Gum Flappin' and Jaw Bonin'

Luke 3: 1-6
Advent 2C 2015

All over the world, Christians are celebrating Advent, the season of preparation for the birth of Christ. And all over Christendom, the first three Sundays are occupied with readings about John the Baptist. Here we are, getting ready for the unreserved joy of angels, tinsel, carols, and the cheery glow of Christmas and in comes John–dusty, camel hair coat (not cashmere), reeking of locusts and honey. He smells of poverty and excessive discipline. He refuses to live in the big city, up at Jerusalem with the powerful and the educated, preferring instead the dust of the desert, a more fitting setting for his style of preaching. He was probably a member of the Qumran sect, the community that lived in the desert outside of Jerusalem and penned the Dead Sea scrolls. They were an austere, separatist bunch, who were awaiting a warrior like Messiah who would cleanse Israel of Rome.

The Church in its wisdom has always insisted that if you want to get to Bethlehem to see what’s in the manger, you must first confront this crazy prophet John out in the wilderness, who sermons are as bitter and harsh as the terrain. People sometimes think that John was active when Jesus was born because we look at these passages about him during Advent. But recall, he’s the same age as Jesus. Shortly after Mary knew she was pregnant she went to live with her cousin Elizabeth who was carrying John. So obviously because John comes before Jesus the Church (meaning the historic, universal church and those who put together the sequence of scriptures for Advent) must have wanted us to hear something.

John certainly does collide with what we have done to Christmas, doesn’t he? John’s gaunt, ruddy body fed with locusts and honey and draped with animal skins stands in stark contrast to a jolly fat elf fed on Christmas cookies and bologna sandwiches and dressed in a red velvet suit with a bag full of gifts for people who already have too much stuff.

Did you ever wonder why none of our Christmas cards have John the Baptist on them? It might go like this: “Our thoughts of you at this special time of the year are best expressed in the words of John the Baptist, ‘ Repent! You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Merry Christmas.” You don’t find cookie cutters in the shape of John the Baptist; his figure isn’t in our crèche scenes; and hallmark cards have never featured him. You never see a John the Baptist Hummel. That’s because he upsets our Norman Rockwell images of Christmas of warm homes, happy families, and the ideal that the spirit of Christmas brings out the best in us all.

He reminds us that we are living as exiles in a wilderness and need to be called home. John the Baptist calls us to account for our lives, not by what nine out of ten Americans think, but by what God the Almighty thinks. John throws a cold, sobering blast of Jordan’s water in the face of our pretension, our delusions of grandeur, and our willingness to expect so little of ourselves.

The majority of today’s Gospel lesson is John the Baptist’s quote from the prophet Isaiah. This is poetry addressed to Jews in exile, in Babylon, which is about 59 miles SW of Baghdad. How did these people feel in exile? How did they respond to their captivity? If you imagine how you might respond if you were forced to spend extended time with people you don’t like, in a place you don’t like driven their by violence (much like today’s refugees) you won’t be far from their experience. Like Luke’s John the Baptist they remember Israel’s experience in the wilderness. The wilderness—midbar is the Hebrew: a desolate, lonely place, disorderly, dangerous, home of wild beasts. When Israel thought of wilderness it recalled Sinai, the pathless place where the Hebrew slaves, once freed, lost their way.

It’s no wonder why T.S. Eliot entitle his great poem to the modern world “The Wasteland.” So much of our culture is a wasteland, a desert, a fearful place, a wilderness. You never know who you might run into. You better carry a concealed weapon. There have already been 355 mass shootings this year. Refugees, men, women and children, fleeing from a brutal civil war looking for a fresh start in a safe land. Who knows what they might bring with them? Better build bigger, higher fences.

By the way, what’s going on with Kim Kardashian? Is she still married to Kanye West? And Charlie Sheen; did you hear he has AIDS? Did you know Bruce Jenner is now Kaitlyn Jenner? And who knew that Starbucks was really a front for an anti-Christian cabal? Didn’t you hear? They have only red cups, red mind you, with no snowflakes or Merry Christmas on them—just red! Such depth in our society! Wasteland indeed. In spite of it all, there’s a voice crying in the wilderness this morning.

