In All Circumstances?
November 8, 2020
I Thessalonians 5:16-18
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/QQ_FIEo3wPk
I guess there are some Christians who think that you should thank God for everything. Thank God for the friend who helps you when you need it, for the rain that waters your garden, for the places of beauty in your day. But for these Christians, it also means expressing gratitude for a flat tire or a lost job or the onset of disease. Now I’m not sure where that theology comes from, but I suspect that some of it might have to do with how they understand the short reading we heard from I Thessalonians where Paul says “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”
Trying to honor God and be faithful to Scripture, sometimes people feel that they are supposed to give thanks for misfortune, for poverty or war or disease. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t make sense, but maybe they chalk it up to being a spiritual mystery, one of those things beyond our understanding, and so they say thanks for things they really are not thankful for and hope that God will honor their attempt.
The letter to the Thessalonians is the very earliest part of the New Testament. Written only about 20 years after Jesus, it contains Paul’s instructions about how to live out a faithful life in response to the good news. The community at Thessalonika was a newly formed church who believed that Jesus would return during their lifetime. Only now some of their number had died before Jesus came back, and that was distressing. They also suffered persecution and the hardship of being out of step with their culture in order to be in step with the gospel. All of that is to say, that life was no easier for them than it is for us, and yet, to them, Paul wrote “give thanks in all circumstances.”
In all circumstances. Did you catch that? In English and in Greek, the verse says to give thanks in everything, but not for everything, not because of everything. We are not asked to give thanks for violence or poverty or abuse or disease, but to give thanks in the midst of those situations, in spite of them.
I’m thankful right now, for scholars who pay attention to details like adjectives. The difference in meaning between in and for is pretty big here.
So I am grateful. Understanding that I am not required to be thankful for bad things does make Paul’s instructions more attainable. It does . . . but understanding that I could give thanks in the midst of hard things instead of giving thanks for them, does not mean that it is always easy to do so.
Robert Emmons is a professor of psychology at UC Davis. He has been studying gratitude for decades. He says that is important to make a distinction between feeling grateful and being grateful. He writes “being grateful is a choice, a prevailing attitude that endures and is relatively immune to the gains and losses that flow in and out of our lives.” [1]
The spiritual discipline of gratitude means choosing to see the good, to find the blessing that we can be thankful for, regardless of how we feel. One way to do that might be to intentionally look at the situation differently, to change our perspective. This public service announcement from the Foundation For a Better Life demonstrates. The boy speaks very quickly at first. He says “I’m the greatest hitter in the world.”
https://www.passiton.com/inspirational-stories-tv-spots/99-the-greatest
“I’m the great pitcher in the world” That is what Wendell Berry might call “being joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
The writer of the Book of Habakkuk says this: “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines, though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.” (Habakkuk 3:17-18).
Habakkuk looks at the facts of his situation and says “Hallelujah” anyway. It seems that being grateful, or at minimum expressing gratitude, is something we can do without feeling grateful. And in fact, naming something that we appreciate may trigger the feelings of gratitude. Exercising the muscle of gratitude may seem like just going through the motions, but going through the motions may, in fact, help us to give thanks in very difficult circumstances.
The first person killed in a hate crime after September 11 was a man named Balbir Singh Sodhi. He was shot standing in front of his gas station in Arizona. He was shot because he was wearing a turban. He was a Sikh. For Sikhs, the turban is a symbol of a commitment to serving others, but his murderer saw anyone with a similar head-covering as an enemy terrorist.
At that time, Valarie Kaur was a young adult on her way to becoming an academic. September 11 and the events afterwards changed her vocational path. She became an activist; now she is nationally known. Balbir Singh Sodhi was a family friend. She felt called to respond and so she made her way to Arizona with a video camera. The stories of the suffering of Sikhs and Muslims in America were not being told on the national news. So with her camera, Valarie asked his widow, Joginder Kaur, what she would like to say to the American people.
What would we choose to express in such circumstances? Maybe anger, righteous, justifiable anger. Or blame, a demand for justice. Maybe just raw grief.
When Valarie asked “what do you want to say to the American people?” Jogindar Kaur said “Thank you. Tell them ‘thank you.’ 3,000 Americans came to my husband’s memorial. They did not know me, but they wept with me. Tell them ‘thank you.’[2]
Her response does not strike me as naïve optimism. She did not deny the pain and grief or reality of her loss at all, but in the midst of that loss, she was able to find one good thing. She strikes me as someone who has exercised spiritual muscles toward maturity.
Sometimes, in crisis, we discover things that matter and we are grateful. And sometimes, the fact that we are grateful becomes a way we cope with the crisis. This, I think, is why Paul summarizes it so succinctly for the Thessalonians – “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” One scholar suggests that for whatever reason, thanksgiving did not come easily to the Thessalonians and that they have a particular need to develop the practice..[3]
Perhaps knowing of their crises, Paul especially wants them to develop the resilience that may come with gratitude.
It is that same impulse that led the Executive Team to lift up gratitude as an emphasis for this season. Earlier this fall, as we anticipated this time of the year when we usually focus on financial stewardship, your church leaders talked about their gratitude, their gratitude for the ways our faith community has stayed connected, for the ways you have kept up with your financial and relational commitments. Most of you received a letter this week. It came from Judy as moderator, expressing the church’s gratitude for you and inviting you to express your gratitude in the form of a financial commitment for 2021. If you didn’t receive that letter yet, please contact the church office if it doesn’t arrive in the next day or two.
The purpose of the letter is to enable a tangible ritual of thanksgiving. One of the ways we express our thanks to God is in our tithes and offerings. But our other very real purpose of this emphasis on gratitude is the same as the apostle Paul’s – to remind us of ways to form our lives around the good news of Jesus, to cultivate spiritual disciplines that press us towards maturity, and to develop practices that build resilience in times of crisis.
The best way I know to encourage gratitude is with stories. The last one for today is one I’ve told before, but not in several years. It has a different resonance for me this year in the midst of pandemic. Perhaps it will for you as well.
In 1637, all of Europe was at war. The Thirty Years War was a terrible time. There was a walled city called Eilenburg in Germany and thousands of refugees came there seeking safety. Then the plague came. Soon thousands upon thousands of children and teenagers and men and women were dying. At this time, a 51-year-old pastor named Martin Rinkart, was serving a Lutheran Church in Eilenburg. In one year, more than 4,000 people died, including Martin’s own wife. At one point, he was the only pastor remaining in that city – one had moved to a safer place and Martin performed the funerals of the other two. So, in the midst of his own grief and trauma, Martin was conducting 40-50 funerals a day.
To his congregation he said, “We must lean on God’s presence. We must be the presence of Jesus for one another. We must have the sustaining presence of the spirit to guide us or we will not survive.” And in this time when thousands of people were dying every day, Martin Rinkart wrote a prayer of gratitude which he taught to his children. We know that prayer as the hymn “Now Thank We All Our God.” Let us sing it now, as our own way of giving thanks in all circumstances.
[1] https://www.dailygood.org/story/532/how-gratitude-can-help-you-through-hard-times-robert-emmons/
[2] https://youtu.be/5ErKrSyUpEo
[3] Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians, Anchor Bible vol. 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 330.