Have you ever been blessed? Think about it.
Have you ever been a blessing to someone else? Think about that!
Who are these people who bring blessing?
What is this language of blessing?
Why did Abram have to up and leave everything he knew, set out into the unknown, in order for God to bless all the families of the earth?
The language of blessing means well being in all aspects of life: material, social and spiritual.
The language of blessing is very earthy, not ethereal or ephemeral. It involves food, clothing, a home, it involves relationships, it is social, and it involves the spiritual as well, life in the spirit, life lived with God, a life filled with worship of the Holy One.
The language of blessing sees the material world, our physical bodies, this corporal existence as evidence and invitation to life in the Spirit, and life in the Spirit embeds us in life in the material world. All is grace, all is gift, we worship and give thanks to the God of blessing, the God who blesses, the God who is blessing.
That is the language of blessing.
It is the language of life itself, the language of love, the language of God.
It is a language we have forgotten.
It is the language we are invited to recover.
Abram had to up and leave to learn this language. He had to leave what he knew, to cross a wilderness that his descendants would cross back and forth and wander through across the ages.
It was an act of great faith, a faith that justifies in Paul’s language, a faith that saves, a faith that breaks the chains that bind a fallen world.
One way of understanding conversion, the Greek word Metanoia, is that it is more than a turning a point, more than turning away from something and toward something else, it also can mean to go beyond what we know.
Conversion, that point in our lives when we hit our limit, we hit the wall, and we go on blindly to we know not where. The proverbial leap of faith. Blind faith.
Abram was called away from the set, the settled, the familiar, the comfortable, the known, to leave his country, his kindred, his father’s house and go to a land that he knew not, a land that God would show, beyond what Abram knew, Abram’s conversion was beginning.
Leave what you know, Abram, and God will show you a new land, you will become a blessing to all the families of the earth, you will learn the language of blessing.
To learn a new language, to really learn it, we have to leave the place where they speak our language, and go to another country and learn their language, we have to be immersed in that new land, the new culture and learn their ways, learn how they speak.
We all know people who have gone off to language school, language immersion, cultural immersion. They are immersed into a new world, everything becomes part of learning a new way to speak.
Immersion! It sounds an awful lot like Baptism. It sounds an awful lot like Abram going to a new land, to be immersed in the language and culture of God, immersed in the language of blessing.
And he walked across the wilderness to get there.
And his people, would always be known as the people who walk through the wilderness, like Joseph being sent to Egypt in slavery,
like Moses lifting up the bronze serpent during the exodus,
like the people of Israel being led away to exile and then back home from exile,
like Jesus fasting for forty days to then face temptation in his hunger,
like the generations of believers who have walked through Lent, that they may speak the language of blessing.
The God of the wilderness, the God of blessing, that God calls to us to go to a new land and learn the language of blessing, and that is where we hear that Jesus is that language of God, Jesus is that language of blessing, Jesus is the blessing of all the families of the earth.
What keeps us from speaking the language of blessing?
Have we made our home in a land where the language is all about taking and using and consuming?
We are called to leave that home, and become displaced, to wander where we don’t know much, until we reach the place where the language that is spoken is of giving, of grace, of hospitality, of thanksgiving, of forgiveness, of food, shelter, clothing, of family, friends and of worship, of worship.
The land where we bless one another rather than curse. Where the earth and all the earth’s families are treated as long awaited guests.
Where Jesus is the language of God’s blessing.
How do we get there from here?
How do we speak Jesus name in such a way that all the families of the earth are blessed rather than cursed?
Have you ever been blessed?
Have you ever become a blessing?