About the Author: Sunday Sermons from Sell Chapel are written by Rev. Preston Van Deursen, Director of Pastoral Care at the Masonic Village at Elizabethtown.
One of my favorite Peanuts comic strips is the one that came out some years ago just a few days before Thanksgiving. Lucy’s feeling sorry for herself and she laments, “My life is a drag. I’m completely fed up. I’ve never felt so low in my life.”
Her little brother Linus tries to console her and he says, “Lucy, when you’re in a mood like this, you should try to think of things you have to be thankful for; in other words, count your blessings.”
To that, Lucy says, “Ha! That’s a good one! I could count my blessings on one finger! I’ve never had anything and I never will have anything. I don’t get half the breaks that other people do. Nothing ever goes right for me! And you talk about counting blessings! You talk about being thankful! What do I have to be thankful for?”
Linus says, “Well, for one thing, you have a little brother who loves you.”
With that, Lucy runs and hugs her little brother Linus as she cries tears of joy. And while she’s hugging him tightly, Linus says, “Every now and then, I say the right thing.”
I would like to make this a another day of Thanksgiving. For today we celebrate the feast that was prepared for us by our Lord and Saviour. I am asking that each of mistake a moment and count our blessings. For many of us, we will focus on our material blessings. Our warm house. The comfortable car. The stylish clothes. A table bountifully spread. And yet, in the long run of things, these are the least important of all our blessings.
Our lesson for the day from John’s Gospel takes place just after Jesus has taken five small barley loaves and two small fish and had fed about five thousand men and an unknown number of women and children. Amazing is too small an adjective for such an extraordinary feat. Now the crowd is seeking him out in earnest.
Jesus isn’t impressed with their sudden interest. “I tell you the truth,” he says, you are looking for me . . . because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” Then he gives a word of warning, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
What Jesus is saying is beware of focusing on the physical, the material blessings in your life. These blessings are generally trivial and transitory. It is a cliché, of course, to say that money can’t buy happiness. But the proof is bountiful. There are many, many people who are blessed materially who are miserable.
Jim Burns in his book Radically Committed tells about an incident a few years ago when police in New York City were called to a building where a woman was threatening suicide. She was standing on top of a fifty-four-story building ready to jump to her death. The police suicide squad was taking the woman extremely seriously. She didn’t look the type, in her expensive dress and distinguished appearance. But every attempt to convince her to get down from the ledge ended in failure. One of the police officers called his pastor to pray. His pastor said he would come right over and see if he could help.
When this wise old minister surveyed the situation, he asked the captain if he might try and get close enough to talk with the woman. The captain shrugged and said, “What do we have to lose?”
But as the pastor started walking toward the woman she screamed as before, “Don’t come any closer or I’ll jump!”
The minister took a step backward and called out to her, “I’m sorry you believe no one loves you!” This got her attention, and also the attention of the suicide squad because it was such an unorthodox style. The pastor went on to say, “Your grandchildren must never have given you any attention.”
At this statement the woman took a step toward the pastor and emphatically replied, “My family loves me and my grandchildren are wonderful. I have eight grandchildren.”
The pastor took a step toward her and said. “But then you must be very poor to be so desperate as to jump.”
She looked at her plump body and very nice dress and said, “Do I look like I’m in need of a meal? We live near Central Park in a beautiful apartment.”
The pastor took another step. He was now within three feet of her. He asked, “Then why do you want to jump and kill yourself?”
Her surprising reply was, “I don’t remember.”
The pastor had helped the woman turn her focus off her problems and on to reasons to be thankful. They continued to talk, and she even showed him pictures of her grandchildren, with lengthy descriptions of each family member. A year later she was a volunteer on a suicide prevention hotline helping other people to choose a thankful life.
As we sit in this beautiful place before the table loaded with tasty food, do not assume that these are the blessings that most count in life. They’re not. This woman needed to focus on the things in her life that really mattered and then her blessings were obvious.
Only one thing really matters in life, and that is relationships. relationships with other people and with God. People who feel loved can be happy in any environment. People who focus on anything else are guaranteed to experience tremendous heartache someday, for everything else is temporary.
Heidi Neumark in her book Breathing Space tells about having lunch with a little girl named Danielle. Danielle’s mother, Deena, died from an asthma attack brought on by smoking crack. Danielle’s ten years old and has eleven sisters and brothers. Some are older and on their own, and some of them went to live with a relative down South. That left five parentless children in the home. An uncle, known to be a compulsive gambler, moved in. Rumor had it that his main interest was in using the children to get money for his habit. Neumark doesn’t know if that is true, but there was little affection or attention shown to the children at home, except what they offer each other, which is considerable. Three of the youngest were in the summer program at Neumark’s church.
