Sunday Benedictions
Bear with me as I write this night, overwhelmed yet again by the news of the day, the week, the year—an unrelenting saga of heartbreak and tragedy delivered in the past via morning papers, radio, and the evening television news. I could well understand the counsel then from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who advised his students always to read the newspaper in one hand with the Bible in the other, looking for context and matrix and the intersections of life and faith.
Today we’re awash in information and nonstop news reporting from every corner of the world. It comes at us like a raging river in springtime threatening to drown us in its urgency and drama. I’m grateful for much of it. We need to see the faces of refugee families fleeing for their lives. We need to know and feel what it means to be caught in a natural disaster or a bloody coup or another senseless shooting. But it takes a toll. Just as too much junk food robs our bodies of vital nourishment, the effect of receiving and absorbing the 24-7 barrage of news reporting is an assault on our minds and souls as toxic as malnourished bodies.
So I write this night after a long week. The Middle East is a smoldering cauldron of fear and anger. Congress is in gridlock. It’s the hurricane season and coastal towns are preparing for a hard hit. An acquaintance and his family lost their home in a fire a few months ago. A dear friend struggles with alcoholism and another with Parkinson’s disease. This is life for all of us. We are in desperate need of healing oil and sheltering comfort—not as an escape from the world but as a way of being in the world.
Tomorrow is Sunday. After a long week, we will gather like hungry birds, weary of doing and making and being, ready to participate in this alternative way of being in the world. We come together to remember who we are, to lament and pray, hope and sing. Confessions are made, blessings are given, peace is offered, bread is broken, wine is poured, all are fed. Tomorrow we participate in the drama of a long history of news reporting chronicling times as complicated in some ways as our own. Tomorrow we will enact God’s saving acts on our behalf knowing ourselves to be God’s own healing oil and sheltering comfort.
Sunday, this day set apart for Sabbath rest, offers gifts of renewal, restoration, and resurrection. Balm for tired souls, yes. Healing oil and sheltering comfort, yes. But Sunday also calls us from despair and hopelessness to action. Sunday’s benediction calls us to be bearers of benedictions, healers, comforters, the very hands and face of the Christ we worship. Sunday’s blessing is time for balancing the sorrows that are part of everyday life with the joy that is at the heart of Christianity, time for remembering and time for being.
The spirit of God is present in each of us. We are God’s dwelling place. We are God’s home. Sunday invites us to stop. With the heartache and worry of the week’s news still ringing in our ears and surrounded, even on Sunday, by the clamor of football games and news programs and social media all vying for our attention, Sunday asks of us a moment for silence. Sunday prompts us to remember, to taste and see, to walk with and act, to speak and to listen, to hear the still small voice inside each of us calling us to be benedictions for one another.
Go in peace. Serve God. Allow yourself to hear and absorb the suffering of the world. Be the face and hands of Christ in the places where you live. Use your voice and your resources to make a difference. Care for yourself and for sisters and brothers whose lives are a daily struggle for survival. Be grace, hope, joy, mercy. Help us, 0 God, to become healing oil and sheltering comfort for those in darkness and despair. Holy God, eternal spirit, earth-maker, pain-bearer, life-giver, help us bring life out of death.
Reflection
Go in peace. Serve God. Allow yourself to hear and absorb the suffering of the world. Be the face and hands of Christ in the places where you live.
- In what ways do Sundays serve as a benediction for you?
- If not, where do you find rest, renewal, resurrection?
- Describe some ways you’ve experienced healing oil or sheltering comfort.
- Is it possible to live the joy at the heart of Christianity in such a troubled world?
Taken from Benedictions: 26 Reflections. Copyright 2016 by Julie K. Aageson. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.