And now we give you thanks, our God, and praise your glorious name. For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you. Amen.
I remember when I was a kid, one of the lessons that was drilled into me was to say “thank you.” If someone at church said something nice, I was to say “thank you.” When a relative mailed me a card with some money in it for my birthday, I had to call them to say “thanks.” When people went out of their way to do something nice for me, I was taught to write a thank you note. To this day, I still write thank you notes when people give me gifts or go out of their way to help me out. It’s a good habit to be in – gratitude is a virtue that our society can use more of.
And, thankfully, gratitude is on the rise. There’s a neat tool online called the Google Ngram Viewer. It’s a search engine that allows you to search for how often a particular word or phrase appears in published works from 1800 through today. The results are shown as a line graph showing the frequency of usage. Essentially, it’s a way to see how popular an idea is across time. There are some really interesting results on the topic of gratitude.
Gratitude, at least as a word, was much more prevalent in previous generations, but after a big decline through the 1800s, it’s been on the rise since 2000. Same thing for the word “thankfulness” and “thanksgiving.” Perhaps you’ve heard of the trend of people keeping a gratitude journal. The idea is that each day you write down the things that you were thankful for. It’s the market monetizing the 500-year-old idea of the Daily Examen from Ignatian spirituality. The Ngram results show that prior to 1993, the phrase “gratitude journal” was virtually non-existent and has been on the exponential rise since then. A lot of us are finding the blessings that come from being grateful.
And this is a good thing. In the 1920 and 30s, the words “anxiety” and “gratitude” were used at nearly identical rates. But since 1945, the word “anxiety” has been used far more often than “gratitude.” Based on usage in published works, today we are four times more anxious than we are grateful. The rising interest in gratitude journals and thankfulness practices is a helpful and holy corrective to the sense of anxiety that surrounds us.
We heard Jesus speak about both of these things, anxiety and gratitude, in the Gospel text from Matthew. Biblical scholars tell us that Jesus’ time was an anxious one as well. Some historians refer to the 1st century in that part of the world as the “Age of Anxiety.” Given the instability of their political situation, the massive wealth inequality that left most of the population in poverty, and the Roman occupation of the Holy Land, there was a loss of confidence and hope.
Well, if historians call that era the “Age of Anxiety,” we are living in what Jonathan Haidt calls in his latest book “The Anxious Generation.” We’re dealing with technology that is moving faster than we can keep up with, let alone understand. There are tangible manifestations of the climate crisis all around us. Racism remains far too common. We have a wealth gap that is growing in the wrong direction. Wars are raging in Sudan, Palestine, and Ukraine. Social scientists are warning us about the epidemic of loneliness. Indeed, there is a lot to be anxious about in the world today, just as there was in Jesus’ day.
Thanksgiving won’t necessarily make all of the problems go away overnight, but being a humble and grateful people just might mean that we don’t pass on this anxiety to the next generation. Thanksgiving, as a religious holiday, both in ancient Israel and in the United States, is an agricultural festival. We are reminded of how the gift of God’s creation abundantly provides for us. So with an agricultural lens, let’s think about what gratitude is all about.
The first step is that gratitude is rooted in awareness. Jesus calls our attention to the world around us. Gratitude takes us out of our closed-minded worries and has us notice what is all around us. We are surrounded by the goodness of creation, by birds of the air who are provided for, and by lilies of the field who are adorned with beauty and cared for by God. It’s a lesser-to-greater argument – if God provides for them, how much more will our loving Creator care for us?
Jesus notes that worrying, which can mean either mental anguish or toilsome striving, doesn’t get us anywhere. He asks if being anxious adds to the span of our life. Of course, it doesn’t. It probably does the opposite – stress shortens our lifespan and makes us waste what time we do have on worry. Another way to translate Jesus’ question is whether or not worrying can add a cubit to our height – which highlights the absurdity of worry. Our anxiety about something being different doesn’t correlate to real change.
To be clear, there is a difference between planning and worrying. The Bible is full of wisdom about the need to make appropriate plans. Jesus’ advice is not “throw caution to the wind” and don’t think about tomorrow. That would be a bad reading of this text and it would be terrible advice. But there’s a difference between thinking about tomorrow and anxiously obsessing over it.
