Moe, Larry and Curly Invest their Talents

Matthew 25:14-30 Parable of the Talents (November 19, 2017)

            So here we are this morning, just a few days before Thanksgiving. Some of you are likely running menus through your mind, for the meal you will prepare for your family, and guests later this week.

Others of us might be thinking about the travel plans still to be completed, or are running mental lists of the things you need to pack.

 If you weren’t thinking about Thanksgiving at all when you arrived at church this morning, hopefully the litany we began our gathering with this morning put you in to the mood to think, if not about menus or travel plans, about the gratitude you feel for the abundant gifts that are yours all through God’s generosity.

            As a congregation, today is also a day on which we have set aside some time after worship, first to feast together at our annual congregational meal, and then, to conduct the annual congregational meeting – an event in which we all have both the joy and the call to participate.

At our meeting, we will name and celebrate the ways in which we have been particularly blessed as a congregation this year. We will also talk about some of the ways in which God is calling us to have faith, and to use our imaginations, as the church of Jesus Christ, in God’s kingdom work in 2018.

            On this second-to-last Sunday of the church year and at a time when, in our secular world, we are led to think about the things for which we are most grateful, the assigned Gospel text, known as the Parable of the Talents, invites us to thoughts about the abundance of God and our response to the great gifts God gives us.

            So, first, what are talents? <accept answers> Right - We think of them as the special area of gifts we each have – for instance, some of us are singers or musicians, some of us, teachers, and some of us are handy with tools and are great at building things.  Others among us are scholars and some are poets and some of us are very creative in visual arts. Some of us are great in math and science, others of us are stronger in writing and history and philosophy.

Some of us have one or two areas of talent while others may seem to be good at doing just about anything we set our minds to – which, I have to say, sometimes seems totally unfair. So, we have talents –gifts we possess, gifts we share, particular areas of strength and skill, knowledge and ability. Excellent! I want you to hang on to thoughts of those talents.

             As we look at this morning’s parable, however, the first thing to know is that the kind of “talent” the gospel story refers to, isn’t what we just described. 

The Greek word that is used here, talenta, actually refers to an amount of money that would be equal to about 15 years’ worth of wages for the average person. Think about it. Even at minimum wage, 15 years’ worth of wages is a lot of money.

In our parable, as the master goes away, he entrusts what is a huge amount of wealth to these hand-picked servants. The parable doesn’t give them names, so let’s just call them Moe, Larry, and Curly.

We know that Moe, Larry and Curly were hand-picked and that the master personally knows something about each of them because the text tells us that he gave to each according to his ability. So, the talents Moe, Larry, and Curly were given were chosen specifically for them, knowing that they each had the capacity to use them wisely.

Curly was given one talent – a pretty hefty chunk of change, right? Larry, got two talents, what would be a life-time’s worth of wages; and finally, oh, my word – five talents would be an obscene amount of gold and silver, but that indeed is what the master gave to Moe.

So, the master goes away and leaves his trusted servants to their own devices. Thankfully, Moe and Larry have pretty decent imaginations…generous, joy-filled imaginations.  They know their master: what he likes, what he expects, how he works; and they have the ability to imagine what might be. When they combine their knowledge of their master with their gifts of imagination, these two servants develop an investment plan.

Perhaps they set off for Wall Street, to look at investment possibilities. Certainly they scour the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or Investopedia. Maybe they decide to invest in tried-and-true Amazon.com, Google, or Apple stock. They picture what might be and they get right to work, risking all that they have been given, to make it happen.

But poor Curly doesn’t have much imagination. Shovel in hand, dirt on his face, Curly buries that talent deep in the earth. Refusing to even try to picture anything new, he goes for the status quo, digs a hole deep and wide, and hides his master’s money.

So, while Moe and Larry exhibit a kind of joy in receiving the master’s talents and freely use them, invest them and grow them to the pointed of doubling the value of the fortune entrusted to them, it turns out that poor Curly has been held captive by fear (according to his excuses) or by laziness (the master’s assessment).  While he didn’t lose the talents given to him, neither did he appreciate, celebrate, and use them. It seems Curly has difficulty accepting the master’s gift in the first place.

