Unexpected

"Unexpected"
Matthew24:36-44

Do you remember all those disaster movies that were hits a long time ago?  One of the first was the movie, "Earthquake" that came out in 1974.  It was the first film that came out in sensuround, a kind of stereo sound that was supposed to make you not only hear the earthquake, but feel it as well.

The storyline of the movie began with introducing the audience to a number of characters.  We watched and became involved with their individual stories.  We saw how their everyday routines were lived out each day.  As the audience, though, we knew the secret the characters on the screen did not.  We knew an earthquake was coming.  The people in the movie just went on with their everyday lives.  But we in the audience wanted to shout out the secret, "Watch out you idiots—an earthquake is coming!!"

That's about the way every disaster movie since then has been developed.  Whether it was an alien attack in several movies, like "Independence Day," or a volcano erupting out of the La Brea Tarpits in Los Angeles in the movie, "Volcano", we first get to know characters carrying out their everyday lives until the huge unexpected event drops in their laps.

That's also what is so scary about all the terrorist attacks that go on every day around the world.  You never know.  People are carrying on with their normal everyday lives.  They are going to work.  They get on the subway.  They get on a school bus.  They are standing around the coffee pot having their normal morning banter.  Then the subway train starts gaining speed and the brakes don't work.  Or a bomb goes off.

Each day, people look at the mounds of work on their desk in their cubicle, wondering when it would get done.  They were thinking about the argument they had had with their spouse that morning across the breakfast table.  And then everything starts shaking.

They were looking through their iPhones and iPads, sending texts and tweets, updating Facebook.  Then a spaceship shows up, shoots a death ray into the building, imploding it.

They were kissing loved ones at the airport terminal and boarding what they thought would be a routine flight.  They were asking stewardesses for a pillow for the long flight ahead.  They were opening their laptops once the OK was given by the pilot to turn on electronic devices.  Then the unexpected happened:  Snakes on a Plane!!

The movies and the real life events people have faced in our country lately have all served to remind us of the reality that none of us knows what's going to happen in the next moment.  We assume life is a stable progression of events, mostly predictable with few if any surprises.

But the truth is, we really can't be sure what unexpected things might be dropped into our lives at any one moment.  Possibly the very next moment.  As the bumper sticker from the late 1960's stated, "One atomic bomb can ruin your whole day."

Jesus was making the same point about the unexpected return of the Savior.  Jesus likened it to the time of Noah.  People went about their everyday lives.  They carried out their ordinary kinds of tasks.  From small, routine matters to big ceremonies they lived through their predictable, ordinary lives.

Then the rain started falling.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Nothing unexpected.  Everyone saw the rain clouds forming.  Lots of people probably looked up and said to someone else, "Looks like rain."  Rain was a normal kind of occurrence.  Except this rain didn't stop as expected.  "It rained and poured for forty daysies, daysies…" until all life on the planet was drowned except Noah's family and their floating zoo.  That was totally unexpected.

That, said Jesus, is what the Second Coming of the Savior will be like.  People will allow their lives to be lulled into predictable routines.  They will become numb to the holy.  They will go on with their treadmill lives, with no Godly pursuits happening.  They will make their squirrel cage existence go round and round, but never make something happen with the Lord..  They will continue to live like rats in a maze, scratching down alley after alley, looking for a reward that doesn't even matter in the larger scheme of things; or maybe giving up on the idea that there ever was a reward somewhere in the confusion.

And then, BAM!!  The Lord will return unexpectedly, sweeping up the faithful and leaving the rest behind to face their fate.  No one will see it coming.

Jesus used the story of Noah for a very particular reason.  That reason was because he wanted us to see that this is the way God likes to make things happen.  The biggest events God has made happen, and will make happen were totally unexpected.  It's just the way God does things.

Let's use a couple of pieces of the story of Moses that I've been telling the kids.  Moses, out in the wilderness taking care of sheep, doing, day after day, whatever it is shepherds do.  And then, whoa!, there's a suddenly a bush on fire nearby, but it's not burning up.  Moses couldn't have expected that, no matter how creative his mind may have been.

