ALWAYS GIVING THANKS

11 22 09

EPHESIANS 5:16-20

ANTHONY E.ACHESON, M.DIV.

Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday for many of us in this culture. It lets is put a maximum focus on the simple enjoyment of our blessings, with a minimum of the psychological pressure we often feel on holidays, especially Christmas.

Today’s passage from the Book of Ephesians contains an encouragement to be people who cherish the value of giving thanks in our spiritual lives. We all have much to be grateful for: our prosperity, the peace and beauty of the land we live on, the gifts of the spiritual truths and traditions that are available to us. In addition to the simple enjoyableness of this holiday, Thanksgiving also offers us a spiritual opportunity. Beyond the natural pleasures of good food and company, this occasion is an opportunity to increase our appreciation of the Source of all our good things; to focus on the Divine Ground they spring from, and to increase our awareness of the Divine Process by which those good gifts came to be, and have come into our laps.

Saying ‘thank you’ doesn’t always come easily to us in our natural state. If you’ve ever raised a child, you know the routine where someone gives your kid something, and you dutifully ask, “What do you say?”;  and your child politely produces the magic words: “Thank you. ” There is, to be sure, a kind of natural gratitude that a child shows by simply smiling or laughing when given a gift. But to proactively express gratitude to someone who gifts us; to consistently become conscious of the process by which that gift comes us; those forms of gratitude have to be learned, and they have to be practiced through repetition.

Spiritual gratitude, then, is not just perfunctory politeness. It does not consist in simply saying thankful words–appropriate as such words may be when training children, or in the rhythm of day to day social life. Religious gratitude is not behaving politely toward the Divine. More deeply, spiritual gratitude is the acknowledgment that there IS a Larger Divine Process. It is the acknowledgment that no matter how hard you or I work to gather in grain for our bread, or grow our own potatoes, or mash them, or trim and baste the turkey for our Thanksgiving feast, we ourselves cannot actually grow grain or potatoes or turkeys . Yes, as a figure of speech we may say, “I grow my own produce or poultry.” But, we don’t really. We may plant, fertilize and weed our own gardens. We may tend them skillfully and well. We may do so with a lot of hard work and love, but you or I don’t make those potatoes or squash plants grow. Spiritual gratitude is the acknowledgment of the Larger Power that REALLY grows the potatoes and squash and apples, or raises the turkeys.

Today’s passage in Ephesians 5 says a remarkable thing. Listen to verse 20 where it says, “Give thanks unto the Lord always and for ALL things.” The clear implication of that verse is that we are called to give thanks, yes, in our blessings, but also in our banes and troubles, and even FOR our banes and troubles. We are called to give thanks, yes, for our pleasures, but also for and in our pains. We are called to give thanks, yes, for our joys and successes, but also for and in our sorrows and defeats. We are called to give thanks not just at some times but at all times. We are called to be people who, in these words from Ephesians Chapter 5 are, “always and for everything giving thanks.”

Part of the purpose of this passage is to help us see an important distinction between giving thanks, on the one hand, only for our blessings; and giving thanks, on the other hand, for and in all things. As we do that, we start to realize that the author of those words is not only making a statement about good social behavior, but is also making that statement from a profound state of CONSCIOUSNESS that is very different from ordinary consciousness. The encouragement to give give thanks for all things, comes from a state of consciousness that sees that the events of our lives happen for a reason; and that even the difficulties of our lives there is value and meaning to be found at a level of reality beyond what our ordinary perception can comprehend.

For me personally, some of the deepest thanks I am giving this season are for the life and good health of our daughter, Emma. This week her first check up came back clean following her breast cancer treatment this summer.  Although the place our daughter has in our hearts has never been in doubt, her cancer diagnosis this year has been a reminder of how incredibly precious she is to me, and how incredibly much I love her.

Her importance in my life sheds an important light on something that happened to me when I was a young minister. In 1977, I got my first full-time job as a minister at a church in Hamilton, Ohio. I loved that job. In addition to being the Assistant Minister there, as a part of my job description I was also the organist and choir director of the church. It was one of the most enjoyable stops in my professional life. I was ordained at that church 32 years ago this past Friday.

