Blessed
/by Rev. Eric Folkerth
Our culture does a very poor job of helping us to understand what it means to be “Blessed.”
On the phone we hear the greeting “Have a Blessed Day.”
After a championship we hear athletes suggest they have been especially “Blessed” by God.
Even some preachers and their followers get sucked into the confusing and contradictory messages of a “Prosperity Gospel,” suggesting that God “blesses” some humans with abundant financial resources beyond their wildest imaginings.
I tend to think that the concept of being blessed is, at one and the same time, both more complicated and simpler than many of these cultural messages. I’m very sure that God does not bless some people with copious financial riches while at the same time “cursing” others in some conscious way. I very much believe our own actions sometimes help us feel more blessed, and our own decisions sometimes lead us into hard times. But other times bad things just happen, and they eventually happen to all of us.
One thing I am very confident about: Jesus’ famous sermon —titled “The Beatitudes”— is not intended to be a “humble brag” for those who think they are better than others.
In fact, it’s intended to be a comfort for those who feel excluded, marginalized, and hopeless.
Jesus means to open up the concept of “blessing” and to enlarge it to include those whose eyes are downcast, whose spirits are troubled, and who have been told their whole lives that they are not “worthy.” (Whatever it means to *be* worthy, of course…)
We’ll be unpacking The Beatitudes in a new way in worship this Sunday.
As a preview, simply know this…
However your life feels right now —whether you are triumphant, defeated, or somewhere in between— God’s blessing is already all around you and inside of you. God’s hopeful message of inclusion and grace means that God wants good things for you. They may not ever be the specific things *we* hope for at the specific times we hope for them, but God blesses us just the same.
Join us as we look at blessing this Sunday.