I remember some years back when I, with my community of Lift Jesus Higher, used to go round Vanier, where I was living at the time, doing what was called “prayer walking”. We would go round, in groups of three or four, walking round the streets of Vanier and offering up prayers of blessing on the residents, and shoppers, and schools and other institutions as we passed them by. Once we passed by a woman who was working on her front garden. She asked us what we were doing, and we introduced ourselves and explained that we were praying blessings down on the area and its people. She seemed initially approving of the idea, and said she was herself a Catholic and so, encouraged, we offered to pray a blessing over here. To our great surprise and disappointment, she snapped “NO!”.
It wasn’t the only time it happened. Once I and another person were knocking on people’s doors, doing the evangelizing that the recent Popes had been calling us Catholics to do. One couple, whose door we knocked at, actually let us in, instead of closing the door in our faces, so we went in, introduced ourselves and shared the gospel with them. I noticed that the woman had an injured leg, so I offered to pray with her for healing. But again, she refused the prayer, saying things like she didn’t want to bother God, that he had more important things to bother with than her problems, and, despite our assurances that God actually wanted to heal her, kept saying “No”. The funny things is that, while we were talking, her neighbor came in, and the woman immediately said we should pray with her as she had a number of personal problems. So, she wanted her neighbor to be blessed, but not herself.
Again, we left puzzled by her refusal.
Part of our bewilderment was that we had just come back from a mission trip to Peru, where we had gone around various places there, and prayed with various people for healing and blessing from God, and no-one, no one, turned us down. Taxi drivers, waiters in restaurants, people living homeless on the streets, policemen, soldiers, various passersby – all of them were just so willing to receive a blessing from God. But when we came home and started trying to do the same with people here, we got a huge thumbs down.
Why does that happen so often?
Why do we so often refuse, or are reluctant, to embrace God’s blessings, or even fail to ask for it? Do you know that in Jewish homes, every week, as part of their Sabbath evening celebration, the father gathers his children around him and prays blessing over them. Can you imagine? By the time he or she is 18 years of age, a Jewish child will have been blessed 52 weeks a year, for 18 years, a total of 936 times. Jewish children, growing up, receive a multitude of blessings, are saturated in the blessing of God as Father. No wonder Jews have made an impact on the world, far beyond their numbers. Whereas I have come across, and ministered to, so many grown-ups who have any number of personal problems, so many that can be traced to a lack of affirmation, encouragement and blessing from their parents as they were growing up. Parents and grandparents, and godparents, it is never too late to start offering to pray blessing on your children, grandchildren, and godchildren. Teachers and care givers, as well. In fact, anyone, who looks up to you, is influenced by you, depends on you. And, if you are shy or your employers would disapprove of you doing this for various reasons, you can always pray a prayer of blessing quietly.
Part of the problem, it seems to me, stems from the fact that so many of us were not brought up to know God as a God of blessing, whose desire is only to bless us. We have been taught that he is a kind of curmudgeon, or tyrant, or judge, who looks down on us, mostly with disapproval and is just looking for the opportunity to catch us doing something wrong, so he can punish us. I am glad to say that this is changing in the church’s teaching these days, but very often, parents and grandparents are still affected with the old kind of teaching and thinking about God, so they never think to see God as a God of love, and never think to pray God’s blessing on their children and grandchildren. How many of us, brothers and sisters, were ever used to receiving praise and encouragement and blessing from our parents?
How many times have we ever thought to praise, encourage to bless our children?
Which is so sad, since our second reading today, from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, is a profound exposition on the theme of the God of blessing. Having first declared that God has blessed us, and I quote, with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, Paul goes on to enumerate the seven-fold blessing that God pours out on all believers, all given by the Father, in and through his Son, Jesus, and sealed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. In summary, these seven blessings, and remember, seven is the biblical number of perfection, are these: (1) We have been chosen by God, even since before the foundation of the world, to be his holy and beloved ones; (2) God destined us to receive adoption into his family as his sons and daughters; (3) we have received the forgiveness of our sins through the death of Jesus for us on the cross; (4) God has revealed to us his plan for our lives, to gather us up at the end to live with him forever in heaven; (5) for those who, though Jewish, have become Christians, they have received a heavenly inheritance; (6) those who were Gentiles, pagans before becoming Christian, also get to share in God’s plan of salvation’ and (7) we all, Jewish or non-Jewish Christians, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit as a down-payment, a guarantee that all these blessings will come to us.
And all, all these spiritual blessings are ours, before we even get to talking about all the other blessings God will pour out on us throughout our lives: blessings of family, education, background, career, marriage and so on. Note that Paul says that God has freely bestowed these blessings on us, no payment required, and they are given “according to God’s good pleasure of his will”, and “lavished”, that is Paul’s word, “lavished on us.”
Now, here is a fact that you might not be aware of, brothers and sisters. When do all these spiritual blessings begin for us? At our baptism! At our BAPTISM. When parents have their children baptized, they are guaranteeing for their children the seven-fold blessing that I have just been describing. Who, in their right minds, would not want that for their children, and straightaway? Why do parents choose to delay having their children baptized? Because they are not in their “right minds”! In other word, they have never known that baptism brings with it such extraordinary gifts from God- adoption as his children, a heavenly inheritance and destiny, forgiveness of all their sins committed before baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit with everything that this brings, salvation, eternal life, the continued life-long blessing and favor from God as their heavenly Father. But, you and I, brothers and sisters, if we didn’t know all of this before, we know it now, so let us always have this passage ready to quote whenever anyone asks us why we got baptized, or our children baptized, and let us also read it, and re-read it again and again, and, when we do, let us pray with all our heart, the words of Psalm 67: “O God, be gracious to us, and bless us, and let your face to shine upon us … and may you continue to bless us till all the ends of the earth come to revere you.”