The Blessings We Provide

 I want to us to start by thinking about who has blessed us in our lives.

If you haven’t read the November Crown yet, I’m going to give you a heads up that Allison Carr wrote a great article for the board this month about what a blessing is and how if we claim that we are blessed when we have good health, our possessions, and everything that we need. That sends a message, intentionally or not, to those who are struggling that, for some reason, they are not blessed. That’s not the message that we wanna send.

I’m turning it to say that the blessings we receive are the encouragement of others. The encouragement and the affirmations to continue the journey. We’ve all had people in our lives who helped us. It might have been a parent, a friend, or an acquaintance. Someone who helped you to know that it was worth it to continue the journey.

This picture is of my grandmother with my oldest daughter. She’s not in the room today. She would’ve gotten a surprise, but I would’ve had to tell her, just like I told Allison, it’s the people who helped us know who we are and believe in ourselves. Those are the people who blessed us, and that is who we are to be with others. So who are these people in your life?

Today is All Saints Day, November 2nd, or in Mexico, it’s Dia de los Muertos. It’s the remembering of those who have gone before us, and they may even still be alive. Those who have encouraged us or those who helped you to affirm who you are.

I called Milt Gockley this week and asked if he had some wisdom from someone who encouraged him, and he shared with me that his grandmother had told him that time gets shorter, the years go faster as you get older. And he thought, well, that’s silly because there’s always gonna be 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. Now he knows the wisdom of his grandmother.

But, this is one of those days when we stop and we will remember those who passed in the past year. But it’s that time when we think about who else was important in our lives.

In our scripture today, 1 Peter 3:8-12, it talks about being a blessing. You are blessed to be a blessing. That is who we are to be.

The first letter to Peter was written at a time when there were a lot of Gentiles converting to Christianity, and there was this sense within the Roman culture that there was fear about this foreign religion that we know as Christianity. They were afraid that Christianity was going to challenge their patriarchy and make their women misbehave. It was said that Christianity would bring immorality, insubordination within the household, and sedition against the state. Now, I want you to sit with that a minute. And I want you to think about that.

This letter to Peter was written to help quell the fears of those who were looking at this religion and wondering; it was to remind the new Christians and those who had been converted for a while, that they were to be compassionate. We are to imitate Christ. “Be agreeable, be sympathetic, be loving, be compassionate, be humble.”

But what was Christ really like? When I look at the scriptures, I see someone who was not about picking up the norms of the society and continuing them, but someone who was looking for those who were struggling, who were hurting, and it was to those people that Jesus went, and he offered healing and he offered them community. He helped them to come back to stop being pushed out and ostracized as they had been.

I paired this scripture, 1 Peter, with the first chapter from John’s Gospel, John 1:10-18. I read this scripture twice a year. You may not have picked up on that. I read it on Christmas Eve and I read it on Good Friday because I think we need to remember the circle and it’s John’s creation account that Jesus was with God from the very beginning and came, we call it the incarnation, became one of us so that we could know more about God and helped us to be called children of God and to know that we are blessed.

Just because we are loved by God, it doesn’t give us any other guarantees. Just that you are loved as you are, for who you are, and we are to share that Jesus was trying to have us come alongside him so that we would do the same. God is the word that they use, which means Jesus is the unique Son of God, and through Jesus Christ, we are children of God.

The beauty of that is that as children of God, God helps us in our journeys because life isn’t easy. We don’t need to sugarcoat this. We all have struggles, and they’re different struggles, but we all have struggles, and Jesus wants us to know that first of all, he’s with us to the ends of the earth. We’re never alone. We don’t need to be afraid, and he invites us to create a beloved community so that we have others to help us understand. Sometimes those thoughts are in our heads, and we don’t know if that’s God or us. Community can help affirm the thoughts that are God’s. Because we just naturally wanna take care of ourselves, we wanna protect ourselves and get the most for us because we’re afraid that we won’t have enough.

As we affirm others and encourage others as we bring them into the beloved community, we also have to name when we see things that aren’t. Last week, I shared a quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

We are living in times when there are some who believe they know the will of God. In fact, they’re so sure of it that they are trying to take over all hearts of our society, and they are going to. It can be inviting because they can talk about bringing us back to God and bringing prayer back into school. All of this can sound very romantic until you realize that they have a very definite definition of what this will look like, and it really is about power and control. They’re going to set up the laws so that we have to function in the way they want us to function.

This isn’t about encouraging others or affirming who people are. This is about saying, you have to do it my way. That’s not who I saw Jesus as. Jesus didn’t challenge the Roman Empire. That was Judas’ problem. Jesus didn’t go far enough. Judas wanted Jesus to challenge the empire, and he didn’t. Instead, he continued to help those that hardly anyone knew, to just quietly go about blessing people.

We are in a place where there is a real crisis. Some people rely heavily on their SNAP benefits, who are about to find out that those cards are empty, and they don’t know how they’re gonna feed their families. We have people who haven’t been paid for the past month in their jobs. We have to say this is not it. This is not how we are as people of God. This is not how you bless people by making them struggle harder, and we have to act.

Here are your senators and your representatives’ telephone numbers. Take them down, call them, tell them it’s time to act. People need food, people need funds.

The group that wants to control things is in town. They are the ones behind the national prayer breakfast this week. POWER Interfaith is having a prayer vigil at St. John’s Episcopal in town on Friday. In addition to doing a prayer vigil, we’re doing a 12-hour vigil asking for donations of food for their food pantry because they feed a lot of people.

The other thing that we’re doing, as Church of the Apostles, is that we are giving $5,000 to the FoodHub this week. We’ve had money in the market basket conduit because of the grocery cards that you buy. We have this money, we’re gonna send it to the food hub. That’s what it’s meant for. It’s meant for times like this. We are gonna make a difference.

As always, we are also collecting for the Hempfield Food Pantry. All food pantries need more resources, so we’re gonna try and spread things around. It’s not right what’s happening.

We are a community, and we can make a difference. That is what we are called to do. We are called to bless others, and we are about that work.

May it be so. Amen.

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