Blessing God*

I know I missed posting last week. Late Friday night I returned from Heraklion, Crete to Amsterdam on a delightful airline called Transavia, which is all Dutch, but for some reason they love flying in the middle of the night. So it threw my sleep-wake pattern off schedule completely.

(The photo to the left is a ferry called Kriti I, sitting in the port in Heraklion.)

Besides, I was so relieved the rapture found me in Amsterdam, I just took the opportunity to sleep late and enjoy the sun. Sorry.

While I was in Greece I had another one of my silly epiphanies. Silly, I say, because well, they are! This one came about while I was sitting on my deck overlooking the Venetian Harbor in Heraklion, reading my “teach yourself Greek” book, when suddenly I learned “kyrie” means “mister.”

I was dumbstruck! You mean all of that ponderous ostentatious singing and beating of chests and gnashing of teeth in church, and in the end Greeks would just say “Hey, mister”? Well, yes.

(This is a photo of Dia, the island just north of Heraklion, viewed from the rooftop garden at my hotel.)

Of course, like all of my silly epiphanies I kept pondering it (and you can expert to hear more about this one). I Googled “kyrie” and “eleison” and all I could find were essays about how it means “Lord have mercy” in the Roman rite, which is true; but there was nowhere online any etymological help.

So lets go back to empirical reality. Greek people seem to live pretty close to their reality. So I could imagine that a Greek Christian might speak to God by saying “Hey, mister” and then I could imagine the rest might be something like “let me be.” (I said, I’m imagining this ….). It sort of turns the relationship between us and God upside down, from the usual western perspective.

(This is a photo of the Western end of the Venetian port, where small vessels are docked.)

Of course, upside down sometimes turns out to be right-side up, especially when we’re dealing with God. For instance, we have to learn to bless God. I know, you are thinking I have that backwards, that it ought to be God who blesses us. But no, I have it right—it is we who have to learn to bless God. God already has blessed us in the eternal act of creating us as children of God and stewards of God’s kingdom (and all you need to to do have your breath taken away is look at the beautiful waters of the Aegean).

If we already have received the favor of God (the literal meaning of to be blessed) then it is our responsibility to return the favor, to show God our love for God and our thanks for our createdness by blessing God in return. It is easy enough to do; just as easy as blessing your friend when he sneezes. In every moment when you realize how great you feel, just pray “God, I bless you for this wonderful day.”

This is just one wonderful example of how what Jesus has come to teach us is that we are so used to seeing everything backwards that we cannot see the world God has called us to live in. Maybe this all comes from our upbringing by parents who have to teach us everything. We spend so much of our lives as children feeling at once totally liberated and totally subservient. I think we learn that it is only when we run and jump and play that we are liberated, and that all the rest of the time we are subjects of an autocratic regime unable to make decisions for ourselves. So we expect Santa Claus to bring us nice things (rather than figure out ourselves how to gain them), we expect magical lovers to appear in our midst and love us at first sight, and we expect God to make a beautiful garden and let us live in it (without having to even lift a finger to tend it).

(This is the wall of the Venetian Port stretching to the northeast above Heraklion; this is where the ferries depart for Athens or other Greek isles.)

But you see, Jesus says we have to be active about creating the kingdom of God, at the very least we have to “seek” it, we have to look for it. Because so long as we wear these backwards blinders we will not see it. We have to turn ourselves around and learn that it is through us that the kingdom becomes manifest in the world. And we have to begin to think of God as our partner in creation–“Hey mister!” indeed.

This lesson applies especially to the lgbt community. We have to learn that God has made us gay on purpose, so that we can teach our nongay peers how to turn around and see the way. After all, we spend our whole lives living in a dual reality. If anybody knows how to move from one to another, we do. So it is vitally important, not just for us, but for the kingdom itself, that we learn to have pride in who we are and to bless God for the vision we have been given in our own createdness.

In today’s Psalm God is blessed repeatedly in thanksgiving for the wonders of creation. And in today’s Gospel Jesus is at pains to explain that most people cannot see the way because they do not understand how. But we, as disciples of Christ, can not only see the way but we can lead the way. And we do this by keeping Jesus’commandments. Love God, bless God, and in so doing bless and love each other.

*6 Easter (Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:7-18; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21)

©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.