From the UCC Network: 02/16/2011 "The Power in Blessing"

The Power in Blessing 

Excerpt from Numbers 6:22-27

"May the Lord bless you and take good care of you.  May the Lord smile on you and be gracious to you."

Reflection by Martin B. Copenhaver

There is great power in the act of blessing.  So why we don't offer more blessings for one another?

We may assume the people we care about don't need a blessing.  We think our children need advice.  We see that our parents need support.  A friend needs a listening ear.  A spouse needs a kind word.  Someone who has annoyed me needs a piece of my mind.  We may not consider that what someone may need more than anything else — what that person may be hungry for, in some cases dying of hunger for — is a blessing.

Or we may have concluded that someone doesn't deserve a blessing.  There is an old Gaelic blessing:  "May those who love us, love us.  And those who don't turn their hearts; and if those who don't turn their hearts, may they turn their ankles, so we'll know them by their limping."

Doesn't that capture the kind of blessings we are sometimes tempted to offer?  It's more like a curse — which, of course, is the opposite of a blessing.  Sometimes the good words stick on our tongues.

So it's important to remember that words of blessing are borrowed words.  We are asking God to bless because we may not have any good words of our own to offer.  To say, "May God bless you," is to borrow the power of God to offer good words when that seems beyond us.  It is asking God to take the lead.

Prayer

God bless those I would like to bless, and those I am unable to bless on my own.

About the Author Martin B. Copenhaver is Senior Pastor, Wellesley Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Wellesley, Massachusetts. He is the author, with Lillian Daniel, of This Odd and Wondrous Calling: the Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers.

Common Prayer

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you;

may he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm;

may he bring you home rejoicing : at the wonders he has shown you;

may he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.

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Bombs, Cookies And The Cross

Bombs, Cookies And The Cross: "

There’s some interesting talk stirring about how it may be necessary to cut defense expenditures to decrease the deficit. Even though the $533 billion budget is the elephant in the room and the $200,000 spent every minute on the endless war on terror is the gushing, bleeding wound of America, this has been the taboo secret, the idolatrous sacred cow. But folks are beginning to whisper.

Maybe people have grown tired of militarism and war. After all, war hasn’t gotten the best press over the past few years. Maybe the recession has created a desperation that has led us to rethink the status quo, where nearly half of every tax dollar goes to militarism. Maybe we are starting to realize if we don’t stop spending all our money on a defense shield soon we won’t have much left to need to defend. Or maybe it’s all the above, the perfect storm for peace.

As a Christian, I am convinced in the power of non-violence by the greatest nonviolent act in human history: Jesus dying on the cross, even for his enemies. You’d think we Christians would be the hardest folks in the world to convince that violence is necessary, but that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, much of the world seems confused by Christians who are so quick to abandon the cross of Christ and pick up the sword of Rome.

I’m reminded of a dinner conversation I had recently with Ben Cohen, founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, who has become a friend I deeply admire (and not just because he makes good ice cream). We talked about how this moment in history may very well be perfectly poised for Christians and non-Christians to work together for peace, and to eat some ice cream together with the money we may have spent on guns. And it is Ben who put together one of the coolest demos about the federal budget, using cookies as measuring units to show us how the dollars stack up. Check it out:

Martin Luther King said more than 40 years ago that every time a bomb goes off overseas, we can feel the second impact of that bomb as we watch our schools crumble and our health care system go up in flames. As Dr. King said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

So let us hold up our glasses of milk and toast to another world — Christians and non-Christians, Muslims and Jews, all who would rather see ice cream dropped from planes than bombs — and let us put our hands together and build a world where the schools have enough money and the militaries have to sell cookies for their uniforms.

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Shane Claiborne is a prominent author, speaker, activist, and founding member of the Simple Way. He is one of the compilers of Common Prayer, a new resource to unite people in prayer and action. Shane is also helping develop a network called Friends Without Borders which creates opportunities for folks to come together and work together for justice from around the world.

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