Sermon: Gratitude and Cynicism

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Gratitude and Cynicism

By Charles Rush

October 25, 2009 [1]

[ Audio (mp3, 5.6Mb) ]

saw a cartoon that featured a regular guy in a car at the Gas station. He says to the attendant, 'fill her up.' The attendant asks him, "Regular or obscene." That could be said of so many things in our life. And it is true that we have too much… everything.

I was reminded of this reading Ted Koppel's reflections on his life. He grew up in Germany during the war and his family emigrated to England. As a child he had gone to bed hungry quite often and had lived with all the deprivations that war brought to that generation. When he first came to the U.S. he heard a commercial for an antacid that brought relief to people who had eaten and drank too much. It made him cry.[2]

I had the converse thought of Ted's walking through the barrio in Managua, surrounded by emaciated children that beg from you plaintively. I was sort of morally embarrassed to be fat amongst all of them.

It is true that we simply have too much. At a spiritual minimum we ought to be incredibly grateful people shouldn't we? And yet, it is not that simple. It remains one of our fundamental spiritual challenges to keep our children from becoming entitled little snots that expect the world to fulfill their every need and desire.

Our worst nightmare is that they will become little Veruca Salt, the little rich girl in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Willy Wonka gives out 5 prizes inside his famous chocolate bars to visit his amazing chocolate factory. Veruca wants to win so badly that she has her father buy 100,000 chocolate bars in search of the winning ticket. She stomps her foot at home, "Daddy, I want to go to the chocolate factory… I want it… I want it… I want it…" And her father has hundreds of his employees opening chocolate bars, looking for the prize, until she indeed wins. The whole audience collectively groans that the spoiled little tyrant gets her way.

On the big day, she is standing with her father and the other 4 winners waiting to get into the famed chocolate factory, with all the press from around the world behind them. Little Veruca says to her father. "Daddy, I'm tired of waiting I want to go in and I want to go in now!" Her father patiently explains that it is 9:59 and they can't go in until 10 a.m. sharp. Veruca says "Daddy, make time go faster".

Young or old, it is so painfully unbecoming to have so much and not only want more, but actually expect that the world should cater especially to your needs because… well just because…

It turns out that gratitude is fundamentally a spiritual disposition that is independent of material means. It is a gauge of how grace is flowing through your life. I was reading a batch of sermons from around the country on Thanksgiving. It struck me how often the theme comes up that the holiday is not simply about overeating, overdrinking, football, and shopping the day after Thanksgiving.

Part of the reason that it struck me as odd is that we have unwittingly opted out of that model in our family for the past several years. We were lucky to stumble on another way. My sister-in-law owns a camp in the mountains of North Carolina. All five of the families have been coming each year. Most of the kids sleep in one of the bunk houses and the parents are in various cabins. These cabins are not heated, of course, just screened in. And it is colder there than here because it is higher up. But a stream flows right under our cabin. It is the best sleep of the year, about 8 blankets deep and the sound of the stream.

It is a working farm: cows, chickens, goats, and 14 horses. Everyone brings their dogs who are literally in dog heaven. We have a pond in the middle of the camp. And the past couple years, I've been working with my nieces and nephews casting a fly rod. From 3-13 and everyone wants a turn.

Every year, the Uncles take all the kids on a long hike up to the top of one of the mountains and this year we are planning to get everyone up on a horse. The activities and the setting are great, but the question comes up, why does this work?

It works because everyone stops just to be family. It helps that everyone likes one another and wants to spend time. And it is better when we are thoughtful towards each other. It is better when the Uncles put all the kids to bed, when they put one of the meals together. It is better when everyone shares the cooking and the cleaning up.

Gratitude is not something abstract in your heart; it is not just an emotional sentiment. Spiritually speaking, it is a way of living that manifests itself in a myriad of thoughtful gestures. Gratitude expresses itself in gracefully caring for those around us. It strikes me that we have to actually create opportunities for our families to engage each other in this way. That is what holidays are supposed to do spiritually, they are supposed to give us an opportunity to disengage from our work world routine and the values of our wider commercial culture and give a fuller attention to practicing gratitude and grace with each other front and center. We have to think about how to create a context to facilitate that happening.

We have to create traditions that allow that to happen. I heard of a family in our congregation that started a family tradition at Thanksgiving. They have everyone in the family write a couple things that they are thankful for on a scrap of paper and they put them all in a hat. One by one, they draw them out and read them. And then they have to guess who wrote which. One of the more interesting things they discovered is surprise that they couldn't always guess the author. But the tradition is important because it gives everyone the opportunity to reflect and share gratitude.

