Blessings
A Blessed Word
You’ve had a bad day. It was a frustrating day at work, dealing with selfish customers and annoying co-workers, and to top it off, your car got hit by someone who ran a stop sign, and it turns out they were drunk. It’s a hot day and you have no air conditioning. But your neighbor noticed the crumpled fender on your car in your driveway, and invited you over for supper and a dip in their pool. As you sit in the cool water, all you can say is “Bless you for doing this.”
In graduate school, I took a lot of courses on communication and language. One of the things we covered in those classes was the different categories of communication – such as asking a question, complaining, making a bet, reminiscing, joking, preaching. You may remember from English class the categories of sentences: questions, statements, and exclamations. This is taking that idea much further, looking at all the different things we do with words.
Some categories get a lot of attention, such as cursing. There are people who work for TV stations whose job is to make sure we don’t hear certain words, or at least, warn us that we will hear them. Some categories are more special, such as taking an oath. Three weeks ago I officiated at my first wedding, and I pronounced the couple husband and wife, something I had never done before.
Let’s talk about a category that might seem special, but you probably don’t realize how often you do it. I am talking about “blessing.” As a pastor, I get to end worship services with a blessing or a “benediction” – but how often do you do that? You may say a blessing before a meal, or if someone sneezes, you may say a quick “bless you.” Other than that, you may not use that word very often…or perhaps you do. Perhaps you’re in the habit of saying “God bless America,” or you may have something on your wall that says “Bless our humble home.”
What all those meanings have in common is wishing well. It’s a way of saying, “May God bring you happiness, prosperity, success, health, mercy, and peace.” That synonym, “benediction” comes from the Latin roots “bene” meaning well, and “dict” meaning speak: to speak well of someone, or to wish them well. So, really, it’s the simplest verbal way to be loving toward each other. It is the opposite of jealousy or bitterness or ill-will. It is such a beautiful thing to do–and as I mentioned, you probably don’t realize how often you do it in a given day.
For example, when you say “goodbye” to someone. Do you know where that word comes from? It started as a whole phrase – “God be with you.” Over time it got shortened to “god be w/ye” and then “goodbye.” If you speak Spanish or French, you might say “adios” or “adieu” – which means, “to God.” When we part company with someone, we have so many ways of saying farewell: “I hope things go well for you.” It’s almost inconceivable to end a conversation without saying something like “Have a good day” or “I hope I can see you again.” Isn’t that beautiful?
And, of course, we might begin a conversation with someone by saying “Good morning.” Some people might squabble over whether that means “I think it is a good morning” (perhaps because of the weather), or “I hope you have a good morning” – which you could call a blessing. When I go on a long bike ride, I might end up being blessed by dozens of total strangers on the bike path. In most cases, the only thing I will ever say to that person, or them to me, is a blessing.
You might say, “Those are just social habits – they don’t really mean anything.” But I like to think they are social habits that do mean something, There’s a reason we developed those habits of constantly wishing each other well. There’s a reason that if you look for greeting cards in a Target store, you’ll find rows and rows of them – they might as well be called “Blessing cards.” “I hope you return to good health.” “It’s wonderful to take a day to celebrate your birth.” “I am glad you got married, or graduated.”
Blessings play a major role in the Bible. In the first chapter of Genesis, God created living creatures, and it says, “God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number’.” And again when he created Adam and Eve: “God blessed them.” After the flood, God blessed Noah. In Genesis 12, God blessed Abraham by saying, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” The word “bless” appears 81 times in the book of Genesis alone.
Some stories show you how significant it was to receive a blessing in those days. When Isaac was old and blind, he wanted to bless his twin sons, but Jacob’s mother Rebecca had a plan – to disguise Jacob as Esau so he would get the blessing meant for the firstborn. Jacob was nervous about this plan – this was a very serious matter, and if his deception was found out, the blessing would have been turned into a curse. You can also tell how serious it was by the way Esau reacted when he discovered that Jacob took his blessing instead. It says he “burst out with a loud and bitter cry,” and asked, “Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father!” Isaac could not just say, “I was tricked, so that blessing didn’t count.” It did count.
Later, the Children of Israel were returning to the land of Canaan after 400 years, and were passing through the kingdom of Moab. This made the king of Moab very nervous, and he called for the prophet Balaam to come and curse them. But as soon as Balaam saw the tribes of Israel, he blessed them instead of cursing them. This made the king furious, but Balaam said, “God has blessed and I cannot reverse it.”
In the New Testament, when Mary found out that she would give birth to the Messiah, her cousin Elizabeth said, “Blessed are you among women.” At the end of the book of Luke, the last thing Jesus did with his earthly body was to bless the disciples, and it says “While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven.” (Luke 24:51). Almost every one of the Epistles, the letters to the different Christian congregations, begins with a blessing: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” And what is the last verse in the entire Bible? “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”
Echo Chambers
These are all reminders of the same thing: God wishes well for us. But as I said, I am a student of language, and there are two interesting facets of blessing as a form of communication that I’d like to explore. The first is the question of direction.
Let’s go back to that neighbor who invited you over after your bad day, and you say “Bless you for doing this.” You are saying you want God to grant this person all good things – but you are also expressing gratitude. You are saying “You blessed me by doing me that favor.” In other words, it’s a way of saying “I was blessed by you, and now I wish that that blessing goes back to you.” Another story about blessing from the New Testament is when Mary and Joseph brought baby Jesus to the temple, and the old man Simeon blessed the baby Lord. It’s also clear that Simeon felt blessed by this – like he was the recipient of the blessing.
