Sermon Library
“Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
November 28, 2010
Service Theme: Advent I – 2010
Source: 1st Thessalonians 5: 12 - 18
Advent I – 2010 November 28, 2010
Thank You Power:
Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You
1st Thessalonians 5: 12 - 18
A Parrot and a Turkey
A young man named John received a parrot as a gift. The parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary. Every word out of the bird’s’ mouth was rude, obnoxious and laced with profanity. John tried and tried to change the bird’s attitude by consistently saying only polite words, playing soft music and anything else he could think of to ‘clean up’ the bird’s vocabulary. Finally, John was fed up and he yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back. John shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even ruder. John, in desperation, threw up his hand, grabbed the bird and put him in the freezer. For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed. Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute. Fearing that he’d hurt the parrot, John quickly opened the door to the freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out onto John’s outstretched arms and said “I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I’m sincerely remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully
intend to do everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behavior.” John was stunned at the change in the bird’s attitude. As he was about to ask the parrot what had made such a dramatic change in his behavior, the bird spoke-up, very softly, “May I ask what the turkey did?
A Change of Attitude
I tell this joke not just because it is about a turkey on this Thanksgiving weekend, but the point that the parrot was able to make a change in his attitude with just a little motivation. We often think or have been conditioned to think that our attitude is related to our environment and situation. But our attitude really resides in our mind, of course. We just need a reMINDer of that from time to time just like the parrot needed a little reminder. We can all make our own change of attitude and do so on a day to day basis, or more directly, on a moment to moment basis.
David Patrick Columbia
A couple years ago I came across an article entitled Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You. The article was about TV journalist Deborah Norville’s book by the same name. I thought that this might be something to share on a Thanksgiving weekend Sunday. She opens her book with this story.
“Some days, you just want to stay in bed and hope the world forgets you exist. David Patrick Columbia was having one of those days. New to New York City, he was worn down by the hustle and bustle, no longer excited and proud about relocating to Manhattan, as he had been weeks earlier. He’d imagined himself a hot young talent taking the magazine world by storm, only to end up doing grunt work as a low-level assistant on a barely-making-it salary. He couldn’t afford his own place and felt uncomfortable sponging off a friend. I was rethinking everything – my ability as a writer, my career choice, he recalls. That Saturday morning, he wanted to stay in bed. But no, he had to fetch a photo for work. It was cold, gray and damp when David headed across town. ‘I don’t know what possessed me, but I decided to start counting things along the way that made me happy,’ he says. I just wanted to see how many pleasing things I came across.’ First on his list: a mother walking her baby, all bundled up in a stroller. That little face just made me smile, he says. Then he saw a jet in the sky. Flying has always captivated me. And it went. From the sizzling smells at bistros to eye-catching store windows displays, David acknowledged one thing after another that brightened his mood. By the time he picked up that photo, he was feeling thankful he’d made the move to the Big Apple. He writes, I was reminded that I lived in an exciting, interesting, and invigorating place. Whenever I’m feeling down, I do this. It makes me feel better. It’s been more than 20 years since David took his walk of thanks across Manhattan. Now he’s a successful entrepreneur in the media business and says his gratitude strolls helps him stay focused to this day.”
The Study
What David Patrick Columbia discovered in his own life, Robert Emmons, PHD, has proved in his lab. A professor of Psychology at the University of California, Emmons has long been interested in the role gratitude plays in physical and emotional well-being. Along with another professor Michael McCullough of the University of Miami, Emmons has conducted several tests and divided subjects in many different groups and over and over again demonstrate what we would expect, The people who focused on gratitude quite deliberately were just flat-out happier. They saw their lives in favorable terms. They reported fewer negative physical symptoms such as headaches or colds, and they were active in ways that were good for them. They spent almost an hour and half more per week exercising than those who focused on hassles. Plain and simple, those who were grateful had a higher quality of life.
This is not just a psychological result, but also apparently neurological. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University can demonstrate that the good feelings generated by something as simple as an expression of appreciation intervenes in the release of dopamine, the chemical in the brain associated with happiness. Dopamine can also be activated in certain situations when people are clearly being helpful to other people. And since helping someone else makes people feel good about what they are doing, the positive feelings continue and even amplify, creating more good feelings. It is nice that we can now prove physiologically what we have been taught theologically.
The Scriptures
The Bible is filled with stories and statements of thanksgiving and giving. If you just pick up the middle of the Bible, you will open to the well read and well used book of Psalms and it is hard to find a page that does not say, “Give thanks unto the Lord.” For example, Psalms 136 begins “O give thanks to the Lord, for God is good, for his steadfast loved endures for ever. O give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever.” On the next page we read the beginning of Psalm 138, “I give thee thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing thy praise; I bow down toward thy holy temple and give thanks to thy name for thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness.”
