Gracious God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that we can, and the wisdom to know the difference ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
With nearly 70 million views, Simon Sinek’s TED Talk called “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” is one of the most widely viewed, discussed, and implemented leadership strategies. Using the examples of Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers, he argues that “people don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.” In other words, if you don’t know your “why” it doesn’t matter how good the “how” or the “what” of your product, business, or plan is, it won’t flourish or captivate anyone.
In his lecture and subsequent book called “Start With Why,” Sinek introduces the idea of the golden circle – three concentric circle with “why” at the center. The next circle is the “how” – essentially, your standards, norms, and values. And the outer circle is the “what” – the outcome, product, or plan.
He uses Apple as his primary example. He says that if they followed the standard marketing of most tech companies, they’d say “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly.” And maybe some people would buy one, because all those things are true. But we all know that Apple has created more than lineup of computers, earbuds, and phones. They’ve built an identity, and they’ve done that by having a compelling why at the center of everything.
Sinek notes that Apple’s messaging is different. They say “In everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. They way we challenge the status quo is by making products that are beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make computers.” By starting with the why, then moving to the how, and finally to the what – Apple has created far more than a company worth over $4 trillion, they’ve created a brand, a purpose, a following.
I bring this all up because many churches really have no idea what we’re doing. It’s sort of a perpetual motion machine – we just keep doing what we’ve always done because it’s seemed to have worked. I mean, look at this place. You don’t get a building like this without doing at least a few things right along the way. But we’re finding ourselves in a place where we can no longer take church attendance for granted, where fewer and fewer people know the story of faith, where the “what” of the products of Sacraments, forgiveness, and moral formation are no longer things that a lot of society is interested in buying. For a long time, the Church didn’t need to worry about the why or the how, we were the only place to get the whats in terms of meaning, purpose, and networking. But that’s no longer the case.
At our recent Vestry retreat, I told the Vestry though that instead of focusing on creating a “mission statement,” “vision statement,” or even a “why statement,” that I think we need to focus on the “how.” This isn’t to undermine anything I’ve said about the importance of the “why,” rather, it’s just that the “why” is given to us; it’s not something we need to spend time figuring out.
On page 854 of the Prayer Book, in the Catechism, we find a question about the mission of the church, which the Prayer Book defines as “restoring all people to unity with God and each other.” That’s our why. We believe that unity with God and one another is our purpose, our destiny, our hope, and our calling. Of if you prefer a quotation from Scripture, we heard it this morning, both in the most famous verse there is, followed by most overlooked verse there is: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Essentially, Jesus us is telling us his “why,” his purpose – and it’s what the Prayer Book also says. The why of faith, the why of Church, the why of Jesus is to restore us to unity with God and one another. So instead of paying a consultant to tell us what we already know, I told the Vestry that we can take that “why” as a given, and instead put our imagination, creativity, and energy into figuring out the “how,” and from there, the “what” will come organically.
To be sure, this is a tough question that does require a lot of prayerful wondering and discernment – how, in the year of our Lord in 2026, in Colorado Springs, within our broader Anglican tradition, do we restore ourselves to unity with God and one another?
We would do well to pay attention to Scripture to see how God intends for this work to happen. As we heard in the reading from Genesis 3 last Sunday, we were created for relationship with God and one another. But we were tempted into talking about God instead of with God, and the severance and disunity began.
How God intends to begin the process of repair and knitting us back together was through one couple named Abram and Sarai, who would later be renamed as Abraham and Sarah. God says to Abram, “I will bless you so that you will be a blessing.” That’s it. That’s how God intends to restore what has been broken by sin, by blessing Abram, through whom God will bless all of creation, so that we might be restored to unity with God and one another. This is how we participate in the mission that God has given us – having been blessed, we are to bless others.
But what does it mean to bless? We use that term all the time, but it’s not always clear what we mean. We say “bless you” when someone sneezes, the priest pronounces a blessing upon people and objects, and we often say “Blessed be God.”
