The other day as I was driving through our neighborhood I noticed a new sign on the front porch of a home I drive by every day. The big banner furled across the railing of the house read “Vote Pro-life.”

I’m not sure exactly why the banner caught my eye or why I even thought about it, as ubiquitous as political signs are these days. But by the time I had gotten home, I had vowed that I would join my neighbor. So, I’m on a crusade. I say, “Yes. Vote Pro-life.”

Vote for the candidates who will support policies that determine to lift up the poor from a concern for mere survival and help give them the tools to a life of dignity and respect. Vote for candidates who will pledge to give them a helping hand rather than a dismissive “why don’t you go get a job?”

Vote for the candidates who will support policies that protect the environment and foster life not only for the human species but for all of creation. Vote for candidates who will pledge to help us move away from energy policy that far too quickly depletes our natural resources and uses energy sources that are clean and readily available, sources like solar and wind.

Vote for the candidates who will support an end to US aggression and police action. There is nothing more anti-life than war.

Vote for the candidates who will support policies that limit access to guns. Support candidates who will support legislation to make it difficult for anyone to own a handgun or semi-automatic rifle or assault rifle. Why can we legislate the necessity to wear a seatbelt when you get into a car, but we can’t legislate access to guns that have no other purpose than to kill people? I say, “Vote Pro-life.”

Vote for the candidates who will support policies that will make health-care affordable and accessible for all people. And vote for candidates who will have the courage to admit that our present health care system is neither just nor sustainable.

Vote for the candidates who will take on the challenge of reforming our penal system. It’s so counter-productive and barbaric for a society to warehouse criminals and pay only lip service to rehabilitation. Give people who have made a youthful mistake — albeit a serious mistake — a second chance to be the people they were meant to be.

I say, “Vote Pro-life.”

See, while I agree that the life of the unborn is precious, that they should be honored and protected, and that abortion as birth control is wrong, it’s more complicated that black and white answers and policies. And I bristle at the notion that one can be pro-life with regard to only one narrow slice of the broad range of life and life issues. How can we be so adamant about protecting unborn children, but leave significant numbers of the already born children hungry and in poverty and attending substandard schools? How can we decry the violence of abortion and have no moral qualms about unleashing drones that have killed an unconscionable numbers of innocent people, including children. Is it pro-life to consider them as nothing more than collateral damage?

So, when it comes time to cast my vote in less than two weeks, you can be sure that I will be considering every candidate and every issue, and I will voting, proudly and unabashedly, pro-life.

Let Your Light Shine Together
A Wedding Sermon
The Marriage of Elizabeth Coyne and Christopher Honig
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Philippians 4:4-9
Matthew 5:14-16

