Sermon: Gratitude and Resentment

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Gratitude and Resentment

By Charles Rush

November 21, 2004

love the simple zeal for life that kids embody before they are too weighed down with the responsibilities of life. Someone gave me a stack of letters that our 4th and 5th graders at Brayton school had recently written to our soldiers abroad. Here is a typical beginning to a letter, from Robert, "Everything is still pretty boring here in Summit, except that we have a new candy store called Ricky's. Their candy is great but at $7.50/lb. pretty expensive don't you think?"

I'm picturing a G.I. in Fallujah with maybe just a bit more on his mind than the price of candy in Summit… Or maybe it is just a topic he can get his mind around.

And this from Emily, "How long have you been in war? I have a 2nd Cousin in war too. Do you know him? I don't really know his name but he is really tall, brown hair, and his name starts with a G." That ought to narrow it down.

Or this one, typed from Bailey, sharing something of herself with a new pen pal in Afghanistan. "It is my dream goal to become FWP, First Woman President. If that doesn't turn out, I'll probably try singing. If that doesn't work, I'll become an author. If none of them work, my life is screwed."

They are so wonderfully ebullient, so full of unemcumbered élan vital as the French philosophers used to call it- the life force. And sometimes touching in their compassion too. I read one of them that said, "I admire your courage. I'm sure that you must be scared from time to time and wonder if you are brave enough but I know you can do it. I believe in you. Thanks for keeping us safe." Thank you indeed.

Youth is wonderful, in part, because the anxieties and responsibilities of life have not yet weighed them down. That happens so often. We let anxiety accumulate a little here, we don't resolve it there, and the next thing you know we are malformed, disfigured from carrying all of this around. Our creative verve just goes out.

Jesus tells this simple, yet profound parable about a guy who is in deep debt, so much so, he couldn't possibly get himself out of it, a debt so big that only royalty could afford to cover it. And the King cancels the debt. Then this guy goes out, runs into a small guy that owes him a few dollars, has the guy arrested, thrown in jail, really done in. He is taking his own anxiety, his own lack of self-esteem, and just pouring it all over those beneath him. He is a living metaphor of that expression that you often hear in the corporate sector when mid-level management gets blown out of the water for the latest failure at the firm. "Merde runs down hill."

It is unbecoming to behave this way, but we all do it periodically. In fact, spiritually speaking, we all have to learn to stand over against this dimension of ourselves. We have to replace that negativity with something positive.

A couple weeks ago, someone was telling about one of the younger siblings in their very large family. One of the youngest brothers always had an entrepreneurial spirit, had started several different companies over the years. Some of them were successful, others were a bust. And he was mercurial, some years really on top of his game, other years his bad habits and vices controlled him. There was the good Patrick and the bad Patrick, and you never knew which one was going to show up. As the years went on, the swings in his life got wider and deeper, slowly by slowly. He'd been through more business partners than Zsa Zsa Gabor had been through husbands. At this point, there wasn't a single relative of his that hadn't invested money with him at some point in time that hadn't been flushed down the commode or returned in half, years later. Despite the fact that he still had some months when he was fiscally solvent, the people that knew him the best generally just shied away from the subject of his career. They didn't want to even open that faucet a trickle for fear of what might flood out. They didn't want to hear another story about litigation or how so and so had betrayed him, so and so couldn't be trusted. Particularly after he had a couple under his belt, they didn't want to hear the speech about how awful the world is and everyone is just in it for the money and no one really believes in anything and it is all about a secret machination really that is operating behind the masquerade of civility and politics. Enough already.

What put his sister over the edge was a phone call she got about her nephew. He is a junior at college, got into a couple of scrapes, made some bad decisions, and is now out of money for the year with many months of education left to go. Patrick's reaction to his son's misfortune was to get on the phone with his son, ream him out about responsibility, to promise loudly and often that he wasn't going to bail him out but he was going to teach him a lesson. "Oh, please…" she said, "when I think of all the times I bailed out my brother" and then the rolling of the eyes and the sighing of the chest.

It is so ironic and painful, not only the way that our own failings become the ones we rail at in the next generation, but also the way that our accumulated anxieties and fears can catch us from behind like a Hemilich maneuver that cause us to spit out a verbal stream of spiritual negativity. We take our misery, compound it with frustration and anger, package it with moralism, and let it explode on the next receiver. And whew, what a mess. This is regular enough as a temptation, if not a reality, that we have to deal with it spiritually.

In our parable, this morning, Jesus suggests the antidote is grace that begets gratitude. Unfortunately, I can't give you a 'how to' that can make this happen. I wish things spiritually came in neat prescription formulas but they don't.

But the reality is that grace and gratitude can pour over you and rinse out the particles of malaise that are tangled in your hair. It can set you right again and stand you up into your full stature so that you are at home again in your own skin. The Spirit moves like that.

I know that for me, as I've gotten older, it has become increasingly important to garner a bit of solitude as a respite during the course of the year. To be in the silence, in nature, probably because that is so hard to achieve during our daily metropolitan lives.

