Leaning into gratitude (to see what it's like) -- an un-preached sermon to open the door to Lent 2020

(With thanks to Pattie Lanktree for the image.)

For a few years now I’ve been part of a male spirituality group.  On occasion, distinct from our usual meetings, we plan a special “Gratitude Meeting” at which the only agenda for the meeting is for any who wish, to share what they are grateful for at that moment.

It seems I don’t get as excited by those meetings as the other guys.  And I wonder why.

Am I just simply ungrateful?  Unwilling or unable to feel and express gratitude for what I have, what I have been given, and what blesses and saves me?  Inclined instead to see what I have as somehow my “possession” – mine to work at, earn, and claim as my due reward?

Or am I suspicious?  Jaded and tempted to cynicism by the kind of religious gratitude that thanks God for every big and little answered wish and want – from the momentous to the frivolous, from the deeply life-changing to the patently selfish?  The kind of thanksgiving that seems to cheapen the meaning of gratitude and to shrink God down to a household deity pandering to self-centredness?

Or am I maybe resentful?  Envious of what others have, enjoy, and have accomplished?  Feeling cheated and overlooked by life and by God in the blessings sweepstakes?  Maybe sadly undone by my own mistakes and issues along the way?

I’m thinking about all this because I believe what’s said about gratitude being a first step towards true spirituality, and a basis for contentment and resilience in life.  Also, gratitude is the theme of both our Lenten discussion group and our worship this year.

The discussion group will be using video interviews with Diana Butler Bass as the beginning point for conversation about gratitude.  Bass has literally written the book on gratitude.  It’s called Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks and in it she chronicles her own difficulties with feeling and expressing gratitude, what she has learned along the way, and the difference she sees it making to life.  For five Monday evenings through March and into April we’ll meet to talk about what her learnings might mean for us.

On Sundays the theme of our worship is “Growing Gratitude.”  It will be a journey into the unknown as much for me as for you, and I hope the journey will be good for us all.

At the moment, two things stand out in my soul.

One – a general point, is something Diana Butler Bass says early on in her book.  She says gratitude at its deepest level is not about specific things we get or that come our way and that we are thankful for, but that it’s about learning to see how (and why) all of life, all that is, and all that ever will be is gift.  That as one of many inter-dependent and deeply inter-connected creatures (rather than as either creator or centre of the universe) we really make, earn, and in the end deserve nothing as our own, and that the most honest thing we can do is constantly to look around, feel wonder, and see what we can do to happily and thankfully share what is there for the good of all.

As she puts it, “the universe is a gift.  Life is a gift.  Air, light, soil and water are gifts.  Friendship, love, sex, and family are gifts.  We live on a gifted planet.  Everything we need is here, with us.  We freely respond to these gifts by choosing a life of mutual care. 

“Some people think of God as the giver of all the gifts.  Whether you believe God or not-God, however, gifts come first.  We would not even exist without them.  We are all beneficiaries … and we express our appreciation by passing gifts on to others.  When we share gifts, we become benefactors toward the well-being of all.  Although it may be ‘new’ to some in Western societies, this is an ancient understanding, one that echoes through many of the world’s oldest and wisest sacred traditions.  It is an invitation to … live more simply, graciously, and freely, attuned to our own hearts, our neighbours, and the common good.”  (pp. xxiv-xxv)

The second thing sitting in my soul is a practical thing.  It’s a minute – literally one minute in the middle of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood,” the recent movie about Mr. Rogers.

Mr. Rogers, played by Tom Hanks, is in a restaurant with a jaded, life-worn journalist trying to figure him out.  As their meal arrives Mr. Rogers invites the reporter to join him in a minute of quiet remembrance of all the people he can recall who have loved him into being.  Reluctantly the reporter agrees and joins Mr. Rogers in a full minute of silent remembering of all the people – good and bad, easy and hard, likeable and unlikeable, who have loved him into being.  (And it’s the “and’s” in the last part of that sentence that are the important part.)

The way the scene is scripted in the movie, the other people in the restaurant see what the two men are doing and also fall silent for the minute.  The way the scene is seen in the theatre, every person in the theatre is also drawn into that one minute of silent, spiritual remembrance of people along the way who have loved us into being.  Japhia and I both felt it, and I know others did too.

All of which makes me both nervous about and drawn towards Lent this year.  Gratitude as a spiritual challenge, a transformative idea, and a practical exercise – what an interesting journey this might be.

