October 13, 2013
Rejoice, Give Thanks and Sing
- Psalms 66:1-20
- Dr. Teri Thomas
Two weeks ago after church I began a long drive to Hilton Head, South Carolina.
I needed to do some worship planning and it is easier to do that away from here,
with no distractions. My mother and step-father were at the beach and offered me a room.
Late Sunday afternoon I was somewhere along I-24 between Nashville and Chattanooga when traffic came to a standstill. I played with the buttons on my fancy GPS and learned that both lanes were blocked about three miles ahead.
I was stuck.
I was not happy.
I wanted to get past Atlanta before dark. I was tired.
I didn’t have time to waste just sitting around doing nothing.
I glanced at the carton of books I had sitting on the back seat and saw one I had been reading on Gratitude. How could I be grateful for being stuck between two semi’s on a highway somewhere in Tennessee?
Well, I did have some food in the cooler and it is always easier to eat without trying to drive.
So I pulled out a sandwich and poured some ice tea from the thermos.
I turned on the radio and happened upon my favorite NPR show- Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me
and it was just beginning! I got to hear the entire show without any distractions.
I put my seat back and enjoyed the next hour and a half,
grateful for good radio,
grateful for food and drink
and grateful for some time to rest.
It’s easy to get side swept by things going wrong.
Maybe you’re not feeling 100 percent, or work is inducing stress.
Fall break has ended and you have to go back to school.
Perhaps you got into a fight with a significant other.
Take a look around. There is too much unemployment;
a gridlocked Congress and shut-down government;
strife in Syria and too many other places in the world.
Looking at all this, how do we seriously consider gratitude? How can we give thanks?
In this morning’s passage from Luke, Jesus meets ten people with little to be grateful for.
They have leprosy and beg Jesus to heal them.
In response, Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the local priest.
As they travel they are cleansed of their infirmity.
When one of them notices he turns back to express his gratitude,
falling at Jesus’ feet in a posture of worship to give thanks.
Gratitude
In Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, she refers to gratitude as “a kind of meta-strategy for achieving happiness.”
“Gratitude is many things to many people,” she says.
“It is wonder;
it is appreciation;
it is looking on the bright side of a setback;
it is fathoming abundance;
it is thanking someone in your life;
it is thanking God;
it is ‘counting blessings.’
It is savoring;
it is not taking things for granted;
it is coping;
it is present-oriented.”
She found that people who are grateful are likely to be happier, hopeful and energetic,
and they possess positive emotions more frequently. Individuals also tend to be more spiritual or religious, forgiving, empathetic and helpful, while being less depressed, envious or neurotic.
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." -- Melody Beattie
And that’s what the nine missed.
Their leprosy was gone, but they didn’t voice their blessing, and so missed out on also being made whole.
This world is full of challenges and blessings. Which will we focus on?
What does it take to recognize that life is a gift, and the only possible response is gratitude?
The pastor of a small Presbyterian Church in Mississippi tells of an incident that took place in his first year as pastor. He was visited by three men inquiring about one of his members, a widow who lived by herself. Was she getting out? Were her friends keeping in touch? Was there anything they needed to know?
The three men explained the situation, gave him their cards—one lived in New Jersey, another in Oklahoma, the other in California—and he was told to call them if there was anything they could ever do to make her life happier or easier.
These three men arrived each year bearing gifts. They employed a family who mowed the woman’s yard, trimmed the bushes, checked tree branches, and gutters. One of the men prepared the woman’s tax returns, another contracted repairs on her house. Sometimes they helped her shop for a new car. They were meticulous in checked on everything and anticipated every difficulty the woman might face.
You see: these three men had once been soldiers standing on the ground floor of a house in Normandy
just a few days after D-Day when a German grenade came bouncing down the stairs. A fourth soldier threw himself on the grenade, absorbing most of its impact. That man was this woman’s husband. The three men lived because of his death.
After the war was over the three men began making their way to Mississippi on a regular basis to make sure that this man’s widow would lack for nothing they had within their power to provide for her.
Isn’t that a remarkable story? I’ll tell you another remarkable thing: there were eighteen soldiers on the first floor of that house in Normandy. All eighteen of them were saved by the action of that one soldier,
and after the war was over three of them made their regular pilgrimages to Mississippi. (Story from Lectionary Homiletics)
What does it take for us to recognize that life is a gift, and the only possible human response is gratitude?
Thanks be to God.
Amen.