Pliny the Elder, a Roman author, naturalist and philosopher once said that the Romans, when they couldn’t make a building beautiful, made it big. Sounds something like our culture, doesn’t it? If we can’t do it well, we do it bigger. We add dollars to our income, rooms to our houses, activities to our schedules, appointments to our calendars. And the quality or our life diminishes with each addition. We certainly have more food than we can consume, more high tech gadgets than we need, and more material resources than we deserve. And yet there is still widespread unhappiness. Many of our people still speak of a lack of fulfillment and despair. But, in spite of it all, there’s a voice crying in the wilderness.

We have our own personal wildernesses as well, don’t we? Perhaps your spouse or a child died a few years ago and you’re still wandering around feeling lost. Or perhaps that perfect job that you craved with all its perks and prestige has lost its luster—a lot of it. Or now that you’re old, you battle one ailment or ache or pain after another. My mother told me that after she turned 80 she feels like a used car with one part after another wearing out and needing to be fixed. It gets discouraging. Being a parent these days can be a wilderness experience at time as well. Is there any place in your life today that could be described as wilderness? Is the address where you live or work really feel like home? Or are there moments when you get the impression that you are not fully at home, that you are in exile, that there might be more to life that this?

It takes a certain degree of honestly to admit our yearning. After all, here we have freedom of choice. We are free to fashion our lives pretty much as we choose. If the lives we fashion are unfulfilling, who is there to blame but ourselves? Therefore, we are reluctant or embarrassed to admit our sense of unfulfillment, our hungry hearts, that dawning sense that there must be more than this.

All of which makes it rather remarkable what we do here in church at this time of the year. Advent is a season of yearning, of waiting. Think of the hymns we sing during Advent. They are somewhat restrained. They speak of desire, of waiting, or expectation. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The Advent prophets all speak to a people in exile, a people suffering from homeless and despair.

John the Baptist’s voice is that of one “crying in the wilderness.” In order to hear John’s cry, one must be in a wilderness. I suppose it is an axiom of our faith that it is difficult to be found unless you are first lost. It is impossible to be saved until you are damned. It is tough to receive a gift if you already have everything. You can’t be satisfied if you have no hunger. It takes a certain amount of courage and conviction to admit to yearning. In order to see the fragile light at Christmas, one has first got to become accustomed to the dark. In order to see the stars in the highest heavens, one must sit for a while in the darkness here on earth. Are you up to such honesty?

When you are in exile, in a wilderness patch in your life, you really only have one of two choices: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and my life and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in the place where I find myself? This is not to say that yearning is not a call to act, to do something different, to hitch your wagon to a star, but until that happens you’ve got to wait. All of us are given moments, day, months, and years of exile. What will we do with them? Wish we were someplace else? Grumble? Escape into fantasies? Watch a lot of porn on the internet? Drink and drug ourselves into oblivion? Wilderness experiences strip away all that is superfluous and we find the essentials—our life in God. William Falkner once said, “It’s hard believing, but disaster seem to be good for people.” I know that whenever I’ve gone through hell I don’t like it, but I like the person I’ve become on the other side.

So here is the Good News this second Sunday of Advent. To those who live in exile, in the wilderness, lost, wandering—God is making a way. You heard John the Baptist: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be make low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.” God is making a way through your desert, through our desert, a highway strait to you. Keep looking, keep yearning and maybe, just maybe, this Advent you shall see “the salvation of God.”

Fourth Sunday of Advent Year C
December 20, 2015

On April 11, 2009 a stout, frumpy woman with unruly teeth and unkempt hair walked out on the stage as a contestant for the TV show Britain’s Got Talent. She wore a gold lace dress which didn’t work much in her favor. She told the folks who interviewed her for the competition that she was unemployed, single, lived with a cat called Pebbles and had never been kissed. She cared for her elderly mother and volunteered at her church.

This unassuming, awkward woman walked out on the stage to chatter, giggling, and a long and unpleasant wolf whistle. Amanda Holden, Piers Morgan and Simon Cowell smirked and rolled their eyes as the contestant stumbled introducing herself, saying where she was from and what she was going to sing.

Then she opened her mouth and this is what came out. (“I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables.). The woman was Susan Magdalane Boyle. Her first album was released six months later and debuted as the number one best-selling album on charts around the globe.

This chubby, modest, inconspicuous woman knocked those three snotty, elitist, judges on their keisters not only with her amazing voice, but because she knocked away all of their puffed-up presumptions. This is a Cinderella story where the wallflower becomes the princess. This is the ugly duckling story where you can’t judge a book by its cover. And boy could this woman sing. And so could Mary.

