…Whenever I hear the nature of God portrayed like an equation, something that can be manipulated towards a result—“solve for X”—I get my hackles up. I feel strongly that the nature of God is so much higher than our own natures, so beyond our comprehension, that it must be much more like a law of being, like a law of physics, than algebra. Isaiah’s language really captures it for me when he writes:
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word, that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
Frederick Buechner, in his book Beyond Words, writes that “In the biblical sense, if you give me your blessing, you irreversibly convey into my life not just something of the beneficent power and vitality of who you are, but something also of the life-giving power of God, in whose name the blessing is given. Even after old, half-blind Isaac discovered that he had been hoodwinked into blessing the wrong twin, he could no more take the blessing back and give it to Esau than he could take the words of it out of the air and put them back into his mouth again.”
Blessings are like that. They’re like a static charge unleashed. They have aim and drive, objective, effect, an incontrovertible nature. That’s true when one person blesses another in God’s name. How much more so when God blesses us directly? Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “for God’s gift and His call are irrevocable.” That almost sounds like it should start with “Beware.” Almost sounds like it should start with “Fear not.”
So when I hear passages like these blessings and woes preached as though they describe a kind of cause and effect relationship in which human beings earn God’s compassion or retribution by doing or not doing certain things, I get a little squirrely. It’s that word “for,” isn’t it? “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” “Woe to you are full now, for you will be hungry.” That word “for” basically means “because,” and in the course of all these repetitions I think it starts to stick in our ears, stick in our minds until, preoccupied as we are by our little human senses of justice, we build up sort of preponderant impression of causality.
We get to thinking that these blessings and the woes are are imposed—because of something. We can get to feeling like we ought to be suspicious of joy, fearful of plenty or contentment, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. We can get to thinking that “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled,” is some kind of magic spell—if we could just figure out the exact way that we’re supposed to claim that statement, the goods will manifest. Being #blessed--getting money, becoming filled, attaining joy, is something we ought to be able to do for ourselves, right now.
But that is not how blessings work. In fact, what if causality has nothing to do with Jesus’ point here? What if Jesus is simply describing how things are, the human condition for all people, at all times, in all places, and trying to show us how God permeates that condition?
What if Jesus is not saying “everything happens for a reason,” but simply saying, “everything happens”? What if we’re more in the province of Ecclesiastes here? For everything, there is a season. When you are in seasons of joy, plenty, and peace, it is a fact of life that seasons of pain, need, or confusion are probably yet to come for you. So there is a kind of shadow of woe that abides with those who are enjoying times of comfort and ease. But that shadow should make us prayerful, generous, compassionate…not afraid.
Because equally in those times, there is a static charge in the air—like the one you feel on a humid summer day when the air grows very still before a storm—that charge that indicates the presence of power: God’s blessing, God’s guaranteed presence and faithfulness in your life through whatever may lie ahead.
It is there for those in the midst of storms, too:
Blessed are you who are poor, who need, who hunger, who weep because for everything there is a season and for hard moments there are also sweet moments, but more than that blessed are you because God’s gift, and God’s call are irrevocably with you.
Everything happens. Sometimes I think, in all honesty, everything does not happen for a reason, but everything happens, and it always has. And God is working all things together for our good. Those two things go together, gift and call. God’s gift of blessing, of faithful presence in each of our lives is the force that empowers us to answer the call when it comes to us, to participate just as we are in that working together of all things for good. Even at our most broken, for someone, at just the right moment, God has appointed us to be a gift…
adapted from The Sermon On The Plain by Beth Downey Sawatzky
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MAY GOD’S BLESS US TO GROW AND THRIVE – IN 2025!
May God Bless you and yours as we journey in this Epiphany Season…
As we see, appreciate and embrace the Great Gift of God with us
May God’s Spirit empower us to
“expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God”… and
May God Continue to Bless Union Church!
-Pastor Mark
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