Psalm 128
Blessed are all who fear the Lord,
who walk in obedience to him.
You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings and prosperity will be yours.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.
Yes, this will be the blessing
for the man who fears the Lord.
May the Lord bless you from Zion;
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life.
May you live to see your children's children—
peace be on Israel.
As a Pastor, one of my favorite parts of the worship service is the benediction. It comes at the very end, after the last hymn, before the congregation leaves. I get to stand up and say, "receive your benediction..." and offer some words of hope and encouragement. It's a special moment to sum up everything the worship service was all about and to send the people out into the world to do and be something different.
I remember reading, as a teenager, a book about St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis was a monk in the 1300s who founded an order of traveling preachers called the Franciscans. They took a vow of poverty, lived off the kindness of strangers, and emphasized the teachings of Jesus is a time when the Church had all but forgotten them. Most likely you've encountered St. Francis as a small concrete statue in a garden. This is because he was said to be a friend to animals. There is a purely legendary story about St. Francis that he once preached a sermon to a flock of ducks. Then he blessed them and they flew off in the formation of a cross.
As a teenager, I thought that story was ridiculous. Who would waste their time preaching to ducks? Now that I'm a preacher, myself, I get it. We preachers have it bad. We love to preach so much we'll preach to a flock of anything that will hold still. But it's not just that. On Sundays, when I give the benediction, it's my sincerest hope and prayer that the congregation would leave the church in the formation of the cross. It's all I want.
When I give the benediction, I want it to mean something. I want it to do something!
"Benediction", by the way, is just fancy Church talk for a blessing. When the Pastor is blessing the congregation, he or she is asking God to go with them and guide them. And asking that they carry something away with them. That they live lives in the world shaped by the Gospel. We've worked all week on this worship service and on this sermon and we're fervently praying that some of it will somehow make a difference. A blessing is a prayer... A statement of hope... An offering of one last bite of Gospel before you leave.
In ancient times, people though of blessings very differently. The ancients believed that words carried real power. One way to understand how people though about blessings in Bible times is to consider its opposite: a curse.
Ancient people believed that if you cursed someone you could do them real harm. You could make their fields stop growing or make their wives miscarry or worse... Everyone knew someone who knew someone who was cursed and the very next day they dropped dead. Whether or not this actually happened or not is neither here nor there. In a prescientific world, people believed it. The Bible, because it was written by ancient people, takes this as a given. Disaster is narrowly averted in the book of Numbers when a seer named Balaam is prevented from proclaiming a curse over Israel and instead offers a blessing. In Leviticus 19:14, the Israelites are commanded not to curse the deaf. Why? It is especially dangerous for a deaf person to be cursed because they don't know they are and can therefore do nothing to reverse it. In Deuteronomy, God himself offers a curse that will befall the people if they do not keep his commands. The Old Testament takes curses very seriously.
But it takes blessings even more seriously. A blessing was the opposite of a curse. People believed that blessings carried the same power in the other direction. If someone prayed a blessing over you, wombs could be opened, crops could multiply, diseases could be healed. Remember the story where Jacob disguises himself as his brother Esau to trick his father into giving him a blessing. The whole drama of the event hinges on the belief that the words spoken mattered and they couldn't be taken back. Jacob was going to be blessed in his older brother's place. The promise of God moved from one person to another. All because a blessing was spoken.
Now days we don't much believe in words. We view them as cheap and ephemeral. Gone as soon as they leave our lips. We throw the name of God around like punctuation. We say hurtful things to total strangers online that would amount to a curse in another time. We say "bless you" when someone sneezes almost as a reflex... an empty holdover from a time when words meant something. We've lost something essential... something powerful: the ability to change the course of events with holy words.
As our Caravan moves through this strange wilderness, all we have for each other is words. We cannot be present for one another. We can't do things we used to do to show God's love. But we can pick up the phone and say something. We can sit at our keyboards and type something. What if we believed those words were vessels for God's saving action? What if we knew once again the power in Jesus name? What if... we could send each other off in the formation of the cross?
Receive your benediction...
I speak over you and your household the powerful name of Jesus Christ. May you be safe and well in the coming weeks and months. May God protect you and your family from this deadly virus. May your home be filled with love and peace during this time of seclusion. And may we all worship together in person once again, someday soon. Amen.
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