Rod Robson: 6/11/2011 – Gratitude
admin January 6th, 2012
I feel like I grew up in a very different world from the world that my children inhabit, one of the areas of life that has changed an awful lot is food. I think that I was in my twenties before I can recall eating Mexican food or Italian, or God forbid Indian. Curried sausages was about as spicy as it got in our house. It was meat and three veg in my childhood, and one of those veggies was invariably potatoes – rice was not on the menu, macaroni once in a very long while.
The approach to cooking has changed to, invariably things used to be boiled then even sausages. I remember meals being put in front of me, the greens having been boiled to within an inch of their lives to extract all the colour from them. Gray green silverbeet or sullen looking peas, cauliflower struggling to maintain its structural integrity which would dissolve in your mouth, bleached potatoes, swedes and a sad looking chop staring up at me.
‘I’m not eating this rubbish’ I said, somewhat less calmly than I am saying now. And my longsuffering mother glaring down at me saying quite rightly, ‘Roderick, count your blessings boy. The people in Ethiopia would appreciate good food like this. You should be thanking me.’ ‘Well mum, perhaps we could wrap it up and send it to them ’ or something similar would be my retort. Have you had those conversations? I have done both sides now, its the circle of life.
Its one of the things that we as parents desparately want our kids to learn, to show gratitude when others are kind to them. So when you pick your child up from a play date at someone else’s house, there is this little dance that goes on until the child thanks their host. We try to hint to our child to say the magic words, the eyes are going and we are sending a host of silent psychic hints of ever increasing ferocity. We probably look like we are having some sort of spasm, which the host, polite to a fault, pretends to ignore.
We had this sign language thing going on with our kids, and rubbing your chest was the signal for thank you. Less threatening and less obvious than say thank you! We recognised that saying thank you does not come naturally and needs to be learned, its part of a child learning to appreciate other people and what they do for them
Today’s text is 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, and it’s also about saying thank you, Paul says-
Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
It comes at the end of the letter which was designed to give new believers encouragement – there is a big section on the second coming, and some advice to them on how to live godly lives. It’s all carefully unpacked and laid out right up to chapter 5:11, then there is this intense little flood of good advice at the end which these verses are part of. It reminds me of that scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the young man Laertes is about to leave the country, and his father Polonius comes to say good bye.
Reading from Hamlet – Laertes and Polonius
He’s dumping all of his good fatherly advice as quick as he can because the boat is about to sail, its everything that he meant to say but didn’t get around to. Similarly, its almost as if Paul was in a bit of a hurry and just had time to jot down a few final thoughts, maybe the parchment was almost full or the boat for Thessalonika was about to leave. Don’t know, but he just blurts all this stuff out.
I’m left wondering what the connections might be between thanking, praying and rejoicing – but Paul was in a bit of hurry so he didn’t spell it all out for us.
If you take this text at face value it’s pretty challenging. I don’t know about you but rejoicing is not a constant state for me rather an occasional sojourn, and I am not always thankful – I am frequently quite grumpy. But it’s God’s will for us in Christ Jesus to rejoice, pray and be thankful – so it’s serious. These are commands not optional extras or worthy suggestions, so we have to grapple with them.
The challenge for us in rejoicing and giving thanks all the time is that some pretty awful stuff happens in life, loss is a reasonably regular companion. I know numerous people that have suffered miscarriage, infertility, relationship breakdown, injustice at work, serious illness and the death of people close to them – it goes with being finite beings in a sin scarred world. To tell them to rejoice seems like rubbing salt in their wounds. And I have heard it preached that we should thank the Lord for the hard stuff as well as for the blessings, because it all comes from him.
A friend of mine was in Christchurch last September in time for the quake, and she went along to church with the people that she was staying with on the next day. They were praising God that he had spared us as no one had died, which at the time did seem to be pretty extraordinary. In February they said that the deaths were down to God, praise his name.
Thanking God for what happens opens up a real can of worms. If we attribute the good things that happen in life to God and thank him for his blessings, from the banality of finding a parking space to the gift of a child, then some would say that it makes sense to attribute the bad things as well. As that well known verse says, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. That church i just mentioned would presumably argue that it does not make a lot of sense to thank him for the good stuff but not credit him with the bad. He is either in control of all things or he’s not. Those that think that he is pulling all the strings say that we need to thank him for the hard stuff as well, but that takes you down a really tricky slope.
Is God responsible for all of the sin in the world and its consequences – no we are, so it makes no sense to thank him for that because a good God will not bring evil such as war or violence into existence. We cause our wars not God. We end up in a philosophical sinkhole of our own making if we follow this logic to its conclusion and thank God for sin and its consequences, its perverse.
There’s a movie that I love called Strictly Ballroom, which is set in the very small world of competitive ballroom dancing in Melbourne. In the clip that you are about to see we are going to see how Shirley, the star dancer’s mother deals with her son’s desire to dance new steps, which are different from the officially sanctioned way to dance.
The consequence of his unorthodox approach will be that he will not win the Pan Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship, Latin American Division – which is her fondest wish for him as she didn’t win it when she was a young dancer. She hopes that he will succeed where she failed.
