Gratitude and Thanksgiving

Proper 23, Year C, 2016

Jeremiah 29; Ps 66; 2Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

Oct 9, 2016, St.John’s Sharon

This morning’s readings point us toward gratitude and giving thanks.  The gospel tells the story of the ten lepers who are healed, but only one of whom returns to tell Jesus, “Thank you.”  We also can find a surprising attitude of gratitude in our first reading from Jeremiah.  In talking about gratitude this morning, I first want to look at the question of our overarching approach to life, before looking at specific ways the readings instruct us in giving thanks.

Our approach to life is where any discussion of gratitude has to start.  To oversimplify a bit, in the area of gratitude, we can look in one of two directions.  The first is that the universe owes us nothing and every breath is a blessing, everything we have is a gift, and every aspect of our life is the result of the overflowing generosity of our Almighty Creator.  The second and less commendable stance is to believe that we are fundamentally entitled to a certain number of things and a certain level of experiences.  Anything that doesn’t go our way, any perceived slight or deficit, and any moderately painful occurrence means that somebody failed us in some way. Whether that somebody is a family member, a human leader, or the Lord God Almighty, they need to be suitably reprimanded for our inconvenience.  Most of us tend to bounce back and forth between these two attitudes depending on our mood and how our day has gone.   But the more we live in a place of acceptance and the less we live in a place of entitlement, the happier and more grateful we will be.

When we are honest, we know that everything is a gift.  We have nothing on our own.  God made us.  God made everything we have.  God made the time that we spend.  God made the air we breathe.  God made the food we eat and the water we drink.  God made the photons of light we see and the waves of sound we hear.  God made the intricately complex chemistry of our brains that lets us learn and choose and imagine and love.  God made the families and communities and the church we are a part of.  God made the hands the we work with.  God made the trees that are used for the paper for our money. God made it all.  Everything comes to us as a gift.  Even when the things God made don’t seem to work the way we want them to, they are still a gift from God.  When our bodies are in pain, when those we love let us down, when our communities aren’t what they once were, when our toys break, and when we ourselves make bad decisions that hurt ourselves and others, even then, everything is still a gift from God.  Even then, maybe especially then, we are called to find some way to be grateful. 

This situation where everything was a disaster is what faced the Israelites in our first reading.  Jeremiah is writing to the exiles in Babylon.  They are in Babylon because the Babylonians have destroyed their city, destroyed their temple, killed a number of them, uprooted them from their homes and their way of life, and forced them to live in the middle of a city where they speak a slightly different language, have different ways of doing things, and where all the Israelites are now at the bottom of the social pecking order.  If anybody had a good reason to sit down and pout, it would be the Israelites in exile.

But Jeremiah gives them pretty specific instructions not to pout.  “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf,” Jeremiah writes.  He says, “where I,” and he’s speaking for God here, “where I have sent you into exile.”  God did this.  God sent them into exile here.  Even this is a gift from God.  The Israelites may feel like it is a white elephant gift where they got the last pick, but it is still a gift.  In God’s eyes, the city of Babylon is not necessarily a bad gift for them.  God’s people just need to treat it like a gift and act out of an attitude of gratitude. 

The instructions for those activities are pretty straightforward.  First, pray for the city.   Pray for its welfare.  Pray for its prosperity.  Pray that it and all its people, even the people you hate and who you hate for a good reason, are going to thrive.  Because, by the way, you are only going to thrive if this city thrives.  Babylon may be a gift to the Israelites, but the Israelites are also going to be a gift to Babylon.  Second, God says to put down roots.  Treat this city as a gift you can love.  Build houses and plant gardens.  Find a nice Babylonian girl and settle down and have children and let them get married and have grandchildren.  Be part of the fabric of the life of that community.  Be concerned about what happens there.  Jeremiah tells the exiles that these are God’s instructions.

Now these instructions are especially surprising because the exiles were planning to leave as soon as they could.  They wanted to go home.  But Jeremiah said, in effect, you have to appreciate the gift you have.  Don’t ignore what you’ve been given to wait for the gift you want but that you haven’t received.  Jeremiah’s words are still good advice in any situation.  We need to be grateful and work with what we have.  God gave us what we have for a reason, so instead of looking at what we don’t have, we should take full advantage of what we do. 

