November 10, 2013 Gratitude Grounded In Hope 1 Samuel 2.1-8 Last Wednesday evening we started a new small group here at church called, “Getting to Gratitude.” It is a learning lab in which we look at research from medicine, social science, religion and self-help traditions that can help us hold gratitude at the center of our lives. During our first time together, we started a list of the things in life that help us get to gratitude. There was absolutely nothing monumental on the list. No one named, “hitting the lottery, getting that big promotion, climbing Mt. Everest, or owning a Lamborghini.” When we identified the things that help us get to gratitude, they weren’t at all related to achieving big goals or reaching milestone accomplishments or having monumental, once in a lifetime experiences. They were ordinary, everyday things: opening the door and being affectionately greeted by your pet dog who has been waiting all day for you to return, noticing the beauty of nature, experiencing the support of family and friends, being around people with positive outlooks on life, a good workout, silence, music, art, prayer… None of the things on the list were extraordinary. None of them were expensive or inaccessible. None of them required a lot of time or effort or skill or training. They were all simple, ordinary, everyday things that have the power to change our entire outlook on life and fill our hearts with gratitude. So why aren’t we more grateful than we are? Why do we spend so much of our lives caught in resentment, envy, disappointment and sadness? During my sabbatical, I read an essay entitled, “When Things Go Right.” It was written primarily for people in management, but it has a much broader application. In the essay the authors pointed out how reluctant we are to praise people for the things they do well. We have a tendency to overlook all of the things that people do right because our attention is drawn to the things that they do wrong. We don’t notice the dogs that are well behaved. We notice the dog that is barking. It is the same with people. When our kids aren’t fighting, we don’t notice. But when they get into an argument, then they have our immediate attention. When the people we work with do all of the right things that help the work progress smoothly, we don’t often notice and rarely say “thank you.” But when a colleague doesn’t measure up to our expectations, then they get our attention. We notice the things that disappoint us, or annoy us, or frustrate us. Instead of complimenting people for the things they are doing right we are more likely to criticize them for the things they are doing wrong. We notice the bad and take the good for granted. We do notice and often recognize the outstanding achievements, the record setting performances, the monumental tasks that others accomplished, but those are few and far between. And people expect to be noticed and recognized for their outstanding achievements. But what if we started expressing appreciation to people for the ordinary things they do every day to make life better for others? Donald Peterson, the former chairperson of the Ford Motor Company use to spend the first few minutes of every day hand writing short but sincere positive messages to the people he worked with. He argued that, “The most important ten minutes of your day are those you spend doing something to boost the people you work with.” From now until Thanksgiving, we are going to be focusing on gratitude here at First Congregational Church. We spend four weeks getting ready for Christmas every year. We spend six weeks getting ready for Easter. So this year we want spend four weeks getting ready for Thanksgiving. Instead of simply taking a moment to go around the table and invite each person to name one thing that they are thankful for before gorging on turkey and stuffing, we want to create some space for us to think more deeply about the spiritual practices that help us hold gratitude at the center of our lives. We are not hard wired for gratitude. There is no hormone that our bodies produce that trigger a response of gratitude in us. We are hard wired for anger and fear. When the fight or flight response is triggered, adrenalin gets dumped into our bloodstream setting off strong emotional reactions that contribute to the survival of our species. But gratitude isn’t linked to a survival. It is a higher order emotion that doesn’t help us escape from or conquer a perceived threat. Gratitude is an experience that is vital, not to our physical survival, but to our spiritual well-being. For Christians, gratitude is the evidence of a faith filled life. In our culture, gratitude is circumstantial. When things work out the way people hoped they would, then gratitude is the appropriate response. It is what we see being enacted in the ritual end zone dance that the running back performs when, after crossing the goal line, he kneels down on one knee and raises his finger towards the heavens. You never see a quarterback do that after getting flattened by a blitzing linebacker. They never scrape themselves off the turf and take a knee and point a finger towards the heaven in gratitude. In our culture, gratitude is reserved for victory, triumph, success, achievement. We pop the champaign after closing the deal on a big contract and go out on the town celebrating when we are finally awarded the big promotion. Last week Kellogg began terminating the employment of 7% of their workforce worldwide. I don’t imagine that many of the people who were escorted off of their worksites held gratitude at the center of their hearts that day. Gratitude was reserved for those whose jobs had been spared, who got to stay on and continue collecting their paychecks. Gratitude is circumstantial in our culture. When things work out well for us, we are grateful. When they don’t we are disappointed. But in Christian spirituality, gratitude is rooted, not in the circumstances of our lives, but in the nature of our relationship with God. In the oldest text of our New Testament, the Apostle Paul wrote these words in his first letter to the Thessalonians: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thes. 5:16)” The apostle Paul was able to write those words because he knew that God’s love and God’s mercy and God’s grace are not circumstantial. As Christians, our gratitude is rooted in our deep conviction that whatever the circumstances of our lives, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Today we heard the song of Hannah in the second chapter of 1 Samuel. Hannah’s song of gratitude was not circumstantial. In fact, it is a song of gratitude that she sang after giving up the one thing she had most hoped for in life. Ever since her marriage to Elkanah, Hannah had been hoping for son. In the culture of her day, offspring were seen as the link to immortality. They were the ones who preserved your heritage. To be barren was a source of deep shame in Hannah’s day. And to make matters worse, Elkanah’s other wife, Peninnah, had already given birth to both sons and daughters. And Peninnah never missed an opportunity to provoke and irritate Hannah because the Lord had, “closed her womb.” Every time Hannah went to the temple, she prayed for a son, but year after year Hannah remained barren. Even though Elkanah continued to love and support his wife Hannah, eventually her disappointment became so strong that it overwhelmed everything else in her life. She was unable to eat and wept with inconsolable grief. But just as Hannah’s world was collapsing in on her, she had a spiritual awakening. She went to the temple and instead of praying the same prayer she had always prayed asking for God to provide her with a son, Hannah turned her hope over to God. In the temple she vowed that if she did ever conceive a son, she would give him up and offer him into the priesthood to serve in the Lord’s temple. And the moment Hannah released her hope to God, she experienced a deep sense of relief. She went back home and was able to eat and drink with her husband again and was no longer sad. Hannah eventually did conceive and gave birth to a son and named him Samuel. And as soon as Samuel was weaned, she gave him up to be raised and trained by Eli, the priest of temple in Shiloh. And Samuel grew up to become a great priest, and eventually was sent by God to anoint the first King of Israel. Hannah was finally able to sing her song of gratitude, not when her own hopes were fulfilled, but when she was able to entrust her hope to God. On the day that she gave up her son to be trained as a priest in the temple Hannah sang her song of deep gratitude, “‘My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God.” Gratitude, in our spiritual tradition, is not circumstantial. It is not the experience we have when our own hopes are finally fulfilled. Gratitude is the experience we have when our hope is rooted in God. No matter what the circumstances of our lives, when our hope is rooted in God we are able to, “rejoice in all things, and pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances, for we know that this is the will of God.” Amen.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:41:35 +0000
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