Sermon given at the United Church of Christ of Annapolis for Sunday, 6 Oct 2013
Our good friends in Cambridge, England, Andrew and Susanna, begin each meal together with a simple blessing: “We give thanks for being, we give thanks for being here, we give thanks for being here together.” During the blessing, guests join hands and intentionally look at one another. Three things are acknowledged in this blessing:
- Being. I, as an individual, exist, with all my thoughts and emotions.
- Here. I, as an individual, exist here in this space, at this present moment. This is an event, no less nor more than any other event, but I am awakened to the moment of this particular event.
- Together. I, as an individual, exist here in this space, at this present moment, alongside other people, whom I see and affirm.
Through the three-fold process of the prayer, we are drawn to intentionally reflect on our own existence and recall that that alone is special; we then move along to expand our awareness to the place, all of those things that signify what “here” might mean during that event. And then, we go even further by growing aware of the people that we are with in that place and affirming that they are there with our eye contact and/or hand-holding. The entire three-fold activity is held together by a unity of thankfulness: we give thanks for each stage.
Thankfulness is one of the most profound of human activities, and yet one of the easiest to forget. Turning back to our Greek classics, those ancient heroes who forgot to thank the gods for their good fortune and instead decided it was solely their own skill that led them to safety or success would quickly find themselves no longer in the good graces of the gods. This was less because of any Greek idea of a bunch of angry gods, but rather the result of a society that saw gratefulness as the binding force of all that existed in the culture. Gratefulness for this culture was not something that was given after the fact, as in the proper response for a favor; rather, it was something that existed already in the world. It was a given that one would be thankful for the existence of another person, because in ways one might not even begin to understand, one was dependent upon that other person and always and already owed them. The heroes owed their success and good fortune to the fabric of the world and community in which they lived.
The most sinister of characters would be that person or group of people who felt that they owed no one anything, or worse, that the world owed them. To them, life in the community was a balance sheet of favors and debts. They would be guilty of what Gary Snyder called “stinginess of thought” in our worship preparation reading. Living a “good life” would be one where nothing was owed on either side of the balance sheet. In today’s world this is a phenomena we are accustomed to witnessing, played out on the grand stage of politics, healthcare, housing, minimum wages, our monthly bills, and interpersonal behavior. So often our system of rewards is based not upon a general, always-present thankfulness for one another, but rather a system of merit decided by those in positions of authority over another: did this person deserve this reward, or no? The thanks is restricted only to those who are deemed deserving because of a certain action, and not in the general sense of just being people interacting with our own household.
In that ancient world, where no one pretended to understand the complex web of interconnectivity between one another, to be always in a state of thankfulness was to be demonstrating some sort of faith. In our society today, we recognize God in a general understanding of thanking God when something just works, or a person recovers from sickness, and so forth. We do not presume to know how it works, and even when it can be easily explained, we just know that something happened that made it work. The choral response we sing today following our pastoral prayer, “Thank You, Lord”, reflects this sentiment.
Though Jesus was probably not drawing from the ancient Greeks, something of this understanding of faith arising from constant thankfulness is apparent in his short parable given in response to the apostles’ request. They ask: “Increase our faith!”. It’s one of the most ludicrous demands in the New Testament. It is a demand for miracles, for acts of unquestionable proof that Jesus is the son of God. It is not thankful for Jesus’ presence amongst them, but is rather a demand upon him to serve them. It is a selfish demand for Jesus to make a spectacle of himself in order to purchase their belief in God. Indeed, this is often what churches feel they need to do as they begin to discern how to grow or be more dynamic or vibrant: they feel that people are demanding that we as a church “increase their faith”. In response we feel obliged to put on spectacular displays for them. And so we are tempted to slick things up without a due regard to substance. That does not mean that a church should not have a party: lest we forget, Jesus’ first miracle is to provide the means to keep the Wedding at Cana going – and back then, weddings went on for days at a time. These activities bind community. Nor does it means that a church should not change in order to be more relevant. But what it does mean is that the church should not have a party for the sake of having a spectacle. Nothing a church does should be for the mere sake of appearances. Jesus answers the apostles’ demand with a substantive response, which is similar to that unity within my friend’s table prayer: to paraphrase, he says “increase your thankfulness”.