From Naperville to Valparaiso and Glen Ellyn to Valparaiso via Bloomington, Chicago to Pretoria, South Africa, and West Point, Nebraska, Ann Arbor, Hyde Park, Chicago.
The two of you have certainly kept the Post Office busy trying to stay current with your forwarding addresses. For the past few years, this has been your story, Liz and Chris — many places and many people and many experiences. All of them have led to this beautiful moment in your story. Here you are in this place, this holy ground, with your family and friends, before the signs and symbols of your faith — a pulpit with a book, a baptismal font, a table, and an assembly of family and friends.
Rejoice in the Lord always.  And again I say rejoice. That’s part of what we’re here for, to celebrate with maximum joy your love, but more so, to celebrate the promises God has made to you and the promises you will make to each other. That’s a shorthand way of saying that we are here today to celebrate your intention, Liz and Chris, to bind yourselves to one another in covenant promises, to give God thanks for the blessing that God brings to those promises, and to talk about how your marriage becomes a fundamental part of how you live out your baptismal identity in the world.
The lesson you chose from Jeremiah is one of those classic biblical passages about covenant. I’m a little leery about saying anything about “covenant” in the presence of a future lawyer, but I’m going to anyway. We don’t use that word much in popular culture, and when we do it’s in the sense of a legally binding agreement, as in a homeowner’s covenant that you can’t paint your house hot pink, or that if I pay you rent, you will take care of my leaky faucet.
In the biblical sense a covenant is so much more — it’s a binding promise that flows from the strength and grace of relationship. Covenant gets right at the heart of who God is and how God deals with us. In spite of our brokenness, God has bound God’s self to us in love. God has promised to make God’s self known to us. You will all know me, from the least to the greatest — That’s exactly what God has done in Jesus. God has promised to each of you — to all of us — faithfulness and love and forgiveness that will last your whole life and carry you through death to whatever life God has in store.
And because we know God’s faithfulness, we can pledge our faithfulness to one another. In popular culture weddings and marriage are all about love. I don’t want to deny the importance of love. But today is much more about promise and fidelity and community. It takes very little to fall in love and be intimate. It’s a much more weighty matter to make a pledge of faithfulness and to bind our lives to each other. You can do that, Liz and Chris, because you have known the faithfulness of God. You can do that because your lives are lived under the grace and commitment of God’s crucified love. We love because God first loved us. So, freely, you give yourselves to each other. Freely, you promise faithfulness and love. Freely you promise to share your lives with each other in good and bad, sorrow and celebration, when there is much and when there is little. And God promises to be in the covenant and bless you.
The other lesson you have chosen gives us one more important thing to talk about. You are the light of the world. Let your light so shine before men and women that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven. Those words take your love for each other and thrust it out into a world that for the two of you has become small. When I was your age, I was the kid coming out of the small town in Nebraska and I thought it was awesome that I got to fly to Minneapolis once. The world was so big. But for the two of you and many of your friends, the world has become small. You have traveled, you have worked and studied around the world. You have met and worked with people from from across the globe. And you have seen brokenness not only in your own neighborhoods but in places that are so different, but where people are fundamentally the same. You have witnessed first-hand a world in need of healing.
Two of the hymns that we yet will sing both speak of moving from the church into the world, from this sanctuary to Ann Arbor and then back to Chicago, from this sacred music to the cries of suffering and injustice. In fact, the hymn we will sing in just a moment specifically reminds us that since God has entered your story, your story now goes out into the world. You will take God’s love, your gifts, and your talents, and you will hurl them against darkness and evil. Your task from here on is to cast your light over those places where you live and work, to permeate every place you go with what Jesus called “your good works.”  See, you don’t get to stay in this sanctuary very long. And neither do you get to stay in the classrooms of the University of Michigan Law School or the Lutheran School of Theology for very much longer. Before long you will go into a world where the music will not be the grand hymns of the sanctuary but will be the screams of families when children are killed on the sidewalks of the city and the the cries of the hungry and the laments of those denied opportunity and the mourning of the prisoner and the weeping of those for whom life is a great burden. For God’s sake and for the sake of the world, talented and gifted people like you have to turn outward. You must insist that your light not be hidden beneath a bushel; you must demand that the light of Christ shining through you shines brilliantly on our social, economic, ecclesiastical and political life. And when that happens, you will be part of realizing Christ’s own vision for the world in which truth and equality and justice and peace and abundance for all are the way of the world.
Today, Liz and Chris, I suspect that you more than anyone here realize how graced and gifted you are, how many gifts God has given you, how your parents have loved and shaped you, how your larger family and circle of close friends have enriched your lives, along with the hundreds of people remembered or forgotten who have brought you to this day. And you know without my telling you that these gifts, both divine and human, are most richly used when they are shared.  We have the highest hopes for your future; we don’t know where you will be summoned to live and love and work. But we do know that that wherever God calls you, the deep love that you already share with each other will increase and multiply as you turn that love also to others.
This is your story, a story that neither begins nor ends today. Instead a story that comes to a momentary climax before continuing in the world. In a moment, you will make promises. And then you will come to the table together for a meal that unites you and all of us in Christ. Both your promises and that meal of grace make real in this moment the mission that you received in your baptism. A long time ago, you were commissioned by water and the Spirit to let the light of Christ within you shed its redeeming light over others. Today, in a moment of deep celebration and fuller awareness, you resolve to let your light shine together.

My oldest son is now married. And I presided at the wedding.

In the weeks leading up to the wedding, lots of folks asked how I would be able to do that without getting emotional. You know, father of the groom. First-born son. All of the emotional stuff tied up with being a father.

To a certain extent, all of that is true. Chris and I have a special relationship. We have always had the gift of enjoying time together, of good and sometimes deep conversation. I have been awed and humbled that Chris calls me or sits in the living room with a beer and asks for fatherly advice in a way that I never did with my own father. I don’t know how things worked out that way, but I am grateful.

