God's Blessing

Easter 6 – May 25, 2025

Acts 16:8-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 14:23-29

Our psalm for today starts out with a paraphrase of the blessing that God gave to Moses to be used by Aaron and his sons when they bless God’s people. You know that blessing because it’s the same blessing that we use to end the Liturgy. So what does it mean to be blessed by God? I ask that question often. Especially when I ask someone how they are and their answer is, “Blessed.” Do they say this because their life is going well? That was the Old Testament understanding – that you were blessed by God if you did as God desired but were not if you went against God’s commandments. The sign that you were blessed was prosperity, health, and popularity. Job had all those things and then everything went terribly wrong and he lost everything from his family to his status. Since he lost everything Job’s friends believed that he had gone against God’s commands and they tried to get Job to admit his wrongdoing and change his ways. But Job kept insisting that he had not done anything wrong. While he was correct in that he had not done anything wrong, God admonishes Job for his preconception of God’s will. Job, then, is one of the first Bible accounts that tries to answer the unanswerable question of why bad things happen to God’s people. Especially when we all have been blessed by God.

If we look at our own lives we realize that we have not always had health, prosperity, or popularity. If we claim to have been blessed by God in those times, God’s blessing must mean something other than having health, prosperity, and popularity. It must be something that is part of us at all times and in all situations. We already know that but we do not always live that way. To be blessed by God means to always be in the presence of God no matter what. To be blessed by God means to live in peace with ourselves and each other. To be blessed by God means to share our lives with Jesus. Yes, what it means to be blessed by God is to be freed from sin and death so that we can become God’s blessing to the world by our words and deeds. 

We bless the world by praying for others, by sharing the gifts that God has given us, by speaking up for those who have no voices, in a word by loving others as God first loved us. We are especially called to work to prevent cruelty and violence. We are called to this task especially in this time in which our government is acting in cruel and unchristian ways. In fact, it's doing so against the people God has called us to take care of – the orphan, widow, and alien (read immigrant) in our land. We do so because God reminds us that we once were aliens in a foreign land. 

I know, the task is daunting and individually seems insurmountable but together, as the Body of Christ – we are called and blessed so that we can point out the sin of our nation and call our leaders to the task for which Jesus has called us: To love all people as God first loved us. Blessed by God and freed to love.