Feeling Grateful

Good morning church and thank you for being here with us. If it is your first Sunday I want to thank you for choosing to come and be a part of this community.

My name is Michael LeBlanc and I am the pastor here at Shepherd’s Community United Methodist Church. This is my second Sunday as pastor of this congregation and I just want to take a moment and express the profound gratitude that I feel and that the whole LeBlanc family feels. This church has welcomed us, loved us, and made us feel right at home so quickly.

Last week we were presented with two baskets full of pantry goods but we also received kind words of welcome and were just generally made to feel like we already belong here. We are so very thankful.

Last week we talked about how we serve a God who is constantly at work within our lives and the world around us to do a new thing. We serve a God of creation and regeneration and so we see that God is constantly working within this world to make new things happen. We discussedt how all of creation attests to this generative and creative nature of God. I aksed all of you to pray in expectation for what God is doing in our lives as a community and to pray in expectation about what God is doing in your life personally.

I am in a season of thankfulness. We left a church that I had served for 6 years and received gift cards and notes and paintings and all sorts of well wishes. And so this got me into writing thank you notes, of course. 

We are also in a season of exploration. The girls and I have been driving around Lakeland and finding new places to eat and new places to explore. Amanda and I grew up coming to Lakeland because y’all had the fancy restaurants and a Target but in the last 10 years y’all sure have added a whole lot! We have tried to find all of the best places in our town and we feel like we have barely scratched the surface.

We love the Library. 

While we were perusing the aisles, I found a book by Diana Butler Bass called Grateful. I thought, “well I am grateful,” and then I grabbed it. The author is a scholar of Christian history and has a PhD from Duke so she is smarter than me.

I found a book that has deeply challenged me and I thought if it was challenging me, it might challenge you as well. And so for the next 5 weeks I want us to explore the subversive act of giving thanks.

You’ll see in your bulletin a thank you note. That is for you to hold on to-- more on that in a little bit.

Bass talks about gratitude in four different ways. We experience gratitude as personal feeling, personal action, community feeling and community action. These four ways we experience gratitude is much more than just what a thank you note can contain. Today let us focus on the personal feelings of gratitude that we feel and that we don’t necessarily feel.

To further guide us this morning we have our passage from Colossians. Colossians is a letter written by Paul, a follower of Jesus who never met Jesus. This letter is written to a church in the Colossae, a small town in modern day Turkey. Paul wrote these letters to guide churches that he helped start so that they would remain faithful to the teaching of Christ even though Paul wasn’t around.

The whole book of Colossians is written to describe the nature of Jesus. In the early church there was a lot of discussion and confusion as to the nature of Jesus. Was Jesus just a really nice guy or was he God incarnate? Was Jesus a god or was he a God? Was this Christianity thing an offshoot of Judaism or was it a brand new thing?

And so when we read our passage today it should be in that lens. We are reading a letter written to a different church in a different time but we struggle with their same issues, right? We are trying to see, or at least I know that I am, trying to see what sort of difference Christ can make in my life. This letter is talking about all that we can be through Jesus in a way that assumes we are already there, while still growing in the image of Jesus.

While I was reading “Grateful,” a statistic really stood out to me. The author reports that “78% of Americans said that they felt strongly grateful in the last week.” This is an amazing statistic and I also think I don’t really buy it. Feeling immense gratitude, according to studies, should also result in feelings of peace, health and contentment. When you compare this to other studies that show Americans are also more anxious, less optimistic and more distrustful than ever.

Personally, and I have to be vulnerable here and admit-- with the exception of the last few weeks, I cannot say that I feel grateful or thankful every single week.

Months may go by and I will hold a sort of grumbling grouchiness. Am I the only one? Sometimes it is so hard to feel grateful simply because it is so easy to see the things that we do not have or the things that we want.

This doesn’t need to be a jet ski or a fancy car. It could be that we see others with a bigger cleaner house, better hair, less body fat, more vacation days-- and it makes us feel discontent. This is normal and human, but can impact our mental and spiritual health-- it can make us feel far from God.

And the other feeling this statistic perked up within me was good old fashioned guilt. If 78% of my fellow Americans are strongly grateful every month then what is wrong with me? Because we know that we should feel grateful, right? It was the fourth last Sunday and we should have felt gratitude for our country. Thanksgiving is right around the corner and we should celebrate all of the things we have been given. We should feel grateful that we wake up and we should be grateful we get to sleep.

All of these “shoulds” lead me to a place where I feel guilty that I don’t have gratitude.

And so we get this perfect storm where our lack of gratitude can lead to a sense of guilt which makes me less grateful which makes me more guilty and on and on we go.

But then we look back at our passage and we see what our potential is. If we know that the letter to the Colossians is explaining all that we could be, we can be less concerned about what we should be. 

Gratitude is such a strange emotion. It is multi-faceted and contingent on so many different parameters. Whenever I think about gratitude I think about Christmas. I think about when Mary and Joseph welcomed the Magi and they received gold, frankincense and myrrh. One out of three awesome gifts for new parents. Yes, I understand these gifts had great symbolic significance, but I also know that Mary and Joseph would probably had been happy to receive formula instead of embalming spices, but I digress.

We read that Mary treasured all of these things in her heart. After Annabelle was born, I felt like I knew what the Gospel writers meant by those words. Treasuring things up in my heart meant staring at this newborn for hours and hours even though you want to go to sleep. I remember that when Annabelle was an infant there was a brief trend of stacking cheerios on the heads of sleeping babies. I posted a picture of our stack (it was quite high, not to brag) and more seasoned parents commented with one thing “go take a nap while she is sleeping!”

