“A
Deeper Thanksgiving”
Luke 18:9-14
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
Text: “…give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (I Thessalonians 5:18)
Several weeks ago when Ross Mackenzie was preaching here and the gospel text that we are using today was read that day, too, an aha moment broke in on me as I was listening to it. The Pharisee in the story, while attending to his daily devotions, said as the centerpiece of his prayer: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector standing here.” As those words passed into my hearing, it occurred to me that much of my gratitude, too much, arises from the accident of my fortunate circumstances relative to others. While not devoid of compassion for people whose lot in life seems less than mine, still, it was discomfiting to me to realize how often my feelings of thanksgiving are evoked by a favorable comparison of my life to others’ lives. Perhaps you know by your own experience what I mean.
“God, I thank
you that I live in my part of town and not their part.”
“God, I thank
you that I have my job and not his job.”
“God, I thank
you that we do not have tsunamis, cyclones, and earthquakes where I live.”
“God, I thank you that I am not sick like she is.”
Perhaps “comparative
thanksgiving” is just a part of human nature, but it seems to me a
second-class thanksgiving. I would
like to think that I and we can move on to a deeper thanksgiving, one that moves
closer to the spirit of Paul’s counsel to the Thessalonian church when we
wrote… “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in
Christ Jesus for you.”
Paul is not saying, of course,
to be thankful for all circumstances.
There are some events and situations in life for which thanksgiving is
not only next to impossible, but also inappropriate.
Yet, Paul says, even in the midst of circumstances for
which we cannot be grateful, we can still be thankful.
How? Why?
Because, as one commentator puts it, “We all are pensioners on
God’s bounty.” A reader of
our website who lives in
Like salt resolved in the ocean
so I was swallowed in God’s sea
past faith, past unbelief,
past doubt, past certainty.
“…so I was swallowed in
God’s sea…” Or, as Paul
puts it, “In God, we live and move and have our being.”
That we belong inextricably to the universe, to the cosmos, to the
creation, to God is the cause and reason for what should be our unrelenting and
ceaseless gratitude. That is what
Mary Oliver seems to be saying in her poem called Bone.
Bone
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape –
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something -
for the ear bone
2.
is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer’s head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long -
and I thought: the soul
might be like this –
so hard, so necessary –
3.
yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don’t we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it
4.
lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts –
certainties –
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
While it is not wrong by any
means, of course, to give thanks for particular things – a beautiful sunset as
the day is dying in the west, a daughter standing beside you in the popcorn line
in a movie theater and out of nowhere saying, “I love you, Dad,” the
rare sighting of a bald eagle perched in a tree by the side of the road between
here and Erie – the gratitude that transforms our lives is more profound than
that, a deeper thanksgiving that rises up within us as we become more and more
aware of our part in the oneness of everything…in the all-encompassing oneness
of God.
I don’t think I ever have
heard it put any better than the way our friend Angus (Watkins) said it in a
note to me on the first anniversary of my daughter’s death:
“Even as the trees ringing
the clearing where I live let go their colored leaves, I am pleasantly surprised
that the understory of trees still offer a beautiful screen of yellows and reds,
closer to the earth. Isn’t that
ironic – that in churches we used to think that the loftier (heavenly?)
phenomena were to be more revered as the sites of what is grand and lovely…as
if the farther from where we are, the better?”
“In the short time that I
knew your Katy, what made her most beautifully wonderful was her
down-to-earthiness, in so many ways. So,
for me, a fitting memorial to your dear daughter on the anniversary of her death
will be to scoop a big handful of leaves from the ground and hold them up before
releasing them in a breeze, to rejoice in the beauty of their hanging there for
a short time, and then tumbling and raining earthward to become a good soil for
new things.”
“In the Great Story of Life, isn’t that how it is for all things and for all of us?…to be some part of the understory for some shorter or more lengthy moment, to dance in brief suspensions, before tumbling in all poignant loveliness into the eternal mix of it all?”
Being
a part of the understory of life, even in the most difficult of situations and
the saddest of days in addition to all of the good and happy ones, trusting that
my life is located in God and kept by God, that is the deeper
thanksgiving that gives joy to my living. I
find it harder and harder to be thankful for my own privileged life while too
many others around me live in poverty of soul or substance.
I find that the kind of thanksgiving that makes me glad I do not share
the circumstances of those we call “less fortunate” serves to distance and
isolate me from them and from the pain of the world rather than carrying me more
intimately to those who suffer and more deeply into the hurt of life.
But when my thanksgiving derives from being a part of the eternal mix of
it all, that we are now and forever given to one another and all things within
the mystery we call God, then I feel connected more profoundly to the world, to
life, to God, even to the truth of myself.
As
I told our children a few minutes ago, the Eucharist table is set with
Christ’s thanksgiving supper to which each and all of us are invited, a table
and a humble meal at which we are reminded of how Jesus, filled with gratitude
for life and his life, spent it in the service of love, and invites us to do the
same. Until we do that, it seems to
me, our thanksgiving is a little hollow, a little self-interested, a little
selfish. The greater part of
thanksgiving is thanks-living.
So,
sure, it is fine to be thankful for specific things in our lives so long as we
remember the larger context that God is one, that life is one, and that our
thanksgiving ought not to remove us from the beautiful, terrible, frightening,
exhilarating mix of the world, but carry us more deeply into it.
Amen.
©
Copyright 2007 First Presbyterian Church