Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

First Chronicles 29:10-13 Thanksgiving Sunday, November 22, 2009

Then David blessed the Lord in the presence of all the assembly; David said: "Blessed are you, O Lord, the God of our ancestor Israel, forever and ever. Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. Riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might; and it is in your hand to make great and to give strength to all. And now, our God, we give thanks to you and praise your glorious name."

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When I was starting out in ministry, my first parish was in a little town in Northwestern Massachusetts called Rowe. I was there for about a year and a half while finishing up my seminary degree. During that time, one of the things that came as a surprise to me was a request I received to pronounce a blessing on the new Post Office. I knew that they were renovating the building. Rowe is a small town. It would have been hard to miss. But when it was finished they decided to have a brief dedication service and they wanted me to pray.

At the time, to be honest, I thought that was pretty weird. I was just in the process of learning what it meant to be a minister, and most of what I thought I was supposed to do was to stay on the church side of the street. Blessing a Post Office felt like it blurred the lines between the sacred and the secular. But I wasn't about to turn them down. The town leaders and the church leaders were mostly the same people. Saying no would not have been a very smart thing to do. We had a nice little dedication service followed by coffee and doughnuts, and ever since then, I like to think the coming and going of the mail in Rowe happens with a certain blessedness that it might not have had otherwise.

Since then, I've discovered that offering blessings is something ministers do all the time. Over the years, I've blessed Chamber of Commerce dinners, Rotary Club lunches, town meetings, homes, boats, hog roasts, corn boils, CROP Walks, memorial day parades and a county fair, among other things; not to mention all the normal weddings, funerals, baptisms, communions and worship services. When people want something blessed, often enough their first reaction is to call in the local clergy. It's kind of an honor, actually; even when you realize that sometimes ministers are called upon because praying in public makes a lot of people who aren't ministers really uncomfortable.

I remember one time I was leading a planning meeting for an upcoming youth group retreat. We had a leadership team of six adults, all gathered around discussing how we wanted the weekend to go. I brought up the subject of worship and asked who would like to help lead the praying. You could have heard a pin drop. After a minute or two of awkward silence, one of the team leaders looked me in the eye and said, "That's what we hired you for." So I learned; minister's bless things. That's one of the things we're expected to do.

David might have been an exception. He wasn't a minister, exactly, but he was obviously comfortable with public speaking. Today's passage is a blessing David gave before a gathered assembly of some thirty-eight thousand people. David, we're told, "was old and full of days." He had brought the people together in order to hand his kingdom off to his son Solomon, and organize the building of the temple which was to be Solomon's great work. After everything was organized, "David blessed the Lord." Reading that line, I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite old songs from the musical, Godspell.

"Oh bless the Lord my soul. His mercies be proclaimed. And all that is within me join to bless his holy name. Oh yeah."

David blessed the Lord. That's what it says right there in First Chronicles. However, when you think about it, isn't there something funny about the way that sounds? "David blessed the Lord." Usually, when I think about someone blessing someone, what comes to mind is that we are giving something away to someone who didn't have it already. I give you my blessing. You weren't blessed before, but now you are. I bless a Post Office. It wasn't blessed when I got there, but it was when I left. Isn't that the way it works? But if that's the case, then how, I wonder, could David bless the Lord? Unless I'm missing something, God was and is and ever shall be the soul and source of all blessedness. It's not like he was running short.

Obviously, giving a blessing in that sense isn't what David had in mind. What he was doing was recognizing, acknowledging and proclaiming just how blessed God already was.

"Blessed are you, O Lord … forever and ever. Yours … are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty … you are exalted as head above all … in your hand are power and might … we give thanks to you and praise your glorious name.

Clearly, David was not giving God something that God was lacking. Rather, he was using the most magnificent collection of words he could think of in order to praise something that no words could ever begin to capture. Oh bless the Lord my soul. All that is within me join to bless God's holy name. Oh yeah. God, of course, was blessed already. David was simply calling people's attention to that fact.

You know what though, we need to be careful not to imagine that this is only true when we're talking about God. We may not always realize it, but what is true of blessing God turns out to be equally true of everything else we bless. By our act of blessing, we're not making something blessed that wasn't already. We're not giving something away. We are simply acknowledging what was there all along.

Now, that's quite different from the way we usually think. Take a simple example. When someone sneezes, most of us were taught that the polite thing to do is to say, "God bless you." Somewhere back in history that came from a belief that our souls were particularly at risk when we sneezed. A sneeze was like an explosion that blew a hole in our defensive walls, making us briefly vulnerable to the powers of darkness. If someone nearby didn't quickly rush in with a blessing to patch the hole, the consequences could be dire.

Today, no one I know takes that kind of thinking seriously. We've lost our sense of urgency about blessing the sneezing masses. We still do it, some of us. We just don't feel so urgent about it. We don't fear, anymore, that people with head colds are in danger of losing their souls. But generations later, the "God bless you" habit is still in place, and underneath that habit of blessing lies a habit of mind, which still assumes we are giving something away when we bless someone.

That is one way of thinking about blessing. But as I said, it's not what David was doing. David wasn't giving something to God. David's blessing was more along the lines of "Namaste." I'm sure most of you have heard that word by now, one way or another. For those who don't know, Namaste is a Sanskrit word that comes originally from the Hindu tradition. Today it's often used in the practice of yoga and eastern meditation. It's part of a greeting practice that goes like this. Placing your hands together with the fingers pointing up, as though you're praying, and bowing your head slightly, you say the word; "Namaste."

If you look it up on Wikipedia, which I did, you'll find there are a number of ways of understanding what this practice means. It gives some examples:

- I salute the God within you.

- I honor the Spirit in you which is also in me.

- The light within me honors the light within you.

- The Divinity within me perceives and adores the Divinity within you.

And my personal favorite:

- I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.

Isn't that beautiful? All that with just a simple word and gesture. Namaste. There's a certain humbling of yourself in that gesture that we in the west don't respond to very well. But if you think of it in terms of blessing, it can really help you get inside of what David was doing with God. It's not that God was lacking something that David happened to have and was willing to pass along. In the spirit of Namaste, David was simply saying, the Divinity within me perceives and adores the Divinity within you. What a great thing to say to God!

However, if we're going to start thinking of blessing in this way, it means we will have to begin to believe that there actually is divinity within us. The Spirit of God, the spark of God, resides within all things. God is infinite. God is everywhere. That much we know. But as much as we may think we believe it, in my experience most people don't. We've all had the message pounded into our heads that we shouldn't think of ourselves too highly. Most of us have come to draw a pretty hard and fast line between who we think we are and who we think God is. In that light, it seems to make perfect sense for us to ask for God's blessing, but it makes no sense at all for us to bless God. Do you see the difference? Our normal way of thinking is that God has got plenty to give us, but we have nothing to give in return.

The message from David in today's reading, is that blessing is not about giving and receiving at all. It is about proclamation. It is about saying out loud what should be obvious but often isn't. God is blessed, and so is everything else God has brought into being. Pronouncing blessings is a matter of recognizing, not only the divinity of God, but our own divinity as well. To bless is to open our hearts and minds, as well as our eyes, to the divinity of God in all that God has created. It is to announce to the world the divine mystery that exists everywhere we could look, whether we actually do look or not.

Think about that this week, I invite you. As we all gather around our various tables of Thanksgiving, as we reconnect with family and friends, as we offer praise for all our many blessings, may our thanksgiving become a proclamation of the blessedness within which God has caused us to live.

Namaste.

Amen.