Thank You!

Let us pray: If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.  Amen.

I don’t like the way you pray with our children. One concerned parent many years ago voiced to me.  If you were at Pizza Eucharist you may remember how I like to say grace with kids.  Let me demonstrate:  Raise your hands in the air.   Now start turning them.   Say THANK YOU!    Its my favorite way of saying grace with children.    Thank you!  

But what about Jesus? the parent asked.  It’s a fair question.  We are called beloved to live like Jesus.  We are called to heal and be good news in our troubled world.  We are called to be generous, loving and yes, to say thank you.   It was the mystic Meister Eckhart who said, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”  

This beloved is Count Your Blessings Sunday.  We are counting the blessings we have as a community because we have a vital collective, a vital community a witness to Jesus in Stillwater.  Our witness is a bit different from others.  We witness to Jesus by loving the questions by being free to Question.  We love Jesus through the relationships we have in our community with each other.  We witness through our worship—its beauty, symbols, this holy living room, this jewel box of a place that we pray in together.  All of that is good and powerful and important.  

Most important however is our work in and through our community.  The ways we form our children to be in relationship with each other, the ways we teach them to care for our neighbors and the planet,  the ways we are good news in our community, our neighborhood and our planet. 

The only excuse for all of this lavishness, these words, this music, this pretty little jewel box of a building this holy living room is that we say THANK YOU over and over and over again.  Thank you.  The only justification we have is that we give this building over to our community and we use our resources to be good news in our community.  I often quip, and call this beautiful place the castle.  It looks like one doesn’t it?  

This castle holds us fast and keeps us safe like any castle does.  This castle however is meant to be a sacred place of healing and restoration for all our neighbors.  That’s the point of church: that we give ourselves away.    Archbishop William once wrote, “the church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”   That’s Jesus’s point today in our story about the lepers.  The one who returns is not a part of his tribe.    The only excuse of this embarrassment of riches is that we exist for those who are not our members.  That is the blessings we need to count.  How are we good news in our community, our neighborhood and our world?  That is the beautiful onerous challenge of being a Christ follower. 

We worship in this beautiful place with elegant accoutrements and words  because God is beautiful.  God is just.  We are called to beauty so that we can bear the ugliness of our world.  Leprosy was and is a wretched disease that mars the beauty of the human form.  And yet, St. Francis that we celebrated last week embraced the leper and found Christ in that embrace.  We are called to do the same.  We are called to joyfully engage in the suffering of our world to be bearers of beauty in face of a world set on its path of destruction and violence.  We are to be the blessing that others count in their lives.  We get that strength and capacity to do this by coming to this holy living room this sacred place, this jewel box, soul beaten up, bloodied and marred.  We come here to be reminded that we are the blessing, we are the Christ, we are the good news the world desperately needs right now.   Our work together as church as Christ in the world is harrow HELL. That’s why we’re here.  That’s we give our hearts,  our time, our toil our sweat our money our gifts our all to this place. 

I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me scripture tells us.   We can do all things because we are being formed in eternal habits in this gym of our souls.  We come to this table, to these beautiful words prayers and hymns, we come to stare at the way the color flashes through the stained glass,  we come because we want to have relationship with others who give their hearts their lives their all for something larger than themselves: love, relationship and to the source of life itself that we blithely name God.   

That is what we gave to in our capital campaign.  We gave ourselves over to the larger collective,  to this castle that helps us remember that we can do all things in Christ who strengthens us.  We count this place as a blessing and it is.  From this place that is a blessing of beauty and sacredness, we become the blessing, we become the sacred, we become the hope and good news of the world.  One transformed heart at a time.  Count your blessings beloved and remember the more of your heart and soul and toil you give away, the more of a blessing you are for the sake of the world.  You beloved are the blessing that needs to be counted.  Each and every one of you.  

On the last Wednesday of September when we held our pizza Eucharist, as I was cleaning up and closing up,  there were probably a good 8-10 little ones crowded and hiding together in pulpit playing a rousing game of sardines together.  As the children ran rambunctiously through this space, I said thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.   

My heart was transformed in that moment and I was reminded that the splendor of gratitude is transformative grace that invites us to be counted as a blessing for the universe. 

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.  

Thank you!