Materials
Praying Through The Psalm Series #4
Praying Your Gratitude
Psalm 118
by R. Todd Bouldin
Have you ever noticed that some people have more than their share of problems but always seem to be content and thankful? My mom is like that. She’s been plagued with crippling arthritis most of her adult life, yet I’ve rarely heard her complain about her condition or what she can’t do. Others have relatively easy lives but seem never to be content or thankful. They always are seeking something more. That is because gratitude has nothing to do with the circumstances of life and everything to do with your view of God. If you are having trouble being thankful, it isn’t new circumstances you need. It is a new vision of God.
Pray Psalm 118:19-29.
For the past four weeks, our sermons have called us to pray the Psalms. We have learned that we can bring anything to God in prayer – the Psalmists did, and their prayers still made it into the Bible. There are no words that God can’t hear. We have let the psalms guide us as we prayed our thirst, our confusion, and our fears. Now today we pray our gratitude. The psalms were the ancient book of worship for the Hebrews and the Early Church. Children were taught to memorize the words. I think the words of Psalm 23 were the first words my parents taught me from Scripture. In times of trouble, or sickness, or death, these prayers would immediately roll off the tongues of the saints and they would find themselves again in communion with God. Sometimes they would pray the psalms, sometimes they would sing them like we did this morning, and sometimes they would recite them in worship.
Today’s Psalm, 118, belongs to a group of psalms known as the Hellel or praise psalms. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Those words from Psalm 118 were as familiar to the Hebrews as the hymns, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” or “Amazing Grace.” They were said especially during the season of Passover.
So it is no surprise that when Jesus entered Jerusalem at Passover, the crowd began to sing this hymn once again, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” “Bind the festal procession with branches.” They had probably been singing it for a while, just as they had done at each Passover. However, the gospels make it clear that Jesus didn’t just happen to ride into Jerusalem when a crowd was standing on the road singing Psalm 118. No, the people were clearly singing their thanksgiving to Jesus because they had seen what he had done in his ministry. Perhaps in that crowd was Zacheaus who had been forgiven his sins or blind Bartemeaus who had been given his sight. Or Lazarus who Jesus had raised from the dead. All of them healed and delivered by the gracious hands of Jesus. The people were so grateful for the grace they had received. This is the first kind of gratitude, responsive gratitude, to which the Bible calls us.
The Psalmist in our psalm today expresses his thanks to God in response for God’s mighty deliverance. “I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation.” Responsive gratitude demonstrates that we are paying attention to the blessings of life. Like the people who experienced deliverance from Pharaoh’s armies or lined the streets on Palm Sunday, we realize that Jesus has been good to us and so we come to church to join the festal procession of those who have been delivered and are grateful. It doesn’t require an especially spiritual person to offer responsive thanksgiving. You just have to be able to pay attention to the blessings in your life. I have a friend who is a very prominent lawyer in Tennessee, and one of my favorite people. Every time I ask him how he is doing, I forget that I shouldn’t even have asked because I know how he will respond, and I get the feeling he really means it, “Better than I deserve.” Now that is responsive gratitude. Things could be a lot worse. It is a lot worse for someone. Always. So, be thankful.
As obvious as that seems, I am always amazed by how many people cannot bring themselves to live with gratitude. They choose instead to focus on their loss, on their hurt, or what life has not given them. And as sympathetic as we should be with some of these individuals, it is a choice they have made. Complaint is not natural. Neither is gratitude. What is natural is that life will often hurt, but what comes next is up to you. You can respond by either complaining or giving thanks. Those who choose gratitude choose not to be victims. They choose to determine their own response to the disappointments of life and they choose to defy their disappointments by finding reason to give thanks. It doesn’t matter how critical, or boring, or unpredictable your life becomes, your last freedom as Victor Frankl would remind you, is to determine your response. Don’t give that up. Don’t dare allow the circumstances to take over for you. Insist on your God-given freedom to choose your response to life. Choose gratitude. If for no other reason than because it feels better than whining. It certainly feels better to those around you.
Responsive gratitude, though, is only the first step in learning how to conduct a spiritual life. If you stay with the Psalms, if you keep praying them, eventually you will learn a deeper form of gratitude that goes beyond just making the choice to be grateful. This form is not just responsive – it is creative.
Creative gratitude does not wait for the circumstances to set an agenda to which we respond. It does not wait to see what the world will come up with next for you and then challenge you to find a reason still to be grateful. Rather, creative gratitude is world-creating. It subverts the pain-filled, suffering world of the front page of the L.A. Times, and the hurt and loss we fill when we look in the mirror. It does this by insisting on giving praise and thanks to a God who is not done with his creation. With this God, there is always more to the story. Earlier in this psalm, the psalmist sings, “I was pushed hard, so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me. The Lord is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation.” Later, the psalmist sings out, “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.”