Back to the wedding. When we first started the conversation about where it would be and who would preside, we talked about other options; for many different reasons, none of them were better than having the wedding at Faith Lutheran Church (where I am the Senior Pastor) and having me preside at their wedding.

As the wedding day approached, as Chris and Liz planned their wedding service, as I shared in those plans, I became more and more determined that for a little over an hour on a Saturday afternoon in October, I would be pastor and not father.

That may sound strange, especially given the nature of our relationship. It’s also strange because as a pastor, what I do and who I am are inextricably linked. I am a father; I am a husband; I am a pastor; I am Jim. While I might try to distinguish these roles, I never very successfully segregate them. So, when I preside at my son’s wedding, I am father, I am husband, I am pastor, and I am Jim.

Which brings me back to what I said a few lines ago. For a few hours on Saturday afternoon, I was determined that I was going to be more pastor than father. It would have been easy to tell cute stories about Chris when he was a kid, or about the phone calls when he told me about he and Liz falling in love. But I’m convinced that would have been the easy way out. And it would have short-changed Chris and Liz.

For the promises they were making, they deserved to have someone speak to them about how their covenant is informed by their faith, by the long arc of scripture and tradition, and by the sacramental presence of God in their lives and in the assembly gathered around them. The weightiness of the promises they were making demanded that their words of promise to each other be put into the context of their own baptismal calling where God spoke words of promise to them. They needed to hear how it makes a difference that they make those vows in the presence of the Body — those gathered, and the Body extended through place and time.

It was a delightful weekend, full of family, celebration, stories, laughter, and bright hope for the future. As father, I relished all of it. But in the middle of a weekend filled with being the proud and happy father, for one hour on a Saturday afternoon I was pastor.

Dear Coach Eigbrett,

You probably don’t remember me. I was that scrawny freshman kid on your cross-country team at Bridgeport High School. I wasn’t very good as high school cross country runners go, and that in a region where cross country wasn’t a big deal for anyone; it was all about football, as I remember.

There were only 5 of us on the team. Frank was the star. Even as a sophomore, he placed in the top 10 in the state meet. In fact, it was mostly due to Frank’s first place finish at districts that we even made it to the state cross country meet.

If Frank was the star, I was the complete opposite. I rarely finished the workouts without walking. The rest of the guys were in the showers already by the time I got back. I usually didn’t finish any of the races without walking, and I know I was one of the last runners to cross the finish line at the state meet. I’m pretty sure I was an embarrassment to you; at least that’s what I felt like.

I really didn’t like running, and I especially didn’t like being pushed so hard that it hurt. So, I quit. Not the team, but the workouts and the races. When it started to hurt, I started to walk. It made sense to me. When it didn’t hurt so much, I started running again. Like I said, I didn’t like running very much. My dad had convinced me that being on the cross country team would get me in good shape for the basketball team, which was the sport I really liked. I wasn’t very good at that either, though I did make the team and did a good job of cheering the starters from the bench.

I guess on some level I liked being part of the team, even though, as I remember, I didn’t feel that much a part of the team. I liked the trips to the races; I really enjoyed the state meet, but I don’t remember ever feeling like I contributed anything. Probably because, in concrete terms, I didn’t. Our score was based on the cumulative total of the five top finishers. Since we only had five on the team, my consistently end-of-the-pack score didn’t help the team very much. I might add, however, that if there had been only four on the team, we would not have been scored as a team and we would not have been eligible for the state meet; Frank could have run as an individual qualifier, but the team would not have gone. There is that.

So here’s the funny thing. I’m 52 years old, and I’m still running. Imagine that!

When I got to college, I discovered that running at a more leisurely pace for a half hour or 45 minutes was actually enjoyable, and a good antidote to the hours of sitting in class and in the library. It became a way to clear my mind and to decompress a little. As time went on, I began entering 5K races, a 10K race here and there, and found a whole community of people who ran for the fun of it. Over the years, I’ve loved being a part of that community.

In my 30’s, still running, after I was married and had a new baby, I even convinced my wife to start running, a physical activity that she was convinced she hated, and now she is still running 4 times a week into her 50’s, and enjoying it.