After I had been working at that church for about a year, the Senior Minister resigned to take another job, and I became the Interim Pastor. I had a lot more responsibility and before long, I was enjoying this new found role greatly. The Moderator of the church was a good friend and encouraged me to apply for the Senior Pastor position, which I did. I was doing good work. The people there seemed to like me for the most part. I wanted that job very much and I thought I had a pretty good shot at it. But when the decision came down, the job went to somebody else. I had only been in the ministry for a little over a year and they hired someone with more experience, which made a lot of sense for them. But for me it was a big disappointment. I thought those people had made a BAD decision. And on an emotional level, I felt that something BAD had happened to me.

But when I think now about the disappointment I felt then at not getting that job, and when I reflect today on how incredibly precious my daughter is to me, and my wife is to me; as I look back on that “bad” experience of not getting that job in Ohio–which soon led to my taking another job at the Edwards Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, which in turn led to my meeting Nancy; I can only say, thank God I didn’t get that job that I wanted so much in Ohio, because if I had, I would never have met Nancy, and if I hadn’t met Nancy, our beloved Emma would never have come to be. So–what looked to ME to be very bad, in the form of losing that job in 1979, really turned out be very good, because it made possible two of the most precious things that have come to be in my entire life: my marriage and our daughter.

For me, remembering and taking advantage of the insight of the value of that painful experience in 1979, has given me an invaluable resource to deal with the inevitable pains and setbacks and difficulties that life presents to all of us. For me losing that job in 1979 has given me a model, which serves as an ongoing reminder to myself that whenever something painful or difficult happens to me that I may reflexively view as bad, I can remember to keep looking deeply into it to see if it may not also be the bearer of some larger or greater good. Goethe once wrote that “it is in limitations that the master is able to show his mastery.” And the poet Rumi once wrote a magnificent poem in which he said, “Your old grandmother may say, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t go to school today. You look a little pale.’ Run when you hear that. A father’s stern slaps are better. Pray for a tough instructor. We have been busy accumulating solace. [O God,] Make us afraid of how we were.”

Losing that job in the late 70’s is an example in my life of something that I was not pleased about at the time, but that I look back on now and say, “Thank God,” very literally. There is a Higher Purpose at work in life. There is a Universal Intelligence and a Universal Mind and a Universal Purpose that is at work, through reality that is guiding us. And sometimes it gives us things that we fabulously enjoy. Sometimes it gives us things that we do not enjoy. But part of the gift and offering which is the spiritual life is to keep reminding us to remind ourselves, over and over again, even in the midst of things that are hard, that there is a higher hand in this; and that there is always that higher purpose.

This is the meaning of deep gratitude. Deep thankfulness is not so much a moral imperative as it is a mode of perception. It is not so much a category of conduct, as it is an attunement of consciousness. It is not so much an obligation we owe, as a way we can learn to know-a way we can learn to know something newer and deeper and truer about the very structure of Reality Itself. It is specifically a reminder that this awesome, Ultimate Process that grows our turkeys and potatoes, and cranberries and apples for the cider, is also working in stealth inside you and inside me to keep us growing also. And despite our sometime fear to the contrary, that is a Process that never ends.

Gratitude, therefore, is a spiritual tool that we can use to remind ourselves that that Divine Process is creative and growthful, and loving and working for our good. Gratitude is a major spiritual tool toward the perception of the Divinity within things. It is the pro-active act of acknowledgment that the Divine is in fact in all things, and in all events and situations.

In Ephesians 5 there is this piece of spiritual advice that says, “Give thanks always and for everything.” And so as we prepare now for another season of Thanksgiving, I invite us all to reflect on the things for which we are called to give thanks this season. That includes, of course, thanks for the happy blessings that we may have. And also in the mix, we are invited to reflect on the not so easy things of our lives, to see if we can move another step forward to see how the Higher Divine Intelligence may be at work even in those.

MEDITATION.

And as we close now, I invite you to bring to mind two things. First, bring to mind a few of the wonderful happy blessings that are most at the forefront of your mind and awareness this Thanksgiving season. And be in gratitude for them.

Then secondly, remember if you can at least one thing that has happened at any time in your life that may have seemed only painful, bad or distressing at the time that it happened, but that you might be able to look back on now as having brought some unexpected blessing over the larger arc of your life.

Ask the source of wisdom within you if you can view that hard time as a form of birth rather than unraveling; as a form of gain rather than loss. Ask that inner wisdom source if there is some current pain or problem you can shift your perception of. Ask if you can see it newly as also a vehicle of birth or growth rather than merely hurt or limitation. Let’s take a few moments in the silence of that reflection. I will close with a spoken prayer.

