gratitude

1 Lent C, 2019: Gratitude is Prime

March 10, 2019 by Cam Miller

I wish I could show you the photograph I took
of my dog, Rabia,
positioned like the Great Sphinx
in front of the fireplace
on a ten-degree morning.
Behind her the gas fire roasting
her backside, in front,
streaming through the windows,
bright, radiant sunshine
washing her face and shoulders.

The look on her face…
that is what I wish I could capture in words.
It was as pleased and satisfied an expression
as I have ever witnessed.
But she also had – unless I was merely projecting –
an air of gratitude about her.

If I had to put words
to what I witnessed, it would be:
“Thank you for this lovely warmth
and for being a dog capable of enjoying it.”

Shortly after that, she flopped down on her side,
closed her eyes, and went to sleep.
Now there is a lifestyle I could get grateful about.

This is a weird First Sunday of Lent.

We have Moses,
in what is actually one of my favorite scenes
in all the Bible,
directing a rehearsal
of the first Thanksgiving
in the Promise Land.
We have Mary Oliver,
our featured poet for Lent 2019,
declaring herself a messenger of love
for a world so impossibly splendid
it seems to her impossible
not to burst with gratitude.

And, bringing up the rear,
we have Jesus battling Satan in the desert
in a scene suitable for a violent video game.

On the face of it, Luke’s story is an outlier
to the theme of gratitude,
but scratch the surface
and that Devil-wears-Prada scene
has gratitude rivering through it also.

I want to briefly, point to what is happening
in each of these readings
and allow them then,
to shed their grace on us.

That piece from Deuteronomy
is the tail end of a twenty-one-chapter sermon
Moses preached to the masses of ex-slaves
as they are primed to cross over the Jordan River
into the Promised Land for the first time.
I have belabored the scene before
so I won’t do it this time.
Suffice it to say, the rag-tag thousands
are gathered on the floodplain of the river
waiting to enter the Land of Milk & Honey
after forty years of looking for it.
It must have been like children
on Christmas morning
waiting to descend the stairs,
but after a 21 chapter sermon
they were probably morose on their haunches
waiting for Moses to shut up.

But this is Moses’ last day on earth
and he is not going quietly into the night.

Think of Martin Luther King, Jr. last speech,
because he references Moses
about not going with his compatriots
into the Promised Land:
he can see it,
and he knows they will get there,
but he also knows
he is not going.

One of the last things Moses has to say
is what we heard this morning:
an outline of a Thanksgiving liturgy.
His whole speech in one way or another,
is Moses pleading with the ex-slaves
not to forget
who they are
and whose they are.
“Don’t forget where you came from,”
he urges them –
slaves from Egypt who had nothing
and suffered greatly.
“And don’t forget how you got here,”
he begs them –
by the hand of God
rather than from their own doing.

“Remember…
do not forget…because
if you forget, it will go badly for you.”
That is what he tells them
over and over and over again.
And he finally gives them a ritual practice,
a liturgy, to remind them,
so that if they rehearse it enough,
they will never forget.

Moses knows that gratitude
is both powerful medicine
and an elusive,
even vulnerable
state of heart.

Practice and rehearse your gratitude,
he tells them, and if you do,
the prosperity you are about to experience
will not ruin you.
But if you forget,
your prosperity will destroy you.

That is Moses’ message
and it is one we need to hear.
and one we can read the truth of
in our own lost horizons.
Remember whowe are
and whosewe are,
and open our hearts to gratitude.

Now Mary Oliver.

This is such a powerful, if humbling
and challenging story.
Mary Oliver had a horrendously painful
childhood.
Being a very private person
she did not speak at length publicly
about it, but it is clear
her father abused her
and her siblings.
She had no love for him
and even in old age
bore the scars of those terrible years
in rural Northern Ohio.
Even to the end
she did not like being indoors,
inside of walled rooms.
Her love of nature
was both a welcome embrace
of sublime beauty,
and also an escape
driven by the ghosts of memory.

