Gratitude and Thanksgiving: Our Forms of Praise

2 Chronicles 5:13-14

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“It was the duty of the trumpeters and singers together to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord, ‘For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever,’ the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.”

Beginning this Sunday, we are starting a new series on Thanksgiving and Praise. We have much to be thankful for, not only as individuals, but as a church. As we dive into this series, I want to take you on a journey from the earliest days of the Israelite people all the way through to the New Testament Church. Each had to find ways to be thankful in their own time and as a result of their own situations. God, however, was always there and always faithful.

There is something about “praise” or acknowledging something of importance that also embodies thanksgiving. I imagine that all of us can think of earthly folks who are important enough to us that when we acknowledge them, we really are offering a deep prayer of thanksgiving for all they have done in our lives. Beyond the people in our lives, though, there are certain acts that also seem to coincide with the feeling of thanksgiving—certainly that of celebration. In our passage today, we can see the use of trumpets, cymbals, and other musical instruments as one such way to offer praise to God.

Each week, we offer Prayers of Thanksgiving. We are pausing in our service to say thank you for all that God has provided and all that God will provide. Our prayers, according to Gandhi, “is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness…And so, it is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” This perspective pulls us closer to the center of who God is and how God desires for us to live each day.

When we are able to admit where we are weak, we have a direction for what we need to improve upon with the help of God. The longing of our soul is to be whole and authentic people. We continue to worship God in an effort to understand who we are in relation to God and to learn how to live daily in concert with God’s desire for us. It is this deep longing that keeps us coming back for the many connections we have in community and the reminder that God always needs to be present at the center of our lives.

What is so powerful about thanksgiving is it reorients us toward what is, not what will be. When we offer God thanks for all that we have been given, we are no longer seeking that which we do not have. Our hearts and minds begin to shift away from asking for things and instead living in the moment with gratitude. Equally, our gratitude helps us focus on the needs of others. Recognizing our own intangible wealth allows us to give from our abundance. There is never a decrease because that kind of abundance is self-fulfilling; it continually rejuvenates on its own.

The more love we offer, the more love we have to offer.

The more hope we offer, the more hope we have to offer.

The more compassion we offer, the more compassion we have to offer.

The more kindness we offer, the more kindness we have to offer.

Likewise, we can generate division and ill-will in equal measure. What we focus on is what actually grows. If I decide that I want to foster hatred or enmity, that is easy enough to do as well. The question is, though, which would I rather have in the world? Love or hate?

Perhaps we can even say that gratitude and thanksgiving are super-powers. Even those with the most hardened hearts, when convinced of operating from a place of gratitude and thanksgiving, their hearts soften (think about the story A Christmas Carol or The Grinch). While fictional, they do offer insights into how our entire world can be turned upside down through recognizing how blessed we are.

For Ebenezer Scrooge, he had to see the wreck and ruin of all his personal relationships to understand how necessary gratitude and thanksgiving were. Once he came face-to-face with his own “scrooge-ness” he was able to reorient his life toward abundance, which then flowed outward to others. The Grinch had to learn that tangible possessions were not the source of gratitude or thanksgiving. When he realized his mistake, his heart grew and grew. This heart growth filled the Grinch with his own gratitude and thanksgiving—so much so that he returned all the gifts.

What we offer to God should not be reserved for Sunday alone, but every day we should be grateful for how God interacts and intervenes in our lives. While we may not understand it, or even recognize most of what God does in the world, when we do, it should be such a profound experience that we cannot help but bring out the trumpets, the harps, and the cymbals, and praise God. Our attitude of gratitude will release such an outpouring of thanksgiving that it will change us from the inside out.

Mark Nepo writes the following, “This is what the heart knows beyond all words, we can find a way to listen: that beyond our small sense of things a magnificent light surrounds us, more than anyone could ask for. This is what prayer as gratitude can open to us.”

May your prayers be filled with gratitude and thanksgiving, and may you begin to feel God’s outpouring of a generous spirit—a spirit that fills us to overflowing.

10th Commandment: You shall not covet...Love God, Love neighbor, Love self!

Exodus 20:17

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17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Matthew 22:34-40

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34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Romans 13:8-10

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8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

I know this is crazy, but I am tying all three of these passages together this week. So, buckle up for the ride.

As we wrap up our series on the 10 Commandments, it was always my intention to end with Jesus’ words to the Pharisees, “Love God, love neighbor, love self.” When Jesus provides them with a summation of the law, everything falls in place. The first four commandments are all about how we are to live in relation to God. The last six commandments are all about how we are to live in relation to each other and ourselves. As we have seen, the commandments regarding community aren’t just about how we treat others, but also how we treat ourselves. Self-love makes community love possible.