Or, standing at the edge of the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army coming like a dust storm down upon them.  Had they escaped, just to be slaughtered?  But then God tells Moses to hold up his staff, and when he does, the sea parts before them, and the Hebrew people walk across on dry ground with two huge walls of water on each side of the procession.  Totally unexpected.

Or, moving to the birth story of Jesus, Mary's life unfolded with the normal, small town, Middle Eastern culture predictability.  She was arranged by her father to be married to Joseph, a man from a family on the good side of town, with a respectable occupation.  As a carpenter, Joseph lived by the rule, "Measure twice, cut once."  It applied to every part of his life.

Mary would have a stable life (pardon the pun) being a wife, and, God-willing, a mother of several sons.  Well, God was willing, only a lot sooner than Mary was willing.  In an unexpected way and with an unexpected message, God dropped his world-changing plan into her lap.

But more than that, God dropped the Savior into the lap of an unsuspecting, unexpectant world.  In one of the smallest of Israel's towns, in a cattle stall, while the rest of the world carried on, or slept on, God was birthed into his world.

With the same kind of unexpectedness, Christ will come again to end and remake all of creation.  That's how God likes to make things happen, says Jesus.  So you better be alert.  Those least alert will be left totally clueless.  You don't want to be one of those, Jesus added.

Or, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard Jesus is supposed to come again, but I'm not going to wait around for it.  I'm going to go on and live my life and not hold my breath.  I've got places to go and people to see."  According to Jesus, those kinds of people were drowned in the flood.  Or, will be left behind at the second coming of Christ.

Queen Victoria was one of the most loved Queen's of England.  She would make unexpected calls on the farm folks who lived in cottages or small villages across the British countryside.   Any day might be a royal day, and the humble Brits would put a chair at their table prepared for a possible, yet surprise, visit.

They would keep their houses spotless. They were a clean and wholesome people, but the Queen's surprise visits added to the joy of keeping their homes lovely. The old people who remembered her visits in their youth charmed visitors by the expression used in the residences across the countryside. They would say, "Perhaps today, she’ll come my way."

Or, as Christians, we should say, "Perhaps today, the Lord will come our way."  The people, with the first coming of the Savior, had all but given up that God would send such a one into the world.  They were already amending their expectations that God would usher in a "Messianic Age" but that an individual Messiah probably wasn't a part of God's plans.

Then, surprise, Jesus the Savior is born, and all their expectations went out the window.  It was God, who had to say, through Jesus' coming, "Perhaps today, the Savior will come your way," so that they could get back on track with what God was doing.

The kinds of questions you need to be asking yourself, this Advent, are questions like, How could the Lord catch you the most unawares?  What kinds of activities do you get so wrapped up in that you would miss today—the coming of Christ or the Second Coming?  What kind of qualities do you have that would make you "takable" rather than being "left behind?"  When are the times you are most attentive to God?  Most inattentive?

What I'm thinking is, if God is important to you, you better be ready for the unexpected.  You better be ready for anything.  And, especially, you better be ready to have God impose his agenda and his schedule upon you.  Because, in the end, ready or not, that's how it's going to come down.

"Maybe today, the Lord will come your way."

Grace Descending; Gratitude Ascending" (part 3)

"Grace Descending; Gratitude Ascending"  (part 3)
1 Thessalonians 5:18 (KJV)


"In everything give thanks…"

Four words.  In.  Everything.  Give.  Thanks.  Let's look at them individually in order.

First, "In…"  Other words and phrases we could use instead of "in" might be, "during",  "while in the midst of…",  "immersed in".  The point is, that we are giving thanks while something is happening.  We aren't giving thanks while in some sort of life bubble or experience vacuum.  That's not possible.  And we aren't giving thanks after everything is over and we are looking back and saying, "Thank God that's over!"  Although that would be legitimate.

