To coin a phrase, now having celebrated my 90th birthday, after all these years, I still keep praising the Lord: for I have been blessed in many ways. A case in point: my family recently threw a spectacular birthday party for me, at a downtown hotel. Extravagant and wonderful it was, beginning with an elegant meal. Overwhelming it was for me, since a panel of theologians all of whom I have long admired, all of whom had just participated in a public discussion of my theology at the American Academy of Religion, joined us for the birthday festivities, too. It all was, indeed, a blessing for me that my words here cannot begin to describe.
On the other hand, something troubles me about that thought. A blessing? Think about it. As a pastoral counselor for many years, I used to nudge counselees to try to find other ways to say what I just said. The problem: the language of blessing suggests that some have been blessed and that others have not, or even that others have been cursed. It also implies that God or some ultimate power of the universe ordained that state of affairs.
But the God attested by the witness of biblical faith, when all has been said and done, doesn’t routinely do that kind of stuff, the biblical theme, blessing and cursing, to the contrary notwithstanding. Or think about it this way: the biblical theme of God blessing and cursing sets the stage for the main acts of the biblical narrative, about the unfolding acts of the God who is – love. Blessing and cursing, it appears to me, is a secondary biblical theme, notwithstanding the prominence people of faith and others have given it by constantly recalling texts like the Beatitudes (“Blessed are those…).
The first and last Word of God, as I hear the God attested by the Scriptures speaking anyway, isn’t about monarchical decisions issued from on high that will impact those humans who do certain things. It’s something much more about the God, who is love and who is near us: who is in, with, and under all things and who was born in a stable, for our sakes and for the sake of every creature: something really down to earth like that, as the classical biblical theme “God with us” or Emmanuel suggests.
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