The last commandment instructs us to not covet. There is a laundry list of things that we aren’t supposed to covet – pretty much anything belonging to anyone else – but most importantly, anything that doesn’t belong to us. Covet goes deeper than just wanting, though, it is an intense, wish-filled desire. The word desire strikes me because in both the Buddhist and the Hindu tradition, there is special attention paid to desires of the heart; that is the path to suffering.

God’s admonition to not covet is God’s final attempt to refocus the attention of the people on what is most important in this life. Over and over again, God wants the people to build a foundation where God is at the center of all their activities and that the community becomes the realm where God’s love gets lived out. When we spend our time coveting what others have, our attention is no longer on God or even the necessities of the community, but on our own wish-fulfillment.

In the New Testament, Jesus makes it clear that love is the whole point of the law. It is important to note that without self-love, love of our neighbor is not nearly as likely. Additionally, love, according to Jesus, is not optional. Paul puts it this way, “10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

What we must ask ourselves, though, is how far do we extend this love? It is important to remember that in addition to loving one’s neighbor, Jesus also calls us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. If we take the challenge of loving our neighbors as ourselves seriously, then we must have an equally serious conversation regarding the question, “Who is my neighbor.”

I am personally challenged to apply the concept of neighbor to those who I think are behaving abhorrently in the world. How do we do this? Are there certain behaviors that we can all agree upon that are violations of community? Are we willing to drill down deep enough into our own behavior to discover the ways in which we are violating our communities?

If we know that self-love is a primary component of how we love others, then this is probably one of the most important places to start. Self-love is not selfish! Self-love is defined as 1. An appreciation of one’s own worth or virtue, and 2. Proper regard for, and attention to, one’s own happiness or well-being. What is most important about these definitions is that they still require the individual to look at themselves from a “right-sized” perspective, not from a narcissistic or grandiose perspective. When I begin to overvalue my own worth or virtue, or only desire happiness and well-being for myself and no one else, then I have skewed the entire commandment.

Self-love is not an easy trait to nail down. We most often miss the mark because we undervalue or overvalue ourselves. It takes extraordinary effort to do enough self-evaluation to get this right. It’s as if our vision of ourselves is always slightly, or in some cases, dramatically distorted. This is where the community can rescue us. If we are doing our best to live in community and love in community, the community can help hold us accountable. When we are disengaged from the whole community, we are more likely to have a skewed opinion of ourselves and of other communities.

This commandment to not covet pushes us to re-evaluate everything we know about how we engage with one another. It calls us to remember who we are in God, who we are to each other, and who we are to ourselves. It is easy to invite suffering into our lives when we are fixated on gaining that which never belonged to us. As I have worked with this commandment, it reminded me of our earliest days in this country. When we first encountered indigenous people, we talked about land ownership and boundaries that cordoned us all off into our separate spaces. Indigenous people, however, did not adhere to the same land ownership ideas. The Great Spirit allowed them to occupy the land. The land was a gift to the people, and in return, they must be caretakers of the land. The more they cared for the land, the more the land cared for them. They lived in manageable sized communities and shared all of their resources because they understood the value of communal living.

God’s establishment of the people of Israel was essentially in the same vein. So much of what God tried to teach the people, though, we tossed aside when we decided that Jesus was disconnected from this message. The commandments were never meant to fall by the wayside, nor were God’s instructions to live in community. Interestingly enough, all people of faith, from every religious tradition around the world, understand what it means to live in “community” and what the consequences are of not doing so. In the west, we have lost our focus. Our communities consist of only people who look like us and act like us. God’s definition of community was much broader and much more inclusive.

As we continue to contemplate the impact of the 10 Commandments on our lives, it is imperative that we re-evaluate how we live in community, how we share our lives in community, and how we nurture that community. Our need for self-love is paramount. We must be able to love ourselves and love others in the same way that we proclaim that we love God. They all go hand in hand.

Reflecting on the 10 Commandments and walking through this series of services has allowed me to remember what God ultimately requires of us:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?

(Micah 6:8)

This should always be our goal, justice, kindness, and humility. Each of these provides a framework for self-love, love of neighbor, and love of God. If we are just and kind, we will not covet. If we are humble, we will live and share in our communities as is necessary for the whole of that community. This isn’t about imposing our beliefs on others; it is about bringing our best selves to the table. We are more likely to find common ground when we are willing to just love because love is the better answer. I would like to believe that Love Wins; that love always wins. This is only true, though, if we nurture it and watch it grow.

9th Commandment: You Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbor

Exodus 20:16

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“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

Matthew 7:1-5

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7 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

After much contemplation, I decided to pair these two passages, not because they are a perfect match, they aren’t, but because when we are bearing false witness against anyone it usually comes with a heap of judgment. And when we are judging others, we are usually skewing the truth so that our judgment feels justified. Neither of these scenarios are good.