And yet…
her poetry.

“My work is loving the world…
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling
them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.”
(From “Messenger” by Mary Oliver)

So, this is just one poem,
and we know there are so many more.
She was a modern-day Psalmist
that voiced the love of God
and God’s love of Creation
in as many different ways
as there are birds and trees and waterways
and skies.

Across her own kind of wilderness,
making an escape from her suffering,
like Moses and Israel,
the wings of her salvation
was gratitude.
Powerful,
healing,
mysterious and renewable,
gratitude.

Then comes the gospel story.

There is so much we could say,
so many directions to walk in
with this story.
There are so many things
I want to talk about,
but almost all of them
have nothing to do with this moment
stacked up alongside
Deuteronomy and Mary Oliver.

So, allow me to distill Luke.

Much is made by preachers and theologians
about the three temptations of Jesus
and they get allegorized into all kinds of desires,
lust, and allegiances.
But boil it down
and it is just our simple,
every day, human lament,
shriek, bellow,
blubber, yelp
or whine, that we want more.
There is never enough for us.
No matter how muchwe get
and no matter whatwe get
and no matter howwe get it –
it is just never enough.

We might be satiated for a moment,
for a while even,
but sooner or later
that worm starts to turn in our gut
and slither and slime its way up.
We always want more
of whatever it is we get.
And when we do not have something
we want, that little lust
or whimper
can become a rage
and a scream.

Discipline,
shame,
fear of punishment,
self-restraint
can set boundaries on our hunger for more
and our agitation that we never have enough,
but there is only one thing
that actually heals it.
Yep, you guessed it: gratitude.

Like a prime number,
gratitude doesn’t have any factors
other than being what it is – a form of joy –
and what it does – heal us.

That story in Luke,
if we dig around in it
from the wisdom of our own experience,
instead of being distracted by the glitter or
scratch of the supernatural,
is about gratitude.

What gave Jesus the capacity
to resist some pretty powerful temptations,
is gratitude for being “Beloved.”
Remember, that is the scene just
before the one we read in Luke today.
God tells Jesus he is “beloved.”

“You are loved,” God says to Jesus.
“You are my beloved.”

Like my dog in front of the fire,
Jesus was completely wrapped
in the arms of God’s love
and there was nothing to do or be
but just plain grateful.

Remember, gratitude is prime,
and has no factors
other than being what it is – a form of joy –
and what it does – heal us.

Moses knew it
and tried to arm his generation with it.
Mary Oliver became a servant of it,
and found healing on its wings.
Jesus was bathed in it
as the beloved of God,
and it gave him what he needed
when he needed it.

I am thinking that gratitude
and the practice of gratitude
is not exactly what we think of
when we think of Lent.
But it seems to me, that’s what
is right in front of us
that we ought to be gawking at today.
Gratitude,
a form of joy
that also heals.

Welcome to Lent.

November 19, 2017 (Thanksgiving, Year A): The Bond Between Gratitude & Joy

November 19, 2017 by Cam Miller

Text for Preaching: “Welcome Morning” by Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.”

SERMON

The joy that isn’t shared, I heard
dies young.”

There is a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest
that leads from gratitude to joy.
That is what I invite us to ponder this morning.

We have a familiar place to begin,
almost proverbial if you have been subjected
to my preaching for six months or more.
In combination like they are today,
Deuteronomy and Luke make it crystal clear:
When we imagine we are self-made
the engine of gratitude runs on empty.

It is really pretty obvious,
and we hardly need an ancient Mesopotamian story
to explain it to us: if we are self-made,
who is it, we are we going to be grateful to?
Ourselves, right?
And what is the meaning of self-gratitude?
It is simply the fattening of Ego.

This story from Deuteronomy, thanks to the lectionary,
was the second or third sermon I ever preached here.
It is one that has come around again and again,
because it is so prototypical of Biblical Wisdom.
It will keep coming back too,
and I hope becomes like a song stuck in our head
or even a stone in our shoe.

