Psalm 118:1, 19-29; Philippians 4:4-7 A New Attitude for a New Year Sermon preached January 19, 2014

Opening I heard a slightly humorous story about a two brothers, who looked almost like identical twins. One brother was a doctor, and the other a pastor. One day while the doctor was picking out a cantaloupe at the grocery store, a woman rushed up to him and said, That was such an inspirational sermon you preached last Sunday Thank you, he replied, but youve mistaken me for my brother. He preaches; Im the one who practices. Well, today Im going to preach on something I want to practice. Heres my problem. I can be an overly critical, glass-half-empty kind of person. Sometimes I worry more about the bad stuff that might happen in the future, than recognize the blessings of the present. Sometimes, I can have a negative, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop attitude that sucks all the joy right out of life. So Im always striving to improve my attitude. And so what I have here this morning at the beginning of a new year is a sermon about maintaining a better, more faith-filled attitude during the coming year. Like I said, Im preaching this for me, but if you listen in you might find something that helps you too. Importance of attitude Now, theres all kinds of stuff out there telling us to have a better attitude, demonstrating the power of a positive attitude. Probably a number of you have been to coaching or training conferences that emphasized a positive attitude. And there are tons of books written to help us with our attitudes, tons of quotes about attitude like these: Will Rogers, America's homespun philosopher, once said, "Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it." For every loser there is a winner. You simply have to make up your mind which you want to be. -- MINISTER'S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK, Stan Toler, #6. Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow. -- Helen Keller And all this stuff is right. Attitude is important. Heres a way to look at it. Attitude is like one of the gauges in an airplane cockpit. Jack Kier, a member of this church, has been helping me fulfill a lifetime dream of learning to fly by taking me up in a Cessna 1

and teaching me the basics - and in a airplane cockpit, there is an instrument called the attitude indicator. It measures the aircrafts position relative to the horizon. When the nose of the plane is pointed up, its called a nose-up attitude, and when the nose of the plane is pointed down, its called a nose-down attitude. Now the attitude of the plane directly affects the performance of the plane. The right amount of nose-up and you can climb into the clouds. Too much nose down, and you crash into the earth. And attitude does the same for us. Where does a positive attitude come from? What doesnt work. Now, you could try to develop a positive attitude by reading some of the enormous body of literature out there on the subject - you could go to seminars and conferences - and that might do some good for a while, but I doubt thats really enough to create long-lasting change. Or you could try keeping in mind that there are always people who are worse off than you. But when people try to summon up a positive attitude by saying, Well, theres always someone worse off than me, I wonder, whos the person on the end of that chain, the person whos the worst of at all and who cannot comfort himself by saying, At least Im not as bad off as him... I mean, do we want to be feel better about ourselves because of the sufferings of other people? A new attitude thru rescripting So how do we develop a better attitude? One that lasts? Think of it this way. Everybody lives by a script. A script that tells us who we are, what life is about, how we should live our lives. We develop a better attitude, through learning and internalizing and living, the new script of the Gospel. And this idea will take some unpacking. Everybody lives by a script. You probably could see this during the Christmas season just past if you got together with family. Everyone in the family seems pretty much to go back into the roles they had years, maybe decades ago. Sometimes thats merely humorous - your younger sibling was the loveable rascal of the family, always cutting up and pulling pranks and even though now hes a highly respected attorney in New York, when you get back together, he plays that role again. And sometimes its not humorous when youre with family and that old script starts playing, old wounds, old patterns, emerge and youre transported back in time and feel like an insecure, unloved eight-yearold all over again. Everybody lives by a script. Nations shape the script of their populations. Were watching China emerge, or re-emerge, as a great power and thats not being driven from the top by the leaders - its coming from the people whove been taught they are part of a 2

great and ancient civilization that was humiliated by the West and by Japan for centuries...but now theyve thrown off the yoke of their oppressors and its their time on the world stage to be respected and maybe feared. Everybody lives by a script whether its Plain People around here who live like their ancestors two hundred years ago, or a retired Marine who still carries himself with perfect posture, or the hipster in Brooklyn who wears thick glasses and drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon... I knew a man in Virginia who came from a prominent family and he internalized a script that he was the scion of a prominent family and he had to live in the grand old family house...trouble was, the grand old house was in an neighborhood that had turned dramatically for the worse...and he was barely getting by working as a less-than-successful attorney...of course he was an attorney because that was a family expectation...and he couldnt afford to keep up the house so the result was he and his family lived in a decayed mansion in a dangerous neighborhood because he felt he had to play out his character in the script as it was written for him. I wonder if any of us might be living by a script that is keeping us in some kind of bondage. That is keeping us down. That is sucking the life out of us. That has resulted in a life full of frustration and futility. Through the gospel of Jesus Christ the Lord seeks to re-script our lives - for the better. He did it with tax collectors and prostitutes and the sick and shunned and outcast during his ministry on earth - and he does the same today for us. Psalm 118 We can see how that works by studying our OT reading, Psalm 118. This psalm is part of a section called the Hallel psalms, meaning praise psalms. And the opening words of this psalms - Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord - were as familiar to Israelites as Amazing Grace or Be Thou My Vision are to us today. These psalms were used in Passover worship, and they taught, or reminded the Israelites, of the script they were to live by. And that script was that they were the least of all peoples, but God set his eye on them and made them the apple of his eye, his chosen people; they used to be slaves in Israel, but God was a God of faithful love and rescued 3

