ON PRAYER

3. PRAISING AND THANKING

November 24, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
I Thessalonians 5:12-18
Luke 17:11-19

"pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances..."
-I Thessalonians 5:17-18 (NRSV)

If you are like most people these days, you believe that
praying is a good idea but don't do much of it. If you are like
most church-goers these days, it would be a bit of a generous
exaggeration to call what praying you do a "prayer life."

If what praying you actually do, other than the prayers you
Say in church, is an occasional word, mostly on the run, you are
normal. That's the way it is for most of us. Maybe that's not
how it should be, ana maybe someday you and I will change, but
for now what praying we do is pretty limited.

Now I don't have it on any authority but my own faith and
experience, and on that modest basis I would suggest that Goa
doesn't hold that against you. God maybe even understands how
the life you try to live is already claiming your mental energy
before your alarm clock goes off; that you may even he Working
while you are showering or shaving; that you give yourself so
totally to your job and your friends and your commitment, that
the first solitary and quiet - and therefore prayerful - moment
of your day is often the last moment before your eyes close in
sleep. I believe God understands that and while wishing to hear
more from you - wishing for more of a conversational relationship
with you - does understand you; and like a parent is a little sad
that what you are missing by not praying is important to you.

If you see any of yourself in that description, there is
something you can do about it besides feel guilty. There is a
good place to begin without signing up for a forty-eight-hour

prayer retreat. It is rudimentary. Say "thank you." As your
mind skips into gear while you shower or shave, say "thank you."
AS you slip into blessed Sleep, say "thank you." It's not

much... But it just may be enough.

We've been thinking about prayer and I have suggested that
to pray requires:

- A strong sense of your own worth as a child of God, not

simply a depraved Sinner, but one God loves as if there were only
one of you to love.

-And I proposed that to pray you must be willing to bring to
God the content of your heart and to ask God to meet your needs.

-And I proposed, that in order to pray, you must be willing
to start the conversation, to insist on a hearing, and sometimes
to express impatience.

~And this morning, my proposal is that the way to begin and
to end your praying, in fact the words to say, if you cannot or
will not pray any other words, are these... "Thank you."

We seem to know to teach it to the children. We teach them
to "say grace" early on. People who don't pray themselves, don't
think much about it, teach their children to Say table grace. It
seems that we Know intuitively the importance of gratitude.
Often we ask the youngest to do the table praying for us. It's a
moment to shine. It's also a moment of high theological integri-
ty when the three-year-old says:

"God is great
God is good.
Let us thank God for this food."

And sometimes there are moments of high humor.

My younger brother and I used to think it was hilarious when
an eighty-five-year-old great uncle made it rhyme by praying:

"God is good
Let us thank him for this food."

And when the scout leader or camp counselor asks someone to
Say grace, someone invariably says, "Grace," or worse yet,
"Here's the bread. Here's the meat. Good God, let's eat." And
if you ever see me chuckling as someone's table grace goes on too
long, it's because I'm remembering sitting at a long table at
Summer camp, holding in my lap the trough we made out of the
plastic table cloth, into which the boy at the end was pouring
ice water, which was overflowing into the lap of the boy at the

other end, as the Rev. Robert Fulton's table grace droned on and
on.

We teach children to say thank you because we know intui-
tively that gratitude is somehow basic to our humanness.

11/24/91

From the giver's side of it, the act of giving is incon-
plete until the gift is received and in some sense acknowledged.
Of course, you don't give a gift to be thanked; but if you are
not, you are never sure that the gift arrived, never sure that it
was appreciated, never Sure, that is to say, that your love - or
whatever it was that motivated you to give the gift -
meant anything at all to the recipient. How foolish we feel and
how diminished the act of giving is when we.have to ask, "Did you
receive my gift?"

We know that gratitude is part of the dynamic of giving and
receiving - that it is basic to the relationship between giver
and recipient: and further, we know that saying thank you is
somehow connected to our own spiritual health.

It was C. S. Lewis who observed that God asks for a lot of
praise and gratitude in the Bible. At first reading, it appears
a little petty, frankly, like the dictator who needs a claque of
people around to tell him how wonderful he is.

But then Lewis, who was writing an essay about the Psalms,
observed that if we fail to admire great art, for instance, we
have missed something. The art isn't poorer for our refusal to
admire it, but we may be.

He observed that healthy, modest: and happy people did a lot
of praising - praising of each other, the world, music, food and
that cranky, unhappy people didn't praise anything.

So, Lewis, with his child-like approach to these weighty

matters, came to a logical conclusion: praising and thanking
will make you healthy and happy. "Praise," he wrote, "almost
seems to be inner health made audible." {Reflections on the

Psalms, p. 80]

That's why the Bible insists that we do so much praising and
thanking and it is also the point of the story in the Gospel of
Luke about the ten Lepers, a favorite Thanksgiving text.

It seems at. first to be a simple example of ingratitude.
Ten men were healed. Nine didn't say thank you. Those nine have
been treated very roughly over the years in countless Thanksgiv-
ing sermons as examples of human boorishness and ingratitude.

But there is more going on than is immediately apparent in Luke's
Simple story.

What we know about people with leprosy is that they were
isolated from society because of fear. When they contracted the
dread disease, they were forced to leave their families and
remove themselves from the community. There were no hospitals,
halfway houses, so they banded together in small groups of iso-

11/24/91

lated despair. They got by begging for money. More often than
not they died of hunger, exposure, or the inevitable madness
their terrible isolation produced.

