Grateful, Part 2

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

November 15, 2020

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Thank you, Lord, for the blessings you have bestowed on my life. You have provided me with more than I could ever have imagined. You have surrounded me with people who always look out for me. You have given me family and friends who bless me every day with kind words and actions. They lift me up in ways that keep my eyes focused on you and make my spirit soar.

Also, thank you, Lord, for keeping me safe. You protect me from those things that seem to haunt others. You help me make better choices, and you have provided me with advisors that help me with the difficult decisions. You speak to me in so many ways so that I always know you are here.

And Lord, I am so grateful for keeping those around me safe and loved. I hope that you provide me with the ability and sense to show them every day how much they matter. I hope that you give me the ability to give to them the same kindness they have provided to me. I am just so grateful for all of your blessings in my life, Lord. I pray that you remind me of just how lucky I am, and that you never allow me to forget to show my gratitude in prayer and returned kind acts. Thank you, Lord. In your name, Amen.

 

Matthew 25: 14-30

The Parable of the Bags of Gold

¹⁴ “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. ¹⁵ To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag,^[a] each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. ¹⁶ The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. ¹⁷ So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. ¹⁸ But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

¹⁹ “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. ²⁰ The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

²¹ “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

²² “The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

²³ “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

²⁴ “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. ²⁵ So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

²⁶ “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? ²⁷ Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

²⁸ “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. ²⁹ For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. ³⁰ And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

A Message

Grateful, Part 2: Awareness and Practice

There’s an old story I wanted to share with you. It’s about a philosophy professor. One day the professor came to class with a huge glass jar, and set it on a table in front of his students. He then took out a bag full of fist-sized rocks, and started placing them inside the jar one by one, until they reached the top of the jar. Then he addressed his students:

“Is this jar full?” Most of the class answered “yes”. “No it isn’t!” he answered, and then he took out a bag full of gravel. He poured the gravel into the jar and shook the jar until the gravel filled in all the spaces between the big rocks, and reached the top of the jar.

“Is this jar full?” he asked again. With a bit more hesitation, most of his students replied “Yes? We think?” “No it isn’t!” the professor answered, and he took out a bag of sand. He started pouring the sand in the jar and rattled it around until the grains of sand filled in the crevices between the big rocks and gravel, and until the sand reached the top of the jar.

“Is this jar full?” he asked again. Wise to the idea that there was more going on here than meets the eye, most of his students replied “Probably not.” “No it isn’t!” the professor said, and he took out a bucket of water, and poured it into the jar until it filled in all the spaces between the big rocks, the gravel, and the sand, and until the water reached the top of the jar.

“Now”, the professor said, “that jar is full. What do you think the lesson is here?”

One of his smark alek students raised his hand and said “That no matter how full our schedules are there’s always room for one more thing?”

“No.” the professor said. “The lesson here is that if you don’t get those big, fist-sized rocks in the jar first, you’ll never get them in.”

I love that story, and I’ve always found it a helpful lens through which to view our faith experience, especially now as we’re at part two of a three part sermon series about Grateful by Diana Butler Bass. Gratitude is one of the most important virtues of our Christian faith, one of the “big rocks” to put at the base of that jar. But where do we put gratitude in our lives?

This question is all the more pressing as we’re just over a week away from Thanksgiving 2020: the Weirdest Thanksgiving Ever. Many local governors and mayors have strongly advised against gatherings of more than ten people, and gatherings from multiple households. This leaves many of us with very tough decisions to make, especially if we have out of state family in the midst of heavy travel restrictions. Are we going to see our parents, our children, our cousins and dear friends for Thanksgiving? Are we going to buck advice and risk coronavirus exposure in order to see the ones we love? Are we going to sit around our tables missing familiar faces? Are we going to eat in from of a computer and have a Zoom dinner? Are we going to try to wear masks and visit others? Such a weird time, in a weird year. Y’all, it is weird with my soul.