Clip – Strictly Ballroom
She is trying to fake it till she makes it, trying to will herself to rejoice as a way of fending off or denying her feelings of despair. No one is fooled. She is extreme but many christians are essentially doing the same thing, because you’ve always got to rejoice, you are sort of not allowed to grieve. It’s like being sad would show a lack of faith.
I recall meeting Brian in a resthome when I was a student chaplain. He was a widower with poor eyesight, failing memory and could manage about six steps on his walker before he had to sit down for a rest. It would take him about 40 minutes to get to the dining room for his meals – he was doing it tough. And I said to him you have sustained some real losses haven’t you. He replied not really, there are some poor beggars here that are much worse off than me, he was thankful that he wasn’t one of the people that was really suffering. I heard variations on that theme a lot in the resthome, it could be worse. I don’t think that is what Paul is calling us to when he says give thanks in all circumstances. Brian had a positive attitude to his circumstances, but was minimising the very real and major losses that he had suffered.
I don’t think that Brian was a christian but I have heard a christianised version of this approach. Sometime when I have expressed my concern for christian people going through hard times I have been met with – ‘well, I am still walking in victory, I’m not going to lose that.’ I don’t think that this is what Paul is calling us to.
So what does it mean to give thanks in all circumstances?
There are two answers that I want to suggest to you. The first is to thank God for the things that we can unconditionally and absolutely attribute to him. That is our salvation, that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit who will walk this life with us, he will embody Jesus to us – God will not leave us or forsake us. Also Jesus promises that our treasure in heaven is safe.
He will remember the love and the grace that we shared with others, the encouragement we gave to someone who needed it, the gifts that we quietly gave to his kingdom. He does not forget our good deeds and will ultimately reward us, because God is nobody’s debtor.
The second is that we are told to give thanks in all things, not for all things. So no matter what is happening in my world there will be things and people that I can be thankful about. In Brian’s case he still has his memories of the things that he experienced earlier in his life, he still watched cricket in his room, had people looking after him who he enjoyed, and a couple of good friends at the home. Despite the dramatic shrinking of his world there were still good things in it that he could be thankful for. It is a matter of counting your blessings and so maintaining an attitude of gratitude no matter what your life circumstances, I think that it’s a spiritual discipline. Paul was not calling him to thank God for his disabilities, but rather to maintain the practice of being thankful in his life.
Likewise, Paul does not require my young self to deny the horrendous cuisine that I was exposed to as a young man, but I can give thanks that it sustained me. And Shirley is not called onto to deny her very real grief about her son, but she could give thanks that she has a son who shares her passion for dancing.
Many modern secular psychologists would be saying a hearty amen to these conclusions. People who are thankful are more optimistic and more mentally healthy than those that don’t. But christian gratitude goes further.
Thanking God is a very tangible act of faith. In saying thank you, especially when things are difficult, we are showing that we trust in God’s goodness and God’s care for us. By a decision of our will we are choosing to trust God’s charactor and care for us. Thanking God is an essential building block of the joy of the Lord, rejoicing in God comes from a grateful heart.
The mega story of our faith is that God created everything that has ever been, he spoke it into existence, and when he created it he saw that it was good. All things were clean, pure and unsullied.
Sin entered our world through our rebellion, seeing ourselves as the ultimate authority rather than God. It fractured
• our relationship with God,
• our relationships with each other are scarred by the consequences of our selfishness,
• our world groans under the curse of sin, and
• inside ourselves we are broken by its poison.
Paul in Romans 1:21 sums up our sinful rebellion by saying that we neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.
In Jesus God became one of us and entered into our experience to be reconciled to his creation. He sought us out to be his people, to identity with us, to save us from ourselves. Our salvation is far from complete, we are being saved to be a part of the community of love that is Father, Son and Spirit. God’s kingdom has broken into our reality but its fullness is still off in the future, when Jesus returns and all things are brought together under his lordship.
I have a friend who has a particularly tricky mother who he manages with great skill. In the run up to his wedding he was quite concerned about how she might react to his new in laws, she was in fact starting to cause a few problems. His solution was to publically thank her for being so welcoming to his bride’s family, and she glowed under his thanks. But he was thanking her for what he hoped she would do rather than what she had in fact done, and it worked brilliantly. He used thank you as the first word, but our thank you to God is always the second word. God is glorified in our giving thanks.
Saying thank you is our response to the saving act of Jesus, who saved us by creating us and by redeeming us from sin, it is our response to his saving love. It is always the second word, never the first because the first word was Jesus Christ.
The temptation for us is to try to narrate God into our lives. If you listen to most christian testimonies the person telling the story is usually the main character, but the truth is that it’s the other way around. We are in the process of becoming part of God’s big story of creation and redemption. Thanking Jesus is a way of realigning ourselves with his story, that he made us, that he is good and cares for us, and we have a place in his people and in the future plan that is unfolding.
There are a couple of parallel passages to this verse and I want to show you one, its Colossians 3:15-17
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
You see the similarities, giving thanks is connected with joyful worship and the experience of the peace of Christ. This passage is clearly targeted at the life of the church community, not so much at the individual believer. Interestingly the Thessalonians passage is also not talking to the individual believers, but to the whole community. Being thankful and rejoicing are things that we do together, a team sport as well as an individual pursuit.
So today we thought that it would be good to consider what you are thankful for. We are going to open barstool in a minute, …