Gratitude's Quiet Complexities

A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church, November 19, 2017

Scriptures: Luke 17:12-17; John 12:1-8;

         Most of us recognize the simple and straightforward ways in which gratitude enriches our lives. Experiencing it restores our perspective and helps chase away such inner demons as despair, doubt, jealousy, greed, and envy. Expressing it draws us into a state of humility, compels us to acknowledge our debts to others, and provides sustenance to our relationships. Receiving it offers encouragement and reassurance that our acts of generosity and kindness have not gone unnoticed. In some deeply true way, the only difference between a happy and fulfilled life and a miserable and unfulfilled one often lies in the single ingredient of gratitude.

As people of faith, we try to remain mindful of the importance of directing our gratitude toward God. We hear this sentiment in the words of Thomas Merton:

To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us—and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, [and] is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

During this season especially, we remind ourselves, and each other, of the important place that gratitude has in our mental and physical health, the quality of our existence, and the depth of our relationships with everyone, including God. It is a pretty simple idea.

But treating simplicity with a healthy skepticism often turns out to be a good approach, particularly in theological matters. After all, we worship a God for whom complexity is not a hobby but a vocation, indeed a loving and principal preoccupation. Consider the design of the universe, or the architecture of a strand of DNA, or the mysteries of a Bach fugue, which, it has always seemed to me, were not just written to the glory of God, as the composer declared, but in God’s own image. God instills complexity into even the simplest of things, leaving it there for us to seek and find. Today, I want to talk about three aspects in which the “simple” phenomenon of gratitude may be more complicated than we first suspect.

One of those complexities relates to how we think about and deal with ingratitude. Ingratitude shows up in our lives in very different ways. Sometimes we act as purveyors of ungratefulness. Other times we find ourselves on the receiving end of it.

I suspect that none of us cares much for being treated ungratefully. Indeed, when Shakespeare’s King Lear cries out “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is to have a thankless child,” we may think he has understated matters a bit. After all, thankless spouses, parents, friends, neighbors, bosses, co-workers, customers, clients, or elected representatives probably do not sit very well with us, either. We do not find ungratefulness an attractive characteristic in anyone and feeling unappreciated is a consistently lousy experience.

And yet ingratitude is extraordinarily common, as the Bible recognizes. In preparation for this sermon, I worked my way through the Gospels looking for instances where someone who had been the beneficiary of Jesus’s healing, forgiveness, or grace expressed their thanks to him or to God. I did not find many. Sometimes, Jesus’s acts are even met with dismay: for example, after he casts the demonic spirits from a herd of swine, the local people “thank” by asking him to leave town as quickly as possible. More commonly, his actions are met with silence. 

In most instances, Jesus passes over these omissions without comment, but occasionally he takes note of them. Consider, for example, the first passage I read this morning from chapter 17 of Luke. Jesus heals ten lepers, and only one (ironically, a socially marginalized Samaritan rather than an observant Jew) bothers to offer thanks. Jesus essentially responds: “Only one returned to praise God? What happened to the other nine?”

In contrast, throughout the Gospels we find Jesus giving thanks and expressing his gratitude to God. When he feeds five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes—he gives thanks. (John 6:11) When he breaks bread and takes the cup at the last supper—he gives thanks. (Matthew 26:27) Indeed, when we share in communion, we replicate Jesus’s act of thankfulness and make it into our own.

Given that ingratitude is so unattractive, causes so much unnecessary pain, and seems so thoroughly un-Christ-like, we might wonder why it is such a pervasive, tenacious, and stubborn force in our society. Maybe much of it has to do with fear: fear that gratitude costs us something; fear that it somehow lessens us; fear that exhibiting it will signal that we owe something to someone else. In this sense, we may shy away from shows of gratitude for the same silly and ungracious reasons we may shy away from apologizing.