Through the years there have been brief periods when I have quit running. Felt it was too hard on my body, got too busy, or just found other ways to get exercise. But running is the thing I always come back to. I’m still not very fast. But I do it consistently, and I can even finish a workout without walking. I’m sure you would be happy about that!

The even more amazing thing is that about 5 years ago, I started running marathons. Crazy, huh? The kid who couldn’t run 4 miles without stopping is now running 26? I know, it doesn’t make sense. But I’ve run 1 or 2 marathons a year for the past 5 years and I can’t imagine my life without it. It keeps me disciplined, it keeps me in a relative degree of well-being, and I simply cannot describe in words the feeling of elation, exhilaration, and accomplishment when I cross the finish line after 26 miles. I will probably never qualify for the Boston Marathon. But I finish. And that means a lot to me.

So, I just thought you might want to know that maybe the point was not how I did or didn’t fit into the competitive culture of high school sports – even though back then it was way, way, way less intense than it is these days. Maybe the point is to cultivate some ability to recognize exercise and some kind of physical activity as a fundamental component of living well. I’m not so sure that’s what you had in mind. But I am grateful that the seeds planted in a scrawny, no-good-to-the-team runner have taken root and grown into a lifelong pursuit of fitness and well-being.

The number 5 runner on the Bridgeport High School Cross Country Team and bottom 10 finisher at the 1974 Nebraska State High School Cross Country Meet,

Jim Honig

So, what do you call a bibliophile whose obsession with books borders on the unhealthy?

No, it’s not a joke. I’m really wondering.  Because that’s what I think I am.

I have an office full of books. I have shelves and shelves of books at home. I have stacks of books that I have bought recently (recently, as in the last 5 years), always, of course, thinking that I would read them, that I was interested in them. It’s true — I do intend to read them; I am interested in them.  But I also have a life apart from books, and my proverbial reader’s eyes are consistently bigger than my schedule’s stomach.

So, back to the shelves of books in my office. All of them I thought I would use. Some of them I use. And many of them are there taking up space. Maybe they aren’t what I thought they were. Or I have changed and my sensibilities no longer fit the particular slant of the book that is on my shelf. I’m not sure who has betrayed whom, but I have lately realized that there are many books in my office library that I have no good reason for keeping.

So, I’ve decided I’m going to purge. I haven’t exactly decided the criteria. No longer reflect my theology? Haven’t taken the book down in 5 years? 10 years? The theology is outdated? The topic is outdated?

Stay tuned. This should be interesting.

“I mean no disrespect. But how can we get that message out of the university and onto the streets where it needs to be?”

He asked the question in a sparsely furnished and worn room that the pre-event publicity labelled a conference room. It reminded me more of an old church basement than a conference room even though we sat at street level. The speaker was an African-American man, 60, give or take, blue jeans, long sleeved t-shirt and outdoorsy vest, a traditional Muslim head-covering. The event was the book signing for Three Testaments, a single volume that includes English translations of the Torah, the Gospel (Christian New Testament), and the Koran. Interspersed is a collection of historical, hermeneutical, and contextual essays.

A panel of experts, two professors, a rabbi who also was a part-time seminary professor, and a Muslim translator, had each given their take on the project. The event intended to market the book; each panelist gave his or her own positive spin, though each managed to point out the ambitious nature of the project and the inherent limitations. And each pointed to the importance of the three religions understanding each other and dialoguing about both their differences and their similarities.

That’s the context for the question. “How can we get that message out of the university and onto the streets where it needs to be?”

I thought it was not only a poignant question, but a real-life question. It’s a question I ask a lot, especially given the escalation of conflict in the Middle East, the level of religious misunderstanding in our own country, and the increasingly uncivil character of our civil exchanges. I, too, mean no disrespect, but the particular “experts” really had no idea how to answer the question. While they acknowledged the importance of getting the dialogue into the streets, they had no substantive answer for how to do it.

I do. Not because I’m smart or particularly capable, but because I’ve had the good fortune of being involved in broad-based community organizing. Organizing grows out of the fundamental assumption of the importance of relationships. I meet with you one-one-one and hear what’s important to you, what makes you tick. You hear the same from me. Because we live in the same community, we discover that we have common interests and concerns. You and me, my organization and your organization, we discover that we can get some things done together that we could never do individually. And in the growth of the relationship and the mutual work, we come to a mutual respect.   And we find opportunities to have dialogue about our deepest beliefs, even though we confess very different religions.