That's why "in" is so important.  We have to determine, in what?  In life, whether we be in panic mode, in procrastination mode, in multi-tasking mode.  We are in the middle of some kind of experience, good, bad, or ugly.  Because we're in the middle of it, we don't know how it will turn out.  Our circumstance could go this way or that.  Our circumstance could present us with an infinite number of life options.  That may be part of the panic.  We aren't in control.  We feel like the situation is taking us for a ride rather than us being at the steering wheel, which is the position we'd like to be in.

When we are in control, we are less willing to see, and therefore take a look at more options.  So while we are "in" some circumstance in which we aren't in control we may be open to other possibilities that we might otherwise not entertain.

Not only that, but while we are "in" some circumstance we may be more willing to rely on another.  That other may be God.  Or a fellow Christian.  Most of us would probably say we rely on God most of the time.  But there are times we really lean on God, when we are "in" some kind of circumstance we'd rather not be in.

When you think about it, we are always "in" some situation or another.  Usually many situations at once.  Life is a "being in" experience.  Think about the opposite.  What is a "not in" kind of life?  Uninvolved.  Unconnected, with no relationships.  Ungiving.  Ultimately, being "not in" life is a death spiral kind of living.

In.  Another way I like to look at "in" is adventure.  The disciples would be a good example here.  If you are reading along the 5 x 5 x 5 Bible reading plan, we just finished up the gospel of John not too long ago.  At the start of the gospel, (as it is at the start of each of the gospels) Jesus calls the disciples.  Before Jesus, their lives followed a daily routine: get up in the wee hours of the morning, climb in their boat with their brother or father, row out on Lake Galilee, cast the nets, pull them back in, pull any fish you caught out of the net, cast the nets again, pull them back in, hour after hour, row back to shore, sort the fish, salt the fish, carry some to market, mend the nets, go to bed, start it all over again the next day.

That is, until Jesus came and offered them to be part of an adventure.  To join him not in a life of ruts, but a life of adventures, one after the other.  Something new each day.  It may be a life changing conversation with someone.  Or it may be a healing.  Or it might be teaching others about God's ways, and seeing the lights go on in their faces.  You are helping them get it!

That's the kind of "in" that many of you are living.  In an adventure.  Living an adventure with God.  You are "in" life, not "out of life", out of synch with God and God's ways.

The next word is "everything."  Everything.  This may be the hardest word in the phrase, because when Paul says "everything," he means, everything.  The good and the bad.  The beautiful and the horrifying.  When we hear the word "everything", that's where we usually go—to the horrible side of everything.

We put all our experiences on a continuum.  On the far side are the experiences that fill us with ecstasy and wonder, amazement and total goodness.  On the other end of the spectrum is the gut-punching, life-sucking, endless emotional pain, kinds of experiences.  That's the end we think of first, because it is so difficult to marry gratitude with grief.

When I lived up in Nebraska, I went through a 12 week class called, "Grief Recovery."  I took the class for a couple of reasons.  One was, I wanted to lead such a group myself in the church I was at, so I wanted to see how this one was run.  And I took the class to work through, in a group setting, some of my own long held on to grief that I needed to find a way to let go of.  It met once a week for the 12 weeks.  There were about 50 people in the class.  I wasn't prepared for what happened.

For the first few weeks, at the opening, we all had to sit in a circle in a big room, and at the start, speak out loud why we were there.  We had to introduce ourselves with our name and then say what our loss was.  It wasn't so hard for me to speak my loss, but to hear everyone else's.  It was overwhelming.

Parents whose teenagers were friends killed in an auto accident on graduation night.  One man's daughter was raped and murdered.  There were at least two families whose family member had taken their own lives.  One man's adult daughter died of AIDS, that she had gotten from her husband because he was cheating on her.  One young woman's husband, a few days after they were married, was killed in an auto accident.  And on and on it went around this circle of 50 people.

The collective grief filled the room with tears until the level was up to the ceiling and I thought I might drown in that liquid grief.  When I think back to that class, and then try to speak out loud these words of Paul, "In everything give thanks," it's like my mouth and throat can't do it.

