Sermon Notes: Worry and Gratitude

On Wednesday, my pastor asked me if I wanted to preach on Sunday.  I said sure.  Then he asked if I would do the whole service.  I said sure.  He's been going at high speed, as pastors do, and fighting off a cold, and the holidays are coming.

I thought it would be easy to preach the last Sunday of our gratitude series:  Luke 12:22-34.  But as I looked at the text, it seemed filled with peril.  There's the first part telling us not to worry--but we've all got plenty to worry about, and some of us need some professional help, and I don't want people to feel bad about that.

And then there's the end that warns us about the danger of possessions and wealth.  But I know that many of our parishioners are quite poor and barely hanging onto the edge of being able to sustain what they have.  It feels wrong to preach about letting go of our attachment to stuff to people who might genuinely not have what they need.

I thought about going the "God will provide" route, but that worried me too.  If God doesn't provide, and we find ourselves without a way to pay the light bill or we find ourselves homeless or the welfare people take our kids, does that mean we didn't pray well?  That God doesn't really love us?  It's shoddy theology, in the way that praying for a cure to illness leads to problems if the cure doesn't come.

In the end, I talked about all the issues with the text and how to preach it--and then I recommended gratitude as a cure for all sorts of ills--the rest of the liturgy stressed gratitude so it fit.  I recommended a gratitude journal as a way to help us notice all the blessings that God sends our way, and I recommended that we say a prayer of thanks as we keep our journals.  I suggested that we also post our gratitude to our social media sites to counter the ugliness that we find there.

It wasn't my best sermon, but I suspect that the sermons I feel are my best are not the ones that the parishioners might choose.  And it's good to have a voice that's different from my pastor's.  We are still a very white, very male, very straight church (ELCA Lutheran).  I'm not real different from the standard pastor, but I am female, and we still have too few females.

It was a good way to spend a Sunday morning:  baking communion bread, writing a poem, and then heading to church to do my co-treasurer duties and then lead service.

And now it's off to get bread and treats for the students and then to spin class.