1 Thessalonians 5:12-24
“And Are We Yet Alive: Thanksgiving”
Preached Sunday, January 28, 2024
Two weeks ago I started a three week sermon series entitled “Trusting in God.” This sermon series is about entrusting our past, present, and future into the hands of God. My hope is that through this series we can process together all that was, is, and could be - through the lenses of mourning, thanksgiving, and dreaming. And while it is focused on the life of our church community, each sermon also has individual applications.
Two weeks ago we talked all that we are mourning in the life of our church - most people mentioned specific people they love who used to sit by them in the pews and are no longer here due to death or other reasons. Our second largest thing we are mourning as a congregation is the generational shifts in our congregation, with less children and young families than there once were. The notecards with things that people are mourning, that people turned over to God two weeks ago, are on display in our Narthex. I’d encourage you to stop and look at them following the service, knowing that you are not alone in your mourning and yet - by processing our grief we can be assured of God’s steadfast presence with us - that guided us through the past, is with us now, and will remain with us as we are led into the faithful future.
And so this week I’d like to turn our attention to thanksgiving and how giving thanks is essential in shaping us in the present and guiding us into the future God wants for us.
The Bible is full of exhortations to give thanks. HUNDREDS of Scriptures that encourage us to give thanks. Today we heard Paul’s closing exhortations from 1 Thessalonians: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Here are some more:
Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever! - 1 Chronicles
Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. - the Psalms
Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him; bless his name. - also from the Psalms
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. - Philippians
Giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ… - Ephesians
For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. - 1 Timothy
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. - Colossians
Those are just 8 out of hundreds - if I were to list every one, I’d run out my voice and you would run out of your patience. These are just several Scriptures about giving thanks to God, praising God, giving thanks for each other to God, praising God with thanksgivings in all circumstances...the Bible would not be the Holy Book it is without its continuous flow of references of praise and thanksgiving to God. Gratitude is a thread, a theme, that runs through Scripture. So too is it supposed to run through our lives. In the Bible we see gratitude presenting itself as praising God, presented as lifting up thanks, presented as lifting up gifts and sacrifices to God, and presented as a life-style for those whose lives have been changed by God
Being a grateful person shapes us into being a more giving, more loving, and more grace-filled people - being grateful shapes us into being the kind of people that God calls us to be.
Greater Good magazine says that “Grateful people have been shown to be more helpful, kind, supportive, and altruistic.” One study showed that those who kept gratitude journals were more likely to be empathic and offer more help than those who wrote about struggles or even neutral events. The Templeton Giving Survey found that people who say that they practice gratitude daily, donate more money and volunteer hours a year than those who don’t.
Another example of how gratitude can shape not just individuals but a whole culture is the “Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address.”
The Haudenosaunee are an Iroquoian-speaking alliance of First Nations people in northeastern North America. The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address is a daily ritual of gratitude, giving thanks for the people and natural world around them. Individuals or groups may begin or end their day with this ritual of Thanksgiving. In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about a school where native children started each day with the Thanksgiving address. In that book, Kimmerer connects indigenous wisdom with ecological knowledge and concerns. We could learn much from the way indigenous cultures have practiced sustainable harvesting and practiced care for our living world. Kimmerer suggests that, largely, it is a posture of reciprocity: realizing how much the earth cares for us and caring for her in return. And in caring for the earth, the earth then takes care of us.
There truly is a sense of generosity here: the abundance that the earth gives us through land and fruit and air and medicine. And the abundance that we give back to the earth: through sustainable harvesting, caring for ecosystems, being good stewards of all of God’s resources.
And it all starts with thanksgiving.
A practice of daily gratitude opens our eyes and hearts to the ways and areas that we have enough - or even an abundance. Perhaps of food, of friendship, of love. If one is not thankful, for the planet and the resources it provides or even our relationships and the love and care we have - we will not be generous in those relationships. And as we fail to pour generously back into them, they will not pour generously back into us.
