LET’S TALK ABOUT BENEDICTIONS. The benediction we receive at the end of a worship service is a fundamental part of our worship. After we have loved God together, we are sent to love the world with a mission. As we have wrestled with God in the worship space place, we know we will need to continue to wrestle with God in the world. As we saw each other’s pain and woundedness, we are called to forgive and to attend to the pain and woundedness of the world.
At the end of every worship service we hear another call. As we are blessed, we are called to bless the world. The benediction is not only for ourselves, but also for us to live out in the world. That is why the final benediction always comes with a demand/ commandment. We have to go be Christ and do God’s love in the world. A benediction is a way of balancing the spiritual forces and hegemonic powers of our world and a call against powers, principalities and agents of death as we learn from Ephesians 6:12.
Our world is a place where powers are unbalanced. Humans think they can rule over the earth and animals instead of living in harmony and respect. The result is that we are destroying that which keeps us alive. Upper class people think they own their privileges even if it means the condemnation of the poor to places of humility and despair. The result is a brutal inequality in our society. White privilege keeps silent in the face of racism because of the fear of saying anything or even losing their secure place in the world. White parents rarely worry about their kids coming back home due to police violence. They don’t have to teach their kids to be twice as good so they don’t get ‘in trouble” or even lose their lives. Black parents instead wait in anxiety every afternoon until their kids get home as if it was yet another miracle of God.
A benediction is a demand for Christians to side with the poor against the powers that be! Economic, class, gender, race powers that are in place to destroy minority populations. Thus a benediction is not as simple or naïve or inconsequential as we might imagine. Instead, a benediction, every benediction, is a spiritual force, a spiritual energy that tries to balance the evil and maladjusted spiritual forces in our world. When a mother and father bless their children before they leave the house (a pretty much lost ritual in many Christian households), they are covering them with a force that will protect them from the inflamed and very real arrows of evil.
A benediction at the end of the worship service is in this way a covering/protection/ empowerment both of an individual and a community as they go into the world to face the dangers of this world. A benediction is life anew, made fresh again against the ancient powers of death that looms large everywhere.
Thus a blessing at the end of the service is given before a command is given, for this blessing is the creation of the conditions of the possibilities for the commandment to happen.
If the blessing you receive at the end of a worship service does not trouble you, does not send you right in the midst of the evil of this world, what you are receiving might be fluffy poetry (not real poetry), might be nice words or it might be just another unthought-of part of the worship service. But it is not a blessing. A blessing empowers and disturbs, holds us and sends us forth, makes us look into ourselves and care for the world.
What kind of blessing do you receive/give at the end of the worship service?
CLÁUDIO CARVALHAES is associate professor of homiletics and worship at McCormick Theological Seminary.
