Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, April 15, 2023.

I love that it’s part of my job to go to church! And I’m grateful that you come too!

I was talking with someone the other day about the dimensions of church and the spiritual life; that they are both horizontal and vertical. The horizontal plane is what we experience with companions, and in community. Our greeting time, and when you light candles for your sorrows and joys, these ways of seeing one another are horizontal aspects of our community. To say nothing of coffee hour! The vertical dimension is about depth or height, being still and entering the depths of silence, waiting for the presence of the Holy. Or looking up. Psalm 121 says,

I will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From whence comes my help?
My help comes from the One,
Who made heaven and earth. (Psalm 121:1-2)

Some of us are more inclined toward the horizontal, and others to the vertical. A healthy spiritual life is multi-dimensional: depth and breadth and height. It’s a kind of wholeness, that’s good for us, and what our world needs more of these days.

Last Sunday I said that Easter doesn’t magically wipe away our sadness, our loss, our grief. But it does proclaim—boldly and persistently—that our pain and suffering in this transitory life are not the whole story. That death does not get the last word.

Do you know that Easter isn’t just one day? That it isn’t over yet? In the church calendar Easter is a season of fifty days, a time to lean into promise and possibility. To inhabit this mystery, to look for signs of life springing up where it seemed there was only death and decay. A time to discover and bear witness to our own resurrection stories. A good time to sing hymns with “Alleluia” in them!

And this is a really good time to bask in the joys of this season. To bear witness to grass turning green again, or stand in awe before that subtle green haze that appears over a forest as trees start to push out their new leaves. It’s a good time to let down your guard and open your heart, to “shower the people you love with love,” as James Taylor sings.

In case you missed it, our worship theme for April is “Gratitude.” Tori and I chose this theme back in the fall, when the days were getting shorter and winter was coming. We must have imagined that by the time we got to April, it would be a good time for gratitude; that we’d be feeling pretty good in these days, and probably grateful. And here we are! 

But true gratitude should be a year ‘round practice, and not dependent on things going well. It’s one thing to feel grateful in good times, but what about when times are tough?

David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk who’s been called the “grandfather of gratitude.” He grew up in Austria when Hitler’s army was in control, and as a teenager he was part of the resistance, which was centered in the church. He knows from experience that you can’t be grateful for everything. He says, “You can’t be grateful for war in a given situation, or violence, or sickness, things like that. So the key, when people ask, ‘Can you be grateful for everything?’ — no, not for everything, but in every moment.”

What would it look like if we would practice this kind of in-the-moment gratitude? As we move thorough our days, to ask, in what ways am grateful right now? You could try this while waiting at a stoplight, or wrangling your children; it could be helpful when you’re tired or frustrated. To stop and ask, “Is this a moment when I can practice being grateful?”

I hope you know how grateful I am for you—almost all the time!—because you are such grateful and generous people. I noticed this from the start. Last year Tori told me about a class in seminary where they were talking about the difference between having a critical view of things, versus an appreciative one. Some churches, like some families and workplaces, tend toward the critical, and that’s a hard place in which to thrive. 

Of course, critique and evaluation are important, and necessary, if we are going to change and grow and get better. But isn’t growth is more possible when you come from a place and spirit of gratitude? And doesn’t gratitude lead to belonging, and generosity?

This week, those lines from E.E. Cummings, that feel so right for Easter season, have been in my heart: 

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings…

So here’s my question: what are we going to do with our aliveness? Once we find it, how are we going to spend it? With Easter here, with its invitation to look for and practice resurrection; with spring here, and its call to be more fully alive, what now? What are we going to do with these gifts, and this calling?

Gratitude is not only something to bask in, as important and needed as that kind of sabbath-keeping is. Gratitude is meant to be shared. It’s supposed to be like a springboard into deeper connection and care and service.

Robbin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, recently wrote an essay in homage to the Serviceberry, a native plant that provides sustenance and sweetness to birds and humans alike. Picking and eating those berries alongside “Cedar Waxwings and Catbirds and a flash of Bluebird iridescence,” she says.

“This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are—along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in the towers of cumulonimbi. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.”

Can you remember a time, when you received and enjoyed a gift that you didn’t make or earn? That came to you as pure gift? Maybe it was something like sweet berries, offered by a neighbor. Maybe it came in a time of struggle or pain; a hand reached out to you in kindness just when you needed it, a cup of water when you were parched. Whatever the gift, didn’t it bring you into a deeper communion with its source, and with life itself? Wasn’t it an experience of the horizontal and the vertical converging, the earthy and the holy all mushed up into something sweet and live-giving?

And in these days, don’t we need some sweetness and some sustenance, in order to have some love and courage to take out into the world?

Robbin Wall Kimmerer says, “Gratitude is so much more than a polite ‘thank you.’ It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.”

“If our first response is gratitude,” she writes, “then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.”

And we each have gifts, don’t we? Theologian Rebecca Parker asks, “What will you do with your gifts?” And answers, “Choose to bless the world.”

In three weeks we’ll be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the founding of this Universalist congregation. Before long, our accessibility and renovation project will be complete. Our recent work in transgender inclusion, and efforts called the Way of Belonging and the Ministry of Arts, these are all at inflection points. The time is ripe to be asking, “What Now? What lies ahead? What are we going to do with our gifts?”

Kimmerer would say, “Give a gift in return.” Parker would say, “Choose to bless the world.” The question is, what are you going to say? And what are you going to do? What are we going to do, to help heal and bless our world?

The answer, my spiritual companions, is up to you. It’s been, as the Beatles sang, “a long, long lonely winter.” And I’m not just thinking about these last few months. We’ve been through some years of challenge, holding on and doing what we can to assuage the hurt and the loneliness. And we’ve done that very well. 

But now what? Now that we are here, in this moment of promise and potential, what do you intend to do? How are you going spend this life you have been given? How are we, as a faith community, going to walk our talk?

All around us are reminders that we are temporary stewards here. That our days are numbered. The invitation and the call is to be faithful: to live our lives with intention and energy and courage, so that while we are here we will do our part to heal and bless and transform our world. And to sing “Alleluia” as we go,

Amen.