Texts: Luke 17: 11-19; Colossians 3: 15-17
A Theology of Resentment, and A Theology of Gratitude
Ten were healed. One came back. Ten were afforded the opportunity to resume their lives. One returned to give thanks. Ten were given an unimaginable gift. Only one saw fit to acknowledge the giver.
So it goes in Luke’s story about gratitude, where ten people suffering from disease are healed by Jesus. The story suggests two alternative approaches to life. In one, we look upon that which has been afforded to us – our health or our livelihood, our material possessions or our relationships, the food we eat and the air we breathe – as a given, something to be taken for granted – a kind of birthright. That’s what happened with the nine. The text indicates that they were insiders, children of the promise. Perhaps they felt as though they deserved to be healed. Perhaps they were simply swept up in the moment, and failed to appreciate the enormity of what they were given. Who can say? Despite it all, they exhibit a kind of indifference, and they return to their homes.
In the other approach to life, we recognize the profundity of our dependence, and choose to approach life in a spirit of humility and gratitude. That’s what happened for the one who returned. He was a Samaritan, the text tells us, a foreigner. He was not an insider, and could take little for granted. It renders him capable of discerning how fortunate he is. It allows him to perceive and recognize the blessing he had been given. And so he makes an uncommon decision. He breaks away from the others. He returns to give thanks.
Ten were healed. One came back to offer thanks. If the story were written about you, who would you be? What approach to life have you chosen?
Gratitude is, by and large, an uncommon way of being in the world. And if Luke’s story is any indication, it is especially uncommon among those used to enjoying the perks and privileges of some special status. In Jesus’s time it had to do with being a member of the chosen people. In ours, it has to do with race, or class, or gender. It is difficult for anyone to practice the path of gratitude, but it requires an even greater awareness, and a still greater effort, for those habituated to privilege. Whatever our status, whatever our background, gratitude remains uncommon. But I believe we are summoned to be an uncommon people.
Gratitude is a profound part of the Christian tradition. It stands at the center not only of the episode of healing we’re considering this morning, but also throughout all of the New Testament. And quite often, it’s in a moment of crisis that gratitude is most powerful, and most revealing. Any time that Jesus breaks bread, for example, the writers tell us that he gave thanks before doing so. He did it before feeding the five thousand, but he also did it on the night he was arrested, when his world was on the verge of collapse. Still, he gives thanks where he can. Is there a connection between his gratitude, and his capacity to withstand the storm that soon will engulf him and his followers? Perhaps. So too, in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he admonishes his readers to, in his words, “clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” He then continues: Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.” This from a writer who, as often as not, composed his letters from a prison cell. Is it possible to be thankful from a prison cell? Is it gratitude, in part at least, that enables Paul to withstand his own tribulations? Perhaps the way of gratitude opens our hearts and souls in such a way that whatever prison we might find ourselves in becomes a little less powerful, a little less imprisoning, and a little less scary.
That theme of gratitude and thanksgiving threads throughout both Catholic and Protestant theologies. But it’s at the beginning of the 19th century, that a German theologian named Friedrich Schleiermacher teased out its most powerful implication. What he said was this: religion, properly understood, is the feeling of absolute dependence. Translating that expression a bit, we might say that religion doesn’t consist in believing this or that, or in behaving this way or that. Instead, religion consists in the experience of being connected, of sensing not our independence, but our interdependence. Some writers have called it an oceanic feeling of oneness, moments in which we sense with joy and awe the kindred nature of all things, including our own place in that web of relations.
To sense such a truth, let alone to feel it, can be profoundly difficult. But it results in expressions of gratitude and thanksgiving. To use the older language of the Bible, we might say that it results in praise, or blessing. “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” the psalmist wrote, words that we used to open our service today. To do so is to invoke the feeling of absolute dependence, the experience of wonder, and the certainty of our interdependence. But it is also to invoke the spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving for all that has been given to us.
I am not suggesting that we must be thankful for every misfortune that comes our way. I am not suggesting that those who have been visited by disaster, or who have been discriminated against or persecuted, should just get over it and be thankful for what they have. It would be obscene to use gratitude as a means of ignoring or covering up the structural injustices that do permeate our culture and our world. It would be ignorant to say to somebody lying in a ditch, “I’m sorry you’re in a ditch, but just try to remember how much you have to be thankful for.” If life is a gift, if we’re an uncommon people shaped by gratitude, we’ll work to get that person out of the ditch, and trust that if and when we ourselves land in the ditch, somebody will do the same for us. That’s because we’re aware of the strengths and resources we actually do possess, and wish to use them generously. And if we’re shaped by gratitude, we’ll do what we can to prevent people from falling there in the first place. Gratitude, in other words, is not an excuse for complacency or indifference. It simply acknowledges the threads of connection that already exist between us all, no matter how gossamer thin, which has the effect of setting things in motion.
The uncommon path of gratitude has the capacity to reframe our lives. I would like, in the time that remains, to suggest some ways that you might choose the uncommon response of gratitude in your own lives. Many of you are experts already, and so forgive me for saying what you already know. But if Luke’s story is any indication, each of us needs continual encouragement in the practice of gratitude. I do, and perhaps you do as well.
