November 23, 2008 Twenty-Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Reign of Christ,
Thanksgiving Sunday, Neighbors in Need Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 95; Matthew 25:31-46
A stockbroker in the Midwest I know has been calling frequently these past
few months. He usually calls with a joke to share, but he has also been reporting
some of his observations from the deck of the sinking economy. One week he was
alarmed at having heard that safes and guns are the only two items whose sales are
increasing. This week he was commenting on how people’s fears seem only to be
getting worse. He said it is as if they had walked out into their back yard at night
and allowed their imagination to run wild and become as terrified as if they were
standing in the middle of a jungle full of ravenous beasts. But it is just the same
secure suburban back yard they were feeling completely safe and comfortable in a
few hours ago in the daylight.
My stockbroker friend keeps trying to remind himself of the yard in the
light, even as he looks into the dark. He is trying to remember what is within and
behind the shadows—the love in his life, life itself, and a higher power, a light that
shines in the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome. He is trying to keep
those things in sight.
Today’s sermon is entitled “Seeing Thanks, Giving Thanks, Living Thanks.”
Seeing comes first because the ability to give and live thanks depends on our
vision of the world.
There is an old story about a man who thought a neighbor boy had stolen his
ax. The boy looked like a thief, acted like a thief, spoke like a thief. But a few
months later the man found the ax where he had left it leaning against a tree in the
woods. After that he noticed that the boy had changed—now he suddenly looked
like just an innocent boy—a life to be grateful for, rather than resentful.
Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “The eye is the lamp of the body.
So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is
unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” What this means is that how
we see things, how we perceive reality, will determine whether our hearts are full
of light or full of darkness. It does not matter what reality we are looking at—it
can be a pitch black night in a jungle full of ravenous beasts—but if our eye is
healthy, our hearts will be full of light. The light comes from the eye itself. Light
comes not from what the eye sees but from how it sees.
What does it take to have a healthy eye? Jesus does not say it directly, but if
you read the Sermon on the Mount there is no question what he has in mind. A
healthy eye is an eye that is focused on God. It is an eye that seeks God’s presence
in all moments and all things.
A stockbroker who is looking at the economy crashing around her, who is
looking at her livelihood and investments shriveling to nothing, who the hears
wolves of ruin howling in the night around her, can still feel courage and peace and
gratitude even as she faces the worst reality if she is at the same time filling her
spiritual vision with God, and seeking God’s presence in all things—if she keeps
shifting her focus between the darkness and the light.
Similarly, people like the man who lost his ax who feel fearful of others,
who live within the shuttered vision of self-concern and locked door of alienation
from their neighbors, can come to see what Jesus was talking about in today’s
gospel passage. If we train our eyes to look for God in all things, we can learn to
see God’s presence within the people we suspect or fear or want to avoid out of
self-concern. We can see Christ within the hungry and thirsty, the stranger and the
one dressed in rags, the one whose sickness overwhelms us, or the prisoner who
frightens us.
We can learn to see that even within what seems to be the darkest of times,
there is always light for which we can give thanks. In fact, we can come to see that
the darkness itself is a gift for which we can give thanks.
The Italian priest and poet Fra Giovanni lived in the Dark Ages, the time of
the Black Death, a time far darker than we can imagine today. Someone once
asked him how to get through such darkness. Fra Giovanni wrote this poem in
response:
The gloom of the world is but a shadow.
Behind it, yet within reach, is joy.
There is a radiance and glory in the darkness,
Could we but see; and to see, we have only to look.
I beseech you to look!
Life is so generous a giver, but we,
Judging its gifts by their covering,
Cast them away as ugly, or heavy, or hard.
Remove the covering and you will find beneath it
A living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power.
Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch
The angel’s hand that brings it to you.
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty,
Believe me, that angel’s hand is there:
The gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence.
Our joys, too: be not content with them as joys.
They, too, conceal diviner gifts.
Giovanni says that behind everything, both joy and gloom, is radiance, is the
divine presence. And within every trial or sorrow or duty is an angel’s hand. It is
all gift. He says there is “glory in the darkness, could we but see; and to see, we
have only to look. I beseech you to look!”
During this Thanksgiving week, I invite you to look—try looking to see the
gift within all circumstances. Try shifting your focus back and forth from what is
distressing or depressing you to the light of God.
