Rev. Anthony David
April 29, 2007
There’s a story about the famous attorney Clarence Darrow that I’d like to share with you. He had just solved a client’s legal problem, and the client asked, “How can I ever show my appreciation?” Clarence Darrow replied, “My good friend, ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has been only one answer to that question.”
Today is Stewardship Sunday here at Pathways Church, and so the issue of financial stewardship is unabashedly before us. It’s about each of us investing in this community which tax laws might categorize as a “non-profit organization” but which, in a far more meaningful sense, generates all sorts of profit: personal growth and spiritual growth; relational growth and family growth; the growth of a heart for service and social justice; the growth of a sense of belonging to each other and to the larger world, the growth of an ability to come together and make a difference in a way that could never happen if each of us were isolated and alone, lost in the suburbs, feeling (perhaps) that because we walk a spiritual and social path that is different from others we are ugly ducklings. But we come together and realize who and what we are. We are swans. We come together and we realize that we have a higher calling and a higher purpose in life. We come together and know that our mission is nothing less than building a spiritual community that changes lives.
That’s what I call profit, and of the most important kind. HOLY profit. That’s the kind of profit that this place generates. The tax laws might categorize us as a non-profit, but don’t be fooled. Invest in Pathways, and you invest in people’s lives. Pathways is like Clarence Darrow, solving the problem of how to live well and fully as whole human beings in a complicated world. And so, how do we show appreciation? “Well, My good friends, ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has been only one answer to that question.”
If you are a member or friend of Pathways, I hope you have brought your pledge form with you today. If not, we have extras to give you. At the end of my sermon, we will move into a ritual in which people will come up to the front, altar call-style, and hand in their forms. Then, each and every person will be invited to pick up a green leaf and walk over to our Pathways tree to symbolize how, by your act of giving into the mission of this place, you are greening it. Just as each leaf of a tree represents an expansion of the tree’s ability to breathe and live, each pledge and each person here represents expansion of the green and growing life of Pathways. So you’ll hand in your pledge card, and then you’ll pick up a leaf and put it on the tree, and then be seated. A simple ritual. But the gesture is momentous. This community here greening and growing!
In fact, between now and then, I would invite you to consider upping your pledge. Remember those Phoenicians! If all current pledgers added just 25 more dollars a month, then the end result would be another $20 thousand dollars to the total. Talk about a way of saying, I believe in this place! Even more greening and growing!
Now I am mindful that I’m coming across as rather enthusiastic about financial generosity. As in, Tone it down a bit there, Anthony….. But you know what? I believe in the mission. It’s all about giving to that. Changing lives. So I’ve got no shame. No shame at all.
But I do want to say something to our newcomers today, people here for the first or second time. I want to say what we always say when the offering basket goes around: be our guest. Don’t worry about it. You can’t possibly be expected to jump up and pledge generously when you are still in the church-shopping mode. Forgive us if there’s any awkwardness you are feeling. But I will ask you to do one thing: just witness how this church takes very seriously the issue of good stewardship. It means it will take you seriously. For stewardship is a central problem of the good life. And as I say this, please know that I understand stewardship as going far beyond what we do with our dollars. It’s ultimately about right priorities in life. Are we spending our dollars in ways that demonstrate our best values? Or what about how we spend our time? Or our life energy? Or our talents? All the resources that are available to us as people in relationships, as members of communities, as citizens of states and nations, and as ecological citizens of planet earth: how are we spending that? This has everything to do with the good life. Stewardship is a basic and fundamental spiritual issue—and when you have an entire world pressuring you willy nilly to spend spend spend the resources that life has given you—when there’s just so much pressure to spend—there’s got to be something in your world that invites you to pause and to reflect and to ask, Should I? How can I spend with integrity, and sustainability? How can I be a good steward of the precious gifts of my life? How can I escape a life of narrow selfishness and bless the world around me? How can I do that?
It means that any church worth its salt is going to step up like Clarence Darrow and help its people ask and answer all such questions. It’s about being relevant to the human condition. Getting to the heart and soul of the good life. The problem of integrity and sustainability. The quest for a purpose-driven and value-driven life. How do we do that?