First, we might choose gratitude in our interactions with others. For most of us, whether we know it or not, there is an entire legion of people caring for our needs, making our lives a little easier, and a little better. Many of them are unseen – the people picking our produce or raising our meat, or those making the consumer goods that we depend upon and purchase. What would it mean to begin to recognize, in gratitude, all the ways that we depend upon those invisible hands making our lives manageable? Would it mean responding, in gratitude, by paying more for what we purchase, to insure that all of those we depend upon are paid livable and decent wages?
So too, we might respond in gratitude to those whose assistance we do see. When a person serves us food at a restaurant, we might find a way to simply to say thank you. When somebody picks up after us – a custodian at work, or someone who cleans our house, we might find ways to treat them not as “the help,” but as human beings worthy of our gratitude. When somebody supports us, encourages us, or offers a listening ear, we might find a way to show how much it means to have that kind of support. Spouses or life partners support one another in such a way, and so you might thank your partner, if you are so fortunate, for the ways your life is better for their presence. Parents do that for their children, however imperfectly, and so if you are a child of someone, you might find a way to offer thanks to a parent or grandparent or even a mentor who helped to shape who you are. We depend upon others for our material needs but also for our emotional and spiritual needs, and so we must find ways to express our gratitude to each of them when we can.
Second, we might also choose gratitude in our internal responses to life. I don’t have to tell you that many people choose the opposite. They hold onto the disappointments that occur in life, and they let that disappointment fester and grow. They look upon what others have with a sense of envy. They treat what they have been afforded in life with a sense of entitlement. And they resent those who, they fear, are threatening whatever status or resources they feel entitled to.
It’s a response that the novelist William H. Gass chronicled in his 1995 novel The Tunnel. In it, a middle aged history professor holds onto the small and large disappointments of his life, letting them fester into a boiling alienation and rage. His scarred childhood, his unhappy marriage, his failed love affairs, all of it is baked into a poisonous and toxic stew of resentment. He fantasizes about creating a political party, which he would call “The Party of the Disappointed People,” which would worship the God of Resentment. And he offers a word of advice to those everywhere who had ever been passed over or ignored, something that I’ve come to think of as a theology of resentment: “Don’t invest,” he says, “in a future you will never see, a future which will despise you anyway, a future which will find you useless. Pay for your own burial plot. Get the golf clubs out. Die with a tan your daughter’s thighs would envy.” It’s a bleak, bitter theology, but it’s one that seems to have gained more than a few adherents of late.
Who can doubt that disappointment is a defining feature of what it means to be human? Who can doubt that things we wish would work out often don’t? There will always be someone who has something better than us, something more than us, a life more fortunate than ours. Disappointments do occur, but we also have the capacity to resist the temptations, to say nothing of the theologies, of envy or resentment that can follow in its wake. In the face of disappointment or loss, we have the capacity to address that disappointment, even while recognizing everything in our lives for which we can be grateful. That takes practice. It requires a kind of discipline. That’s what makes it uncommon. But it remains available to us all, even if far too many choose the common path of indifference, or worse, resentment.
In a collection of essays, Maya Angelou wrote about the discipline of gratitude in the face of disappointment. Hers is a theology of gratitude that serves as an effective antidote to the theology of resentment. Maya Angelou too had a painful childhood, leading to a loveless sexual encounter that left her with a child to raise on her own. A performance career took her away from home for long periods of time, and she entered a prolonged depression that left her feeling helpless, and suicidal. She returned home, resumed the care of her son, and confided in her voice teacher, the only person with whom she could talk openly. He said, “Sit down right here at this table, here is a yellow pad and here is a ballpoint pen. I want you to write down your blessings.” Angelou protests, but her teacher insists. “First write down that I said write down, and think of the millions of people all over the world who cannot hear a choir, or a symphony, or their own babies crying. Write down, I can hear – Thank God. Then write down that you see this yellow pad, and think of the millions of people around the world who cannot see a waterfall, or flowers blooming, or their lover’s face. Write I can see – Thank God. Then write down that you can read,” he continued. Angelou notes that she followed her teacher’s instructions, and that when she reached the last line on the first page of the yellow pad, her madness was routed. It was a practice she continued to the end of her days. It’s something you can do as well.
Maya Angelou’s practice hints at a third outlet for our gratitude: in our relationship to God. For some among us, God is an easy word to say. For others among us, the word has been tarnished beyond salvaging. For some, the word signifies a personal entity who numbers every hair. For others, the word signifies the entirety of what is. Whatever God means to you, whoever God is for you, we collectively trust that there is a mercy and grace flowing through the world, a mercy that is truer than whatever cruelties are sometimes practiced, and a grace that is deeper than whatever disappointments we may experience. Such mercy and grace precedes us, enfolds us, sustains us, and binds us. It is a love in which, as the Apostle Paul states, we live and move and have our being. That love, God’s love, is capable of upholding you in the midst of all manner of life’s storms and trials. That love, God’s love, already has. When we can, we must remember to say thank you in whatever manner is befitting for each one of us – with a whispered prayer or an irrational act of exuberance, with an extension of our money and our time, but also with an opening of our hearts. There are a million ways to render thanks. Just pick one.
Ten people were healed. Only one returned to give thanks. Which path will you choose?
