This sermon was preached at Whittier UMC on Sunday, November 24th, 2019, based on Psalm 107:8-9 and 33-37 and Colossians 1:11-20. You can listen to it by clicking below (coming soon).
Would you pray with me?
God of all hopefulness and God of all joy, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Our sermon this morning is about gratitude. It’s a big topic, so let’s start off small. When was the last time you said, “Thank you,” or “Thanks”?
This morning, probably, right? Maybe someone held the door for you or maybe you dropped something and someone picked it up. Most of our gratitude is like this, almost a reflex. I say, “Thank you, sir,” or “Thank you, ma’am,” all the time, but that’s mostly because my mama raised me right.
But think back to the most recent time that you said thank you. Can you remember what you felt? Did you feel anything at all? If you didn’t, can you remember a time when you felt gratitude, when something someone said or did made you honestly want to thank them?
The times I’ve felt anything like that are few and far between for me. If gratitude were a garden, I’d mostly be growing weeds. But one example comes to mind. I was calling the billing office at UNC Hospitals, preparing myself to pay the $900 bill for an ambulance ride out of pocket. I had fallen at work and my worker’s compensation claim was denied, a month too late for me to file it with my insurance. As I talked to the man in the billing office, though, he said that there was no charge on my account. I asked him to check again, explaining the situation to him, and he replied that the ambulance charge had been paid. Not understanding what was happening, I told him to check one more time, because there was no way this had been paid. And he said, “I guess you got a little grace today. Anything else I can help you with?”
Forgiving that fee changed my life for months. Other bills got paid on time, I was able to buy food that wasn’t frozen or didn’t come in a can, and I even went out with my friends a few times. I had expected to be saddled with an unpayable debt. Instead, I found myself free. And the relief, the joy, the peace I felt in that moment, when the man in the billing office told me that my medical debt was gone, was enough to make me start crying before I hung up the phone.
Have you ever felt gratitude like that?
I think our passage from Colossians this morning is talking about a gratitude like that. It opens with a prayer for the Christians at Colossae, a prayer that begins a few verses before our reading, praying that the Colossians might be filled with knowledge and wisdom and understanding when it comes to God. The author prays that the Colossians might be given strength and that they might be able to endure and give joyful thanks to God who has saved us from the kingdom of this world and given them a place in the kingdom of God’s Son.
But again, I have to admit that I struggle to feel real gratitude as I read the beginning of this passage. I have the same kind of guilt-ridden feeling that I have when reading many of the psalms. They’re always telling me to offer praise when I don’t necessarily have praise in my heart. Maybe some of you have that same feeling from time to time. Your spirit and your mind and your heart don’t always line up when it comes to God. You might cognitively understand why Jesus should be praised, you might get the argument straight in your head, but you don’t feel it. It’s not connecting with you.
Which is why the second half of the passage is so important to me. It’s actually a foundational part of my theology. It’s part of the bedrock of how I understand God. And it’s how I’m able to be grateful to God.
Christ is the image of the invisible God. Jesus is God we can see, and if we can see Jesus, we can see God. Everything was made through Christ and all things hold together through him. In Christ the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, that we might all be reconciled to God.
See, the Son was there at creation. From the very beginning. And through the Son all things were made. That means, according to Colossians, that there’s nothing in this world that is higher than the Son, nothing that is outside the reach of the Son, because the Son was there when all things were made. When Paul says in Romans that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, this is why. When Jesus was able to get up from the grave, this is why. There is nothing on this entire Earth that can keep Jesus from us.
The Son could have chosen to let the world grow ever farther from God. Instead, God loved us so much that God couldn’t stay away. And in coming to earth, the Son reconciled us back to God.
This changes everything for us.
Because in defeating death, Jesus showed us that there’s nothing in this world that can hold us hostage anymore. Mistakes we’ve made in our past, mistakes that have hurt us and others, and keep us tied up in guilt and despair? Jesus has freed us from that. The opinions of other people who don’t think we’re good enough or don’t think we’re tough enough or don’t think we’re enough at all? Jesus frees us from that. Fear of anything in this world, fear of people who are different from us, people who are more powerful than us, fear of people we don’t understand? Jesus frees us from that. Because when the fullness of God comes down to Earth to dwell and to reclaim God’s people, there is nothing that can stand in the way of that. You are free from all that stops you from living life and life abundant in Christ.
I mean, imagine that. I know I asked you to imagine things last week, but imagine that.
Imagine being free.