Seeing the abundant treasure as burden rather than gift, he is closed off to the master’s joy. Rather than gleefully applying the gift, even to the point of taking a risk with it and therefore allowing it to grow, he seals it off, buries it deep, and hides it away.

What the master handed over to Moe, Larry and Curly – whether one, two, or five talents – represented an abundance of wealth, clearly within the ability of each to choose well, and to use and grow.

God gives us an abundance of treasures as well, with the expectation that we, too, will responsibly use them and treat them as a wonderful gift, given for our joyful use and investment in the kingdom of God.

How do we receive and use the gifts God has given us? Do we receive them as burden or gift? Do we see them as limitations or possibilities? Might we joyfully accept and use them as the investments that God intends?

Home, families, love, and grace, have all been given into our hands by our beloved Master. Individually and as a community, God has provided us with abundant gifts, including these other talents – the ones we named earlier, to grow God’s kingdom, to make straight the path for Jesus’ return, to bear into the world all of the goodness and generosity of our God, realizing that these talents were never ours to begin with. Rather, they are the gifts of God, to be joyfully treasured, used and grown, and returned to God.

What are you going to do with these gifts of God’s that God is letting you use for a little while? As a community we invest and grow the gifts God has placed on our table when:

·         The hungry are fed, and the homeless are accompanied and housed: look around us, for example, at just a small sampling of the food provided through our continual efforts to share our talents with the hungry.

·         The Kingdom breaks through in materials collected for youth service projects, quilts constructed, as well as our support for the ELCA’s advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable in our world.

·         God’s will is being done: when forgiveness is extended to loved ones, and when prayers are lifted for others.

·         Generosity abounds as God’s kingdom breaks through in gifts of time and talent shared with lonely seniors of limited income and families struggling to make ends meet, who will receive Thanksgiving meals and Christmas gifts through the generosity of Grace Lutheran Church.

These glimpses of the Kingdom fuel our imagination for what the Kingdom of heaven will be like. And when we can imagine what might be, what will be, we are empowered to use our talents and work now to make this promised future a reality.

The difference between the servants of our parable wasn’t in what they received—it didn’t matter whether they were given five talents or two talents or one talent—what mattered was how they imagined what God might do in, with, and through the gifts they had been given.

The real risk in the story of God’s gift of talents given for our use and investment is the risk that God takes. God knows his servants well; he knows what they can do. 

So, he laid down his possessions, his whole living; he died, as it were, for all of them by giving up control over his life. Will the servants of the Lord squander their gifts? Will we hide them? Will we play it safe, or will we trust that when we use and stretch and invest our talents for the sake of the kingdom of God, God will bless our efforts and make use of them as God sees fit?

God indeed gives generously to us and shares abundantly with us. All that God gives us is ours to use, share and grow wisely, and that is what our gospel lesson this morning talks about - both the abundance of God and our responsibility to respond faithfully to the blessings, talents, and trust that God places in us.

            On this day, as we give God thanks and praise for the abundance of God’s provision for us, for our families, our church and our world, may we, with imagination and joy, come to the table to be fed and nurtured, so that we might be strengthened to share our talents in the world, for the sake of the kingdom of God.  Amen.

Gratitude and the Meaning of Life

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

Today is the final installment of our sermon series, “Barriers to Gratitude.” Such barriers can affect our outlook on life, our interactions with others, and our life of faith. An attitude of gratitude opens us up to living lives that follow Jesus’ command to love, that allow us to know and feel God’s love and to recognize the gift of blessing even in the midst of chaos, pain, and challenges. To live a life of gratitude is to live in the joy and awareness of God’s grace.

The barrier we’ll talk about today is “disappointment”. We all experience some disappointments in life. You cannot go through life without knowing its sting. Even as you are sitting here today, it is very likely that some of you are sitting on a big disappoint in your personal or professional life.

The word disappointment means just what it sounds like – it means to have a previously scheduled appointment canceled, an expected opportunity erased, or a promise broken. For some of us, disappointment has come in the form of our favorite sports team underperforming – especially when we are sitting on season tickets.

I learned early in life to stay out of the living room if my dad’s beloved Yankees were disappointing his expectations for a pennant win. His disappointment could be loud and stormy. Disappointments like that are a dime a dozen and we can pass them off pretty easily.