And one last thing – yes, a third thing comes to mind, beyond the two I warned you about.  A memory.  Of driving a few years ago to who knows where, listening to an Adele recording of the Bob Dylan song, “Make You Feel My Love.”  Crying as I listened to the song, deeply remembering different persons who at different times in my life have loved me in ways the song unveils.

“When the rain is blowing in your face, / and the whole world is on your case, / I could offer you a warm embrace / to make you feel my love.”  All the way through to “I could make you happy, / make your dreams come true; / nothing that I wouldn’t do, / go to the ends of the Earth for you, / to make you feel my love.”

I have known people who loved me that way – at least, as close to it as they could manage and as I allowed them.

And is maybe that it?  The secret – at least one of the secrets, to gratefulness? 

To know yourself to have been loved in ways you neither earned nor deserved nor even could completely comprehend?  And to remember it?

p.s. The Adele version of the Bob Dylan song can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0put0_a--Ng

Blessed are the broken (sermon from Sunday, Feb 2, 2020)

Reading: Matthew 5:1-12

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is presented as a new Moses for the people of God – someone who leads them out of our imprisonment to both Rome and Jerusalem (to state and church), to be free for the ways of the kingdom of God. 

Just as Moses led the people through the Red Sea and then to the Jordan, so Jesus joined them in crossing the Jordan to new life on the other side.

Just as Moses went up on a mountain to see the glory of God, so Jesus went up on a mountain to be the glory of God.

And just as Moses came down with a law for the people to live, Jesus came down … not with a list of laws, but with a list of blessings for people who felt like they were failures in the world’s eyes, and a promise that maybe their awareness of failure was exactly what made them people of God.

"Blessed are the poor ... are the meek ... and are the peace-makers..." he says. Or, as Monty Python says he says in The Life of Brian, "blessed are the Greek ... and the cheese-makers..." It's always interesting how things get heard and remembered.  

Even among the Gospel writers.  Like when Luke recalls Jesus blessing the poor, and making it clear he means the poor in wealth, resources and worldly power; while Matthew remembers Jesus blessing "the poor in spirit."  Quite a different thing.

Some see Matthew and Paul alike as having to deal with churches that were very much caught up in the charismatic-celebrity thing -- the all-too-worldly tendency to look up to, and bow down to those in a community who seem to be especially gifted, learned, dominant, full of answers for everyone, and always more than ready to take charge of things -- those who are "rich in spirit."  Those who leave the rest of us usually feeling somewhat envious, or inferior, or not as important, smart or "spiritual."

That is, until Jesus -- Son of God, no less, and the Messiah to boot, comes along, looks us all over, and says, "Blessed are you who are poor in spirit, who don't have it all together, who really struggle sometimes with all this God and spirit and faithful living stuff.  Thank God for you!  Cuz it's you who are at the door and know the way in to the kingdom of heaven."

Not many choose to be broken.  Nor to be emptied and poor.  To be bereft, and have their life fall apart.

But it happens.  To all of us.  Because of life, because of the world, because of other people, even sometimes because of ourselves we end up in some situation like that, and worse.

It’s worse if in whatever we suffer, we also feel alone – cut off from God and from other people.  And that happens too, because of the ways we see God sometimes and because other people aren’t always very good at staying and being with us in the midst of the brokenness, the pain, and the emptiness.  It’s not where we want to be ourselves – on the dark side of God; why would others want to be there with us?

Which makes it all the more radical and graciously overturning of the way the world (and the church?) usually works when at the very beginning of his ministry in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus looks out over the poor and the sorrowful souls of Galilee and says,

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

          Blessed are the meek,

                   for they will inherit the Earth.

And so on…blessed are you and blessed are others

who are broken, empty, powerless, alone and in need one way or another,

for God is yours and you are God’s,

and it is you who are blessed and a blessing.

Sometimes in our desire to be good and rewarded with blessing by God we interpret these blessings as commands.  As a kind of law or a self-help self-improvement manual.  So we can go about trying to cultivate poverty of spirit, mournfulness, meekness, a thirst for righteousness and so on, thinking if we manage to cultivate these attitudes and ways of being we’ll earn God’s favour and be among the blessed.  And it can’t be wrong for us to see the spiritual value of a little more humility and openness to pain. 

But what if Jesus is more simply just saying to those who are already broken down and broken open by life, by other people around them and by their own human sinfulness, “Blessed are you, for in your need, your powerlessness, your vulnerability and your lonely sorrow you are opened to grace, to God and to holy and healing community in ways we cannot imagine nor create for ourselves, and can only choose to embrace when they come.” 

Anne Lamott calls it a holy openness to “the gift of failure.” 

