Saying Thank You. O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! 2

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1 Rev. Joan Pell Sierra Pines United Methodist Church Sermon: 10/21/2018 Series: The Way of Gratefulness Scripture: Psalm 95:1-2, Luke 17:11-19 <Luke 17:11-19> Saying Thank You NOTE: This sermon is mainly a summary of the ideas in chapters 3&4 in a book by Diana Butler Bass called Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks < Psalm 95:1-2> 1 O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! 2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! 11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13 they called out, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! 14 When he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priests. And as they went, they were made clean. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16 He prostrated himself at Jesus feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18 Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? 19 Then he said to him, Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well. Our sermon series this fall as we approach Thanksgiving is all about gratefulness. Not only are the leaves turning glorious colors, but the summer crops and the fruit from the trees of the field have been harvested. Events at nearby Apple Hill in El Dorado County are in full swing in October, their busiest month of the year. This series is based on a book by the progressive Christian author Diana Butler Bass called Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks. 1

2 The book presents gratitude in 4 dimensions. 1 There are two aspects of experience: Our feelings about an event and our actions as a result of that event. And there are two arenas of our lives. Individual gratitude with our personal spirituality. And Community gratitude and what it means to be a thankful society. So, putting these together, we will be considering 4 areas of gratitude: Individual feelings. Individual actions. Community feelings. Community actions. Most of us lean towards one of these 4 understandings of gratitude more the others. Yet, we can become off-balance and have a distorted view when we do so. We started last week considering our Individual Feelings. Today I will be talking about Individual Actions. This is gratitude in terms of individual responsibility. Last week we thought about how our individual emotions sneak up on us as an unplanned response. It could be happiness and relief at the safe delivery of a baby or finding a lost pet or surviving a narrow miss while driving. It could be thankfulness for completing a house repair task or finally tidying your closet. It could be a sense of awe at concert or seeing all the fall leaves or harvested fruit. It could be the sense of pleasure we get from giving another person a gift. There is no one experience of gratitude, it is a complex and episodic thing, and one that is deeply personal. 2 But when you are not feeling gratitude and everyone around you is, then there is a disconnect. When I did my chaplaincy training, we were told that of we went into the room all upbeat and the patient was having a bad day, it would be hard to connect with them. It was better to go in with a more neutral stance and quickly listen to gauge the patient s mood, and then connect our words with their emotions. But if you are the one who is not overwhelmed with gratefulness, how do you experience gratitude when your feelings are elusive? Diana Butler Bass suggests that part of the answer lies in the nature of gratitude. While gratitude is an emotion, it is also more than an emotion. Gratitude is also a disposition that can be chosen and cultivated in a way that manifests itself as actions. Gratitude is not just what we feel, it is what we say and do, and then those actions and habits and practices of gratefulness can begin to change us. Let s think first about choosing gratitude, and then about cultivating it. 1 Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks (New York: Harper One, 2018), xxvi-xxvii. 2 Ibid., 8. 2

3 ONE. Choosing. Notice. Be aware of blessings. We live a lot of life on auto-pilot going around in a daze. There is so much that we just do not notice on a daily basis and we just take it for granted. You might see the fall leaves on the ground as a nuisance and a job to rake and dispose of; but a three-yearold sees a play scene! Leaves to throw. Leaves to kick. Leaves to jump and hide in. And in England, conkers to find and to put on a string to fight with! We are often far more aware of our frustration than our blessings. We notice when a car cut us off. Or when someone s opinion offends us. Or when a meeting starts late, or the restaurant has lost our dinner reservation. So how do we choose gratitude? You ll find plenty of self-help books or websites to help with this one. The main ideas that crop up: Keep a daily gratitude journal or if you prefer, just mentally name three things you are thankful for. Writing them down has a certain level of accountability. It can be hard to find things to be thankful for at the start. Perhaps it is the same three things every day. But as you push yourself to notice more, it can be surprising to go back and read what you wrote. I am not really one for journals, but I do know lots of people that it has helped. But mentally naming things has been beneficial to me. As well as a gratitude journal, choosing gratitude means developing cues to remind you to be thankful. Might be when you wake up, before each meal, last thing at night. Or it could be when you brush or comb your hair, every time you pass the Lake of the Pines guard gate, when you return the grocery cart, when you are stuck behind a slow driver. I have found my commute to be good for this. As I turn left at the lights onto Highway 49 on my way to the church. And as I turn right onto 49 on my way home. And at that point I have no pen and paper! But it is a cue for me to give thanks. Diana Butler Bas cautions that doing these things for a short period of time is a lot like going on a diet to lose weight. A lot of people can manage a one to three-month diet and lose some weight. The difficult bit is moving to the long-term habits that maintain a good diet that keeps the weight off. As soon as you stop it is easy to go back to the old pattern. 3 3 Ibid., 56. 3