This is what Paul meant when he said “Pray without ceasing.” Every time
we shift our focus to God it is a prayer, even if the only word we use is the word
“God,” or even if we do not use any words, but just turn our inward gaze toward
our spiritual heart. This is the whole trick of seeing the light—it is that simple. It
is just a matter of holding the two realities together in our heart and mind—the
surface reality of the world and the deeper reality of the Spirit. If we do that, we
will learn to see thanks everywhere.
And seeing thanks, we will naturally give thanks. I don’t know how many
people in the United States will come to a thanksgiving table this year completely
unable to see anything worthy of thanks in their lives. Certainly there are millions
of lives that have every right to feel ungrateful, like the more than 10% of our
neighbors in Vermont who live in poverty and do not have enough food right now,
or the high school drop-out dealing drugs on inner city streets, or the single mother
who has just lost her job. When you cannot see why to be grateful, you cannot
force it. Gratitude is not something that is easy to fake, nor is it something we can
demand of others whose suffering fills their sight.
But if we can change our vision so that we can see the gift within the trial, if
we can come to see thanks in any given situation, we will give thanks without
thinking about it. It will just happen. We may not say thank you, but our laughter
or lightness will express it.
It is better, though, to express our thanks in words or some other conscious
gesture like a work of art or a gift given in return. The full benefit of a gift does
not come until we have expressed our thanks. When we give thanks it is like
taking a jumper cable and attaching our dead battery to a live battery. Giving
thanks completes a circuit, it brings something alive. By giving thanks in some
way we create a little power plant of love, and both the giver of the gift and the
giver of thanks come away with a spark that lights up the world around them to
some extent, however small. If you put some of those circuits of gratitude
together, they quickly gain power. Just look at the list of gratitude and hope in the
bulletin today. There is a power in our shared thanksgiving that can transform us.
It can open a door into another realm within our daily reality.
This deeper reality is what Jesus was talking about in today’s gospel
passage. He calls it “the kingdom,” and in today’s passage it is the reign of Christ
that comes at the end of our lives or at the end of the world. But elsewhere in his
teachings the kingdom of God is someplace we can enter here and now. It is the
realm of eternal life that Fra Giovanni saw behind the material shadow-lands of
this earthly realm, but within reach.
In today’s passage Jesus tells us that there is one way of expressing thanks
that opens the door between the realms more powerfully than anything else we can
do, and that is to serve our neighbor in need—the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger,
the one unable to afford winter boots, the sick, the convict. It is to live thanks, to
live a life of giving to others as an expression of our gratitude for what we have
been given.
When we live thanks, we do not ask whether the person we are confronting
is worthy of receiving our gifts. We are not giving because of who or what they
are, we are giving because we feel called to empty ourselves in self-giving love
just as Jesus emptied himself. It is as much an expression of gratitude as a
response to need. It is a choice of a way to be as we pass through this world,
indiscriminately, not dependent on the people or circumstances we encounter.
Jesus was always being criticized for giving of himself to outcasts and sinners and
people considered the worst and least by the establishment of his day, but he was
also criticized for what he gave to the oppressors at the top of society. It didn’t
matter to him to whom he gave, he just felt compelled to keep giving. And what
he knew and was trying to teach us was that by choosing to live that way, we can
enter right now into the realm of God, the eternal realm of love and life and light,
of peace and joy. We can live there even in the absolute worst of circumstances.
One of the greatest teachers of this is Viktor Frankl, whom I quote often. As
you may recall, he was a psychiatrist and author who survived the Nazi death-
camps. Frankl saw people there who lived generously in situations that turned
others into ravenous beasts. Frankl wrote,
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who
walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last
piece of bread. They may have been few in number…but they offer
sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a [person] but one
thing: the last of [our] freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any
given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
(Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 104)
Today we each have before us a black hole, a vortex of fear and negativity
that is trying to suck us into its centripetal force and suck all the light out of us.
The future is uncertain and may look scary or at least bleak, but we have a choice.
There is another way to see reality. We can look at the fearful uncertainties and at
the same time keep filling our inner vision with the presence of God within and
around us. We can keep looking to the light that shines in the darkness and learn
to see the darkness itself as a gift. We can become agents of transformation by
living out of a sense of abundance and gratitude. We can change the world by
taking this path, by choosing the attitude that opens the door into God’s realm of
peace and joy and love. Or we can sink into the abyss of negativity and fear and
add our darkness to the deepening night. Let us pray in silence, telling God which
way we choose, and asking God’s help to hold to it…
Sermon 11/23/2008