Not Just Counting Our Blessings

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 23, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We know that gratitude can lead to a wealth of psychological, spiritual, and even physical health benefits. Yet, how do we truly cultivate gratitude? If it is as simple as expressing thanks for the good things in our lives, what happens when life seems just mundane or when things get really hard? What happens when folks with power and privilege demand gratitude from those over whom they hold power? How do we make sure our “thanks giving” is an authentic spiritual practice?

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

GRATITUDE
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Gratitude, it happens,
needs less room to grow
than one might think-
is able to find purchase
on even the slenderest
of ledges,
is able to seed itself
in even the poorest of soils.

Just today, I marveled
as a small gratitude
took root
in the desert of me-
like a juniper tree
growing out of red rock.

If I hadn’t felt it myself,
I might not
have believed it-
but it’s true,
one small thankfulness
can slip into an arid despair
and with it comes
a change in the inner landscape,
the scent of evergreen.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Reading

THE FOUNTAIN
by Denise Levertov

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched-but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
The fountain is there among it’s scalloped
grey and green stones,
it is still there and always there
with it’s quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.

Sermon

Quote

“Conventional gratitude is based on distinguishing what we like from what we do not, good fortune from bad fortune, success from failure, opportunities from obstacles… But what about all the obstacles, unpleasant people, and difficulties in our life? …we should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with. Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, loving-kindness or compassion? It is by dealing with such challenges that we grow and develop. So we should be very grateful to have them.”

So says Buddhist teacher and author, Judy Lief.

The spiritual topic we’re exploring this month in our religious education classes and spirituality groups is “Nurturing Gratitude”

And, indeed, a wealth of research has shown that gratitude is one the most powerful spiritual practices in which we can engage.

It benefits us in a multitude of ways psychologically, physically, and spiritually.

Practicing gratitude is even associated with increased life satisfaction and extended lifespan.

Turns out, the age old words of wisdom about counting our blessings may well be sound advice.

So why then does that pesky Buddhist Judy Lief insist that I have to be grateful for people who annoy me?

Well, it turns out that counting our blessings, practicing gratitude only for the good things in our life is necessary but not sufficient.

Studies show that even simple gratitude practices like writing down three to five things each day for which we are thankful can benefit us greatly and that, in fact, we can’t just sort of automatically adopt an “attitude of gratitude” We need an actual practice such as this to kind of bring the gratitude into our spiritual sensibility.

This practice of listing 3 to 5 gratitudes each day has been one of my spiritual practices for many years.

The thing is, for a long time, I only listed good things that had happened to me, things that brought me happiness, my pets, the comforts in my life, people I loved who brought me joy.

I left out the annoying people and the difficulties in life.

But this counting only my blessings came to feel harder to do and to feel incomplete, when, for instance, my stepfather died only shortly after I was ordained here at this church.

When a pandemic hit, and I was stuck at home all of the time.

When my spouse became very ill during a challenging time for doing ministry, and then entered hospice and eventually died.

The research shows, and I certainly experienced, that we have to learn to appreciate all of life as a gift, even during those terribly difficult times.

Living and loving fully means we will endure sorrow.

If we can only find thankfulness for the things that happen in life that we like, our spiritual wells can easily run dry when the hard times hit, which they inevitably will.

I want to share with you what late night host Stephen Colbert had to say about this, in part because I am so grateful for how much he annoys Donald Trump.

Colbert Video

“It’s a gift to a gift. It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. But if you are grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to do, and Not everybody is, and I’m not always, but it’s the most positive thing to do, then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.

So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss. Well, that’s true. Which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it’s like to be a human being, and to connect with them and to love them in a deep way that not only accepts that all of us suffer, but also then makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people. It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here in human if you can’t be the most human you can be?”

Now, I want to be careful here to mention that what he says, while beautiful and valid, also comes close to a theology that I reject called “redemptive suffering”.

The theology of redemptive suffering has been used to keep oppressed folks in positions of pain and suffering far too often, such as when a religious leader tells women to stay in an abusive relationship and just be grateful for the reward they will receive in heaven.

Yes, that still really happens.

“Just bare your cross like Jesus did” is not a a valid theological stance.

I think what we’re learning is not so much that we need to be grateful for the bad things that happen to us, but for having been able to move through them and having learned and grown along the way, for, as Colbert notes, how experiencing our own fragility can help us recognize the fragility of others and thereby love them even more deeply.

What we’re learning is: Be grateful for the gift of life. Live fully. Embrace all of life.

There is this irony that it can be the most difficult to access gratitude during these difficult times, and yet these are the times when we may most need it.

Author Sarah Ban Breathnach captures this as follows.

“Gratitude holds us together even as we’re falling apart. Ironically, gratitude’s most powerful mysteries are often revealed when we are struggling in the midst of personal turmoil. When we stumble in the darkness, rage in anger, hurl faith across the room… While we cry ourselves to sleep, gratitude waits patiently to console and reassure us; there is a landscape larger than the one we can see.”

