The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
November 25, 2007
Pentecost 29
This is the sermon for the
last Sunday of Pentecost or the Feast of Christ the King.
On Thanksgiving Day we had a
wonderful service here, and we had over thirty people. I hope you will bear with me as I know some
of you here this morning were at that service.
I am going to give the sermon I gave on Thanksgiving morning because I
think it fits with the whole thing that we are going through right now in the
parish in terms of our stewardship.
I want to begin with a
time-honored story about four brothers who left home for college. They became successful doctors and lawyers,
and they prospered. Some years later
they chatted after having dinner together; they discussed some of the gifts
they were able to give their elderly mother who lived far away in another city.
The first said, “I had a big
house built for mama.” The second said,
“I had a hundred-thousand-dollar theater built in the
house.” And the third said, “I had my
Mercedes dealer deliver a SL600 to her.”
And the fourth said, “You know how much mama loved the Bible, and you
know she can’t read anymore because she can’t see very well. I met this preacher who told me about a
parrot that can recite the entire Bible.
It took twenty preachers twelve years to teach him. I had to pledge to contribute a hundred
thousand dollars a year for twenty years to the church, but it was worth
it. Mama just has to name the chapter
and verse and the parrot will recite it.”
The other brothers were
impressed; and after the holidays mom sent out her thank-you notes. She wrote:
“Milton, the house you built
is so huge, and I live only in one room, but I have to clean the whole house. Thanks anyway.”
And “Marvin, I am too old the
travel. I stay home; I have my groceries
delivered, so I never use that fancy Mercedes.
The thought was good. Thanks.”
“Michael, you gave me an
expensive theater with Dolby sound. It
could hold fifty people, but all of my friends are dead, I’ve lost my hearing,
and I am nearly blind. I’ll never use
it. Thank you for the gesture just the
same.”
And “Dearest Melvin, You are
the only son to have a good sense to give a little thought to your gift. The chicken was delicious. Thank you.”
Most Americans are
celebrating Thanksgiving this week. One
hundred million turkeys made the ultimate sacrifice so that we may stuff
ourselves over this holiday weekend.
Still, Thanksgiving for many is a difficult holiday. True Thanksgiving is getting to be a rare
commodity. No wonder some people prefer
to call Thanksgiving “turkey day.”
And now we come to the Friday
of Thanksgiving weekend which we now call “black Friday.” I love that…we’ve gone from Good Friday to
black Friday, and authentic feelings of gratitude and appreciation are getting
hard to find in our world. We are told
that some department stores are having a difficult time hiring people to be
Santa Clause this year. Why? Because today’s department store Santas are getting too many kicks in the shins from kids
who are disappointed that they didn’t get exactly what they wanted last year
for Christmas. I don’t know if that is
true or not, but it certainly reflects something that is happening to far too
many people in our society.
Someone has said that there
are basically two kinds of people in our world:
those who have a sense of gratitude and those who have a sense of
entitlement.
Now think about that for a
moment. A sense of
gratitude versus a sense of entitlement.
For those who live out of a sense of gratitude, nothing is taken for
granted; everything is a gift. For those
who live out of a sense of entitlement, everything is taken for granted. Nothing is truly appreciated. And since we feel we are entitled to
everything we have and more in our affluent land, feelings of entitlement
probably far out number feelings of gratitude.
Now I don’t know how many of
you are country music fans (I am not particularly a fan of country music), but you
may remember a singer/song writer named Jimmy Dean; and some of you probably
have eaten his sausage. He co-wrote a
song that reflects a feeling of gratitude.
It’s called Drinking From My Saucer. A part of one verse goes like this: “So Lord, help me not to gripe ‘bout the tough
rows that I’ve hoed. I’m drinkin’ from my saucer ‘cause my
cup has overflowed.” Well, the grammar
may be a little rough; after all, it is country music, but the sentiments are
right on: I’m drinking from my saucer
because my cup has overflowed. That’s a
feeling of gratitude. Thank you,
God. My life has been tough, but the
good times outnumber the bad, and I am grateful.
