Paul Walker “Bless Your Heart”

 Let’s talk about blessings this All Saints’ Day. We generally understand a blessing as something good that has happened.  A beautiful day or a timely rain, a financial windfall, a strong marriage and stable job – all blessings. When the chips are down, we are often reminded to count our blessings. 

     Some people try to make counting blessings a daily ritual – to thank God for 10 blessings each day. I actually think that can be a good practice. We can so often get mired in what we do not have but think we need. Or what happens to be our lot in life at the moment that we wish we could change. It doesn’t hurt to remember that we don’t have the corner on pain and difficulty. 

     I mean, I love the Police, but when Sting sings, “But it’s my destiny to be the king of pain, - I’ll always be the king of pain,” I want to say, “C’mon, Sting, give it a rest. You are doing alright.” I know that money doesn’t buy happiness and all that but you’ve got a net worth of 600 million dollars. Count your blessings, son.

     Blessings. I grew up with a common version of grace at meal time - “Gracious Lord, make us truly thankful for these and all thy many blessings, for Christ’s sake, Amen.”  My dad said grace like an auctioneer or a Kentucky Derby announcer: 

“graciouslordmakeusthankfulfortheseandallthymanyblessingsforchrissakeamen.” At Thanksgiving Dinner, someone will probably be asked to say “the blessing.” You usually hope that person is like my dad and not some long-winded pious person as the turkey wafts and glistens right under your nose.

     We occasionally say “bless you” to others. You can be on a subway in New York and sneeze and even there in the godless north (!) you might get a “bless you” from a stranger. Saying “bless you” after a sneeze began in the sixth century when Pope Gregory the Great said it during the bubonic plague. A sneeze was an obvious symptom of the deadly disease.

     Saying “bless you” is nice enough but then you move into the “Bless Your Heart” territory.  In southern speak, “Bless Your Heart, you brought your special pecan pie for dessert!” actually means “your pecan pie is disgusting and inedible and will be thrown in the trash after we all pretend to eat it, and we all know that you think you know how to bake but you are hopeless in the kitchen and terrible at just about everything else you do, bless your heart.”

     Funnily enough, the southern usage of Bless Your Heart is closer to Jesus’ version of blessing than the count your blessings version. That’s because in Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus turns the whole thing upside down. You are in the blessed category if you are poor, hungry, sad, and hated. Not many of us count our blessings at night saying, “Thank you, Lord, for my financial difficulties, my weight problems, my ongoing depression, and the fact that I’m being gossiped about by my so- called friends.” 

     What we would call blessings – wealth, satisfaction, happiness – Jesus calls “woes.” I’m not on a campaign to reorient the way we use the word “blessing’, but it is very helpful to understand what Jesus has in mind here. The Greek word for blessing is “makarios”. It means happy but also “self-contained”.  The Greeks called Cyprus the happy isle because of the perfect climate, geography, and fertile soil. They referred to Cyprus as being “makarios” because it contained everything you needed to be happy.

     Obviously, no one in their right mind is happy being poor, hungry, sad and hated. Jesus isn’t saying buck up, people, put on a happy face and make do. He is saying that our happiness is contained in God. It is not dependent on what is ephemeral – on what passes away. He is saying that the terrible things in your life – like being poor, hungry, sad, and hated – finally have no power over you. 

     He’s saying that those kinds of situations bring you close to God. Or vise-versa – those kinds of situations bring God close to you. As the scripture tells us, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, sad, hated. Of course, you don’t have take those descriptors literally to fit in or relate. Everyone is at times the broken-hearted and crushed in spirit. Everyone at some point is on the receiving end of a southern “bless your heart.” 

     Today, All Saints’ Day, we say that all that is bad in life is in preparation for all that is good. For all that is bad in life is a little “d” death that prepares you for the Big “D” Death. “For all the saints, who from their labors rest.” Today we think about death – we read the names of those that have died in the past year. 

     Today we are thinking about sleep – as the clocks have been turned back – and we are thinking about death. In Greek mythology, the god of sleep was named Hynos. At night, Hypnos grew wings and flew through the land dispensing opiates and giving rest to the weary. Everyone loved Hypnos – a brief rest from their labors. But Hypnos had a twin brother named Thanatos – the god of death.  Thanatos went from house to house, dragging people to the underworld. Everyone feared Thanatos.

     Today we say we have no fear of Thanatos. The little “d” deaths that prepare for our final death are good things – blessings – because our death is the ultimate blessing! We see this in the cross. The worst thing possible is in fact the best thing possible. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, we too will be raised and from our labors rest once and for all! 

     And the best news is that all that takes is what we already can’t help but do – which is die! As our friend Robert Capon says, “Jesus never meets a corpse that doesn’t sit up right on the spot. Consider. There is the widow of Nain’s son; there is Jairus’ daughter; and there is Lazarus They all rise not because Jesus does a number on them, not because he puts some magical resurrection machinery into gear, but simply because he has that effect on the dead. They rise because he himself is the Resurrection even before he himself rises – because, in other words, he is the grand sacrament, the real presence, of the mystery of a kingdom in which everybody rises.”

     So, bless your hearts, my friends, you all are going to die! Then, with all the saints, sit up right on the spot and enter into a life in which, as we say in our funeral liturgy, “sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.” 

     Amen.