But I know the Paul, who wrote these words, didn't just put them out there as some kind of Joel Osteen platitude.  Paul had been beaten several times to within an inch of his life, had been stoned nearly to death, imprisoned several times, shipwrecked, all simply for preaching the gospel.  And at the end of his life he realized he was going to be beheaded.  If someone like that can write, "In everything give thanks," then I can certainly listen.

Remember, I just said our life experiences are on an everything continuum, which means there are some really great things that happen to us.  That "everything" means "everything"—which means all the great stuff too, as well as everything in between.  And even then, in response to the great things on the everything spectrum, we aren't very good about saying thanks.

It's like the story of the 10 people who were healed by Jesus of their leprosy and only one returned to Jesus to say "Thank you."  Think how the lives of the other 9 had been changed for the better!  What an amazing thing to be released from that death sentence of an awful disease where body parts rotted and fell off.  Now they were whole and cured and able to see their family and friends.  They got their lives back.  That was an opposite end of the spectrum experience from the bad stuff that can happen to a person, and still they were thankless.  So on either end of the everything experience spectrum, we aren't very good at being grateful people.

In everything.

In everything GIVE…  Not receive; give.  Throughout the history of the Dear Abby column in the newspaper, one of the main themes of the letters she'd receive, was about this very issue.  Somebody did something for someone else (gave them a gift, did a good deed) but no thanks was given back.  The person writing in to Abby ended up being resentful and angry.  How dare someone not give thanks!  To us!  It's a sign of our ever deepening narcissism that we are more concerned about getting thanks, than giving thanks.  We would rather put someone in our debt, than being indebted to someone else.

It's part of what's wrong with our relationship with God.  To "give" thanks means you are giving thanks to some one else.  You have been given to, and so you are responding to the giver with thanks.  So, in order to give thanks, you have to acknowledge that you've been given something, by someone.

That is the understood, but invisible object of Paul's statement:  In everything give thanks.  But to whom?  To whom do we give thanks?  For Paul, of course, the answer is God.  In everything give thanks (to God).  If we are to give thanks to God in everything, that means everything is a gift from God.  All that we have, all that we experience, all that we are, is a gift from God, deserving our thanks.  So give God what is his due, for everything that comes our way.  Don't wait to read God's letter to Dear Abby, before you give God that gratitude.

Lastly, is the word, thanks.  In everything give thanks.  Now this will be the hardest part.  I've already said, at the start of the message that giving thanks for the most awful experiences seems nigh impossible.  But what I want to try and explain now is going to seem really counter intuitive, and equally impossible.  So you're going to have to listen well to this part.

Remember the continuum of great things on one end and really awful experiences on the other?  What we all hope will happen with our lives is that we will end up with more good experiences on that end of the continuum than bad things on the other end.  We think life is about collecting more thankful memories than grief-filled, resentful memories.  If life doesn't end up that way, we are sure we will not come to the end of our lives with much of a thankful heart.  No one wants to end up feeling that way.

Now comes the hard part.  Gratitude in everything is a way to reclaim your past.  It doesn't make sense, does it?  But what if gratitude is a way to redefine your past, including rejections, abandonment, loss, and failures?  Can we be grateful to God in everything, and through that thankfulness, celebrate how we gained a heart for deeper love, stronger hope, and broader faith?  Can we trust, and therefore thank, God no matter what?

When our gratitude for the past is only partial, or we are grateful for only part of our past, our hope for a new future can never be full.  If we are not grateful for everything, then we will miss how God can make even the worst of our experiences into something good.

Another way to look at being a totally converted person—as I believe Paul was— is to gather up all of your past, and to express your gratitude to God for it all.  It is seeing how God has taken all of your experiences and by God's hand, transformed them all into ways that makes you grateful.  Everything becomes wrapped up into an expression of God's grace, and thereby something for which we may express our gratitude to God.

In everything give thanks.

Saying Grace: Living a Life of Gratitude

"Grace Descending; Gratitude Ascending:

Saying Grace: Living A Life of Gratitude"  (part 2)

Luke 24:30-31

Dinner, the evening meal, was the only meal my growing up family ate together.  We sat in our chairs at the dining room table, my father turned on the TV in the next room, where he could see it from his dining table chair, and we ate the standard meat and potatoes meal my mother had cooked.