Mary was much like Susan Boyle—living a quiet, unassuming life with her parents. She’s aware of her humble status—a woman, likely of a peasant class–in her time and culture. She was property as much as anything, belonging first to a father and then later to a husband (a husband who could divorce her at will in ways she herself could never initiate no matter what her circumstance). She didn’t belong to a famous family, hadn’t grown up in a metropolis, and had absolutely no prospects whatsoever to make a mark in the world or to ever be remembered beyond the next generation or so. Yet miraculously and startlingly, God visited her with news so stunning, it would take at least the rest of her life to understand it all.

As our scripture passage opens, she had just made a beeline to a small town in the hill country of Judea where her cousin Elizabeth lived. I imagine she was still reeling from the night before when the angel Gabriel, big as a bear and brighter than a star, announced that she would be the mother of Israel’s Messiah. Just when she was starting to wrap her head around this it dawned on her, “Holy cow! I’m pregnant!” What am I going to do?!” She must have panicked. “How will I explain it to Joseph, never mind my parents?!” She likely left Joseph a note: “Honey, something’s come up. I need some down time with my cousin Elizabeth. I know you’ll under-stand. I’ll see you in a few weeks.” The few weeks turned into three months, long enough for her to be showing when she returned home to Nazareth.

When she approaches Zechariah and Elizabeth’s home Mary shouts, “Hey Elizabeth, it’s me!” Then an amazing thing happened: the child leaped in Elizabeth’s womb. “And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’”

Note here that Elizabeth called out to Mary “in a loud voice.” It’s noteworthy because so far, most all of the action in Luke has been in the quiet shadows. Zechariah emerged from the Temple mute after an angel told him Elizabeth would bear a son. When Elizabeth became pregnant, scripture says she stayed in seclusion for five months. Mary likewise does not appear to have made any public pronouncements about what Gabriel had said to her—if I were her I wouldn’t say a peep to anyone! In fact, she may have visited Elizabeth because she was the only person she could trust. She needed a place to vent, a woman who would understand, a traveling companion. But once Mary arrives, those things that had been done in secret are revealed in a public way. Elizabeth is not shy to proclaim God’s truth with a loud voice. And neither is Mary.

Mary sings out. And what did she sing? This is no lullaby. The words thunder forth like a battle cry: “He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones; and the rich he has sent empty away.” Not too sweet a Christmas carol, I think. It’s a song about someone low going up, someone up high being brought low. You won’t hear women singing like this except in Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, or in refugee camps around the world. A woman who has been battered living now in a safe shelter, a recovering drug addict or a woman pulled out of sex slavery—they would know how to sing a song like this.

Mary’s song reveals that she has learned a thing or two about what God is up to and how God operates in the world. God’s reign is an upside-down kingdom where all is reversed and turned on its head. “The lowly are lifted up and the humble are exalted.” (Luke 1: 53)
Maybe Mary remembered her Bible stories. Maybe she remembered that God picked Abram and Sarai in their Golden Years to travel to a Promised Land. Maybe she remembered how God in Genesis always chose the younger child over the older child with the birthright. Maybe she remembered how God called stuttering Moses and vulnerable Ruth and the baby of the family named David to be Israel’s king. Maybe she recalled how God had chosen Israel and not mighty Babylon with its hanging gardens or extraordinary Egypt with its towering pyramids.

Perhaps she remembered all this and then connected all the dots to the child growing in her belly, a child so important that even her older cousin Elizabeth had just referred to him as “My Lord.” Mary was bearing Elizabeth’s Lord!! She was bearing the Savior of the nations!! Her. Little Mary. Mary the ordinary. Mary the garden variety. Mary the Susan Boyle of her day.

And as she pondered all this and treasured all these things in her heart, she connected a few more dots. In her song she saw that those who for now fancy themselves as captains of industry and masters of the universe—those with enough money to cause others to kowtow to them, who can buy politicians, rig markets, pull strings and leverage deals in their favor over the little guy—these allegedly rich and powerful folks are on the losing side of history. At the end of the cosmic day their wealth and worldly power were their only comfort in life and in death. They might gain the whole world, but if in so doing they will forfeit their own souls. They’d be sent packing, empty as a pocket and without hope.

Mary could see it as clear as crystal. God loves the poor, favors the disenfranchised, and has keen eyes locked onto the invisible members of society. And in the kingdom of her Child, all the wrongs that created the perpetually poor and the perennially invisible would be righted. All the injustices under which people suffer now would be ironed out in a new landscape of righteousness. The valleys where the poor wallowed will be raised up and the mountains where the haughty and cruel crowed would be made low.

