The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself

Thanksgiving 2002
Giving Thanks in an Age of Entitlement

Week of Monday, November 25, 2002

A recent issue of the Christian Century featured a cover story on a favorite writer of mine, Martin Marty, who recently retired as a professor of church history at the University of Chicago.¹ As I read and reread this article, I was struck by how Marty's entire personal and professional life was permeated with a deep sense of Christian gratitude for the many manifestations of God's grace in his life. As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, I offer four reminders from Marty's life that helped me to pause and celebrate with thanksgiving for God's care.

Marty is now seventy-five years old, and like everyone in his generation his life was defined by the war and the Great Depression. All the more so as his Swiss Lutheran immigrant family scratched out a living in the Nebraska dirt. His was a family of country farmers. His grandfather did not have many books in the house, Marty recalls, but he did have a Bible. After working the farm until nine or so at night, they flopped into bed dead tired. His father was the principal of the local high school, making them a “status family.” Twice a day he gathered the family for Bible reading and prayer. They were as poor as everyone else, says Marty, “but we didn't know it. We had a garden. The neighbors were good friends. We didn't feel deprived. It was a very sheltering environment.” No wonder that he speaks fondly of “the aristocracy of simple people.”

True gratitude, I was reminded, does not depend upon material welfare, and similarly, no amount of material welfare can generate true gratitude. We know this, and it has almost become a syrupy cliche or truism in our day. Many poor people exude grace and gratitude, while many wealthy people are bitter. But I was grateful to be reminded of this reality.

Marty's life also reminded me that a life of gratitude accepts the bad with the good. Genuine gratitude is not a zero sum game in which thankfulness increases the more fortunate you are and decreases the more adversity you experience. Marty had been married to his first wife Elsa for thirty years when she died of cancer in September of 1981. He wrote a book about his deep grief, A Cry of Absence (1983; 1993), which focuses on the psalms and the human experiences of loss, anger, despair, and a sense of God's silence. Psalm 88, in particular, says Marty, is “a wintry landscape of unrelieved bleakness.” Each night as they rose together for Elsa to take her chemo medicine, they would read the Psalms together. Elsa would read the odd numbered Psalms and he the even numbered ones. When it came his turn to read Psalm 88, he tried to skip it, thinking that it would be too much for Elsa to bear, but she rebuked him, saying, “the light ones don't mean anything if you haven't walked through the dark ones.” Lord, help me to accept the bad with the good, and so to deepen and enrich my gratitude to you.

In his professional life Marty has distinguished himself as one of the country's premier church historians; in 1997 the president awarded him the National Medal of the Humanities. But when you look carefully, you discover an unusual aspect about Marty's writing: almost all of it was done in response to the requests of others. He likes to refer to a term from the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel to describe this aspect of his life and writing. It is called disponibilite, which means putting yourself at the disposal of others and of God. In a sense this has meant that Marty has allowed others to set his writing agenda, and some have even criticized him that in putting himself at the disposal of others he has chosen the broad, middle road of consensus and compromise, avoided controversy, and never spoken out boldly on important issues. He chooses to see it as God's call.

This sense of availability to others has characterized his family life, too. He and his wife Elsa raised four sons and two foster children. When they took in two boys from Uganda they found themselves raising seven boys and a girl between the ages of eight and fourteen. But what father would not trade every professional accomplishment to hear his son say, “I don't know so much what he's like as a theologian...I just know he's a great dad.” So says Marty's son Peter.

Marty's availability to others in his writing and in his family reminded me of the line from the prayer of Saint Francis: “for it is in giving that we receive.” Normally we think of gratitude as a response to something that we have received, but I wager that Marty's life and work reminds us of a third aspect about thankfulness: gratitude grows more by giving than receiving.

Marty has been a cradle Lutheran all his life and never wandered from those roots. At present he is completing a biography of Luther for the Penguin “Lives” series. In her article, Zoba describes him as a “happy Lutheran” in contrast to the common stereotype of “guilt-vexed people derived from Prairie Home Companion.” How so? Among other things he exalts in Luther's bold and daring proclamation of God's radical grace. Perhaps you have heard the aphorism to “sin boldly.” In fact, this comes from a letter that Luther wrote to his younger protege Philip Melanchthon who was super scrupulous and anxious about God's grace. Luther rebuked him:

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach true grace and not a fictitious grace. If grace is true, you must bear a true and not fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death and the world.

What does Luther mean? He means that we should not preach grace only for polite, acceptable sins. He means that even with our own deep sense of sin, frailty and failure, grace liberates us to live fully and freely. So said Marty's son Peter about his father: “He lives confidently and joyfully. You can't stop him with grief. You can't stop him with mean-spirited people.”

Here we discover the deepest and surest cause of gratitude. True, gratitude does not depend upon material possessions. It is enriched by accepting the bad with the good. It increases with giving more than with receiving. But it flourishes at the moment that we realize that God's grace is over us and around us, and that nothing can separate us from His loving grace. We rejoice, not because of all of the good things in our lives (although we should not fail to do that), but because in His grace “our names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:19–21).