4 Can noticing things to be thankful for, become a long-term habit? Can thankfulness become a routine pathway of grace? How do we sustain awareness over the long term? Which brings us to point number two. TWO. Cultivating. Habits. Practices In our scripture today, only one of the ten lepers thought to say thank you. They had all been healed, which is not exactly an everyday occurrence; they were probably all excited and wanting to tell their families, yet only one had enough of an ingrained habit and attitude of gratitude to return and say thank you. Our Christian faith can really help us here. For more than a thousand years in Christian societies the hours of work were interwoven with times of prayer, forming a cycle of morning, noon and evening rituals. Laity as well as monks, nuns and priests would follow these practices. The same was true for Muslims, Jews and Buddhists. If you go to places like Assisi or Mecca or Katmandu bells and minarets and gongs still call people to prayer. But that practice has faded in modern Western society. Public prayer has given way to private prayer and perhaps daily devotions. The form that our private prayers take varies widely. Perhaps you sit down and read your Bible and highlight it and pray extemporaneously. Another option is to use a written devotional, and there are many rich options. Sometimes, it is easier to pray prayers that others have written and let them seep into our hearts. I certainly find this to be true. Most daily prayer books begin with a prayer of thanksgiving, with a form of thanks like Psalm 95:1-2 that we heard earlier. 4 Our Christian prayers direct our praise and gratefulness to God as the giver of all gifts. Diana Butler Bass says she keeps a notebook of gratitude prayers by her bed and prays one each morning. Some are prayers of others, and some are prayers she has written like this one: With the morning birdsong, My heart echoes thank you. With the rustling sounds in the kitchen, My heart echoes thank you. With the early noise of the suburbs, My heart echoes thank you. With the awakening words of day, My heart echoes thank you. 5 Gratitude sets the intention of the day. Hourly prayer can punctuate the day with gratitude. Meals are a good time to pause too. And bedtime can be a time to review, reflect and offer thanksgiving for the day. There s a prayer of examen that came out of 4 Ibid., Ibid., 78. 4

5 the Catholic tradition that many Protestants use to give thanks for the good in the day, to acknowledge all emotions about the day, and then give thanks for whatever was experienced. And for insomnia, you can try counting blessings instead of sheep! As well as Choosing and Cultivating gratitude, there is a metaphor that might help us: METAPHOR. Tailwinds and Headwinds. 6 If you are running a race, then a headwind is the wind in your face, it creates resistance and imposes a challenge; it is a barrier. On the other hand a tailwind is the wind at your back, pushing you forwards. It puts you at an advantage and makes things easy; it is a blessing. When my sons cycled across the USA in the summer of 2015, they went from West to East. They chose this direction, so the prevailing wind would be a tailwind as they cycled across those large flat states like Kansas. They hoped that they would not experience the really bad headwinds. In reality, the winds swirled around, and there were still many days when there was a headwind. They pushed through and succeeded, and it gave them a tale to tell. Diana Butler Bass suggests that we remember the challenges in life more than we remember what comes easily. We pay attention to what we work hard for. BUT if we are not careful we remember and fixate on our challenges or barriers and then envy and resent others who have had an easier time. On Facebook, many people post about their tailwind events, and it is easy to think others do not have a hard time. If we overvalue the headwinds in our lives and devalue the tailwinds, then we miss some of the opportunities we have to be grateful. What if we think of the tailwinds in our lives as blessings that we should give thanks for? These blessings are benefits that are often invisible. The things that we do not often notice. Blessings include the boost bestowed on us by systems, structures, families, and other benefactors who assist us on our way. Political policies, economic advantages, social relationships, DNA, skin color, gender, physical abilities can all silently make a difference in our lives. Most of us live in Nevada County. Yes, house prices and rents are high, but not nearly as high as the Bay Area or Los Angeles. Highway 49 is crazy to drive on at times, and we all complain, but it takes an accident for it to become totally gridlocked unlike the metropolitan areas that backup every day with commuter traffic. Rush hour at Lake of the Pines means waiting for one extra cycle of lights to get in or out adding perhaps 5 minutes to a journey. We are blessed. 6 Ibid.,

6 I am an immigrant, now a citizen. We first came here from the UK on a skilled worker visa that enabled my husband to work for a specific company and the children and I to come with him. There was no wait; the company simply applied on his behalf and few months later we had the visa. We later applied for a green card and later still citizenship. While I can tell you some headwind tales about sitting in INS offices, I can also tell you about the tailwinds and how much easier this whole process was because we are white English-speaking Europeans. Headwinds make us say I earned this Tailwinds should call forth I received this, I am grateful. If we magnify the barriers, the burdens and pay no attention to the boosts, the blessings, then we are missing seeing how much there is to be thankful for. We can choose to believe that we are in command of our lives, and not reliant on the blessings that come our way. We can choose to focus on our very worst moments and believe that everything is against us. But that cuts us off from grace and has us thinking that there is nothing to be thankful for. Do you know someone who cannot let go of the very worst thing that has happened to them? Over the years, I have seen this happen in a few people s lives. Perhaps it is you stuck in a negativity cycle? Our scriptures are full of songs of thanksgiving even in difficult times. Our faith teaches us that there is a way out, and that together we can help each other. Gratitude is a disposition that can be chosen and cultivated in a way that manifests itself as actions. When we neglect gratitude, we are making a choice for negative emotions and more negativity. When we choose gratefulness, the choice leads to more gratitude and a spiral of appreciation. The first choice sets up the next choice. So first, choose gratitude. Make a deliberate point to stop and notice the tailwinds, the blessings. And then second, cultivate gratitude. Draw on our rich Christian tradition of prayers of thanksgiving and routinely recite those prayers every day until it becomes a way of life, a way of gratefulness. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. (Mt 6:21). Thanks be to God, Amen. Let us pray Lord Jesus, in your faithfulness to us, you shower us with grace, mercy, love, and all we need. Open our eyes to see your blessings so that we can name them and count them. Draw us closer to you as we develop the habits of gratitude. Shape our hearts and fill them with gratefulness. May we be like the leper who returned to you and gave you thanks. Amen. Resource Bass, Diana Butler. Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks. New York: Harper One,