Instead, we are to be rooted in awareness. And this is where a gratitude journal or the Ignatian Examen really can be helpful. Our days are filled with blessings and occasions of grace. Noticing them is the key. One mystic has said, “Attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives access to God.” You might keep a note on your phone or in a paper journal where you jot down things that you are grateful for as they happen to you. If it works better for you, you can do it at the end of the day before you go to bed. The goal is to become more aware of how God is sustaining, blessing, and coming to us throughout our days.
Being rooted in awareness, gratitude is then nourished by a trust in God. We heard the prophet Joel write, “You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame. You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other.”
Trust is one of those words that we all know, but is harder to define. When we say someone is trustworthy, we usually describe it more as a feeling as opposed to a rational process. Trust is built upon past deeds and reliability, yes. But we can also trust someone that we’ve just met – such as a surgeon who is going to operate on us. In that case, we turn to credentials. And God certainly is trustworthy based on both of these notions of trust.
Throughout history, God has demonstrated being with us and for us. Yes, there are tragedies in history, but there are also stories of redemption that prove that we can trust God to bring us through a crisis. As the Creator, Sustainer, and Lover of all that is, God also has the bona fides to make us trust that God is qualified to handle anything.
And yet sometimes we meet someone who is just trustworthy. We don’t know what licenses they hold or what their past contains, but we find ourselves trusting them. Generally, we trust someone when we feel that the person is going to do what is best for us. So when we’re in a foreign city and we ask for directions, we might trust someone to give us reliable directions instead of leading us into an ambush. Well, God is someone who absolutely has our best interest at heart, and this is what trusting God is all about.
Sometimes we even have to trust God more than we do ourselves, because God not only knows more than we do, but knows what we need more than we think we do. God’s primary promise to us is to be with us and for us. As one preacher put it, God gives us maximum support and minimum protection. Yes, bad things happen to us all, but God remains with us, meaning there is always the possibility for reconciliation and restoration.
We joined our voice with the Psalmist who proclaimed, “The LORD has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed. Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses of the Negev. Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy.” That is what trust is all about. Yes, maybe we’re in a literal drought and there is famine. Or maybe it’s a drought of resources, or health, or justice, or good news. Trust is knowing that God has not abandoned us and anticipating that songs of joy will follow our tears because God is good all the time.
What helps me to have this sort of trust in God are the prayers of the Church. By reciting the Psalms, reading Scripture, and punctuating my day with prayer, I find myself being assured of God’s presence with me and God’s intention to surround me with gracious goodness and love. This trust is what nourishes gratitude, as it allows me to relinquish control and lets God be God.
And lastly, gratitude blossoms in relationship. What’s so important about those thank you notes or phone calls is that they deepen our relationships with others. When we address God in gratitude, it delights our loving Father that we come with joyful hearts and gives God further opportunities to bless us.
If we are not grateful, a few bad things can happen. We might just assume the world operates on luck – so when things go our way, we were lucky and when calamity happens, that just means it was our turn to pull the short straw. But that’s a sad world to live in. It means that the world is utter chaos with no sense of order and it leads to a fatalistic worldview in which we think that our actions don’t make a difference. Justice, mercy, peace, and love are always worth pursuing.
Or a lack of gratitude might make us think that our world is primarily about karma, which is an economic reality. You do enough good things, and you get good things. Obviously, God is not a vending machine for us to manipulate, so that’s not quite right either. Nor is the idea that we deserve the good things that come to us. That is rooted in self-righteousness which has no room for God. “We’ve been good boys and girls and have unilaterally earned what we have, no thanks to anyone else.” That’s clearly not a Christian position.
Instead, we gratefully proclaim, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” We know that God desires goodness and wholeness for all of us. As we acknowledge the source of our blessings, we enter into a deepening relationship with God. In our prayers of gratitude, we might also tell God what is on our hearts, ask God how we can share these blessings with others, or ask God to be with us in the places that are still a challenge. Gratitude flowers into the joy of walking humbly with our God.
Just like the produce of the earth that we thank God for today is rooted, nourished, and flowers, so too does gratitude lead to a flourishing faith. Gratitude is rooted in an awareness of what God has done and is doing for us, it is nourished by trusting in God’s promises for us, and it flowers into knowing God more deeply. As we move to celebrate the Great Thanksgiving, we ask that God gift us with thankful hearts so that we might always praise the God from whom all blessings flow. Amen.
