A Three-Fold Thanksgiving
By Dr. Tom Pace
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Colossians 3:15-17
We have been in a series on the end of Galatians and we’ve been talking about sanctification, life in the Spirit. Today’s sermon isn’t out of Galatians so it’s not technically a part of that series, but it picks up on the same theme of the kind of transformation that God does in our lives. It’s Thanksgiving weekend. I think at Thanksgiving we often make it sort of an event when really the Scripture teaches us that Thanksgiving is to be a way of life. So I want to invite you to follow along in your bulletin and listen as we read this little passage from a longer section in Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Colossians 3:15-17 (NRSV)

Join me in prayer. O God, open us up to whatever you have for us today. Open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I want to talk about which camp you’re in about what you’re supposed to wear to church. Isn’t that one of the good things about wearing a robe every Sunday? You don’t even have to think about it. You have to watch your shoes – that’s all you have to watch out for.
Some of you are in the “gotta dress up” camp. That you’re supposed to dress up for church. I have a friend who says, “You know, I’m going to meet the king, so when I go meet the king I’m going to get dressed nice to meet the king.”
Okay. I said that the king – that king – has seen me in my underwear so I don’t think I need to worry about really impressing the king when I show up at church.
Well, let’s think a bit about what you wear. Our Scripture really begins with a conversation about what you are to wear. It’s not in the part that we read together, it’s what precedes it immediately. This is from Colossians 3: “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed…But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self….As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience….Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
So this is a passage about again sanctification and about that transformation that happens when God’s grace comes into our lives and we understand ourselves as forgiven and justified. And then the Holy Spirit moves in and begins to sanctify us, by God’s grace, to change us so that we are more like his son Jesus Christ.
So gratitude is a response to God’s grace in our lives but it is also then what I call a keystone habit. Listen, a keystone habit is one habit that if you’ll practice it, it sort of brings the other habits along. So if you practice gratitude these other habits – compassion, humility, patience, kindness, love – these other characteristics of life begin to come with it. And that’s sometimes called a keystone habit.
Listen, he follows the words that he just said about putting on love with these that we read just a minute ago. “And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God …” That’s the second time he mentions gratitude. “… And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
Three times. He says, “Look, you have to be thankful.”
So what I’d like for us to do is to see how we can take a look at Thanksgiving and view it as that keystone habit … Remember last week we talked about how we can sow seeds, that we don’t bring the transformation ourselves, that we don’t do it by gritting our teeth or by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps or by the strength of our will. We do it by seeding the Spirit and then the Holy Spirit does that transformation.
One of the ways we seed the Spirit is by practicing gratitude. So let’s look at these three ways, the three things he talks about. First he talks about thankful hearts. “The peace of Christ rule in your hearts…And be thankful.”
Notice that he is now talking about what we are not what we do. Be thankful, he says. It’s a state of being. It’s who you are.
In my former church there was a mentor of mine, a woman named Betty Blackman. Betty was a committed layperson, a fierce personality. Very few things happened at Christ United Methodist Church without Betty Blackman approving. I guess that’s the best way to say that. She was just committed and focused. And when we had her lead in prayer, which she did periodically, she always began her prayers with these words: “It is with grateful hearts that we come before you today, O God.” At first I thought that was sort of her entry – a sort of “Dear God.” I asked her one time about it and she said, “No, my grandmother taught me that always we are to come before God first and foremost with thanksgiving, with grateful hearts.”
So that’s all well and good, but the question is that I want to have a grateful heart all the time. I know I should have a grateful heart all the time. I want to have a grateful heart all the time. But sometimes I have a problem with having a grateful heart all the time. I don’t know if you have that problem. So I think Paul helps us by giving us a couple of ways that we can begin to move that heart, to seed the Spirit so that it begins to change.
He says, “Teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.” So he talks about grateful voices, how we speak and how we sing. What do we do with our voices?
In the letter of James, James has a great image. He talks about our words a good bit and he says that a tongue is like a fire. That’s true, it gets you in trouble here and there. But then he says, “We lead a horse by putting a bit in its mouth.” And that’s how we can lead our lives, too. With our words. We change our words and our lives will begin to follow.
Jesus has a similar image where he says, “What you put in your mouth, what you eat…” Because remember in Pharisaical Judaism whatever you ate made you clean or unclean. You couldn’t eat shellfish, and had to be kosher. He said, “What you eat doesn’t matter.” In fact, he’s pretty graphic about it. He says that it goes into your body and comes right back out. He says, “But the words you say…” The old King James Version says, “What a man says proceedeth from his heart.” And that’s what makes a man unclean. A person unclean.
So our hearts and our words are tied together. What we do is we practice grateful words, to begin to move our hearts.
Part of it has to do with what we say to one another. “Teach and admonish one another with all wisdom and gratitude.” Teach and admonish one another. What we say to one another. Simple things like being polite, saying, “Thanks for dinner” or “Thanks for the ride.” To say to the custodian who gets paid to clean my office, “Hey, thanks for cleaning my office.” Just basically being polite and saying, “Thank you.” It may seem shallow but it’s the words we say that begin to guide us.
