Preached at Bethany Lutheran Church on Saturday evening, November 19 and Sunday morning, November 20.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 100
Philippians 4:4-9
John 6:25-35
I’ve been doing a little exercise on Facebook this month, coming up with something every day to be thankful for. Pictures are bonus. Because thanksgiving--the holiday--is challenging for me. Instead of basking in the glow of all the things I have to be grateful for, I have to pack up three kids’ worth of stuff, and also the dog, then spend hours in the car driving to Indianapolis and then ricocheting between houses visiting everyone we’re related to, constantly at least a little overstuffed, and then it’s over and I’m exhausted and I just want to go home and crash. The fact that we have that many people who love us and the resources to go and visit them is itself a huge blessing, but I’m usually too overwhelmed to see it. On Thanksgiving Day I don’t really ever get a chance to sit and just be thankful. So this year I decided would be different--I was going to be thankful, darn in! I figured if I started getting warmed up early, I’d be ready by the time Thanksgiving itself rolls around!
Most days I’ve come up with one or two things really easily. Some days I find a whole bunch of them. Some days I struggle to find any. Thankfulness, I’ve been learning, isn’t so much an event as a habit of thought. like a muscle you have to exercise. I hate exercise. It’s boring and repetitive, and it makes me sweat. And when I look around, giving thanks feels so cheap and lazy. There are protests, riots, and hate crimes here, wars and human rights violations overseas (and quite possibly some here too), and the political climate makes me want to become a hermit. Being thankful for a cup of hot earl gray for my afternoon pick-me-up reminds me that many people, even here in the United States, don’t even have clean water for their children to drink. And then I feel like a jerk.
Being told to “give thanks” or “count your blessings” can feel so useless, even counter-productive. Like a cop-out--hey, instead of actually solving these problems, distract yourself with things that make you happy! Leave things as they are and don’t upset the status quo, because everyone else is fine with it, and if you’re not, you’re clearly just ungrateful. Then I resent the exercise even more, because I feel like I’m just tricking myself into being passive, even when there’s a lot of work to be done.
But that’s exactly what Paul recommends in his letter to the Philippians--“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”
In every situation. Not just good situations, or just on special holidays--every situation. That during times when you have a lot of concerns--when things are going badly and you’re praying your heart out--you especially need to be giving thanks. It’s not to distract yourself--you’re still praying about the problems and presenting them before God--but you do give thanks even while keeping your eyes fully open to what’s going wrong. Paul doesn’t say, “Be thankful instead of dealing with your problems,” he says, “Be thankful instead of being anxious about your problems.” The opposite of thankfulness isn’t action, but anxiety, because thankfulness brings the peace of God to guard your heart and mind while you go about your work, carrying out the things you have been taught.
In the prayer group that met over the summer, one of the types of prayer that we explored was the examen. It begins by first asking God to be present with you, and then in the company of God’s presence you review your day, looking for the ways that you were blessed that day and the ways you saw God moving in the events of the day or in other people. And it’s only after you’ve put yourself in a position of gratitude that you move on to addressing your mistakes, your concerns, your plans for tomorrow. And I was really anxious during those weeks. I was very, very pregnant--like, could have a baby any day pregnant--and every morning I woke up wondering if this was the day, and every night I went to bed disappointed that it was not.
And then I started doing the examen in my journal, writing down the things I was thankful for before getting to my frustration about STILL BEING PREGNANT and my worries about birth and bringing a newborn home and how my worries and frustrations were spilling over into impatience with my older kids who didn’t deserve to be snarled at the way I had that evening, but by the time I got to those worries, I felt so much more peace about it--maybe even what you might call “the peace of God that passes all understanding,” and even though my worries were still there, that peace guarded my heart all night long so that I could sleep, and maybe even snarl at the kids a little less the next day.
Gratitude transforms us, and a habit of seeking out even the smallest and most superficial blessings helps us practice finding deeper, hidden gifts--like a friend who understands our frustration or our grief and supports us while we’re overwhelmed, or the grace to remember to take a moment to breathe before we react, or seeing the people who are already out there, fighting against the injustices that we can’t even begin to imagine how to tackle yet. The problems are still there, but now we can see that the problems are not all that there is, and perhaps we’re being given the grace to push back against them. Paul tells the Philippians that “what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me--practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” Gratitude gives us the grace to practice the kingdom work that we’ve been taught, even when we feel overwhelmed by just how much work there is to do, because now we are aware of the presence of the God of peace.
We can see this move from gratitude to grace in the gospel reading, in Jesus’s response to the people who came to him.
This was right after the feeding of the 5000--he had miraculously fed a whole crowd of people, which is a tremendous blessing! and they thought this was pretty great and came back to him for another blessing, another free meal. But this time Jesus doesn’t give them more food--he doesn’t give them another easily-facebooked blessing. Because you know if facebook or instagram had been around everyone would have been posting pictures of their free fish sandwiches tagged with #blessed. But Jesus tells them that they’ve missed the point--it’s not about the loaves and the fishes. The food was just to get their attention. It’s about him, and if they thought that the gift of bread was good, they ain’t seen nothing yet.
Once you start noticing those little gifts--the bread and the fish, or the autumn foliage, or the buy-one-get-one-free at Starbucks--that’s when Jesus can get your attention and point you past the leaves and the coffee, which feed your soul for an afternoon, to the bread from heaven that will feed you forever, the God of peace who will stick with you and give you grace through even your most impossible work.
Anne Lamott wrote a book about what she considers the three essential prayers, “Help, Thanks, Wow” and in the “Thanks” chapter describes the power of gratitude. She says,
“‘Thanks’ is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed. You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable. (...) When we go from rashy and clenched to grateful, we sometimes get to note the experience of grace, in knowing that we could not have gotten ourselves from where we were stuck, in hate or self-righteousness or self-loathing (which are the same thing), to freedom. The movement of grace in our lives toward freedom is the mystery. So we simply say ‘Thanks.’ Something had to open, something had to give, and I don’t have a clue how to get things to do that. But they did, or grace did. Thank you.”
I like how the Message translates the last lines of the passage from Philippians--after Paul says to give thanks and pray with hearts full of gratitude, he says, “Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” Practicing thankfulness--breathing it in and out with every little ordinary, everyday gift--leads to practicing even more hard and holy work--bearing the unbearable, loving the unlovable, becoming part of God’s work in the world.
Thanks be to God.
