“Profound
Thanks”
Luke 18:9-14
First Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
November 23, 2007
Thanksgiving Sunday
The Pharisee in our story today,
while attending to his daily devotions, said as the centerpiece of his prayer:
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues,
adulterers, or even like this tax collector standing here.”
As those words have passed into my hearing over the years, it has
dawned on me that much of my thankfulness, too much of it, arises from the
accident of my fortunate circumstances relative to the circumstances of others.
It is discomfiting to me to realize how often my sense of gratitude is
evoked by a favorable comparison of my lucky life to others’ lives that are
not so materially or circumstantially fortunate.
Perhaps you know by your own experience what I mean.
“God, I thank
you that I live in my part of town and not their part.”
“God, I thank
you that I have my job and not his job.”
“God, I thank
you that we do not have tsunamis, cyclones, and earthquakes where I live.”
“God, I thank
you that I am not sick like she is.”
“God, I thank you that my child is not in trouble like their child is.”
Perhaps “comparative
thanksgiving” is just a part of human nature, but it seems to me a
second-class thanksgiving. I would
like to think that I and we can move toward a more profound thanksgiving, one
that moves closer to the spirit of
Paul is not saying, of course,
to be thankful for all circumstances.
There are some events and situations in life for which thanksgiving is
not only next to impossible, but also inappropriate.
Yet, Paul says, even in the midst of circumstances for
which we cannot be grateful, we can still be thankful.
How? Why?
Because, as one commentator puts it, “We all are pensioners on
God’s bounty.” The Sufi
poet, Rumi, says it like this:
Like salt resolved in the ocean
so I (am) swallowed in God’s sea
past faith, past unbelief,
past doubt, past certainty.
“…so I (am) swallowed in
God’s sea…” Or, as Paul
puts it, “In God, we live and move and have our being.”
That we belong inextricably to the universe, to the cosmos, to the
creation, to God is the cause and reason for what could be our unrelenting and
ceaseless gratitude. I think that is
what Robert Bly was trying to convey in his poem entitled “Tasting Heaven.” (There
is an allusion in the poem to Wallace Stevens, himself a poet, who, for most of
his life, until a reputed deathbed conversion, believed that god was a creation
of the human mind.) Now, “Tasting
Heaven” by Robert Bly:
Tasting Heaven
(Robert Bly)
Some people say that every poem should have
God in it somewhere. But of course Wallace Stevens
Wasn’t one of those. We live, he said, “in a world
Without heaven to follow.” Shall we agree
That we taste heaven only once, when we see
Her at fifteen walking among falling leaves?
It’s possible. And yet as Stevens lay dying
He invited the priest in. There, I’ve said it.
The priest is not an argument, only an instance.
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have
Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies
Are left over from some larger party.
While it is not wrong by any
means, of course, to give thanks for particular things – a beautiful sunset as
the day is dying in the west, a daughter standing beside you in the popcorn line
in a movie theater and out of nowhere saying, “I love you, Dad,” the
rare sighting of a bald eagle perched in a tree by the side of the road between
here and Erie – the gratitude that transforms our lives is more profound than
that, a deeper thanksgiving that rises up within us as we become more and more
aware of our part in the oneness of everything…in some larger party…in the
all-encompassing oneness of God.
I do not think I can say it any
better than the way our friend Angus (Watkins) said it in a note to me on the
first anniversary of my daughter’s death:
“Even as the trees ringing
the clearing where I live let go their colored leaves, I am pleasantly surprised
that the understory of trees still offer a beautiful screen of yellows and reds,
closer to the earth. Isn’t that
ironic – that in churches we used to think that the loftier (heavenly?)
phenomena were to be (most) revered as the sites of what is grand and
lovely…as if the farther from where we are, the better?”
“In the short time that I
knew your Katy, what made her most beautifully wonderful was her
down-to-earthiness, in so many ways. So,
for me, a fitting memorial to your dear daughter on the anniversary of her death
will be to scoop a big handful of leaves from the ground and hold them up before
releasing them in a breeze, to rejoice in the beauty of their hanging there for
a short time, and then tumbling and raining earthward to become a good soil for
new things.”
“In the Great Story of Life, isn’t that how it is for all things and for all of us?…to be some part of the understory for some shorter or more lengthy moment, to dance in brief suspensions, before tumbling in all poignant loveliness into the eternal mix of it all?”
Being
a part of the understory of life, even in the most difficult of situations and
the saddest of days in addition to all of the good and happy ones, trusting that
my life is lived in God and kept by God, that is the deeper thanksgiving
that gives joy to my living. I find
it harder and harder to be thankful for my own privileged life while too many
others around me live in poverty of soul or substance.
I find that the kind of thanksgiving that makes me glad I do not share
the circumstances of those we call “less fortunate” serves to distance and
isolate me from them and from the pain of the world rather than carrying me more
intimately toward those who suffer and more deeply into the hurt and heart of
life. But when my thanksgiving
derives from being a part of the eternal mix of it all, that we are now and
forever given to one another within the mystery we call God, then I feel
connected more profoundly to the world, to life, to God, even to the truth of
myself. It seems to me a more
profound thanks.
As
I am reminded of the stories Jesus told and the life he lived that was filled
with gratitude and spent in the service of love, we are invited to do the same.
Until we do that, it seems to me, our thanksgiving is a little hollow, a
little self-interested, a little selfish. The
greater part of thanksgiving is thanks-living.
So,
sure, it is fine to be thankful for specific things in our lives so long as we
remember that “these delicacies are left
over from some larger party,” so long as we remember the larger context
that God is one, life is one, and that our thanksgiving ought not to remove us
from the beautiful, terrible, frightening, exhilarating mix of the world, but
carry us more deeply into it.
It
has been a while since we have heard from Mary Oliver, so I am permitting her
the last word today through her poem called “Wild
Geese” in which she celebrates gratefully her place, and each of ours, in,
as Angus says it, “the eternal mix of it
all.”
Wild Geese
(Mary Oliver)
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
For
our places in the family of things, no matter how lovely or difficult or happy
or sad, for life and hope, for grace
that comes fresh every morning, for the care and companionship of others along
life’s way, and for God who sweeps us all, each one, into God’s eternal and
compassionate heart, we say thanks and
thanks and always thanks.
Amen.
©
Copyright 2008 First Presbyterian Church