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Sermon Index

BAGS OF GOLD

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 19th of November 2000
Thanksgiving Sunday

In the Hindu tradition we find this story, as told by Rachel Remen in her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom:

Shiva and Shakti, the Divine Couple in Hinduism, are in their heavenly abode watching over the earth. They are touched by ... the ever-present place of suffering in the human experience.

As they watch, Shakti spies a miserably poor man walking down a road. His clothes are shabby and his sandals are tied together with rope. Her heart is wrung with compassion ... [She] turns to her divine husband and begs him to give this man some gold.

Shiva looks at the man for a long moment. My Dearest Wife, he says, I cannot do that. Shakti is astounded. Why, what do you mean, Husband? You are Lord of the Universe. Why cant you do this simple thing?

I cannot give this to him because he is not yet ready to receive it, Shiva replied. Shakti becomes angry. Do you mean to say that you cannot drop a bag of gold in his path?

Surely I can, Shiva replies, but that is quite another thing.

Please, Husband, says Shakti. And so Shiva drops a bag of gold in the mans path.

The man meanwhile walks along thinking to himself: I wonder if I will find dinner tonight or shall I go hungry again? Turning a bend in the road, he sees something on the path in his way. Aha, he says. Look there, a large rock. How fortunate that I have seen it. I might have torn these poor sandals of mine even further. And carefully stepping over the bag of gold, he goes on his way.

This story was brought to Dr. Remen by one of her patients, a physician living with cancer. Remen continues:

It seems that Life drops many bags of gold in our path. Rarely do they look like what they are. I ask my patient if Life has ever dropped him a bag of gold that he has recognized and used to enrich his life. He smiles at me. Cancer, he says simply. I thought youd guess.

This week, we celebrate Thanksgivingsome of us at home, and some far away. Some with family and friends, a few alone, perhaps for the first time. Always, we come to Thanksgiving with memories: of childhood trips over the river and through the woods, [as] to grandmothers house we went; of celebrations around a big table with three or four generations of family; of that first Thanksgiving away from our families.

This week as we gather once again, we will be joined, in spirit, by those no longer with usparents perhaps; spouses; for a few, even children who have gone before us. Some of us will come to the table with fresh knowledge of our own mortality and wonder whether this Thanksgiving may be our last. And some of us will come to the table, or stay away, in the knowledge of family dysfunction and conflict.

How can we be glad, in the face of sadness? How can we be thankful, in the face of loss? How can we affirm lifes goodness in the face of hostility and rejection?

Thankfulness in the face of grief is not about forgetting. We can never forget the great losses in our lives. Thankfulness is not about a life untouched by sorrow, or fear. Otherwise we could never be thankful. Most of all, it is not about wishing for hardship as a doorway to joy. We must not trivialize our pain, much less romanticize it.

Yet thankfulness is about opening ourselves to the ultimate goodness of life, even in the face of its pain and its unfairness. Thankfulness is about learning to see bags of gold where before we might have seen only rocks that blocked our way; Thanksgiving is about learning to see silver linings, where before we saw only clouds. We would not wish for rocks or for clouds or for lossbut they come upon us anyway. Thankfulness is about seeingand seizingthe opportunities that can come with them, opportunities to learn, to grow, to experience life more deeply.

I have spoken before about my first day as a student chaplain in a hospital. On the daily listing of patients, one name seemed familiar. I remembered a man who had come to see me years before for legal help in ordering his affairs. A lawyer himself, he had been diagnosed with cancer.

I knocked and entered. We recognized each other. He was in the hospital that day, he said, for his 22nd surgical procedure in his struggle with cancer. I would see him many times that summer. On one visit, I asked him if he had known those many years before what lay ahead for him, would he have wanted to live? He answered that he had asked himself that question many times, through all the pain and suffering. At first, the answer was No. But now, he said, it was Yes. Yes because the cancer, and the knowledge that his days were numbered, had brought a new quality to his lifeto each new day, each cloud passing across the sun, each bird that sang, each visit from his children. It had sharpened his senses, given him a new sense of thankfulness for the sheer gift of life.

Many times since that summer, I have thought of Michael. He died soon after. Each time, I pray that when faced with similar pain, I will be able to say Yes to life, as he did.

