Don?t Worry - Be Thankful! Dec 13, 2009
Overall, Advent is a strange season. It actually begins rather slowly, starting as it did this year on the weekend of Thanksgiving. We arrive at church after Thanksgiving festivities and find that everything has changed - harvest colors have become blues and silvers and fall flowers have been replaced with poinsettias. For some people - and I am speaking personally here - that’s when it hits. Christmas is closer than it’s been all year! That’s when we’re glad Advent lasts for 4 weeks! However, that appreciation for time quickly fades as activity escalates. The goal of the church during Advent stays steady - to help us stay with this time of reflection and preparation, of remembering the prophets and those who waited and watched for the fulfillment of promises through the years. Wait . . . watch . . . hope . . . pray . . . prepare - we proclaim in church. But, the reality is that even though here in church we are only on our third candle, everything around us is shouting light them all - all the candles - sing the carols - wrap those presents - what? - the lights aren’t up yet? Why did you let -20E stop you from doing what has to be done? And what about getting those cookies baked? Is the house clean? Are we ready for grandma? She arrives next week. Or is it the next week? What day are we on anyway? The tickets . . .do we have the tickets? You know, to the Nutcracker. But which Nutcracker? Then there’s Alice in Wonderland - gotta fit that in. And the Chamber Singers. And the Messiah - what? The Messiah is over? How can that be? I never miss the Messiah. It just won’t be the same without the Messiah.
Which is, I submit, precisely the point of an Advent season. Christmas just isn’t the same without the Messiah but all too often the worries, anxieties and sheer activity of the season take over. And, no matter how many Advent candles we have lit or how many we have left, the reality is that things are moving fast and, if we don’t get a handle on it, we may miss far more than a concert. We just may miss the Messiah and the gifts he offers. Advent is the season of ‘pressured waiting’ which makes it seem strange. It is counter-cultural. It invites slowing when everything around us urges hurry. It invites us to breathe deeply in an environment that is hyper-ventilating. It invites confidence when our insides and outsides ache with worry, the unwanted gift the season seems to thrust upon us. No matter what is going on out there - in here, it is Advent , strange and wonderful all at the same time!
So, take a deep breath and listen to today’s scripture text for this third Sunday of the strange season of Advent. It is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. As you listen to the words consider that Paul was writing from prison where he was being held on a capital charge. And, according to the New Interpreters Bible, "the people to whom he was writing were unlikely to be living comfortable lives. Most of them were poor, many were slaves, and few of them would have known the meaning of security." In other words, the imprisoned Paul and the Christians in the Roman city of Philippi all had lots to worry about. Still, Paul wrote . . .
Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in (God)! Make it as clear as you can to all you meet that you're on their side, working with them and not against them. Help them see that the Master is about to arrive. He could show up any minute! Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray (with thanksgiving). Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. Summing it all up, friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious - the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into most excellent harmonies.
A simple message from a man in prison to a people in crisis - choose another way of being. Don’t worry - be thankful. And, though our circumstances are different, the message seems to translate well because we still need to learn how to forgo anxiety and made a different choice. As I said last week, a life without worry is a choice. Worry does not have to have its way with us - but it will unless we intervene, each of us in our own lives, everyday. The focus for us this third week of Advent is the stuff of Paul’s message: don’t worry - be thankful. Make that choice and let it supplant worry. Paul urged the Philippians to pray with thanksgiving, to choose to fill their minds and their lives with moments of grace rather than the overwhelming anxiety of life lived in a relatively hostile environment and he assured them that through that choice, God would ‘make everything work together into a most excellent harmony.’ That was not an empty promise. It was a promise born in the reality of a Roman prison. Don’t worry - be thankful. It may not change your outside, your circumstances, but it will change you on the inside.