And you know what a difference that can make. Because what we hope is that the Spirit of gratitude manifesting itself in thoughtful, gracious deeds becomes infectious. And those around us start to interiorize that disposition and act thoughtfully. Because when that happens you get into a positive energy flow spiritually as a group, as an extended family. And when that happens people become more loving and creative and interesting and enjoyable. They actualize a spiritual joy. "They get healed" in the wonderful words of a Van Morrison song. This is what we want to happen. I am only here to remind you this year that it can.

The Spirit of Gratitude infects all that we do. In all kinds of every day ways, we start to see ourselves as facilitators of positive Spiritual energy. Winston Churchill was right when he said "We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give… We are facilitators. Joan Holmes once said that we need to become known for what we allocate, not what we accumulate. And she is right. In our limited tenure on earth, what is fundamentally important is how we facilitate gratitude, grace, love, and healing.

Lynne Twist learned this in one poignant day of contrasts. She was raising money for the Hunger Project, a group that was focused on helping develop sustainable farming in famine wracked regions of Africa.[3]

In the morning she had an appointment with the CEO of a major grocery chain. It turns out that his company had been involved in fraud that had been written about widely. They needed to corral their negative publicity and were looking for an opportunity to repair their reputation. So Lynne got an opportunity to meet with the CEO.

She dons her best power suit, takes the elevator up, up, up…. Goes through the bank of personal assistants, down the corridor and in to see the CEO, sitting behind his large desk overlooking the skyline of the city.

She has 15 minutes and she describes what they do, a couple of stories of change. He listens impassively. At the end of the 15 minutes, he reaches in his desk, and slides her a check for $50,000, the largest single check they had received to date.

She had that complicated sense of 'wow, important money.' At the same time, she realized that it didn't matter what she really said, he had already made up his mind that this was what he was going to do. And she said, "As he slid the check across the table and I took it, I could feel myself taking his guilt as well." It was an unsettling, unsatisfying experience, despite the largesse.

Just a few hours later, she was at the other end of the spectrum. She went to speak in a church. Instead of the large crowd that she was expecting, it turned out to be a collection of a dozen women, most of them retired… The church ladies.

And it turns out that they weren't meeting in the sanctuary but the church basement classroom with a leaky pipe that was literally dripping next to her. I know that leaky pipe.

But there she was and she launched into her description of the work that they were doing and how lives were being changed. At the end, she didn't even want to ask them for any support because these were women of such modest means. But she did. After which the room fell silent for a while.

Finally one of the ladies from the back of the room said, "I like what you are doing." I don't have a credit card or a checking account. "To me, money is a lot like water. For some folks it rushes through their life like a raging river. Money comes through my life like a trickle. But I want to pass it along in a way that it does the most good for the most folks. I see that as my right and my responsibility. It is also my joy. I have $50 in my purse and I want to give it to you." She came up and gave her $50 in fives and ones.

Lynne said she was moved to tears in that moment because of the Spirit in which she received that gift. It was the energy of the commitment of the giver. It felt like a ceremony. It had integrity and purpose. Lynne said it was "blessed money". She went home that night, like most of us in those situations, wondering what the day had meant.

The next morning she woke up, still reflecting on the previous day. She went to her brief case and did the difficult thing. She took the check for $50,000 from the CEO and mailed it back to him. She wrote him a note and said that they were only looking for partners that were really committed to the cause and that his company should find something that they were really committed to. She writes that, hard as it was to send that money back, she also felt unburdened, like she mailed that guilt right on back.

She never got a response, never heard from the company again. Years go by and one day she gets a letter in the mail from that CEO. He is now retired with a substantial package to live on.

He wrote her a letter and said he never forgot the day that he read her note returning the money, especially the part about looking for committed partners. He said he realized that he had been focused so narrowly on doing anything and everything to simply increase profits that he was befuddled and stunned by someone who was not concerned about them in that way.

He had a change of heart, that in fact he was concerned about addressing hunger, and that he wanted to be a person of commitment. He said he needed to complete something in himself that he had left uncompleted professionally, and he wrote a personal check several times bigger than the corporate check and he got directly involved.

Money really is like water. We don't get to keep anything when we die. It is all about how we allocate what comes through us in this short time of living. It is not about the size of your gift. It is about the Spirit of your giving. It is about becoming a complete person. It is about living a life of gratitude and thoughtfully, graciously blessing the world around you. May you feel the abundance that really is your life; May you find people and causes that are worthy of your commitment; May you become a blessing. Amen.

[1] A version of this sermon was preached by Rev. Rush on Nov 20, 2005.

[2] From his book Off Camera (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000), p. 173.

[3] Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2003) from chapter 5, pp. 97-120. My thanks to Laurie Rufolo for giving me this book.