Rev. Tessie Mandeville
November 25, 2007
Christ Covenant MCC
Decatur, GA 30030

We find ourselves this week reflecting on gratitude and all that God has done in our lives. As I was thinking about gratitude this week and what I wanted to say about it, I realized I was cranky and not in the mood to talk about gratitude. I certainly wasn’t in the mood to preach a sermon about gratitude because that would make me face my crankiness and I wasn’t in the mood for that either!

On Tuesday this past week I was in court for the better part of an afternoon because one of our parishioners was there awaiting a sentencing trial. I wrestled with whether or not I should go to court because truth be told, the crime she committed is very close to home for me in my own personal life and sometimes it’s difficult to be the pastor in a situation that hits that close to home because I can’t be objective. I listened carefully to all that was said and to the sentence that was handed down; I cried and I worried and I felt pain for everyone involved in this situation, on all sides of it. I can’t say I was glad to be there, or glad for the outcome. At most I can say it was my choice to go though it was a complicated and sad situation that left me with a terrible headache and a heart deeply saddened.

And that was two days before Thanksgiving. I had friends in town all week, and friends here today, and yet I still didn’t want to talk about or preach about gratitude because I wasn’t feeling a lot of gratitude in my heart. I was feeling a lot of anxiety and worry, grief and loss. I started wondering if I shouldn’t have planned a service called “The Thanksgiving Blues”! And I kept reading the letter from the Apostle Paul to the church at Philippi, and I got cranky with him on more than one occasion after reading, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” And I wondered, “What gives him the right to tell us that?” And then I learned that Paul wrote this letter to his friends from prison, a place where he was awaiting his own trial and sentencing and perhaps he was struggling with his own Thanksgiving blues.

Because I believe he wrestled with what it means to be grateful, even in the most difficult of circumstances, I believe Paul has some words of comfort, and even instruction, for us today. And I’m probably not alone in thinking that it’s easier to take words of instruction from someone who you know has authentically struggled along the journey rather than from someone who seems to rattle off clichés. The apostle Paul is not rattling off clichés. In his letter to his friends he is not giving them the advice from Bobby McFerrin’s song, “Don’t worry, be happy.”

It seems to me that Paul came to an important conclusion in the solitude of that cell. He may have been boxed in but he still had choices to make :

He chose gentleness . That seems kind of an ironic statement given the harsh realities of prison life. But he chose to let his gentleness be known to everyone at a time when he could have behaved otherwise. At a time when it would have been easy to lash out at those around him. Think about how you feel when you’re struggling with something in your life and feeling boxed in or trapped. It’s easy to lash out, to say things we don’t mean, to take our toys and go home when we don’t get our way. But if we choose to practice gentleness, we can lessen the hurt we cause ourselves and others.

Paul chose to believe in God’s presence . In the quietness of that jail cell, and it wasn’t the only time Paul was in jail, he chose to believe that God had not abandoned him no matter how dire the circumstances looked. He chose to believe that God was with him in his struggle, in his pain, and that in fact, God felt his struggle and pain right along with him.

Paul chose prayer . He chose to stay in intimate relationship with God during a time when it would have been easy to turn away. He chose to pray about everything. And I believe that means he shared his heart with God. When he was angry about being in prison. When he was worried and anxious. When he didn’t know what would happen to him in the future. The Rabbi Abraham Heschel talks about prayer in this way: “Prayer invites God to be present in our spirits and in our lives. Prayer cannot bring water to a parched land, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city, but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.”1

And finally, Paul chose gratitude and I believe he was ultimately able to do this by meditating on what was good, not on what was wrong. Not on what he had no control over but on what he could control. It’s so easy to get trapped in thinking about what’s wrong with other people, what’s wrong with the world, instead of spending time thinking about the good in others and the world. Here’s an exercise I practiced this week: I wrote down what I was thankful for about a person who hurt me recently. This was not an exercise in masochism; what this was for me was a way to engage the “both/and” about this person: that they had both hurt me and had touched my life in remarkable ways. Try that exercise sometime. It took the edge off just a little bit for me. It didn’t erase what happened but it helped me focus on the whole picture, not just the part that hurt.

We can choose our state of mind no matter the circumstances. The author, Iyanla Vanzant says it this way: “If you choose to live in panic, drama, and fear, life will accommodate you. It will give you exactly what is required to experience your chosen state of mind.”2 Then it’s just as true that if you choose gentleness, prayer and gratitude, life will accommodate you because whatever you put out in thought comes back to you in form.

I heard someone say recently, "We cannot revoke what has happened at the level of event, but we can rework it at the level of significance, and that choice -- how we respond to whatever happens -- makes all the difference in the world."

And so this week of Thanksgiving, I finally realized that this is what the apostle Paul meant in his letter to his friends. How we respond to whatever happens, makes all the difference in the world. The bottom line is that there is no magical formula for gentleness, prayer or even gratitude. It is a choice. It is your choice. And it is mine. Blessed be and amen.

1 Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, words about prayer in Singing the Living Tradition, # 497.

2 One Day My Soul Just Opened Up by Iyanla Vanzant, p. 285.

Copyright © 2007 by Rev. Tessie Mandeville. Permission granted for non- profit circulation with attribution of author and venue. Other rights reserved.