“Blessings to Go: The Original Blessing”
Genesis 1:26-31, from The Message
Genesis 12:1-3
Matthew 5:1-16, from The Message
Truth is, I don’t remember exactly why I started offering Blessings to Go.
I do remember making a somewhat spontaneous decision to offer blessings and Communion to go at the old county fairgrounds location of the Northampton Pride festival, because I knew from previous years that people were shocked to see a church and a pastor at Pride, and some folks had spoken to me about having been rejected by the church.
It occurred to me that offering blessings at Pride might be the closest many queer folks would ever come to church, and it might be the first time in forever some folks had been offered Communion. The year was 2013, and the line of people waiting to be seen and blessed and served Communion was long.
By then, I had been ministering for five years to the members and friends of this church and the unhoused and down-on-their-luck folks who took refuge in our building. It was holy and hard work, and I loved it. But the experience of sharing God’s unconditional love with people I didn’t know, people who felt God and the church had rejected them because of who they were and who they loved, stirred something new and deep within me.
To use a very old expression I first heard in the movie “Chariots of Fire,” I was used to “feeling God’s pleasure” whenever I followed my calling in preaching and teaching, administering the sacraments, visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and working for God’s justice and joy. Those were things I was supposed to do; they were the things you expected me to do and the things I felt called to do.
But offering Blessings to Go was different. No one expected me to do it—in fact, some church members were embarrassed by it. In the same way, no one had told me to do it or taught me how do it; it just came to me, which led me to believe it might have come from the Spirit.
And when I did it?
Well, I felt my heart soften and open. I saw people differently, maybe with God’s eyes more than my own. I heard myself saying words I hadn’t planned to say, and recognized an in-the-moment-and-ongoing formation of a radically open theology of grace and love I hadn’t really thought through. The theology I heard myself speaking sounded almost scandalous and, precisely because of that, I knew it hadn’t come primarily from me.
And so I had to wonder if this wide-open blessing had come from God.
And if it had—well—I had to be faithful to it. And if it was of Spirit, I could only hope that it would bless and transform me as much as it seemed to bless the people who asked me for a blessing.
And so I began to offer blessings on the sidewalk in front of the Black Sheep deli once a week. With the help of then-church sexton Dennis Szuhay and then-church administrator Ruth Morse, I stood beside a large sandwich board-type sign that said “Blessings to Go” on one side and “Ask me for a blessing” on the other.
And people did ask.
Some drivers made U turns, pulled up in front of me, and got out of their cars to ask me for a blessing. I blessed the curious, the skeptical, and people of many faiths, as well as self-avowed atheists. I blessed children and mothers and one woman hoping to become a mother who, a few weeks later, told me she had conceived and that she believed my blessing had something to do with it. I blessed homesick college students, and college students walking around town with a liter of vodka in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other. I blessed unhoused folks so drunk they could barely stand. I blessed folks who came to me in tears and folks whose eyes filled with tears the moment I asked if I could touch them and placed my hand gently on their head.
I turned down offers of money, but accepted payment in the form of small candy canes from children.
By 2014, when our church applied for a pastoral renewal grant from the Lilly Foundation, every aspect of blessing—from God’s blessing of us to our call to bless—shaped what we did. We got that grant, and during my 2015 sabbatical I offered Blessings to Go in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., at the gates of the Old City, the gateway to the Pentagon, and many places in between. In those places of conflict and violence, I found the practice of offering blessings to be both heartbreaking and hopeful, and it continued to deepen my experience of God’s love and my awareness of the world’s need of it.
Since then I have continued to offer Blessings to Go, not quite as often but with an ongoing sense of calling and an undiminished joy. It feels like God’s good work, a reclaiming of the original blessing that is at the center of who we are as children of God.
Among the people I blessed at Hampshire Pride in May was a little girl named Ducky, maybe five years old. A few days later, her mother sent me an email.
At last weekend’s Pride celebration in Northampton, it said, you offered a blessing for me and my daughter, Ducky, that lightened my heart and held us both in love. … The following day our family went on a hike and, while standing on a rock outcropping looking out across a valley, Ducky made up a poem on the spot that echoes a lot of what you said in your blessing. That she is beautifully made, loved by God, and a child of the earth. In a moment where I worry very much about what the world is telling Ducky about who she is, I’m grateful beyond measure that you gave her words of affirmation and love.
And now, as I prepare to leave you and this amazing church, I realize that my practice of offering blessings has shaped who we are as a church. And I hope and pray that this church will continue to be a source of blessing, healing, hope, and joy to the world long after I am gone.
Because, as our scripture lessons make clear, we—all of us—are blessed—not only for our own sake, but also for the sake of the world. The blessings we receive from God are intended not only to benefit us, but—through us and because of what we choose to do with and make of those blessings—to benefit all people and all creation.
In no small part because of religion and religion-based ethics systems, many of us have all but forgotten our original blessing, the blessing God bestowed on all people and all creation for all time.
Our original blessing is the one that tells us we are good—very good—in God’s sight, and that we were created by the God who islove. We were imagined and loved into being—by love, in love, and for love. We were created in God’s image—the image of love—and that original blessing shapes both who we are and what we can become.
I believe this intellectually and, over time and little by little, I am learning to trust this blessing with all my heart. I trust, too, that somewhere deep in all our hearts, perhaps buried deep under a lifetime of religious, social, economic, and psychological messages to the contrary, we know this. It’s in our spiritual DNA.
And maybe that is why, without consciously thinking about it or planning it, the blessing that I have offered to hundreds of people over the years evolved over time to sound sound something like this:
Blessed are you, [person’s name] beloved child of God. May you always know that this is the essence of who you are. God created you as you are, and God loves you just the way you are. There is nothing you have to do to earn God’s love, and nothing you could ever do to lose it. It is poured out on you as a free gift, brand new every day. May you know this so deeply that it fills your heart with love and joy that flows out to all the world.
That’s it! That’s the blessing!
That’s also the heart of the gospel, the seeds of the kin-dom, our original blessing, and our divine purpose—all of it rolled into one simple blessing offered to strangers on sidewalks and street corners, to trans folks at Pride, to unknown neighbors at the Block Party, to church members in worship, to angry men in Jerusalem, to hurting veterans in Washington, and to all kinds of folks in between.
That’s not just a blessing to go but also a lifeline, a reason to live and love, and the thread of grace that connects us all.
And this is the lifeline, the holy purpose, and the saving grace that we in the church are uniquely positioned to provide. More than that, we are called and commissioned to provide it and to live it out in ways that heal, connect, restore, lift up, and enliven.
There are, of course, countless other blessings, some of them meant for all of us, others particular to certain people in specific situations. Some of them, like those in the Beatitudes, don’t feel like blessings to us but turn out to be instruments of identity, transformation, justice, and life fully lived. We don’t have time to discuss them all, but we’ll explore a few of them in the coming weeks.
Meantime, may we live into the great gift of our original blessing. May we know that we are loved without measure and beyond our imagining, and may we share that blessing with everyone we meet.