THE WORTH OF WORSHIP

PHILLIPPIANS 4:6-9

11 1 09

ANTHONY E. ACHESON, M. DIV.

When we come into this sanctuary on Sunday mornings the word we most frequently use to describe what we do here is ‘worship.’ This word worship is based on the word ‘worth.’ ‘Worship’, in the Old English, was  ‘worth-ship.’ Over the centuries the ‘th’ in the middle got collapsed out and became the word we are familiar with. The historic origin of this word worship has something important to teach us: at root, worship has to do with worth. It is an act in which we first, affirm, and then proactively seek out, that which is of the most worth to us.

But that begs the question: what is of most worth to us? We might answer by saying, God, of course. We might say that God is the center and focal point of our faith; that God is what is most important in our lives, and therefore what is worth most to us. But how does that manifest? How does the ‘worth-ship’ of God show up, or display itself in the way we actually live, or in the choices we make? How do we gain clarity about not just what should be of greatest worth to us, but what actually is of greatest worth to us.

One way to gain that clarity is to become aware of what activities we actually spend the most time on; what kinds of thoughts we actually give the most attention to; what we truly love and enjoy the most. One way to define love is the act of giving attention. If we want to know what we truly love-which is another way of referring to what is of greatest worth to us–it can be a valuable exercise to monitor carefully what we pay most attention to. And this in turn can be traced in noticing how we spend our time, as well as what we spend our time thinking about.

Consider one specific example. We might ask ourselves: when we read, what books or magazine do we focus on in our reading? If we read novels, do we read stories that either inspire us, or lead us to new understanding? Or do we read books that simply pass time; or, more negatively, stimulate mental patterns within us that we might do better to lessen rather than encourage. And when we read, do we remember what we read? A week after we’ve read a book, how well could we describe it? How specifically could we describe what we learned from it, or how it helped us to move forward in our lives? Reading, of course, is just one slice of life. And I don’t mean to suggest that 100% of our reading needs to be heavy or serious. But that’s one example of how we might go about assessing what we are giving the greatest worth in our lives. Worth isn’t something that we just identify, or describe, or assert verbally. It’s easy to say we come to worship God, and that God is the highest worth. But what we actually do ascribe the highest worth to is found not in what we say is most important to us, but in how we actually spend our time.

As a minister, I have spoken with many people over the years who approach the end of their lives, or who find themselves in a crisis and suddenly realize that so much of what they have emphasized and focused on, so much of what they have ascribed great worth to really was not all that important to them. I have counseled many people who have spent decades of major effort and energy into amassing much money, or achieving a prominent career, but at some point find themselves saying, ‘O my God, look at how much time I didn’t spend with my kids; look at what I didn’t do to keep my marriage strong and healthy.’ It is not my intention to cast aspersion on prosperity or success. They both have their legitimate plate in a balanced life. But if work and money become what run us, they can often pull us toward imbalance if they cause us to neglect our human relationships.

One of the greatest minds of the twentieth century was that of Aldous Huxley. He was a prolific author, best known for his novel, Brave New World. In the 1950’s when he was at the height of his powers the New York Times once asked him to write a review of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Few people qualify that assignment. The great composer Igor Stravinsky said, ‘Talking to Aldous Huxley on the phone was like having the entire British Museum on the line.’ Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religion has commented, ‘He was one of the most amazing, lovable, generous and knowledgeable people you could ever know. He graced me with thirty five years of wonderful friendship. I loved every minute with him. He was majestic and he was modest. In our final conversation one of the last things he said to me was, ‘Huston, it’s a little embarrassing to have spent one’s entire life pondering the human situation and find oneself with nothing much more profound than to say, ‘We should all try to be a little nicer.’

What is of greatest worth to you today? Clearly being a little nicer, being a lot more loving, focusing more on the Divine, cultivating more richly the presence of the Spirit, expanding our capacity for faith, and being both witnesses and servants to the creative power and presence of the Spirit, these are the things that are of greatest worth.

And my prayer and hope is that as a result of our having come here today, and reflecting on this topic, and soon receiving this sacrament, we would indeed become clearer about what is of most worth to us, and more enabled to serve those values. We ask it in the name of the living Christ. Amen.