How do we spend whatever resources are ours, in a good way? And: why can it be so hard at times? What gets in the way?
Which takes us to the rest of this sermon, and its special focus. Start talking about good stewardship, and it’s natural to wonder about what might get in the way of that. And one of the most frustrating and perplexing manifestations of this takes the form of a paradox. When we might be immersed in abundance, we feel only scarcity and weakness and cannot mobilize the great resources that are there. It’s like a diabetes of the spirit: the sugar is there, the sweetness is there, but it can’t make its way into the bloodstream to be used. Something is making this impossible. Something is blocking it. And so all sorts of difficulties ensue.
It’s the abundance paradox. So much already there, so much that could be received and could be given away, but what happens instead is paralysis. It’s like kings and queens who have forgotten who they are, and so feel weak when they are in fact mighty, poor when they are in fact rich. The abundance paradox. Does this ring any bells?
And no doubt there are any number of reasons for this. Social evils aplenty, like structural poverty, or racism, or the kind of humanocentrism that prevents humans from seeing themselves and their best interests as inextricably linked with that of other animals and the earth. Lots of social evils like this that crush and distort. But today I want to explore a reason that falls more under the category of the personal and psychological. I’m talking about unrecognized or unresolved grief. Not grief in itself, but when grief is resisted and stopped and goes underground—and then takes on its own independent shadow life and plays us like a puppet.
It’s hard not to talk about this, after some of the events of recent weeks. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history, there on the campus of Virginia Tech. Or the shooting at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Events in the world, and events closer to home, like the death of a loved one, an illness, a minister leaving—all these, taking away from the joy of the day, and taking people into a place of sadness and loss.
Grief in itself is not the problem—what’s at issue is how we respond. It is said that the only bad emotion is the stuck emotion, and I absolutely agree. So when grief gets stuck, it puts us right into the abundance paradox and therefore becomes a stewardship issue. The church that blesses our families and our lives asks us to give generously to it, so it can offer bigger and more blessings, but the call falls on deaf ears. Or a relationship asks us to be generous in some way, a personal passion that we’ve been putting on hold for years begs us to name it and acknowledge it, or a social injustice that makes our hearts break demands that we do something—these and similar things all call to us, but the call falls on deaf ears.
And so we can have loads of money, but we spend it poorly because what we are really trying to do is fill up the hole in our hearts. Or we can have loads of personal strengths and talents, but we hate ourselves anyhow. Love and opportunity can surround us—we can be immersed in it—but all we can see are things to criticize and to attack. This is what life is like in the shadow of unresolved grief. We become a puppet to it. We are kings and queens who forget who they are.
And this is a stewardship issue. Resources are there for us to use, sweetness is there for us to tap into, but the way is blocked. We can feel so poor, even though in an important sense everyone—everyone—has already won the lottery of life. We don’t give, even as Life calls out to us to give. The call falls on deaf ears.
It’s stuck grief. Unresolved grief. And here’s how I’ve seen this, first hand. My Mother. Some of you know she died this past January, and it’s interesting what can happen when a parent dies. For me, she has become almost like a sacred text to be read, and interpreted, and learned from. The relationship goes on.
And so consider this illustration of the abundance paradox. It comes from a dream that my Mom had later on in life, one of those Big Dreams people have that keep on repeating and repeating. Here it is. In the dream, Mom would find herself kneeling on the ground and wanting to rise up, to stand up on her feet, but she couldn’t, she wasn’t able to, because an invisible and unknown pressure from above was holding her down. And that’s it, that’s the dream. It was always the same sequence of events. Always ending with her trying to get up, but not being able to.
That’s the abundance paradox, in a nutshell. Wanting to rise up, to stand up, take a big deep breath, claim your life—and you know you ought to be able to, but you can’t. Something is holding you down.
For Mom, I’m convinced that her grief had something to do with what most if not all of us can relate to: rejection. Feeling misunderstood, or undervalued. Not being seen for what she was. Mom was a middle child, and it was the eldest and the youngest, for one reason or another, who got the bulk of the attention. She fell through the cracks. Her life was continually adjusted to others’ needs. She wanted the sun to shine on her, but it didn’t happen.
