"Somebody Else's Troubles"
A Thanksgiving sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
November 23, 2008
ANCIENT & MODERN READINGS:
Our first reading is from Peter Merel's translation of the
Tao Te Ching by 6th Century BC, Chinese philosopher and holy man,
Lao Tzu:
If you offer music and food
Strangers may stop with you;
But if you accord with the Way
All the people of the world will keep you
In safety, health, community, and peace.
The Way lacks art and flavour;
It can neither be seen nor heard,
But its benefit cannot be exhausted.
Our second reading is from the Dalai Lama, from his Nobel Lecture
of December 11, 1989:
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries
or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particu
lar job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example,
starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be
at peace with those around us.
When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace
with neighboring communities, and so on. When we feel love and kindness
towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for,
but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. And there
are ways in which we can consciously work to develop feelings of
love and kindness. For some of us, the most effective way to do
so is through religious practice. For others it may be non-religious
practices. What is important is that we each make a sincere effort
to take our responsibility for each other and for the natural environment
we live in seriously.
SONG LYRICS: Somebody Else's Troubles, Steve Goodman
And it ain't too hard it to get along with somebody else's troubles,
They don't make you lose any sleep at night.
As long as fate is out there burstin' somebody else's bubbles
Everything is gonna be alright.
And everything is gonna alright.
SERMON:
Thanksgiving is a special time when families and often friends
and loved ones get together often traveling great distances to celebrate,
to give thanks and to tell stories. It's a great time for telling
stories. We have an old one, a family favorite that comes up from
time to time in our family. It's about a wealthy Texas oilman who
is visiting in England where he finds himself invited to a dinner
party. It's held in the very elegant home of an elderly Duchess.
When he arrives, the oilman is seated at a great long table, lined
with notable and noble guests. During the course of the dinner it
seems the old Duchess breaks loose with a rather loud belch that
can be heard throughout the room. (I might note here that I've edited
the particular emanation in question to clean up the story, hopefully
enough to make it a bit more sermonable.) The old woman lets loose
and the oilman is surprised when the Earl, sitting just to the right
of the old woman, quickly and audibly comments, "Er, pardon
me."
This ritual is repeated a number of times; each time a different
person at the table, responding, "Pardon me." Finally,
the oil man turns to the woman sitting next to him and says, "I
don't get it. The old girl lets loose with all these burps, pretends
like nothing at all has happened and somebody else takes the rap
by saying, 'Pardon me.' That doesn't seem right. What's going on
here?"
"Well," says the woman to his side, "the Duchess
is our highest ranking person here. It just would not do; it wouldn't
be right for her to go around belching in public, now would it?
We're all quite happy to cover for her. It's the least we can do,
isn't it."
A few minutes later, the old dowager breaks loose with yet another
grand emission. Before anyone else at the table can say a word,
the Texan stands up, raises his hands in the air, and says, "Nope,
nope, this one's on me. 'Scuse me, ma'am."
As our kids grew up over the years, there were quite a number of
various occurrences at the dinner table that would elicit the response
of someone saying, "Please, please, this one's on me."
It was a kind of fun way to turn what might have otherwise been
an embarrassing or even a disgusting sort of moment into a more
gracious one. Maybe you've had similar customs in your home, little
ways where somebody else's burden is picked up and at least partially
shared by others. So often, it really isn't so hard to get along
with somebody else's troubles.
Have you ever taken something out of the refrigerator, or the oven
or from the sink and dropped it, making a huge mess on the kitchen
floor, or worse, on the living room carpet? I hate it when that
happens! And did you ever have to clean up that mess alone? And
do you remember what you might have said to yourself while you were
cleaning it? Possibly words that you might not want to repeat in
this room.
But have you ever made a mess like that or some other kind of mess
- life holds the possibilities of so many varieties of messes -
and then had somebody step in to cheerfully help you out or even
to take over and do the clean up? It changes the whole experience.
It's sort of like someone stepping in and saying, "this one's
on me." You don't have to feel like an idiot because someone
is right there to say, "Hey, I know how it feels. I've done
this sort of thing myself. It's no big deal. You're not in this
alone." And find that you're not in it alone, and that makes
it better.
Or have you ever been the person who steps in after somebody else
has just made a mess? Have you been the one to say - this one's
on me? It's really a very different experience to volunteer to clean
up somebody else's mess because you choose to, than it is to clean
up your own mess because you have to. It's really a gift to both
people. It's a gift that promotes gratitude, but more important
it's a gift that comes out of gratitude. The person who says, "This
one's on me," is saying I'm so grateful just to have you in
my life that I'm going to make sure that you don't have to go through
this unpleasant experience alone. Or if you're saying it to someone
you don't even know, the message is - I'm so grateful for what I
have in my life, for what I've been given, that I'm willing to share
it with you, stranger, hoping it will allow you to feel that you,
too, have enough.
"It ain't hard to get along with somebody else's troubles."
By the way, that song, sung so well by Mike Shapiro and the Nitty
Gritty UU Band, has long been one of my favorites by the late, great
Chicago folk artist Steve Goodman. It makes an obvious but such
a meaningful point. It almost makes you think that you're getting
off easy if the troubles aren't really your own, but I don't think
that's it. It's not hard to get along with somebody else's troubles
because, really, getting along with other's trouble is about the
very best way we have to get along, all together.
We might think that's because it's a great opportunity to grow
and express our compassion, which it is. But more important, it's
because it allows us to experience and to express our gratitude.
If we can't feel and express gratitude, I think our souls shrivel
up and we die. Gratitude is a key that unlocks so many possibilities
of connection, so many possibilities of all sorts in our lives.
