Psalm 50:7-15

7 Hear, O my people, and I will speak: "O Israel, I will bear witness against you; for I am God, your God.
8 I do not accuse you because of your sacrifices; your offerings are always before me.
9 I will take no bull-calf from your stalls, nor he-goats out of your pens;
10 For all the beasts of the forest are mine, the herds in their thousands upon the hills.
11 I know every bird in the sky, and the creatures of the fields are in my sight.
12 If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the whole world is mine and all that is in it.
13 Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?
14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and make good your vows to the Most High.
15 Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall honor me."

This year, Monday Matters is focused on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We'll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen.

A sacrifice of thanksgiving

I’m puzzling about this phrase “sacrifice of thanksgiving.” The phrase comes up in the psalm we may have heard yesterday in church, and in a bunch of other places in the Bible. What kind of sacrifice is that?

On the one hand, it strikes me the psalmist is talking about a sacrifice that is no sacrifice at all. In other contexts, a sacrifice is transactional. If I give up this, if I offer this, I will earn your approval. I will earn forgiveness. A sacrifice of thanksgiving abandons that transactional dimension, and simply admits that all is grace. It brings to mind the wisdom of Rob Bell who, along with others, said that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more and nothing we can do to make God love us less. That love from which we can never be separated comes without condition. Nothing can separate us from that love. See Romans 8. Thanks be to God.

Looked at another way, there may be some kind of sacrifice when we offer thanksgiving. When we do so, we are saying no to that ego driven conviction that by virtue of what we offer, God will be more pleased with us. For many people in our culture, that’s a hard pill to swallow. It hurts to let go of that mindsight. It’s built into our operating system. We want salvation the old-fashioned way: we want to earn it. (Think Javert in Les Mis.) The gospel of the Old Testament as well as the new points us in another direction.

Ask yourself the question I’m asking myself in light of this phrase: what do I need to give up, to let go, in order to live a life increasingly marked by thanksgiving? It may not simply be the need to prove ourselves, to prove our worth. It may be we need to give up resentments that block our ability to be thankful. It may be that we need to place our jealousy or covetousness on the altar. Maybe we need to extend forgiveness to others or perhaps to ourselves as a measure of our sacrifice.

From another point of view, we can return to the idea that the best kind of sacrifice we can offer is no sacrifice at all. Scripture tells us it’s not at the top of the list of what God wants. In several places we read that what God really desires is mercy not sacrifice. We heard that in the gospel yesterday, as Jesus calls out the Pharisees who are criticizing him for hanging out with the wrong crowd. We hear it in the prophets like Hosea (Hosea 6:6) or Samuel (I Samuel 15:22) who say that mercy is what is expected of us.

By now, it’s probably clear to readers that I’m not sure what a sacrifice of thanksgiving really means. Consult your local clergy for more clarity. But whatever it means, we can’t go wrong by focusing on thanksgiving, by increasing gratitude in the attitude. That’s a spiritual practice, which means that like any practice, the more we do it, the more proficient we become at it. Maybe that means establishing a list of things for which you are grateful, and reviewing it every day. Maybe that means setting aside 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes at the end of the day to attend to your gratitudes. Maybe it’s making a commitment to acts of mercy, wherever you see a need for mercy. Those needs surround us.

Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving this week. Find out what that means for you.

- Jay Sidebotham