St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, October 9, 2011

Thanksgiving Sunday

A Grateful Attitude – Rev. David Mundy

Psalm 23 Philippians 4:1-9

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a little girl in our congregation who loves rocks. She has her own collection and from time to time she visits my study to reacquaint herself with the basket of smooth rocks I keep for the Maundy Thursday service each Holy Week. One Sunday she showed up at my study with two young friends and instructed me to get the basket to show the other girls these rocks. She told them to feel how smooth they were and to rub one against a cheek to get the full effect, which they did.

So, it was really a no-brainer when we were in a gift shop in Nova Scotia this summer, in an area which is renowned for its geodes, beautiful rock formations which can be split open to reveal crystals. They had little chunks of these geodes for sale at the counter for a couple of dollars and I bought one for our junior rock hound.

It turned out that she was helping her mother as an usher in church a couple of weeks after our return from holidays, so I went in search of her gift. I held out my closed hand and put the rock in her little hand. As soon as she saw it there was a look of astonishment on her face, then she flung herself against my leg in a hug. Then she ran to her mother shouting, “look Mom, David brought me diamonds!”

Do you think that her reaction made my day? She was delightful, and not only have I told the story a number of times, every once in a while I think of it and just chuckle to myself.

How is that for gratitude? A three-dollar chunk of rock becomes diamonds! There is nothing like the exuberance of a child. Now, because she is a five-year-old she could just have easily said “eh” and given it back.

Are you a grateful person? We have come together this Thanksgiving Sunday knowing that this is a day when we can express gratitude to God for the fullness of life, and even to give thanks if life is not what we might want it to be.

I suppose the difference between the gratitude of a child of five and an adult of 25 or 55 or 85 is the sense of wonder we experience in our childhood and the way life tends to unfold over time, often with those knocks which we don’t call hard for nothing.

This Thanksgiving one of our readings is from a letter of the New Testament written by the person some call the inventor of Christianity, the apostle Paul. Even though Paul never met Jesus during Jesus’ ministry, he was perhaps the first to truly comprehend that Jesus was the Christ, the promised one of God, not just for Jews but for everyone. Paul underwent his conversion from an observant Jew, a rabbi even, to a follower of the Risen Christ but he was convinced that the grace of Christ was for everyone.

Paul was the original planes, train, and automobiles guy, or the ancient equivalent, and soon he was travelling to the far-flung corners of the Roman Empire preaching and teaching the Good News with fire and vigour. Shipwreck? Didn’t matter. Thrown in jail and beaten? That didn’t stop him. He kept travelling and sharing the Good News and then writing letters of encouragement to the congregations he established in what are now Turkey and Italy and Greece and Macedonia.

Paul was unstoppable -- until he was stopped. After more than thirty years of relentlessly sharing the gospel, Paul spent time under house arrest in Rome, where he was at least allowed to write to some of the congregations, including the one in the city of Philippi. And somehow, even though he was aging, and cooped up after a lifetime of travel, this is Paul’s happiest, most grateful most joyous letter.

How could that be? Why wasn’t he bitter and angry with God? Well, Paul believed in the fullest sense of belief that he had received the grace of God in Jesus Christ and four walls couldn’t stop him from experiencing the freedom of that gracious love.

Perhaps you have seen or experienced a worship service in one of the more evangelical congregations where there are lots of “call and response.” “God is good!” the preacher proclaims, and the people respond with “all the time!” Well, in our rather staid tradition we would probably say, first of all, “you don’t need to shout” and then we would get into an earnest theological debate about the nature of suffering and the injustices of the world and on and on.

Don’t you think Paul would lean toward “God is good, all the time?” We heard “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice!” Or as The Message paraphrase puts it “Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him!”

Even though Paul is imprisoned and restricted physically, his spirit is still free as a bird and he is filled with gratitude and joy.

We are fortunate that none of us has to live under house arrest because of what we believe, although there are people in this world who suffer this injustice. Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma or Myanmar as it is also known, lived under house arrest because of her commitment to democracy. She spent fifteen of the past twenty one years under arrest but somehow maintained a hopeful outlook on change in her troubled country.

As I say, we don’t live under physical house arrest but the reality is that many of us end up being caged by our own responses and attitudes to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

When we are five years old, we haven’t yet gone through the disappointment of working toward a goal or dreams to discover that those aspirations will not be realized. The statistics on youth unemployment have been gloomy lately and it’s hard to be grateful when there seem to be so many dead ends.

In relationships we find ourselves focussing on the faults and the shortcomings of those we supposedly love or once loved. Bitterness can end up imprisoning us in a whirlwind of negative emotions.

In our culture we are constantly being encouraged to be dissatisfied with what we own or don’t own. Every time we turn on the television from the time we are children we are bombarded with messages which tell us that the latest toy or fashion is absolutely essential to being a fulfilled person. A few days ago we heard about the death of Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, now the world’s most valuable company. Not only was Jobs a creative genius whose company makes cool stuff, he was masterful in convincing us that life just isn’t complete without the latest version of those products.

We might not like who we have become or how we have come to see the world, but sometimes we end up stuck there, although I am regularly inspired by those who rise above circumstances to live their gratitude. A few weeks ago I visited two members of our faith family who still live in their own apartments in the same building but rarely get out because of health problems associated with age. Both are blind, and both have other serious physical concerns. One only gets out for dialysis treatment a couple of times a week and the other uses a walker to get around.

What struck me was that both of them were so appreciative of their visits. And yes, their lives are severely restricted, but both are grateful for the love of family and the gift of each day. It was a privilege to pray with them at the end of the visit to acknowledge God’s love.

Surely it is within our prayerful, grateful response to God that we rediscover the possibilities for our lives and how to see the rocks as diamonds. It was the medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart who offered that “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” Then there is Anne Lamott’s modern adaptation and observation that there are really only two prayers, “Help me Help Me Help me, and Thank You, Thank you, Thank you.”

In Paul’s prayer he is inviting us to make the spiritual and psychological jail break out from dissatisfaction, and bitterness and anger into the love of Christ. I’m not sure where I saw it recently, but the word gratitude was intentionally spelled incorrectly to emphasize the choices we make for thanksgiving and gratitude. It was spelled with an extra “T” and lower so that the emphasis is on grATTITUDE, and I think most of us would agree that expressing gratitude is not just a polite and mannerly habit. It is a way of being, a way of life. When we come together for worship we shape our attitudes as we give thanks to God for the beauty and goodness of life in the midst of sadness and loss. We

The “G” of gratitude results in another “G” generosity. When we know we have been blessed by God we will, in turn, bless others. .A couple of days ago I was invited to speak at a Rotary Club and tell the group about the work we are doing with The Gathering Place, the community meal which is offered once a month here at St. Paul’s through our Bowmanville Ministerial. I have decided I could never be a Rotarian because they meet at 7:00 in the morning! At the end of the talk which I shared with one of the other organizers of The Gathering Place a woman mentioned that it was her birthday that day and every year she gives money to a charity or cause on her birthday. So she gave the Gathering Place a hundred dollars, a generous gift and an impressive reversal of our usual expectations on a birthday.

We can choose to live gratefully and generously through the use of our time and abilities and money.

This Thanksgiving we are encouraged to realize that our deepest hungers will be satisfied in Christ if we are open. The Message version of Psalm 23 begins with “God, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing” and ends with “your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life.”

In Philippians Paul says:

Finally, beloved, whatever is true,

whatever is honourable,