12th Sunday after Penecost-Rev. Melanie Lemburg
12th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 16A
August 23, 2020
This past week, Facebook shared one of my memories with me. It was a post that I had shared five years ago from the brothers of SSJE (the Society of St. John the Evangelist is a Episcopal community of monks in Cambridge, Massachusetts). The post read: “For what am I most thankful today? When was I most fully alive? How did I receive love? How did I give love? Often in these moments, God was catching me: appearing in a surprising form. Stopping to reflect, I now see and say ‘thank you.’”[i] I shared this quote with my group of seminary friends that meets weekly on Zoom, and I was so touched by their responses. “For what am I most thankful today or this week? When was I most fully alive? How did I receive love? How did I give love?”
This has not been a season where I have been closely in touch with my gratitude, and this question from my past served as an important reminder for me of the spiritual practice, the spiritual discipline of gratitude.
Also this past week, I read a reflection on our gospel reading for today by the Lutheran pastor David Lose. The gospel reading for this week is the portion of Matthew’s gospel where Peter makes his confession of Jesus as the Messiah, and Jesus recognizes Peter as the rock upon which Jesus will build his church. Neither of them has acted in an obvious way to live into either of those titles in any way that the other could have expected. Peter, in all his fumbling bravado, hasn’t acted like the stalwart rock that Jesus names him; and Jesus hasn’t acted like Peter would have expected a typical Messiah to act. In some ways, I think that they see each other bathed in the light of gratitude, of hopefulness, of possibility. And it is this light that enables them each to have a clarity of vision for each other in this particular moment.
David Lose writes that we can celebrate this reading this week, even be grateful for the way that Matthew lifts up Peter’s success, his clarity of vision because we all know what’s going to happen in next week’s gospel reading. Peter is going to fail miserably, immediately after his proclamation of Jesus as Messiah. Jesus will quickly turn from proclaiming Peter as the rock upon which he will build his church to calling Peter a stumbling block between Jesus and his mission of self-giving love. Lose suggests that we should “pause to give thanks” this week; to celebrate with Peter that he gets it right.[ii] I would include that we also need to celebrate the way that God reveals this truth of each of these men to each other; to celebrate the way that Peter is “not conformed but… transformed to seek the will of God” (as Paul puts it in our Romans passage for today).
We are invited to remember that our practice of gratitude can be a way that God reveals God’s very self to us. Through our gratitude we can sometimes see the way God is surprising us, showing up in our lives through the way we have given or received love or when we have felt most fully alive.
I truly believe that gratitude is the rock upon which this church is founded. We are most fully ourselves when we express our gratitude for each other, and God continues to show up and be revealed in and through that practice, that gift, even in this season of diaspora.
There was an article that was circulating among clergy circles this week about how difficult it is to be a pastor during the pandemic, and the article cited a recent Zoom call that the author was on where no less than 4 clergy out of 10 expressed that they’d had suicidal thoughts recently. These clergy talked about the burden of the complaints from their congregation, how no matter what they did, a portion of the congregation was going to be unhappy. I read that article, and while my initial feeling was the sadness that I have for my colleagues who feel this way, my most profound feeling is a one of deep gratitude, because this has not been my experience. My experience has been that even in the deep loneliness that I feel as your priest who cannot be regularly with you in person, your gratitude, that you freely give and express, continues to nurture me in its light in ways that continue to reveal God to me. Your consistent generosity of spirit for me, for us, and for the work we continue to try to do has been a profound gift. And I am so deeply grateful for you.
So this week, I invite you to ponder the question that I posed to my group of seminary classmates. If you feel so inclined, you can even post your responses in the Facebook comments as the service continues to share your gratitude with others. And reflect on it as the week goes on.
“For what am I most thankful today? When was I most fully alive? How did I receive love? How did I give love? Often in these moments, God was catching me: appearing in a surprising form. Stopping to reflect, I now see and say ‘thank you.’”
[i] From SSJE’s Facebook page. Originally posted and shared by me on August 17, 2015. Ssje.org/word
[ii] http://www.davidlose.net/2017/08/pentecost-12-a-pausing-to-give-thanks/
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