You will say in that
day: I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your
anger turned away, and you comforted me… With joy you will draw water from the
wells of salvation. And you will say in
that day: Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known his deeds among
the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted.
Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously; let this be known
in all the earth. Shout aloud and sing
for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel. (Isaiah 12:1-6)
The Principal of Mahurangi College, on sabbatical, spent five
weeks in South Sudan, a war-torn place, schools destroyed along with much more of
the infrastructure, children now having lessons under trees or in the ruins,
bringing their own chairs… But David
MacLeod found students “bright-eyed and eager to learn”. He went on to Canada, with schools better
equipped and financed than here in NZ. There
he found students “disinterested, poorly motivated and contributing to a youth
mental health crisis… The Canadian kids just had a dullness in their eyes by
comparison”, said David MacLeod. Of
course, those are generalisations, but still, I imagine, we are not entirely surprised.
The passage from Isaiah is the Lectionary Canticle for
worship on the 3rd Sunday in Advent.
It is about joy and thankfulness.
Isaiah is filled with gratitude… this is the 8th century BC,
when the Assyrian was coming down like a
wolf on the fold.[1] Gratitude is a principal marker of grown-up
faith – but the gratitude we mean is decidedly not on the level of counting your blessings, naming them one by
one. That is more on the level of
Aunt Daisy than Jesus or Isaiah… if your blessings outnumber your disasters, so
the story goes, then you’re ahead – but that’s not faith, it’s
accountancy. A related cliché says: There’s always someone worse off than you… Believe me, there are situations, some of
them quite common, in which there is no one worse off. Nevertheless, gratitude was not unknown in
Auschwitz.
Real gratitude flows from God. It is a gift of faith, not something we
generate ourselves, like remembering to say thank you to Aunty Agatha. Gratitude and praise is a grace we receive. It is a sharing of God’s joy in creation and
in constant re-creation. To say “Grace”
at meals, for instance, though we may do it perfunctorily, if at all, is a “kairos”, a spiritual moment. The food before us is a gift, part of the
gift of life and love. So we pause,
properly, to think however fleetingly how all is gift – and of the atrocity of
famine in the world God made and gave to feed us. Neither is this gratitude giving thanks because
we are safe and privileged – that is what the pharisee did. We give thanks that food is there at
all. We give thanks for the hope that is
in us, which is often “hope against hope”.
We give thanks for life and breath, for love and goodness, and kindness,
for second chances and the lessons of adversity. We give thanks for light on the horizon, the
promise of Advent.
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