Scripture: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, John 6: 24-35 November 24, 2013
“This is the greatest day of my life, Daddy,” our son Lucas exclaimed as he ran into my arms and wrapped his arms tightly around my neck and his legs around my torso. His joy flooded me with joy, knowing that we had chosen a sixth birthday present well. Unabashed, undiluted, undivided, overflowing gratitiude. Pure. Jesus said, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” I think that moment and others like it are what Jesus was getting at. The purity of his gratitude felt holy to me.
Like all of you, I’m sure, I was raised to be polite. One of the corner stones of politeness was saying “thank you.” It sounded ritualistic and formulaic: “Thank you, Mr. or Mrs. So and So, for fill in the blank. It was delicious, fun, very kind of you.” But the idea was that it become both heartfelt and habitual. I remember practicing this politeness all the time in my childhood, gradually without any prompting whatsoever from my parents. We are trying to instill this same spontaneous politeness in our boys and I have noticed a few things about how they think and respond which have some bearing on my larger topic of thanksgiving.
First, “this is the greatest day of my life” aside, the first response when receiving something is usually not to say thank you to the giver. Focus, happiness and gratitude, is upon the gift itself in my hands, not on the hands that gave. Case in point. Grandma takes the boys out for ice cream cones. The moment they have those cones in their hands, they are absorbed in those cones and how good they taste. She might as well not even be there. It is usually only after the fact, maybe, sometimes only with prompting from father, that thankful attention can drift or be brought back to embrace the giver.
Second, our motivations for expressing thanks are often mixed and rarely completely genuine, “this is the greatest day of my life” aside yet again. People say thank you quite a lot out of self interest rather than actual appreciation. How so? So that they get invited for ice cream again; to not hurt the other person’s feelings and thereby close off the future floodgates of ice cream cones; to make the giver feel good enough that there might be hot fudge sundaes next time and perhaps banana splits in the foreseeable future.
Our boys are good boys, thoughtful boys, kind boys, appreciative boys, but they are still human beings who have to learn how to feel and express gratitude. I know. Our boys have been some of my greatest teachers on gratitude and I have a long way to go.
In our Hebrew Bible lesson this morning, we see how the people of Israel learned and practiced gratitude. They did it by returning to memory, their sacred memory of when God had been with them, what that meant to them, and how that compels them act now. The memory begins with a state of being lost, isolated, alone, not yet, a wandering Aramean named Abraham. Then memory moves to a foreign place of becoming, not home, Egypt, where Israel became a great nation. Formation from a wandering individual into a nation. The price of formation, of becoming, because there always is a price for formation, spiritual, emotional, physical, intellectual, professional formation all comes at a cost, the price of Israel’s formation is hardship, oppressive labor at the hands of their slave masters. But formation is not the last word. Then there is deliverance by the might of God, which gives meaning and significance to the becoming and leads, finally, to the blessing, the promised land of milk and honey. Lack of orientation, not yetness, formation in a strange place, hardship, deliverance, blessing, at home.
While this passage from Deuteronomy and it's recitation by generations of Jews may sound ritualistic and formulaic, both of which it certainly was, just as my childhood expressions of thanks were, it gives us a vital window into just how real thanksgiving kicks in, the kind of thanksgiving which will make us exclaim “this is the greatest day of my life.” For one thing, gratitude, powerful, transformative gratitude often starts with memory. In the moment, we certainly appreciate something or someone, but it is the memory laden with meaning that makes the present holy, makes the texture of the present richer with depths of gratitude.
So this morning I'd like to take you on a Thanksgiving binge using the Deuteronomy model. We’re going to tap into our memories and feel the gratitude. So here we go. Either close your eyes or at least stop glancing at your smartphones and let’s remember.
Notyetness. Remember when you were young. When everything was still in front of you. When life was largely mystery, questions, and possibilities. Try to remember the specifics: the sights, sounds, smells, feels, tastes, people and placed. What are you thankful for?
Becoming. Remember when you became...a friend, a lover, a husband or wife, a parent, when you felt like you had become a grown up, when you became what you do for work. What are you thankful for?
Formation in hardship. Remember the challenges of life that formed you: school, athletics, travel, work, difficult people, difficult circumstances. What are you thankful for in retrospect?
Deliverance. Remember the times you were delivered from evil: from sickness or death, from loneliness, from failure, from pain, from blowing up your relationships or career. That you either never became addicted or have been able to put it behind you. When you realized the meaning and significance of you being you. The times when you felt the grace and power of God moving in your life, leading you from darkness into light. The time you snapped out of negativity and realized how much you had to be thankful for, when you were going through a tough patch and it suddenly dawned on you that the sum of what you loved about your life far outweighed the sum of what you disliked or even hated.
And finally, home and blessing. Remember what home is like for you and your blessings. Once again, try to remember the specifics, the sights, sounds, smells, feels, tastes, people and placed.
If this exercise resonated with you, then you have swum a bit in the richness of your life. But that is still swimming in the shallow end of life. The real depths of human experience bubble up out of the real depths of gratitude, when you know the richness and see what it means, what it all points to.
In our lesson from John this morning, Jesus is trying to get people to make just that shift, to get them into the deep end, from enjoying the richness of the abundance Jesus has brought in the loaves and fishes and hoping that he will do that trick again, to what that abundance means, to what Jesus' miracle points to. The audience is holding up a loaf as something to be eaten and saying "give us more," but Jesus tells them the loaf as a pointer towards God in heaven as the more he has to give. The exchange is enigmatic, it's true, but mostly because we too are locked into a instrumental point of view, where whatever we have is good as far as it serves us, as opposed to seeing what the presence of this goodness in our lives means. Like the ice cream cones. Do we love them because they taste good, or because of what the ice cream cones in our hands tell us about the love of the giver. It doesn't have to be either or. But if it is only what it does for us, then we miss the meaning.
Melody Beattie, "Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude make sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow."
This Thanksgiving I invite you to practice remembering your blessings and giving thanks. See if you can open yourself up from "thank you, Mr. God, whoever you are, if you're really out there, tojust covering my bases in case you're listening, thank you for the ice cream cone" to "this is the greatest day of my life, Daddy." When you start remembering the greatest days of your lives you'll be living yet another greatest day of your life. And that is what Jesus is pointing to.
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