Back in the early 80s, the government in Pretoria, South Africa, banned the lighting of candles or the singing of Christmas carols in Soweto. When asked why by the press, the South African government replied, “You know how emotional black women are. Christmas carols have an emotional effect upon them.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 27, 1985). You let a poor Jewish woman like Mary sing, a black mother in Soweto sing, you never know where it might lead.

“Music hath power to soothe the savage beast,” says Shakespeare. True. But it also hath power to release, cut loose, pull down, raise up. African slaves knew this. When they sang their spirituals in the cotton fields they were not only praising God, but protesting the masters who locked them out of worship, yet couldn’t keep them from the promises of deliverance in the Bible.

Singing has spawned some of the most profound social movements in this century. One only has to think of ribbons of protesters marching in Selma singing “We Shall Overcome,” during the Civil Rights movement. The protesters in Leipzig, Germany in 1989 knew this as well during the so-called “velvet revolution.” Many don’t know this, but several months before the fall of the Berlin wall, the citizens of Leipzig gathered on Monday evenings by candlelight around St. Nikolai church – the church where Bach composed so many of his cantatas – to sing. Over two months their numbers grew from a little more than a thousand people to more than three hundred thousand, over half the citizens of the city, singing songs of hope and protest and justice, until their song shook the powers of their nation and changed the world. (Later, when someone asked one of the officers of the Stasi, the East German secret police, why they did not crush this protest like they had so many others, the officer replied, and “We had no contingency plan for song.”). There is no contingency plan to the reign of God. It is here and it is coming in all of its fullness, like it or not.

So this Christmas season can we sing Mary’s song? I hope so. I think so. If you’ve ever been a Susan Boyle and felt frumpy, insignificant, overlooked and underestimated, then you can sing with Mary who was overlooked, insignificant, and underestimated, but chosen by God for her quiet faithfulness to bear the Savior of the world. While you might not give birth to Jesus, you are still a God-bearer, one chosen to bring light, hope, comfort and peace into someone’s life and into this world. No one can ever say that you are worthless because God raises up the lowly and exalts those the world thinks are insignificant.

But can we sing all of it? If you’re like me, some of it sticks in my throat. Can Mary’s God truly be our Lord and our God — the God who overturns the way the world works, who elects the least and the last to bring in the kingdom, whose judgment will save the poor, the wronged and the oppressed? Can the God who is going to knock the powerful off their peacock thrones, their stock exchange seats, their professional chairs, and their benches of judgment really be our God? Can we really praise this God — Mary’s God?

I know it may not feel like it but we are sitting pretty at the top of the world’s economic pyramid so it might be hard to sing. According to the United Nations, nearly half the world’s population, 2.8 billion people, survive on less than $2 a day. About 20 percent of the world’s population, 1.2 billion people, live on less than $1 a day. Nearly 1 billion people are illiterate and 1 billion do not have safe water. By the world’s standards, we in this country are so rich, so comfortable and so healthy, we can even fool ourselves into thinking we do not need God — certainly not Mary’s God! We want a therapeutic God who comforts us, but doesn’t challenge us. We like things the way they are, please leave well-enough alone.

So what would Mary sing to us this Christmas when we feel overwhelmed by the threat of terrorism, when we hear of shocking gun violence and mass shootings almost every day, when we see politicians bloviating on the airwaves that they will bring the Second Coming if elected, when our fear prompts the latent racism and xenophobia that has always been there, when the frustrations over the treatment of young Black men and women by police spills into our city streets, when the atrocities of ISIL done in the name of God goes on and finally world leaders are finally beginning to address climate change?

She would say to us what she has said to every generation overshadowed by the same fears and challenges that we are: “[God’s] mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.”

That, my friends, is Mary’s gospel and ours today as well.

1 Thessalonians 5: 12-24
Norman B. Bendroth
Thanksgiving Sunday 2015

¹² But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; ¹³ esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. ¹⁴ And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. ¹⁵ See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. ¹⁶ Rejoice always, ¹⁷ pray without ceasing, ¹⁸ give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. ¹⁹ Do not quench the Spirit. ²⁰ Do not despise the words of prophets, ²¹ but test everything; hold fast to what is good; ²² abstain from every form of evil.