But what happens when the disappointments go deeper – are even life altering in some cases?

Some of us have experienced the disappointment of unrequited love, or not getting into the school, college, or career field we dreamed of. Still deeper disappointments have been experienced by those of us who have endured the disappointment of a lost pregnancy or the inability to ever conceive the children we dreamed of; a devastating diagnosis for ourselves or for a loved one; or witnessing the suffering of a loved one.  

Uncertainties of life frequently throw each of us into the pool of disappointment at times, where we bob around, sometimes feeling as though we are sinking or drowning. And that’s exactly what happens to people whose resiliency fails them, or who lack the ability to draw on hope – and even gratitude - in times of trial and disappointment.

The story of Moses would seem to be the perfect example of extreme disappointment. One would think that Moses had earned the right to cross the river into the Promised Land. Yet here we have one-hundred-twenty-year-old Moses, the great prophet whom the Lord knew face to face, who had performed unequaled signs and wonders for the Lord. Yet, he was denied entry into the Promised Land. He led the people of Israel right up to the proverbial front door of that long-promised place, yet all he could do was view it from atop the peak of Mount Nebo.

Talk about disappointment!   

It is the nature of life, even sometimes the life of faith, that sometimes does not make sense. When this happens, it is only natural that disappointment follows. When we are disappointed, it is only natural that sometimes, we react by complaining, we experience bitterness, even anger. Hopefully, time, faith, and perspective give us the ability to return to attitudes of gratitude, but that doesn’t always happen. That is when disappointment becomes a barrier to knowing the deep and abiding gift of gratitude.  

Like Job, most people who have been through the wringer of life have a long list of disappointments and complaints against their maker. It’s hard to be grateful when the thing you most want and need and desire and pray for is taken away.

But there is also great power in those who see their own stories as a part of something greater. Scripture tells us that Moses knows in advance that his ministry will end just short of his intended destination, yet he spends his last breaths in blessing and praise of the same Lord who has passed that judgement on him.

So, how do we become like Moses? How do we live in gratitude even when our hearts have been broken and disappointments assail us? Experts in the field of psychology conclude the attitude of gratitude to be a choice that we make.

Viktor Frankl, for instance, was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who, along with most of his family, was sent to concentration camps during World War II. It was during their years in those camps that Frankl’s mother, father, brother and wife all perished. The only person in his family to survive the Holocaust, aside from himself had been one sister who had emigrated to Australia.

From his observations and personal experience, Frankl developed theories that he later wrote, taught, and spoke about. In his best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote that people are primarily driven by a “striving to find one’s meaning in life.” It is this sense of meaning that helps people survive and even thrive following painful experiences. Can we do that? Can we make the choice to be grateful no matter what our circumstance?

About gratitude, Frankl wrote, “The last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one’s attitude, especially an attitude of gratitude in a given set of circumstances, especially in difficult circumstances.” Frankl considered gratitude to be a choice one makes in the face of adversity as well as blessing.

As people of faith, we don’t have to look far to find meaning in life. We have been entrusted with the message of the Gospel of Jesus Chris. We have the joy of knowing that no matter what might befall us in this life, nothing can separate us from the love of God known and experienced in Jesus Christ. We live each day knowing that we are created in the image of God for the purpose of sharing God’s love and compassion with the world. We live with the assurance that not only will God never let us go, but that God’s Holy Spirit is with us through every trial and joy, disappointment and success in life. Yet, sometimes, we forget.

In an age of instant gratification and convenience, we lose the understanding that there is a discipline to disappointment. There is a discipline to gratitude. It takes practice to react with gratitude and not resentment to the disappointments of life.

During a particularly sad and stressful time in my life, I really didn’t feel much gratitude. It was enough just to feel that I had survived each day. What made a difference to me was a friend, a person of faith, suggesting an exercise, though I didn’t know it at the time, that would give me gratitude practice. She suggest I take little red dots – the kind you find in office supply stores – and post them strategically around the domain of my existence – so: house, car, work space. Every time I saw a dot, I was to think of something I could be grateful for; to think of something positive –. And to say a short prayer of thanksgiving.

