An Attitude of Thanksgiving 

1 Thessalonians 5:12-22; 1 Samuel 1:4-20 

November 18, 2012[1]

My dad was not a college graduate.  He never completed High School.  He was not a poet.  But I cannot begin to guess how many times I heard him quote this little poem:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone.

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

Sigh, it is lost on the air.

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

But shrink from voicing care.[2]

After awhile, I started to think I was "sophisticated" and I became skeptical about my Dad’s wisdom.  My college English professors would not have been very complimentary about this poem, about its literalism, about the sing-song nature of its rhyming patterns.  It sounded more like something reprinted from The Power of Positive Thinking than something from a book of poetry called Poems of Passion, the volume in which it first appeared. 

Yet for my Dad, this poem was not a surface-level “don’t worry, be happy” sort of thing.  This poem spoke volumes about the way he approached life.  Don’t be mistaken, my Dad knew tough times.  He was a child of the depression.  His father died when my dad was about 14 or 15, and my dad soon struck out on his own.  He tried his hand at working on the railroad and got bored with it.  He tried working in the shipbuilding yards in Norfolk, but he couldn’t stand it.  He joined the army, but he soon got a medical discharge—I was never quite clear if the discharge was because of a hearing problem or asthma.  But he served enough to qualify for the GI Bill, which allowed him to go to apprentice school to learn carpentry.  Outside of his God and his family, building was his passion in life.

My dad put me to work so that I could earn my way through college.  He was not an easy man to work for.  I wouldn’t have lasted long if, in the middle of a tense moment on the job, I would have started quoting this poem!

But my Dad was fair and he was respected.  You always could count on him to be looking out for the guys who worked for him.

In his later years, he would quote this poem more often—especially after Mom died.  He explained it this way.  He said, “I decided that I could go around being miserable and making everyone around me miserable, or I could make the best of things.”  And he did.  For him, the way of joy and thanksgiving was not a surface level emotion; it was an attitude that governed the way he lived.  Though he felt pain, he also felt thanksgiving for his God, for the woman whom he cherished until the day he rejoined her in heaven, and for his family.  So in his later years, every day he would get up in the morning and begin his day by singing "Holy, Holy, Holy!  Lord God Almighty!"

This all came to mind as I read these words from the Apostle Paul to the Church in Thessalonica:  “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus” (1Thessalonians 5:18, NIV).  On the surface, these words often have struck me as falling into that same genre, “laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone.”  Don’t worry.  Be happy.  But I started digging a bit further into these words this past week. 

This first letter to the Thessalonian Church is the oldest piece of Christian literature in existence.  It was written just twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.  This puts it sometime around the year 50 A.D.  The scholars tell us that Paul was probably in Corinth when he wrote this letter, a long distance from Jerusalem.  This was before Rome began the intensive persecution of the Jews and the Christians that ultimately led to the complete destruction of the City of Jerusalem. 

This letter was written years before Paul was carried off in chains to Rome, before he suffered shipwreck and imprisonment.  It was written long before the words he wrote to the Philippians about how he had learned the hard way to be “content whatever the circumstances” (Philippians 4:11).

Yet Paul already knew something about persecution—because in his earlier years, he was one of the biggest offenders in promoting the rift between the Jewish leaders and the rapidly growing sect of Jewish Christians.  He also knew what it was like to have to flee under cover to escape with his own life.  He also knew of controversy, as the Jewish Christians debated the circumstances under which they should be preaching the Good News to the Gentiles and baptizing them. 

Paul had spent substantial time in the city of Thessalonica and had developed a strong bond with the church there.  He wrote this letter in response to a report that he received back from Timothy saying that there were some problems brewing with the church.

As he nears the end of this letter, Paul begins this rapid fire series of instructions—we use the fancy word “exhortations”:  “Be joyful always; pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.”  But lest his readers dismiss these words the way a college student dismisses advice he receives from mom about laundry, Paul claims high authority for these instructions:  “this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”  (1 Thessalonians 5:18). 