We can also take Jeremiah’s instruction to heart for ourselves in seeking the welfare of the city where we live, and praying to the Lord for its welfare.  Personally, this is one of my favorite verses in the Bible, and one that I take as a serious part of my ministry.  This call is why I like to prayerwalk in the community and serve on city council or other boards.  My particular expressions of seeking the welfare of our city won’t be the right ones for everybody, but everyone can find some way of living into this calling.  Praying for our community and investing ourselves in its success are ways that we can express our gratitude to God for the many blessings that come to us from living where we do.

Our gospel suggests some other specific avenues to show our gratitude. Jesus and his disciples are walking along the border of Samaria and Galilee.  We know that the Jews looked down on the Samaritans, and the Samaritans weren’t real fond of the Jewish people either.  So in this border area between the two groups, who did Jesus come across? A bunch of lepers.  People who everybody was afraid of because they didn’t want to catch whatever skin disease the lepers had.  Since they weren’t allowed to live in town, they had to live out on the border.  This particular group of lepers recognized Jesus and called out at a distance, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  They weren’t going to get to close, because they didn’t want to give Jesus their disease either.  Jesus does have mercy on them, and still at a distance, tells them to go show themselves to the priests.  Priests would be the ones who could certify that they no longer had skin diseases and could come back and live in town.  (Gratefully that is no longer the job of the priests today.)  The ten lepers walk away.  On the way they realize they are clean, so one of them, who happens to be a Samaritan, runs back to say, “Thank you!”  Jesus remarks that all ten were clean and only the foreigner returned to say thank you.  He says this so that we don’t miss the point.  The Samaritan didn’t need to be reminded.  Then Jesus tells him to go on his way, for his faith has healed him.  What we need to remember are Jesus words: “Were not ten made clean?  Where are the other nine?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God?” 

So are we found returning to give praise to God?  Or are we part of those who couldn’t bother to be grateful?  We’re here today.  That’s a good thing.  It’s certainly a step in the right direction.  Part of our returning to God in gratitude is in the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving where we come to God to offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, to God before we go out and do the work he has given us to do.  We come to church and thank God for all that he has done for us. 

Looking a bit more deeply at the reading, we can see that what Jesus does for the lepers, he does at a distance.  The leper approaches Jesus more closely, however, to give thanks.  This principle holds true for us, as well.  Our life is a gift from God whether we look to him or not.  Everything we have is a gift from God whether we return to say thank you or not.  We can look away from God and wander as far afield as possible, and God can still shower good gifts upon us. 

Returning with gratitude, however, means that we approach God.  We invite him more deeply into our lives.  We prostrate ourselves and recognize that he is our Lord and the Lord of all that we have.  One of the ways we invite Jesus in and recognize God’s Lordship is to give of what God has given us.  We are grateful for the time God has given us, so we offer some it back to God by making time for prayer.  We are grateful for the way he has made us, so we offer to use the spiritual gifts he has given us to build up the Body of Christ.  We are grateful for our financial blessings, so we offer the first ten percent of our income as a tithe.  We are grateful for the people we love, so we pray for them, and talk to them about what God has done in our lives, and maybe even pray with them or bring them to church if we are able.  We are grateful for the natural world, so we intentionally use fewer natural resources through recycling or by doing with less.  When we express our gratitude in our recognition that all things come of God and that of God’s own are we giving back to him, not only are we drawing near to God, but we are recognizing his blessing in all that we are and have, while also accepting those blessings more fully. 

Finally, although the readings today don’t address it directly, an attitude of gratitude will also spill over into giving thanks to those around us.  Gratitude to one another makes a huge difference in the depth and quality of our relationships.  Recognizing what others have done for us and offering thanks really matters, whether their actions were unbelievably amazing, simply part of the normal service done by people who care about each other, or just a very well-meaning attempt that didn’t quite pan out.  Offering appreciation and accepting thanks helps families, communities, and churches exhibit the kind of love we are meant to have.  And, if it isn’t too stereotypical to hear a sermon about it in an Episcopal church, hand-written, personal thank you notes are a really good thing.