In the congregation I serve, we have developed good relationships with several Muslim congregations and a Jewish synagogue (the one in the western suburbs of Chicago). We have worked together on projects of mutual benefit to our institutions and our community. When we decided to fill a semi-trailer with food to send to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, the local Muslim school contributed the most to the project. When we began an ESL class on Monday nights, the high school students from the Muslim congregation swelled the ranks of the tutors.

Because of the relationship, and the trust developed in working together, we’ve had several opportunities to dialogue our our religious beliefs, both the similarities and differences. And the conversation happened in the context of trust rather than suspicion. And that makes a world of difference.

It’s always about relationships, isn’t it?

Here’s the short version: I hired a pastor to be the part-time custodian at our church.

I’ll spare you the administrative details; it’s part-time evening work so that there’s a staff person here in the evening when the building is heavily used by both church groups and community organizations. And then there’s always someone to lock up when it’s time to go home. Mostly normal cleaning stuff: emptying trash, vacuuming floors and cleaning bathrooms. Occasionally, there’s a tables and chairs set-up that needs to happen in preparation for the next morning.

When it was time for the interview, a well-dressed and articulate late middle-aged gentleman introduced himself with excellent English spoken with a heavy accent. I ushered him into a vacant office and introduced myself, “Hi, I’m Jim Honig. I’m one of the pastors on staff here.” I explained that in the absence of our Director of Parish Administration, I’d be conducting the interview, and invited him to call me Jim. He introduced himself, also inviting me to address him by his first name. And then immediately added, “I’m a pastor, too.”

Didn’t see that coming.

What I was thinking, but didn’t say out loud was, “Then why are you applying for this custodial position?” It didn’t take him long to get around to answering my question. He studied at a small seminary in Guatemala. He’s here on a visa that allows him to serve as a pastor. He serves a small hispanic congregation in one of the inner ring Chicago suburbs. His congregation rents space from another mainline congregation, and they can’t afford to pay him enough to support him. So he takes part-time jobs. Right now, he has a part-time job in the morning, does his pastor work in the middle of the day, and was looking for another part-time job for the evening. He likes to have the weekends open for his church work, especially a Friday evening men’s prayer meeting and Sunday worship.

When I described some of the cleaning he would be responsible for, he quipped, “This is no problem. I do the same thing in my church, except for free.”

I left that interview with strange swirl of humility, guilt, and gratitude. Is there such a thing as humuiltitude? I sometimes complain about some of the more frustrating aspects of my work, but overall, I recognize that I serve a wonderful congregation that is extraordinarily active and mission-minded. I work with a great group of people, both our professional staff and lay leaders. I am paid well for what I do, relatively speaking, and I don’t have to worry about finding an extra job to support my family. In fact, I enjoy a quality of life that I never thought I’d enjoy as a pastor. We live in our own home (ok, the bank still owns alot of it) in a very nice community. We can go out for dinner if we want, we take nice vacations, and were able to support our kids through college. We even have some savings and some money put away for retirement.

What’s more, I work in a place where the more mundane things (at least to me) are done by someone else, and I have the luxury of spending my time doing things that I am for the most part uniquely gifted to do. My grandfather was a pastor of a small congregation in rural Kansas. He didn’t have the kind of life or ministry that I enjoy. I think he loved what he did found his own reasons for joy and satisfaction in his vocation. And I also think that he had a harder life than I do. When we’d visit, I remember going over to church with him on Saturday afternoon when he’d run the bulletin on an ancient mimeograph and then Grandma and whatever grandkids happened to be around would help fold them all by hand.

I don’t have to fold bulletins. I don’t have to clean bathrooms or empty my own trash. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m above those kinds of tasks. It’s just that I have the luxury of being able to do other things.

So, I wonder if I would have the same dedication to my calling as my new colleague who will also be our new custodian. Do I love this work enough that I would do it even if I wasn’t paid and had to piece together part-time jobs to get by? Would I be willing to have another job and do this pastoring thing on the side, in the time leftover from another vocation? Honestly, I don’t know.

I know that around the world bi-vocational pastors are the rule, not the exception. I am the exception. And if the trends of attendance and membership in mainline denominations continue, there will likely be many more bi-vocational pastors right here.