The setting for this story from Deuteronomy is Moses’
Gettysburg Address to Israel’s future.

The story of the exodus of escaped slaves has arrived
at its spectacular crescendo.
As if the 10 Plagues against Pharaoh was not enough;
as if the parting of the Red Sea was not enough;
as if Manna in the wilderness was not enough;
as if a forty-year sojourn through the desert – in which
no one was lost – was not enough.
Now, just on the other side of the Jordan River,
awaits The Promised Land.

Forty years of walking,
two generations of birth and death,
and finally, there it is and all they have to do
is wade across the shallow Jordan River.

We all have a Promised Land
and we have all stood on such a moment,
when the thing we wanted most was right there
ready to be taken.
Those escaped slaves
could look across the narrow span of water
and smell it: the Promised Land.

For slaves, and any number of refugees or immigrants
of any country or generation,
property is the Promised Land.
Ownership.
The imagined security of not depending upon
other people for food or shelter.

Their Promised Land,
like ours, was flowing with milk and honey.
The good life after such a terrible life,
was the Promised Land.

Moses, that weary, battle-scarred,
and nearly dead leader
looks upon his community with a wizened eye
and insists they sit down.
Sit and listen, he orders, and they do.
Then he issues a stern warning.

When you have eaten your fill,
when you are fat and satiated and can’t hardly move
from the happiness of eating so many good things;
and when you have money in the bank,
and your 401K is better than you ever imagined;
and when your house is everything you had hoped for,
and it is clean, and pretty
and you are so pleased to show it off;
and when you have the car you always wanted,
and your kids are safe and happy and in a good school,
or finally off on their own, and doing well;
and when you get to travel
to those places you always dreamed about;
when nothing
could possibly be better than it is right now…
then, at that moment: remember.

Remember that you are not self-made.
Remember that your abundance is a gift,
not an accomplishment – a gift, not only from God,
but from the lives of those who went before
and walked you into this very moment
even when you imagined you were walking alone.

Remember, Moses urges them,
desperate in the knowledge he will not go with them,
if you forget – if you forget –
and your Ego begins to play its slick and tricky games
to make you imagine that the goodness of your life
is all your own doing,
then…you will lose the goodness of your life.

That is what Moses promises
at the edge of the Promised Land.

In the excitement of getting what we want,
even when it is what we desperately need,
as in the story from Luke, remembering is key.

In the happiness and excitement of procurement,
acquisition,
ownership,
success,
affluence,
security,
healing,
recovery,
or achievement –
in the excitement and happiness of “getting it”
and “having it” –
if we forget,
then the goodness of what we have received
will soon drain away like the gush
of a cow’s jugular at slaughter.

Empty of gratitude, is empty of joy.
“The joy that isn’t shared, (we’ve learned),
dies young.”

I for one, do not know why
joy and gratitude are inseparable, but I do know,
from my own descent into ego,
that gratitude and joy
are the Siamese twins of spiritual wellness.
Separate them, and there is a death waiting to happen.

Self-gratitude cannot spawn joy.
Rather, self-gratitude feeds self-aggrandizement,
and the ego’s happy delusion that life in the universe
orbits around me – or should.

Joy, on the other hand, cannot be created
or manufactured,
or in any way be purchased by our own efforts.
Joy is visited upon us, a gift that wells up within us,
and when we keep gratitude as a core element
within our heart, then
joy has fertile ground to host it.

We can make ourselves “happy”
by doing the things we know make us feel good.
But joy is a distinct and different experience,
not so much an emotion as an experiential moment.

But as I said, there is this inexplicable relationship
between gratitude and joy,
almost a physics that bonds them.

We do not know how or why they are that way,
but we do know that when we lose touch
with gratitude,
we lose capacity for joy.

I am going to suppose that all of us here
have a reoccurring bout or struggle in our lives,
something we contend with, that threatens
our happiness if not our well-being.