My mother almost always served some kind of fruit out of the can with our dinner.  A favorite of the family was fruit cocktail.  All of us 5 kids made sure that someone else didn't, by the luck of the scoop, get more cherries than anyone else.  The cherries in the fruit cocktail were the most valuable thing at our family dinner table.  And therefore the first thing eaten.

But we couldn't eat until we had said the prayer at the table, which was usually offered by my mother.  We all had to fold our hands and bow our heads, and close our eyes in reverence during the prayer.  When the prayer was done, all of us kids would unfold our hands, grab our spoons, open our eyes and lift our heads, all as quickly as possible, and eat the cherry out of our fruit cocktail.

Except me.  Mine would be gone.  During the table prayer, my father would steal the cherry out of my fruit cocktail and eat it.  He thought it was funny.  He'd always laugh.  Ha ha ha ha.  I always thought it highly irreverent that he would steal something during the prayer—especially MY cherry.  It always made me mad he'd steal from my bowl, simply because I had the bad misfortune to have to sit next to the guy.  I think he enjoyed making me mad and disappointed when we had fruit cocktail.

That was just one of the many dysfunctions at our family dinner table.  The fact that it happened during the most sacred part of the meal—the dinner time grace for our food—forever gave me a tinge of anger at every table grace since then.  That memory has tainted for me what should have been something holy, expressing gratitude to God, but ending up making me feel entirely ungrateful.

Mine was not the only table where the table grace had become twisted.  In one episode of "The Simpsons" the family was voted family of the year.  So news and camera people followed the Simpson's around for a day.  At the end of the day, they are gathered around the dinner table, Homer asked Bart to say grace, the TV cameras are humming, while Bart prayed, "Dear God, we bought all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.  Amen."  To which everyone sucked in an air-filled gasp.

It was my daughter Kristin who saved the table prayer for me.  I never liked the rote table graces, and so, like my mother, would offer a prayer for our food.  When Ryan and Kristin got old enough, they wanted to say the prayer for our food.  Kristin was probably about four or five, and she would start praying.  Kristin's meal time prayer went on and on and on, thanking God for everything her wonderful little heart could think of at that moment.  And it was a long list.  Every family member by name, her friends at kindergarten, all by name, the church, birds chirping outside, our dog Jake, the shirt she was wearing that day.  And on and on.  Sometimes Ryan and I would open just one eye and look at each other and smile, wondering when her thank-full monologue was going to be over.  But I just let her go on, because I loved it, and treasured her prayers.

Kristin saved the table prayer for me because her prayers had three qualities of gratitude that I will share with you, in the hopes that your gratitude will find these qualities and you would make them a part of your grateful living.  I think the the table grace can model the larger life of gratitude to God.

The first quality of her praying gratitude was simplicity.  Even though her prayers were long, her gratitude was simple.

When Alan Luttrell and I first started getting together for breakfast once a week 4 years ago, before Rod and Rex joined us, we'd have these conversations.  One conversation I remember was around this question:  "Is faith and belief simple or complicated?"  Is the Christian faith simple or complicated?  I think, if I'm remembering that conversation correctly, we both came down on the side that believing is really simple.

I'm of the opinion that faith in God and all this, when looked at from God's perspective, is really quite simple.  You believe or you don't.  You act in faith or you don't.  You take God at His word and heart or you don't.  For Alan, it all came down to (as he said last week in his moment for mission), "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as your self."  It doesn't get any simpler than that.  We are the ones who make faith complex and muddy.

Kristin's simple prayers of gratitude opened that quality of simplicity up for me.  Karl Barth, was a German theologian during the Nazi era. He wrote a multi-volume work of Christian theology titled, Church Dogmatics.  It's so complex and wordy in it's writing that just one of Barth's sentences may go on for 5 pages.  Years later, in a seminar attended by an American audience, Barth was asked to summarize his beliefs into one sentence.  Barth started singing: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…"

Our beliefs are not that complex.  Our faith is as simple as, "Jesus loves me…"  Expressing our gratitude to Jesus is that simple, because it's simple gratitude expressed out of a simple, yet powerful faith.