I want to share a story from poet and spiritual advisor Mark Nepo that I think captures this idea so movingly. I give you his words, because I don’t want to do them injustice by paraphrasing. He writes:

“When my father was dying, I was alone with him in the hospital and found myself feeding him applesauce. The moment opened and my whole being, my whole life, was suddenly concentrating on slipping the spoon with the utmost care into his mouth, waiting for him to swallow, and then sliding the spoon slowly from his lips, so as not to disturb his labored breathing.

We repeated this ritual tenderly, spoonful after spoonful. And in the rare quiet of a January afternoon, wonder began to fill the room. I began to cry softly. There seemed to be a glow about us.

Through my thoroughness of care, I’d found a transparent instant in the middle of all our trouble, in the middle of his dying. And in this moment of tenderness, all of life opened. We had fallen into the center, which felt like the dot of clarity cleared in a lake by one drop of rain from which the water ripples in every direction. My father and I were in that still dot of clearness…

As I slipped the spoon from his mouth one last time, I felt that I was in the moment of every child who ever fed their dying parent. I kissed his forehead and held his hand, both of us more alive than we could remember, completely covered in inexplicable wonder.”

This burst of gratitude for the sacred blessing of caring for a loved one we will soon lose is a powerful way that people are able to move through grief.

Now, many of life’s challenges are not this intense though. Sometimes, the challenge is just that things are not quite living up to our perhaps sometimes unrealistic expectations.

One of our wonderful church members, Angela Smith posted on Facebook the other day about something from the letters her terrific husband Charles writes to her each day.

With their permission, I share it with you now

“My hubby’s letter this morning reflected on the fact that life sometimes doesn’t meet our expectations, but still what happens may be good enough. So today I invite you to join me in sharing his intention to be “grateful for the good enough!”

Amen, Mrs. and Mr. Smith.

Somewhat related to this, I will also quickly add that much of life is neither the extremes of unadulterated joy nor times of sorrow, suffering or disappointment.

Much of life is more ordinary or mundane.

So, we must also embrace the more common aspects of life too.

Perhaps a result of losing a spouse of 33 years, I find myself extraordinarily thankful for some of the more ordinary moments within the fierce and wonderful love I share with my fiance, Woodrow – just coming to the art gallery opening here at the church together or grocery shopping with each other.

OK, I want to shift gears a bit now, and explore a potential downside to gratitude or at least the imposition of it, with thanks, actually to Woodrow, who brought this to my attention.

That’s not the downside. That’s very much an upside.

A number of recent studies have found that expectations of gratitude by folks in groups with greater power – professors with students, whites with BIPOC folks, men with women, cis-heterosexual with LGTBTQI+ folks for instance – this expectation can result in the pacification of folks in the group with less power.

When gratitude comes to be seen as obligatory in such conditions of inequality, folks can be less likely to work for their own liberation.

Even more insidious, during longterm and/or extreme periods of inequality or abuse, folks who are being oppressed can develop an almost “Stockholm Syndrome” kind of gratitude, a survival instinct that comes from being so dependent for so long on whatever crumbs those in power choose to dole out.

I think we see this expectation all the time.

The calls by some recently for LGBTQI+ folks to feel grateful that the Supreme Court didn’t take up a case that could have revoked the right to marry the person we love – a right we fought so hard to gain only a few years ago.

“Be grateful that we didn’t take away this basic human right.”

BIPOC folks are repeatedly admonished to give thanks for all the “progress” that has been made.

Again, “be thankful for those rights we have chosen too give you and could decide to refuse again.”

Our President and Vice-President chiding the President of Ukraine over not expressing enough gratitude to the U.S. for protecting our international commitments and own national interests.

The list could go on.

Perhaps the lesson for those of us who have sometimes experienced oppression is that we don’t owe thanks to anyone else for them doing the right thing or allowing us the basic human rights they enjoy.

And for those of us who sometimes find ourselves in a position of privilege and power, if we give to others with an expectation of gratitude, we’re not being generous, we are being transactional and, in fact are acting to maintain our own privilege.

Especially when what we are, quotation marks, “Giving”, is that which was already their fundamental rights as human beings. And I thought I was going to make it through a whole sermon without a social justice rant.

Perhaps I should be grateful that our right to rant still exists.

My beloveds, despite these challenging times in which so many of those basic human rights we cherish are being threatened, we still have so much for which we can still be grateful.

We don’t have to give thanks for whatever crumbs are doled out.

We have the spiritual resilience to resist and to refuse to be pacified.

We have been given the gift of life, and a fierce love that dwells within us and within all of our days, from the mundane to the heartbreaking to the ecstatic.

A fierce love that guides us and leads us to justice and the Beloved Community if only we listen to its call.

And for that, we MUST be grateful.

Amen. Thanks be

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.

Benediction

For our benediction today, I leave with you the words of botanist, environmentalist author, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer, abbreviated from “The Honorable Harvest”

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you,
so that you may take care of them.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Give thanks for what you have been given
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you

Amen Blessed be. Go in peace.

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