To listen to this sermon on gratitude, click here.
Hebrew Scripture Reading—Psalm 118: 10-17 and 19-29
I would like to begin this morning with a suspenseful, yet ultimately prayerful visualization exercise. Close your eyes if you like, and imagine yourself with your right arm outstretched as it hangs onto a root jutting out from the edge of a cliff. Your grasp of this root is all that is keeping you from plunging to a terminal fate three thousand feet below. As it happens, you find yourself in this predicament because the person you love the most pushed you over the edge before storming off in a rage. I won’t mention the reason why the love of your life did this. You know the reason. And so, there you are dangling precariously from the root. The sweat on your hand is making it harder and harder for you to maintain your grasp. Ever so slowly, your hand begins to slip downward. Your eyes look upward at your aching hand. For a second, they glance down at the rocky landing far below. Now, at this point, let’s hit the pause button for a moment of reflection.
If paranoia is the belief that the universe is conspiring against you, you are dealing with the realization of that paranoia. Even the person you love the most has conspired against you. Gravity is conspiring against you. The sweat of your own hand is conspiring against you. Your situation is a lot like that of the psalmist in the reading for today. Talk about paranoia realized. The nations surround the psalmist at every side as enemies. They’re like a swarm of bees, a fire of thorns, says the psalmist. Then, comes the almost fatal blow when the psalmist is pushed and finds himself falling. The universe would appear to be conspiring against him.
But let’s return to your situation and hit the play button to see what happens. Right when you think your hand can’t hold onto the root any longer a savior appears at the edge reaching down to grasp your hand. I don’t want to create any more tension after church than I already have, so I won’t say that this person is the new love of your life. All I can say is that this person is your savior. Perhaps, the love of your life came back for you. He or she realized that a mistake had been made. At any rate, you gladly take hold of your savior’s hand as you are hoisted away from the precipice. As you reach flat ground, you roll away from the edge laughing and crying with tears of relief. You look up at the bright blue sky above overwhelmed with gratitude as you repeat outload, “Thank you, God! Thank you, God!” over and over again.
Now, let’s reflect on this last part of our visualization. If you closed your eyes, you can open them now. In contrast to the word paranoia, the term “pronoia” has been coined to describe the belief that the universe is conspiring in one’s favor. Your near fatal fall may not lead you to think that this is a case of realized pronoia, but you do feel as if at least part of the universe is conspiring in your favor. The evil part hasn’t won out. You might think of all the difficult times you have managed to survive. You might think of how you have not only survived but possibly even thrived. You might think of how you were often able to do so because there was someone or, possibly, a number of people who cared for you, who supported you, who helped pull you through. The person you love the most may or may not have been one of those people. Yet, the observation still holds. There is a lot of love out there, and it is what has enabled you to continue on. Our psalmist this morning is in a similar position. After having experienced paranoia realized, the psalmist is saved. The psalmist is so ecstatic and exuberant that we can almost imagine him rolling around on the ground in thanksgiving for God’s steadfast love.
What’s different about the psalmist is that he is praying for an entire community in the context of a worship service. This isn’t just a solitary individual who is filled with thanksgiving after being bullied around. This is someone giving voice to the joys of a people who he knows have been through a rough time. This makes me think that part of our purpose in worshipping together as a community is to occasionally take a moment to think about those times when we have dangled from the edge only to be hoisted back up by caring hands. It could have been the death of a family member or your own illness that nearly tossed you over the brink of despair. It could have been a divorce or some traumatic event in your life. The experience could have been so disastrous and difficult that it cast everything into doubt. Meaning and purpose and maybe even your continued existence were in question. And, yet, somehow, some way with the help of someone, you pulled through it. As a community, we then pause in worship to acknowledge those moments and to give thanks for the ways in which the spirit of God has conspired in your life to bring you to safe ground.
We need that space and that time for gratitude, and I don’t think Thanksgiving Day is enough even without the greed of Black Friday encroaching upon it. While the rest of society yearns for more and more material treasures, faith communities at their best carve out time to appreciate the spiritual gifts that we already have. Our psalmist gives us some clues for how to do that. One is to count the deeds of God, to remember what God has done for us, to remember those times we have been pulled away from the edge. Another clue is captured by the line made famous by a hymn, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
If you look online, you can find a video by Louie Schwartzberg that contemporizes this idea in a beautiful way. Schwartzberg is a renowned cinematographer. His work can be seen in a number of blockbuster films, and he was a leading innovator in time-lapse photography. Have any of you ever seen videos that compress the blooming of a flower over the course of days into a video clip of only a few seconds? In introducing a short film entitled Happiness Revealed, Schwartzberg says that he has “been shooting time-lapse flowers…non-stop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for over 30 years.” He says that the movement of flowers “is a dance” that he will “never get tired of” watching. He goes on to say that when people see a lot of his images of nature, they will spontaneously exclaim, “Oh, my God.” He reflects on what people mean by that. He says the “Oh” indicates that something has caught their attention. This reveals how fully present and mindful they are. He says that the “my” tells him that they have connected with something deep down inside. He then asserts that their invoking of God tells him that they have connected with a deeply personal sense of inspiration and a cosmic celebration of life.
In the film that Schwartzberg then shows, the voice of the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast provides a spoken meditation as the screen shows a collage of video shots from nature as well as everyday life among humans around the world. I will conclude with an adaptation of this meditation. I will invite you to use your imagination again as you listen, but I promise no cliffs this time.
You think this is just another day in your life – it’s not just another day. It’s the one day that is given to you today. It’s given to you. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life, and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.
Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open. [Delight in] that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment. Look at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky. We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment with clouds coming and going. We just think of the weather, and even of the weather we don’t think of all the many nuances of weather. We just think of good weather and bad weather. This day right now has unique weather, maybe a kind that will never exactly in that form come again. The formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same that it is right now. Open your eyes. Look at that.
Look at the faces of people whom you meet. Each one has an incredible story behind their face, a story that you could never fully fathom, not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors. We all go back so far. And in this present moment on this day all the people you meet, all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world, flows together and meets you here like a life-giving water, if you only open your heart and drink.
So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which you can open your heart. And so I wish for you that you would open your heart to all these blessings and let them flow through you, that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you; just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch — just by your presence. Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you, and then it will really be a good day.
Amen.