²³ May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. ²⁴ The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

St. Ignatius observed, “The root of all sin is ingratitude.” That’s a sweeping statement, but I think it’s essentially sound. No one is born thankful. It is a learned habit like all other virtues. When we take our children trick-or-treating after they get their treat how often do we say, “Remember to say thank you.” Often we associate gratitude with having enough stuff. We’re grateful for a comfortable home, friends who know everything about us and still love us, our 4K TVs with surround sound, and enough money for a vacation to Barbados once in a while. And that is as it should be. But is there a direct correlation between having enough stuff and gratitude? If that were the case people with the most stuff should be the most grateful. People with not much stuff would be sullen and resentful.

But that is rarely true, is it? The Chronicle of Philanthropy latest findings are that the wealthiest Americans are giving a smaller share of their income to charity (2.1%) than they once did, while poor and middle-income people are donating a larger share. (4.3). Studies also show there is more contentment and happiness among tribal peoples than in the developed West. Maybe they’ve learned that happiness isn’t dependent upon stuff.

In fact, the irony is that often the more we have the less thankful we are. We live in an age with an extraordinary sense of entitlement. You know the old saw, “I pulled myself up by my own boot straps and bull dog determinism. I am where I am because I’ve earned it all.” Really? To say that means that you birthed yourself, changed yourself, taught yourself to walk, educated yourself, constructed all the roads, and created all the benefits you enjoy from society by yourself. There was once a man who boasted whenever he could that he was a self-made man until an exasperated friend finally declared, “Well, that relieves the Lord of a terrific responsibility, doesn’t it?”

An attitude of entitlement or being a self-made person deprives God of thanks. True gratitude begins with humility recognizing that we did not create ourselves and that everything we have and are is a gift. The ungrateful person forgets the inter-dependence of the uni¬verse and that ultimately God is the first cause and the prime mover. The universe didn’t suddenly burp and we were here. It was created and is superintended by our loving God and we live under God’s reign. The word gift is charis which is the same word for grace in the Greek. The gifts we have are all of God’s grace, undeserved and unearned. The Latin root for gratitude is gratis which means free. That’s why we give thanks because it’s free, it’s a gift.

In one episode of the Simpsons, when Bart is asked to give thanks at a family meal, he says, “Dear God, we bought all of this stuff with our own money, so thanks for nothing.” Bart’s prayer echoes the sentiment of our age. Often, the more we have the more likely we are to say, “Thanks for nothing.” When you think about it, who is tempted to claim that he or she is a self-made-man or a self-made-woman? Is it the person who has little of this world’s goods and have enjoyed little earthly success or the person who has been given much and owns much?

In our Epistle lesson today, Paul directs us to “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” What’s with this guy? Does he live in la-la land? In every¬thing give thanks? Is this ivory tower theology? Do we thank God for car accidents, stale marriages, tedious jobs, sleepless nights, final exams, terrorism in Paris, Kenya, Beirut, and Egypt, violent streets, and cancer? No. Nein. Nix. Ne pas. Negenato. Non!

There is a popular heresy that sometimes runs in Christian circles that we should praise God for the evil or misfortune that buffets. “God is testing me” or “God is teaching me,” is said almost glibly. I’ve also heard people say, particularly to those who are grieving, “This is part of God’s plan” and “There is a reason for everything.” I know they mean well and are struggling to find helpful words, but to tell hurting, sick or grieving people that “there is a reason for everything” or that “this is part of God’s plan” implies that God did this to them. To tell Syrian refugees this is to say that God condones violence, kills children and endorses ISIS. Scandalous ideas!

Can God bring good out of evil? Yes. Absolutely. But that is a very different thing than saying that God causes evil to happen. Yes, God does use circumstances to grow us and stretch us, if we are open to it. But that’s quite different from saying God deliberately puts banana peels in our pathway. “God cannot be tempted by evil,” says James, “nor does God tempt anyone.”

What this passage calls us to do is to thank God in spite of our circum-stances. I think Paul is helping us answer the question, “How do we learn to be more thankful?” By doing it. Paul commands us to give thanks in all circumstances. We need to get in the habit of doing it even when we don’t feel like it. We thank God that we don’t have to go it alone–that the Holy Spirit and supportive friends and family walk with us. We thank God for the spiritual resources we have been given to cope with the circumstances. We thank God for this community of faith that carries the pain with us. We can face the Living God and say, “God, I don’t understand why this is happening, but by faith I thank you that you are still God. You are Sovereign and you hold not only my life, but this entire planet. You are the powerful God. You are the wise God. You are the patient God. You are the joyful God. Give me your power, wisdom, patience, and joy. I affirm that you have set your love on me and walk with me through this valley of the shadow and supply the strength I need to deal with it.”

