Christian holy days often inspire me to think deeply about our human lives and what it means to live faithfully as God’s beloved community. This Christmas has not been any different in that regard. I’ve had many different thoughts buzzing around in my head. Please allow me to take a few moments of your time.

Several years ago, when I was working in a cubicle, I received what appeared to me to be an amazing promotion with a matching pay increase. I had recently moved into my own apartment in Browne’s Addition. Things really seemed to be looking good for me. Someone even said to me regarding my promotion, “Wow. God has really been blessing you.”

I resisted that interpretation. Now some people would not like that viewpoint because they would want to take credit for the promotion. They would argue that they worked hard for it and that they deserved it. Like anybody else, I too am prone to think that I deserved something good, but that was not the reason for my resistance this time.

I’ve been around businesses long enough to know that people get promotions for many different reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are the best for the job, but sometimes it’s because they interview well or because they have a relationship with the boss or maybe because they are just better looking than the other candidates. There are dozens of reasons why someone may have gotten a promotion – most of which have nothing to do with God.

How could I in good conscience believe that God intended me to get that promotion and raise? How did I know that someone else didn’t need it more than I did? I just couldn’t bring myself to say that it was the result of God blessing me.

I grew up in a family where we prayed before every meal, where we thanked God for providing our food. Our language seemed to indicate that God had literally provided the food we were eating, but that didn’t match up with the fact that my dad was earning money to buy the food or that many dozens of workers had been involved in producing that food and getting it to us or that my mother had worked for hours in the kitchen preparing it. In what sense could we say that God gave us this food?

And what does that say about the billions of people in the world who do not have enough food to eat? Did that mean that somehow I was more loved by God or more deserving? I’m self-aware enough to know that cannot be the case.

Eventually, I stopped praying before meals. I also stopped thinking that God had somehow given me that food. After much reflection I decided that God, through creation, had established a world that was capable of feeding every man, woman, and child, but that human sinfulness prevented that from actually happening. The only reason I had food was that I lived in a human-made system that benefited me at the expense of billions of others. Once again, God had nothing to do with it.

Now I still believe that job promotions have very little to do with God, and the same goes for who does and doesn’t have enough food to eat in the world. We live in a complex and chaotic world where God’s will is frequently hindered (if not overruled) by human sinfulness. God is not to blame for the unjust systems we humans have established.

I also began to realize that I had misunderstood the purpose of saying that “God had blessed me” or that “God had provided my food.” I wish I could remember when I had this epiphany, but I can’t. Did I read it in a book somewhere? Did some random person tell me about it? I honestly don’t know. I recognized that the purpose of these little phrases is not to make some sort of truth claim about how I got the promotion or how the food got on my dinner table. Rather these pious Christian phrases were designed to instill and nurture a particular virtue within us Christians. That virtue is none other than gratitude.

Gratitude does not require belief that God gave me the promotion. Nor does gratitude require that I believe God literally gave me food that other children were denied. Gratitude instead is a spirit of thankfulness, recognizing our utter dependence upon God. Gratitude reminds us that the good things we do enjoy are not because we are somehow better than others. Gratitude is a feeling that permeates our whole loves, helping make us better followers of Jesus. Gratitude enables us to see beyond our own small worlds into a much bigger world where others do not enjoy all the benefits that we do.

In this post-Christmas season where most of us have received much, we need to turn to gratitude. Gratitude calls to us, reminding us of the boundless abundance of God’s world without somehow crediting our own good works for it. Let us together cultivate gratitude so that we can become better people and a better community of love and justice to share God’s light to this hurting world.

Peace,

+Chris.