There are though a few essential aspects to what it means to bless. The first is the linguistic root of the word “bless” in Hebrew. It’s related for the word for bowing down. So there is a sense of humility in receiving and giving blessings. Tomorrow, March 2nd, the Church marks the feast of St. Chad and today we will be bestowing the St. Chad’s Cross upon a member of this parish who has blessed us through their humble service. As we receive God’s blessing, we do so in humility, recognizing that we have not deserved or earned the gift of God’s love, but love is lavished upon us because God is love. As we bless others, we do so as conduits of grace, not the source. Grace is one of those things that increases the more we give it away. Our mission is not to bless others from the resources we can summon within ourselves, rather we allow ourselves to be used as God’s means of blessing the world. As St. Francis teaches us to pray, “Lord, make us instruments of your peace.” Blessing is grounded in humble service.
Perhaps the best way of thinking about blessing is as the opening of a door. A blessing is an initiation into an alternative reality, something like opening the wardrobe and stepping into Narnia. It’s a logic we know in the Beatitudes – Blessed are the meek; blessed are the poor; blessed are the peacemakers. They are blessed not on the basis of their current situation, but they are blessed because they are inhabiting God’s kingdom as it is coming on earth as it is in heaven.
Now, a blessing isn’t an incantation, it’s not a spell, it’s not magic. It is speaking a divine truth that might not otherwise be apparent. In the Celtic origins of our Anglican tradition, many people had a “lorica,” a breastplate. In the case of soldiers, these were literal pieces of armor. But for people like St. Chad, or more famously, St. Patrick, the lorica was a prayer, a blessing that was seen as a protective shield that went with a person throughout life. The oft quoted and infinitely reassuring words of St. Julian of Norwich function as such a protective blessing – all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
When we receive a blessing from God, it is stepping into a peace that passes all understanding, into a love that defies explanation, into a mercy that is beyond all deserving. Scholars sometimes call this a “speech-act” whereby the utterance creates the reality.
Think about going to a baseball game – you think the pitch was right down the middle and so you yell “Strike three, you’re out!” Well, the only thing that happens as a result of your outburst is a hoarse throat, perhaps some annoyed seatmates. Your words are ineffective and empty. But when the umpire says, “You’re out!,” it is so. Likewise, a blessing from God is not only true, but it makes real that which it declares. Receiving a blessing allows us to live according to the rhythms of God’s grace instead of the cacophony of the world.
The third aspect of a blessing is that it is an act of consignment, meaning it is an act of entrusting these things to God. When something is blessed, whether that’s a person or an object, we are saying it is dedicated to God and that it, or they, will find their fulfillment in God’s purposes, not our own. When we bless, we trust God will do more than we can ask for or even imagine.
When we say “amen” to a blessing for peace, we are handing the production of peace to God, not our efforts. When we say “amen” to a blessing for protection, we are trusting God to be always be with us and for us. When we say “amen” to a blessing for guidance, we are prioritizing God’s wisdom over our own. And the same is true when we bless others – we are entrusting them to God instead of needing to be in control. This is apparent in how God speaks of the blessing to Abram – “I will make your name great, “I will bless you.” God is the active agent in a blessing. Receiving a blessing is to acknowledge that God is God, and we are not.
Blessing is how God’s why is put into action – by blessing us so that we might bless this world in God’s name. The purpose of God’s blessing is our restoration to unity with God and one another. God tells Abram that this blessing will make him into a great people so that all of the families of the earth will be blessed. To borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, we might say that the reason for God’s blessing is the creation of the beloved community.
The work we have been given to do is receiving and reflecting the blessing of God. Our mission is to bless – to be grounded in humility, to enter into God’s holy alternative way of love, and to entrust our lives to God’s mission and purpose. May the God who has blessed us to be a blessing grant us both the courage to pursue beloved community and the grace to dwell in it. Amen.
