Blessing the World by Mending the World

I have often been intrigued by the notion of "blessing the world." It's important for me because I am one that believes our call for mission can be traced back to God's call on Abraham and Sarah. God's call was for Abraham to lead a nation - a people - that would be blessed and would bless in return. Unfortunately, too many TV preachers and religious hucksters have caused us to think that to be "blessed" is simply to make alot of money and have alot of nice things. If you don't have that, you are not blessed. But, I keep suspecting that to "bless" the world goes alot deeper then that. Thank goodness I came across some stuff I read from Walter Brueggemann a while back. In his book, The Word the Redescribes the World, Brueggemann writes:

"Thus blessing is that the world should be generous, abundant, and frutiful, bespeaking effectiveness in generative fertility, material abundance, and this-worldly prosperity. Perhaps out best way to speak of this mandate is to think of 'shalom' in the broadest scope. Israel's life is to make the world work better according to the intention of the creator. That is an immense mission given to this one man (Abraham) and his family!...It is the missional mandate of God to Abraham that Abraham shoudl exist so that the general condition of curse in the world is turned to a general condition of blessing, life, and well-being...Israel's mission is to mend the world in all its parts. That is Israel's raison d'etre in the midst of creation...the mandate in Genesis is not to make the nations over into Israelites, nor even to make them Yahwists. The focus is kept upon the improvement of the quality of life as willed by the creator God."

For my own purposes, I have always felt that a simple call of the church is to mend, tend, and send. In other words, we are to mend broken lives...and mend creation. We are then to tend to the spiritual growth of those in our community...and then we are to send folks out so they can engage in mending the world. I appreciate what Brueggemann has to say by indicating that the goal is not to make "...the nations into Israelites, nor even to make them Yahwists. The focus is kept upon the improvement of the quality of life as willed by the Creator God."

Makes me wonder if ultimately when we are to "bless" the world that the focus is not so much on whether people are converted by moreso on the fact that we seek to improve the quality of life for everyone - as willed by God. This has huge implications for issues such as healthcare, poverty, homelessness, even ministering to those who are laid off, bankrupt, and addicted to consumerism.

We bless the world by mending the world - as willed by God.