A Year of Gratitude
Pentecost 20
October 14, 2007
Luke 18:1-8
By Pastor Tom Kadel
This sermon was preached at the kickoff service to mark the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the founding of Christ Lutheran Church. During the service there were also four vignettes offered lifting up key moments in the life of this congregation.
Today is a day of significance. Today we begin the celebration of the 175th anniversary of Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church. We’re calling today the kickoff for that year of celebration for we assemble today one year to the month ahead of our actual anniversary date. CLC was organized as a Union Church with Christ Reformed Church in October of 1833. Next October we will mark the anniversary date with a wonderful service and Bishop Claire Burkat will be with us and there will be many other things that happen along the way to make that date especially significant for us.
Anniversaries have a special nature to them. We observe anniversaries of special moments like July 4. We observe anniversaries of difficult moments like 911 or August 29 and Hurricane Katrina. Married couples observe anniversaries of their wedding date – sometimes by reaffirming their wedding vows. There is something about us that wants to – and probably needs to – observe anniversaries.
They mark significant moments along a journey and have power to help us remember and reaffirm the meaning of the journey in the first place. So, a kickoff day like today has an important function. Today we begin to remember and begin to reaffirm the meaning of the journey that Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church began in 1833. Today we remember the reason for this journey and then surround the remainder of the anniversary celebration in its mantel.
What was the reason that the journey of this congregation began? You’ve already heard it. Remember back to the first historical vignette, the one that featured the words of founding member Isaac Wampole? “O God, how much do I owe unto Thee for all Thy mercies and innumerable benefits bestowed upon me from my birth to this present day – O make me truly thankful for the same …” This congregation began as a thankful and grateful people and during this year, may we seek to recapture the same spirit of thankfulness that caused ordinary people to do extraordinary things to begin a living and worshipping congregation. It was not easy and each of those founders sacrificed mightily in time and finance to make this congregation happen and all of them made those sacrifices because of their gratitude to God.
I am hereby proclaiming the 175th Anniversary of Christ Lutheran Church as a year of gratitude. We are beginning a year of gratitude in which the anniversary’s theme “Messengers of the Light” will be more than a slogan, but will be a flesh and blood living of everything we do – worship, service, giving, supporting, encouraging, equipping. By October 2008, may we be so immersed in gratitude to God that our actual celebration day will be an eruption of praise of God.
I want to tell you a true little story that I hold up for you as a metaphor for our year of celebration. It is a story told by Greg Anderson in his book Living Life on Purpose and it is about a man whose wife had left him. He was completely depressed. He had lost faith in himself, in other people, in God – he found no joy in living. One rainy morning this man went to a small neighborhood restaurant for breakfast. Although several people were at the diner, no one was speaking to anyone else. Our miserable friend hunched over the counter, stirring his coffee with a spoon. In one of the small booths along the window was a young mother with a little girl. They had just been served their food when the little girl broke the sad silence by almost shouting, “Momma, why don't we say our prayers here?” The waitress who had just served their breakfast turned around and said, “Sure, honey, we can pray here. Will you say the prayer for us?” And she turned and looked at the rest of the people in the restaurant and said, “Bow your heads.” Surprisingly, one by one, the heads went down. The little girl then bowed her head, folded her hands, and said, “God is great. God is good. And we thank God for our food. By God’s hand we all are fed. Thank you God for daily bread. Amen.”
That prayer changed the entire atmosphere. People began to talk with one another. The waitress said, “We should do that every morning.” “All of a sudden,” said our friend, “my whole frame of mind started to improve. From that little girl’s example, I started to thank God for all that I did have and stopped majoring in all that I didn't have. I started to be grateful.”
God is great. God is good. And we thank God for our food. By God’s hand we all are fed. Thank you God for daily bread. Amen. Surely that is a prayer of thanksgiving that young and old alike can and do pray.
For our year of gratitude, I urge each of us to learn and pray another version of that prayer. God is great. God is good. We come to God in grateful mood. By God’s hand we’ve all been led. Thank you, Christ, the church’s head. Amen.
Would you pray that prayer with me?
May young and old alike pray this prayer daily and live this prayer daily and infect the world around us with gratitude. Now, that will be an anniversary worth celebrating!
Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Postscript
The postscript was shared in the concluding moments of the worship service.
“Christ Lutheran Church has accomplished much for the Lord in the last 91,516,320 minutes. Where will we do in the next 525,600 minutes?”
That’s the question posed at the end of our final vignette and it is a question of great significance. A congregation without a direction is like a rudderless boat. It will simply go wherever the prevailing winds and tides take it. That congregation is quite likely to ride those winds and tides to places that the people of God should never go. It is likely to take that congregation on a journey seeking the very things that Jesus gave his life to turn his people away from.
A rudderless congregation will be prideful and self-important. A rudderless congregation will seek growth for the purpose of its own gain and leave behind the Great Commission of Jesus which states: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
A rudderless congregation will trust in itself and forget God. A rudderless congregation will seek to reflect the values of the culture it finds itself in rather than to challenge those values and model instead God’s values. Those are not ports Christ Lutheran Church should ever be blown into. And today is our day of commitment that it shall never be so for us.
What journey will this congregation take if it consistently lives, worships, and serves from an attitude of gratitude? That is the key question.
In the next year an attitude of gratitude shall take us deeper into the community through the Shepherd’s Shelf, the Come Little Children Child Care Center, disaster preparedness and response. In the next year an attitude of gratitude shall increase this congregation’s financial resources so that our giving to and through the larger expressions of the Lutheran Church will increase and benefit ministries that all Lutherans do together like fight world hunger, seek world justice, witness for peace and strengthen peacemaking. We do all those things now, but we certainly have the capability of doing much more.
In the next year an attitude of gratitude shall permeate far deeper into the nooks and crannies of our worship.
In the next year an attitude of gratitude shall expand our ministries with children and youth both within and outside this congregation.
In the next year an attitude of gratitude shall flow more deeply through our own families strengthening them and making them mangers for the birth of Christ in friends and neighbors.
In the next year an attitude of gratitude shall take us places we do not imagine right now because with Christ as our rudder, God will take us where God wants us to be. And wherever we find ourselves, we will self-consciously know ourselves as Messengers of the Light.
These are the things that gratitude will cause to happen. I hope you will want to get in on it.
Let us pray again: God is great. God is good. We come to God in grateful mood. By God’s hand we’ve all been led. Thank you, Christ, the church’s head. Amen.