The power of the simplicity of gratitude is discovering it is the one thing necessary.  I've preached before about getting caught up in so many things that seem like they are necessary for us to have a good life, and we try to do them all and we wear ourselves out chasing them.  But being grateful to God is one of those simple and necessary things that causes ripple effects through so much else in our lives.  That's what we need to look for—the ripple effect qualities, not just the one splash qualities.  That's the power of being simply a grateful person—that gratitude to God casts ripples throughout our whole lives, affecting so much.

The second quality of Kristin's meal time gratitude was spontaneity.  Her prayer-full gratitude flowed spontaneously out of her little girl heart.  She couldn't hold back.  Everything, and I mean everything, was an object of gratitude for her, and she couldn't wait to thank God for every bit of it.  She didn't write it out on paper ahead of time.  She didn't memorize it.  She just let it flow, in a wondrous gush of uninhibited prayer.  She wasn't worrying about what I or Ryan was thinking of her—she just let go.

I talked a bit last week about how gratitude doesn't seem to be part of our natural make-up as human beings.  We have to coax gratitude out of our children—"Did you tell grandma thank you for giving you that K-State toilet seat cover?"  It seems we have to teach, or model to our children a sense of obligation for being a person of gratitude.

That's why those moments, like when Kristin prayed at the meal time table, that she had no sense of obligation.  "Who want's to pray?"

I never heard, in response, "I guess I'll do it, so we can get it over with, so we can eat."

Kristin had none of that kind of obliged drudgery about having to be made to say thank you to God for every little thing.  For her, that spontaneous gratitude was like listening to improvisational jazz music.

A couple of years ago, I went to a concert at Johnson County Community College with Ryan and his wife Amanda.  It was a concert of Miles Davis music.  Miles Davis was one of the great jazz trumpet players, and known for his gift of improvising.  Throughout this concert, the performer would stop and talk about the genius of Miles Davis' music, because he would improvise—that is he would compose music on the spot, while other musicians carried the melody and rhythms of the song underneath Davis' improvising solo's.

That's what Kristin was doing when she was 4 years old:  Improvising her gratitude.  Her grateful prayers were the solos she'd play, layering them at the dinner table over the rhythms of her 4 year old life.  On and on she'd pray out of her amazing spontaneous thankfulness, and I got caught up in the sheer originality of her composing on the spot, right there at our mealtime table.  That's what gratitude opens up for our lives and living.

The third and final quality of Kristin's grateful table grace was unrestrained delight.  She loved to pray out her gratitude.  She'd be disappointed if I said the prayer, or asked Ryan to pray.  She delighted in saying the table grace.

The word in Latin for our English word, gratitude, is gratia.  It literally means, pleasure.  Gratia is the taking pleasure in some gift or relationship.  Gratia, or gratitude is the way of finding pleasure in all things.  The reason we are able to find pleasure by offering thanks for all of life's occasions is because we don't know which will turn out to be, possibly, one of our greatest blessings.  Even our worst experiences, as they start out, can suddenly change by the hand of God.  Then we find ourselves overwhelmed with gratitude because we didn't see the good God planned coming.   The only proper response is gratefulness, expressed in unrestrained delight.

Think of the scene of the Last Supper.  It's somber.  In a few hours, the betrayal of Jesus will take place and the whole trial and Crucifixion will be set in motion.  Jesus announced that one of the 12 was going to betray him and the disciples are all wondering who that was going to be.  Each of the disciples is wondering, silently, "Is it me?"  Into that dreadful scene, Jesus says a table grace.  He takes the bread, he breaks it, he blesses it, and says thanks to God.

How do you look upon such a scene and say, "Thanks"?  How do you live in the midst of such a dour experience and break bread, and speak blessing into such an experience?  How do you change your facial expression from anxiety to unrestrained delight?  The only way is to do as Jesus did, to speak thanks, to give blessing, to express gratia—pleasure—knowing that to do so is to transform that occasion and all of life with gratitude.

