Are you thankful to be alive?
I am, that’s for sure!
And what are some of the things you are thankful for?
We naturally start with things,
the kind of things we call: material blessings.
There is something inherently honest about that.
After all we are people of this
earth
with basic needs both for
the
sustaining
of life and the hope for a comfortable life.
But it is not surprising in a gathering of people of
faith
that we quickly begin to think of
other kinds of things for which
we are even
more deeply thankful: for people we love,
for freedom, for opportunity, for purpose in life;
the kind of things we call: spiritual blessings.
Did you notice something about our thoughts just
then?
The minute we begin to express
gratitude,
to feel thankful,
we can only
speak of these things asblessings.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul seems
to
come upon
a wonderful spiritual dynamic,
almost
unexpectedly,
as he talks
with the church about an offering they were receiving
to help some fellow believers who were in great need.
He thought about the difference between those who
gave
cheerfully
and with great generosity, and those
who gave only out of a sense of duty.
And, as he thought, he discovered some powerful
spiritual
relationships
which together formed what I would
like to call:
the dynamic spiral of thanksgiving.
You know the difference between a spiral and a cycle:
a cycle goes around and around, back
to the same place and around again.
A spiral goes around and around, but when it comes
around,
it is no longer
the same place anymore. There has
been a change.
There has
been an advance. The whole thing has moved up.
There are three great points on this dynamic
spiritual
spiral:
blessing, generosity, and
thanksgiving.
As you saw by your own experience of giving thanks
this
morning
blessing and thanksgiving are
entirely
dependent upon one another:
thanksgiving
creates blessing, and blessing causes thanksgiving
We will see in a moment the role that generosity plays.
We have to start somewhere as we try to understand
this
dynamic spiral,
but even though we start at a
particular
point, we can never forget
the
totality,
the wholeness, the interrelatedness of the spiral.
Begin the Spiral with Blessings
So lets begin our movement around the spiral
with the blessings we enjoy in life.
It is OK to begin with all the things we enjoy in
life,
and it is more than OK to realize
that these things are blessings.
One of the songs we used to enjoy singing expressed
this
very well:
“Count your many blessings, name
them one by one
And it will surprise you what the
Lord hath done.”
And there was another one which made an honest plea
to
the Lord:
“Showers of blessing, showers of
blessing we need.
Mercy drops round us are falling,
but for the showers we plead.”
That’s where we usually begin, and that’s a good
place
to begin
but its not a good place to stop.
The blessings that really count
are not the
kind of blessing that we can count (one by one).
There is liberty: Thanksgiving Day is the great
national
Holy Day
in our country. It is not just a
Christian
day or a Jewish day;
not
protestant
or Catholic, or any other such designation:
it belongs to us all, and it brings us all together.
So we should include among our blessings the freedom
and
opportunity
which we enjoy as citizens of this
great nation.
And beyond liberty there is love.
We know we are entering a far deeper
realm when we think of the
blessing of
having people around us who love us
and who accept our love for them.
It’s not the turkey on the table which is the
meaning
of Thanksgiving
(I’m tempted to say, “It’s the
turkeys
around the table!”)
I say more
seriously, it is the people joined in love around the table.
And beyond liberty and even beyond love
there is the blessing of life itself.
Of course liberty and love and all the rest are
blessings
IN
life
but what we are thinking about now
is the blessing OF life,
and that
involves
a far deeper faith.
Anyone can give thanks when everything is going
great;
when the sun is shining, the birds
are singing. We sing,
“My oh My
what a wonderful day!”
But only the person of deep faith can follow the
admonition
of Paul
to be able to ‘give thanks in all
circumstances.’
In fact, strange as it might seem to those who do not
share our faith,
it is just in the times of greatest
difficulty; of struggle, of pain,
of sorrow,
of hurt that we are moved to our deepest thanks
for the assurance that God is with us;
that he will bring us though it all.
So I am thinking of our whole lives, not only the
good
times, but even more
of the times of great difficulty and
struggle when I speak of
life itself
as a blessing of God.
Continue the Spiral with Generosity
Now, as we move around this dynamic spiral, we come
to
generosity.
Here is the way Paul put it: “God
blesses you so that you will be
able to be
generous, and generosity will produce true thanksgiving.”
