Readings
- Deuteronomy 8:10-18
- 2 Corinthians 9:7-15
- Matthew 6: 25-33
Sermon
Lillian Daniel, in our challenging piece in the Christian Century, tells the following story:
[A man] explained how his own son had bowled him over with a great insight. He said: “Listen to what my son wrote: ‘Children are starving with empty bellies in faraway lands. They have nothing to eat. All around them they hear the sounds of gunfire and bombs going off. And it made me realize that we are so lucky. We are so lucky to be living here and not there.’”
“I had tears in my eyes when he said that,” the parent went on to say. “I was blown away and I realized that he gets it, he really gets it. It was gratitude. That’s our religion—gratitude. And at that moment, when he recognized all that suffering and how fortunate he was, I could not have been prouder.”
There is a profound problem with being thankful and its a very human problem. Being thankful is really rather easy much of the time and it shifts too easily to a kind of “aren’t we lucky” thinking.
We can look out the window on a beautiful morning like today and it takes no effort to be thankful for the blue sky, the sunshine and the crispness of the air. Aren’t we so lucky to live in our nice houses with windows we can look out of to see the beauty of God’s creation?
But its a little more difficult for the homeless man who has lain shivering awake all night under the cold clear sky to see that same beauty! And if God has given us, in our comfortable homes, such beauty, why has God also inflicted upon the homeless man such despair?
The full sermon is attached to this post in both OpenDocument and pdf versions.