Gratitude in Hard Times

In our family, fall is birthday season, a two-month stretch when several of us celebrate our birthdays. So it is also the season for writing thank yous. How many of you were raised by a mom that made you write thank you notes? I was – and I perpetuated that with my own kids. It’s about the one time they write anything by hand, put it in an envelope, and mail it from the mailbox, something I always insisted on because it helps bring home the point that they don’t just get things magically, or because they’re entitled to them. (Everything in a clergy household has a moral, you realize.) I wanted them to know that they get things because someone thought of them and did the extra work of selecting and getting that gift to them. Even if they might forget that – maybe most of the time – writing some thank yous might help them to remember sometimes. I try to follow the practice too, to write thank yous at home and at church, though I don’t do it as often as I’d like to. It feels important, and not just because it’s polite.

Gratitude, of course, is not just etiquette – it’s a spiritual practice too. There are many prayer practices and journaling exercises that try to help us focus on our gratitude. This year some of our lay leaders here are taking part in a program called Revive, meant to nourish and deepen spiritual leaders. The first module of the program focuses on prayer, learning and practicing different prayer techniques and building a discipline of prayer into every day. One of the lessons teaches how to pray in public: when someone asks you to open the meeting in prayer, or say grace at the meal, or pray with them before they go into surgery…any number of times we might be pressed into praying service. The program teaches a simple formula, with the acronym STAF: Salutation (greeting), Thanksgiving, Ask, and Finish. This is the secret formula behind all those prayers that go something like, Dear God, thank you for gathering us here today, please help us to listen to this sermon and not fall asleep, we pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen. So there, now you too all know the secret formula, and so when I ask one of you to pray out loud at a meeting, you’ll be able to do it, no problem.

What’s especially important about this formula, I think, is where it goes right after the salutation. We don’t jump straight into the ask, knocking on God’s door for what we want, pushing the buttons on the ATM to get our needs met. We start first with expressing our thanks – which serves to remind us of what God has done and is doing for us. When we start with thanking God, it’s like writing those thank you notes. We pause to remember that everything we have is not just a given – and neither is our life. What we have and what we are can’t be taken for granted. Even when we’re at our worst, or the situation around us is completely dire, we begin our prayers with thanks because there is always something to be thankful for – even if it is just that God is with us in the suffering.

So in a few minutes we’ll be offering our thank yous to God, by way of placing our pledge cards on the altar. But first, we need to explore that gospel lesson we just heard. It’s a little heavy for hanging gratitude on, I grant that. It is a stark message from Jesus about suffering to come, a reminder that everything we see around us will come to an end. It’s a message that comes this time of year to prepare us for Advent, the season when we wait with expectation for the coming of Christ to redeem all things. As if in response to the growing darkness of the days, our church season acknowledges the darkness in the world around us – in contrast to the plenty we celebrate at Thanksgiving, or the material abundance and glitter of the holidays, we pause to remember our need for Jesus’ redemption. This is where the church can get a little Debbie Downer, I’m afraid – but hear me out.

There Jesus is with his disciples, looking at the beautiful, glittering temple, the center of Jewish faith. The disciples are impressed and delighted, but not Jesus. It’s all going to be destroyed, he says (a reminder not to bring Jesus along on your next vacation). Also there will be wars, and famines, and persecutions, and great suffering. But cheer up! by your endurance you will gain your souls.

Ouch. Not much to feel grateful about in that, is there? Sit with these words long enough and we might be tempted to look around us at our world and think, oh yikes, Jesus is right, it’s happening right now! Wars and famines and persecutions are everywhere! Yet we need to remind ourselves that this time we’re living in, dreadful though it may be, is not the worst that has happened since Jesus spoke these words. And we are nothing like persecuted here in our comfortable Pauma Valley. No, this passage is not meant to be a proof text for reading the end times here and now. But it is meant to shake us up. These things we cling to for comfort, they are passing away. These priorities we hold in our lives, they are misplaced. These injustices we allow to continue around us, we will be held to account for.

And yet there is in this stark message a basis for true gratitude and hope. If what we have is fleeting, all the more reason to be grateful for it while we have it. If all we have in the end is our souls, then thank God for sustaining the deepest part of our selves through everything. And thank God for God’s promise, that we will never be left alone in dark times. God’s wisdom will guide us, God’s hand will hold us, God’s light will lead us – all of us, together, God’s people in community.  We’re not all by ourselves in this race; we gain our souls together.

When we bring our gifts to the altar in a few moments, we’ll bless them, gathering in our gifts for the coming year, the gifts that will enable this community to continue serving and worshiping and loving God’s people. Giving to St Francis is itself an act of thankfulness and faith. It’s thankfulness for all we have received in this place – welcoming love, nourishment for our souls, laugher and joy, meaning and purpose. And it’s done in faith that God is at work here and will continue to be on into the future, whatever the future holds. And, I’ll add, it’s pledging our trust in one another, that here this group of people are bound by a shared love, trying to do the right thing. At a time in our culture when it is hard to trust others or leaders to do the right thing, this is a radical act of faith, to commit to community. All of that is worth giving thanks for.

But ultimately we give because we know that everything we have is a gift anyway. Giving is recognizing the gifts we have been given, and letting them flow on into others. Whatever happens – whatever the stock market or the inflation rate says, whatever the doctor tells us or our loved one shares with us, whatever the worst is that can happen, even what is happening now in places of war and devastation in our world – we know that God is there in it, with us, suffering and rejoicing alongside us, surrounding us in the deep love that we were made for. In the end that is the light that truly shines in the darkness – that is what truly sustains us.

So we pause today, here in worship, to say thank you. To give generously out of that gratitude as we go forward together into a new year. Remember that God made you, that God loves you, that God is always with you. That is the substance of our faith. That is our inheritance from the saints in light. Thanks be to God.