Nobody Has Said It Over You

He counted it once, roughly, on the back of an order of service, and then wished he had not.

Every Sunday for nineteen years. Every wedding, and there have been about a hundred and sixty. Every funeral. Every meal in a hall, every ordinary Tuesday evening thing that ends with people standing up and looking at him and going quiet because they know what comes next.

He lifts his hands and he says it over them, and he has never once got bored of it, and it is the part of every week he loves the most.

Somewhere over three thousand times.

And in nineteen years nobody has ever said one over him.

Not once. He has checked, properly, the way you check a thing when you suspect you are being unfair. He went back through ordination, which was a lovely day and where the words were said corporately over four people at once, and he does not count that and he has thought hard about whether that is fair and he thinks it is. He went back through two moves and a sabbatical he did not take.

He cannot find a single occasion where a person stood in front of him, put their hands out, and spoke a blessing over him by name.

Here is the odd part and it is why he has never mentioned it. He does not feel entitled to one. When he tries to imagine somebody doing it he immediately feels awkward, and part of him thinks it would be embarrassing for both of them.

Which he has begun to notice is a strange thing to feel about something he does three thousand times to other people and considers the best part of his week.

He is not sad about it exactly. He is standing at the front of a room most weeks with his hands up, doing the thing he loves, and a small quiet observation has been forming for about four years that he has never said out loud in any form to anybody: it only goes one way.

Somebody came out to meet him

Let me be clear at the start about what this is.

Nothing is going to be asked of you. There is no arrangement to make, nobody to ask, no hint at the end that you should go and get somebody to do this for you. If a line of this turns into a task then it has failed. You are being given something and asked for nothing at all.

Now, there is an episode in Genesis that takes up three verses and then does not go away.

Abram has been in a fight. He has rescued his nephew and a great many other people and he is coming back, and he is at the top of his powers: victorious, respected, needing nothing, the man everybody else in that region is looking to.

And this happens.

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth.Genesis 14:18-19

Look at what is going on in the movement of that scene.

Abram is not asking. He is not in need, he has not sent for anybody, and there is no indication that it has occurred to him that he might want something. He is on his way home from doing the thing he does.

And somebody comes out. That is the verb the passage turns on. Melchizedek is not summoned and does not wait to be found. He brings bread and wine out to meet a man who was not expecting anything, and he says a blessing over him by name.

So hear this, standing at the front of a room with your hands up: it does not only go one way, and it has not for a very long time. That is not my sentiment; it is what His word records happening to the man everybody else in that story was looking to, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes three verses out of a war story and lands them in a man with an order of service in his hand.

And notice the second thing, because it is the one about your awkwardness.

Abram did not think it was embarrassing. He took it, and then he gave a tenth of everything he had, which is not the reaction of a man who has been made uncomfortable. He was blessed by somebody and it registered.

The awkwardness you feel when you imagine somebody blessing you is not humility and it is not modesty. It is what happens to a person who has been on one side of an exchange for so long that the other side has stopped feeling like a place they are allowed to stand.

You are allowed to stand there. Scripture puts the strongest man in the chapter on the receiving end without one word of apology, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling you that it would be embarrassing for both of you.

And here is the last thing, and it is the one I most want you to have.

That blessing over Abram was not arranged. Nobody organized it, and it did not happen because Abram raised the matter with anybody. It came out to meet him on a road.

Which means the thing you have not had in the form you know it may well have been arriving in a form you do not recognize, on ordinary roads, in bread and wine that did not look like bread and wine, from people who were not standing at a front with their hands up.

You have been blessed and it has been happening for years. His word puts the whole initiative on the side of the one who came out, and the Holy Spirit has been arranging that for nineteen years in ways that were never going to look like a Sunday.