved to the priest.
The church has long recognized certain blessings belong to the laity as well. Everyone can bless themselves with holy water; parents have the power and responsibility to bless their children. Dr. Joe remembers hearing, as has father was dying, someone telling him that you must ask for your father’s blessing. Which he did.
When it comes to the blessing of people — from birthday prayers to the liturgical blessing at the end of the service — the blessing is direct. And if received, it has an effect on the relationship between God and the life God has given you.
When it comes to the blessing of things, however, something slightly different is happening, but the ultimate object of God’s blessing remains God’s people. We do not bless things for the purpose of making special versions of them. This is easy to see in Holy Communion. The prayer of blessing over the bread and wine is not there for the sake of the bread and wine; the purpose is that we may consume that bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ and so receive the grace of the sacrament. You are the reason the bread and wine are blessed.
Or think about a meal. You probably “say grace,” say a blessing over your meal. We do not bless our hamburger for the sake of the meat patty. We bless the food as a way of setting the food aside, even if only for a moment, to recognize it as God’s gift. It points us toward heaven. And through it, it can become of a means of grace, renewing in us the connection between God and God’s gifts that make our life possible.
One of my fraternity brothers is the co-owner, with his wife, of F.M. Light and Sons, which is a western-wear store in Steamboat Springs that her great-great-grandfather founded in 1905. As you drive into Steamboat from any direction, starting 50-75 miles out, there are these small, bright yellow billboards for F.M. Light and Sons along the side of the road. You see one, and then another, and the another, and then another. Probably 30-50 of them along the drive. Constant reminders that when you get to Steamboat Springs, you need to stop at F.M. Light and Sons.
The blessing of items in the physical world, be it the water in the baptismal font or the stoop (that’s the little thing hanging on the wall by the double doors that holds holy water), a cross that you wear every day, a quilt that carried you through treatment, or…yes…a motorcycle you take out on the farm-to-market roads, is a means by which we are constantly pointed to God’s grace and presence in every single part of our lives.
There’s a variety of practice when it comes to blessing the physical world. I am not, as some priests in other communions are, regularly called upon to bless the bridal chamber prior to a wedding (nor am I particularly looking for the opportunity). I usually get asked to bless prayer beads, crosses, prayer shawls. And holy water. I bless almost all the holy water around here. Did you know, the Easter Orthodox bless Holy Water too, but they drink it. In the Roman Catholic church, there’s a special saints day for the blessing of throats, which in its traditional practice involved holding lit candles across a person’s throat.
What all this points at is not that some people are doing it wrong, but that there is a widespread need we have, as human beings to be reminded that God’s presence and purpose is in all of physical life. A tractor gets blessed, but not because it’s going to plow the field to grow the wheat for communion wafers. A tractor gets blessed because growing food and feeding our community is a gift of God and holy work. A pen gets blessed because the words written in ones letter may edify and cure someone’s soul; a medicine is blessed because healing is divine.
If you bring me something and ask me to bless it, odds are good I’ll do it — because odds are whatever that thing is used for has a chance to remind you of the gift of life, and how everything we do with that gift of life ultimately should point back at God.
These blessed items are sacramental — not sacraments, but something similar to sacraments — in that they become channels of God’s grace into our lives. They point us to heaven, and through them God points back at us with his grace and love — for remember, it is always God’s people who are blessed.
The blessing of the church is a spiritual resource. Blessings are ways of connecting you to God’s grace that imbues every inch of this life we lead. Take these blessings on yourself:
The bread and wine and communion,
The blessing at the end of the service;
The birthday and anniversary blessings.
Make a habit of touching the holy water and making the sign of the cross as you come here and leave here; let it be for you a little sacrament of God’s forgiveness, washing you clean, and his welcoming you as daughter of son in baptism.
Parents, bless your children — use the words from Numbers if you don’t have your own.
And don’t be afraid to ask for a blessing upon some thing in your life that you want to set apart to point you at God, and allow God to point at you.
This is not hocus pocus. This is the love of God who loved the physical creation enough to come down and say “This is my body.” Your body too is holy, and blessed. Let it be surrounded by blessings, that you come to sense ever more fully God’s presence everywhere in your life.
Amen.
