Infectious Gratitude/Contagious Generosity

Psalm 127

Hebrews 9:24-28

When we think about getting better at practicing thankfulness, we might think in very personal terms about the people or circumstances that have blessed us.  Gratitude is sometimes a strong emotion.  But some of you have told me that gratitude feels more like the background music to your life, a soundtrack that accompanies you as you go.  I like that image.  Today I want to emphasize that gratitude is also something we experience in our community life.

 

Psalm 127

This is a Psalm of “ascent” – songs sung on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for festivals.  Some of you like to sing in the car on road trips (I know because I’ve ridden with you!).  So think of these Psalms as Israel’s road trip music.

This festival song sings of God at work in, beneath, and through all our activity.  The Psalm offers several examples to help us imagine all our lives as suffused with God’s creative energy: building a house, protecting a city, earning a living, and raising a family. 

In all these projects there is an ongoing dependence upon God that is natural and good.  This kind of singing begets gratitude.  This way of life doesn’t demand the miraculous.  It finds God’s goodness working in and through everyday, ordinary things.

Learning to pray and sing this way helps us release the anxiety that forms when we begin thinking that everything is up to us.  We can feel ourselves relax - the tension leaves our bodies - when we recognize that God’s grace is the gift that flows through all we do.

Hebrews 9

The reading from Hebrews may sound strange to us.  It might help to read it as an expression of the shared joy of Israel’s festival celebrations.  All through Hebrews, Jesus Christ is described as the new festival, the intensification of all of Israel’s blessings.  The line of argument seems to be . . .  if Israel had reason to celebrate God’s goodness in all of its festivals, how much more can we celebrate now that the whole world has been invited to join the party?

From this perspective, being “Christian” just refers to that joyful community gathered around Jesus Christ who is God’s amazing gift to us and to the whole world.  Gathered around the good news of Jesus Christ, we’re dealing with the real thing, reality in all its depth and richness and mystery.  Gathered around Jesus Christ, we celebrate the one who has accomplished our salvation in its entirety.  The appropriate response is thanksgiving, joy, and shared ministry free of anxiety.

Gathered around Jesus Christ, we wait in hope with the help of the Holy Spirit for Christ to appear again.  This waiting and watching is what makes it possible for us to live and work in hope and not in despair.  We can work out our friendship with God and others in the life of the church – helping, serving, loving – knowing that God will bring all things to completion when Christ returns.  Our efforts, small as they may be, difficult as they may feel, contribute to a movement towards the healing of the world that can only find its completion in Christ’s gracious appearing.

We’ve been practicing gratitude – trying to get better at expressing it and living it.  Trying to become more aware of the many blessings and gifts in our lives.  The fundamental breakthrough happens when people like us recognize that we are receivers of gifts beyond measure.

“Gratitude is the wine of the soul.”  Rumi, Mystic Poet.

“Strange thing about gratitude – it always comes with a preposition.  We are grateful for something, grateful to someone, and, often, grateful with others” (Butler Bass, 97).

There is an important communal dimension to thankfulness.  There was a Veteran’s Day service at Memorial Hall yesterday.  The shared sense of gratitude for those who have served in the military pervaded that gathering.  The orchestra played the theme songs of the various branches while veterans stood.  It was not at all a partisan political rally.  There was no sense of naming our enemies or elevating ourselves above other countries.  What we all fest was a moving sense of togetherness that couldn’t have happened on individual personal level.

If you’ve been to any major sporting events, you know this experience.  I got to see the Royals play a World Series game in both 2014 and 2015.  I saw a Game 2 win against the San Francisco Giants in 2014 (a series the Royals went on to lose 4-3).  And I saw another Game 2 win against the New York Mets in 2015.  The Royals went on to win that series 4-1.  That championship was especially sweet for me because my buddy in New York is a life-long Mets fan.

The Mets game was electric.  The tail gating was epic.  Fans in the parking lot were sharing food and beer and stories.  During the game every pitch mattered.  The crowd almost never sat down.  Johnny Cueto pitched a complete game.  And the Royals ended up winning that game 7-1.  But even so the crowd stayed until the game was over.  Of course the traffic get out of Kauffman was terrible, but people were waving one another into the traffic line with a relaxed smile.  Thousands of people had just experience something very rare – a sense of togetherness that we only glimpse – it seems – at sporting events, concerts, graduations, and weddings.

As we bring our pledges today to support the ministries of the congregation, we might want to imagine it as a festival day.  This is a day to celebrate and rejoice together.  Our ministry together – worship, work, fellowship, learning, and care – is to be carried out in the spirit of a festival of gratitude.  There is here an abundance of gifts – financial gifts of course that resource another year together.  But gifts of time, friendship, passion, curiosity, food, laughter, service, compassion – all of it shared among us with joy.

It might be good to remember the spirit in which we bring our shared gifts to the church for the year ahead.  We might, of course, do so out of obligation, or guilt, or shame.  We might, of course, do it reluctantly, or even with resentment.  But there is another way to bring our gifts.  And that is with festive hearts and shared joy.  We might find it actually fun and adventurous and interesting to share in a project like the ministry and worship of the church with a bunch of other people. 

“In the festivals, Israel comes to a fresh realization that its freedom is not its own work, but is a gift gladly given by God. . . . Festival is the capacity to enter a way of life in which all other claims, pressures, and realities can be suspended” (Brueggemann, in BB, 113).

I have a friend in New York who never wants to go home.  After a late dinner I was ready to turn in for the night.  But my friend coaxed the four of us into a little place called MiniBar.  It was truly tiny.  There were maybe six seats at the bar and four or five tables.  Our group found the last open table.  When we arrived, there was a New York Knicks game on.  And so the whole bar cheered for the terrible Knicks and shared stories about past Knicks teams.  Then when the game was over, the bar switched to a channel that was running episodes of Bob Ross painting.  This is apparently a popular tradition.  And to my surprise, the energy we had shared during the Knicks game continued.  Everyone began cheering for Bob Ross.  Each little tree he drew; every wave in the lake; each mountain and each cloud.  Everyone would cheer.  It was one of the most memorable bar nights with a group of strangers I’ve ever had.  There was a sense of joy, of sharing space, of friendship.

It’s no surprise that some of the most powerful feelings are those we share with others in public.  Thomas Jefferson writes, “When any act of charity or of gratitude is presented to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also” (Thomas Jefferson, in BB, 105).  You might call this positive peer pressure.

Research has shown that “people really do respond emotionally to acts of moral beauty and that beneficial acts and feelings cause others to want to copy them.”  Researchers refer to this as “moral elevation” and have demonstrated “that witnessing goodness increased actual biological responses in the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls heart rate and calm breathing. . . . Gratitude, evidently, is contagious.  It can be spread from heart to heart” (BB, 105).

There is something special about the experience of gratitude with others.

Gratitude can be infectious.  Generosity can be contagious. 

First we’ll watch a short video about some of the ways we’ve shared our lives this past year.  And then we’ll receive the offering.