Being Gracefully Thankful for Blessings

It is impossible not to be thankful that Hurricane Ivan passed well west of Camden County. In fact, compared to the folks in Punta Gorda, Florida and Gulf Shores, Alabama, we have dodged a couple of bullets lately. For that I am thankful.

            I am also mindful that I have to be careful how I phrase that offer of thanksgiving. If I get a bit too impressed with myself in thinking that God protected me from the wrath of those storms, it could make it sound like the folks who did face the brunt of the hurricanes’ vengeance were somehow less deserving of God’s grace. Of course, I don’t think that, but I could give the message if I’m not careful.

            There are many instances when our justified thanks to God for some miracle can be hurtful to someone else. When you give thanks for surviving cancer, how is the widow who lost her husband to the same disease to feel? I would not want to suggest that we stop thanking Jesus for the many wonderful ways we see God acting in our lives. I want to suggest that we just become aware of how someone else may hear our joy. Instead of suppressing your joy, just know that it may lead to a chance for you to console someone who is still experiencing a loss.

            A miracle is by definition a time when God acts in human history to create a supernatural change. While God is free to do whatever God will, our own free will and choices good or bad would be severely limited if God continually reached in to make everything go the way we want it to. Many prayers will go seemingly unanswered. Storms will hit. Buildings will fall. Lives will be lost. Where is God then?

            The hard message of Jesus’ death on the cross is that we don’t always get the cup of sorrow to pass from us any more than Jesus did. Yet even if we feel abandoned by God, perhaps especially then, we are not. Scripture teaches us that God is present with us in our problems, in our suffering.

Once Jesus was teaching about the need to repent, to turn away from your sins, and be ready for God’s Kingdom. Right in the middle of this teaching, some people in the crowd speak up and tell Jesus about a group of people from Galilee killed by Pilate at the Temple (Luke 13:1-9). Pilate mingled their blood with the sacrifices offered at the Temple. It was a bloody sacrilege offered by the very Roman ruler who would later condemn Jesus to death.

Of all the people Pilate could kill, why would God allow this group to die? They were at the Temple in Jerusalem offering sacrifices to atone for their sins. We have to assume that they were there in order to get right with God. Instead, they get on the wrong side of the Roman leadership and end up violently put to death. It’s a murder in the very House of God. The crowd wants to know how this can happen? Jesus asks the ones who bring up this particularly bad news whether they think that the Galileans were more sinful than all the other people in the Galilee were. Why would Jesus do this?

The common explanation about why bad things happen to good people was that the people bad things happened to were not actually good. The idea was that the loving God rewarded good people and punished the bad ones. Therefore, the people who were killed by Pilate must have had it coming. Otherwise, the all-powerful, all-good God on high would have prevented the murder in his own house. Right?

Wrong. Jesus rejects that notion completely. He goes their example one better by adding to it another case taken from the current events of his day. He asks if the people listening to him think that the 18 who were killed when the Tower of Siloam fell were the worst sinners in Jerusalem. No, he tells the crowd, once again rejecting the direct connection between our own sins and the bad things that happen to us. Jesus acknowledges that bad things can and do happen to good people all the time.

Reaching out to people that others thought were cursed by God was a bit of a specialty in Jesus’ ministry. He didn’t treat lepers and other outcasts of society as people who should be cast out. Jesus constantly ministered to the people no one else cared about. He showed that the leprosy they had, the other problems they suffered with did not mean that they were beyond God’s love and care. Jesus would reach out to the widow showing that God never stopped loving her or the husband she lost all too soon.

Scripture guides us to pray without ceasing in good times and bad, trusting that in the larger picture, God is in control and we never were anyway. Trusting God comes more naturally when the hurricane veers away from your house. But, we also have to find a way not to be so full of thanks that we miss even noticing the suffering of others around us.

There are times, such as the recent hurricanes, when our good fortune is someone else’s misfortune. I remain thankful that Camden dodged a bullet. But there are many in our midst who are so tossed about by the storms of life that the fact that we missed a thrashing by hurricane force winds may not have even registered on their radar screen. We need to be present in and with others who are suffering in our midst, sharing our joy with him or her to be sure, while also letting those persons know that God has not forgotten them.

You can be Christ’s eyes and hands to see others who are hurting and reach out to them, as long as you don’t get so blinded by your own blessings that you miss the cries of those in need.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

previous         Return to Religion Column page       next