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.