One hot day when a swimming trip was planned for the afternoon, Danielle was brought to Neumark’s office in tears. It turned out that she didn’t own a bathing suit. They decided that it would be all right to skip the morning math lesson and go out to get a suit. The trip took them out over lunchtime, and so they stopped at a nearby McDonald’s, where Danielle ordered a Happy Meal. She got up and came back with some extra napkins. Then she began divvying up the small bag of fries into five little piles, each on its own napkin. Neumark asked her what she was doing. “My sisters and brothers will feel sad that I got french fries and they didn’t,” she explained “I’m taking them home to share.”
“Sitting there in McDonald’s with Danielle,” says Heidi Neumark, “I felt rich.”
Little Danielle knew what is important in life and it’s not cars or houses or clothes or even food. What’s important are those people you love. What’s important is our relationship with them and with God.
A few years ago, someone broke into the home of Christian author and evangelist Anne Graham Lotz. The robber or robbers took everything of value in the home and left Anne with a deep sense of fear and instability. The night after the break-in, Anne lay awake and contemplated her many fears. But then, she recalled a verse of scripture from I Peter. Even if the robbers took everything of value from her, she still had an inheritance in heaven that could never be taken away. Suddenly, all her fear left her, and Anne fell asleep counting her blessings. Here is the alphabetical list of blessings she came up with twenty-six blessings in all. Anne Graham Lotz realized she was Accepted by God, Beloved by God, Chosen by God, Delivered by God, Enlightened by God, Forgiven by God.
She discovered she had the Grace of God, Hope for the future, Inheritance in heaven, Justification, Knowledge of God, Love, Mercy of God, Nearness to God, Oneness with God, Peace, Quickening of the Spirit.
She reminded herself she was Redeemed, Sealed with the Holy Spirit, Treasured by God, United with other believers, Validated as an authentic child of God.
In conclusion she decided she had His Wisdom; And one day she would be: Exalted with Him! That’s one way of counting your blessings.
The people who followed Jesus after the multiplication of the fishes and the loaves were fixated on the physical miracle. What Jesus wanted them to focus on was the faith that produced that miracle. They were fixated on the bread and the fish, he wanted them to understand that there was a new bread from heaven, he himself. He says to them, “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
“Sir,” they said, “from now on give us this bread.”
Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”
In other words, only one thing matters relationships. Relationships with one another and our relationship with God. The blessings we need to focus on are not physical or material, but emotional and spiritual.
This is a hard sell in a land of such abundance. Linda Kulman, wrote in U.S. News & World Report sometime back these prophetic words:
“We are a nation that believes in having it all. In 1950, American families owned one car and saved for a second. In 2000, nearly 2 in 5 families owned three cars or more. . . . Americans shell out more for garbage bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything. Indeed, America has double the number of shopping malls as it does high schools.
“In 1900 the average person living in the United States wanted seventy-two different things and considered eighteen of them essential. Today the average person wants five hundred things and considers one hundred of them essential.
“Our obsession with stuff carries a hefty price tag. The average American family devotes a full one-third of its spendable income to outstanding debts.”
Our addiction to material goods may actually make us less grateful than if we had very little. If your feeling of gratitude today has any relationship to the size of your bank account or the number of toys that you have to play with, you may not ever experience the true spirit of life.
Edward Markquart of Seattle once put this in a beautiful way. He said, “A great danger in living in a materially abundant world is to come to expect that material abundance and no longer feel deep gratitude in one’s heart.
“To illustrate, at your house, have you ever experienced a Christmas where a child has just received ten Christmas presents and then asks: ‘Is that all? Isn’t there more?’
“And then next Christmas, when the child is older and they receive only five gifts, they say: ‘Well, it wasn’t quite as good a Christmas as last year?’ When a person receives so many presents, one no longer has that deep inner gratitude but rather the expectation of more abundance. By contrast, if a person has never received a Christmas present and receives one present, that person is overwhelmed with delight at that one gift.
“I’ll never forget,” Markquart goes on, “my mother’s story of her most memorable Christmas. My mom, an immigrant, was raised in dire poverty, and when she received an orange that Christmas, her heart was overwhelmed with joy and thanksgiving. That single orange was the best and most memorable Christmas present she ever received. Why? Because there is something about poverty that enables one’s heart to be filled with gratitude. One of the greatest dangers of living with material abundance is that one loses a deep feeling of gratitude but rather develops an expectation for more abundance.”
Do we get that? Our very affluence may seal us off from God. We may end up depending on our material blessings rather than our connection to God to provide us with both happiness and security.
In his book Money, Possessions and Eternity, Randy Alcorn tells the story of a persecuted Romanian pastor who told a group of ministers: “In my experience, 95 percent of the believers who face the test of persecution pass it, while 95 percent who face the test of prosperity fail it.”
This is a hard message. I’m supposed to simply remind you to be thankful for your blessings, but if you’re thinking blessings like your hi-def television and your new iPad, then you are going to miss it altogether. Be thankful for the people you love and who love you. Be thankful that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. Count your spiritual blessings this day. If you focus on them, then you will understand what real gratitude is all about.