In the Gospel of Luke we find the story of ten lepers who met up with Jesus and asked Jesus to have mercy on them. Jesus said go and show yourselves to the priests. And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. No one else returned to give thanks except this foreigner. And Jesus said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17 11 – 19) We now, in fact, know from other studies that faith along with attitude contributes a great deal to our wellness.
In the Epistle of Thessalonians we read, “Be at peace among yourselves. And we exhort you, brethren, admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray constantly, and give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thessalonians 5: 12 – 18)
Deborah Norville
It was precisely this passage that Deborah Norville personally spoke about in the introduction to her book as she described an incident in which she is stranded in an airport due to weather and mechanical problems and is going to miss an important interview for national TV. After initially getting anxious and frustrated along with the mass intensity of everyone else in the airport – she catches herself and somehow remembers this scripture, “In everything give thanks.” Somehow this line in scripture came to mind in this moment and situation and it literally helped. She immediately became thankful that there are professionals in the airline industry who know when it is safe to fly and when it is not, when the plane is completely ready to fly and when it is not. She became completely conscious that all is well and no one is getting hurt and all will be well and the supposedly most important interview will be easily reprogrammed. Her attitude genuinely changed.
She then attributes her change of attitude in creating an invitation to join a few other business men in their chartered plane, another option from an extra friendly counter agent who gets her booked on a flight even closer to her destination, to a flight attendant who is grateful for her positive attitude, especially after just dealing with a most disgruntled passenger, and bumps Deborah up to first class for simply being so nice.
At the moment of the flight cancellation, there was an immediate reaction which seemed like a calamity which soon created confusion and turned into a seemingly chaos. Deborah was also caught up in the mass frenzy, but for some reason she caught herself and took a deep breath. She somehow remembered a simple scripture verse which literally lifted her above and beyond the practical problem. And it was also because of this very practical and personal change of attitude, as she reports, she inherently helped to create other options which moved her from being abandoned to being home.
Moments of Emotional Decisions
This thanksgiving message today could be considered a bit of a hallmark card about being thankful. My intention, however, is to go beyond such sentiment and call all of us to really realize the very real difference that mindful attitude and consciousness can play in our every day-to-day lives. I have personally become more and more conscious of just how many emotional decisions we as human beings make on a day to day basis. I suspect that we all make about a thousand emotional decisions every day of our lives.
We make these very important decisions consciously or subconsciously and I suspect, mostly subconsciously. We have been strongly conditioned to believe that our emotions and attitudes are based or predicated on our environmental or situational surroundings. In other words, we cannot help what we feel or believe because it is all based on what happens to us whether it is our fault or others. We are conditionally affected by certain external events which we think can control our own emotions.
In reality, however, our thoughts and attitudes have nothing to do with our external experiences. Any situation outside ourselves can often not be controlled. We typically then see ourselves as victims of our external circumstances. This becomes most disconcerting to us. When, in reality, however, our external circumstances have nothing to do with our internal emotions and perspective. This is not to discount our problem, but to simply put it into a bigger picture and perspective.
We always have two problems, the external and real problem and then the internal and emotional problem. The external and real problem is often something that we have limited power to change, but the internal and emotional problem we often have unlimited power to change. I think this has something to do with the popular and often pictured phrase, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The wisdom to know the difference has always been the challenge. But, I do think it can be found in the wisdom to know what we can change and what we cannot change. We cannot change the attitude or perspective of others or events around us, but we can change the attitude and perspective of ourselves. And this truth alone can make a major difference in all of our lives once we have really realized this.
The Boy and Picture of Jesus
I began with the joke about the parrot and the turkey. I wanted to talk about the big difference of attitude and how we are all really capable of such change for the better no matter what the challenge is before us. I conclude with this similar story. A variation is the boy who failed his studies and misbehaved in every school he attended and was expelled from them all. He was finally accepted in a Catholic school where he excelled in his studies and behaved like a young gentleman should. When asked by a former mentor what was the reason for the change. He said all of the classes he attended had that dude hanging on a cross over the blackboard and he knew they must mean business.
We can change our attitude and perspective with the help of Jesus. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus states in the Sermon on the Mount, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, not about your body, what you shall put on. Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they. And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life . . .Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”
I know of many people who are going through really tough times right now, whether is has to do with finances, work, physical health, emotional health, relationships, and other challenges. I do not mean for this message to ignore the reality of such challenges and the practical resolutions. I only wish to say that whatever real problems are before us, we can still make some very real emotional decisions as to how we shall approach our very real situations. And no matter what it is, our attitude will make all the difference. I am not trying to just be a positive thinking guru or evangelist, but a simple person simply relaying the reality of the big picture of God, the teachings of Jesus and the power of the mind and especially the power of the “thank you” mind. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Drive
Aspen, Colorado 81611
http://www.aspenchapel.org