Thanks … for nothing?

This reflection was written by for our parish blog our in the early days of Covid time (remember March 2020?). Each of the authors reflected on one of the scriptures of the day. Somehow this one never made the cut. Perhaps the editors found the title a bit, ah, negative. Bear with me, please… you’ll find that I actually reveal a secret about prayer. I thought I’d share it on Thanksgiving Day 2020.

To give thanks seems on the face of it a quaint formality. The writing of dutiful notes long eclipsed by the advent of phone calls, email, and digital messages.

And how on earth (and why) would we give thanks to God when times are fraught.  One feels, well, thankless. As we used to say as kids, “thanks… for nothing!”

The words of Psalm 139 come to mind: How shall I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

But consider: We live within and sustained by God’s creation. We are not strangers but God’s own people… all of us, not just some of us. And our Psalm for this morning is not Psalm 139 but Psalm 50. It begins by introducing God’s power.  “Our God comes and does not keep silence…” but comes “like a devouring fire… to judge the earth,” yet these flames are not at all interested in blood sacrifices:

If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows unto the most High.Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.
(vv12-15 NRSV)

The words about the wicked (see vv 16-22) are trenchant. It’s tempting to run them as a mental video with the faces of obvious villains past or present, which would of course allow me to feel superior.  A temptation important not to succumb to.

Here’s the last verse: 

‘Whoever offers me the sacrifice of thanksgiving honours me  ♦
and to those who keep my way will I show the salvation of God.’

Why is thanksgiving described twice in this Psalm as a sacrifice?

When I was first exploring prayer in a methodical way, my spiritual director gave me a structure taught by Ignatius of Loyola:  To start the prayer time by imagining myself in the presence of God, picturing God looking down upon me with love. Then to proceed with the prayer of the day. And, at the end, whether or not anything particularly remarkable had occurred, to give God thanks for the prayer time. 

On one very dull and dry day I came to that last step with an unfeeling heart and an attitude of ironic detachment. What would it be like to give thanks for… nothing!  Yet I gave it a try. And as I connected with the God who had seemed so entirely absent—because thanking requires connecting—suddenly I discovered there everything my prayer had lacked. 

Thanksgiving is a sacrifice because in it we come to the Giver bringing, if we are honest, whatever we have in our hearts—our fine words, if we have them, our overwhelmed silence or underwhelmed doubt, and even our ingratitude if that’s the burden of it, and then stand empty handed. But not alone.

Thanks be to God.