The idea was that even in the depth of our dark days, because of the love of Jesus, there is still light. Even when we are sad, there is something to be grateful for. We are in some way blessed. This is not to deny the fact that sometimes, life just stinks. But it is a way to retrain the brain to see not only the most obvious, negative stuff, but also to see the positive things in life, and to develop a healthy and spiritually grounded attitude of gratitude about them.

Look to the faith of Moses, best displayed as he sat alone with his God watching the horizon of his life’s work, feeling not resentment but grateful. What we all need is a little perspective – what is the grander story being told? What is the greater story of which we play a part?

Today, as we commemorate the 500^th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, we remember that we are part of the story of faithful people who give thanks for the Word of God that comes new to us each day.

We are part of the story of the Church of Christ that, in gratitude for the life-giving blood of Christ on the Cross, gather each week to worship and praise our Lord.

We are Lutherans, focused on the grace of God, known through faith as the gift of the Holy Spirit and the mercy of Jesus Christ our Lord, the very Word of God.

We are the grateful recipients of God’s love, sent into the world to bring the healing love of Christ to our neighbor.

We are God’s children, redeemed for the sake of the Kingdom of God, filled with gratitude for God’s unerring love, acceptance, forgiveness, healing, and presence in the midst of our deepest disappointments.

We can rejoice and give thanks for our place in God’s story, in spite of disappointments we’ve faced along the way.

As Christians our sense of gratitude comes from a deep well of faith and hope given to us through baptism, reinforced by the Word of God and grown and nurtured through the sacraments. It is profound. It forms us in generosity. It encourages our efforts to respond to the blessings of God with our lives. It influences our sense of stewardship, citizenship, and everyday living.

In his book, On Fire, inspirational writer and speaker John O’Leary writes,

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

May it be, that whether we are experiencing forest or desert, joy or sorrow, loss or gain, we might learn to be grateful, for the grace, mercy and love of Jesus that accompany us on the way.

Beggars Made Worthy

October 15, 2017

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon Series, “Barriers to Generosity” – Entitlement

          I have a keen interest in the British royalty. I love to read both history in general and historical fiction of England. I’m fascinated with the lives royals lead, and with the ritual and tradition that surround them.  Last year, for instance, the two television programs I most enjoyed binge watching were “Victoria” – based on the life of Queen Victoria I, and “The Crown,” based on Elizabeth II, the reigning Queen of England.

          As a result, I find royal weddings kind of exciting. The first royal wedding I very clearly remember was that of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. I recall the excitement of the crowds, straining to get a look at Lady Diana in her royal carriage on the way to St. Paul’s Cathedral; the pageantry; her charming stumble over the order of her husband-to-be’s multiple names. What fun to be invited to such a spectacle and party!

          So, I have to tell you that if I received an invitation to a royal wedding, I would feel enormously honored and grateful to be among those to be included. There is no way I can expect to ever receive such an invitation. Therefore, if I indeed received one, not only would it come as a great surprise but I would do everything in my power to come, prepared to show not only my gratitude and joy, but my utter respect and desire to please and honor the queen or king issuing the invitation.

          So, what’s wrong with the people who were the first to receive the invitation to the king’s son’s wedding in today’s gospel text? The king must have been so pleased to issue the invitation. With great pride and with over-the-top generosity, surely, he looked forward to having the grateful recipients of the invitation come to honor both him and his son by their presence. What a party he was prepared to throw!

What’s wrong with these people who surprisingly declined the invitation? Who simply would not come? Who had better things to do with their time – more important things demanding their time and attention?

          Not only did they decline the initial invitation, but they made light of it – they behaved as if they were entitled to the invitation, and could simply choose to attend only if it were convenient enough for them to do so – only if they had nothing better to do. They behaved as if this invitation and the honor it conveyed was all about them and had nothing to do with the honor, fealty and praise that was the king’s due.

          Now, we all know that rulers can be incredibly thin-skinned. When thwarted they can behave like children having a full-blown and devastating temper tantrum, with devastating and deadly results. After all, kings expect the ultimate respect, honor, and worship of their subjects.

