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July 23, 2006 Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

Psalm 23
Overflowing Cups

Today's psalm is perhaps the best known and most beloved declaration of faith in the western world, read and prayed by Jews and Christians alike. When we are anxious or upset, the psalm gives us courage and peace. When we are grieving it offers us comfort. When we are overwhelmed by how badly other people treat us, the psalm teaches us how to deal with it.

Even if we can't recite the whole psalm perfectly many of us know it well enough to recognize it and pray along in a funeral or worship setting much like we sing along to the star spangled banner at a football or basketball game. In just 57 Hebrew words and about double the words in English, the psalm proclaims the experience of generation after generation of Jews and Christians, showing us a way of understanding the world we live in, teaching us how to recognize the presence of God at times and in places where it seems God is absent, or those times and places where we are so caught up in our own concerns that we overlook God's presence with us in the midst of our troubles. The primary message of the 23 rd psalm is not that bad things will never happen to us, no matter how good or careful we are, but rather the primary message of the 23 rd psalm is we will never have to face those bad and painful times alone, “for thou art with me.” From the words of the psalm we can infer that the psalmist did not have a life free from pain or problems. He had enemies that confronted him. He experienced being in the pit, in the dark and depressing times of life—yet he praises and thanks God for all that God has done for him, not because his life has been easy, but precisely because his life has been hard and God has seen him through the hard times.

The 23 rd psalm gives us a lens for seeing and responding to what happens to us in our lives in the way God desires that we see and respond. Much of the time we cannot control what happens to us, but we can always control how we respond to what happens to us.

One could preach several sermons on any of the lines of this psalm, and the line today I'm particularly focused on today is the end of verse five, “my cup overflows.” Or in the familiar King James Version: “my cup runneth over.” Now overflowing cups is contrary to what the powers of this world tell us. They tell us the proverbial cup is never full. Pessimists say the cup is half empty and optimists declare the cup is half full. It's never overflowing. Life can always be better, says the pessimist!! There's always room for improvement, responds the optimist!

But this is not what the psalmist tells us. The psalmist tells us to look at our lives as an overflowing cup of God's gift to us of life.

The essence of a gift is that it comes to you from someone else, not by your own efforts. All of life, all of our births are given to us as a gift from God. Once we begin to see our lives and our world through the lens of the 23 rd psalm, the way God would have us see our lives and world, then we begin to cultivate a grateful heart that sees the blessings in our lives rather than taking what we have for granted. There's a line in a G.K. Chesterton Christmas essay illustrating this point. “Children are delighted when Santa puts toys and sweets in their stockings. Shall I not be grateful when God puts in my stockings the gift of two healthy legs?”

No doubt after this week members of our mission team will be freshly grateful for things the rest of us will continue to take for granted. Coming back to intact homes, cherished family possessions and pictures that are still there and usable. With renewed gratefulness for air conditioning, home cooking, leisure time and some private space.

To see our lives as an overflowing abundance of good gifts from a gracious and loving God also makes us happier and improves the quality of our lives. Lynne Babb, a Presbyterian minister writes in her essay, “Gratitude as a Spiritual Discipline,” that for years her prayer time with her husband focused on the needs of their family, their friends and the world. They had two challenging sons in the adolescent years. Her husband was experiencing job frustration and stress. She was still in a discernment mode after graduating from seminary. Focusing on all the needs was discouraging and often they felt more depressed and discouraged when they finished praying, having been reminded anew of all their problems, concerns and needs. She writes:” We felt stuck in a rut of discouragement, negativity and powerlessness.”

Somewhere in their praying they decided to make what she calls a small change. Lynn and her husband began each prayer time with a few prayers of thankfulness. At first, she writes, the best we could come up with were prayers like, “ thanks for helping us make it through today,” or “thanks for helping us survive an argument with our son.” But as time went by, Lynn and her husband began to actively look for things to thank God for: each other, the good moments with their sons, food on the table, the flowers and trees they passed, a breeze on a hot summer's day, a change in the weather.

Why is it so hard to be grateful when there is so much to be grateful about? Why do we take so many of the gifts God has given us for granted, not even noticing them, and focus our attention on what we lack?

One reason of course is our consumer culture that is constantly bombarding us with you need, you need, you need. Playing into our sinful and selfish nature of I want, I want, I want. I want to feel better about myself, I want to experience what this product claims I will experience so I need this and then this and then this.

We have a hard time accepting the reality that when we buy into the siren call of our consumer culture we are trying to fill a cup that has no bottom. Not the cup of our God-given life, but the cup of our false desires that can never make us anything but fleetingly content and happy

Another reason it is so hard to live a life of gratitude and thankfulness is our culture teaches us to be self-sufficient and independent. To need anything we can't get for ourselves or be dependant on anybody is a sign we haven't made it yet by society's standards. So instead of moving through our lives each day with a sense of gratefulness, on the lookout for the gifts God sends us each and every day, thankful for what we have, instead we focus on getting what we've earned, our fair share, what we deserve because of who we are, or what we've done. Not realizing that these are all ways---using the proverbial cup image again—of trying to fill a cup that has no bottom.

I encourage you to end your day every day listing either in your mind or on a piece of paper what you are grateful for in receiving, in being a part of for the day. Ask God to help you notice the blessings sent your way that day--what you are thankful for. Ask God for eyes to see and ears to hear the blessings God has in store for you tomorrow. If you keep this up, I guarantee you, like the psalmist, like Lynne Babb and her husband you will find that even in the mist of hard times and sorrow, your cup overflows.

One more thing. Our mission team this week has an opportunity that doesn't come all that often in our lives—the opportunity to enlarge your cup of thankfulness and blessing by undertaking difficult and challenging ministry. For our ability to recognize, enjoy and be thankful for God's blessings is more a function of the size of our cup, our capacity to receive God's blessings than any limitation of God's ability or willingness to bless us. The more blessings we are capable of recognizing and accepting, the larger our cup becomes and more we will be blessed by God, and the cup of our life will always be overflowing.

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