That's the power of the table grace—to let that one prayer be the symbol for living a life of gratitude.  It's such a common prayer.  It's the one kind of prayer that most people pray, even if they don't pray any other kind of prayer.  But to pray at the table, in the simplicity of faith, spontaneous, and with unrestrained delight, is what overlays all of life with gratitude to God, no matter what.

Grace Descending; Gratitude Ascending

"Grace Descending; Gratitude Ascending"

Colossians 4:2

A Jewish mother is at the beach playing with her young son.  She is standing on the beach not wanting to get her feet wet, when all of a sudden, a huge wave appears from nowhere and crashes directly over the spot where the boy is wading. 

The water recedes and the boy is no longer there. He simply vanished. She holds her hands to the sky, screams and cries, "Lord, how could you? Have I not been a wonderful mother? Have I not given a tenth of all my income to you? Have I not tried my very best to live a life that you would be proud of?" 

A minute later another huge wave appears out of nowhere and crashes on the beach. As the water recedes, the boy is standing there, smiling, splashing around as if nothing had ever happened. A loud voice booms from the sky, "Okay, okay, I have returned your son. Are you satisfied?" 

She responds, "He had a hat."

Some people just don't know how to be grateful.  Or maybe it's that they are only partially grateful.  They show gratitude, but…  They are thankful, but…  There's that "but…" always in there that keeps them from embracing full gratitude.  They know they received a certain measure of some unmerited gift, and they say thanks, but they also, in the back of their mind, think they deserved more.  Or they can't get past their critical nature that keeps them from being fully thankful.  "Thank you for saving my son from the wave, but don't you think you could have returned him with his hat intact?"

Being thankful means overcoming our resistance to not be grateful.  It doesn't appear that we are born with the innate ability to say, "Thank you."  When you were a child, and you had received something from someone, what did your mother always ask you?  "Tell them, 'Thank you,'" or some such thing.  We have to be told or taught to be people of gratitude.  A boy said to his father, "Guess what?  I can say please and thank-you in Spanish, German or French."

His father responded, "How come you never say it in English?"

It is remarkable, isn't it, that it's not in our human nature to be grateful.  It's more in our nature to take things for granted.  Or, out of some narcissistic sense of entitlement, to think that what we received was not all that great, and we certainly should have received more.  Or to look upon the task of writing "Thank You" notes as sheer drudgery.  Or we are so self-centered, how do you say "Thank you" to yourself?  Like the guy who in his bedtime prayer said, "Dear God, is there some way you could help me, but make it look like I did it myself?"

There is a resistance there, isn't there, to not be a person of gratitude.  Which means it has to come down to a conscious decision on each of our parts to be thankful people.  Just google "quotes on gratitude" and you'll get list after list of such inspirational material about gratefulness.  Some of them may fill you with the motivation to move towards being a thankful person.  For a day or so.

William George Jordan once said, “Ingratitude is a crime more despicable than revenge, which is only returning evil for evil, while ingratitude returns evil for good.” Why?  Why are we so resistant?  Why does it seem like we have to be convinced to become people of gratitude?  And how do we become convinced?

The apostle Paul linked, in several letters, the attitude of gratitude with prayer.  As our verse for the morning says:  "Persevere in prayer, with minds alert and with thankful hearts" (Colossians 4:2, REB).  Because having "thankful hearts" is so difficult for us as human beings, Paul emphasizes that to move toward that goal, we need to persevere in prayer and have our minds alert.  Think of gratitude as both a process and a goal in the Christian spiritual life.

A thankful heart keeps a person alert in prayer, wrote Paul.  Alert for what?  Alert not only for God, but also for the gifts of God.  Two women were walking through a park one bright Spring morning.  One of the women was not much of a believer in God.  The other woman was a believer.  The non-believer, overwhelmed by the park's beauty said, spontaneously, "I'm so grateful for the beauty of this day."

Her believing friend replied, "Grateful to whom?"