Traditionally, the commandment to not bear false witness against your neighbor was used primarily for any kind of disagreement, especially when the courts or judges were involved in deciding the matter. But how do we interpret bearing false witness in the 21st century. This commandment becomes applicable to everything we do. It can apply to spreading gossip, memes that aren’t truthful, and even postings on social media that have not been verified. If you don’t know whether it is truthful or not, then it shouldn’t be posted. And if it only serves to denigrate someone else, it probably shouldn’t be spoken or posted.

Are we guilty of bearing false witness? Yes! All the time – often inadvertently. There are times when we will repost things on social media that we have not personally verified, and without realizing it, we have just propagated an untruth. God calls us repeatedly to speak the truth in love. If I’m approaching every situation with love in my heart, the likelihood that I will bear false witness against someone diminishes greatly. But how does this relate to not judging?

Bearing false witness is the quintessential activity of judging; and we are good at it. We judge people by what they wear, how big or small they are, their politics, their religion, what they believe or don’t believe, whether they like the same things we do or not, and so on. There are thousands of ways to judge others, and when we do, we are quick to announce our judgment. It even surprises us when we get it wrong.

My dad tells the story of a black man who came into the Buick dealership in my hometown. He waited patiently to speak with a salesperson, but everyone in the showroom was rather reluctant to help the man. Finally, he had to ask someone for assistance because he wanted to buy one of their cars on the lot. The salesperson invited him over to his desk to “see if he would qualify for financing,” and the man looked at the salesperson and said, “No sir, you don’t understand. I have cash in hand and want to buy that Buick out there.” Dad said that everyone in the building looked at the man with skepticism, so that man went out to his car and brought in a bag of money. Once he did, he said, “Now do I have your attention.”

This story illustrates the point of judging quite well. Everyone looked at this black man and assumed he was in the wrong place, that he couldn’t possibly have the means necessary to buy a new car, much less pay cash for it. Everyone in the building judged this man based on the color of his skin. What Jesus tells us is that when we judge others we will also be judged. Often our judgments are about things that no one can change, like the color of someone’s skin. More importantly, though, when we judge, we really do damage to our own self-image.

Jesus goes on to describe what judgment looks like. We complain about the speck in someone else’s eye when we have a log in our own. This brings us back to a common theme throughout our study of the commandments, that introspection should always come first. Through self-examination, we should be able to determine our own failings and be willing to do something about them. In fact, if we spent more time cleaning up our own lives, we wouldn’t really have time to worry about the lives of others.

So, when do we get to complain? This is often the question I get asked when we talk about judging. Someone will confess, “I really just want to understand more clearly why they did what they did?” Fair enough. My question back, though, is why? Why do you need to understand someone else’s motives? Do their decisions directly affect you? Judging is often accompanied by our insatiable need to know things that don’t have anything to do with us. I might wonder why someone would put in a swimming pool in the back yard if they did not know how to swim. Knowing more about the situation might alleviate my judgment, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.

This concept has been a difficult one to wrestle to the ground. We are good at making all kinds of circumstances and situations relative to our lives when they clearly are not. I have learned to ask myself three important questions before I pass any kind of judgment on others: Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? Most of the time, it really isn’t necessary.

What also comes from judgment is a misguided notion that we can separate behavior or belief from the person. I heard this so much growing up, “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” We are incapable of doing this at its most fundamental level. We equate folks with their behavior and their beliefs. We assume all kinds of things about people when they divulge their beliefs, much less their behaviors. We tend to look at people who behave certain ways or believe certain things as “stupid.” It doesn’t take long for us to look at them as stupid people. They become the things they believe in or the ways in which they behave.

What would happen, though, if we focused more attention on our own thoughts and actions? What if we spent our spare time working on ourselves, learning how to be the best versions of ourselves that we could be?

There is another trend that I see that is incredibly destructive. When someone believes they have a right to condemn someone else’s behavior because of how they understand the Bible. They stand firm in the idea that it is their God-given right and necessity to tell others what they are doing wrong and why. They will tell you it is because they do not want anyone to perish but want everyone to have eternal life.

This kind of God-complex is dangerous. It asserts that the individual engaged in this kind of judgment somehow has an inside track with God; knows the mind of God so well that they have been given authority to set the world to rights. Maybe I’m wrong, I’ll deal with God if I am, but I don’t believe that God has given any of us that kind of authority. What Jesus is saying in our passage today is to stay in your own lane. It is too easy to condemn others for all kinds of things. We are quick to judge our neighbor, often without any proof. And even if we do have proof, our neighbor’s behavior is between them and God. We have much work to do in dealing with our own issues. It could take us a lifetime to understand our motivations, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. I know personally, the more I question myself, the questions I have for myself. It is a perpetual cycle.

It is my hope and prayer that we will all hit the pause button on judging, that we will take a step back and focus our attention on fixing ourselves first and being of service to others. This is our highest calling. This is the more narrow path.