Gratitude

Thanksgiving is just around the corner (how did that happen?). It is the season of gratitude and being thankful. It is the time of year we tend to think about the poor and drop a few bucks in the plate for the food pantry or toss a bag of stuffing in the carriage for “their” thanksgiving meal. The recipients of our occasional generosity are the faceless nameless poor who are hungry not just on Thanksgiving but most of the year.

Call me cynical (most people do) but it seems to me that at least some of our gratitude is a thinly veiled version of “thank God I’m not that poor slob.” It mirrors a story in the Gospel of Luke (18:9-14). The parable attributed to Jesus begins with “two men went up to the temple to pray.” One was a Pharisee and one was a tax collector. The Pharisee was all pumped up with his own importance and used flowery words in his prayer that were really self-aggrandizing. The tax collector (who was universally hated by everyone) stood off in the corner and prayed in humility and honesty. The Pharisee, who was lost in his own importance, thanked God that he was not like the tax collector. See the connection?

The parable suggests many teachings, but one that comes to the fore as we enter the season of Thanksgiving is our tendency to be grateful that we are not like…fill in the blank. As we give thanks for our own bounty and give to others out of our excess, we toss a weird kind of prayer that sounds a little like the Pharisee.

Genuine gratitude is born of sterner stuff. It has a direct line to faith. The premise of gratitude is that we are stewards of God’s bounty. It does not belong to us and it is not just a fruit of our own labors. Rather, it is a gift to us entrusted to us by the Creator. As such, we are faith-bound to use what is entrusted to us in the service of others and the creation.

It is an invitation to give, not out of our excess, but out of our very substance. It is an invitation to radical generosity that reflects a radical faith in God as the Eternal Steward. Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament theologian, writes often of the “theology of scarcity.” Basically it means that we hold onto stuff out of fear there will not be enough. It means we are stingy with our stuff and not deeply mindful of the poor who depend on a more balanced stewardship of the earth’s goods.  As the old saying goes, “There is enough for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.”

Many have had to cinch up spending during the time of Covid, and I don’t mean to minimize the budget crunches some people are feeling. For a great many, however, the increased prices and short supply has had little direct effect. And there is gratitude for that. But this is not genuine gratitude, it is a Pharisaic babble that celebrates our ability to rise above others and create an illusion of self-sufficiency.

As we grow in faith, we come to the truth that we are stewards of the earth’s bounty, and our perspective will begin to shift. First, it will create generosity toward others. Second, we will begin to dismantle our theology of scarcity and embrace a theology of generosity that believes there is enough for everyone. Third, it will align our consumption with our resources. Fourth, it will create a base for true gratitude which is intimately related to faith.

Believing in a God who is first and finally generous, always merciful and unfailingly loving allows us to take risks for our faith. It aligns us in a whole new way with the needs of the world and our responsibility as stewards of God’s bounty.

This year may our thanksgiving be built in true gratitude. May our generosity be based in risk-taking faith and may our giving come from a place of deeper stewardship.