Thankfulness

A sermon on Philippians 4:1-9 and Amos 5:8, 14
Preached November 21, 2023

Philippians 4:1-9
“Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my coworkers, whose names are in the book of life.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

Amos 5:6a, 8, 14
Seek the Lord and live. […] He who made the Pleiades and Orion,
who turns midnight into dawn
and darkens day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea
and pours them out over the face of the land—
the Lord is his name.
Seek good, not evil,
that you may live.
Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you,
just as you say he is.

I have to say that when Pastor Sam and Pastor Shemaiah asked me to preach today, I agreed right away because I was more than excited to come back to this sacred space and to see the work my friends are doing, and I am indeed so glad to be here with you all today. But to be honest, when it came to this sermon, I was less excited.

See, thankfulness has been a challenge for me all of my life. It may not surprise you to hear that I was a serious little kid, one of the old souls you sometimes find amongst children. I was thoughtful and responsible to a fault. So when I was given a small plastic coin as a child at a Thanksgiving service, with a smiley face and the words, “Rejoice always! Again, I say rejoice!” printed on it, I took it and put it in my pocket, and began a lifelong journey of trying to figure out how to follow this new rule I had learned.

I knew how to give thanks. I learned from an early age that you say “please” and “thank you” and “yes sir” and “yes ma’am,” so I had that down. And I knew that we gave thanks in church by singing and praying and rejoicing (though I wasn’t really sure how that connected). As far as I could tell, thankfulness was something you did because you were supposed to, like holding the door open for the people behind you or finishing your broccoli. It was good for you. It built character. (And as a serious little kid, I was all about building character.)

But, over the years (over many, many years), I think I’ve figured out at least a piece of why we give thanks and how thankfulness and rejoicing are intertwined, and that’s what I’d like to explore in our time together today. For me, the journey toward thankfulness starts with stardust.

Stardust. It’s almost trite, but it’s true: we are all made of stardust. In fact, the stardust that we are made of is all that remains of the earliest stars in the universe, stars that formed huge and formed fast, living short lives of burning hydrogen in their cores, creating carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, then neon, sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, silicon, all the way up to iron in a last-dash burst of production before exploding. And in that supernova explosion, we see the cosmic spread not only of the elements made in the core of the star but also others that form in the explosion itself. With the exception of less than ten elements made by people in a lab, everything that makes up anything came from a dying star, and the stuff that makes up us came from the biggest and brightest stars of all. Our earliest ancestors are the stars.

Now, when a star explodes, especially these early, massive stars, the elements they produce go on to seed what astronomers call interstellar clouds. These are huge, huge clouds of hydrogen and helium gas that in many cases are larger than our entire solar system, and they exist throughout galaxies. You can actually see what we call dust lanes when you look at the Milky Way in the night sky- they’re what causes the dark streaks that give the Milky Way its characteristic appearance of flow, instead of it looking like a white frisbee stuck in our night sky. But these huge clouds of gas, they also have the dust of heavier elements- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.- interspersed in the gas. And one day, when they become too massive, they collapse.

Whole families of stars are made from a single dust cloud, with some burning bright and burning fast, like the earliest stars, and some, like our Sun, that are smaller and a little more stable. Stars like our Sun are pulled together through gravity and then a spinning disk forms like a wide hula hoop around their center. In that disk are all the rocks that will eventually amass together to make planets, with rocky planets left close to the star and extra gases being blown to the outer solar system to make gas giant planets. Now, for us, we’re incredibly lucky, because in many solar systems, their Jupiter-sized planet doesn’t stay put. It ends up migrating in toward the central star, ejecting rocky planets along the way. Instead, in our solar system, Jupiter is in a stable orbit and runs interference for us, like a kind older brother, blocking some of the heavier asteroids from coming our way.

Though Jupiter, like an older brother, hasn’t always done this. Early in the solar system’s history, we think, something massive hit the Earth so hard that part of it broke off and eventually formed what we now know as our Moon. And that’s incredibly important for us, because the Moon is why we have tides and why we have seasons. The way our planet is titled is, of course, the origin of the seasons, but without the Moon, there’s no guarantee that our tilt would stay the same. The Moon stabilizes us, allowing us to have the regular growing periods that make our life what it is today.

From there, it’s an even longer, more incredible story about water and cells and bursts of change that grew into this beautifully diverse planet, where those who we know to be our human ancestors have lived alongside plants and animals, rock and weather, sunlight and moonlight, for longer than we’ll ever be able to truly imagine.

And here is the point of that story from stardust to us: I can’t make any of that happen.

I can’t do any of that.

See, as a kid, a serious little kid, I made so many things happen. I rescued my little brother’s pacifier from the dog, who would take it right out of his mouth. I did the dishes and my laundry and vacuumed and helped my mom find her purse before I was in double-digits. I got my first job at 14, got a full ride to college a couple years later, and have been financially independent from my parents ever since. I made that happen, or so I thought. I did the work, made the grades, got the job, and earned my place in the world. I did that, all on my own.

And I always used to get irritated at verses like our selection from Amos today. Ooo, God made Orion and the Pleiades. I can tell you the entire chemical makeup and evolutionary trajectory of the Orion Nebula and each star in the Pleiades cluster, so, prophet, tell me something I don’t know.

Well, here is what I didn’t know, as a serious little kid and a self-serious little adult. Whether the prophet knew it or not, Orion and the Pleiades actually tell us the whole story of how stars are made, if we know what we’re looking at. The Orion Nebula is an interstellar dust cloud, a stellar nursery, where stars are formed. The brightest stars in the Pleiades are supergiants, the kinds of stars that burn bright and fast and make those heavy elements that make up us. Betelgeuse, a bright red star in Orion’s shoulder, is a huge star near the end of its life. And just degrees away in the sky is the Crab Nebula, one of the best supernova remnants you’ll see in our sky. By pointing to Orion and the Pleiades, the prophet is pointing us to the grand truth our first ancestors knew: we cannot make this happen. The lifetimes of stars are written in our sky, the birth and life and death of the very elements that make up our bones, and we cannot make them ourselves.

In truth, everything we have is a gift. A gift to rejoice in. A gift to be thankful for.

It took me most of my life to understand this, but gratitude is a choice. In the face of the fact that everything in this life is a gift, from the air that you breathe to the love that you share, you can either choose to accept and celebrate these gifts, or resent them. There is incredible freedom is accepting that we cannot make the stars, but we can rejoice in the gift that they are, that we are. Likewise, resentment is a powerful trap, built of the fear that someday God will take away everything you think you’ve earned. But in this case, my friends, we are always able to choose freedom. We are always able to choose to rejoice and be thankful. We do not have to make the stars. We merely have to receive them as a gift.

And what a gift! What a gift this world is! This place with its streams and rivers and oceans, its mountains and valleys and forests, its animals and insects and people! What a gift to watch the tide come in or the leaves change! What a gift to hear children play or voices sing! What a gift to hold a newborn and to hold the hands of the dying! What a gift to live and work and create together, all of us, in this world where none of us is alone and each of us needs the other! What a gift!

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.

And since you know the incredible gifts that you have been given, live as one who has been showered in grace. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Know that the Lord is near, as near as the next breath, as near as the ground beneath your feet. Do not be anxious about anything, because you cannot make the stars, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God, the giver of good gifts. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, my friends, brothers and sisters and siblings in Christ, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, may one remain with you throughout your days:

Be thankful, friends, for all that we have been given.

Amen.