November 23, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
We all have them, small or large wounds inflicted by accident or on purpose by someone in our past – distant or near. Resentment is something we nurse. It is not a gulp but a sip… a sip, sip, sip, sip, sip, sip that keeps alive a little coal of anger inside that might otherwise burn out or be forgotten but that we draw on now and again with a kind of perverse pleasure. Some of us do it more than others but everyone I know about has resentment of some kind, from something or someone, somewhere. The thing is, it is impossible feel gratitude and resentment at the same time. It is like oil and water that will not stay together.
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Sermons @ Trinity
November 22, 2009
“Oh yeah…”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good morning.
This is not a blossoming time of year.
Nor is it a sugary,
dusty season of paper-bag peaches
dripping with succulence.
But…
“There are days we live,”
as Li-Young Lee writes,
“There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
Oh yeah.
That is what happens when “Thanksgiving” takes over.
Now please,
you know me well enough to know
I am not a Pollyanna.
I do not mean that gratitude,
or the disposition to feel thankful,
obliterates sorrow, loss or grief.
Simply this:
gratitude, or thanksgiving,
attacks and subverts anxiety and resentment.
You and I can live with sorrow, loss and grief.
We have to, life is full of it.
But anxiety and resentment are debilitating.
Anxiety is having one foot on the dock-of-the-past,
and one foot on the boat-of-the-future
and feeling paralyzed about which way to jump.
Gratitude,
tapping into that deep well of thanksgiving inside us,
places us squarely in the present moment.
Standing in the present moment
will almost instantly corrode anxiety,
and often,
re-position ourselves so that we no longer feel
like we are straddling anything.
I’m not saying the anxiety won’t come back –
I am not talking about magic here –
but while we live within the aura of gratitude
we will not experience anxiety.
And by the way,
I do not know why that is
I only know that it is.
Now resentments are a whole different thing.
The word itself, resentment,
comes from two Latin words meaning:
to re-feel.
And that is exactly what resentment is:
re-feeling all over again
some injury or offense or grudge.
We all have them,
small or large wounds
inflicted by accident or on purpose
by someone in our past – distant or near.
Resentment is something we nurse.
It is not a gulp but a sip…
a sip, sip, sip, sip, sip, sip that keeps alive
a little coal of anger inside
that might otherwise burn out or be forgotten
but that we draw on now and again
with a kind of perverse pleasure.
Some of us do it more than others
but everyone I know about has resentment
of some kind,
from something or someone,
somewhere.
The thing is,
it is impossible feel gratitude and resentment
at the same time.
It is like oil and water that will not stay together.
Even when you shake them up
they want to separate almost immediately.
Again, I do not know why it is,
but gratitude disperses resentment like a blast of air.
Gratitude, or tapping into that well of thanksgiving
that all of us have access to within ourselves,
will create room for us to breath fresh air
and dispel the toxic bile of resentments…
at least for the moment.
“There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
Oh yeah, there are those days or hours…or minutes.
There was a time when I thought Jesus’ words
in Matthew 6, witness the lilies of the field,
was the most bogus thing I ever heard.
How disconnected
and idealistic
and stupid
such flowery talk sounded to me.
But then I came to appreciate them so much
that Katy and I picked that passage for our wedding,
as a reminder to one another to keep a perspective
on what is truly important in life.
Just this week I experienced the gold
held within Jesus’ lilies of the field metaphor.
I was meeting with the vestry of another Church
that was seeking help in their effort to put the brakes
on years of steep decline.
They were morose.
They were defeated.
They were fatigued.
The only reason I was there
was that a new, 20-something, member of the vestry
did not know enough to give up
and got my name from somebody and she called me.
We had some conversations
and she set up the meeting to which the vestry,
most of whom admitted,
arrived with deep skepticism.
Being a student of congregational culture
and organizational development,
I described their congregation is graphic detail
and why they were where they were.
In other words,
I named the problem
and I showed them at least one process
that could help them discern a way out.
In the course of our three hours together,
I could literally see weight evaporating off their shoulders –
truly, their body language emitted relief.
As the conversation went from past woes
to the difficult work of discerning opportunities,
hope became something you could see and hear.
Now here is the connection to Jesus’ words.
What opened the door to hope for them,
was the realization that they did not have a mission.
They did not have a clear mission
to which they were all personally devoted.
They did not know why they existed.