So, when we read what seems to be the over-the-top reaction of the king to the insult that has been dealt him when even a second invitation he issued was rejected, we are shocked.

But the people hearing this parable for the first time would have gotten it. They would have understood the disconnect - the deep disloyalty of these invitees, who have repaid the king’s generous invitation with disregard and insult; they would have understood the tragic ramifications of their rejection.

          But, as the parable goes on, it is not just the outright rejection of those on the king’s first invitation list that is brought under scrutiny. Another group of people is invited.

These are the ones who probably think the likelihood of them ever receiving an invitation from the king is about the same as my ever being invited to the next royal wedding. Null. So, when they do receive an invitation, they are excited. They don’t even care that they weren’t in the first group, they never expected to be. Instead, they are grateful to be thought of at all.

Anyone accepting this invitation would want to put their best foot forward, to be seen as grateful for the generosity of the king, and worthy by the king’s grace to be in the mere presence of the king and his son, let alone to be their honored guests.

          So it is surprising – shocking, even, when this one person behaves in a manner that shows his hosts less than the honor and praise they deserve. He seems to think that all he needs to do is just show up.

While those attending this wedding would be given the appropriate wedding dress provided by the king himself, this person eschews even that tradition. It just doesn’t suit him. He’s happy to come to the party, but seems to take the rest for granted.     

The problem with the first group who were invited and with this single invitee seems to be the same. They lack the proper attitude toward their gracious host and king. They lack the respect to accept the generosity of the king as pure gift and not simply as their due. They forget to respond with the proper sense of gratitude and awe for being included in the party at all.

Their basic sense of entitlement gets in the way of any gratitude at all.

          Each week, we are invited to the greatest feast imaginable. This is the feast, Martin Luther wrote, of the marriage - the union between heaven and earth. We come together in worship as undeserving guests, to praise God and offer our thanksgiving for this marriage, the incarnation of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. We are invited to the banquet to celebrate God’s love and generosity and our inclusion in the marriage feast.   

On our own, we are not worthy to be here, but by God’s good grace we are among both the good and the bad, saint and sinner both, who have received the invitation. We don’t deserve this honor, in fact there is nothing we could do to be so deserving. We come not because we are great but because God is great and steadfast in love, mercy, and generosity.

The problem with entitlement is, that whenever we allow ourselves to believe that we deserve what we have, or are somehow more worthy than another, we will find ourselves incapable of gratitude. The proper response to the king’s invitation is to run breathless to the banquet, dressed for the marriage of heaven and earth, wondering how we ever got on such a guest list.

When we come to church, we answer God’s gracious invitation to unite around the table. While we find community here, we don’t come for community. While we find lovely music and pleasing surroundings and friendships here, we don’t come for those things.

We find forgiveness of our sins here, but we should not forget that we come as beggars in need of God’s mercy, neither entitled to it nor deserving of it. But, because God loves us so, we come to be surprised, humbled and grateful to be among those Christ serve at the table of life. Such gratitude requires us to sing out for joy, and cry out in thanksgiving and praise of God.

In the traditional eucharistic liturgy still in use in some places is this confession: “I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.” We would do well to use these words in our liturgy as well, and to embrace the truth within them.

Our birthright as followers of Jesus Christ is to remember that none of us is worthy – none of us deserves to be here; therefore, we should respond to this invitation with nothing short of humble gratitude and thanksgiving.

Like the guests invited to the wedding feast in our gospel story, we too are provided a garment appropriate for the celebration.

The garment we are provided is the righteousness that comes from God.

This garment, in which we become clothed in baptism, sets us apart as the glad recipients of God’s grace. It is the outward expression of the inward change God performs in us in the sacrament through which God calls us Child of God.

It is no ordinary garment, even by the finest of standards. For this garment is comprised of threads of compassion, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness. The fabric of this garment is knit with concern for social justice, care for the poor and the marginalized. The golden thread that holds together the seams of this garment was spun from the blood of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and it compels us, to welcome other to the feast.

It compels us to be not only guests, but servants. It reminds us that in the eyes of God, whether we came from the stock of the good or the bad, we are forever transformed by God’s grace, united with Jesus Christ and with one another at the table.