Perhaps you know that dark place of depression:
the long tunnel reappearing over and over again,
one that passes as mysteriously as it arrives,
or never completely disappears even.

Maybe you struggle with a compulsion,
obsession, or addiction.
Maybe it is an acute loneliness, anxiety,
deep mistrust,
or maybe prolonged periods of self-doubt.

Whatever it is, most of us experience some kind of confinement
at the hands of an on-going disability
or re-occurring tribulation.
Likewise, we have also experienced release from it,
a freeing emancipation
whether prolonged or momentary.
When we are released from our prison,
whichever prison that may be – and some of us
have done time in numerous prisons –
we will do well not to run helter-skelter
like delirious fans streaming onto a football field
in reckless abandon of our good fortune.

Instead, it is well for us to pause;
to actually stop in the midst of our relief
and excitement,
and to remember.
When we pause to remember
that we are not self-made
and that our recovery or release
is not the product of our own doing only,
the widow to our gratitude will fly open
and release its cleansing fragrance within us.

It is a strange undulation, this meandering
in and out of the happiness and sorrows of ego
back toward the waters of gratitude
in which joy becomes possible.

And it is difficult to remember
that the sources of happiness
are not the wellspring of joy.

We get tricked or lulled into imagining
that the Promised Land is the thing we want most.
Peace, love, money;
security and safety;
recognition, thinness, or beauty;
even a cure…
The thing we want most is probably not the
actual Promised Land to which God is inviting us.

The thing we want most is more likely
the acquisition or achievement or procurement
that the ego most desires.
It is tricky, because that thing we want most
may even seem like an altruistic goal –
something for someone else or even everyone else.

But here is the diagnostic tool to help us decipher
the source and the promise of our desire.
Does that thing we want most bring us
to the connection between gratitude and joy?

Does our desire for that thing we want most
evoke gratitude and joy,
or does it excite happiness,
self-satisfaction,
satiation,
pride,
and pleasure?

Now, don’t get me wrong.
I would be the last person in the world
to argue against happiness,
satiation, or pleasure.
But the Promised Land to which God is inviting us,
is not at all the same thing as that which we desire most,
and we need to be clear about the difference.
It is tricky and confusing.
The thing we desire most,
is often not the place to which God is calling us;
and one helpful means of knowing the difference,
has to do with whether or not
we are put in touch with our gratitude
to the extent that we also experience joy.

So this is Thanksgiving week,
instead of being mindful of what we have,
which is the typical cultural grace we are asked to offer,
I would invite us into a different meditation.
Where, within our own life,
where within our own heart,
do we experience joy?
Not happiness,
not self-satisfaction or pride,
not pleasure –
but joy.

If we can find that place,
then we will also get a clearer vision
of the Promised Land to which God is inviting us.
And one way to get there,
is to follow the breadcrumbs of gratitude
that mark the way we have gone before.

Follow gratitude and find your joy,
then share it, because
“the joy that isn’t shared, dies young.”

Thanksgiving Celebration

November 20, 2016 by Cam Miller

TEXT for PREACHING
Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Way, way, way back
on January 24, 2016 –
remember that far back?
It was my second Sunday here
and I preached on the text in Deuteronomy
in which today’s Hebrew scripture is also lodged.

There could hardly be a more perfect reading
to be inserted between post-election
and pre-Thanksgiving,
not to mention the day on which we
celebrate the in-gathering of our pledges for 2017.

I will get to Deuteronomy in a minute
but first, allow me to hover over a single word.

In street vernacular,
this bread and wine ceremony we do every week
is called “Communion.”
In the peculiar parlance of church-speak
it is more properly called, “Eucharist.”
“Eucharist” is the Greek word for “Thanksgiving.”

When those early conspirators
in the subversive moment
that came to be called “Christianity”
spoke about the kind of worship they did,

“Thanksgiving” is the word they used.
Every week for us is “Thanksgiving”
and that is the context
for these next remarks about Deuteronomy.

