The Grateful Dead

It is easy for us to keep score of how we have been a blessing to others because it keeps them in need of us, and us the woe’d feeling blessed.

In Jesus’ listing of who will be blessed and who shall be woe’d, he leaves little room for doubt or question from his audience.

Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the despised. 

Woe, look out to the rich, the full and satisfied, the cheerful, and the popular. 

Jesus’ words are without a doubt Good News for the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the despised. Relief is here for those who have traveled the rough roads of life. Yet, for those on the receiving end of Jesus’ woes, Good News is hard to find. For those of us who Jesus would classify as rich (and that is the overwhelming majority of us), Jesus’ words can leave us wondering where the lives we live fit in the Kingdom Jesus came to inaugurate. 

This is not one of those teaching moments in Jesus’ ministry where we can read something into Jesus’ words to make us feel better or to let ourselves off the hook for our (knowing or unknowing) participation in the margination of those who have been told they will receive the divine blessing. There are no theological backflips we can do to avoid the bluntness with which Jesus speaks. While Jesus is not issuing a curse upon the woe’d, he was calling them to pay attention as a new ordering of society was taking shape in his ministry.

Jesus turned the idea of diving blessing upside down, flipping the notion that one’s favor with G-d could be seen in their prosperity and wealth. Better known today as the “prosperity gospel,” if you are only faithful enough to G-d then you will be rewarded with wealth and prosperity by our Creator. With the mindset of divinely appointed prosperity for a few, those who find themselves on the margins or without are receiving their just reward for their lack of faithfulness or because of the sins they or the saints before them committed. Jesus is proclaiming that the Kingdom he has come to inaugurate will leave those on the margins grateful while those who ignored the needs, profited, or exploited those on the margins will be left to reconsider their lives in light of G-d’s unfolding reign in Christ. 

Since September, we have been considering all the ways G-d has blessed us and how G-d has used us to be a blessing to others. Now, with November being the month when many of us focus on giving thanks, we are extending the practice of counting blessings into a space of countless, or unlimited gratitude. 

As children, we were taught to be grateful for what we had. Many can remember going around the table to start the family Thanksgiving dinner and naming one thing for which we were thankful - family, a bicycle, or no school. Being given 30 seconds to ponder the grateful question, little effort was usually given during this annual exercise. 

If celebrating gratitude is a good thing, why, asks author Diana Butler Bass asks, “is it so hard to do?” Why is gratitude given its own month, its own holiday with a parade, and often ignored or forgotten for the rest of the year?

Are we part of the 78 percent of people who feel a strong sense of gratitude or are we part of the 22 percent left to figure out why gratitude escapes us? Is our lack of gratitude as adults the byproduct of having gratitude forced upon us during thanksgiving proclamations as children?
Over the next four weeks we will consider what it means to reclaim lives of gratitude, being grateful for the world around us, the relationships we have, and for the promised blessing assured to us by Christ’s ultimate reign.

To accompany the sermon series, as a church, we will be studying the book Grateful by Diana Butler Bass in Sunday school classes and small groups. This will culminate with Diana joining us in worship on November 24.

Today, on All Saints Sunday, we are grateful for the Great Cloud of witnesses, the saints who have gone before us, who now find rest from their earthly labors in Christ. We remember those whose race was finished over the past year and those who have left their earthly bodies years or even generations ago.

Today is not a one-time remembrance, as the beloved saints of G-d are ever in many of our hearts, rather today is an intentional day set aside within the life of the church. This is a day of intentional song, prayer, and sacrament to remember the Great Cloud with gratitude.

When we look at the saints of the church, past, and present, we can often be left with a feeling of debt. Their contributions to the lives we live were/are so rich, blessing us beyond our wildest dreams, that we often feel as though there is a debt we cannot repay. Their lives of holiness have impacted us in ways we can never repay. With this realization, we transition from a posture of gratitude to a feeling of required transaction. We seek out reciprocity as a moral obligation because if we do not, we fear, our lack of response will be viewed as ingratitude. 

The idea of quid pro quo, something for something, is at the heart of Jesus’ words in his sermon of blessing and woe. Not unlike today, Jesus’ audience lived in a time when the rich and powerful prospered at the expense of those living on the margins. Those outside the sphere of prosperity and wealth were deemed, at times, as less than deserving of the divine blessing that had obviously (it was thought) been bestowed upon the rich and powerful. The marginalized, in the eyes of those on the woeful end of Jesus’ words, should be grateful for what they had as the lack of divine blessing was thought to be the quo for their quid. 

We despise being in debt to others. We do not mind if others are indebted to us but repaying something we can never repay - giving back to the saints for all they have given us - leaves us as uncomfortable at times as those Jesus named as woe’d.

It is easy for us to keep score of how we have been a blessing to others because it keeps them in need of us, and us the woe’d feeling blessed. 

On this All Saints’ Sunday, we express our gratitude for those saints who’ve lived lives that correspond to the beatitudes - that list Jesus left for us after he blessed and woe’d. Without their witness, we would only be able to believe we can live lives that deserve Christ’s woe.

As we celebrate the saints and the community we find ourselves in with them, for all the saints - past and present - the price owed has always been greater than we could ever pay, regardless of how grateful we are. And while we may feel as though we cannot pay the debt owed know that the something for something requirement of this world ended with the inauguration of Christ’s Kingdom, when Jesus paid for us that which we could not repay.

Karl Barth put it best, “Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice of an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning.” It is the grace of G-d that frees us from the feeling of unplayable reciprocity and moves us to a posture of gratitude. Gratitude for the great cloud of saints and for the saving grace of G-d.

Jesus’ ministry was and is about the fulfillment of promised compassion and mercy to everyone who has been told or felt there was something owed that could not be repaid. We are the recipients of a great inheritance, not a great debt. We have received this legacy with gratitude and cherish it as we await our opportunity to hand it to our children in the same way we received it from the great cloud.

The Good News is that the debt we may feel is owed for the gratitude we feel toward the Great Cloud of saints has been paid, and we can now freely let down the guard we have built up and allow a posture of gratitude to spread throughout the community of G-d’s beloved saints as we become more aware of just how great the cloud is.