Grateful in the Mess

Grateful in the Mess--November 23, 2017

"Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." [Philippians 4:6]

Words like these would be easy to blow off if they were said by someone who had everything going their way.

For the guy who just got the promotion (and accompanying raise!), has all his family around the Thanksgiving table (and everyone is getting along!), and had a new best score on the links (and enough spare time to go golfing!), it somehow would ring hollow to hear someone say these words: "Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests let your requests be made known to God."  It would come off sounding like, "Don't you fret, just smile and expect God to give you more."  It would have echoes of Marie Antoinette's famous, "Let them eat cake!" that just assumes everyone else has it as easy, and as good as you.

If that were the setting for these words from Philippians, they would mean next to nothing for us in the midst of our lives, which are decidedly... messier.  They would be shallowly sentimental pseudo-religious drivel, the stuff of vaguely inspirational wall plaques and bland Facebook memes, but nothing to sustain us through the days when we just are sick with worry... when the promotion fell through along with the job... when we are missing someone who is not at the family table... when our days are so packed full of work and work and work that we haven't had a chance to catch our breath.  If these words, "In everything... with thanksgiving let your requests be made known" came from a place of sheer comfortable complacency, they would offer little to us.

But they weren't penned by someone putting his feet up on the lido deck of a Caribbean cruise.  They were written by someone chained to a solider awaiting a capital trial (and most likely, his execution after that).  

That changes things.  It changes everything, really.

If someone like Paul can speak of being thankful while everything else is a mess, then maybe there is something for us to consider wherever we are.  Because the critical difference, the critical thing, here in his letter to the Philippian Christians, is that Paul doesn't say to be thankful for everything, but that we can be thankful in all circumstances.  Lots of things maybe going wrong, but there is grace in every moment of every day, and that means there are things for which we can be grateful in the midst even of the mess.  

Paul doesn't say he's glad to be chained to a Roman soldier, or that it's fun to be under house arrest.  He doesn't say he's thankful for an upcoming death sentence, and he's surely not a big fan of the petty, narcissistic tyrant named Caesar in whose name and by whose authority he'll face that verdict.  But he does know that even for all of those terrible things, there is grace that seeps down through the cracks to where he is in the mess.  

He is alive as he writes.  Life itself, every new day we get, every breath, is a gift.

He has been given the ability to share the news of Jesus everywhere he has gone, and now even some in the imperial guard have come to faith in Christ (according to the closing lines of the letter) because he is there in Rome... and the petty narcissistic tyrant named Caesar has paid for Paul's transport there to await trial.  That, too, was a grace of God.

He has been shown the support of fellow sisters and brothers in Christ who have not and will not abandon him while he is going through this time of hardship.  They are grace, and they are the face of Christ for him.

And he has been given the promise and presence of the living God that he will never be alone, and that the love of that God will not let him go.  That is grace.

That's just it--grace has a way of sticking around even when everything else feels like it's coming undone.  Grace endures.  Grace seeps down.  Grace stays.

And where our hearts are conscious of grace, we cannot help but be moved to gratitude.  That's why we, taking the counsel of Paul, can give thanks "in everything" as well as praying honestly and letting go of worry.  It's not that the world suddenly becomes perfect or we become numb to the sorrows and losses of life.  The mess doesn't disappear the moment we pray, "Thank you."

But because grace seeps down to meet us where we are, even when it feels like we are stuck the mess, thanks can rise up from the midst of the mess, too.  

Lord Jesus, thank you.  Awaken our hearts to the grace that is present all around us, so that we may know you are present with us where we are.