Choose to Bless the World
I wonder how blessed you are feeling this morning? You might want to hold back your judgement on that until you’ve found out just how long this morning’s sermon is – bearing in mind George Burns’ remark that “The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible”.
This idea of feeling blessed has been much on my mind these last few weeks – after I’d visited an older woman living in the same care home as my mum. She said she was happy for me to tell you this story and I’ll call her Aileen. Aileen is bed-ridden, misses her cat and dog, doesn’t have many visitors as her family live far away. But when I asked her how she was doing a few weeks back she replied ‘I feel blessed Sarah, quite blessed.’ You’ve perhaps had people say that to you from time to time; you’ve perhaps said it yourself. And probably most of us who do use such a statement don’t mean that we have just won the lottery. Like Aileen, who went on to explain that the sun was shining and a blue tit had just visited the bird feeder outside her bedroom window, we are all capable of finding blessings in perhaps not the best of circumstances, we are all capable of noticing life’s small pleasures. But today’s service is focusing on something else – our ability to bless the world. Now I don’t suppose many of us wake up in the morning and think the opposite – that today I shall curse the world. But actively choosing to bless the world does require a bit of work or at least a bit of thought. And most of us have some hurdles in the way, barriers that may stop us from considering ourselves as a blessing to others.
We may have a block caused by the very word ‘blessing’ itself. In some religious communities a blessing can still only be given by certain people but within our Unitarian faith – just as anyone is welcome to lead worship or conduct a wedding ceremony, for example here at Essex Church – so each of us can bless others. And what is a blessing, what does it mean to bless? To me the very word itself has an ancient, almost mystical sense to it. I like the definition we heard from David Spangler earlier on: “It’s an invocation of the presence and the power of the sacred upon a person’s life or upon the function of an object”. And Spangler goes on to suggest that a blessing can describe our very orientation to life itself – and as such can go on all the time as “an act of discovering the part of us that moves in harmony on the dance floor of creation”.
If we step over the block that may be there for us in using this word blessing then I’d suggest that the next block to overcome may be our sense of self-worth, the ‘who am I to bless the world?’ kind of feeling that can come when life has knocked us back a bit, when we don’t feel great or worthy or even very capable, those times when just getting up and out and putting one foot in front of another can feel a struggle. During our low times it may seem an impossibility for us to be a blessing to others.
My colleague Ant Howe writes movingly of this: “Now I’m quite open about the fact that in the past I’ve been depressed. I’m not talking feeling a little bit down here, I’m talking about feeling all the time that I was inadequate. That I was damaged goods. That everything I touched I make worse… and that happens to most of us at some point I think… And the turning point for me? Well, I thank God that against those feelings of depression and worthlessness I learned the truth of our Unitarian faith: that every person has dignity and worth. Not born into sin as some churches might tell you, but born blessed and born to be a blessing. So many religions and churches will tell you that you’re a sinner…you need to be saved…you’re worthless…. Thankfully you’ll never hear that in a Unitarian church because we know the truth that God loves us so much that we already born saved, that our lives are a gift….” Words from Ant Howe, minister of our Kingswood congregation south of Birmingham, who will be joining us in September to run a course as part of our Spiritual Life Skills programme.
Jewish therapist Rachel Naomi Remen writes that a prayer is about our relationship with God whilst “A blessing is about our relationship to the spark of God in one another. God may not need our attention as badly as the person next to us on the bus or behind us on line in the supermarket. Everyone in the world matters, and so do their blessings. When we bless others, we offer them refuge from an indifferent world.” Refuge from an indifferent world is a powerful image for me of what we may sometimes need most when life is tough.
When we are at our lowest we sensibly may turn inwards for a while, we may seek a place of healing within. I think one of the things that can start to bring us back to life and love again is then to turn our attention back outwards towards the world once more and to remind ourselves that we matter, that others matter and that it matters what we choose to do or not do. From here we can tell ourselves that we can make a difference, that rather than being victims of life’s troubles, we are active participants and through small gestures of awareness of our attitudes we can make things better, gentler, sweeter, even more polite! Yes, I’m still pondering that story we heard earlier on about the World’s Politest Man – the thought that the rude man on the bench might actually have been the politest man but that he was only going to be polite once he started his lecture on the subject – that is a funny thought. But it’s about as funny as people who go to church, and Sunday morning being the only time they express their faith in action, in love. The rest of the time they’re mean and horrible. G.K. Chesterton wrote that “Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.”
Faith has to be lived, has to be expressed in practical actions and in a way of being in the world, a way that is a blessing rather than a curse. That I think is what being a blessing is: living as a beneficial presence in the world – and reflecting divine love and truth here on earth. On the back of today’s yellow hymn sheet there is a box in which you can write down some of the ways you choose to bless the world – talking with a few people earlier on we came up with some lovely, simple examples – making a cup of tea for people, picking up litter, smiling at someone, making a phone call or sending a card – simple human gestures of kindness and love. Kindness and love expressing the simple reality that we are all human and that we all have particular gifts and talents to bring to the world. Our task is to recognise the gifts and consciously choose to use them.
I want to finish by repeating that short reading we heard earlier, written by theologian Rebecca Parker …
Your gifts
whatever you discover them to be
can be used to bless or curse the world.
The mind’s power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger,
praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice
or offer love.
Any of these can draw down the prison door
hoard bread,
abandon the poor,
obscure what is holy,
comply with injustice
or withhold love.
You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.
We know it’s not always easy, yet still we can choose consciously, deliberately, to bless the world wherever possible. May it be so.
Rev. Sarah Tinker
Sermon – 8th June 2014
With thanks to the Rev Ant Howe, whose ideas were the basis for this sermon.