One hot and humid August, my mother was hospitalized for pneumonia. I called my father one morning to see how things were going. At the time he was in his mid-eighties with diminishing eyesight. He said that he would be heading back to the hospital later that day, but right then, he was in the middle of canning tomatoes.

“It's the harvest season down here,” he explained. “If I don't do this, the produce will rot.” So that day it was tomatoes, the next day it would be peaches, and then tomato juice.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t concerned about my mother—he was. But in his work my father reminded me of what late summer is all about.

In the middle of difficulties—illness of loved ones, often tropical humidity—this is a time of fruitfulness and blessing. In the middle of stress at work or the ongoing recovery from the flood or the beginning of school this is a time when, if we are wise, we will learn again to receive and to give thanks for the blessing that God gives.

I have to admit that the word “blessing” troubles me. It’s one of my least favorite words and I don’t use it very often. It carries a sense of pious self-righteousness. All too often “blessing” is more a synonym for getting what one wants—it was a blessing that I found a parking place this morning—than it is an expression of faith.

Not that the theologians help much. I find no references to “blessing” in the indexes in most of my books on theology. Calvin alone does not disappoint, writing often about the blessing of God. In most books, however, I find mention of “blasphemy” or “blood,” but there is no “blessing” in between.

Have we lost the sense of God’s sustaining power with us as we live through the daily ups and downs of our lives? Do we think that it is on our own that we live and move and have our being?

It’s easy to forget or ignore the blessing of God.

If  we think at all of God’s salvation—the wholeness, the fullness of life that God gives—we usually think in terms of deliverance—from sin, from oppression, from death. The God who saves is the God who delivers us.

Salvation has another side, however, and that is blessing. Certainly the God who saves is also the God who blesses.

While deliverance is a momentary event, God’s blessing is ongoing and not always readily observed. It often occurs in secret, unseen ways. Blessing involves growth and maturation, prospering and succeeding, taking root and spreading out. The God who blesses is the God who is present with us through our days. Blessing speaks of fruitfulness, of the power to accomplish. Blessing gives the power to live, the intensification of life.[1]

Perhaps we can look for that blessing through celebration.

The Hebrew people were told to celebrate when the first fruits were harvested. Celebrate because of what they had and because of what was coming. They would celebrate not only the present reality but also the promised future.

It wasn’t that they all walked around wearing T-shirts that said: “Life Is Good.”

There were problems. There were challenges. Even so, when the earth began to yield its bounty a festival was in order. The celebrating would be an acknowledgement of God as the giver of all good things. In feasting the people would be reminded that God’s purposes move toward more life, greater ability. This is to say, God is One who blesses.

And the words in Exodus give a new context to feasting.

This was not mindless Thursday-to-Saturday-night partying. The people brought a new awareness to the feast. They accompanied the celebration with concern for the well being of others—the stranger in the community, even the animals, even the land.

The good that we receive from the hand of God is not meant for us alone. Abundance leads to sharing—taking all those extra zucchinis to someone else, bringing food to the food pantry, providing schools supplies for children in our city, cleaning up and restoring houses. Abundance leads to sharing—extending simple acts of kindness toward others, offering assistance, compassion, understanding. The blessing, the abundance of life that we know in the goodness around us, the abundance of life that we find in Jesus Christ leads us to be a conduit for blessing—a channel for more life in the world.

Through celebration and regard for others, we might see the blessing in which we live and by which we are sustained.

Paul, in his profound meditation on the resurrection in his first letter to the Corinthians, uses the image of first fruits to help us understand what the God of blessing was doing in and through Jesus.

Jesus is the first, Paul tells us. The first of many who will enter into a new life that God will give.  First fruits awaken the appetite. They make us desire what is coming with more intensity.  The risen Christ is a messenger of what is to come—life abundant, life eternal. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning, not the culmination of the Christian hope. The victory of Easter is not yet complete, but it is promised.

Our sense of blessing begins to change.

The Old Testament scholar, Claus Westermann said that “As a result of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, death is no longer the limit of God’s work of blessing. Now blessing shares in the hidden nature of God’s work in the cross of Christ. Blessing can no longer automatically be recognized in what occurs but may be hidden in the cross and in death. A part of the acceptance of God’s blessing in the name of Jesus Christ is the acceptance and affirmation of the way God’s work of blessing is hidden.”

Much more must happen before the world is as God intends it to be. We can respond to a world in pain neither with a quick optimism that things must be fine if Jesus is raised nor with a dejected pessimism that evil has been victorious.

The hope of the resurrection is the hope that Jesus is the first of many, that God is still at work in us and through us transforming the world, bringing life out of death.

All of this tells us something about God. The resurrection of Jesus Christ means that God is always bringing forth the new. The cross speaks of God standing with us in the flux of events. The resurrection speaks of God’s being always ahead of events. This is the ground of hope for the world.

The future is life and not death. Christ, the first fruits, goes ahead of us.

This is a time of abundance and fruition and blessing.

And it is also a time of beginnings—a time when new seeds are being planted as students arrive and unpack, as parents say goodbye, as students board those yellow buses, as parents say goodbye. This is a time of beginnings—and the blessing in the start of new ventures.

The wonderful children’s author and illustrator Cynthia Rylant wrote a Child’s Yearbook of Blessings. This is what she writes for this time of year:

Bless the buses, bless the mamas,

Bless the babies in pajamas,

Bless the ones who go to learn,

Dogs will wait ‘til they return.

What a wonderful blessing for this time of summer’s fruitful ending and the fertile beginning to school.

I would add, bless the papas as well, especially as this week many anxious mothers and fathers have sent their children off to school—some for the first time.

The beginning of the school year needs its own kind of blessing, doesn’t it?

The blessing of God surrounds us in all our days. It is our particular task, however, to discover that blessing afresh in this season of abundance, to discover it anew as the school years begin

Let us celebrate this time of fruition, this time of beginning, these late August days. Let us give thanks to God for the blessings it brings to our tables, the blessings of schools and teachers, the blessings of work, the blessings of family and friends, the blessings of this community of faith—God’s people called to be a fruitful blessing to the world.