Yesterday we celebrated Thanksgiving and dedicated our pledge cards. The combination is appropriate. Gratitude makes us generous, and generosity is a way of cultivating gratitude.
 
Christian stewardship begins with the recognition that everything we have and everything we are comes to us as a gift from God. God created us and blesses us in an ongoing way. Most of all, God blesses us by accompanying us as we journey through life. This is the great gift that we celebrate at Christmastime—the birth of Jesus Christ who is “Immanuel, which means God with us” (Matt 1:23).
 
Knowing that what we have is a gift, and that God is the gift that keeps on giving, we do not need to hoard what we have. Instead we can share it, in imitation of the God who gives so abundantly. Thus gratitude—the acknowledgement of the gifts we have received—leads to generosity.
 
Generosity in turn is the practice of not holding on to what we have as if it were our own. Practicing generosity is like an ongoing reminder that everything we have is first a gift to us.
 
This, it seems to me, is the value of making a pledge to Church. We commit ourselves to practicing generosity for the coming year. In the process, we support God’s mission in the world. And in the process, we become a little more the people God calls us to be—a people of gratitude generosity, and love.

Violence in our nation is getting me down. The most recent atrocity is the man who killed 26 people at a Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. This one presumably had no racist motivation: it was a white man killing white people. But it reminds me of the explicitly racist murder of black people during a Bible study at a Church in Charleston a few years ago.
 
I suppose there is no reason that Churches should be sanctuaries from such awful violence. Evil is evil wherever it is committed. But because I spend a lot of time in Church, killing people during worship or Bible study hits me even harder than other awful things.
 
Today I also grieve for the eleven-year-old boy killed in a car accident in Agawam last week. This was not evil—the driver certainly didn’t intend to hit the boy, and he was not found to be at fault. But it is a terrible tragedy that has hit Agawam hard.
 
Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing a few years ago, Bishop Fisher participated in a memorial service. Apparently the participants tried to look forward, to provide a sense of hope even in the midst of fear and loss. That is important work. But, he said, we also need time to lament. Now is a time for lamentation.
 
Unfortunately horrible things are likely to keep happening, and we cannot lament all the time. There comes a point at which we have to move forward. As people of faith, we continue to affirm our fundamental conviction that God is at work in our world, that we are moving, however painfully, towards God’s kingdom, that justice and love will ultimately defeat hatred and violence and evil.
 
That remains my conviction, and it enables me to move forward. But first, for me, comes lamentation.

On Monday, our Diocese led a bus trip to NYC, specifically to the Cloisters, a museum devoted to medieval Christian art. We didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but I really enjoyed points that our docent made.
 
She took us to three statues of Mary and Jesus from three different periods. The Romanesque statue showed Jesus as a little man sitting on Mary’s lap. Both looked forward, not at each other or at the viewer. Our docent said, this portrayal emphasized Christ as God incarnate and downplayed human emotion.
 
The Gothic statue showed Mary as a young woman, standing and holding baby Jesus, who had a tight grip on her gown. He was holding an orb—representing the world—and she was crowned, making the point that she is the queen of heaven and he is the lord of creation. Still, this statue emphasized the humanity of both and the warm, affection they shared for each other. It played to a more emotional piety.
 
The third statue came from the late Gothic period. In it, Mary held the crucified and dead Jesus on her lap. Jesus’ ribs were bare, emphasizing his gaunt frame and thus his great suffering for the sins of the world. This statue portrayed God’s suffering for us, and a piety more generally defined by suffering and death.
 
Her comments really helped me to see the shifts in culture and piety over time in the Medieval period. And it got me thinking, how would I portray Christ, and perhaps the Blessed Virgin, today? Our numbers are too big and our culture too diverse for any single portrayal to speak for everyone. But I like a statue I have seen in two Churches. It shows Jesus on the cross. But he is robed and crowned. His arms are straight and his body intact.
 
What that statue says to me is that Christ was crucified, but that he also was victorious over death even on the cross itself. It is thus an Easter portrayal that doesn’t neglect or ignore the crucifixion and the brutal reality of human suffering. But I need to think more on this….