Paul was not talking about being polite.  Paul was not teaching people to say “thank you” the way we teach our children to say “thank you.”  Paul was not even tackling here the question that he would deal with later about suffering for the sake of the Gospel, although his words certainly would apply in that situation.

Paul was addressing a way of life, an attitude of life that we can grow into, a way of life in which our underlying attitude does not fluctuate with our moods as we bounce from one event to another.  Think about how often we fall into the trap of tying our moods, our emotions to our external circumstances.  It’s easy to be thankful when we have a full stomach, when we have a roof over our heads, when we are surrounded by those we love.  But let a job fall through or illness strike or lose a loved one or receive a bad diagnoses, our comfortable life is disrupted and we fall apart.

Paul is inviting us to see our lives differently.  He is not trying to tell us to ignore reality.  He is inviting us, instead, to a different way of seeing, a way of experiencing that whatever events take place in our lives, God is with us!  Even as Christians, we are so used to thinking about God as being a part of our lives; Paul is inviting us to see that we are part of God’s plan.

But so many times, we can’t see it.  In our Old Testament Lesson, Hannah could not see God’s plan at work.  Day after day, she would visit the House of the Lord at Shiloh and pray for a child.  She told God that if she had a son, she would offer Him to the Lord’s service.  She prayed so hard that Eli, the priest, actually accused her of drinking too much!  She explains her situation to him, and Eli offers her a blessing.  Hannah and her husband return home, and a miracle occurs.  She is with child! (1 Samuel 1:4-20).

So Hannah makes good on her commitment to God and she presents her young child to Eli.  Then Hannah offers her prayer of dedication.  It is as though God has removed a veil from her eyes and has given her the rare opportunity to glimpse just a bit of her part in God’s plan.  She speaks of the tendency of God to act in ways that we don’t expect, to break the bows of the warriors, to reverse the fortunes of the rich so that they beg for food, while those who used to be hungry are hungry no more.  She praises the God who has taken the barren woman and given her children.  And she alludes to the future kings of Israel who her son will anoint by saying that God “will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed.”  Could it be that she had some inkling of the One to come, the Anointed One that would be called the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?!  Hannah did not merely thank God for a good result in her case; rather, she was able to see that her life had a place in God’s design for the world.  For that, she could say, “my heart rejoices in the Lord.”  (1 Samuel 2:1).

So often, we approach Thanksgiving, (if we give thought to it at all) as a time to say thank you for specific individual blessings, for things that go right for us.  I can even recall hearing an atheist commentator on the radio saying that he was thankful for being able to experience another Thanksgiving Day, despite his cancer, although he wasn’t sure who he should be thankful to… a sad thing, indeed. 

I would like to invite you, this year, to approach Thanksgiving differently.  In addition to thanking God for giving us what we want, can you thank God for allowing us to be a part of God’s plan for the world? 

Can you look at your life and see the hand of God at work, bringing you to this time and place, to share in His work of ushering in the Kingdom of God?  Can you look at your part in God’s world and say “Thank You, Lord?”

Can you think of the people who have had an influence on your life this year, the past month, the past week, who have encouraged you in your faith, who have reminded you of God’s love, can you think of their part in God’s plan and say, “Thank You, Lord?”

Can you look at some of the circumstances where things didn’t go the way that you wanted—but despite your disappointment, your suffering, your loneliness, can you see the hand of God at work in your life supporting you, upholding you, and continuing to encourage and lead you in your journey?  Can you look at the hand of God at work in your life and say, “Thank You, Lord?”

In another letter from the Apostle Paul, he was able to do just that.  In his letter to the Church at Rome, Paul told his readers that, “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39, NIV). 

To give thanks in all circumstances is to see our lives as part of God’s plan, and to know that as a result, whatever happens, God is with us.  To live like that is to live in an attitude of Thanksgiving.  And it is in that spirit, that I invite you to live in an attitude of thanks-giving.

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas E. Frost.  All rights reserved.

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[1] Preached at Cunningham United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

[2] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Solitude,” from Roy J. Cook, One Hundred and One Famous Poems with a Prose Supplement, Chicago, IL:  The Cable Company, 1929), 72.