More Blessings (and Woes)

Last week I presented you with the annual theme I want us to live by for the year and it is the Blessing Jar. If you were not here last week then I encourage you to grab one of the jars out in the entry of the church and take it home and the goal is to to at least remember 1 blessing that you had at the end of the day and write it down and place it in the jar. And if you want to share some blessings with the church then I strongly encourage you to come and bring them up to the jar we have here in the sanctuary.

I have to tell you that one of the biggest blessings that I have received so far from this annual theme is the amount of people who have been talking about it already. I have had several people tell me that the jar we gave them won’t be big enough for a whole year. I totally agree and I hope you can find either a bigger jar or a creative way to keep them after the jar fills up and you need to make room for it. We had a youth tell us that they are used to calling their blessings God sightings because that is what they have learned in VBS for years. Which is why when you stop by the narthex you will find the stickers you can place on your blessing jar you will see some that talk about blessings, but some also talk about God sightings for the youth that want to have that on their blessing jars.

There were also people who said they want to put items in their jar that they find instead of a piece of paper which I think is a wonderful and creative idea to build on the theme. There is at least one person who posted to Facebook about it and there is someone who is going to use the idea of blessing jar in another context because they liked the idea so much.

I say all this to firstly share with you ideas others have had to make this more personal and more meaningful to them, and secondly to let you all know that I truly do believe that we need this right now and all of this chatter has been a positive push in the right direction for us as followers of Christ and as a congregation.

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I also mentioned last week that the word bless, in some form, shows up 650 times in the Bible and our text today has four more examples of the word bless coming to us. This is Luke’s story of blessings and woes and is his version of what we know as the beatitudes from the sermon on the mount, although here we plainly see that Luke says they were on a plain not the mountaintop.

The word used for bless is the word makarios and one of the things that we really need to know about it’s use in context of faith and society is that it was used for very specific purposes. There are actually 3 ways in which the word bless was used, or more specifically those who were blessed.

The first use of the word blessed referred to the gods that existed. In school, no matter how recent or long ago it was, we likely studied the ancient Greco-Roman gods. When we talk about or read about them we see how they lived in Mount Olympus and there are beautiful gardens and plenty to eat and drink and life was very pleasant, relaxed and comfortable. The gods had come to a state of being where they had everything they needed in the world and outside the world. For all of that they were blessed and seen as blessed, which is why so many humans attempted to please them so that they might gain a share of that blessing.

The second group are the people who have passed from this life to the next because they have completed this life and are now in the presence of the gods that they saw as blessed. They no longer had to worry about the woes of this life and could be blessed by being with the others who have passed and to be among the gods who have every good thing.

The last group is those few in society who were fortunate enough, or blessed enough, to have the wealth to live a comfortable life in this life. They had wealth and property, they had food and shelter and usually had other people do the work that continued to increase their wealth. They could relax and be comfortable much like the gods themselves.

These are the ways in which someone was blessed and as you can see the only real way to be alive and be blessed was to be the tip top of society. Now I normally don’t read articles about celebrities because it doesn’t interest me, but there was an article this weekend about Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West about their creepy home and curiosity hooked me. What really struck me besides the fact that everything in the house was white and grey, was the fact the article talked about how their home was worth $60 million dollars. Clearly in terms of this one sense of the word you would say that this couple was blessed. I don’t think there are many people in society who could throw down that much money on a house let alone add up all the money they would make in their life to that much money.

Makarios is used to talk about gods, the dead, and the ultra rich and Jesus turns to the disciples after choosing who the 12 will be he says to them and probably everyone else who was listening and tells them that blessed are the poor, and the hungry, blessed are the the sad ones, and those who are hated. How can this be? How can anyone who is poor be blessed? That is the exact opposite of what society says. Society says you need a $60 million home to be blessed. Society says that being poor is a sign of a gods displeasure with you. You can’t be hungry and be blessed because the blessed never have to worry about food again. There may be sad times, but the blessed had plenty to laugh and be joyful about. The blessed don’t weep.

Jesus flips the idea of what it means to be blessed upside down. Jesus redefines makarios to mean those who follow God and who believe in the Son of Man. Jesus tells the disciples and the crowds that being blessed is about having a relationship with the one and only God who wants to have a relationship with you. It doesn’t matter if you are poor, or hungry or sad or are hated for your beliefs. It is that faith that makes you rich. You can have everything or nothing in this life but without the core belief that God is God and that God loves you, there is nothing.

Then Jesus warns people that if you get your joy and your happiness from the things of this life. If you get your contentment and solace from how nicely people speak of you and the things you have in your home and compliment you on the clothes that you wear then you have what you want. But woe to you, he says, because it won’t last.

What does last are the things that you place in the blessing jar. When you receive a blessing from God in any form, when you have a God sighting during your day and you remember that it was God that did that for you, when you remember that it is God that loves and cares for you and that nothing can take any of that away. Then Jesus says to you: makarios are you. You do not have to be the upper echelon of society, you do not have to have the latest things that come out, simply know that you are blessed because you know God and God knows you. And that is enough.

Amen.