A number of years ago I was in a conversation with a man whose wife had passed away after them being married for fifty years. He was broken-hearted. Just broken-hearted. We sat on his back porch and talked about their marriage, about life, about politics, and all sorts of things. He just wanted to talk. Sometimes we just sat in silence for a while.
I asked him at some point, “How did you stay successfully and happily married for fifty years?” And he said, “You know, every day I told my wife how I felt lucky to have her as my wife. I just felt really lucky.” And he went on to say, “I think there are a lot of people who just don’t feel very appreciated. They don’t feel appreciated at work; they don’t feel appreciated at home. And saying, ‘thank you’ just makes a big difference.” So I think it changes the nature of a relationship when we’re grateful, but it changes us, too. That’s because our heart is tied to our words so if we can move our words, then we begin to move our heart.
It’s more than just what we say to each other. It’s what we say to God. This is how Paul begins most of his letters, like Philippians: “I thank my God every time I remember you.” I thank my God. Then in I Thessalonians, “We always thank God for you, making mention of you in our prayers.” Then he begins Colossians, “In our prayers for you we always thank God.”
So it’s interesting. I’m not thanking you, I’m thanking God for you. It’s different. You get a good double whammy with it, don’t you? You’re expressing appreciation for a person but you’re also talking to God full of grace and gratitude.
In the Jewish Passover liturgy, there’s something called the Dayenu. I’ve always enjoyed this concept. The word in Hebrew literally means, “It would have been enough.” Now there are fifteen verses in the Passover liturgy that goes with Dayenu. The first five have to do with being led out of Egypt, the next five have to do with being provided for in the journey through the wilderness, and the last five have to do with being given the Torah and the Promised Land.
I want to read to you kind of how it goes. I’m not going to read all of the fifteen verses but let me read to you how it goes so you get the rhythm. “Had God just split the sea but not taken us on dry land, then it would have been enough. Dayenu. Had he just taken us on dry land but not drowned our oppressors, then it would have been enough. Dayenu. Had he drowned all oppressors but not supplied our needs for years then it would have been enough. Oh, Dayenu. Had he just supplied our needs but not given us manna it would have been enough. Oh, Dayenu. Had he just fed us manna but not given us the Sabbath, it would have been enough. Oh Dayenu. Had he just given us the Sabbath, but not brought us to the mountain it would have been enough. Had he brought us to Sinai but not given us the Torah it would have been enough. Had he given us the Torah but not brought us into the land, it would have been enough.”
I love that image, that whatever we have is gravy. That we’ve been given, life itself and everything else –everything else – is gravy. Our cup runneth over.
I really encourage you to think about taking some time and writing your own Dayenu. Mine would go something like this: “God, if you had just given me life itself, and not given me a wonderful family to shape me, it would have been enough. If you had just given me a wonderful family to shape me, but not introduced me to the Savior, it would have been enough. And if you had just introduced me to the Savior, but not taught me to live like the Savior teaches, it would have been enough. And if you had just taught me to live but not given me a mission and a purpose to pursue with my life, it still would have been enough. And if you just had given me a mission and a purpose, but not given me a wonderful family to be with me on that journey, it would have been enough. And if you had just given me a wonderful family on the journey but not given me the wonderful friends all around me it would have been enough.”
You could go on and on. It’s an interesting way to sort of count your blessings. To say, “Look at what you’ve done for me, all the time, God. I am so grateful.”
Write our words, and as we say them, as we sing those words, as we count our blessings, as we rehearse that in our minds and with our lips, our lives begin to follow. It’s one of the reasons you come to church every Sunday so you can open the hymnal and sing the songs “Rejoice! Rejoice! Give thanks and sing.” Because what we do with our voices guides our hearts.
He goes on, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Thankful deeds. Things that you do.
After I’d been here at St. Luke’s about a year, I was with some other pastors and we were visiting. Here’s what you guys need to know – all of them are jealous that I get to be the pastor at St. Luke’s. That’s true. I know they won’t acknowledge it, but they are. They really are. And some of them actually will acknowledge it. They just say so.
In one of our conversations, one of the guys said to me, “So what’s it like to be a pastor for such privileged people?” Hmmm… boy, that annoyed me. I had this emotional reaction that just went through the roof. It was one of those things where I didn’t say anything. But what I should have said is… Have you ever had that happen – thinking what you should have said? Some of them I can’t repeat to you, some of them I can. But part of me wanted to say, “Look, you don’t know my people. You drive by my church and you think you know everything about the folks in there and that they’re all so privileged. You don’t know.” Part of me wanted to say, “Look, I have all sorts of people in my church. Some are really privileged and some are not so privileged. There are all sorts of people you don’t know.” Part of me wanted to say, “Why are you dividing people into categories like that?” Then part of me wanted to say, “Hey, privileged people need a pastor, too.” Right, makes sense.
Here’s where I landed. After praying about it, he’s right. He’s right. We’re privileged. I own it, I own our privilege. If you woke up in the morning and you took a breath, you’re privileged. Life is a gift to you, it’s a privilege given to you.
