Be A Blessing Views
For most of us, today will be a day of remembering our blessings. Giant stuffed turkeys will be placed into ovens to emerge a few hours later in all their golden glory. Pots will bubble over on stoves watched eagerly by little ones, who are just hoping we’ll look away long enough from the growing array on the table for them to sneak an early bite. Wafting through every room, that wonderful incense of Thanksgiving—a combination of turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin and cherry pies—will draw everyone inexorably toward the table. And when it’s all finally ready, grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, old friends and in-laws and neighbors and college students returned home and even a few prodigals will pull their chairs around the table together and I hope in more homes than not, a blessing will be said; an acknowledgment of God’s goodness to us during the past year and those that have passed.
I#'d like to begin this morning by building on this point because I think that it will be very helpful in understanding the words we heard Jesus speak in our Gospel reading this morning. I want to look at two examples where God pronounces His beatitude, His blessing upon His people in the Old Testament.
What we 're seeing here is the divine order which God establishes right here in the beginning. First He gives His blessing and then He says, 'go to work. ' To turn that around and think that first we need to go to work so that God will bless us is to get it all wrong. They don 't work to win God,'s blessing and favor. He gives it to them entirely apart from their works, before they 've done anything.
As they go into this new world that He has created, they bear His blessing. Through them, the world that includes their future children and grandchildren, as well as all nature, sees the blessing of almighty God through this couple. In other words, they are the embodiment of God 's blessing in the world. They are the visible manifestation to the world of what Godt's divine favor looks like.
Be A Blessing Images