The person with a sense of
gratitude understands that they are not at the center of the universe. When something good happens to them, it is a
gift to be treasured and for which to be profoundly grateful. The person with this understanding of life is
grateful for their health, for their family, for their faith, for the people
they meet each day. Life is a gift, and
they are so, so thankful.
On the other hand, there are
some people who look at life like this:
Everything ought to go my way; I am entitled to be smart, attractive, wealthy. I am
entitled for all the traffic lights to be green when I drive. I am entitled to the maximum paycheck
possible for somebody as wonderful as I am.
I am entitled to get my own way at work, at home and relationships. I am entitled. And that is how some people really feel. So when they hit a bump in the road, when
life gets hard and circumstances turn against them, then they sulk and pout and
make themselves and everybody around them miserable. A sense of entitlement.
Now which attitude
categorizes you: a sense of gratitude or
a sense of entitlement?
In the story of Jesus and the
ten men with leprosy in the Gospel of Luke, only one returned to give
thanks. I suspect that one in ten
reflects the percentage of people who truly live out of a sense of gratitude. The rest of us live
somewhere in between a sense of gratitude and a sense of entitlement. Maybe the figure one in ten is a little high;
maybe some of us who think we are living out of a sense of gratitude want to
rethink our answer. When are you most
thankful to God? When do you praise God
in spirit and in truth? When the stock
market is up? When your team, our team, like the Red Sox or the Patriots or the Celtics are
on a winning streak? When your family is
safe at home?
But, you know, some of us go
through difficult times. I know at
Thanksgiving time is when, at least for me, I begin to think of those people
that I have celebrated Thanksgiving with over the years. And, I don’t know, I felt my mother and
father more this year than I ever have, and I really miss them. I missed having them around the table so that
we could talk and share and laugh. It is
really difficult sometimes. And I don’t
know about you, but I find such genuine expressions of gratitude in the face of
unbelievable heartache almost overwhelming, and I begin to realize my own sense
of entitlement. Gee, I wish I still had
my parents and my uncles and my aunts.
And here’s what I think we need to see:
the happiest people on this planet are those who live with a sense of
gratitude. Giving thanks isn’t a duty, it is, I think, the key to joy.
Does this make sense to
you? Most of us have an upside down view
of life. We think to ourselves, if
something really terrific happens to me, then I will feel grateful. But such gratitude is a fleeting emotion,
gone just as soon as life has one of its downturns, as life must inevitably
have. No, the secret is to commit
yourself to a sense of gratitude, regardless of what happens, when you will be
able to find joy in the most humdrum, and sometimes even the most painful
experience. And how do you do that? I think you do that by centering your life in
the grace of Jesus.
In the Gospel according to
John, there is a passage that is situated just after Jesus has fed the five
thousand. Now Jesus, the Gospel of John
tells us, withdrew
from the crowds, and he went to the other side of the lake, and the crowds
followed after. He was a man who could fill their stomachs, and they liked that; but
that’s not what Jesus was after. He
wanted them to seek spiritual bread and not physical. “Do not work for food that spoils, but for
food that endures through eternal life which the Son of Man will give you,” he
said to the crowds that sought after him.
They asked Jesus, “What miraculous sign then will you give that we may
see it and believe you? What will you
do? Our forefathers ate the manna in the
desert and it is written. He gave them
bread from heaven to eat.” And Jesus
said to them, “I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the
bread from heaven; but it is God who gives you the true bread from heaven, 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.”
The ultimate Thanksgiving
feast is to partake of the bread of life freely given to us by God. And that is why we are here this
morning: to come to the Eucharist which
is the great Thanksgiving; a chance to share with one another the true bread of
life. And we, who were not entitled to
anything, were given the greatest gift of all:
the gift of God’s love and grace.
In Jesus we receive the bread of life, freely given. When we center our lives on that gift of
love, we drop all our feelings of entitlement, and we see life and everything
in it as a gift from God.
And my prayer is that you
will see a sense of gratitude during this time of stewardship in our
parish. God needs your commitment; St.
John’s needs your commitment, and you need to make a commitment to express your
sense of gratitude.
Amen