Bass suggests in the book that gratitude is much more than a feeling we have when something nice happens or we receive a gift. Gratitude is a habit. And it’s a habit most of us aren’t hard wired for. Our brains are hard wired to notice unfairness, moments of danger, obstacles, and risks. It’s how we protect ourselves—we see all the potential pitfalls long before we get to them and then plan a safe course around them. However, this leaves most of us neurologically wired to see the bad in life over the good. Gratitude requires us to change our neuro pathways so as to not miss the blessings that hide between the tough moments. Bass presents practical advice: consider keeping a gratitude journal, or praying every morning and night.

Still, gratitude requires something even deeper that most of us are very unwilling to give up. True, Christlike gratitude is only possible if we remove the protective casing from around our hearts so that we can let in God’s blessings even in the midst of fear and disappointment.

This leads me to this week’s Gospel story. Oh boy is this a tough one to preach on. No one comes to church on Sunday excited to hear the words “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” If we’re not very careful, this passage can teach us a lot of harmful things. It can depict God in a very harsh light. It can paint God as a materialistic deity who blesses us with lots of money if we multiply God’s investment in us, and that can lead us down the rabbit hole into the prosperity Gospel before long. Even more troubling, many of our translations refer to the three men that engage with their master in this story as “slaves”, and it’s incredibly difficult to square the Bible’s references to slavery as a common practice with our modern day sense of justice. These words can be particularly wounding for our BIPOC friends because of our country’s horrible involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Because of all those things, I ask you as you read what I’m about to type: whatever preconceived notions you have about this text, try to hold them only very lightly. Invite your mind and heart to a different reading of these words.

What I want to lift up here is our natural human instinct toward self preservation. Most of us are inclined to be like the third guy, burying our talent (and it’s no accident that the word for a form of currency is now a word we use for our gifts and graces) rather than taking the risk of using it. As much as we hope to avoid danger when we do that, so often the growth that Jesus invites us to only happens when we’re willing to leave the comfy sandbox and step out holding his hand into the world’s marketplace. Many of life’s greatest blessings only come our way after we step off the safe path.

To that end, I wanted to share a story with you about a friend of mine, a fellow Methodist clergywoman. She didn’t want me to use her real name, so I’m going to call her Susie. A few years ago Susie was in an abusive marriage. Her husband was a demeaning and controlling man who was starting to show sparks of violence. Susie was scared. She started to make a plan to leave him. She was going to start packing up her stuff while her husband was at work, and she was going to store it in her car. When she felt ready to take off, she was going to leave in the middle of the night. She would get up to feed their infant son, which her husband would not have found unusual, and she was going to switch off the baby monitor, get the baby ready, and tiptoe out of the house while her husband slept.

But then a major crisis happened before Susie had the chance to see her plan through. Her husband’s anger management issues got him fired from his job, and he had a mental breakdown. He called Susie’s mom and told her he was going to jump off a local bridge. Susie called 911, and the police saved her husband from hurting himself and got him to a hospital. While he was there, Susie packed up his stuff and stashed it in his car, then took his house key off of his key ring, handed his car over to the police, and told them that he wasn’t welcome in her home anymore. A nasty divorce followed. It was the worst time in Susie’s life.

But today, a few years later, Susie is grateful for this crisis. She’s not grateful for the abuse she experienced, but she is grateful for her husband getting fired, reaching his breaking point, and getting hospitalized, because once that happened he finally got help. Now he has his mental health issues under control. He and Susie have an amicable co-parenting relationship, and they have a healthy son who will not be raised in a violent home.

Opening our hearts to gratitude at all times means inviting Jesus to walk with us even when we’re frightened enough to run from him. Sometimes the most glorious blessings happen right at the edge of the outer darkness, when we can see the monsters gnashing their teeth at us, and Jesus pulls us to safety. May our hearts be transformed by a love so powerful that even though we have wept, we say thanks to God.

Amen.

I invite you to receive the benediction:

Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all of God’s people, whether you’re inches away from my keyboard or on the other side of the world, we say together: Amen.