I imagine it feels like a $900 medical bill disappearing, only better.
But gratitude, if it sticks, isn’t a once-and-done thing. Gratitude, if it sticks, leads to a lifetime of thankfulness.
How could it not?
What’s achieved for us in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection isn’t a one-time ticket to the reign of God. It’s the freedom we need to live in this world as if the reign of God was already here. It’s the confidence to live as if no one can judge us except for Jesus, because no one else can. It’s the grace to forgive, to forgive ourselves and to forgive others, to live without our sins or the sins of others keeping a hold on us. It is daily being able to wake up in this world with so much pain and tumult and understand that all things were made through Christ. Every good thing in this world has the stamp of the divine on it and my friends, I’m here to tell you today that we are good.
When I think about this, when I think about this freedom I have in Christ, that through Christ God reached to me and I can reach back to God, that every good thing on this Earth is held together by the one who came to this world in love and took on flesh and bone and pain and sorrow so that we might know joy, I understand why Mary fell at the feet of Jesus outside of the tomb on Easter morning. I understand why we praise. I get why the psalmist has to talk about streams of water in the desert and the hungry being fed. What other words do we have to explain our gratitude to the God who offers us impossible salvation?
I told you this was a big topic.
Let’s zoom back in, back to our everyday lives. What does it mean to live into our freedom in Christ and into our gratitude every day?
Well, for some, it looks like saying grace before every meal. It’s a simple acknowledgement that all things come from God and all things are going back to God and the plants and vegetables and labor that have gone into making this meal are all gifts from above. For those who’ve experienced food insecurity, who’ve had trouble putting meals on the table, saying a blessing before each meal contains real thankfulness, real gratitude. For others of us, saying grace before each meal is the most basic of ways of acknowledging that God has redeemed our bodies and blesses us with the delights of pumpkin pie and fried okra. My daddy makes a potato casserole that must be inspired by the Spirit.
For some, it’s noticing the beauty in creation all around us. All things were made through Christ and in Christ all things hold together, and for some of us, breathing in the clean mountain air, seeing the last of these beautiful leaves, taking in rocks and rivers and the songs of a thousand birds brings joy to our hearts and honest gratitude to our lips. I’ve heard from many of you that mornings and sunsets bring up something in you that would find its voice in gratitude. The beauty of our mountains is a gift indeed.
And for others, that gratitude comes out through prayer. We offer thanks for the people in our lives who have carried us through, the people who have been Christ for us in difficult times, and those who have brought out the joy and peace within us in good times. I have faith that my garden of gratitude will one day produce good fruit because I can sometimes even be grateful for the people who challenge me, who show me that I’m wrong and push me to be better. I find that one of my most effective gratitude practices, when I can do it, is raising up a quick prayer of thanks after a difficult situation. “God, thank you for that woman who yelled at me in Wal-Mart. Through her you reminded me that the burden of this world is often too much to bear alone and pushed me to see you in everyone I encounter.” I feel like a real saint when those prayers come out of me and are honest.
And for some, gratitude looks like giving. I think that many of you might find yourself expressing your gratitude like this. Christ has freed you from the worries of this world and so you give out of your hearts: cans upon cans, coats upon coats, offerings upon offerings. I have seen people in this part of the world give out of gratitude time and time again. I’ve seen a former postal worker, someone whose job bent her back and ruined her knees, hand over as much money as she could give to help the families that she used to deliver mail to. I’ve seen someone on food stamps buy a Thanksgiving box of food using her EBT card. I’ve seen people whose bodies pain them time and again move furniture around and set up a space that speaks of hospitality and welcome to anyone who walks in. Christ won freedom for us and I think the way that many of us show gratitude for that is by using our freedom to serve others, and this is a good and joyful thing.
Friends, I invite you to seek out the gratitude practice that speaks most to you in this week and in the weeks ahead. I invite you to be creative with it, as Christ has freed us for creativity, because not everyone can express gratitude by saying one thing they’re thankful for around the Thanksgiving table. Write, draw, sculpt, carve, build, shape, speak, sing, pray. Whatever it takes for you to honestly express what it means to you to be freed from the things that ails you in this world through Christ through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together.
Because it is in gratitude that we can return to God what is God’s, and receive the gift of God in return. It is in giving thanks that we tell God that we have seen God’s goodness and that God, in return, fills us with goodness.
Thank God for that.
Amen.
All text and pictures (unless otherwise attributed) © Jo Schonewolf, 2019. You can view a full archive of our sermons by clicking here