That is why we can be thankful. When one stops and recognizes that God is with us in all the circumstances of life, it gives us great liberty and joy. When we face the sun, the shadows fall behind us and we don’t see them. But when we turn our backs on the sun all we can see are the shadows. What a wonderful freedom it is to be able to rise above our circumstances and say, “This annoyance does not have to reign in my life. I have a choice. I can let Christ reign over it.” “I do not have to let that person who just cut me off or hurt me or treated me unfairly be in power over my emotions, for the power of Christ reigns in me.” We will be able to experience Jesus’ promise, “In the world you will have tribulation, but fear not, for I have overcome the world.”

Remember, this passage was written by one who had experienced beatings, tortures, stoning, shipwreck, and all manner of rejection. And it was written to the Thessalonians who were constantly slandered by their Jewish opponents, persecuted by the pagan members of the city, and pressured to revert to the easy-going sexual standards of fertility cults. They also had conflicts within the church. There were folks who wouldn’t work because they figured Jesus was coming back soon and would transform society, so they sponged off of everyone else. There were doctrinal problems and personality conflicts. And to these people Paul says with confidence, “In everything give thanks.”

So, what is the cure for an ungrateful heart? First, recall and remember. Remember all that God has done for you in 2015 and remember all that God promises for the future. In recent years I have kept a gratitude journal. Every day I try to write down three things for which I’m grateful. I even write down things that drive me nuts and reframe them into a statement of gratitude. “I am so mad that my daughter’s puppy just peed on the rug again, but I’m grateful for my animal companions and that we have made a home for an abandoned creature.” Upon accepting an award, the late Jack Benny once re¬marked, “I really don’t deserve this. But I have arthritis, and I don’t deserve that either.” There are a lot of things we get in life that we don’t deserve–and a lot of them are good things.

Second, give it away. Demonstrate your gratitude by sharing your blessings with others. Today is not only Thanksgiving Sunday but also Stewardship Sunday. One of the finest motivations I can think of for giving is gratitude. We are blessed to be a blessing. We give to others because we have been given so much. As I wrote in the FLASH and Faith Notes this week, Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We like to reverse it to say, “Where your heart is, there your treasure will be also.” And that would make sense. We give to the things we care about. But that’s not what Jesus said. That’s the appeal we get from public radio. “If you enjoy the music and programming you listen to here, then do your part.”

But Jesus is giving us a different equation. In a recent Christian Century article Martin Copenhaver  suggest that we give and spend where you want your heart to be, then let your heart catch up. Ask yourself, “If I were the sort of person I truly want to be, then what would I do? How would I spend my money?” Then do what you would do if you were that kind of person. Put your treasure where you want your heart to be. Put your money where your mouth is. If you do, Jesus says, your heart will follow along like a puppy on a leash. If you want to care more about the kind of car you drive then go out and buy a high end BMW. But if you want your faith and trust in God to grow, make a pledge to the church that makes a difference.

This is Jesus’ style isn’t it? He doesn’t say feel benevolent toward your enemies. He commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. He asks us to act. Turn the other cheek. Settle differences quickly. Don’t worry. Give thanks to God. It’s like the Nike ads borrowed their motto from Jesus: “Just do it!”

Third, and last, practice gratitude. Not only did Paul tell us “in everything give thanks,” but so do the Psalms “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. O give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever” (Psalm 136: 1-2). The Psalmist doesn’t tell us to be thankful but to offer thanks. Bless God. You may not feel like doing it, but do it anyway. There is a practice from the Jewish tradition that is helpful here. Whenever something marvelous happens to you, when you see a radiant orange leafed tree, when you feel a newborn baby’s soft cheek, after a good meal say, “Blessed be Thou.” Blessed be Thou O wonder and mystery of the universe for my humanity, my senses, the beauty that surrounds, the love of Christ that lives in me.

Gratitude is learned behavior. While circumstances certainly have a profound effect on our lives, by the power of the Spirit, we can choose whether to be bitter or accepting, anxious or peaceful, kind or spiteful, envious or grateful. Over time, like anything, the more we practice gratitude it will become as natural as breathing.

C.S. Lewis observed in his book God in the Dock that grateful people are emotionally healthy people. “Praise,” said “almost seems to be inner health made audible.” I would say that words of thanksgiving are also inner health made audible.