Gratitude Births Stewardship

 December 7, 2025

Rev. JT Smiedendorf  |  Acting Lead & Intentional Interim Minister

Text: I Thessalonians 5:12-18 and the Quran 40.61,64

Download and print a PDF of this sermon here.

 

CENTRAL FOCUS

Gratitude is a faithful orientation, a chosen attitude to the gift of life.

¹²But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; ¹³esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. ¹⁴And we urge you, brothers and sisters, to admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. ¹⁵See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. ¹⁶Rejoice always, ¹⁷pray without ceasing, ¹⁸give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May these words become Living Wisdom within us, among us, and beyond us.

In our reading this morning, we hear the apostle Paul asking the new church at Thessalonica to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” I don’t know about you, but a lot of me does not want to give thanks in all circumstances. It seems to me some situations in life don’t merit gratitude. They are inconvenient or burdensome, or even tragic or unjust or just a pain in the neck. Paul sounds to me like he is asking for a lot, too much even. It sounds like an invitation to be fakey happy, dangerously naïve, or clueless or, at least, in major denial.

But, I’ll give Scripture some credit here and allow that maybe I’m missing the point. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Let’s look into gratitude more deeply with a story.

A 14-year-old boy came out to the front door as he usually did on Sundays to give out alms to those in need who came. He never forgot the visits of the older man, Appaiah. Appaiah had neither arms nor legs. He was a torso of a man who crawled not unlike a snake. As Appaiah approached him one Sunday, the 14-year-old thought of all that he wanted to have in life; a career, a marriage, a family. He thought of all these things that Appaiah did not and would not have. He brashly asked the man crawling toward him, “Appaiah, you don’t have relatives, can’t do a thing, don’t have a place to live, and can’t wear clothes … why do you want to live?”

Appaiah turned around and took a deep breath and looked at the boy, and said, “Son, I look forward to every morning to see the blue sky or see the rain and smell the earth. I taste the good food people give me. I am thankful to God for giving me these eyes to see the beauty of his creation. Isn’t there so much to be thankful for? To live for?”

Author and Executive Director of the Center for Pluralism, Dr. Mike Ghouse, is a Muslim. He shared this story of his childhood and how it blew away his sense of what was important and of what was possible. It brought him back to his faith and his father’s favorite passage from the Quran: “Then which of the favors of your Lord will ye deny?” (55:16). Another two verses from the Quran, chapter 40, echo this theme…

61.It is God Who made the night for you, that you may rest therein; and the day allowing sight. God is gracious toward the people, but most people do not give thanks….64.It is God who made the earth a habitat for you, and the sky a structure. And God designed you, and designed you well; and God provided you with the good things. Such is God, your Lord; so Blessed is God, Lord of the Worlds.

These passages invite the faithful to appreciate that there is a web of life that supports us, a web that we did not create, but that comes from a Sacred Source. As Appaiah told the young Mike Ghouse, the appropriate orientation or relationship or attitude toward this reality, this source, is gratitude.

The medieval Persian poet Hafiz says,

“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.”

But this sacred perspective on gratitude is not supported widely by the culture. We are invited not into peace with all things, but into restlessness to acquire all things, to seek ego security and identity from triumphing over the wheel of fortune, to rise above it, to be grateful after winning the Super Bowl and going to Disney World. These are broad generalizations I’m making, but they are meant to awaken us to the cultural waters in which we swim. Put more simply, what if we don’t want to be where we are? What if we even judge that our life situation is not preferred, but awful? Can we be grateful in all circumstances?

If anyone might have had the right to see life as awful, it might have been Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War. Yet, in the midst of some of the worst that humanity can dish out, Frankl discovered a deep wisdom of human resilience and faith. Said Frankl, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a human but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl pointed to the choice of attitude as the ultimate irreducible freedom. Frankl came to believe that life asks all the questions and that our job is to answer with lives of meaning and purpose, a meaning and purpose that is found in self-transcendence, in the love of something greater than ourselves. A faith-filled steward, knowing that he or she is NOT a self-created owner of life, chooses a purpose that transcends the self, chooses to serve Creator and Creation, chooses gratitude as an attitude, practices gratitude as an expression of faith.

Hear this call to a persistent practice of the attitude of gratitude in the poem by W.S. Merwin, titled “Thanks.”

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

smiling by the windows looking out

in our directions

 

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

 

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

 

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

Dark though the situation may be, the call of faith comes through Viktor Frankl, through the apostle Paul, through the prophet Muhammad, and through the crawling man Appaiah, the call to gratitude, the choice for gratitude, the practice of gratitude.

Gratitude amidst our times is a way of trusting and assisting the Good and the power of Love. It is a necessary and faith-full response. It is not naïve, nor does it lead to inaction or passivity. In fact, a few years ago a study found that grateful people do not ignore the negative, but choose to appreciate the positive. They have the capacity to be empathic and take the perspective of others, and are rated as more generous and helpful by their networks. They exercised more often, had fewer symptoms, felt better about their lives, and were more positive about the coming week.[1]

This is stewardship; assisting the Good and the power of Love, building the Beloved Community, living lives of appreciation and empathy, of generosity and helpfulness, of awareness and perspective that we are participating in a great and wondrous web of life which we did not create and being grateful for it. This is how gratitude births stewardship.

Moments ago we heard Paul say to us, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

Beyond circumstance, there is a faith-filled choice that makes room for a kind of peace with life, a choice for gratitude and generosity of Spirit that leads to life and light, even amidst the dark. Let us choose faithfully.

AMEN

 

 

[1] McCullough, M. E., Emmons, R. A., & Tsang, J.-A. (2002). The grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical topography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(1), 112–127. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.1.112