Why? Well, I won’t scapegoat her parents, or her siblings. They don’t deserve that. As parents, you do your best. As siblings, you do your best. We’re all trying to make it through life as best as we know how. All my Mom knew was that it happened, and it left its mark on her life. Ever afterwards, there was that sense of standing in the shade, a sense of being of less value than others. And the aching grief of this. The aching loss.
How do we face our grief? How do we do this? How do we take its hand, go through the door with it, accept its invitation openly and honestly to experience its stages of denial and then anger and then bargaining and then depression, all the way to acceptance and a new sense of hope? How do we do that without getting stuck in any one stage or over-indulging in any one stage—just letting them come as they must, acknowledging each but holding it lightly and not clinging? How do we stay poised and hopeful even if the journey feels like it’s going nowhere or going in a circle? How do we do it, so that we can let grief do its proper work in our lives—until one day, your heart’s winter has turned into spring, and you can’t say how it came about, but it did. It just happened all around you, when you weren’t looking. It’s transformation. It’s new life.
But this didn’t happen for Mom. Grief extended a hand to her, and she never took it. Till the end of her life, stuck grief was the invisible force holding her down, preventing her from accessing or using well all her resources as a person: her great intelligence and charm, her great beauty, her financial wealth. The fact that she had a family who loved her and lots of people beyond that family who loved her.
All these resources, just waiting to be tapped. But Mom’s stuck grief took on a life of its own, manifesting in all sorts of symptoms that she interpreted literally and chased after, never understanding that they were all irritations erupting out of a deeper source, irritations that could only be healed if she went deeper. But she never went deeper. She stayed at the surface.
And so while she was a great beauty, she would look into the mirror and it was as if some evil wizard or witch out of a fairy tale had bewitched her, and all she could see was ugliness. Not beautiful enough. Never slim enough. And so she struggled with anorexia, was in the hospital several times in her life for this, almost died because of it.
Stuck grief led her into acts of self-destructiveness like this, as well as into hurtful acts towards others. I was always amazed by how charming a person my Mom could be at some times, but then, most of the time, she was angry and critical and resentful. That’s what we do to each other when grief is stuck in our throats, and we feel the irritation of that, the pressure of that. So you look around, and all the imperfections, small and large, stand out—and you attack with a single-mindedness that is laser-sharp. Everyone else walking on eggshells. Everyone else just waiting for the other shoe to fall. And you don’t feel heard until you get your way. And even if you do get your way, well, there is always something else to complain about. I lived that. That was life with Mom. A person with old grief stuck in her throat, which she could never give honest voice to but, rather, reacted to the irritation and pressure and so screamed and screamed and made life so hard for her family who loved her and wanted to share joy with her.
The fundamental issue here is one of good stewardship. And my Mom’s life is the scripture text I’m meditating upon. Her life was one of so many gifts, and yet she lived the abundance paradox because she was trapped by her grief. Struck out at herself and struck out at the larger world. I have seen it, first hand. A tragedy that is the last thing I would ever want for anyone else.
For we are kings and queens. We are not ugly ducklings, we are swans. The Messiah is one of us. Abundance is right here and right now. So let that abundance step forward today, into our midst. And if something’s blocking it—if something’s preventing you from standing up and claiming the fullness of your life—then go deeper. Go deep, so you can go high. Perhaps it is the grief of your days that has gone underground. If lately you find yourself laser-focused on your own imperfections or those of others—just that, and no gratitude, no thankfulness, giving nothing the benefit of the doubt, just frustration, just anxiety, just fear—perhaps it is the grief of your days. Know it as grief, and open your heart up to it. Take its hand. Walk through the door with it, and walk with it for as long as you need to, to get to the acceptance and the renewed hope that will come as surely as, every year, spring comes.
Go deep, so you can go high. Give from the depths of your heart. Give to this church, give to your relationships, give to this world—giving even as you know that this world is a mixed bag of joys and sorrows, full of love and full of hurt, and people you love and who love you will sometimes let you down—giving anyhow, giving with gratitude from all that you are, giving from the deepest places of your soul. Give from that. Give from that. Amen.