So when a band of men who had leprosy saw Jesus and his
friends, Standing at prescribed distance, they cried, "Jesus have

What they get from him is peculiar. Jesus telis the men to
go see a priest, the berson society assigned the responsibility
of diagnosing leprosy. off they go and on the way, lo ana be-
hold, their leprosy disappears.

One of the men returns to Jesus, falls on his face and
thanks him. And Jesus says, "Rise, your faith has made you
well." How about the other nine? Go easy on them. Maybe they
are already home, hugging their families, holding in their arms
the dear ones, the babies, they have not touched in years. They
are not the point of this story.

"Your faith has made you well," he Said to the one who
expressed gratitude. All ten are healed. "You are well. You are
healthy. You are Whole because you have expressed gratitude."
So the point apparently is that you are not whole, regardless of
physical health, what you own, who you are, until you experience

Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School Says that
gratitude is a great reducer of stress,

Dutch priest, Henrj Nouwen, observes that fear and anxiety
diminish as we experience gratitude for the gift of life.

Living in South America for a while, Nouwen wrote in his
journal:

"Thanksgiving Day! There is probably no day I
like so much in the United States as this day.
In many ways it struck me aS a more spiritual or
religious day than Christmas: no gifts, few
commercial preparations, just a coming together to
express gratitude for life and for all the bless-
ings we have received. I am more and more con-
vinced that gratitude is one of the most sublime.
of human emotions." [Gracias!, p. 55]

You cannot, of course, force someone to feel anything. you
Cannot coerce your own feelings. You can Say "thank you," and
that will open you to the experience of gratitude, but you can't
make yourself feel it. What you can do is open your eyes,

11/24/91

What the season of Thanksgiving can do for all of us is invite us
to lift our heads from the book, desk, computer, ledger, brief,
account, hurried, harried intensity of urban life, and look
around.

In his personal memoir, Self-Consciousness, John Updike
wrote about his Unitarian minister father-in-law who always
exclaimed while driving, "What a view!" about countryside no one
else seemed to appreciate:

"Like my late Unitarian father-in-law, am I now in
my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical
world, of this planet with its scenery and weather
- that pathetic discovery which the old make that
every day and every season has its beauty and its
uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a pre-
cious experience, that all species of tree and
weed have their signature and style and the sky is
a pageant of clouds. Aging calls us outdoors,
after the adult indoors of work and love-life and
keeping stylish into the lowly simplicities we
thought we had outgrown as children. We come
again to love the plain world, stones and wood,
air and water. The act of seeing itself is
giorious and of hearing and feeling and tasting."
[p. 246]

Similarly, the late Archibald MacLeish:

"At twenty, stooping round about, I thought the
world a miserable place, truth a trick, faith in
doubt, little beauty, less grace. Now at sixty
what I see, although the world is worse by far,
stops my heart in ecstasy, God, the wonders that
"there are,'"

Pick up your head, open your eyes. Lift up your heart and
give thanks,

Frank Harrington, pastor of the Peach Tree Presbyterian
Church in Atlanta, told a group of clergy a story ina meeting
last week. [It's about an old man, who every Friday in the early
evening, walked from his house down to the ocean, carrying a
bucket of Shrimp. And as the sun Started its descent and the
evening waves gently lapped the Shore, walked to the end of the
pier and reached in his bucket of shrimp and began to feed the
birds who were already there waiting for him. Slowly, intention-
ally, he distributed the contents of his bucket, as he did every
Friday evening, with the sun Slipping down over the horizon,

What was he doing there? He was saying thank you.

11/24/91

His name was Captain Eddie Rickenbacker. Years before,
October 1942, President Roosevelt dispatched Captain Rickenbaker
with a special message to General MacArthur who was beginning to
plan American strategy in the Pacific War. But the B-17 became
lost, ran out of fuel and went down. The crew of eight made it
into life boats and then began a harrowing, long and desperate
fight to survive the sun, sharks, waves, but most of all hunger.

When it seemed that the end had come and there was no hope,
when they had prayed all they could pray, Captain Rickenbaker, in
the raft, was asleep with his cap over his eyes. He felt some-
thing. A bird had lighted on his head. He knew if he could
catch it, they would survive. He did. And they ate it. They used
its entrails for bait. They survived.

And so the old captain, now hunched over, but still proud,

every Friday of his life, took his bucket of shrimp and fed the
birds and said, "thank you."

Frank asked: "What was that sea gull doing there hundreds

of miles from land?" And Wisely did not try to answer. Only God
Knows.

But this we believe. God knows you are here. God knows you
are you. God knows your needs.

Your life is a gift.

Two people loved you into life.

A mother cradled you and fed you,
Dear ones bathed and dressed and
taught and nurtured you...long ago
your life was given to you.

And God's precious world, a gift which has fed and sheltered
you, and filled your heart with its beauty.

And God's gift of love given new each morning... Others who
cherish you, one perhaps, you love with a love you cannot de-
scribe, apart from your gratitude for it.

And mystery of all mystery, perhaps one who loves you in
return.

And the children...
This we believe ~ all of it is a gift.

And the giver has come personally, descended to live and

lieve and die with us and for us, in an ultimate gift of eternal
love.

11/24/91

Praise God from whom all blessings flow" - is how we begin
every Sunday.

"Now thank we all our God" is how we end.
May it be the way we begin and end this and all our days.

And if it is the only prayer you pray, it will be suffi-
cient.

Thank you. Thank you, God. Amen.

11/24/91