If you were to quarter a big, juicy red apple –
you know, cut it into four equal parts –
you would end up with four pieces of the core
as well as the flesh.

But unlike an apple,
in our spiritual tradition the core
is the most delectable part.

Not all Biblical wisdom or perspectives are equal.
In fact, there are some core insights
so scrumptious,
so luscious,
that they are potent enough to live on
without any other source of nurture.

The opposite is true also,
and we know it:
some Biblical perspectives are not even palatable,
and some are toxic.
But the core
is so sweet,
so delicious
that even poetry and music cannot begin to touch it.

Today we bite into a piece of the core,
the one I set on the table back in January
and that is with us week to week.
It is this:
the enemy of gratitude is amnesia;
and the power of gratitude is healing.

Let me repeat that, for effect if nothing else:
the enemy of gratitude
is amnesia;
and the power of gratitude
is healing.

That snippet of Deuteronomy we heard
is part of a long speech Moses delivers
to the all the people of Israel
gathered on the floodplain of the Jordan River.
It is an urgent plea for them to remember
who they are
and whose they are.
“When you have come into the land
that the LORD your God is giving you
as an inheritance to possess,
and you possess it,
and settle in it,
you shall take some of the first
of all the fruit of the ground,
which you harvest from the land
that the LORD your God is giving you,
and you shall put it in a basket
and go to the place that the LORD your God
will choose as a dwelling for his name…

By the way, I suspect that line of scripture right there
is what those early Pilgrims were doing on the first Thanksgiving,
though in our secularized worldview
the biblical background is lost.
Anyway, Moses goes on.

(And you will say)
“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor;
he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien,
few in number,
and there he became a great nation,
mighty and populous.
When the Egyptians treated us harshly
and afflicted us,
by imposing hard labor on us,
we cried to the LORD,
the God of our ancestors;
the LORD heard our voice
and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,
with a terrifying display of power,
and with signs and wonders;
and he brought us into this place
and gave us this land,
a land flowing with milk and honey.

So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.”

Even though we are not farmers,
most of us anyway,
we still understand this “first fruits” idea.
Clearly this is a description
of an early liturgy
instituted for the people to remember
how they became a people
and why they were a people
and who it was that made them a people.

As you may recall,
the Book of Deuteronomy is a re-telling of Exodus
and it delivers within its verses,
the constitution for a nation.
Surrounded by monarchies and empires,

Israel is given the constitution of an egalitarian society –
a radically new model in a world
dominated by brutal hierarchy.

It is a constitution designed for ex-slaves
who are to remember
their slavery,
and remember
their escape,
and remember
what it was like to live without the love of God
as the guiding principle of the society.

“Never forget,” was Moses’ plea to them that day at the Jordan.

After forty years of wandering in the wilderness
looking for the Promise Land
they have finally arrived at the border.
After forty years of looking around each corner
and hoping for it;
drudging over every mound of sand
and yearning to see it;
climbing every steep and treacherous mountain
pleading for it to be on the other side.
After burying the weak and the infirm
in unmarked graves along the way,
they now held them in memory
even through the fog of years
as they gazed across the river into the Promise Land.

Wanting now to charge across the shallow water
into that long, long awaited land of milk and honey,
Moses by act of will and miracle,
makes them sit down and listen to him
for thirty-some chapters.

What we heard today is almost the end,
almost the period at the end of the sermon
and their moment of release into the Promised Land.

And here,
as he has through all the promises,
proclamations,
laws and statutes and social prescriptions
for thirty chapters,
Moses insists that whatever else they do –
whatever abundance and joy
they harvest and enjoy –
that they remember.
“Remember,”
he tells them.

Remember
where you came from: Egypt.
Remember
what you came from:
slavery.
Remember
how you got here:
an act of God and not by your own strength.
Remember
these are cities you did not build,
these are goods you did not make,
these are cisterns you did not dig,
these are grapes and olives you did not plant,
this is food you did not harvest.
Remember
you were slaves with nothing of your own
except the suffering you endured.
Do not forget the origin of your abundance
because if you do,
if you forget,
you will lose it all.

