11-10-2024 GRATITUDE AS RESISTANCE

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Gratitude as Resistance

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given November 10, 2024

Mark 12:38-44

I have told you before about Ignatian spirituality, which arises out of the teachings and practices of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatian imaginative prayer is reading scripture and literally imagining it come alive as a scene before you. What does it look and sound and smell like? Who were the characters? What was going on around them that isn’t even described in the Bible? Who are you in the story – one of the characters, yourself, a bystander, even God? St. Ignatius invited people to go unscripted, so to speak, and ask God to speak to them through their authentic, raw recreation of the scene in scripture. It’s important to do this because it engages more of you than only your intellect. It engages your emotions, your heart, even your subconscious.

If you were to do this with today’s gospel reading about the poor widow who gave her last two pennies to the Temple treasury, what would you see? What do you think the widow’s motives were?

Diana Butler Bass is a contemporary theologian and author. In a blog post about today’s gospel story, [1] she explains the background of the customs of the day, particularly about scribes, whom Jesus says “devour widow’s houses.” In Jesus’ time, you had to hire a scribe to write your will. And so a married man who was dying would hire a scribe to write down what he wanted to happen with his property. Apparently it was not uncommon for scribes to help themselves to a part of the property, leaving the widows with far too little—to cheat women out of their property, and they could do nothing about it. Diana wrote in this blog, what if the widow wasn’t a nice old lady but was angry? What if she was one of those who had been exploited? What if she was bringing the only thing she had left, less than a penny, and in front of the scribes and everyone and God, giving the last of what she had to the Temple so that the scribes wouldn’t get that too? What if her generosity was a kind of public resistance, a protest against the ostentatious hypocrisy of wealthy scribes?

 Now I’m not going to lie to you. Given the events of the past week I kind of like this imaginative interpretation of this gospel story. Maybe this widow was even a childless cat lady. She may not have been able to prevent the scribe from stealing her property, but her story is still being told 2000 years later, and the name of the scribe has long since dissolved into dust. In all seriousness, this week is a week that a little more than half the country got the result they wanted, and many millions of people in the rest of the country are reeling. If you didn’t see my email on Wednesday issuing a special word about the election, I encourage you to find it, or I can send it to you. In Thursday’s e-news I also shared thoughts from our Bishop. He recounted a scene in Ted Lasso when Coach Ted is standing before his soccer club who had just lost a critical match against their opponents, and they were devastated. Ted Lasso said to them that there was nothing he could say that would make them less sad. But, he said, he could promise them there was one thing worse than being sad, and that was being alone and sad.

I’m guessing many of us have been very sad, and afraid and angry and confused and many other things, this week. But regardless of how we felt, we are not alone. And we are also not helpless or hopeless.  There are some things that no one can take from you, and the chief of these is your state of mind, the story you choose to tell, the attitude you choose to have in the face of loss. Ironically, Diana Butler Bass, the same woman I just told you about who thought the widow was an angry woman publicly protesting the elite corruption of the scribes, also wrote a book called Gratitude. She had been in the thick of beginning this book in 2016, and spent the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s first Presidency writing about gratitude, which was the last thing she felt at the time. I really, really appreciate that in this book she does not say she believes God wants us to be grateful FOR everything. There are some things for which we cannot ever give thanks. I don’t believe God is happy or controlling things when a child is abused or the poor are hungry or those in power oppress the vulnerable.  But Diana Butler Bass does say that God calls us to be grateful IN everything, and there is a world of difference in that. In fact I would go so far as to say being truly grateful is a way to avoid drowning in poison.  Gratitude and generosity are subversive, a way to resist and protest when the dominant paradigms are all about hatred and fear and demonizing. Gratitude and generosity are a way to say, you can take a lot from me. But you can’t change my character. You can’t change my connection with God, my connection with Christ, who went to the grave refusing violence and hatred, and whose love was so powerful it conquered even death. We can make a difference by focusing on gratitude and generosity in the small sphere of our personal lives and this community’s life. We can choose to model Jesus’ third way, a way that goes beyond the vast chasm threatening our nation.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s really OK to feel angry. It’s OK to feel despondent and sad and afraid and hurt and many things. Our emotions tell us what our values are, what is important to us. But we can’t live there. Well we could, but then we would eventually become the very thing we are opposing.

