First Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity Sunday Year A

First Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday Year A June 4, 2023 What would you think if I said to you, “Well, bless your heart!?” It can mean any number of things, right?, depending on the context. I could say it to you to comfort you. I can say it to you pitying. I can say it to you as a joke, or even making fun of you. I had a friend in seminary who was Canadian and most recently from Minnesota who found herself befriended by many of the Southerners in our class, and she spent months making a study of “bless your heart,” seeking to understand the myriad of ways that it was used and invoked in conversation by the rest of us. And what she learned is that it’s all about tone. i In the book The Lives We Actually Have (which is actually a book of blessings), Kate Bowler and co-author Jessica Richie write about blessing in the introduction: “The act of blessing is the strange and vital work of noticing what is true about God and ourselves. And sometimes those truths are awful. Like, blessed are those who mourn. I mean scripturally it’s true. Jesus said it. But does any of that feel true when our worlds are ripped to pieces? No. Or, blessed are the poor. Again, it doesn’t feel true at all. But in the act of blessing the world as it is and as it should be, we are starting to reassemble what we know. Maybe, God, you are here in the midst of this grief. Maybe, God, you can provide for this specific problem or be discoverable when I’m buttering this toast.” They continue, “For that reason, [another author] calls the act of blessing a kind of spiritual “placement.” This goes here. That goes there. We are beginning to fit this moment into the larger order of things, the divine story of God’s work and purposes. I find that language of placement and re-placement to be incredibly satisfying. Blessings put our spiritual house in order, even when our circumstances are entirely out of order.” I love that understanding of blessings as something that help us name our realties and help us order or re-order our lives. In our reading from 2nd Corinthians for today, Paul is concluding that letter and he is invoking the power of the divine relationship including the characteristics of the relationship of the Trinity: order, mutual agreement, and peace. And he offers the people of the church of Corinth God’s blessing in a trinitarian blessing that is unique to all of Paul’s letters: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” So what’s really happening here? The church at Corinth is Paul’s “problem children.” He’s already written them one letter where he is letting them have it because he has heard that they are divided up into factions. In first Corinthians, he urges them toward unity and to remember the faith that he taught them when he was with them. In second Corinthians, Paul has gotten wind that these folks known as the “super-apostles” have moved into town and are influencing the Corinthians. The super-apostles are questioning the absent Paul’s credentials, and so he defends himself and reminds the Corinthians to not be led astray by false teachers of the gospel. Perhaps Paul is trying to remind the Corinthians about the nature of God who is social and relational, that we are made in the image of God, so we are social and relational also? Perhaps because he has such difficulties with the Corinthians, Paul is urging them to draw upon the full resources of God for this troubled chapter in their life-reminding them that the love of God is available to them; that the grace of Christ is already theirs, and that the Holy Spirit is actively working to connect them with Paul, with each other and with the followers of Jesus all around the world. There are echoes here of Jesus’ promise in Matthew, that he will be with his disciples and us always, even to the end of the age. The gift of the Trinity, the divine relationship, is that we are all always connected—the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always in relationship with each other and us; we are connected through the Holy Spirit as the body of Christ that transcends time and space, this life and the next. In our Wednesday healing service, we reflected on a time when we received an unexpected blessing from someone. The common threads in those experiences were when a person we encountered (sometimes a stranger, sometimes someone more intimate) named something about us or about the world that helped us re-order our understanding of ourselves or the world, helped connect us deeper to others, and helped us be more at peace. This is the ultimate gift of blessing and it is the ultimate gift of Christian community—why we need each other--to help uncover and discover truths about God and ourselves that we couldn’t find on our own. I invite you to reflect on this notion of blessing this week as well. Think about a time when you received an unexpected blessing and how that changed what you know about yourself or the world around you. And be open to paying attention to ways you might be called to receive or to offer blessings from others this week. Today as we mark the end of Rev Aimee’s time with us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the unexpected blessing she has been in our lives here in this place over the last five years. Some of my colleagues thought I was crazy hiring a United Methodist deacon, but it worked, so HA!!!! She has freely shared her gifts of ordering things, of creating connections; she has helped us be more aware of pop-culture and the world around us. I mean, let’s be honest….how many of us finally broke down and watched Ted Lasso because Aimee wouldn’t stop asking if we’d watched it yet? She definitely brings the fun, and we are grateful for all the ways that she blessed us and helped us learn more about the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of Holy Spirit as she walked this way with us for a season. i. Here’s an interesting article from Southern Living that helps unpack more the phrase “bless your heart”: https://www.southernliving.com/culture/bless-your-heart-response