Hebrews 10: 16, 17, 18; Isaiah  12: 1 and 4; Jeremiah 33: 10 and 11

Psalm 147 says: “A joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful.”  Ah, thankfulness, that thing we all know we should have more of.  That thing we all feel guilty about, because we know we have it so much better than other people. The journalist Joseph Alsop said:” Gratitude, like love, is never a dependable international emotion.” It’s true in general too, thankfulness is not a dependable emotion.  In a sermon at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, Gary Wilburn said: “In 1636, amid the darkness of the Thirty Years’ War, a German pastor, Martin Rinkart, is said to have buried five thousand of his parishioners in one year, and average of fifteen a day. His parish was ravaged by war, death, and economic disaster. In the heart of that darkness, with the cries of fear outside his window, he sat down and wrote this table grace for his children: ‘Now thank we all our God / With heart and hands and voices;/ Who wondrous things had done,/ In whom His world rejoices. /Who, from our mother’s arms,/Hath led us on our way/ With countless gifts of love/ And still is ours today.'”Here was a man who knew thanksgiving comes from love of God, not from outward circumstances.(Don Maddox) Ah come on, are you kidding me?!  That gratitude is the midst of misery is ridiculous, isn’t it friends?  Church goers as late as the fifties might have eaten up a story like this, but we are almost offended by it.   Even the following is now too much for us.  It’s a platitude it seems. Erma Bombeck wrote: ”Every time I forget to feel grateful ….I hear the voice of an eight-year-old named Christina, who had cancer of the nervous system. When asked what she wanted for her birthday, she thought long and hard and finally said, “I don’t know. I have two sticker books and a Cabbage Patch doll. I have everything!” The kid is right.  (Redbook , October, 1992).”  Friends, let’s get serious.  What about the woman who has just lost her spouse? How will she find gratitude?  The man who has lost his job, whom will he thank?  The child with a debilitating illness, where does she tap her gratefulness from?  The children who lost their parents to starvation and war? Where will they go?  Friends, we cannot be cheap about gratitude, but let’s see if we can find something new to learn about gratitude.

First. I think it is right to say that gratitude is not something we can hoard or keep for ourselves. Our reason for gratitude requires that we give those who are beaten down by life a reason to feel gratitude also.  We have to share it.  We should not let our bucket overflow with gratitude to just to have it drain away, but instead have our gratitude replenish us for service to other.   In other words gratitude has to be converted into active love.  If we do that, it will continue to multiply itself.

Second,  gratitude does not exist in a vacuum.  It is not a separate thing all by itself.  It is connected to hope and to faith.  Perhaps the writer of the famous hymn was grateful over his own survival and wanted to share it and the hope connected to it with those who were beaten down and who felt hopeless.  Perhaps Erma Bombeck shared her story because she, as someone who knew what it was like to be seriously ill,  wanted to inject her discouraged readers with thankfulness and hope.

Finally,  gratitude is not just about something we received in the past or have in the present, it is just as much about the power of the potential of the future.  French moralist Duc de Rouchefoucauld said:” In most of (hu)mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favors.”  In other words we say ‘thank you’ because we think we can get more good things as a result of our gratitude.  In terms of people, that sounds pretty cynical, but in terms of God that isn’t all bad.  Our gratitude had hope inside of it.  If we didn’t believe we had hope for more good things we couldn’t be grateful.   Hebrews reminds us that God will remember our lawless deeds no longer and forgiveness no longer requires an offering.  In other words, it is free.  These verses call for hope and for faith. In Isaiah we hear that God’s anger has passed that God has become our strength and our salvation.  This gives us hope for the future. Jeremiah talks more clearly of the future: in a place of desolation there will sound: “the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voice of those who say: ‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good, for God’s loving kindness is everlasting.”

So, friends, here we see the connection between hope and gratitude. Gratitude is not just about the past, is about the future.   Again, first, we cannot hoard gratitude, but must share it and convert it into loving service and so multiply it, second gratitude does not exist in a vacuum, but in tandem with hope and faith. Finally gratitude is just as much about the future as it is about the past and the present.  Perhaps when we think of the upcoming holiday and about the American history of deliverance from peril, we think about the past, but it is Hebrews, Isaiah and Jeremiah who remind us that the true reason for our gratitude is the future life God wishes us to partake in. Thanks be to God.