Jesus poses a question which assumes that the apostles, the very ones who are supposed to be living in the Jesus Way and showing this to all people, are slaveowners. They are in a position of authority with control of the lives of other people. The question assumes that they feel that it is perfectly natural to live in this hypocritical structure, with them as followers of Jesus, and their slaves as servants who have their own, different and subordinate, ways of doing things. Their lives are lived in a balance-sheet mentality; even their comment, “increase our faith,” suggests that they want that aspect of their lives increased so as to offset some other imbalance. They don’t see that by not living lives of thankfulness they are slaves to their own system. They don’t see that Jesus is teaching them to break out of thinking in those ways!
How often do we thank the postman, or the people laying asphalt to create roads, or the people collecting the garbage and recycling of our homes? Teachers? The people operating the networks that keep the internet and electricity in place? Those treating our wastewater or trying to solve the ecological challenges of the Chesapeake Bay? How often do we thank God for all the things that come together to make our lives possible? True, we pay people, perhaps grudgingly. Let’s face it, though: that transactional activity is not much different than slavery in the sense that one would provide the basic needs of a slave, in return for the slave to function as required.
In order for one to have even a modicum of faith in Jesus’ eyes, that “faith the size of a mustard seed,” Jesus wants the apostles to show how thankful they are for others who interact in their lives. To show this thankfulness, Jesus directs the apostles to how they treat the invitations to their dining table. Is it a place where all can eat together? Or is it a place where only an exclusive few are able to eat? Is it a place where some are standing behind the chairs actively serving the guests? Today is World Communion Sunday, and together with Christians around the globe we will sit at Jesus’ table. It is open to all; it is, as my friend the British-Caribbean theologian Michael Jagessar calls it, “a table with no corners.” It is a place where Jesus expresses his thankfulness for all of us, and selflessly feeds us with the spiritual food that represents the substance and lifeblood of his own life. It is a perpetual example of thankfulness for us to emulate. In response to this meal, we give thanks to him. This is a thanks that is so much more than a thank-you note. It is a thankfulness that fills the core of our very being, overflows, and is demonstrated by how we act.
How we act upon thankfulness is evidenced every time we break down the structures that perpetuate inequality and mere transactional zero-sum relationships. We give thanks to Jesus and this meal on the communion table every time we give thanks for the lives of our sisters and brothers, those we know, and especially those we do not know, when we affirm that we love them in thought, word and deed. When we recognize how inter-connected we always and already are in our lives, and we are moved to give thanks, we thank God for it. It’s an emotion we can share in common with those ancient Greeks, and an emotion we give thanks to Jesus for reminding us about in this parable, in his life, and in his own open invitation to the table.
So much in our world drags us back to zero-sum thinking. It’s hard to pay an electricity bill with thankfulness. Those whose are furloughed in our congregation from the shut-down, and the many of us directly affected by it, will have trouble getting back to work on thankfulness. Zero-sum structures are part of the fabric of our society, and balance sheets keep us out of a lot of financial trouble. They can be approached prayerfully. Jesus recognizes that there will always be those structures. Yet he refuses to acknowledge that these need to dominate our approach to life together. He wants us to put mutual appreciation and thankfulness in front of our thinking, and let the balance sheets follow such an approach.
He also reminds the apostles that if we only do that which we’re required to do, our lives will end in “zero sums” ourselves, and we will count ourselves as “worthless slaves who have done only what we ought to have done,” no more, no less. In contrast, a life lived out in thankfulness overflows in meaning. When thankfulness overflows, we are able to find meaning in our own being. We can give thanks for being. We are able to open ourselves up more to the place in which we are: we can give thanks for being here. If we can give thanks for being here, we can go so much further and give thanks for being here, together. We find that the prayer itself is a table with no corners, for it works itself around in a circle. Because we can give thanks for being together, we are able to find in the affirmation of ourselves from one another meaning in our own individual being. It is a cycle of building up that continues, and can only be achieved in the feeling of mutual thanksgiving. That is what we do in this church every Sunday, if not every day.
And so, I ask us now, from where we are sitting, to reach out our hands and join them with those around you. Let this be a beginning of a mutual appreciation of one another. Some of you won’t know the person next to you, but know that your life is as connected to them as it is to a parent, a partner, a child: as we prepare to approach the table which Jesus has joyfully prepared for us, which is put together by so many hands in the Body of Christ around the world, let us say our prayer as we take in the space around us, and the people around us: “We give thanks for being, we give thanks for being here, we give thanks for being here together. Amen.”
Bibliography: http://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, All Things Shining (2011)
preachsirmons 