Month: December 2019

What the ministry of blessing looks like

When I posted my entry on Practicing Blessing in the local church last Monday (12/23) I got one thing wrong. I mentioned a “conversation that was not caught on video.” In fact, it was. The incident involved a pastor who questioned whether he had authority to bless.

Although the questions about the pastor’s authority to bless seem to come mostly from churches in the evangelical tradition, when one casts a net over the question of whether ordinary Christians have that authority, then the doubt extends across most Christian traditions. Russ’s response to an earlier question on the content of blessing speaks to the doubts found about the authority of Christians to bless in our religious culture. The following excerpt (a bit more than 2 minutes) is worth the listen:

An example of blessing

The full videos of Russ’s four talks blessing run around an hour each. I know that few of us are so burdened with free time that watching an hour long video is a challenge. Nonetheless, I encourage all of you to find time to view – you won’t regret it. Again, you can find them here: https://www.trinitygreeley.org/russ-parker-videos/.

Of course, the practice of blessing by all Christians is nothing new, though it has certainly been lost for quite a while. Ian Bradley, in his book Celtic Christian Communities, makes note of the common practice in the Christian communities in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other regions where “Celtic” Christianity thrived in the 4th – 9th centuries.

With this understanding of the power of the spoken word, pronouncing a blessing or benediction was no mere pleasantry or routine greeting to pass the time of day. Nor did it simply involve, as its Latin root benedicere suggests, speaking well of someone or something. Rather it conveyed to the recipient in an almost physical sense a portion of God’s goodness and grace… Although those delivered by saints and holy men [and women] were regarded as having a special force and efficacy, blessings were certainly not regarded as the exclusive province of priests and monks, and could come from the lips of any Christian. They were emphatically not confined to liturgical use but had a prominent place in the every day lives and conversation of laity and clergy alike, both inside and beyond the monastic vallum.

Ian Bradley, Celtic Christian Communities: Live the Tradition (Kelowna, BC, Canada: Northstone Publishing, 2000), 61

So if all Christians have the ministry of blessing, what is it that we should be teaching them to bless? Given the state of our society, it would seem obvious that we should teach husbands to bless their wives and wives their husbands. In fact, this would be a good discipline for couples preparing for Christian marriage. When the couple is together, their time should begin, or at least end, with blessing. When they are apart, they can bless one another, even from a distance, each night before sleep.

Parents need to be blessing their children, at night as they go to bed and in the morning before they leave for school. Both parents need to participate as a mother’s blessing is not the father’s, nor the father’s the mother’s. Children can be taught to bless their parents and one another.

These blessings can extend beyond the family and even beyond the life of the congregation. But wherever and to whomever the blessings are given, how do we bless. Again, I point you to Russ Parker’s video talks.

There is one other blessing I’ll close with, taken from Russ’s book, Rediscovering the Ministry of Blessing. It is a blessing for the communities in which we live.

Blessing for a town

We stand in the mighty name of Jesus and bless you [name of town], that you might prosper under the mighty hand of God.

We bless you that justice and righteousness might take their proper place within your boundaries. We bless you that the favour of the Lord might rest upon you and give you peace.

We bless you that the Father’s compassion might fall upon your people. We bless your poor that they might be lifted up.

We bless you that the knowledge of Jesus might come in among you like a flood.

We bless the people of God in [name of town] that they might rise up with servant authority and become a people of blessing.

We bless you that the joy of the Lord might be your strength. Amen.
(Worldwide Mission Fellowship)

Parker, Russ. Rediscovering the Ministry of Blessing (pp. 125-126). SPCK. Kindle Edition.

A Holy Christmas Word

What is the most important verse in the Bible?

That is a rhetorical question. The answer is as individual as we are, though I suspect the answers would cluster around several choices. But as Advent draws to a close and we begin the 12 days of Christmastide, I’ll offer my own and try to explain why it is important. The verse I’m promoting is the 14th in the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The impact of that verse draws on the opening lines of the chapter: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The importance of verse 14 also lies in the suspicion with which spiritual people regards physicality. To be pure spirit delivers us from the pain and limitation and decay of our physical experience. Oh yes, there is much to rejoice in our materiality. The beauty of this world that our senses convey is a source of continuous delight. But the same materiality that enables us to delight in our material world also makes it “subjected to futility.” (Romans 8:20) Except.

Except, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And if God, who is spirit, was willing to enter fully into our material life, that means that materiality, even subject to decay, can be the vehicles of God’s grace and presence. That, in turn, means that all our actions in this material world have spiritual effects and spiritual consequences.

