Sermons

“Abiding in Gratitude”

Psalm 66:1-12; Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Luke 17:11-19 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – October 13, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that our souls might be made new again and our hearts give thanks with refreshed sincerity.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

My husband, Todd, and I started watching a new (to us) show this past week called “Rectify”. It’s about a man who has been on death row for 19 years, who is then released because newly tested DNA evidence casts doubt on his conviction.  He returns home to the family he’s barely seen since he was 17, more or less free, if not quite exonerated just yet.  There was a scene in one of the early episodes where his very sincerely Christian step-sister-in-law, Tawney, makes an earnest attempt at conversation by asking him what his favorite season is.  She goes on to say her favorite season is fall, but she also really loves a good hard rain on a summer day, especially if there’s a lot of thunder.  Daniel then struggles to explain that where he’s been for the past 19 years, he didn’t have a window and he was surrounded by really thick walls, which were surrounded by more really thick walls; he couldn’t ever hear thunder.  But, he says kindly, he will definitely be watching out for his first summer thunderstorm.  This is but one of many awkward moments when things that most of us take for granted – like the weather, or grass, or the overabundance of food at a buffet restaurant – are causes for confusion, or wonder, or gratitude for Daniel, who has had nothing but concrete and metal shaping his life for so long.

The premise of a show like this offers us an opportunity to reflect on all the things we have to be grateful for, much of which we don’t give more than a passing thought to on a regular basis.  The contrast between the relentless deprivation of death row and the comparative ease with which most of us live our lives is a good reminder of our calling as followers of Christ to cultivate lives of humble thanksgiving.  The scripture passages we just heard all point to the centrality of two related ideas that are intertwined throughout the biblical witness: 1) gratitude is our most faithful response to God, and 2) gratitude comes more naturally when we humbly remember the transience of our earthly situations rather than relaxing too far into the complacency that comes with getting too comfortably settled in.  Number one I’m sure you can easily embrace.  Number two may need a little unpacking, so let’s start there.

There is a major theme that runs through most of the Hebrew scriptures that my Old Testament professor would have called the “Wandering Aramean” theme.  He had a thing about this verse from Deuteronomy 26, where it says, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.”  It’s not exactly clear if the verse is talking about Jacob or Abraham or the whole family line in general, but the point is that even though the Israelites were a people whose identity was shaped largely around the idea that God had promised them a land flowing with milk and honey, it was essential for them to remember that before that, they were nomads – landless, nationless, vulnerable to the whims of other peoples, as illustrated most explicitly by their years of slavery in Egypt – and thus (and the “and thus” is almost always included), thus they had a special obligation to watch out for other vulnerable people, including orphans, widows, and particularly, foreigners in their midst.  Remembering their heritage as wanderers helped keep the Israelites in a posture of gratitude toward God.  And as with all true spiritual disciplines, it didn’t just affect their relationship toward God, but also shaped their behavior toward other people.

We see the gratitude that flows from this discipline of memory in Psalm 66, where the trials they’d been through are recalled, and then thanks given because “you have brought us out to a spacious place.”  When we turn to the passage we heard from Jeremiah 29, the “wandering Aramean” is both a little harder to find and right out in the open.  Jeremiah is writing to the Israelites who had been exiled to Babylon.  Perhaps they didn’t need to be reminded of the “wandering Aramean” because they were already living that life themselves – landless, nationless, exiled into hostile territory.  But what does Jeremiah say to them?  “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.  But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  I know it’s not your “forever” home, but make yourselves at home.  The point here is no longer about the moral obligation to take care for refugees, but advice to refugees themselves.

And now it is us who may struggle for perspective.  Exile is such a hard word: Leaving behind everything you know, everything you’ve worked for and built up; going somewhere where nothing is familiar, with no idea if or when you might return.  How long does it take you to decide to settle in a little, rather than living out of a suitcase because you might get to go home tomorrow?  What would you be giving up on if you planted a garden?  How does your family get re-defined if your child marries a local girl?  These are not questions most of us have had to ponder.  We are trapped in the complacency of the settled, so much less aware of our reliance on God and the true home that is only found in God.