Worthy? No, except by the love and mercy of God, which knows no bounds. Deserving to be here? No, but our inclusion compels us not only to come to the party, but to come prepared to give honor and glory to the host with thanksgiving, joy, respect and love. May it be so.

That Was the Best Time of Our Lives!

10-1-2017, Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lectionary Series on Barriers to Gratitude

Exodus 17:1-7

        By the time we had our second and third children, I was lucky enough to be be a stay-at-home mom.

        We wanted and were blessed with three children. Like the Israelites had prayed for their lives, we had prayed for healthy children, especially after we lost a child during pregnancy and conceiving again took longer than we had hoped.

       So here I was, surrounded by my three cherubs! I loved their baby days. I loved getting up in the middle of the night to feed them, while our house and the world around it was fast asleep and oh, so quiet; sitting with them for hours, cuddling; reading books on the sofa or lying in bed soaking in the love, their little arms and legs forming a cocoon around me. Those were the days!

       I loved the smell of my children; the sweet baby fragrance, later replaced by the fresh-air-and-earthy smell when they came in from playing outside. In fact, I loved those days so much, that even now, when I look through old pictures from that season of our lives, I want to weep for missing them. Truly, those were the days! <p>

       When my children were young and I was a stay-at-home Mom, I took up journaling. It was a way to preserve my sanity, though some may question how well it really worked.

Life with one school-aged child and two toddlers was a little crazy, often totally exhausting, and sometimes really frustrating. Most days, there was just not enough of me to go around.

       While I was cleaning up one mess, the “cherubs” were usually delightfully busy making two or three more. I was outnumbered.

       With three to run after, schedules to juggle, and living far from any of our family, with minimal support system, those days could be hard. Many of you have been there.

       Through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, I look back blissfully on the wonderful, sweet, utopian memories of those days, and think how perfect they were. The journals I kept are a great reality check.

       As I read through them, I read loving reflections on the blessing of motherhood, followed by the details of a day to day existence that was fraught with tension, exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, isolation, confusion, worry and fear. Some days as I wrote in my journal, I just skipped the “how blessed is motherhood” part and went right into the venting part.

When I pick up one of those journals now, I read about the days I thought I would lose my mind. I read about the relative lack of reward for so much hard work and heartache. I read words reflecting my worry that I might not be getting it right – could I be permanently scarring my children with my mothering choices? In the pages of those journals, I read of quite a different experience from the one of my nostalgia-addled memories. <p>

Not long before the events of our First Reading take place, the people who have been praying so hard for God to liberate them are freed from the cruel grip of slavery in Egypt. They who have suffered so long in misery as slaves under Pharaoh, were finally and quite dramatically led into freedom by Moses.

       God did the incredible, answering their prayers and giving them miraculous, safe passage not only away from the despot, Pharaoh, but away from the hard labor, heartache and demoralization of their slavery.

       Through Moses, God to lead the Israelites on a path to freedom, parting the waters of the Red Sea, and giving them safe passage away from the pursuing armies of the Pharaoh. The first response of the people after their liberation was a grand celebration. The women danced and Miriam sang, ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”

       But, not long after, within a few verses, in fact, the miracle has worn off and the people fall into a pattern of grumbling. They forget to trust God. They keep forgetting all that God has done – they forget about the Passover and the parting of the Red Sea; and the gift God gave them in this leader, Moses, whom God equipped to guide them through the rough places toward a promised land. They fail to look around and see God’s presence and provision for them each day.

       In our text today, we see it again. When they tested and stressed, rather than trust God, they grumble.

       Now, this truly has to be one of the signs you’ve really lost it: when you start to idealize your past, even though your past involves being a slave to the Egyptian Pharaoh: “Back in the good old days,” you enthuse, “when we spent all day in the hot sun, making bricks and doing the back-breaking work of building pyramids, when we had no rights, no freedom, when we could be beaten to death for not producing enough, for being too old or weak or sick or slow, and the Pharaoh occasionally killed all our male children - yeah, those were the good old days!”

       And then, what happens next? These Israelites get so lost in their grumbling that they end up going in circles for forty years! An entire generation passes away because they are lost in their nostalgia and nostalgia, candy-coated, much-improved rendering of what once was never leads you forward; it casts an impossible standard. .

