You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
When Lori and I attended the Vital
Worship Grant Colloquium in Grand Rapids, Michigan last June, John Witlivet
told a wonderful little story about gratitude.
John is the Director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, which
is the organization that awarded us our worship grant.
He told us about teaching gratitude to
his young son. Each morning at breakfast
when the little guy sat in his highchair, John would give him his bowl of
cheerios. Setting the bowl down, John
would say, “Say ‘thank you, Daddy,’” and the child would immediately begin
gobbling down his cheerios. Day after
day, the same ritual occurred: The bowl
of cheerios placed before the child, the father saying “thank you, Daddy”, and
the young boy snarfing up his breakfast.
However, one day, John set the bowl of
cheerios in front of his son, and before he could say the usual words, his
child piped up, “Thank you, Daddy.” What
a wonderful surprise after all those days and weeks of patient teaching!
Of course, gratitude was not learned in
that single breakthrough day. The next
morning, the child began to gobble down his cheerios without a single word, and
the ritual began again. However, over
time, John’s child learned the words of gratitude – “Thank you, Daddy” – and
began to say them more and more frequently with less and less prompting.
Gratitude is not a quality that we
humans possess innately. In other words,
we are not born as grateful women and men. I mean, really: You have got to admit it! We are pretty selfish and self-centered. We are inherently more concerned about
ourselves and about our own welfare than we are about others and their welfare.
And it is not just you and me - we being somehow uniquely dysfunctional. Gratitude just does not seem to be in the
human genetic make-up.
Gratitude is something that we have to
learn over time. We have to teach one
another how to be grateful – and we have to look to the Bible to teach us the true
importance of gratitude.
Gratitude is a spiritual discipline,
and it is something that we must practice day in and day out – just like John
had to continue to teach and model gratitude to his son – even after that
momentous first morning when the young child said, “thank you, Daddy”
unprompted.
Another thing about gratitude is
this: Gratitude is contagious. If you witness me or your spouse or your
parent or your friend being grateful, you are more likely to become grateful as
well. Gratitude that I see emanating
from you begets gratitude flowing from me.
Gratitude lies at the very heart of our
relationship with God. “Sing to God with
gratitude in your heart” as our Bible passage for today reads. “In every
thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning
you" - as the Apostle Paul writes in a letter to the congregation in
Thessalonica.
However, gratitude does not operate
independently and in a vacuum.
Intertwined closely with gratitude is generosity. As American author William Arthur Ward wrote,
“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not
giving it.”
Generosity is really the only way to
express our gratitude. And what is so awesome about this connection is that acknowledging
what we are grateful for motivates us to be ever more grateful – but, even more
than that, to be ever more generous.
This strong and binding connection
between gratitude and generosity lies at the heart of being a disciple or
follower of Jesus. Grateful people are
generous people, and generous people are grateful people – and grateful
generous people are followers of Christ.
It is as simple as that!
We recognize our blessings. We intentionally affirm our gratitude for
those blessings. We respond in
generosity to the fact of those blessings.
This intertwining of gratitude and generosity is a spiritual discipline
– and a very important one at that. As Olld Testament scholar Walter
Brueggemann wrote, it is how “the God who sends and lives in the Spirit breaks
old deathly patterns and makes all things new” – new in us and in the
world.
Of course, this deep and profound
connection between gratitude and generosity is not the way the world works. However, we always knew that following the
way of Jesus would eventually lead us farther and farther from the values our
culture upholds. In a sense, then, the level
of our gratitude and generosity reflects the level of our commitment to the way
that Jesus beckons us to follow.
In short, if we want to become closer
to God, then we must invest in the Kingdom of God. As art historian Johannes Gaertner reminds
us: "To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is
generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch
heaven." Learning to be both grateful and generous is the path of our
spiritual journey.
Beginning today and for the next 60
days, we are going to have an opportunity to experience the link between
gratitude and generosity. We will be
able to intentionally acknowledge the blessings God has given us in the hope of
learning gratitude. We will also be
encouraged to express our gratitude through random and not-so-random acts of
generosity.
These 60 days will be a spiraling
ascent that has the potential for us first to grow in gratitude, then to deepen
our faith, and finally to unleash God’s power in our lives through an
intentional commitment to generosity. We
are calling these next 60 days, which will lead us from World Communion Sunday
today through Thanksgiving Sunday to nearly the very beginning of Advent at the
end of November, “RVCC: At the Corner of Grateful and Generous.
Our worship for these next eight weeks
will reflect the spiritual discipline of gratitude and generosity. We will begin each Sunday with a Moment for
Contagious Gratitude as we did this morning.
That is how we will enter into the spirit of worship – with a profound
spirit of gratitude.
In addition, you will be challenged to
intentionally reflect on the blessings you experience in your lives and in this
your church by using a Gratitude Journal.
Part of that journal keeping will also include recording the random and
not-so-random acts of generosity you initiate.
Oh, you might say! I am so busy!
I do not have time to count my blessings. However, as your pastor, I say to you that
gratitude is a very important step of faith and one that we all need to make
time for. It does not have to be a lot
of time. Begin your day with a moment of
gratitude – or end it just before you go to bed. Ask yourself:
What are you most thankful
for in your life this day? What are your unusual treasures in life? What are you grateful for in your church?
And acts of generosity? “Well, I cannot afford to support another
charity. I do not have time to work in
the soup kitchen or take a bunch of clothing to Goodwill or Salvation Army,”
you might declare.
However, acts of generosity are not
always about writing a check or volunteering hours you think you do not have –
though they certainly could be. Look at
the hours Lynn and Regan have given to painting and upgrading our nursery – or
the time Rolf has put in keeping our church from floating away in the
rain.
Acts of generosity may also be letting
a car out in front of you when the traffic line is long, chatting with a bored
cashier at the grocery store, calling someone you have not seen in a while,
sending a card or a quick email. As
American comedienne Margaret Cho once said, “Sometimes when we are generous in small,
barely detectable ways it can change someone else’s life forever.”
Now to motivate you to be part of our 60 days of
gratitude and generosity, I have a “Gratitude and Generosity Journal” for each
one of you. It has 60 lines – one for
each day to prompt you to remember what you are grateful for in your own life
and in your church. There is also a
section for you to record your acts of generosity.
Part
way through our 60 days, we will share our blessings and acts of generosity as
part of our worship service. I am also
hoping that the older children and youth particularly will come up with a
service project or two to demonstrate their generous spirits.
DISTRIBUTE JOURNALS
In
conclusion, my hope as your pastor is that over the next 60 days, as you stand
poised at the Corner of Grateful and Generous, you will see clearly that:
1.
A strong and sacred relationship between gratitude
and generosity exists
2.
Intentionally reflecting on all that we are
grateful for will prompt us to be ever more generous with our time, talents,
and treasures
3.
Our generosity will bring forth even more blessings
in our lives, will deepen our faith, and will strengthen our relationship with
God
And
when all that comes together, it is my prayer as your pastor that a sacred fire
will be lit in each one of us and in this church, a fire of compassion and
gratitude leading to a deep generosity of spirit. And it will be as Theilhard de Chardin once
wrote, “The day will come when we shall harness for God the energies of
love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world,
the human being will have discovered fire.”
We
stand at the corner of grateful and generous.
Let the journey begin!
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, U.C.C.
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