Friends, eternal life is a privilege, it’s a gift given to you. We are privileged people and in fact I suspect many of us are more privileged than others. But all of us -100% of us – without question are privileged people. Because we’re alive. Because we’ve been given the gift of life in the eternal.
Brene Brown has written many books. She lives here in Houston and she’s a sociologist. She has a great sentence. She said, “The difference between privilege and entitlement is gratitude.”
You see, with that privilege comes this realization that it is a privilege. And when you have that realization then that demands a response in gratitude. We are privileged and with that privilege comes a responsibility to do something with that. To take the privilege. The life we’ve been given. The eternal life we’ve been given. And use it for something. Do something with it.
I actually found that quote, not in one of Brene Brown’s books, but in a book by a woman named Kristin Welch who is an evangelical Christian activist and writer. She lives in Magnolia, near here. I started reading her book and it talks about the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and I thought, “Wow!” But anyway, her book is called Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World. Powerful title.
One of the things her family does is that they eat beans and rice for dinner every Monday night. She said she wanted her kids to know that this is now 95% of the world lives. Just beans and rice. She said, “For the first few months that was fine, because my kids like beans and rice. But after a while they said, ‘Mom, we’ve got the point. We’ve learned our lesson. Beans and rice. We’re kind of getting sick of them.’ That’s when the learning begins.”
How can you be grateful for something you’re sick of? She goes on to have this great sentence where she says, “Parents teach our kids more with our lives than with our words.” If we want to raise grateful kids we have to live grateful lives. It’s not just our words –we live grateful lives.
A couple of weeks ago on Veterans’ Day, we asked all of our veterans to stand up and we clapped for them. We clap out of an emotional response of gratitude. The reason that we feel that way about our veterans – the same thing for our police officers and firefighters and our first responders, those who keep us safe – is not just because we’re grateful for them, but because they have actually done something with their lives in response to what they’ve been given. So we look at a veteran and we say, “You didn’t just flap your gums about something. You actually went and did something.” When we know of people who actually put words into actions, who give of themselves for something, for a cause or something they believe in, in gratitude for a country or a city, or for life itself. When we see people actually do something, we’re overwhelmed.
We live in a culture where now it seems that the right thing to do is to post something online. We think, “I’m going to say something and that’s going to count as doing something.” That’s not doing something. If we’re going to lead really grateful lives, if we’re really grateful for what God has given us, for the privilege of life itself, we’re going to act. We’re going to do something.
I want you to imagine that it’s Good Friday. I’m not talking about the Good Friday that comes before Easter that comes around every year. I’m talking about the actual Good Friday – 2000 years ago. Imagine that you walk up to the cross and you see your Savior there, suffering for you, out of love for you. Is it enough for you to walk up to the cross and say, “Hey, Jesus – thanks!” Of course not. See, our gratitude for that demands a response of action, of our deeds, of giving ourselves away.
Grateful hearts, grateful words, grateful deeds. Ben Stein reflected on something his father did. Ben’s father, when he was in college chose not to join a fraternity but instead signed up to wash dishes for the fraternity in the fraternity house. Didn’t join but washed dishes.
He was reflecting on what that experience was like. This is what he said to his son, “I cannot tell you anything that in a few minutes will tell you how to be rich. But I can tell you how to feel rich, which is far better. Just be grateful. As my pal Phil Demuth says, ‘It is the only totally reliable get rich scheme.’ Be grateful.”
I think it can change your life.
I grew up in southern Illinois and just outside of Marion, just off the freeway there is the Marion Federal Penitentiary. I was reading this week about a man named John who’d spent 22 years in the federal pen. As his parole date became clear, when he was going to be leaving, he wrote every guard and every warden and assistant warden in the prison, a thank you letter. Here’s what he wrote to each one: “I just wanted you to know that I thank God for putting you in my life and I thank you for the things you have done for me.” Then he went into detail, listing things. He also wrote, “The chaplain told me that saying ‘thank you’ and meaning it would change my life and I want to start right now.”
Saying “thank you” – living “thank you” – meaning it will change your life.
I heard a rumor so I don’t know if it’s true or not, and I always hesitate to venture out to what happens in other religions, other faith traditions. I heard that the Mormons have to wear this underwear garment all the time, under their clothes. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Who knows? They do, I guess. But I don’t really care what you wear to church. I don’t care if you come in shorts or if you wear a suit and tie. But I want you to encourage you to put on underneath all that, a garment of gratitude, that when you clothe yourselves you strip off that old self and you put on gratitude first and foremost. And you wear it all the time – all the time. And no matter what else you’re wearing, I think your life will be changed.
Gracious God, we are so grateful. We say “thank you.” We sing “Thank you” but most of all we live “Thank you.” We give of ourselves in response to your amazing grace. In response to the privilege that you’ve given us to be children of God – your children. We ask, God, that you continue to use our words, our deeds, to shape our hearts so that everything we do in thought, in word, in deed, we would do with gratitude to you. In the name of Christ. Amen.