The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address is not a prayer in the sense that we think of prayer as Christians, but is a daily ritual of centering gratitude. It makes me examine myself and my own posture of thanksgiving…and admit it’s sometimes lacking.
It makes me think that as Christians…the rest of the world should look at us and see practices of generosity, sustainability, and reciprocity and be able to ascertain that it comes from living into a culture of constant thanksgiving.
So where do we start if we want to be people of gratitude and create a culture of constant thanksgiving?
When you want to practice gratitude you have to pause from the daily to and fro, the buzz, the to-do lists and take stock of your life and of the world. And I want to be very clear here, too often when we take stock of the things we are thankful for, we rely very heavily on material gifts - on wealth, status, belongings -- but gratitude is not just about and not even just primarily about what we have materially. Gratitude is, at its core, about wondering at the goodness of God and the gift of life given to us and to all creation.
Spiritual writer and theologian Diana Butler Bass wrote a whole book on Gratitude and faith, one that is certainly worth reading. Butler Bass says, “Gratitude is, however, more than just an emotion. It is also a disposition that can be chosen and cultivated, an outlook toward life that manifests itself in actions—it is an ethic.”
And it is an ethic of gratitude that we need in the present so that we can be the type of people, be the type of Christians, who sustain and build the kind of church and community that God wants for us.
When we are grateful, that gratefulness overflows into generous actions of love for others. The ethic of gratitude in our lives looks like following the Biblical commands to care for the lost and the least, to give what we have, to love others as self, to always widen the circle, invite the stranger in, to make room at the table… Gratitude naturally leads to generosity. Just as there are hundreds of Scriptures about gratitude, just as gratitude is a theme, a thread, running through the Bible, so is generosity, so is selflessness, so is giving all that we can to the glory of God and love of neighbor.
Next week we will talk about the dreams we have for the future of our church. But before we can get to those dreams we have to stop and give thanks. For what was that produced fruit and shaped us into the people and community that we are. And for what is, our present, and all that God has given and fostered within us in the here and now. And we have to not only give thanks once, we have to become a people of gratitude, for grateful people are overflowing with love and generosity - what God needs of us to do the work God is calling us to.
Allow me to share one more story - the story of the hymn we will sing after the sermon today.
In the early days of Methodism, in the days of before, during, and after the American Revolution, Methodists relied on saddlebag circuit rider preachers. There was a clergy shortage due to the revolution and Anglican priests returning to Britain. And life in much of the colonies and then the early United States, was more spread out over large spaces of land. There simply weren’t enough clergy for every community to have their own and so the circuit rider - or saddlebags preacher - was born. Circuit riders were ministers who rode their horses from community to community, creating a circuit. They would offer the sacraments and preach in a town then get on their horse and travel to the next, ever riding in a circuit.
But once a year - all the clergy from all over the country would gather together in one place for a time of conferencing and worship. And they would begin each conference by singing the hymn “And Are We Yet Alive” - written by Charles Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist movement.
The hymn is primarily a hymn of thanksgiving - thanksgiving for the very life that they still hold on to. Thanksgiving for all that God had seen them through. Thanksgiving for being together. Thanksgiving for the community and mission they shared.
As we sing this hymn today I pray and hope we can give thanks for the same things: thanksgiving for the very life that we still hold on to. Thanksgiving for all that God has seen us through. Thanksgiving for being together. Thanksgiving for the community and mission we share.
This morning we will be people who give thanks in all circumstances. During the pastoral prayer, I will give you several moments of silence to write on the inserted notecard in your bulletin. Write something that you are thankful for in the life of church - it can be something that was or something that still is. It can be a person, a group, a sense of the culture here, a program of past or present, the feeling you get when you are in this space with these people…whatever you feel gratitude in your heart for. You will be invited to write it on this card and put it in the plate when the offering is being collected - an act of rejoicing and thanksgiving, given as praise to God. Keep your cards anonymous - don’t put your names on them. Next week, when we return to this sermon series, these cards will be displayed in the narthex.
I’ll close with these exhortations from our Scripture this morning: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
Amen.
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