The Gratitude Gap

If you have ever been on an airplane, and gone from one place to another and back home, you might have noticed a few things. I like to watch the map, personally, while I fly. And if you watch the map you’ll notice that you don’t fly in a straight line. You fly in a curve, since the earth is curved. And you’ll also notice that sometimes the time it takes you to get to your destination is longer than the time it takes to come back home, especially if you traveled to California or somewhere else west of here.

That’s because of headwinds and tailwinds. The jetstream blows west to east in the continental US. So some winds blow the plane forward and help it, and other winds push against the plane, giving it resistance, making it harder for the plane to go forward. Some winds might come directly across the way the plane is traveling. If you’re riding in the airplane, you might notice the headwinds and crosswinds, because the plane might start shaking and you might get jostled around in your seats a little bit. But you probably wouldn’t even notice the tailwind. It’s just blowing the plane forward the whole time, calmly and strongly.

Living a life of gratitude is a lot about noticing things. We might notice, for example, that today is a beautiful, lovely day and we might remember that last year, it was cold and windy and we had our service in the gym. I’m grateful that we get to be outside for our service and our snack today. We might notice other things about our day so far and feel a feeling of gratitude. But if we never looked, we wouldn’t notice. If we didn’t notice, we wouldn’t be grateful.

Living a life of gratitude is also very much like headwinds and tailwinds. The headwinds are the difficult things we come up against, and the tailwinds are the invisible blessings that we take for granted every day. We tend to notice the headwinds in our lives, but not so much the tailwinds.

It’s kind of like the difference between being sick and being well. Do you notice when you’re well? Do you wake up, every morning that you’re well, and think, “I’m well today! I don’t have a headache. I don’t feel bad. I can breathe so easily right now!” But when we are sick, we notice everything about our bodies. Our head might hurt, we notice how difficult it is to breathe, we never thought we could produce that much snot! When we are well, we are riding a tailwind. We are able to do all the things that we need to do, with a healthy body, and we tend not to notice it. But when we are sick, we are facing a tailwind. And we definitely notice. We pay attention. We complain. We want someone to make us feel better. And when we do finally feel better, we are so grateful.

But what if we were grateful, every day, for being well? What if we noticed?

Living a life of gratitude is all about noticing, every day, something that we might not otherwise recognize as a tailwind. Some people keep a gratitude journal, every day, so that they can write down all the tailwinds in their lives, all the things that they wouldn’t otherwise notice or pay attention to. Our gratitude journal today might say something about the nice weather today, or about our families or pets, or about feeling well instead of feeling sick.

If we start to notice all the tailwinds in our lives, we also notice that they are not things that we necessarily created or control. A life of gratitude realizes that we are dependent on so many other people for everything it takes to get through just one day . . . and dependent on God our Creator, who gives us the gift of life, and breath, and everything else that we have.

Did you make the sun rise this morning? Did you plant and make these beautiful trees grow? Do you plant, water, harvest, pack, and deliver your own food? We are incredibly interconnected and interdependent, on one another and on God, for everything we have, including our very lives. To acknowledge and celebrate this fact daily is to live a life of gratitude. It is to NOTICE the tailwinds.

That’s what the people of God were doing in the reading that Ava read for us a few minutes ago. All cultures and religions have harvest festivals as ways of acknowledging our dependence on one another and on God. We can’t do it on our own. And so the people of God remembered. They remembered the headwinds, the difficult times, like when God brought them out of slavery in Egypt.

But they were also really good at remembering the tailwinds. That’s what a lot of the book of Psalms that Ryan’s reading came from are all about. The psalms are still used as prayers by millions of people every day, who want to remind themselves that “The Lord is Good; God’s mercy is everlasting; God’s faithfulness endures from age to age.”

As the great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer said, “the greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. The one who has learned this knows what it means to live. They have penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything.”

Reminding ourselves daily of the tailwinds behind us--our families, our friends, our teachers, our religious communities, the beauty of creation, and all of God’s innumerable blessings, leads to a life of peace. As the Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Philippians, praying with thanksgiving leads to the peace of God.

Because when we understand gratitude as a way of life, we understand that God has created a world of abundance. Abundance, not scarcity, is the nature of existence itself. There is always more. So there’s no reason to be anxious about having enough! There’s no need not to share what we have with others. If we believe that scarcity is the nature of existence, we will fight, we will be jealous and envious, we will constantly be looking over our shoulders and not trusting our neighbors.

But gratitude teaches us that there is enough. There is always enough, Jesus says, because he is the bread of life and the cup of salvation.

This Eucharist is a model of gratitude. This meal is meant to show us a picture of God’s plenty, of God’s abundance, and our dependence. This Eucharist shows us the tailwind. It lets us know that God loves us more than we could possibly imagine, and that God will provide what we need.

There is no suspicion here, no looking over our shoulder, no distrust at the Lord’s Table. We aren’t afraid that there won’t be enough. That is why we say that we “receive” Eucharist, not “Take” it. That is why we come with open hands and hearts, waiting to receive the gift with gratitude in our hearts.

I hope that you learn to choose gratitude. I hope that you remember that God loves you. And I hope you remember that you have many, many tailwinds in your life that are propelling you forward, helping you grow into the amazing human being that you are, every day.

AMEN.

*Note: The idea of "headwinds" and "tailwinds" in this sermon came from Diana Butler Bass's book Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Grace.