Generosity
is like the catalyst that activates the spiral and moves it upward;
I am almost tempted to say the ‘fertilizer’ that causes
the spiral to grow.
When Paul says, “God loves a
cheerful
giver,” he seems to be quoting
some well known passage, like a
scripture,
except that we do not
have any
other
copy of this scripture. To me, it sounds like
something Jesus might have said.
If so, then Paul gives us something the Gospels
overlooked,
possibly because everyone knew it
by heart.
There is more here, I think, than meets the eye at
first.
It has to do with the very image of
God in which we are made.
That does
not mean anything about the shape of our bodies,
it means everything about the condition of our spirits.
And when we are generous and loving toward others
we are exhibiting the likeness of
God which he seeks to form in us.
Such generosity not only grows out of the blessings
of
life,
it is a blessing, a double blessing,
as Paul points out: both the giver
and the one
who is helped is blessed by it. And most of us would say
it is the one who is able to give who is blessed most of all.
Think of old Silas Marner whose life grows more and
more
narrow
and devoid of meaning until he
chances
upon a little abandoned girl
and slowly
finds love and joy as he gives care to her.
We know it is not only the little girl who is
rescued
by Silas Marner,
it is Silas who is rescued by the
love he discovers for her,
and the
rediscovery
of generosity he finds in expressing that love.
The old Silas would have hated to give up a single
coin
of his great store of
money.
He counted it every day, holding on to each coin with
greed.
It would have hurt him to give a
cent
to any one or any cause.
The new Silas is moved by love to generosity in
giving.
Love did not move him to give until
it hurt;
it moved him
to give until he felt joy in giving.
The church does not ask its people to give until it
hurts.
No, far more,
to give until it feels good and
right,
to give until we feel the joy
of giving
because that is the way
to greater blessing for the giver.
The Spiral Lead to Thanksgiving
And from blessing, through generosity, the dynamic
spiral
moves on to thanksgiving.
It may not be so obvious to us as it seems to be for
Paul;
we may be surprised by it, but he
is clear as a bell:
generosity is not the end, it is not the goal;
the goal is the thanksgiving it produces and expresses.
That’s where this dynamic spiral is headed every
time
it comes around.
It is the giving of thanks that
completes
our relationship with God--
the very reason for our existence.
If you believe in God; if you believe that you are
his
creation;
if you believe that your life has
a purpose;
it is up to
you to find out what that purpose is.
Paul says that there are only three things that are
eternal
about us:
our faith, our hope, and our love.
But the more I think about it,
I believe that gratitude to God is at the very heart
of faith, and hope, and love.
Put it very simply: what does God want from us
anyway?
Or in another way, what do we have
to give to God?
The answer
to both questions is: a response of gratitude.
The Psalmist, in our first reading, had learned long
ago
that God does not
need any material offerings that
humans
can make.
They are his
already. But there is one thing
that God does not have unless and until
we freely and fully give it to him: our thanks.
In the novel, The Color Purple there is a crucial
scene
where Shug and Celie
are talking about their concept of
God. Shug tells Celie
that more
than anything else, God loves admiration.
Celie responds, “You saying God vain?” “Naw,” Shug
replies,
“Not vain,
just wanting to share a good thing.”
She goes on to say, in words
that I
prefer
not to quote exactly, that it hurts God when we
walk by the color purple in a field of wildflowers
and don’t even notice it.
Celie begins to get the point when she asks, “You
mean,
God want to
be loved, just like the Bible say?”
Now we are at the heart of it, God is love the
writer
John tells us in the Bible
and he made us in his own image,
that
is with the capacity,
but never
with the necessity, to love him in return.
That’s the nature of love it must be freely given.
That’s why Jesus said of the poor widow in our Gospel
last Sunday.
“She gave more than all the rest.”
because she gave all she had;
she gave
herself;
she gave herself in gratitude.
Looking at her we can see this magnificent, dynamic
spiritual
spiral at work:
trusting in God for his blessing she
gives with total generosity,
and she is
enabled to give God an abundance
of what he wants from each of us, she gives her thanks.
This dynamic spiral is not
to
be admired, it is to be practiced.
That is the
only way we can ever discover its power.
Recognizing our great blessings from God: liberty, love, and life;
let us share with others in a generosity of spirit as cheerful givers,
and thus enable and express our gratitude and thanksgiving to God.