That's the alertness that gratitude in prayer helps with.  Maybe our problem is not that we are ungrateful, or that we are somehow beyond an exclamation of thankfulness.  We just don't know, because of our lack of or limited faith, who we are supposed to be thankful to.  We may be thankful for a number of things, but who are we thankful to?  Life?  The universe?

Alertness in prayer, Paul wrote, is what focuses our attention.  Alertness to God.  Alertness to the movement of God in our lives.  Alertness to the blessings of God that come our way every day.  Alertness to being aware of the many occasions during even the most ordinary of days, that would inspire us to say, "Thanks be to God."  That is one of the main works prayer—to be alert every day for the instances when we saw the hand and movement of God, and we can't help but say, "I'm so grateful, and I know the One to whom I am grateful."

A man stood at the front of the congregation and humbly announced that he and his wife wished to donate $5000 toward a new stained glass window in memory of their son who was killed in Afghanistan.  A woman in the congregation then nudged her husband and quietly whispered, "Let's do the same thing."

"What?" the husband whispered back.  Our son wasn't killed in Afghanistan."

"Yes," she replied, "I know."

Both couples, alert to God, decided to do the same thing, respond in the same way, because they were thankful for two opposite reasons: a son's ultimate sacrifice in war; and a son who didn't have to be faced with such a moment.  It is that prayerful alertness that has to happen in order that gratitude may be the response to Godly action, no matter what that action is.

That's where I got the sermon title for this series, "Grace descending; Gratitude Ascending."  In other words, God acts first.  God is moving about in our lives and in our world.  We see that action, when we are alert to it through our praying.  And once we see it, we respond.  God's grace falls upon us like the sunshine.  God acts first in some descending activity.  Once we see it, once we catch a glimpse of it through our praying alertness, we respond with "gratitude ascending" to such a giving and amazing God.

Our verse for today had one more element of gratitude:  "Persevere in prayer, with minds alert and with thankful hearts."  The word is "persevere."  To have an alert and thankful heart is not something that comes at the snap of the fingers.  Such a heart can only happen when we persevere.  Cultivating a thankful heart, alert to God, takes a lifetime.

One author was the guest of honor at a writer's club.  He declined to give a speech, but agreed to answer any questions the club members might have.  One lady raised her hand and asked, "Tell me, to what one thing do you attribute your success?"

The author paused for a moment and answered:  "I can best answer that by telling a story of a Swede in Alaska.  He was the owner of several rich mines, and all his friends wondered how he had managed to become so successful.  So finally, one of them asked the Swede their question.  'Ay never told anybody before,' the Swede replied, 'but Ay vill tell you.  Ay just kept diggin' holes.'"

I talked at the start of this message about our resistance to be people of gratitude and overcoming that resistance.  Being an overcomer means having that perseverance in prayer.  It means having not just the attitude of "keep diggin' holes," but actually doing the work.  The Swedish miner didn't have good intentions about diggin' holes.  He did it.  And he kept digging, and he kept digging, and he kept digging.

The result of that kind of perseverance in prayer is intimacy with God.  That's the only result of persistent prayer: growing an intimate relationship with God.  All three of Paul's qualities work together to build that kind of faithful relationship.  If you are keeping your mind alert for the activity of God, if you are responding to the activity of God with a grateful heart, if you are persevering in prayer, even in the times you don't feel like praying, when you just keep at it, you just keep diggin', the result is a long intimate relationship with God.  When you then come to the end of your life, you know the one whose hands your are laying your spirit into.

Even when you get to the end of your life, whenever that is, because of your prayers and alertness and thankfulness, you can gratefully turn your soul over to our amazing God, with whom you have walked your whole life.

One grandmother was talking to her granddaughter.  "I hope you like the dictionary app I got for your iPad for your birthday.

Her granddaughter replied, "Yes, and I just can't find the words to thank you."

All that we have to live a wonderful life has been given to us by our God-of-all-gifts.  It is simply our task to receive those gifts, to recognize and be alert to those gifts, and then to find the words to let our gratitude ascend to that most amazing God.