Moses warns them over and over and over again,
that prosperity brings on amnesia,
and amnesia is the enemy of gratitude.

So there it is, the succulent morsel of wisdom:
When we forget
who we are
and whose we are
our gratitude becomes weak and flaccid
and may evaporate altogether.
And when that happens,
we run the risk of being overtaken by
cynicism,
depression,
or just plain self-centered anxiety.

When we are full and satiated
and all our basic needs are met,
we sit back and we offer a deep sigh,
“Ah…the good life.”

But the punch line to this whole thing
is that forgetting
who we are
and whose we are
and what it is we have to be grateful for,
is a gratitude killer.
I dare say, all of us know what it is like
to live without gratitude.

One day,
even though we never meant to,
we woke up without gratitude.
We may not have noticed immediately –
brushing our teeth,
taking our shower,
eating our breakfast.
But without gratitude something happens
that re-shapes the experience of life.

Without gratitude
life becomes all about us.
In fact, life becomes about “me.”

Without gratitude,
life becomes an endless river of thirst –
surrounded by water yet never quenched.

Without gratitude,
life becomes an empty pit of hunger –
surrounded by abundance but obsessed with scarcity.

Without gratitude,
life becomes a festering wound of dissatisfaction –
no matter what we have
it is never enough.

I know you know
what that feels like.
All of us have succumbed.
It is almost a universal infection
we have contracted at some point
and will likely be hit with again.

When we run dry of gratitude
no amount of medical or psychological attention
will cure what ails us;
we will be dry bones in a valley of dry bones
and the misery of it is woeful.

At those moments,
gratitude is what injects marrow into our bones
and re-establishes the sinew and cartilage
to make gracefulness a renewed option.
Gratitude keeps us anointed
and well oiled
with the possibility of…
joy.

Conversely, without gratitude there is no possibility of joy;
and a life without joy is, well,
it is mere consumption.

But we cannot give ourselves joy –
that is something visited upon us
and utterly impossible to create on our own.
But gratitude can begin as an act of will.

Gratitude can be conjured up
when we are not feeling it
by remembering
who we are
and whose we are.

Memory activates gratitude.

There is always
and forever
a memory of gratitude.
We can call on it
and invite it to be present in the moment.
Even if we cannot feel it
we can remember it
and invite it to be present.

Remembering who we are
and whose we are
will activate gratitude.

And gratitude is what makes it possible
to survive grief.
Gratitude is what makes it possible
to endure pain.

Gratitude is what makes it possible
to perceive hope
even when we are only getting through
one step at a time.

Gratitude
empowers healing
even when a cure is out of the question.
Gratitude creates an opening for joy
even when sorrow and grief surround us.

The beginning of gratitude
is remembering…
who we are
and whose we are.

It is a very powerful moist morsel of wisdom
we have from these voices
that rise up to us up out of the soil of Biblical history.

Prosperity creates amnesia
and amnesia causes us to live without gratitude
and when that happens
life is only about me;
and in that kind of life
the best we can hope for is mere consumption.

But gratitude is always within reach,
a simple act of will to remember
who we are
and whose we are,
which then sets us back on the road
toward the possibility of joy
and all the other things
for which we give thanks.

I want to pause then,
and thank you,
each of you,
for making me your priest.

As your priest,
I want to thank you for your gifts
of time,
money,
labor,
commitment,
and love in the arms of community.

Beginning now our balancing act
between the living out and letting go of 2016
and stepping up onto 2017,

I invite you to sing your thanksgiving with me:
(Sing the doxology).

1 Lent C, 2019: Gratitude is Prime

November 19, 2017 (Thanksgiving, Year A): The Bond Between Gratitude & Joy

Thanksgiving Celebration

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

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Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

Like us on Facebook

Newsletter

Links

Site Navigation