Grateful Living
By Charles Rush
September 23, 2012
Psalm 100 and Colossians 3: 15-19
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.8Mb) ]
love coming back home after a holiday. But home is not just the packed traffic and incredible tolls when you cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Home isn't even quite just the panorama of light circling Newark Liberty Airport.
Home is when a
guy is doing 96 in the right hand lane and does the Jersey slide across three
lanes, missing your front bumper by a foot and flashes everyone the Jersey
state bird as he goes by. That is when I turn to my wife, in my best Ricky
Ricardo accent and say, “Honey, I'm home”.
Next time, we
are moving where paradise isn't so crowded… Until then, if you just reflect the
world around you, you are grousing a good deal of the time. Earlier in the
summer I'm standing in the DMV listening to the incredibly bored work force
that are uninterested in the people they serve or the mission of their
department carrying on this day-long banter with each other- sarcastic jokes
and cynical retorts. And I started multiplying this work environment, wondering
how many other places there are like this across our beloved Gotham, which I
could only do because in our newer, faster system I stood the whole hour and a
half for there was no seat in the house and no corner of the waiting area beyond
the reach of their kvetching- wait a minute, I'm grousing…
But I wondered
if perhaps this is how we sound to God too much of the time. Like those bugs on
Nova that are born, grow to maturity, chase each other in a dizzying romance
and die all in one day, I wonder if God doesn't look at us like we spend two
hours in the morning of our lives kvetching instead of getting in the swim of
the mystery of our short sojourn on this incredible orb Mother Earth.
St. Paul has
this wonderful litany of spiritual qualities that make up a rounded spiritual
life and he ends it with this phrase, “Be Thankful”. That is how we would say
it in English but Greek is a much more sophisticated language
than English. In Greek, it means something like “cultivate a life of gratitude”.
Continuously be thankful.
Of course,
nobody can be continuously thankful for tonight one of your relatives will take the one tool you need to do your project
without a trace as to who/when/where it might be and you'll get a ticket
retrieving it in Brooklyn… Not that this has ever happened to me, mind you.
Gratitude is one
of those things you have to intentionally return to in your life. Despite the
maddening nature of your relatives and the bone headed escapades of your
neighbors, the world is really a touching and wonder-filled place.
And it is a
small miracle that all of us are even here this morning. Don't it always seem
to go, that you don't know what you've got til its gone?
I was with some
colleagues lately. All of us were commenting on the stories that we've heard
from the Greatest generation in the past few years as
they near the end of their lives.
I shared the
story of Neal Koppenol, who taught at the High School here for many years. I
went to see him in the hospital and he told me that he had a terminal condition
and wouldn't live more than a few more days. Very sobering.
We sat quiet for a while.
I said, “Are you
ready to die?”
He got
reflective and said, “Christmas Eve, 1945 we were bringing people off the
islands around Japan right after the end of the war. We were on an LST and
filled with as many passengers as the boat could hold. The seas kept getting
rougher and rougher, the swells so high that the bow of the boat hung out in
the air far longer than I'd ever seen a boat like that before. It was actually
bending the bow of the boat. Those boats were only welded together, not
designed for open ocean like we were in.
All night long,
I was on deck. It was freezing, the wind so strong you could hardly stand. I'm
watching the bow of the boat go out, out out and boom
down on the ocean, only to be swooped up for another cycle. Over
and over. I can see the metal panels bend. We were waiting for the whole
boat to come apart.
Right at dawn on
Christmas morning, we were just coming into Tokyo harbor and the seas just went
calm within an hour or so. The storm was over. The boat was in one piece. You
know, Chuck, every day since then has been plus one”.
Spiritually
speaking, Neal was exactly right. Faced with the prospect of his impending
death, what did he feel? Gratitude about how wonderful and
precious this life has been; gratitude for this family and our community;
gratitude for the simple blessings of peace and fulfillment that he has known.
It has all been ‘plus one'.
That is the real
Christmas morning. It is an amazing awakening isn't it, when you survive a
brush with death? I'd fallen on my hip so hard, I could hardly walk, but the
Chevy Suburban stopped just a couple feet short of running over me, and I
pulled myself onto the grass. The smell of the grass and the flowers behind me,
I just sat there for half an hour not thinking a thing but images from my life
and then all good things that I love until I finally had an aching, immediate
need to hug Kate, I suppose to hold on to all of the things I find precious in
this life.
Most of us here, should have already died a couple times. My appendix
almost burst when I was fifteen. Thank God, I was babysitting for a doctor, who
took me straight into the OR when they came home unexpectedly early from
dinner.
My mother told
me as a child that I was born with pneumonia and the doctors gave a big shot of
penicillin only to discover I was allergic. If I'd been born just twenty years
earlier they wouldn't have been able to save me in all likelihood. Just last
year, I found a box of photographs of my mother holding me as an infant. It hit
me that she was holding that baby like she'd almost lost it, like if she beamed
enough love around that baby that she could protect it from whatever was out
there.
The truth is
that God loves you like that. God is beaming out that kind of love to you from
before you were born. Your life is mystery filled gift.
So Jesus taught
us that we are all ‘children of God' because Jesus wanted us to live out of the
gracious dimension of our existence. Jesus reminded us to see our lives as
preceded by grace that we weren't even aware of and to remind us that we will
most certainly end our lives with gratitude for fact that we were here.
We know that.
We've lived that. We have to come back to it and back to it so that we can
actualize being children of God in the daily living of our lives by
interiorizing that grace and living graciously in the midst of other people. We
can become different and awaken those around to become new people as well.