So let’s just take a moment, and on the count of three say, “Thank you, Jesus!”  OK, “Thank you, Jesus!”  1…2…3… “Thank you, Jesus!”

Overcoming Fear

Proper 22, Year C, 2016

Lamentation 1:1-6; Ps137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

Oct 2, 2016, St.John’s Sharon

I want to talk a bit about fear this morning. Well, more precisely, I want to talk about overcoming fear.   Paul’s second letter to Timothy this morning says: God did not give us a spirit of fear, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. (The translation we heard this morning mentions a spirit of cowardice and other translations use “timidity”, but the King James talks about a spirit of fear, and all these words tend to work out the same in the wash.) Fear is so important that Paul includes this sentence in his commendation to Timothy about his faith.  What Paul knows is that fear causes the embers of our faith to die and prevents us from using the gifts given to us by God for the building up of his people.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous has this to say about fear: “This short word somehow touches about every aspect of our lives.  It was an evil and corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it.  It set in motion trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we didn’t deserve.  But did not we, ourselves, set the ball rolling?” (Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, Fourth Edition, 2001.Page 67).

We have so much misfortune corroding away every aspect of our lives if we live in a spirit of fear.  Yet God did not give us a spirit of fear.  God gives us a spirit of power, and of love, and of self-discipline.  God gives us what we need to overcome fear and live lives of faith.

Many of our fears can be summed up in three basic fears.  We fear not getting what we need.  We fear that we are not good enough.  And we fear other people’s opinions.

First, we fear not getting what we need.  We need a lot of things.  Maybe not as many as we think we do, but we need food, water, a place to live, some money, transportation, a Bible, a church home, and maybe some other things.  Thinking about not having these things is scary.  What would happen if we lose our jobs, or if the utility bill spikes, or some new medical condition arises that interferes with the basic aspects of our lives?  How we react, not to the reality of these occurrences but our own imagination about them, has a lot to do with how much we have been overtaken by a spirit of cowardice. 

The power of fear and cowardice is that they take us to a small place.  We get pulled back to being a little kid overcome by things we don’t understand and can’t control.  We are suddenly back in those times of our lives when we were powerless.  Even if our minds don’t remember the circumstances, our emotions remember the fear and terror we felt.  But God does not want us in that cowered space.  God wants to break that seductive draw of our past immaturity by giving us a spirit of power.

This spirit of power can be thought about from a variety of perspectives.  One is described in today’s gospel – if you have even a little faith, you can say to a mulberry tree, “be uprooted and planted in sea” and it would obey you.  But this power isn’t a magic wand kind of power where we point at the tree, mumble some Latin sounding words out of a Harry Potter book, and the tree moves.  This spirit of power is the ability to overcome obstacles to God’s purposes being fulfilled around us.  It is flicking a light switch and having the darkness flee away.  It is recognizing that none of the difficulties or depredations of life can withstand the awesome onward march of God’s plans and purposes.  When our hope and our faith are aligned with God’s plans and purposes, we can withstand anything because the spirit of God’s power with us can weave the challenges of today into the glorious tapestry of God’s tomorrow. 

Or, to use another analogy, this spirit of power is like the scene in The Lion King when the young lion Simba is surrounded by hyenas.  

They are going to eat him, but instead of backing down with a spirit of cowardice, he steps forward and lets loose his best roar.  His roar is small and week, but what the hyenas hear is the deep, bellowing roar of Simba’s father, the reigning king of the beasts, who is behind him.  When we step forward with the spirit of God’s power and give our own roar, our fears flee because God is behind us roaring along, and his bellow is even stronger than James Earl Jones’s.  We may still face troubles, like Paul, who was in prison then and would eventually lose his life.  But we can do God’s work in the midst of troubles.  And we can trust that God will give us what we need to do that work even if it is not what we thought we needed.  When can’t do God’s work is when we are hunkered down in a spirit of fear.   