I was recently in Montana, the land of the big sky. And it really is big sky. We were fishing and hunting pheasant. In the morning, we probably drive 50 miles down a two lane macadam highway and if we pass 3 cars that whole time, it is a busy day. Then we get off the road onto a dirt road and go a few more miles passing only horses and cattle. When you get out of the truck, miles and miles from the nearest farm house, there is a quality of quiet that we just don't have on the east coast. The guys that I was with don't talk during the day. You just walk with the dogs in the open field quiet before this great expanse of our world.

This year, we were coming up the side of the treeless mountains at the end of the day. It just so happened that everyone else was a few hundred yards away and I had one young dog up ahead. It was right at sun set. The plain in Montana is probably about 3400 feet high and we walked up another 1100 feet to the top. I was tired, good tired, almost light headed. We had just finished the days hunt was I got to the top of the Mesa. Just on the other side, there was a small covey of Sharp tailed Grouse. The Springer Spaniel flushed the birds and the three of them just flew up out and down into the valley, riding the currents all the way down. Beautiful birds beautiful flight pattern, so quiet that you could feel it in your head and chest. I just stood there and watched them, gazed up Westward as the sun was just going down over the Mountain range in the distance. I turned back east toward and just watched as the top of the range turned orange, red, magenta, purple on down below.

What happened next wasn't so much a thought or a reflection as a sensation. The birds flying below in their graceful beauty probably only have a lifespan of a couple three years. In the background, all of these mountains were cut by receding glaciers 15-10,000 years ago. And I'm here, in my pretty short tenure, participating in a moment in this wider unfolding development. I could feel my evanescence but it wasn't fearful. It was as if the Creator was beckoning me. I felt this sense that of grace and gratitude for being alive, for being part of it all…and I knew that when death came… and I genuinely hope it is many, many years from now, …that it would be okay. I just stood up there for a while and took in the peace of evenings end and the gentle wind of the early night.

Julie tells me that I had, what Native American's call an 'Ah ho' moment. It is a sense of the congruence of the universe, our place in it, and a fundamental assurance of the ultimate goodness even of death. Unquestionably that experience is necessarily shot through with gratitude that we get to live, not only live but to participate in goodness, beauty, and truth. In the Gospel of John it is said that Jesus came not only to give us life but that we might live it abundantly. Where have you felt that sense of simple wonder about life itself? Where have you felt fundamental gratitude and grace in this life?

It is probably not possible to live out of that gratitude and wonder as a basic orientation. Our world is filled with too much banality and negativity to stay in that consciousness. But I'm not sure that is the point anyway. Those moments, and we have just enough of them that they are like a fine distillate attar, the faint scent of which we can periodically sniff and remind us not to suffer the small stuff, but to remember that the life we have been given is precious and sweet… and it is the only one we will get. So live out of it richly, with joy, and spread that abundantly around you as you go.

This week, my brother's family was on television, on a new show on the Discovery channel called "Cha Ching: Money Makers". They came to his home in Washington D.C. and followed his family around last spring, showing them how to devise a realistic budget and live more efficiently. In exchange for which they got a few thousand dollars to renovate their basement on their town house on Capitol Hill.

That segment of the show revolves around my sister-in-law Mary who ran the family, budgeted the family, ran all these charity events on Capitol Hill, for years was a nursery school teacher and an elementary school teacher and knew the whole extended neighborhood. One of the things that the Money Makers team realized after visiting their home for a short while was that Mom was doing too much, so they immediately assigned more chores for everyone else in the family to spread out the work.

They have segments of their daily life, even my winsome nephew Jack, scrubbing a toilet, something I've never seen before. He looks at the camera and says 'There's nothing better than cleaning the bathroom," he says on camera. "Except for, you know, everything else." Then he adds quietly, "I think it's good she gets a break for once. She's happy. That's all we care about."

It shows them going through all the different things that make up their daily and weekly routine. As many of you know, shortly after the taping of that show, my sister-in-law died of a sudden heart attack from an undiagnosed heart condition.

My brother and his kids got that tape a couple weeks ago in the mail. They had almost forgotten about the program altogether. And together, they watched it… I haven't talked to my brother yet about what that was like. But the one dimension of it I know was most apparent was that his wife was so irrepressibly full of life, wit, warmth and fun. And it brought their family together, day in and day out. And then, as my brother says, "Zap, it was over". That is sad, tragically sad. And life is like this unfortunately. But what makes it sad is the wonderful, irrepressible fullness of life that we get to experience; it is the wonderful joy and love in living. That is our blessing.

I hope that you can conjure up a wiff of that essential goodness in this season, particularly this week as you prepare to reunite with your extended family. It is one thing to appreciate the goodness of life, but quite another to appreciate strange Uncle Fred and his really bad jokes that you've already heard twice. It is hard to live out of your grace when your every move in the kitchen is being covered by your control freak cousin who insists on having everything done her way, on her time. It is just difficult to be around our closest relatives when they are living out of their negative energy, when they are not doing so well all the way around. That is the challenge. That is where the rubber hits the veritable road.

And yet, the essence of our spiritual lives revolves around just such occasions as these. It is around the kitchen, around the den, in the field with your nephews and nieces. You can't control other people and there is not much point in trying. But what you can do is be a gracious, non-anxious presence. You can prepare yourself that way. You can pray yourself into that space. And who knows, some moment of touching humanity might just settle over Uncle Fred for a moment. Miracles happen every day. Blessings be with you and go in peace. Amen.