We just completed our Stewardship celebration when we invited us all to remember our gifts and be thankful, to recognize our blessings and be grateful. And then we were all invited - out of that awareness - to make a promise, a gift to God through the church. (By the way, if you haven’t done that yet, there’s still time to get your pledge card in. That’s a perfect Advent activity!) The bottom line is that gratitude and generosity go hand in hand - and a life filled with those two things has very little room for toxic worry. Paul knew it, the Philippians learned it and so can we. You see, worry is primarily about ourselves. We get pre-occupied with our agenda and even when that agenda is filled with other people’s needs and wants it is still mostly our agenda. We worry about having enough, being enough, getting enough. We keep to ourselves, we hoard - money, time - you name it! Gratitude opens us up. When we focus less on ourselves and more on what we have to celebrate or on what we can be thankful for, things open up and we actually find that we have more - time, money, energy, options - than we thought. Generosity follows - and with generosity comes an ability to see the world as God means it to be. I submit that thanksgiving and its sister, generosity, are the real themes of the Christmas season. It is cultivating thankful generosity that will keep us from missing the Messiah.
Last week, Matt Dale sent me an article from the New York Times. It is called In a Month of Giving: A Healthy Reward by Tara Parker Pope.
When Cami Walker of Los Angeles learned three years ago that she had multiple sclerosis, her health and her spirits plummeted - until she got an unusual prescription from a holistic health educator.
Ms. Walker, now 36, scribbled the idea in her journal. And though she dismissed it at first, after weeks of fatigue, insomnia, pain and preoccupation with her symptoms (translate - worry!), she decided to give it a try. The treatment and her experience with it are summed up in the title of her new book, 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life.
Ms. Walker gave a gift a day for 29 days - things like making supportive phone calls or saving a piece of chocolate cake for her husband. The giving didn’t cure her multiple sclerosis, of course. But it seems to have had a startling effect on her ability to cope with it. She is more mobile and less dependent on pain medication. The flare-ups that routinely sent her to the emergency room have stopped, and scans show that her disease has stopped progressing.
"My first reaction was that I thought it was an insane idea," Ms. Walker said. "But it has given me a more positive outlook on life. It’s about stepping outside of your own story long enough to make a connection with someone else."...
An array of studies have documented this effect. In one, a 2002 Boston College study, researchers found that patients with chronic pain fared better when they counseled other pain patients, experiencing less depression, intense pain and disability.
Another study, at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, Calif., also found a strong benefit to volunteerism, and ... showed that elderly people who volunteered for more than four hours a week were 44 percent less likely to die during the study period. . .
By contrast, being self-centered may be damaging to health. In one study of 150 heart patients, researchers found that people in the study who had more "self-references" (those who talked about themselves at length or used more first-person pronouns) had more severe heart disease and did worse on treadmill tests. (Worry is bad for us!) And like Ms. Walker, numerous people have reported feeling better after helping others. (Generosity heals!)
For Ms. Walker, a former creative director for an advertising agency, most of the gifts involved time, emotional support or small acts of kindness. After the first 29 days, she began a new cycle, a pattern she continues. Neither she nor Mbali Creazzo, the spiritual adviser who taught her about the month of giving, knows why it is 29 days rather than 30 or 31 - it may have something to do with the lunar cycle, which is 29.5 days.
Ms. Walker says she now approaches daily giving as a crucial part of her treatment, just like regular medication. She has also found new purpose in her experience and started a Web site, 29gifts.org, that encourages giving to improve health.
"Giving for 29 days is not suggested as a cure for anything," Ms. Walker said. "It’s . . . a simple tool you can use that can help you change your thinking about whatever is going on. If you change your thinking, you change your experience."
Dr. Post, of Stony Brook, agreed . . . "And the simplest way to do that is to just go out and lend a helping hand to somebody."
Thankfulness and generosity, sisters of faith, are not simply nice ideas. They have the power to transform us and, even, to heal us. As Paul wrote . . . through thankful living ‘God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down.’ Think of it this way. Worry expands to fill the space available in our lives. It has a life of its own and it is almost impossible to simply stop worrying because we want to. The trick is fill ‘worry space’ with something else. Something good and healthy and holy. Something like gratitude. Start with an awareness of blessing and then be generous - with time, talent and treasure. "Giving" puts legs on gratitude and, in the process, worry runs the other way.
A life of worry. A life of gratitude. As we prepare so as not to miss the Messiah’s birth among us, we must let go of one to embrace the other. The choice is ours.