It means that we can be bearers of God’s holy and healing presence in every place, in every set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. It means that physical items can convey spiritual power and grace, whether in Holy Communion or holy oil or holy water. It is not that water or oil become magic talismans when certain words are spoken over them by certain people. It is that God is willing convey His grace in the material items of His creation and all because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

The importance of the verse in question is in its application to the minutiae of our lives. All places can be holy places, all moments can be holy moments, all words can be holy words and all actions may be holy actions. And this is true because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Merry Christmas,
Jack Stapleton (The Apprentice Priest)

Practicing Blessing in the local church

In 2017 our parish brought in Rev. Dr. Russ Parker to lead a parish weekend. While the weekend and the teaching were wonderful and blessed us all, it was the preliminary to the weekend that was my own motive for bringing Russ over from the UK. Russ has written many books and one of them Healing Wounded History had been an essential element in moving the congregation in healing, renewal and growth. But it was one of his more recent books, Rediscovering the Ministry of Blessing, that had started us on the path towards the weekend.

Russ did three sessions on blessing in the midst of our primary weekend focus on The Wild Spirit. One session was a lunch for clergy and ministry leaders, a second followed that evening for the general public on the subject of blessing and a third session on a Saturday morning for parents and godparents on How to bless your children no matter how old they are. All the sessions were professionally videoed, and rather than describe them you can find them on the YouTube channel of Trinity Episcopal Church.

There was one conversation that was not caught on video between Russ and a pastor from an evangelical church. The pastor questioned whether he had authority to bless on God’s behalf. He could pray that God would bless someone, but to say “I bless you…” on behalf of God seemed presumptuous in the extreme. I didn’t overhear the rest of the conversation, but the pastor’s question was an eye opener for me. After all, I am an Episcopal priest and we bless anything and pretty much everything that is offered. We bless bread and wine in Holy Communion and the congregation at the close of that liturgy. We bless pets and crosses and rosaries (yes, some Episcopalians use rosaries) and icons and houses and holy water and holy oil. That’s part of our job. That’s part of the authority imparted to us at our ordination. And here was a pastor questioning his authority to bless.

It wasn’t a huge leap to connect the pastor’s problem with the blank looks I saw on the faces of our congregation whenever I encouraged parents, and particularly fathers, to bless their children. Oddly enough, I’d articulated the problem to that congregation in a sermon. However, as is all too often the case, even though I was the one speaking, I wasn’t the one listening. I was explaining why I thought my father had never blessed me as a child (so far as I knew). He didn’t know he could. Therefore, he didn’t know he should. And had he known either, he probably didn’t know how. As I described that situation there was a quiet voice speaking in the dim recesses of my consciousness, that this would be an ideal time to start teaching the congregation how to bless. I did follow up on that with one course, but it was “one and done.”

Within six months of Russ’s visit, I felt it was time to retire and I left my parish work (with mixed feelings of relief and loss) and my parish community (with deep regret). In the months since my departure the absence of the normal pressures of parish ministry has cleared away much of the foggy thinking of the last few years. With the clarity that only comes with hindsight I think my failure to follow up with teaching people how to bless was my greatest error in leadership during the 15 years I served that parish.

There are two reasons why I give that failure to launch that ignoble status. The first is that the ministry of blessing is a concrete expression of the priesthood of Christ that belongs to all who are in Christ. The “priesthood of all believers” needs to be more than just shorthand for the direct access to the Father through Jesus. The model of our ministry is incarnation – the spiritual God acting to save a material creature through embracing the material reality of our creaturely existence. A priesthood that fails to engage material reality, whatever else it may be, is not the priesthood of Christ. In prior years I had both preached and taught in the congregation on our status as priests. But in the time we explored the ministry of blessing, I failed to make the connection between priesthood and blessing.

The second reason was forgetting a phrase I learned from the late Canon David Watson: the meeting place is the learning place for the marketplace. I haven’t quoted that for a long time because when I did I got the same blank looks mentioned above. I think part of the problem was the concept that the primary workplace of the Body of Christ was not inside the congregation but in the midst of the world in which we work the other six days of the week.

In the context of blessing, applying Watson’s dictum meant that we learned how to how exercise our God-given authority to bless within our church so that we could bless in our homes, our workplaces and every other venue of our lives. When we learn that we can bless and how we bless we do so for the sake of others. Archbishop William Temple noted “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” One of the key benefits we offer is that of being blessed by God.

Finally, as Russ Parker noted in his talks and his book, blessing is more than kind or encouraging words. The words are ours, but the work is God’s. Go back and follow the link above to Russ’s talks. It will open up a new vista of ministry and mission for the local church.