Not infrequently, wonder, how it has happened that I am here doing what I do? I told a colleague recently that I’ve accidentally lived a good life. As with so much of life, there are no rational explanations. Yes, I acknowledge God’s goodness and guidance. My prayers are filled with gratitude. But my comfortable life is no particular sign of God’s goodness; my colleague’s God is just as good, even though my life is apparently much more comfortable. Like I said, no easy explanations. For now, I will do my work with an even greater sense of gratitude for where I am and what I get to do. And maybe, just maybe, we at Faith Church can somehow be a blessing and support for a pastoral colleague beyond providing a second job.

There was a time in my life when Memorial Day was just another nice day to have off from the office. I went for years without attending any kind of observance, and doing nothing more to remember than read the editorial in the morning newspaper that usually attempted some profound commentary on remembering those who have died in defense of country.

But in recent years, this day has meant more to me. I don’t know if it’s age or my own ambivalence about the wars that the U.S. has been engaged in for much of my adult life — the defense of Kuwait against Iraq, the Bosnia/Serbia action, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan. Or maybe it’s the fact that the majority of the young men and women who are coming home these days to be buried are the same age as my two sons. Or maybe it’s my own complicated struggle with why we fight wars in these times and whether there’s really an argument to be made that these actions are worth the cost.

For several years now, I have attended our town’s annual Monday morning memorial Day observance at one of the city parks. Today I went again. But before I did, I went for an hour-long bike ride that ended up being a long reflection on this day.

While I was pastor in Naples, Florida, I got to know several combat veterans of WWII. They weren’t anxious to talk about their experiences, but when they did, I heard powerful stories. Like the retired pastor who became a reluctant friend. He told me of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, the horrible conditions, the pain of the cold, and of finding out later that unbeknownst to him, his twin brother was fighting in the same battle, maybe only a few hundred yards away, maybe a mile or two away. My pastor friend came home. His brother was killed in that battle.

I remember the family who told me of the grief of losing their son in the Vietnam war. They lived in a small town in Minnesota and attended a small Lutheran Church. Their son was drafted. He was supposed to take over their farm. He was killed in action. Of course, they were crushed, and I’m not sure they ever recovered. But what makes their story even worse was the alienation they felt in their church and community. It wasn’t that the people in their town were bad people. They just didn’t know what to do or what to say, so they stayed away. I remember Gladys telling me about people ducking into the next aisle at the grocery store so they wouldn’t have to say anything.

And I remember the kid (yes, kid) from our own church who was killed when his tank was blown up by an IED in Afghanistan. I didn’t know him, but I knew of him. He went to the same high school as my sons, and graduated in one of the years between them. I know from his parents how proud he was to be a Marine and how the military had given him a new confidence and a direction in his life that was missing before he enlisted. And I know his family’s deep pain when he was killed, grief that they may never recover from.

I wish we had better language for describing what our fallen men and women have done. We often use the language of sacrifice, as in “they have paid the ultimate sacrifice.” But I don’t think that’s what they’ve done. Sacrifice is the language of payment. The Meso-Americans (the Aztecs, for instance) practiced human sacrifice. They placed a young man on a stone altar, cut his heart out while it was still beating and threw it to the gods as payment to insure the success of crops and military endeavors. That’s not what we do. We don’t go to war with the understanding that we willingly give up the lives of our young men and women in payment for peace or land or whatever it is. Americans would never stand for that proposition.

Nor is their death always particularly heroic. The speaker at our Memorial Day service today was quick to remind us that a lot of military deaths occur in the grind of just doing their daily job. It’s a dangerous job and sometimes things go wrong.

So, what language shall we use? Perhaps we should simply acknowledge that they have died in service of their country. They entered that service for lots of different reasons, some of them practical, some of them altruistic, but regardless, they signed up for work for a cause larger than themselves. They do a job that we don’t want to do and on some level has to be done. And many of them have lost their lives in that service. I hate that it has to be this way. It’s unsettling to me that even one of our young men or women should die in this fashion.

So, today, I simply remember them, the few that I have known or whose families I have known, and the thousands upon thousands that I don’t. And I remember them with a sad, but deeply grateful heart.