A minister named David Lose (an interesting name, given the context) puts it this way:  “Jesus isn't setting up conditions or terms [of holy living] but rather is just plain blessing people.  All kinds of people.  That is, all kinds of down-and-out, extremely vulnerable, and at the bottom of the ladder people.  Why?  To proclaim that God regularly shows up in mercy and blessing just where you least expect God to be -- with the poor rather than the rich, those who are mourning rather than celebrating, the meek and the peacemakers rather than the strong and victorious.  This is not where citizens of the ancient world look for God and, quite frankly, it's not where citizens of our own world do either.  And if God shows up here, Jesus is saying, blessing the weak and the vulnerable, then God will be everywhere, showering all creation and its inhabitants with blessing.”

The word translated “blessed” in most English translations is the Greek word “markarios” and it can also be translated “happy.”   But markarios is not just fleeting, circumstantial earthly happiness; it refers to the celestial bliss of the gods, a life free from the work and worries of the world.  So used of human life in this world, it refers to a bliss somehow above, beyond, or at least not determined by the cares of life.  It’s the blessing and joy of a person who is self-contained and who somehow deeply knows themselves to be right with God independent of external circumstance.

Ever wonder how you get there, though?

A few years ago Japhia and I saw a film documentary called “Happy.”  The start of the film outlines scientific findings that a basic feeling of happiness in life is about 50% genetically determined.  We all have a 50/50 chance of being basically happy or unhappy.  Beyond that, our life situation and circumstances – the things we work hardest for and think are the most important to happiness, like job, money, health, friends, family, meaningful activities, are of about 10% importance to a basic feeling of happiness.  Only 10% !!  The rest – the final 40% that really tips the balance one way or the other, is behaviour and attitude.  Our choices and our spirit.

And that’s what the rest of the film is about – little life-sketches of maybe 20 persons around the world from a Louisiana swamp to a Tibetan cliff village, from a small Danish co-op to a cardboard camp on the edge of Kolkotta near the garbage dump.  All of whom profess to be, and truly are happy.  Most are poor; some have suffered terrible accidents and losses; few have any real chance of what we call “improvement.”

One story I remember is that of Manoj Singh, a rickshaw driver in the slums of Kolkotta.  By day he runs and pulls people through the city streets on his rickshaw; by night he comes home to his family’s little cardboard shack in a village of hundreds (if not thousands) of side-by-side cardboard shacks.  His is protected from the rain in monsoon season by a tarp (he’s so thankful for the tarp), and through the rest of the year it’s the most wonderful home he can imagine because there is a window in one wall, lovely air flow through the shack, and the chance to enjoy life there with his son, his son’s baby daughter, and the good neighbours they have all around them.  “I feel that I am not poor,” he says, “because I am the richest person.  Sometimes we eat only rice with salt, but still we are happy.”

This week I had the pleasure of being included in the Quilt Club tea time.  Almost a dozen women were there, and at one point in the conversation over tea and cookies, for a few minutes there was a sharing of story after story of deep woe.  It began with questions about Melissa’s aneurism and her current condition, and from there quickly went to someone’s friend’s brain cancer, to a growth on someone else’s pituitary putting pressure on the optic nerve, to how traumatic and terrible one of the member’s move has been from her home to a condo, to an acquaintance of someone else who after years of sad singlehood finally and miraculously was engaged to be married only for her fiancé to die suddenly and mysteriously before they could be married. 

As the stories added up, the room grew darker and sadder.  And the fellowship and sense of community around the table grew deeper and stronger.  More holy and heavenly.  Then without fixing or resolving anything, after a few minutes of quiet togetherness one of the women shyly turned on her phone, found a picture she said she had been waiting for a good time to share, and quietly passed around the ultrasound of a new great-grand-daughter.

“Blessed are you,” Jesus says,

“who are poor in spirit,

who know how to mourn,

who are familiar with, and okay with powerlessness,

who know what it’s like to long for justice and righteousness,

for you are the ones

who know the kingdom of heaven on Earth,

who are blessed by God,

who are filled in ways beyond merely human imagining,

who are the ones able to live in, and live out

the mercy, the peace and the love of God for all on the face of the Earth.”

And it’s not a law, nor a self-improvement program.  We don’t have to run out and find ways of making ourselves poor in spirit or bereft and sorrowful.  We do have to learn, though, not to run or hide from such things.

And I wonder, what does it take to be able to accept brokenness as it comes to us or to others?  To embrace poverty and emptiness when they knock?  To live with powerlessness and aloneness, and find the blessing of God in community with others anywhere in the world similarly broken down and broken open?