Already Blessed

Because You Don't Have To Work For It

Dear Friends,

I am not feeling especially blessed recently. My job is great, I’ve got exciting projects on the horizon, my wife has a veterinary school interview coming up, and generally speaking life is perfectly fine. But I’m not sleeping. I’m messaging doctors late at night while in pain, looking for answers. My broken body, a body that I can sometimes remember helps to unify me with Jesus in material ways, is giving me grief. One of my cats is sick. I’d like to make those things stop.

I’m not feeling especially blessed, and I’m sure you’ve had days that feel like that too. Maybe you’re feeling this way right now.

Or maybe you are feeling blessed, at least in the colloquial “#blessed” sense. Maybe you feel like things are going your way, that everything is coming up roses, so to speak. Maybe you’re feeling the opposite of what, as we hear in the Gospel reading this Sunday, Jesus calls “poor in spirit.” Well, here’s the good news either way:

You’re already blessed.

You and me and the people you love. The people you have a hard time loving. Your neighbor and the person next to you on the bus and the one in front of you in line at the grocery store. We are already blessed because we all, at one time or another, find ourselves described in the Beatitudes.

The thing about the Beatitudes as we so often read them is that, individually and within traditions, we have the habit of reading the Beatitudes as requirements or directions, but when you consider them through that lens, it’s important to ask, what are you reading them as requirements for? For being worthy? For going to heaven? For being blessed at all? That just doesn’t sound like Jesus, if you ask me, which is why I love this older piece by Nadia Bolz-Weber that expands and reconsiders the beatitudes.

In this sermon, Bolz-Weber pulls a premise straight out of my grad program and applies it to the Beatitudes, suggesting that when Jesus speaks these words, he isn’t giving directions, but rather engaging in performative speech; to say “Blessed are you who…” is to actively bless people.

Another reason I really appreciate Bolz-Weber’s Beatitude text is that it gets right at the heart of so many of our vulnerabilities and fears and pains, both for ourselves and for those we love. Among the blessings, the petitions, as it were, we find:

• “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables… Blessed are the losers and the babies and the parts of ourselves that are so small. The parts of ourselves that don’t want to make eye contact with a world that only loves the winners.”

• “Blessed are the teens who have to figure out ways to hide the new cuts on their arms. Blessed are the meek. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.”

• “Blessed are the ones without lobbyists. Blessed are foster kids and trophy kids and special ed kids and every other kid who just wants to feel safe and loved and never does.”

• “Blessed are the burnt-out social workers and the over worked teachers and the pro-bono case takers. Blessed are the kids who step between the bullies and the weak.”

We are living right now in the space of “not okay,” as well as generic platitudes on social media saying it’s okay not to be okay, but sometimes I wonder how many people are finally just really seeing the not okay that’s always been there. Trapped at home amidst the pandemic, it’s harder for the teen trying to hide cuts to fly under the radar than if they could stay out of the house (I should know - I was that teen). Burn out has become part of everyone’s lexicon, pushing a long-time plight for some into mainstream view. The pandemic has amplified the not okay, but it’s always been there.

I encourage you to look for the parts in this version of the Beatitudes that resonate with you, or that might resonate with the young people in your life. What words or positions stick out to you? What makes you feel blessed? What is the opposite of blessed? How can we be blessings to each other?

Amid the many who Bolz-Weber names as blessed in her take on the Beatitudes, there is a claim that I think all of us feel and know deeply, and so I will leave you with this for now:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are they who know there has to be more than this. Because they are right.

You are Blessed. Already. Not because of anything you can do or be, but because Jesus says so. Where are you in the Beatitudes? And how can you help others know that they are blessed, already and always?

Peace,
A. Bird