So gratitude. Gratitude is one of those things that can’t be forced, and if you’re not ready for it, that’s OK. Forced gratitude is just thinly disguised guilt. But real gratitude expands the heart and makes us feel awe, peace, and hope. Let me tell you some things I am grateful for.

I am so grateful that yesterday, at the annual Episcopal Church in Minnesota convention in Bemidji, our own Rex and Rena and Daniel Romero convened a group of Episcopalians to start immediate conversations about how we can support our immigrant neighbors given changes that may be coming from Washington. These are real people we know, people we love, people with names and faces and stories, and not statistics or stereotypes, and we don’t have to stand helplessly by while they suffer. I am grateful that Kerri Meyer, the co-founder of the regenerative ministry called Good Courage Farm in Hutchinson, mentioned wanting to convene a group of clergy to study Bonhoeffer and how he combined faith and resistance to oppression. I am grateful that I have a home and plenty to eat and a beautiful family. I am so, so, so grateful I get to do this for a living with all of you amazing people, I get to think and pray and serve and hear your true stories and accompany you in times of difficulty and pain and talk about gratitude from the pulpit. Let me tell you a story from Convention this weekend that really moved me.

On Friday night at Convention a young man shared his story. He said that two years ago he had been in a big evangelical church where women were not allowed to be in leadership and where being LGBTQ+ was seen as sinful. He said that he began hearing a small voice in his spirit saying, but that doesn’t sound like the Jesus I see in the Bible. He began to share his misgivings, but he was told he was backsliding, that it was actually loving to keep women out of leadership and to tell queer people they were sinning. When he kept objecting, saying that perhaps Jesus’ call to love our neighbors meant we should honor leadership gifts in women and that perhaps God created the beautiful diversity of gender and spectrum just like God created the colors of the rainbow, he was told he was a heretic and he wasn’t worth being prayed for. But the voice in his heart wouldn’t be quiet. Eventually, almost with a shock, he said he realized the voice in his heart was none other than Jesus himself. Jesus was the one nudging him to love and affirm everyone. And so this young man said he looked for a church where he could love Jesus and follow Jesus’ command to love God, love our neighbors as ourselves without excluding anyone. And so he came to the Episcopal Church. When one of his other friends recently asked him why he was still a Christian at all,  he had to think about it. Why indeed? Eventually he came up with the answer that rung true. Because he had had a personal experience of a Jesus who was loving and affirming and healing and liberating, and it was worth everything.

I am so grateful that I am part of a church that says, If it’s not about love, it’s not about God. I am so grateful that our church encourages imagination instead of stagnation when it comes to beliefs and interpreting scripture and re-interpreting what it means to follow Jesus’ Way of Love in today’s world.

Let me ask you, what are you honestly grateful for?  Please take a minute to soak in that gratitude, get in it and swim around. Receive the gift of God and then unwrap it and play with it.

It is true that today is Gratitude Sunday, and later you will have the opportunity to present your pledges to the church as an expression of gratitude and generosity, and I thank you with all my heart for this. But I’d also like to invite you to write down your prayers for the nation and for the church, and also the things you are grateful for, in the little pieces of paper at the pews, and please bring them up as well and put them in the baptismal font. We will have a little silent time now for you to write these things down. Far more important than keeping this institution alive is keeping your souls connected with God, with gratitude, with your inner sacredness, and continuing to care for the vulnerable. It’s important to be able to live from a place of gratitude and generosity, flip sides of the same coin, in an endless cycle of giving and receiving that is the flow of love itself. May it be so. Amen.

[1] Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings: The Angry Widow,” November 10, 2024, accessed via subscription to The Cottage at https://open.substack.com/pub/dianabutlerbass/p/sunday-musings-bd5?r=3cy9nk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email , accessed November 10, 2024.

10am Service