Remember that these Hellel Psalms were sung at Passover – the event that created the identity of the Hebrews, when God freed them from slavery and brought them through the Red Sea as we witnessed on the video earlier today. In the Exodus, God miraculously created a new world for the Hebrews. He changed the way it is. He overthrew the most powerful nation in the world to create hope for those who had no hope. So the Psalms do not teach us simply to find some reason to give thanks while still being slaves. They don’t tell us to give thanks because it could be worse. And they do not teach us to be contented slaves, conforming to our addictions, pain and oppression. No, they call us to envision a whole new way of life that knows that we follow a Passover God who can change the way it is, and he will. What can God can is marvelous in our eyes. And that is why we are grateful.
So, in this way, the Psalms are subversive literature. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” The Hebrews sang this as they approached the temple. A people who were rejected were given a place in the world and a place to worship. When the Hebrews worshiped and gave thanks to God, this small nation surrounded by powerful empires was proclaiming the possibility of a different world where God did things no one could imagine. So, thanksgiving is more than just giving thanks for what you have received. It has the possibility of creating a blessedly different way of life.
When the twelfth century began in France, Medieval Europe was filled with reasons to be afraid: plagues ravaged the population, the Muslims were invading from the East and had taken half of Spain, the church was in need of reform, and the new monarchies were locked in a struggle with Rome. There were many poor serfs in their feudal economy. In the midst of all this despair, the Abbott of the Monastery Church in St. Dennis discovered a new grateful vision of heaven on earth. Abbott Suger had the audacity to reconstruct his church with a new architectural form we now call Gothic. In building his towering cathedral, the abbott and his architects were creating a vision of heaven on earth with pointed ceilings and towers that reached to the sky. Flying buttresses, rosette windows, and stained glass were added. All of it was revolutionary and subversive – not just architecturally, but culturally. The Gothic cathedral made an incredible claim that heaven had descending onto earth. God was with them, and now anything was possible. The next hundred years brought all kinds of revolutions in science, theology, politics and technology.
I do not believe that was an accident. People become grateful and creative again when they believe that heaven has met earth. The gratitude of an anonymous abbott helped create another world for people who could not see beyond the way it was.
We can see this creative gratitude told in the movie Life is Beautiful. In 1945, near the end of the second World War, the Jews in an Italian town are rounded up by the Fascists and shipped by rail to a death camp. The father and son in the movie, Guido and Joshua are loaded into a train, and Guido instinctively tries to turn it into a game to comfort his son. He makes a big show of being terrified that somehow they will miss the train and be left behind. Guido constructs an elaborate fiction to comfort and protect his son. It is all an elaborate game, he explains. The first one to get 1,000 points will win a tank--not a toy tank but a real one, which Joshua can drive all over town. Guido acts as the translator for a German who is barking orders at the inmates, freely translating them into Italian designed to quiet his son's fears. And he literally hides the child from the camp guards, with rules of the game that have the boy crouching on a high sleeping platform and remaining absolutely still. The father finally loses his life to the Nazis, but Joshua survives because his father created a different and beautiful world for him in the midst of horrific conditions.
It is all a matter of perspective. Jesus created a new world too when he rode into Jerusalem that Palm Sunday and declared that he himself was the stone the builders rejected, and now the stone that had been tossed aside had become the chief stone of them all. That was subversive language. Jesus was claiming that he was now the temple, the meeting place of heaven and earth.
If you can see that, if you can see that in Jesus Christ you have a meeting place with God, then your heart is filled with gratitude. William Blake wrote these words, “Gratitude is heaven itself.” It does not matter how awful or despairing your life becomes, your thanksgiving refuses to honor the disappointments of the present because you can see a vision of the future. It does not take the disappointments and hurt as the only reality. The present will not last. In Christ, new worlds are made, impossible things can happen, the way it is can be transformed tomorrow, for heaven and earth have met.
When we read the newspapers, when we receive the bad lab report, when we lose our jobs, when we get confused and get lost along life’s path, we declare our faith by insisting on creative gratitude. We respond in thanks for the gifts we already have received. But gratitude also envisions a whole new way of life -- for a Savior who has ridden into our lives, delivered us, and healed us. What others reject God has accepted. Where there once was only the prospect of despair, now there is hope. Where once there was death, now there is life. “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast loves endures forever.” The way it is isn’t the way it really is, and certainly not the way it will be. Anything can happen! “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.”
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