May all our days and all our lives begin with Gratitude, and may they end with Gratitude, may they be bourn up and carried by Gratitude.

In all things: May Gratitude carry us through our lives, because Gratitude is the most honest approach to life itself, to each of our particular lives, and to the reality of God’s Grace for our lives.

When we look at everything as it truly is, if we see ourselves as we truly are, if see everyone else as they truly are, see the world and everything in it as it truly is, which means seeing the truth of God through it all, what can we do but fall on our knees and say, “Thank you! Thank you!”

Every breath is a gift (which we may not realize until the air is choked with soot). It’s a gift, each breath, which has nothing to do with deserving or not deserving. Did we earn our lungs? Did we do anything to deserve clean air in a way that someone else doesn’t?

Every breath is a gift.

Every moment there is solid earth supporting us, is a gift (which we may not realize until the earth quakes). Do we deserve that and other people not? Did we earn the structure of our bones? Did we do anything to deserve the hard rock of the earth’s crust?

Questions of earning, deserving, or not, these are not the right question for these things – they are gifts, simply gifts, that can help us appreciate the goodness of God.

It is a gift that we exist at all. Life itself is a gift. A miracle, given outrageously and extravagantly to countless beings. Life is a gift in itself, of inherent value whether a particular life is easy or hard, or long or short.

We cannot measure how much we have received, how much we are receiving moment by moment.

Yes, there is the need for hard work to keep our lives going. Life itself is a free gift, but it isn’t cheap. Yes, there is struggle. Yes, there is pain. Yes, there is unfairness to overcome or to accept or to succumb to.

And yes, bitterness can be a badge of the most hard-bitten lives. Bitterness can also be an indulgence of the most privileged. But a sense of entitlement – on one hand – or of resentment – on the other hand – comes from a hardhearted bitterness that in fact denies the truth of things. Whether someone has had to work the hardest to get what they need, or whether someone has easily enjoyed plenty, the reality that comes to the wise is that windfall or famine can so often be up to a roll of the dice – “time and chance happen to them all,” as the book of Ecclesiastes puts it. The reality is that no one of us is more or less deserving or undeserving of the essentials for a full and dignified life.

The practice of gratitude reminds us that God is in the center of all things. It is the antidote to hardness of heart and smallness of mind, to bitterness, tightfistedness, anxious clinging.

Gratitude is an essential religious posture and practice – it opens us to the gift of life and the goodness of our living God. Gratitude is necessary to fully receive the gift of God’s Grace, as manifest by Jesus.

For Christians, our experience of God’s grace as manifest by Jesus can only lead to hearts opened by gratitude and generosity. Because Grace, we are clear, is a pure gift, something that is radically outside questions of earning or deserving or merit, and the judgments and hierarchies we try to construct to grade people’s value or devalue. Jesus consistently undercut these kinds of judgments. Jesus showed that Grace is simply and purely a gift from God – the Grace of God’s invitation to come home to the embrace of God’s love for us, an invitation which we can receive with gratitude and share with generosity … or refuse out of hardheartedness.

Gratitude and Grace lead naturally to the virtue of Generosity.

The deeper we go into the reality of God’s Grace, the deeper we go into gratitude, the wider and freer our generosity with the good things of life. When we realize more and more deeply how good are the gifts we enjoy by God’s Grace, and how we enjoy those things regardless of our merit, we want for everyone to enjoy them too. We realize ever more deeply the value and dignity of each and every one, at the same time we realize our essential humility, our essential condition of need and dependence on a Power greater than ourselves.

It’s no coincidence, no random fact that wise and godly people through the ages have shown and taught the virtue of generosity. Generosity is essential and natural to lives centered on the reality of God and the reality of humanity as we are. God’s nature is self-giving. We all depend on God’s self-giving nature for our very being, our very survival, body, mind, heart, and soul. The more we know this, the more we grow into being more self-giving as well.

For Jesus, and for the Hebrew Prophets before him, the revelation of God’s nature is not only about the spiritual realm but also the material. This is about what everyone most truly needs for life and life abundant, body, mind, heart, and soul, and doing our best to do our part so those needs are met.

The teachings are not abstract. They are very concrete.

Jesus instructed his follower to give to anyone who asks of them. Period. John the Baptist as well: if you have two coats and someone has none, give them one of yours. And Moses was clear that the literal fruits of the harvest should be gleaned and tithed in an organized way so that there is plenty openly available to anyone who is in need, without conditions, both among neighbors and strangers and resident foreigners. (Matthew 5:42, Lev. 19:9-10, Deut. 14:28-29, Ex. 23:10-11).

Moses even says in Deuteronomy, basically:
If you do everything right, if you all live according to the moral order that God wills for you, no one will be poor among you. 

But then a little later on Moses also says, again I paraphrase: I’ll be honest, you probably all will not do everything right, you probably will not all live in alignment with these holy ways, so there will be folks who are poor among you. In that case, don’t get hardhearted. But always give or lend with a glad heart to anyone who needs. (Deut. 15; for more on all of this, see here.)

Neither Jesus nor John the Baptist nor Moses puts conditions on deserving or undeserving. As Dorothy Day put it, “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” This is because for hearts transformed through gratitude for God and God’s Grace, we have become freed from judgments about someone’s essential worth and dignity. We realize that none of us can say we deserve more or less than another, we have become both humbled and uplifted, our hearts opened by the grace of God.

This is why the feast is so often the image for the Realm of Heaven on Earth, which we find in our testimonies in scripture. Not just any feast, but a feast with an open table and an invitation sent to everyone.

So, my friends, I am very grateful to you all in how you practice this open-hearted generosity. And above all, I am grateful to God, and to our teacher and brother, Jesus, who shows us the Way of God’s Grace for each and all.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, November 23, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.