And I just remember thinking, “who could sleep when this much excitement is going on!” Amanda and I, we had this sense of awe and wonder at this gift God had given to us and if we fell asleep we might miss something!

Gratitude also made me think about the Christmases of my childhood. Now if we have any generation Z in the house, allow me this brief millennial and older detour-- whenever I think of that great season of preparation-- the arrival of the catalogs. Not just Sears, but also JCPenney, ToysRUs, and even CCS, a skateboarding catalog for that short lived obsession of my teenage years.

I would go at those catalogs with reckless abandon and a sharpie, ensuring my parents knew which iPod I NEEDED and which RC car I did NOT need. Circling all of my wants and starring all of my needs and I would then turn in those catalogs like so much homework and then I can only assume my parents used those catalogs to level off the coffee table because come Christmas morning they clearly had not done their assigned reading.

But without fail, every Christmas I would find something under the tree that would fill me with gratitude. It wasn’t necessarily about the gift but rather that someone heard me. Someone heard what I wanted and they got it. It was this crazy feeling of being known and being loved-- all because someone got the right color water bottle. It has gotten even more strange as I have gotten older-- a hand brace for my carpal tunnel recently filled me with great love and gratitude.

You see, gratitude is more than just receiving a gift. We talked about how gratitude is a mixed emotion. When we see gratitude as contingent on the receiving of gifts we are accepting a thin gratitude. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian during the Nazi era. He was ultimately killed by the state for his role in plot to kill Hitler and he wrote extensively on the Christian walk. One of the main points he talked at great length about was the idea of cheap grace. The idea he had was that so many followers of Jesus took the Grace that was offered through Christ and watered it down as to make it more palatable. The result is like coffee that has been watered down-- it tastes bad and is less effective.

This cheap grace can spread all the way to gratitude. Cheap gratitude is a response to a service. It is the “thank you,” we offer to someone who hands us our order at a drive through. It is the 'thanks,’ we offer after someone says “bless you.” These micro-moments of thanks all clump together until we have something close to gratitude, that is clearly not the same.

This week we are talking about our personal sense of gratitude. This emotional response to the things around us and how we need to be changed into the image of Christ through our gratitude. This thankfulness is what we see in our passage through three metaphors-- rooted, built up and established.

The word for rooted here is an agricultural term. It was used to describe trees that had sent roots down and established a secure base. It reminds me of a time my dad told me to dig up an tangerine tree. I dug towards the tap root… and dug… and dug… and I never did find the bottom. It was a small tree and never had more than a few tangerines every season and yet that tap root seemed to go on forever. As followers of Christ our tap root goes back all the way to the creation of the world. We dig deep into the soil of history and tie ourselves to the message of Christ.

We are being built up in him. The greek word here is an architectural term, the process by which a home is built. The foundation, followed by the cornerstone, followed by the walls and so on. As followers of Christ we are being built up in the image of Christ. We don’t make a decision to follow Jesus and then magically become a carbon copy of our Lord. Rather as we walk the path of following Christ, we begin to look more and more like Jesus. A gradual process.

We are being established. Like a corporation being founded we have an ethos and a brand. This standard that we pursue however hard it might be for us to actually reach. It is a title that we call ourselves, this thing that is greater than just our own goals and desires.

And so when we look to grow in our ability to have the feeling of gratitude, we must strive to be rooted, built up and established in the person of Jesus. Now what does that mean in a practical sense? Well it means that we must lay aside the idea that we are receiving grace in some sort of Divine transaction.

The author of Grateful talks about how gratitude is simply the acknowledgment that we receive God’s gifts in an indiscriminate manner. We receive gifts because God is so good, not because we are so good. Please don’t let your ears go on autopilot with this teaching. I know that for me, when I hear about God’s great grace toward us, I hear something I have heard thousands of times. 

While we were yet sinners Christ died for us, we are saved by grace through faith, not by works, for by grace you have been saved through faith-- not by works so that no one can boast, blah blah blah-- but siblings do we really get it?

Do we have our roots in it? Are we built up in the image of it? Is that our blueprint? Are we established by that word of unmerited favor?

I wonder how differently we would treat ourselves and others if we knew that all of the good we have received-- all the good we could receive came from God, not based off of our own goodness. I wonder how things would be change if we were driven by gratitude.

Remember those thank you notes? Take these with you and I want you to write a thank you note. Write a thank you not to a new feeling, experience, frustration, mistake-- something new you have chosen to have gratitude within. You take that thank you not and keep it with you. We won’t collect it, this is simply a spiritual practice for us to share.

Friedrich Schleiermacher was an 18th century German theologian who described this realization as true gratitude. This true gratitude he said was the:

“truest state of reality- everything exists in an infinite relationship of gifts to everything else-- and it is also the starting place of meaning as our own awareness opens towards others, the world, and ultimately, God.” 

And so my challenge to all of us this week is to lay aside the shoulds of gratitude. Looking at the world as things we have earned with a little bit of luck and God treating us nice. May we instead see the potential of God’s great generosity around us and live into the freedom of the “coulds,” of gratitude.

May our hearts and eyes be opened to the world around us so that we could begin to see this breath and the next each as gifts from God. That our very lives are not transactional but rather that they are indiscriminate gifts given to us by a God who gives freely. May we all see the ways in which we are blessed and be freed for joyful gratitude. 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Let us pray

Merciful God, we know that what we have is a gift from you. Free our hearts for gratitude. We know that the world around us is a series of gifts-- free us from the thought that we need to earn love or value. Help us to know that there is nothing we can do to make you love us more or to make you love us less. Amen.