March 20, 2005 Des Moines
TEXT: 1 Peter 3:8-12
The Cup of Blessing
Blessings. They seem to be pretty important assets. In the Old Testament, Jacob pretended to be his older brother in order to trick his blind father into giving him the blessing that rightfully belonged to Esau. Later, after getting into a wrestling match with a wildcat of an angel, the angel begged Jacob to let him go. “Not until you give me a blessing,” was his bargain.
What is it that he was wanting – in both of those interactions? What is a blessing that makes it worth risking the ostracism of one’s family and the ire of an angel? What is this quality or action or attribute that the Apostle Paul uses to refer to the cup upon the communion table – this “cup of blessing that we bless”? What is this thing that we pronounce upon our mealtimes – or seek, or simply name, depending upon one’s point of view? What is a blessing, this asset that Joyce Rupp encourages us to find floating in our own Cup of Life?
Biblically, blessings were understood to be “the active outgoing of the divine goodwill or grace which results in prosperity and happiness amongst people.”[1] In the Old Testament, blessings were usually counted materially – in the form of long life, increased family, crops and herds, peace, and even wealth.
And we have some experience with that way of understanding it. Television preachers rely it. It is kind of a spiritual, theological “quid pro quo.” If we send in a financial contribution to this, God’s servant, then God will “bless” us in a way that will see all of our bills paid, all of our children compliant, healthy and performing above grade level, and all of our pets obedient and house trained. We become, in other words, the envy of our friends and newspaper feature writers. If only we will write that check, we will get it back in spades.
I’m obviously being a little facetious, but there is this tension. Most of us have been around those who have a great deal, who give God all the credit – “God has really blessed me.” And who am I to argue? Maybe God has blessed them in all those monetary ways. But those conversations inevitably force my mind to people and neighborhoods like those that occupied the week of our mission team recently returned from El Salvador.
If the blessing of God is prosperity, what does mean for those who are gratefully living in the 8’ X 8’ cinder block houses our workers left behind, without running water, closets, or scarcely anything to store in them if they existed? What does it mean for the hundreds in our own community and the thousands and millions around the world whose life expectancy is counted in years rather than decades, and whose stomachs are as often as not empty? That God has no concern for them? That God’s face wears a frown in their direction? That God, for them, has no blessing?
That’s a hard, distasteful conclusion for me to draw. But then I read on in scripture and hear different connotations. Sometimes in the Old Testament the blessing of God was seen to be not so much the increase in one’s bank account but as the increase of wisdom. And then to stretch the matter even further, in the New Testament, Jesus commended the blessing manifest among the likes of the mourning, the spiritually needy, the persecuted, the meek and the maligned; among the hungry and the poor – the very kind of folk the prosperity preachers would implicitly leave out of their shower of Godly blessing.
So what are we to think? What does it mean to be blessed – and to bless?
I like to imagine blessings as having something to do with the “smile” of God – as in the words of that familiar benediction, when we pray that God, in blessing you and keeping you, might “lift his countenance upon you.” In other words, whether we are materially rich or poor, whether we are as dry as a bone or spilling over, might we know some sense of God’s goodwill toward us, and feel some kind of share in God’s own vitality and ageless purpose.
Joyce Rupp suggests that blessing is not so much the act of making something sacred as it is the recognition – the acknowledgement – of the holiness that is already there. “To bless anything of creation,” she writes, “is to acknowledge the touch of the Creator upon that person or object. Calling forth a blessing is actually a naming of the goodness already there.”[2]
What we come to learn is that “anyone or anything that brings good or God-ness into our lives is a blessing. To bless is to bring the touch of God, the touch of love and goodness, to another by our presence, as well as by our actions.”[3]
Perhaps that helps us understand something of God’s encouragement to Abraham in the book of Genesis – that he, Abraham, would be blessed, in order to bless. In coming to know first hand the touch of God, he, in his own way, would come to touch other people with the goodness of God.
And now that I see it that way, isn’t that what Peter is getting at in the passage we read from his letter?
have unity of spirit, he wrote; sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing.
By blessing others, we inherit a blessing, as well. By touching others with the grace and love of God, we experience that grace ourselves.
It isn’t, in other words, a commodity – something that we can hold or hide or cash in or accumulate. It isn’t something we can “use up”; only neglect, ignore or obscure. It isn’t so much a thing, as it is an experience. It is, as Rupp describes it, the “God-ness” of one seeking out, recognizing and touching – lifting up, even celebrating – the “God-ness” of another.
Which names something of a miracle in the whole alchemy of blessing: by noticing the blessedness in that which surrounds us, we experience ourselves to be truly blessed, indeed. By blessing others – naming the God-ness in their own lives – we not only fill the blessing cup of others, but find our own cup replenished, rather than diminished.
It wouldn’t be a bad way to think about living our lives: as cups of blessing who walk around spilling out blessing – calling attention to the God-ness around us, in the places where we work, in the families among whom we live, in the neighborhoods we call home – in the paradoxical realization that our cups of blessing only run dry when we refuse to pour their contents out. In the pouring is their very filling!
Blessing: so secure in the light of God’s smile, ourselves, that we are able to recognize, appreciate, and call attention to the goodness of God manifest in others; disavowing the “zero-sum” construction of reality that believes the more you have, the less have I, but instead takes peace in the faith that there is plenty of God and God’s blessing to go around.
It wouldn’t be a bad way to live: filling our cups with the very smile of God; holding high the cup of blessing and letting it bathe and nourish and honor and encourage all who might slosh into its spill.
Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you, yourself, might inherit a blessing.