The Rabbi's tell
a story about the afterlife. It is filled with long banquet tables full of food
set for a feast. But the people have these metal sleeves on their arms so that
they can grab the food with their hands but they can't bend their elbows to get
the food to their mouths. God takes them to one room where everyone is
incredibly frustrated by this limitation and they are all feeding themselves by
dropping the food onto their faces, making this huge mess that they can't clean
up properly, and everyone is kvetching at the horrible
plight they have, a living hell.
Then God takes
them to another room where everyone is sitting at the banquet table with the
same long tables of food and the same metal sleeves on their arms. Only this
time, people are picking up the food with one hand and feeding a neighbor,
stopping to wipe off their mouth when they've made a mistake. And the whole
room radiates out a harmony, a contentment, a love, a
living heaven because we are all taking care of each other.
We just need to
be reminded of our true purpose and our true fulfillment. In the world in which
we live, it is easy to get cynical about our neighbors. All week long, as
people are lining up to merge into one lane, some jackass from Jersey drives
all the way to the end, jams his bumper in between two cars and pries his way
in line.
As the country
song says, “It's hard get a beat on what is divine,
when everybody's cutting to the head of the line, I don't think its working out
quite like He planned.'
So it is
important that we come together every week to remember the real center of grace
that we live out of. We have these small but important rituals like greeting
one another during the service and saying ‘peace be
with you.' And sometimes they can be profound like those Sundays when I turn
around and say that to someone who has just lost their mother and they are here
just raw and numb in the face of death.
Or we stand
shoulder to shoulder around the communion table, acknowledging the gift of God
that makes our lives go, taking the meal of grace together and we hold hands.
Sometimes I think we are just passing the spiritual energy of the group to each
other and I like to think that it centers on those who need it the most like
those in our midst that are going through chemotherapy, losing not only their
hair, but some of their identity as a person and how really personal and awful
that can be, and lonely too. But we remember that we aren't alone, that we
don't build our lives alone, but with and through these people that are around
us beaming us courage and strength and purpose.
Or we lift one
another up in prayer, like our young people when they finish confirmation and
are headed into the tumultuous teenage years, wonderful as they are, they are
also filled with a lot self-doubt and anxiety. And we lay our hands on them and
their families lay hands on them and the rest of us in the congregation lay hands on their families. For a moment, we fill them with
God's love through us and God's hope for them through our hands, and we remind
them that they are not alone and that we will be a refuge and safe harbor when
the seas of teenage angst roil.
And it is not
just those teenage years either. Recently I was standing with three siblings
that brought their Mother's ashes to be interred in our memorial garden. They
told me where they all lived and we were looking at the bronze plaque out back
with the names of so many families they knew, the Meachams,
the Larneds, the Youngs,
the Greenleys, Isabele Deveney and they were commenting on how important all these
people were in their lives and how they still ran into some of their children
despite living all across the country. I said something simple to them like
‘well, welcome home.' All three of them kind of welled up in gratitude for a moment being back in
the place that had formed them so much. We need to be reminded of what is
really real in our lives.
So, don't worry
about the fact that you are likely to lose focus this week and curse the
blowhards on talk radio that are so damn annoying. We are an impatient species
and it comes with the program. But don't stay there. Don't let it soak into
your Spirit. Center yourself in God and remember it is all a gift and that we
won't have this gift for nearly as long as we would like when it is all said
and done. Open yourself to the real wonder. Hold someone you love and radiate
the grace. Take note of the simple things that happen that
are really so awesome.
One of my
grandsons came to the house yesterday with his sister. They wake up before I do
on Saturdays, so it was really early in the morning. My head is buried under
pillows but I look over at little man with his footie pajamas and his blankie. He's grinning ear to ear and he says to me, “Papa
wake up or I'll give you the business.” I'm always threatening my grandsons
with ‘the business' if they get out of line. What a blessing it is to be waked
an hour early by the little man.
And what do I
do? I get out of bed and make some pancakes for my people. And that is what I
hope for you. I hope you can remember the grace that makes your life great. I
hope you can remember the people that loved you into being, stop taking things for granted around you,
and start beaming out graciousness to those around you. I hope you start hosting
others, taking care of others, nurturing them because you really want to,
because it feels like a good thing to do. Like the parable of the after-life,
it probably won't rebound to you directly, you'll feed someone and they will
feed someone else. But there is an infectious quality to grace in our world and
the chances are very good that when you unleash a ‘conspiracy of goodness'
around you, things will eventually start happening that you are on the
receiving end of some gracious thing that you didn't even expect, some stranger
is feeding you.
It is not only a
better way to be, this is the real way that God intends for us to be. May you
be so lucky as to bless others that one day, hopefully far in the future, when
your real end is upon you, you may be surrounded by people of substance and
strength, people that you have formed.
Trust me, when
that day comes, you won't remember any of those jerks on the Garden State
Parkway or the mindless nitwit processing your insurance claim. You won't have
that much time.
You'll remember
that morning you woke up with your wife in Greece when the ocean was so blue
you couldn't believe it, and you couldn't believe you were so lucky as to share
it with this woman.
You are going to
remember the day that you hugged your best friends after winning a fantastic
game. You are going to remember people you love and how marvelous your life
really was, regardless of the things you didn't quite get to…
Remember your
real center in grace, be grateful, and lavish those around you with
grace-filled love. And, as my grandfather used to sign off on the letters that
he sent me in college, “Don't let the bastards wear you down.” Amen.