It can help us if we can form this habit, well before we face serious loss. Too often, I find myself discouraged about quite inconsequential things. I find myself expecting the worst. There is a teaching in the Talmud, Remen tells us, that We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. But we can change who we are. We can grow. Thats what the religious life is about. When we expect the worst, its as if we are wearing dark glasses. Once we realize this, we discover for the first time that we have a choicewe can take off those glasses; we can let go of the negative expectations that keep us from seeing the bags of gold.

Remen illustrates this with a story from her own family. Her father habitually expected the worst, and whenever things went wrong, he would mutter, the luck of the Remens. He won a large prize in the state lottery, yet he taped the winning ticket to his chest, fearing its theft. When he finally redeemed it, he could not bring himself to spend the money, lest others discover that he had some.

When Rachel was growing up in a small Manhattan apartment, her father would fantasize about the house style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold">in the country he longed to own. It would have a dishwasher, and a garden, and light green walls. Some years later, her parents did buy a little house on Long Island, and they retired. Had he now realized his dream? Visiting, Rachel found her father asleep in his armchair, exhausted. He had taken another jobafter all, there would be repairs to pay for. Visiting again, she found him still working, to pay for an alarm system to ward off burglars. On still another visit, she asked if they would be taking a trip this year. No, her father said, We cant leave the house empty. Couldnt you get a house sitter? Rachel asked.

Horrified, her father said, You could never count on anyone to take care of your house the way they would take care of their own. In fact, she says, they never took another vacation, didnt even feel secure enough to go to a moviesuppose there was a fire while they were gone? Her father kept on working until he died.

I have known people like that. People who assumed the worst. Even been one. Finishing college, I wanted to be a ministerbut held back out of fear. Going to law school near Boston, I fell in love with the citybut didnt even look for a job there, out of the conviction that you had to be from an old Boston family or know someone.

In the last dozen years, once I made the break with my former life, Ive come to assume the best, and I have found it. In moving to a new life in Canada, I found the blessing of seeing my native land from a different perspective. In moving to a congregation that was hostile to my theology, I found the blessing of seeing past my discomfort to discover that I was surrounded by wonderful peopleand I become aware of the dark underside of my chosen Christian tradition, which in other forms has left so many hurt and angry.

But theres more to misfortune than the self-fulfillment of low expectations, more to happiness than expecting the best. In fact, expecting the best without allowing for the worst can leave us devastated when misfortune strikes. As Job discovered, we are simply not given to understand why misfortune happens. Despite the framework of that story, I do not believe that God sends misfortune to test our faithfulness. Rather, the real point is that bad things do sometimes happen to good people, and virtue is no guarantor of health and life. Suffering is simply the human condition. Our challenge is to be faithful in trusting that somehow, in the suffering, we can find something positive. For Job, it was the realization that his afflictions did not mean he had somehow sinned, or failed. It is not always ours to know why some things happen, for life is surrounded by mystery. Why then be faithful? So that he could appreciate this very insight, rather than die in disillusion.

It is true in life that some of us really do have more than our share of misfortune, sometimes, seemingly, the troubles of Jobwhile others seem to live in a ray of sunshine. No one promised that life would be fair, and demonstrably, it is not.

Yet we all know people, some in this very congregation, who are living with limitations of mobility, of sight or hearing or other bodily function, who are living with illness, sometimes with great pain, who radiate a love for life that comes as a blessing to the rest of us. They have found their bags of gold. How do they do it? Have they always said Yes to lifeor is it a gift of their misfortune? I cannot say, but I am sure that the cultivation of a lifelong habit of looking for the best in life can help us greatly in finding it. For in the end, we are surrounded by bags of gold. Through the dark glasses of Remens father, we may see only rocks. But through the yellow glasses of hope, we may discover gold. So much depends on our expectations and our ability to trust.

This Thanksgiving, it is my prayer for all of us that we may find a way to be with family, or friends, or to reach out to others who might otherwise be alone; that we may enjoy the bounty of the season; and that we may come to appreciate thatin spite of lifes trials and lossesthere is beauty and goodness and hope.

I pray that we may prepare ourselves to see the bags of gold that surround usthat in someone we have been with many Thanksgivings before, we may this time find some surprise. That in some insignificant thing we have experienced many times before, we may this time find ourselves moved. That in the faithful ordinariness of someones response to hardship, something we have taken for granted before, we may this time find ourselves inspired. In the words of the hymn style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold">we sang this morning (Hymn 322, Thanks Be For These),

Thanks be for these, lifes holy times,
moments of grief, days of delight ...
Holy becomes the quickened breath ...
May we then celebrate our brief interval of life, and be thankful.