The notion of blessing things is a prominent theme in virtually all religions, including Christianity. But what do we mean when we bless something? Though my hunch is that few would admit it, not far below the surface of our practice of blessing things is some primitive idea that speaking words and suspending hands over objects are like magic. Our actions and incantations infuse the thing with a certain mystical quality that will guarantee success and will serve as a forcefield in keeping evil away.

Over the course of my years as pastor, I’ve been asked to bless lots of things, some of them things that I have no qualms about speaking a word of blessing over, and some of them rather trivial. I’ve been asked to bless bibles and babies, dogs and dining rooms, Harleys and hams, and lots of things in between. So, what have I been doing? What do we mean when we set something aside to bless it?

For a long time, I’ve had some sense that what I was doing was setting something aside for a special purpose. But the more I think about it, the less that theory holds water. It’s really not about a special purpose.  In fact, quite the opposite. We as asking for something to happen in that very thing’s intended use. For instance, if I bless a bible, I am not asking that it be used efficaciously only for some special use, but for the common everyday use that bibles are intended for: to read and study God’s revelation to us. If I bless a car, I’m not asking that it be set aside only to take the youth group on retreat or to take the family back and forth to church; no, I am somehow saying something about that cars intended use, whether it’s getting back and forth to work, hauling groceries, or taking the family on vacation.

I recently attended a conference on the notion of Christian blessing, a conference that was tremendously helpful in pushing me to think and act with more clarity about blessing. Dr. Ben Stewart of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, opened the conference theme with a sermon in which he suggested that to bless something is to open up a space between that common thing and God, a space for awe and gratitude and for recognizing that thing as a gift. In the week or so since I returned home, I have had a chance to reflect on Stewart’s notion of blessing and it has the strong ring of truth for me. If it’s true, then when I bless something, I’m not asking for anything magical to happen with that thing’s use, but that I recognize it’s presence in my life as a gift from a gracious God. That sense of gratitude leads me to think of the stewardship of that thing, and its right use in my life. So, if I bless the car, I’m opening up a space where I acknowledge that car is not ultimately my own, but is a gift from God. I am recognizing the goodness of God in the advance of human technology that allows us to make machines that foster the ease of getting from one place to another and hauling things over a distance. I am giving thanks for the hands that have made it, and I am somehow pledging myself to the proper use of that car. If I bless a bible, I am pausing for a moment to give thanks for the gift of language, of this thing we call a book in which words on a page can communicate ideas, and of the mystery and gift of divine revelation. And I am pledge myself to the proper use of that gift to accomplish God’s purposes in my life and in the world.

I recently spent some time with a couple in our congregation who just moved from their single family home — the home in which they raised their children and spent the first 10 years or so of their retirement — to a condominium. As you might imagine, it was a difficult move to leave behind not only the spaciousness of their home, but the vast store of memories evoked by every space in that house. Yet as they took me on a tour of their new home, there was a clear sense that this was the right time to downsize into a space more manageable and easier to leave behind when they leave town to spend the summer in their lake home. However, I had gone their new home not just for a tour, but to bless their new home.

It’s a beautiful rite. Starting at the entrance to the home, the blessing rite walks us through the entire home, pausing in each room to acknowledge the human activities that take place there, to speak a brief word of scripture that connects to that activity and then to speak a prayer of blessing. With a newly clarified understanding of what it means to bless, I walked through the rooms of their home reading scripture and praying with a new confidence and passion about what we were doing. I spent a few minutes in the introduction to the rite talking about blessing and why we were doing this. It was truly a powerful time as this couple stopped in each room to think of the common activities that will take place in their new home, to thank God for those activities, to thank God for providing this beautiful place for those things to take place, and finally to recognize God’s presence in those very activities. For instance, as we paused in the kitchen, we spent a few brief moments giving thanks for the gift of food and the flavors that bring joy and satisfaction to our eating. As we paused in the living room, we thought of the friends and family who will sit in that room sharing the gift of fellowship and sharing the stories of lives and relationships. And that couple was able to ask God to consecrate this home for lives that will share in God’s purposes for them, for their neighbors, and for the whole world.

God would have been present in their home whether we performed that rite of blessing or not. But I’m confident that my friends now have a much sharper sense of that presence, of their deep gratitude for God’s gifts, and of their own calling to live as God’s children. That’s what I call blessing!