Those greeting cards at Target are a way of wishing well to others, but they are also a form of gratitude – a way of saying, “I am glad that you are in my life.” A birthday card says “I hope you are happy” – but it also says “You have made me happy.” By their nature, blessings go both ways.
Because that is the way the universe works. Whatever you send out, comes back to you. When you send out blessings, blessings come back. Lately I’ve heard the term “echo chamber” a lot – but usually in the context of online discussions and news sources, where people reinforce the same beliefs over and over without questioning them. In that sense, an echo chamber is a frightening and harmful thing.
But you can also think of the universe as an echo chamber of joy and peace – what you send out, comes back to you. So we have that lovely passage from Secrets of Heaven 2057 that describes the perpetual and eternal increase of happiness for each individual angel, and for heaven as a whole. There is no real distinction between giving and receiving – it is all magnification.
This is depicted nicely in a recent TV series called “Ted Lasso.” It’s about an American football coach who becomes a soccer coach in England, and he is met with a lot of suspicion and derision. But the character of Ted is an earthly manifestation of what Swedenborg was talking about: he is a man who radiates blessings to all around him. And slowly those blessings start reflecting back to him. At one point, his star player quits his team and joins a rival team, and in a match between the two, this defector makes a winning pass that results in Ted’s team losing. What does Ted do? He just sends him a congratulatory note about making a winning pass. How can you not love a man like that?
That said, the echo chamber also works to amplify evil. If you live a life of backstabbing and deception and selfishness and cruelty, that will also echo back to you. To put it another way, if you love to curse others, the curses will come back to you as well.
I mentioned curse words as a kind of word that TV censors bleep out – but let’s look at cursing in more depth. Cursing doesn’t have to use a particular set of words: you can curse people in many imaginative ways, using acceptable words. Perhaps the ultimate example of a curse is the word “damn” – which means to condemn to hell. To wish suffering and torture on others. And of course, there’s something fun and exciting about cursing others – in fact, we refer to it as “colorful language.” That drunk driver who hit your car - how can you resist the urge to wish misery and pain on them? That’s human nature, isn’t it? Don’t they deserve to be cursed?
But those curses will come back to haunt you. Imagine being in a society where everyone goes around wishing harm on everyone around them, and keeping tabs of all their grievances and seeking revenge for each one. That is a description of hell.
So that is why the Lord warned us not to curse others, even our enemies. If we have an enemy, that makes us entitled to curse them, doesn’t it? How frustrating to hear Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount, “Bless those who curse you; do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.” He’s spoiling the delicious satisfaction of hating your enemies.
He is also, in essence, saying, “Do not think about the person who wronged you – think about what kind of echo chamber you want to live in.” Do you want to live in a cacophony of harsh sounds that never die? Or a chorus of music that grows ever sweeter?
What If You Don’t Feel It?
So the instructions from Jesus are clear: bless everyone. End of message.
But, of course, that is easier said than done. What about the emotional dimension of it? What if you just don’t feel it? What if it feels like you’ll never become the kind of person who blesses everyone around them? It’s just too far away. What if you get too annoyed with people in general, or a particular person who you simply don’t like? Those aggravating co-workers; that egotistical boss: do you have to even bless them?
Here we get back to the second facet of blessing I wanted to talk about. It’s the question of who is doing it. When the neighbor invited you over for supper, you may have said “God bless you for doing this.” Or you may just said “Bless you for doing this.” What is the difference? In the first instance, you are clearly saying that you hope God will bestow wonderful things on your neighbor. In the second instance, you might mean something closer to “I will do something nice to pay you back.” Or even just, “I will think well of you.” Either way, you can ignore the question of who is going to give those blessings.
Yet it is ultimately the Lord who will do it. So even if you don’t feel the love toward another person, you can still ask the Lord to bless them.
And the Lord will bless them – He blesses everyone in creation. They may not appreciate it; they may feel cursed, but if they could open their eyes, they could see the blessings. If you wish suffering on them, and you could see what God sees, you would no doubt see that they are already suffering – and God is doing what He can to ease that suffering and steer them away from that dark echo chamber. And you may need to remind yourself that they are a child of God as well. When the little children came to Jesus, the disciples tried to turn them away, thinking they were an annoyance. And Jesus reminded them: we are all children. And we can all use the gentle hands of Jesus blessing us.
READINGS:
Number 6:22-27 (“The Priestly Blessing”):
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, ‘This is the way you shall bless the Children of Israel. Say to them:
“The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.”
“So they shall put My name on the children of Israel, and I will bless them.”
Mark 10:13-16
Then they brought little children to [Jesus], that He might touch them; but the disciples rebuked those who brought them. But when Jesus saw it, He was greatly displeased and said to them, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God. Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.” And He took them up in His arms, laid His hands on them, and blessed them.
Emanuel Swedenborg: Secrets of Heaven #2057(2)
Mutual love in heaven consists in those there loving their neighbor more than themselves, and as a result the whole of heaven represents so to speak one human being; for by means of mutual love from the Lord all are associated together in that way. Consequently every manifestation of happiness possessed by all is communicated to each individual, and that possessed by each individual to all. The heavenly form produced by this is such that everyone is so to speak a kind of center point, thus the center point of communications and therefore of manifestation of happiness from all. And this takes place in accordance with all the variant forms of that love, which are countless. And because those in whom that love reigns experience supreme happiness in being able to communicate to others that which flows into them, and to do so from the heart, the communication consequently becomes perpetual and eternal. And as the Lord’s kingdom increases from the communication so does the happiness of each individual.
