Revd Sara’s Reflection Sunday 23rd February 2025
Take time to find something in your home that you hold as precious and important. It may be a photograph, a flower or personal item. Whatever you choose consider what is it that makes it important to you? - What memories does it hold? - How do you feel about it and what would happen if you lost it? Now imagine that God is holding you as precious and important: - Loving and caring for you and your unique character - Following your journey of faith - Wanting never to lose you When you feel able put down your object pick up again this reflection.
Bible Reading: Luke 6:27-38 –How thankful do you feel today? This is a strange season? The excitement of Christmas and New Year seems a distant memory. The days are still short. The weather often unpleasant. Easter seems a long way off… we have so much to be thankful for.
There is plenty of evidence that little practices of gratitude make a huge difference in terms of our mental health and wellbeing. The ability to notice that there are things to be thankful for can be transformative for how we interact with the world, especially in the midst of anxiety, pain and grief. Yet, we take a great deal for granted, don’t we?
What do you think are some of the things that you take for granted? What opportunities for being grateful are you missing? So today, the invitation is simple: practice gratitude.
As the theologian Mister Eckhart once said, ‘if the only prayer you ever say is “thank you”, that will be enough.’ Not because our lives end with thank you, but because in the act of thanking, we are changed into more grateful, more loving people. That is why we teach our children better manners. That is why it’s helpful to keep a ‘gratitude journal’. That is why we give thanks for God’s love for us. As we, once again, learn the lesson of not taking things for granted, let us do the same with love. Let us not take love for granted.
Let’s give love a chance. So, as Jesus says in Luke 6 – we have to practice love. Love for our ‘enemies’. Love for those who curse us. Love is not just a comfortable blanket that we can wrap our friends and family in – that’s easy, that’s not difficult (at least, not most of the time!). Love, in the Jesus imagination, is radical – it reaches across boundaries and breaks through borders. It punches a whole in the walls of exclusion and exclusivity. It bridges the gulf of social order and institutional segregation. ‘Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back’. That’s a kind of gratitude, a kind of generosity, a kind of love that changes things. Wherever you are right now, I just invite you to say those two simple words aloud: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
love and prayers Revd Sara
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