Melody Beattie, a popular voice in the 12 Step Movement and author
of eight books including Codependent No More, wrote:
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what
we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance,
chaos into order, confusion into clarity…It turns problems
into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing,
and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our
past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow."
Gratitude, as Ms. Beattie is talking about, isn't just a tip of
the hat and a "Thank you, ma'am." Although, the world
would be better off than it is if more of us would feel a little
freer even in such simple expressions of gratitude. What she is
talking about is more like what the Roman philosopher Cicero meant
when he said, "Gratitude is not only the greatest of all virtues,
but the parent of all others." It's more like what John F.
Kennedy meant when he said, "As we express our gratitude, we
must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter
words, but to live by them."
She is talking about an approach to life that recognizes that we
actually deserve very few of the many blessing that we enjoy, that
they are gifts of the universe, not entitlements owed to us. She's
talking about an approach to life that recognizes that life itself
is a phenomenal gift that we did not merit, but that has been given
to us nonetheless. Such an approach to life embraces a larger sense
of wholeness, in which our own well-being is connected with those
around us and with our world. If we are held in this world by the
grace of God, that grace is made real through the very human hands
that establish those connections.
When we are grateful, we are called by our gratitude to be more
than merely appreciative. We are called to act in ways that extend
and enlarge the blessings that we have been given by passing them
along, in compassion and in service to the world and to others.
It's not hard to get along with somebody else's troubles. The opportunity
to serve in the midst of other's troubles is a gift that gives us
the opportunity to live our lives in a grateful manner. Johannes
Gaertner wrote, "To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant,
to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude
is to touch Heaven." We might aptly conclude then that to touch
the Earth and those in it with our gratitude is indeed to touch
Heaven itself.
I have to imagine that each of us is presented with myriad opportunities
to express our gratitude in earth changing, life changing ways each
day. We pay special attention to these opportunities at Thanksgiving
time, but I suspect we are selling ourselves short if we fail to
respond in a very regular, spiritually disciplined way each day.
Maybe that's what Thanksgiving could be about - a special day reminding
us that everyday it's not hard to get along with somebody else's
troubles. In fact it can provide a pathway to our salvation. It
really does feel good to wipe up someone else's glass of spilt milk.
I wonder, what other kinds of opportunities are right in front of
you, waiting for your experience and expression of gratitude?
Opportunities abound for us here as a congregation, too. A major
purpose of any religious congregation is to provide its members
with opportunities of service. It is through extending ourselves
beyond ourselves that we are saved. Well my friends, we have come
to the season of salvation! Opportunities to serve and to give of
ourselves as expressions of our gratitude are coming our way. The
"Mantel of Giving" program with Newton Street School,
helping the folks at Toni's Kitchen, supporting The Human Needs
Food Pantry, are all opportunities we'll have to touch a little
bit of Heaven.
There's one special opportunity that has come up this week that
I'd like to bring to your attention. Back last spring, we held a
special congregational meeting at which time you voted to become
a New Sanctuary Movement congregation. We said that we would be
willing to sponsor an undocumented immigrant family facing deportation
from the U.S., and that we would find out what such sponsorship
would mean when we established a relationship with a family. Our
only problem has been locating a family willing and daring enough
to go public by accepting such an endorsement. Perhaps our prayers
have been answered.
This is not about stepping in to help someone who has made a mess
of things themselves. It's more about being there for someone who
has somehow stepped into a mess, maybe even a mess that we had something
to do in the creation of. I received the following email this week:
Mr. and Mrs. Carmona have been in the U.S. since 1995. Mr. Carmona,
the father/husband, has been detained [in the Elizabeth, NJ, Detention
Center] as a result of missing hearings that he didn't know about
years ago after an attorney in California submitted a fraudulent
asylum application for Mr. and Mrs. Carmona (that lawyer has since
disbarred). Mr. Carmona has been working steadily; they've paid
taxes every year, etc. There is currently a motion pending before
an immigration judge who will decide whether he can be released
and apply for a green card.
An attorney working with our New Sanctuary Movement Committee expects
to have a decision in 3 months' time. If Mr. Carmona is released,
he will be able to resume work and the family's emergency will abate;
if the motion is denied, he will be deported, as will his wife;
so it seems likely that their children would accompany them. Their
children are aged 2, 4, 7 and 12.
Señora Carmona will be with us for our potluck soup lunch
at noon today in Fletcher Hall. She'll be introduced by members
of our New Sanctuary Movement Committee at the start of the lunch
and then those interested in learning more about whether or not
we can be helpful to the Carmona's will be invited to stay after
lunch to learn what we might be able to do to be of service. This
looks like it could be a great collaborative opportunity for us
as a congregation to experience and express gratitude for our lives
in a meaningful, connecting way. "It ain't hard to get along
with somebody else's troubles."
As the holiday season gets officially underway this week, I wish
you joy and fulfillment as you embrace family and friends, and as
you extend yourself in finding new experiences of touching the greater
human family with your love and your service. I leave you this morning
with a thought on gratitude by Albert Schweitzer:
To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take
nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that
will stand behind… action. Nothing that is done for you is
a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good,
which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word
or action for the expression of gratitude.
And if you happen to be in the company this week, of someone who
drops the turkey platter or some other matter, you might want to
try to remember that it's not so hard to get along with somebody
else's troubles, and simply say, "This one's on me." It
could provide you with a step along this path of mystery that leads
you to larger connections, to a larger appreciation for your own
life and for the Spirit of Life and Love, itself. I wish you a happy
and grateful Thanksgiving.
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