They had long ago forgotten
who they were and whose they were.
In the absence of a
clear, compelling and shared mission,
all that is left is survival.
All that is left is to worry about money.
All that is left is to fight over the scraps.
All that is left is waiting for the end.
When it suddenly dawned on them that they had
forgotten who they are as a community,
and whose they are as a community,
they remembered the power of a mission.
When they remembered whose they are, God’s,
they knew in their heart of hearts,
that they could learn to discern a mission again
and that that would re-ignite their community
and give rebirth to a future.
They couldn’t see it yet but even so,
anxiety was dissolved by remembering whose they are.
And by remembering whose they are,
they knew they could re-discover who they are
as a community.
Hope almost exploded in the room.
It was so powerful it reminded me
whose I am
and even who I am.
To perform a little updating paraphrase on Matthew,
what Jesus is saying, is that we get obsessed by
things that do not matter in the long run.
We forget what matters.
We forget who we belong to – God.
We forget who we are as agents of God.
We forget the mission we have been given
as agents of the Kingdom of God.
Heck, we forget that we ever had a mission –
a personal mission
or a community mission.
And when we forget those basic things
about who we are
and whose we are,
the only things left to focus on are horrendously
disabling and disheartening things like
our beauty
our youth
our wealth
our status
our personal achievements
our affirmation from others
our, our, our, our –
which really translates as mine, mine, mine, mine.
When our focus or obsession is on such ego-driven
aspects of ourselves…
then anxiety and resentment become chronic.
If our focus is on such slim, fleeting and self-aggrandizing elements
then we will be consumed with anxieties
about when we do not have them any more…
about the day we will not have them any more.
And we know, deep down,
there will always come a day
when we do not have them any more.
Or we will be consumed with resentments
against the people who have robbed us
of what we lust after,
or those who got what we wanted but didn’t get.
We will be consumed by resentments over
loss,
failure,
woundedness
and embarrassments.
And there will always be losses, failures, wounds and embarrassment along the way,
and without a greater sense of mission beyond our own self-interest and aggrandizement,
all we have is a straw
to suck on our resentment over them.
Jesus is not denying our basic human needs.
We have Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs
to remind us that if our basic needs are not met…
we will be focused upon survival.
But Jesus is saying that if we are focused on
who we are
and whose we are –
if we are clear about our mission as agents of the Kingdom of God and we are about that work –
then those basic needs will likely get met
and we will not be anxious about them.
Most of us here,
not all of us but most of us,
have the basics covered and then some –
and then some!
If we are focused on the then some
we will have chronic anxiety and resentment.
I do not know exactly why that is,
but I do know that it is.
It is, I believe, a spiritual truth.
So we can be focused upon
what we have
and what we do not have;
or we can be focused upon
whose we are
and who we are
and what we have been given to do.
What we have
and what we do not have
leads to anxiety and resentment.
Who we are
and whose we are
and what we have been given to do
leads to hope,
and gives us a larger perspective that can assimilate
the challenges and problems we face
without being defeated by them.
Again, I do not know why this is
but I do know that it is a spiritual truth.
Let me end with this,
bringing Jesus’ metaphor into the worship.
The word “Eucharist” –
which is the earliest word for the ritual meal we call
Holy Communion –
means, literally, “Thanksgiving”.
For historic reasons that we were not a part of,
the ritual of Communion came to be focused upon…
that’s right, our needs and neediness.
It got turned into something that people did
to ask for forgiveness,
or to fill a hole,
or to somehow make things right
when they felt out of kilter.
It became something that people did
as individuals coming forward to get something –
driven by the mine, mine, mine of woundedness.
Often it was seen as a solution to the anxiety
that God did not love us enough
or had not forgiven us enough
or would not accept us enough.
In short, Communion often came to be seen
as a solution to scarcity
and a spiritual fix
for some basic need that had not been gotten yet.
But the mission of Communion is Thanksgiving.
Eucharistia means “thanksgiving”
and it aims tap our deep well of gratitude.
Eucharist is the community giving thanks
for the abundance of our lives,
and for the mission we have been given
as agents of God’s kingdom.
Do not be anxious about what we do not have,
do not be anxious about God’s love,
do not be anxious about what we may lose,
rather,
give thanks for whose we are
and thanks for who we are
and thanks what we have been given to do.
“There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
Oh yeah…