I sure loved those baby days; Except when I didn’t. We sure were happier, more secure, more complete; except that we really weren’t.

      

The present can never match an idealized past, and being lost in that past keeps us from seeing the things that are all around us that are truly gifts from God for our present. Nostalgia leaves us stuck in the quicksand of our edited memories, perpetually ungrateful for the place we now find ourselves. Clinging to a season of our past, nostalgia quietly steals our joy and even, our hope; it makes us indifferent to the flowing streams of living water God is providing even now in our wilderness.

       Like the Israelites, when we are trapped in the rosy past, we are blinded to the constant provision of God - today. When we focus on the idealized past, we are numbed to the way that God is acting - now. When that happens, we, too, become trapped in the spiritual lands of Massa, meaning “test” and Meribah, meaning “find fault.”

       Nostalgia not only cripples us as individuals, but also as a community of faith. We recently held a series of Cottage Meetings. During those conversations, we named concerns about our life together today, and we got to name hopes and dreams for tomorrow. We also identified the ways we are blessed today, and gifts we see among and around us; we got to name ministries and activities we do really well.

       Here are some anecdotal observations about those conversations that  reveal some interesting patterns:

First, the greater the institutional memory of the group – that is, groups that were made up of a higher percentage of long the higher the percentage of the group was made up of long-time members, the lower their ability to name blessings. Conversely, groups with a greater percentage of new members present, having little to no institutional memory in this community, were more able to name blessings and gifts, and were more able to hope and dream for the future of the church.

Similarly, groups with longer-term members, had a greater number of concerns framed by comparison with the past. This is not surprising. Discontent of today was viewed through the rose-colored lens of yesteryears.

As a whole while the Christian church is struggling and declining, we are apt to frame our grief through the glorified visions of the churches of the past.

Yet, the church of the idealic past had problems of its own. Massive building projects often tore away at the unity of congregations, we saw the beginnings of white flight, churches divided, the stirring of the Civil Rights movement caused dissention within churches in many places, and the establishment of suburban communities drew thriving ministries away from the cities. This led the theologian Paul Tillich to call suburban Christianity, “one of the greatest dangers for Protestantism.”

All this led to the beginning of the unraveling of what many today would call the traditional church.

Back in our Cottage Meetings, newer members named more blessings, drew lists of things to be grateful for, recognized more places where God is working within the church, which led to more hopes and dreams being named, particularly in outward-looking ministries.

Nostalgia affects us all. It takes practice and intentionality to look around us and to recognize the blessings and gifts with which our world and our very lives are blessed on a daily basis.

My babies grew up and have all become fine young adults. I still miss those baby days sometime, and I cherish my memories of those days, but can appreciate and even look forward to the ways they will bless the world.

Grace is nearing it’s one hundredth anniversary. Ministries have come and gone and our culture during her lifetime. Our culture has vastly changed, but there is a rich community into which God is sending us to serve and to share his presence, gifts and love. I see God at work inspiring us to ever greater generosity in our feeding ministries, in providing school supplies for youth service projects, in the youth ministry we’ll kick-off this afternoon, in the quilting group that will meet on Wednesday and in the groups that use our building, every day of the week.

God is at work in our ecumenical relationships and work; in the faith discussions that take place each Sunday morning around the tables in Fellowship Hall. I see God in our ministry focused on the care of creation, in members reaching out in the past few weeks to so many who have been devastated by storms; God is present in the beautiful music we so enjoy. The best way I can see to stop being paralyzed by the past or kept from building up the future of this church, is by intentionally increasing our gratitude quotient.

       I invite you to practice seeing how God is present and active in your life each week. God is constantly reaching out and blessing us, growing us, stretching us, using us, and accompanying us in all we do. When we open our eyes, ears, and hearts, we will see God at work in everything.

       Rather than the sugar-coated, rosy-lenses of nostalgia, let’s develop the practice of seeing God’s presence, activity and love in our world, and responding to it with deep gratitude.

       Liberation from our past will allow us to walk in faith toward God’s future, full of promise and blessing, casting a vision for generosity and gratefulness living. AMEN.