them from the captivity, rescued them from the pursuing Egyptian army and settled them in the land flowing with milk and honey. And the psalm apparently refers to some more recent threat and says God delivered us, God is still and always a faithful God of faithful love and we can trust him and everything so rejoice, be glad, worship and celebrate! And we think this Psalm was written during a tough time in Israels history - a time of threats from foreign military powers, a time of poverty and scarcity - but the psalm reminds them of who they are in the script - Gods beloved - and says God can be trusted. And the response the psalmists asks for from the worshiping community - is gratitude. An attitude of gratitude. Not a forced gratitude, but one that springs out of the new reality, the truest reality, of the script retold by the psalm. And that gratitude in turn, reinforces the script that tells them they are Gods beloved. We learn the new script of Gods grace and goodness through the practice of gratitude. And my point today is... So my point is that God has a new script for us through the gospel - and we learn and internalize and live out that script through the practice of gratitude. Learning and living the new script of the gospel is the work of our lifetimes - today were only going to consider one facet of that script - that we are a blessed people. And again we learn and internalize and live out that script of being blessed people, by gratitude for Gods blessings. Discipline of gratitude The Israelites had the psalms like psalm 118 to help them learn they were blessed people, helped them respond with gratitude to Gods blessings - how do we do it? First, through the discipline of daily gratitude. The script of the gospel says we are blessed people - loved by God in all things who provides for us in ways large and small. And seeing and giving thanks for these blessings is a discipline, where we learn to pay attention to our lives, and where we learn to give thanks for the blessings of each day. Now this comes down to simple practices that we incorporate into our lives every day: Mealtime - table grace - where before every meal you stop and thank God for the food on the plate in front of you - and then you eat your food slowly, tasting it, being mindful of the nutrition you are taking into your body and giving thanks for it.

Mindfulness through the day. When I was working on this sermon at home our big shaggy dog flopped down at my feet and I reached down to scratch his head and gave thanks for God creating animals and giving us this particular dog to be part of our family. Our days are filled with blessings like that - from the smile of a coworker to a hot cup of coffee in the morning to a sunset on the way home to a word of correction you really needed to hear to a song on the radio that moves you. Keep a gratitude journal. That is, keep a journal on your phone or a little notebook where you record the blessings you encounter everyday. According to a New York Times article, people who kept a gratitude journal where every day they wrote down five small things they were grateful for, after three months were more optimistic, and happier, than people who didnt, and actually had fewer health problems. They also fell asleep quicker and slept better. If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep, said one of the researchers. If [thankfulness] were a drug, it would be the world's best-selling product with a health maintenance indication for every major organ system, said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, head of the division of biologic psychology at Duke University Medical Center.1

Prayer time - you ever sit in prayer and get stumped over what to say? Well, start your prayer time simply by thanking God for who he is, for the gift of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, and then think over your life and thank God for what is good and true and beautiful, thank God even for adversity as you proclaim your trust that he will bring good out of your struggles.

Changing the script Over time, the discipline and practice of gratitude re-writes your script and as a byproduct changes your attitude. When we start paying attention to our lives, we see just how blessed we are. And our self-understanding changes too. I have a friend in South Carolina, hes now the Presbytery Executive, when you ask him how he is, he says, always says, Im blessed and thankful. Every...single...time. First few times you hear that you might think, wow, isnt he spiritual, but as you get to know him you realize he means it, thats how he understand himself as a man whos blessed by God and in response lives with gratitude. And the man has suffered - his son was doing jail time, his wife had health issues but the man was relentless in giving thanks for Gods blessings.

The practice of gratitude changes a person...I read an article recently that said you never escape who you were in high school - if you were on top of the social scale, you were really good looking or an athlete or popular...the rest of your life you kind of expect things to be like that and a lot of people struggle when real life is harder than high school...and if you were on the bottom of the heap, the article says you never really get over the feelings of inferiority - a lot of our scripts get written in high school - but the practice of gratitude over time overwrites that stuff and the gospel gets into us and we begin to understand and live as people loved and blessed by God. That wont just change your attitude for the better, it will change you whole life! How this helps us handle adversity William Willimon writes of a family in a church he served that had just welcomed a new baby into the family. He went to the hospital to do his thing, to pray over the new baby and went into the room and the doctor came in and said, There are some problems with your baby boy. Hes been born with Downs Syndrome, and he also has a respiratory condition. We could correct it, but I recommend that you consider just letting nature take its course. The couple seemed confused. If the condition can be corrected then we want it corrected, they told the doctor. You must understand that studies show that parents who keep these children suffer from a high incidence of marital distress and separation, the doctor said. Is it fair for you to bring this sort of suffering on your other two children? The mother replied, Our children have had every advantage. They have really never known suffering, never had the opportunity to know it. I dont know if Gods hand is in this or not, but I can see why it would make sense for a child like this to be born into a family like ours. Our children will all do just fine. When you think about it, raising our new son is really a great (blessing) for our family. Willimon said the doctor pulled him aside and said, Pastor, I hope you can help them get real. Oh, doctor, Willimon wanted to say but didnt, they are real. They are living in a world more real than yours, a world defined by God.2 Gratitude, changes us, changes the world we live in. Closing

In closing...there is a story about a group of senior citizens was sitting around talking about their ailments. "My arms are so weak I can hardly hold this cup of coffee," said one. "Yes, I know. My cataracts are so bad I can't even see my coffee," replied another. "It has gotten to where I cannot hear anything anymore," said one in the loudest voice of the group. I can't turn my head because of the arthritis in my neck," said a fourth, to which several nodded weakly in agreement. "My blood pressure pills make me dizzy," claimed another. Finally one man summed it up for the group: "I guess that's the price we pay for getting old. But thank the Lord we can all still drive!" Endnotes 1. Mikalea Conley, Thankfulness Linked to Positive Changes in Mind and Body, in The New York Times,, Nov. 23, 2011. 2. William H. Willimon, World Makers, in The Christian Century, Aug. 29, 2001.