The second overarching fear that we have is the fear of not being good enough.  This fear that is rooted in our deep insecurities is also expressed in our fear of not being liked and not being loved.  When we are awash in a spirit of cowardice, this fear prevents us from engaging other people.  We assume that we aren’t good enough for them, and that if we try to build relationships with them, they won’t like us.  We might be rejected, and we can be terrified of rejection because it reinforces all of our fears that we totally inadequate in the first place. 

This fear gets compounded because we spend so much time comparing our insides to other people’s outsides.  We know every issue that we have, and how scared and awkward we are.  Yet we look at other people who seem to have it all together.  If we really knew them, however, and all the things they are struggling with, we’d realize that most people are having as much difficulty keeping it all together as we are.  They are dealing with many of the same things we are.  They feel as insecure around us as we do around them.  They feel as inadequate as we do.  They fear not being loved by us as much as we fear not being loved by them.

While being able to understand that we are all in the same boat may be helpful, the only real way to overcome the fear of not being loved is with the spirit of love.  As Scripture says: perfect love casts out fear.  We don’t have to fear not being good enough because God loves us.  One of the most revolutionary beliefs of Christianity and Judaism is that God loves us.  He made us out of love.  He sustains us out of love.  He redeemed us out of love.  He will bring us into the fullness of eternal life with him out of love.  He sent his Son into the world to live and die to reconcile us back to him out of love.  He has adopted each and every one of us as his children out of love. 

I was at clergy conference this week, and two of my colleagues were discussing how our baptismal service talks about us being adopted children of God.  One of them was adopted and one had adopted two children.  They were visibly moved, because they felt in a deep way just what it meant to be adopted, and the transforming power of that act.  We don’t have to be afraid that we aren’t worthy to be loved, because God our Father has adopted us as his children.  Even if the entire world rejected us, or, as Isaiah says, even if a mother would forget her child, God will not forget us.  He loves us, and he gives us a spirit of love so that we can know that love and live as beloved children of God.

Once we know we are loved, we can share that love with others.  Instead of worrying about whether we are good enough, we can reach out to others and let them know they are worthy of love, as well, by meeting their needs, by building loving relationships with them, and by sharing the good news of God’s love with them.  Instead of withdrawing in a spirit of cowardice, we can love our neighbor.

Our third overarching fear is the fear of other people’s opinions.  What other people think about us is really none of our business, but it sure does bother us.  To be more accurate, though, what other people think about us doesn’t bother us, but what we think other people think about us bothers us.  We really don’t know what other people think about us, but we are generally pretty quick to put together a working hypothesis. 

The spirit of cowardice takes our fear of other people’s opinions and uses it to build all sorts of barriers.  We shouldn’t do that because of what these people might think.  We can only do that when those people aren’t around.  We don’t talk about such-and-such around so-and-so.  And we just pretend some things don’t exist.  At its worst, we stop living into aspects of God’s call to us because of what others might think about it.  We can become like the Dostoevsky character who wanted to give away everything that he had to the poor, but when he saw all his comrades only give a little bit, he decided that was what he had to do, too.  Instead of seeking first the Kingdom of God, we seek first the latest Gallup poll results and do what they tell us.

Instead of this spirit of fear, God gives us a spirit of self-discipline.  Certainly self-discipline provides many benefits, such as the capacity to control our appetites.  But self-control also keeps us from being other-controlled.  We don’t want to be controlled by the need for another slice of pizza, but we also don’t want to be controlled because we think that if we make donations to a worthy cause in someone’s name as a Christmas gift instead of buying some unnecessary plastic gadget found at the mall, people will think we are weird.  God’s spirit of self-discipline gives us the appropriate boundaries we need to do what God has given us to do.  We aren’t spending our energy trying to control other people or make them do what we want, but we aren’t letting our fears about their opinions control us, either.  Instead, we are taking responsibility for sailing our own ship along the rivers of God’s love and justice.  While figuring out what God wants us to do usually involves listening to the wisdom of other people, we can live our lives according to our own godly values instead of our anxiety about what other people think.      

We do not need to be afraid of other people’s opinions.  We do not need to be afraid that we are not good enough.  We do not need to be afraid that we will not get what we need.  For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.