This possibility may offer some guidance about how to deal with our own ingratitude. When we hesitate to express our thanks, maybe we simply need to remind ourselves that the most commonly repeated phrases in the Old and New Testament are “fear not” and “be not afraid.” Maya Angelou once said that: “courage is the most important of the virtues because without [it] you can’t practice any of the other virtues consistently” and I think I know where she got that idea. In any event, nothing puts us on the fast track to ingratitude like fear and insecurity.

The notion that ingratitude often has its roots in fear may also help us deal more patiently and empathically with the ingratitude of others. Ungratefulness can make our blood boil. But maybe it turns the temperature down a bit if we understand that it is likely a symptom of something else. The ingratitude that we experience as an affront may actually be evidence of a great and terrible battle going on inside someone’s heart and soul and mind, and heaping our resentment on top of it will not do anything to help matters.

A second complex dimension of gratitude relates to our hesitancy to accept displays of it. We have probably all had the experience of squirming uncomfortably while some well-intentioned soul expressed their thanks and gratitude to us in terms that we experienced as overly generous. If you wondered just how deeply complicated we human beings can be, then connect this issue with the one I discussed a moment ago: we don’t like ingratitude, and sometimes gratitude doesn’t sit all that well with us, either.

I suppose that a variety of factors might trigger our occasional allergic reactions to gratefulness. Perhaps we don’t care for the spotlight it shines on us. Perhaps we worry that people will conclude we did something in order to be thanked for it, which doesn’t just reduce the value of our act but turns it into a kind of narcissistic ploy. Or perhaps shows of gratefulness aggravate the “impostor syndrome” from which many of us suffer, making us wince at exclamations over how wonderful we are when we know full well just how wonderful we aren’t.

But, of course, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of answering someone else’s gratitude with our own version of ingratitude. We must sustain gratefulness even in the face of a little embarrassment, or a concern that our motives might be misunderstood, or our settled convictions about our own unworthiness. As the great New York Times columnist David Carr once observed: “We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end anytime soon.”

Jesus teaches us something about accepting shows of gratefulness in the passage in which Mary anoints his feet with perfume and wipes them with her hair. Judas objects (insincerely, the text tells us) and argues that she should have sold the ointment and given the money to the poor. But Jesus commands Judas to leave her alone, declaring: “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” (John 12:1-8)

Socially conscious readers of the Gospels sometimes bristle at this passage, taking it as a callous dismissal of the concerns of the impoverished. But that would be very unlike Jesus and in my judgment any such reading misunderstands the passage. Note the sequence of events—Judas objects only after Mary has already spread the perfume on Jesus’s feet. At this point—when it is too late to do anything else with the perfume—Judas sanctimoniously tries to embarrass Mary over her extraordinary show of adoration.

Jesus comes to her defense, and his words do not seek to elevate himself but to elevate her—and, along the way, to put Judas in his place. In essence, Jesus says: “Don’t condemn her for buying perfume for my burial and then thinking to anoint me with it while I am alive! I am grateful for the kindness she has shown while I am still with you.” And then he adds: “Oh, and by the way Judas: don’t worry about your opportunities to care for the poor—you will have an abundance of them, if that really interests you.”

It is, of course, true that whenever a person shows us gratitude there is always someone or something else that may have a better claim to it. But, as a friend and mentor of mine often says: rejecting gratitude is like throwing a gift back into the giver’s face. “Greet gratitude with gratitude,” the story of Mary anointing Jesus seems to tell us, “for by doing so you magnify it and affirm it’s holy grace.”

The theme of grace leads us to the third and last of gratitude’s quiet complexities. And it is this: our most profound experiences of gratefulness frequently come from unexpected sources. As I mentioned at the beginning, the God we worship appears to love complexity, and this explains why God has such a deep fondness for paradox.

In many instances our sense of gratitude has predictable sources. To take a local example, if on a clear and sunny day you can walk to the top of Pyramid Point and look out at the glistening blue water of the lake and not feel grateful for the weather, and the health that got you there, and the bright sky, and the view, and the breeze, and the companionship of whoever came with you, then please let me know and we will set up a special prayer circle for you. In settings like that, most of us do not have to work at gratefulness—it just wells up in us easily and effortlessly.

