The other day I read the rather depressing statistic from Gallup that respect for the clergy in the US has fallen to an alarming 24%. That means that three out of every four people do not believe priests and pastors are worthy of high regard. That is less than nurses, doctors, pharmacists, high school teachers, police officers, funeral directors, accountants for pity's sake, and journalists.
Yes, journalists are more trusted than priests, but at least we ranked higher than car salesmen. Members of Congress. And lawyers.
Do you know who I think is to blame Father Justin? That's who Father Justin began his ministry in April, 2024 in a blaze of holy and righteous zeal. But just two days later, he was removed from ministry and forever banned from delivering word and sacrament. Yes, father Justin is the bad apple that causes the rest of us good fruit to become the objects of scorn and derision of the American people.
Father Justin's crime. Well, he wasn't actually, you know, human, he was ai. And his ministry was on catholic.com as an evangelist. Have a question about Christianity or Catholicism. Just ask Father Justin what could go wrong. But then Father Justin started to skate on thin ethical ice. He would tell people I was ordained in the beautiful city of Rome, the heart of the Catholic church.
It was a profound and humbling experience, one that I carry with me every day in my service to God and his people, except that he was not ordained. Uh, he only pretends to feel gratitude and is incapable of service. But it went further. Later on that first day, users reported that Father Justin went through the motions of absolving people's sins as if through the sacrament of confession.
Weirdly, the AI bot had not been programmed to do this, but AI apparently learn from their interactions and build on their original programming. So here is a non-existent priest giving absolution and bestowing priestly blessings on sincere people who are looking for spiritual help. It begs the question, does a blessing from Father Justin work?
And if it does work, is it more or less effective than a blessing from a human being? And even more fundamentally, what is a blessing anyway are the things we normally think of as blessings, money, happy events, pleasant circumstances, really blessings. Someone might say, I was blessed to win the lottery, but were they really?
Abraham won the lottery. His numbers came up. In today's reading from Genesis, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
This isn't just money or good health or a happy life. This is a dynasty, a reputation, the blessing of being the founder of a great nation. This is blessing in a different universe. In just those three sentences of that reading, the word blessing or bless occurs five times. Abraham becomes the father of many nations.
He is the patriarch of the global house of faith, Christians, Jews, and Muslims revere this passage of scripture because they see their own origins in the man Abraham. Um, and what a relevant weekend it is to think about our three great monotheistic religions who all trace our origins to Abraham. Between us, our three religions make up 55% of the world's population.
That's 4 billion people. That's a lot of blessing, the extraordinary legacy of faith for hundreds of generations to come. But why? Well, I have two secrets to share with you. The secrets of blessing. Here's number one, the sheer unadulterated over the top undeserved gift of God. Abraham and Sarah have done nothing to earn the right to be the parents of faith.
At this moment, they aren't extra holy. They don't impress God with their prayers or their devotion. God chooses them because that is what God does. He takes normal men and women and blesses them. It is God's nature to give and we can't stop him doing it. Try as you may, you can set about to do bad things, but you can't change God's nature.
You can elbow people out of the way to get to communion first, but you won't stop God blessing you. God blesses you because that is who God is, not because of what you do every day. Here it comes more grace, more gifts, more signs of God's love for us. This week, God is going to bless you in ways you can't even imagine because he loves you.
You can protest all you like that you don't deserve it, but it is God's nature to bless and He will not act against his nature even if you give him a thousand good reasons why you don't deserve it. I like this secret, but there's another one, a secret, so miraculous, so transformative that if we really grabbed it, clutched it to our hearts and never let it go, we would turn the world upside down.
God says, I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
I first heard the story of John Lang when I was a teenager, and it still moves me as a boy. I was familiar with his name. Uh, it was plastered on building projects all over the uk. Lang was simply the largest construction company in the country and had a turnover that as a child I could not imagine. His resume featured several hospitals, an airport, Britain's first motorway, and the rebuilding of the gorgeously reimagined Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed during the Second World War.
What I had not known about Sir John Lang, was that he was a deeply committed c. He pioneered employment practices that honored his workforce, such as paid holidays, annual outings, and a culture of care for their families. But more countercultural than that was Lang's salary. Early in his career, he made a pledge to God that he would live on just 500 pounds a year.
When the prophets from his business reached tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, he kept his word and gave it all away, except for 500 pounds a year. Today, the John Lang Group is a multi-billion pound international enterprise with an annual turnover of 250 million. But when Sir John Lang died in 1978, his personal estate was valued at 371 pounds.
The rest he'd given away.
That is the big secret of blessings. We get them in order to give them. I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing of all the deep spiritual truths that the Christian Church has failed to understand in our 2000 year history. This is surely the most tragic and the most damning.
There is evidence everywhere in the developed world of the church's historic greed and lust for power. As a modern European Christian, I feel embarrassed by the splendor and the historic wealth of our buildings and treasures somewhere. I suspect early on in our history, we stopped seeing God's blessing as something to pass on to the rest of the world and saw it as something to be hoarded fought over and jealously kept for ourselves.
Today we tourists marvel at the buildings and the artifacts, and rightly so, but what was Christ's church doing? Accumulating land and making jewel and crusted headgear for its clergy when people around them were starving.
Blessings are forgiving away. We are blessed in order to bless. Yes, this is impossibly challenging, and yes, I am a hypocrite. I don't live like John Lang, and my lack of conviction in what I'm preaching makes me resist living like John Lang. For John Lang, it was the blessing of money. For you, it may be that too, or you may have been blessed with a wealth of time or of energy, of intellect, of education, of experience, of love, of creativity, of practical skills.
Here the word of the Lord. We have been blessed, but not so we can stockpile our blessings. Not so we can hoard our riches, be they material, mental, physical, or spiritual. But to bless others.
In the Spanish town of Segovia, there's an aqueduct. It was built in the year 109 AD for over 1800 years. It carried cool water from the Sierra de Guatemala mountains to the dry and thirsty city. Nearly 60 generations of people were kept alive and thriving because of this ancient wonder of engineering.
They loved their aqueduct and treasured its gift of life, sustaining water. Over time though, the people of the town became anxious about their beautiful ancient treasure, and they imagined how terrible it would be if it collapsed. So they set about preserving it to make sure it continued in as good a condition as possible.
So in the middle of the 18th century, the decision 19th century, the decision, uh, was made to retire the aqueduct and the city laid modern water pipes to homes and public buildings, and as a consequence, the aqueduct began to fall apart. The hot sun on the dry mortar caused it to crumble the bricks and stones sagged, and threatened to fall.
Centuries of flow had kept the structure not just useful but alive. It was never meant to be a museum piece. It had a purpose. It was designed for service and for flow. And when well-meaning people tried to preserve it, they ended up destroying it.
Like Abraham, we have been blessed. We have been born into the economy of flow without flow. Things die, be it the flow of oxygen, the flow of blood, the flow of water, the flow of love and goodness and blessing. We get it to give it, get it to give it, get it to give it. The nation, God created thought Abraham was meant to be a blessing to the rest of the world.
It was meant to bless its neighbors. And the Christian Church was born for the same reason. St. John's for exactly the same reason. To bless to get it and pass it on. Get it, and pass it on. We receive the blessing. We stay in the flow. That's why we're here to receive the blessing of Word and sacrament, song and fellowship to get fed and satisfied and full of blessing.
But then we must go and pass it on. May God give us the will and the success to stay in the flow. Amen.