And if we struggle to remember the wandering Aramean, we are not alone.  All of this is the background when Jesus marvels at the Samaritan leper’s extra effort at thanksgiving.  “Were not ten made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”  Here Jesus is explicitly making the connection between gratitude and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land.  When we keep that long history of remembering the wandering Aramean in mind, this question grows in significance.  Jesus isn’t just pointing out that the foreigner’s manners are better; he is rebuking those around him for forgetting their heritage and the humble thanksgiving it demands of them.

Ironically, the reference to the “wandering Aramean” in Deuteronomy is from a longer section about what one should say when bringing one’s offering of the “first fruits” to the altar as a sacrifice of thanksgiving.  And yet, the one tenth of the lepers who pause to give thanks and praise to God is the not the Levite but the Samaritan.  When we add all this together, one inescapable conclusion is that our spiritual health may depend on recognizing the wandering Arameans in our midst, so that their experience of vulnerability and reliance on God can recall for us how we are all far more dependent than we like to imagine.

The biblical witness is clear:  we are called to remember our heritage as wanderers not simply to increase our levels of thanksgiving, but so that our humility and gratitude can shape our behavior toward others.  We are in the midst of the gravest refugee crisis the world has seen since World War II.  70.3 million people had been forcibly displaced worldwide, as of the end of 2018.  Civil unrest, wars, climate change, human trafficking and more are causing people to flee the only homes they’ve ever known and take on lives as wandering Arameans.  And if we only see them as objects of our pity and occasional charity, we are missing the other main point.  What Jesus needs us to see is that those refugees and asylum seekers are us.  We are all wandering Arameans.  Some of us have built houses and planted gardens and seen our children get married, so we’ve forgotten.  But we are all just passing through, with no “forever” home but God.

Here are some other numbers.  Would you feel more grateful for 18 or 95?  Our country has historically received and re-settled 95 thousand refugees each year.  The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has been intimately involved in this process, with our denominational office working with individual congregations to connect them with particular families who need guides and hosts and sponsors to get situated in their new homes.  Just a few weeks ago, it was announced that in the coming year, the number of refugees allowed in will be capped at 18,000, a fraction of our historic levels.  As complacent Arameans, we do well to let ourselves absorb the true impact of these cuts.  People who have been vetted and waiting in refugee camps for years will now not be allowed entry.  Spouses and children who’ve been waiting to join their family members here will not get to come.

Another important side effect of these cuts is less obvious.  The agencies that assist with the re-settlement process, like the Alliance for African Assistance where Julie Germain works, are compensated based on how many clients they work with.  When the numbers are cut so low, they struggle to afford even the bare bones staff they require to keep going.  People are let go; offices are closed.  Organization viability is lost that will be hard to re-build if and when the numbers are increased again.

The impact of these cuts on individual lives all around the world and on our soul as a nation is impossible to calculate.  And our scripture lessons today make clear that we cannot pretend this crisis has nothing to do with us.  Caring for the stranger in our midst is central to our calling as followers of Jesus, not just because of how it involves loving our neighbors as ourselves, but because of how it affects our capacity to love God.  We love God better, we give thanks more freely and sincerely, when we are reminded daily that we too are wandering Arameans, never truly at home anywhere but in the arms of God.  The best way to cultivate this humility is to care for the strangers in our midst.  If we don’t want to become like the nine lepers who forgot to say Thank You, we need to stay connected to those whose lives remind us of God’s providence – those who are living without homes or a place to lay their heads, those who are imprisoned with metal and concrete unable to hear the thunder, those who have fled the only homes they ever knew seeking safety and succor in a foreign land.

Loving our neighbors is always connected to loving God.  If we neglect one, we end up neglecting the other, and loving only ourselves and our cushy, comfortable, settled-in lives.  Ironically, it’s when we have the most to give thanks for that we’re most likely to forget to do so.  Christ calls us to remember that we are always wandering Arameans, strangers in a strange land, dependent on the goodness of God that we most often experience through the kindness of other strangers.  This is how we find our true home in God.  This is how we learn to abide in gratitude.  Alleluia and Amen.