Granted, some of us are tougher cookies on this front. The story goes that on a walk on a perfect spring morning a friend said to Samuel Beckett “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which the prickly playwright responded “I wouldn’t go as far as that.” Still, most of us know these sorts of obvious occasions for gratitude when we see them.

In contrast, think about the sources of gratefulness in the Gospel stories we have looked at today. Ten people are suffering from a terrible disease—and gratefulness comes out of it. Thousands of people are hungry—and gratefulness comes out of it. The Son of God awaits his crucifixion and anticipates his burial—and gratefulness comes out of it.

Or think of the Beatitudes, where Jesus describes those whom the Lord has blessed and who should therefore be deeply grateful. That list includes some we might expect: those who hunger for righteousness; the merciful; the pure in heart; the peacemakers. But it also includes others who we might think of as unlikely candidates for blessedness and gratitude: the poor in spirit; those who mourn; the meek; and those who are persecuted.

The last of these anticipates the greatest and most unlikely source of gratefulness in the history of humankind—a savior’s agony upon a cross that, in the end, conquers death itself and transforms a symbol of torture into one of grace, redemption, love, and eternal life. Think about the complexity and paradox inherent in that idea—and think about what it offers us. Indeed, we could do a lot worse than to begin every church service by pausing, taking a deep breath, looking upon the cross, and saying softly to ourselves: grateful; grateful; grateful.

We live in difficult and challenging times. Every day appears to bring us new reasons to feel disappointment, dejection, and despair. We seem to encounter endless occasions for sadness and worry. Hope can strike us as elusive, fragile, and vain.

And, yet, over and over again, even out of such hard raw material the God of complexity and paradox brings us reasons for gratefulness: gratefulness for the voices of sanity among the madness; gratefulness for the courageous people who run toward the trouble while the rest of us run away; gratefulness for those who fight for justice, equality, and liberty even when injustice, bigotry, and oppression threaten to outflank them; gratefulness for acts and words of kindness, generosity, and decency in a world that sometimes seems relentlessly harsh, selfish, and crude. To paraphrase what the patriarch Jacob said about God after a wonderful dream: “Surely, there are reasons for gratefulness even in this place—and we did not know it.”

Sermons on this Sunday before Thanksgiving often end with simple admonitions for us to go forward into our lives with an “attitude of gratitude.” Perhaps I have persuaded you that things are more complicated than that.  And maybe they are that way because that is how God likes them.

Maybe in order to cultivate a truly deep sense of gratefulness we need to work on other qualities as well. We need to be brave—so we are unafraid to acknowledge our debts to those who have given us reasons to be grateful. We need to be empathic—so we are not quick to judge the apparent ingratitude of those around us. We need to be open—so we are receptive to the gratitude that others show us and do not indulge in our own form of ungratefulness. And we need to be watchful—always on the lookout for the opportunities for gratefulness that come to us in the most unexpected ways and from the most unexpected sources.

Brave, empathic, open, and watchful. It sounds like quite a self-improvement project, doesn’t it? And yet we are assured of this: “We can do all things through the one who strengthens us. And, through Him, all things are possible.”

Toward the end of his life, after he had discovered that cancer was overtaking him, Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote several essays that have recently been assembled in a short book called Gratitude. He concludes one of those essays with these words: “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. [And above all else,] I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

And so:

for the blessings that come from unexpected places;

for our capacities for bravery and empathy and openness;

for loving and being loved;

for the giving and the receiving;

for traveling and coming home;

for thinking and writing and speaking our conscience;

for our time on this beautiful planet;

for the timeless place that awaits us;

for the presence of Christ in our lives;

for the paradoxically redemptive beauty of the cross—

here we are, the gathered people of the living God …

grateful, grateful, grateful.

  

Amen.