Have A Blessed Day - Really?

'Have a blessed day.' It sounds like a nice thing to say. In fact, one person came up to me after a class I was teaching and said that one of the things he started to say in the past years is, 'Have a blessed day.' He said he noticed how it seemed to alter the way the people looked at him. In addition he said that he found that it had caused a change in how he viewed his interactions with others. We had just ended a discussion about how the followers of Jesus are to be followers - we are to be a part of an imitation of life that creates new life right in the midst of the steps of our day. The life is to be nonviolent - creative - self-giving - no longer merely life filled with stories of that kind of life - but a life that becomes us. The way of the cross thus becomes the way we walk - the way we live with the story of Jesus showing us how he walked out ahead of us along the way we follow. It is with that image that I started wondering about the greeting or the sending words have a blessed day.

I am pulled to be very Lutheran here because I want to start saying to folks, 'Wait. What does that mean.' Is it like a polite 'God bless you' that fills a room when there is an audible sneeze offered up by a  complete stranger? Another version of 'Have a blessed day' is 'Be blessed.' Again, what does that mean - what is intended. Is is a version of 'good luck' - 'hope all goes well' - 'break a leg'? All of those send us off with a polite verbal acknowledgment of our presence and our leaving. But, as we all know, luck has nothing to do with much of our lives - things do not go well, in fact things fall apart quite regularly - and people really do break their legs and are thrown into chaos.

If 'have a blessed day' is like having a charmed day - as in, hope your day goes well and the world is fine - then I want folks to stop saying that. The day at hand is not blessed with all good things around me. It is blessed - period. I want to ask, what do you mean by blessed? Yes, when you tell me 'Have a blessed day' or say 'be blessed' is there a content to that sending? In some ways it goes back to what I might call: End-zone - Good catch - Nice Run - Great hit - Jesus is with me all the way spirituality that is devoid of an understanding of the life of Jesus - the cross - and I would even say the resurrection. A blessed day is the way one takes the day - how we see it - how we move within it. Are we the blessed of God who take on the imitative way of Jesus - and the consequences of that way? When that is our life - our blessed day - it may be a day full of roadblocks, tragedy, and pain. Blessed is not a good luck charm or a wish for success. It is an invitation to become like - the one who bends down to serve - the one who steps onto the side of the left out so that at least someone is with them - it is the one who receives the stranger with unbounded hospitality no matter what others say or think.

I was really impressed that the person I noted above said that his day was changed - his way to look at the world and the day changed - his actions may have even changed. To be blessed is to be drawn into a life changing reality in which our humanity - the fullness of its blessedness - becomes present as we go along the way today. So, when I say to you 'have a blessed day' it may come to mean a day in which you are totally rejected for displaying a love for others that cannot be contained - it may come to mean a day in which you let go of that which you thought you could to live without - and yet you experience a resurrection - it may come to mean a day in which you experience life through the lens of others and that new vision rattles you to the bone and your once dry bones take on a new shape you never anticipated.

Could it be that many of our religious sounding phrases we throw out into the day cheapen the vision and life we all hope will actually transform all things?  Another person also offered this active notion of 'have a blessed day' - be a blessing today. That my friends sound utterly transforming to me. For most of my days can be filled with nothing but bitching and biting and baiting and bragging - with little room for being a part of the blessed Reign of God into which I am invited to live. Hmmm.
TRRR