Sermon: Can We Feel Grateful Together?
Scripture: Luke 2:8–20
Today, I want to begin with two simple questions.
In the Christmas story, shepherds are keeping watch in the fields at night when an angel appears. Suddenly, the sky fills with the song of the heavenly host, praising God. After the shepherds hurry to see the baby Jesus, they return, praising God just as the angels did.
So here is the first question. What were the angels and the shepherds praising God for?
And here is the second. It has to do with gift-giving, zeng yeo. Christmas is called a season of gifts, joy, and good news, and yet it is also one of the most stressful times of the year. Even in celebration, many people feel disconnected or lonely.
So today, between the songs of the angels and the gifts we share, I invite us to pause and ask: what is truly being given, and what is truly worth praising?
I came to Canada in 2006, the same year our first son, Peace, was born. I came from Korea, a society that is deeply collective and relationship-centered, but also intensely individualistic. The Korean view of societal responsibility is limited. As long as my family’s health, stability, success, and happiness are secure, then even if the world outside is in chaos, we tell ourselves we can survive. It’s okay. A palm-sized worldview of peace.
At the end of November, our family had just moved. We had been preparing since June, and when we finally moved into our new home, I remember thinking, now we can finally rest. Smiling, I was lying on the bed with Min-Goo, holding the remote for the newly installed TV, everything feeling just as we had hoped, when the phone rang. Our second child, Jah-bi, had broken his collarbone during a hockey game in Nanaimo, and they asked for a parent to come immediately.
For the first few days, I stayed by Jah-bi’s side, day and night. I was exhausted, helping him up while he cried that he couldn’t get up. He had been so excited about this season. He had been selected as a representative T2 hockey player, saying, “Mom, this is my last year of hockey”, dreaming about tournaments and his best season yet. And suddenly, he couldn’t return to his team.
In that moment, the life I had carefully planned felt like it slipped just a little, to minus point five. And I thought, if I can just get back to zero, then I can start again.
That moment showed me how small my world could become, shrinking to the size of my palm, circling tightly around my family, my friends, my community. That is what I mean by being deeply relationship-centered and collective, and yet at the same time intensely individualistic, in a Korean sense. A palm-sized worldview of peace. A palm-sized gratitude.
As a girl in that culture, I experienced many absurdities, limitations, and contradictions rooted in age-based hierarchy, patriarchy, and social structures. There were many designated days for gratitude, Parents’ Day and Teachers’ Day, but I grew up without much space to understand gratitude itself. Gratitude was often taught as something directed toward authority and toward what those in authority had given, even though many of the contradictions and limitations also came from those same structures.
So instead of learning gratitude as a profound and transformative practice, my life was shaped more by solving problems, making decisions about my own path, and developing habits of analysis, critique, and criticism in order to find my way. I built my life through my own abilities, discernment, and achievements, with little reflection on how much of my life had actually been built through countless interconnected forms of giving by others. Social, interpersonal, and communal gifts, small and large, given without expectation of return, through what we might call zeng yeo.
But at some point, little by little, something changed. Especially when I had time to be quiet and still, when I intentionally set aside the part of my mind that analyzes, critiques, and decides. Like placing a tea bag into a transparent glass cup and pouring hot water over it, watching the colour slowly spread like a flower or a cloud, when I poured the warm water of contemplation into my heart, my understanding of gratitude began to unfold and to nurture me.
As I had more of those moments, I began to realize that there is something profound and transformative, a spiritual quality, within gratitude. It gives my sharp inner edges a place to rest. Instead of focusing only on what is big, rigid, obvious, or unjust and reacting to it, gratitude allows me to tend to the integrity, genuineness, and authenticity of who I am today, shaped not only by my own will, but by the gift-giving of those who have been in my life, those who have offered advice, friendship, letters, and presence.
Even though there is no life without contradiction, it allows me to recognize, however faintly, and not always clearly, the ways gifts have been given to me over time. It brings to mind the moments of giving and the people who shared them, every kind of gift, material and immaterial, cultural and practical, human and relational, given in interconnected and sustaining ways. Before, these moments were absorbed into analysis and critique. I did not pause to name them as gifts or to express gratitude when I felt it. I did not stop to look back at the many gifted pieces of my life, like bits of stained glass reflecting many colours, resting quietly in the cup of my life.
Faith, then, is the affirmation that these interconnected acts of giving carry sustaining power, and that they are the very foundation that sustains and moves this world, even now. This world, this society, this universe reflects the face and the light of God, whose very nature is gift-giving, whose very nature is love. That light is reflected even in darkness and in the broken fragments of life. And perhaps that is why faith itself is worth praising.
At this point, I want to pause and look at gift-giving a little differently. In Korean, the word is zengyeo. When we translate it simply as “gift,” something important is often lost.
Zengyeo is not a transaction. It is not a commodity or an exchange. As Jachuchi Yuta points out, it begins with something that cannot be bought with money. More precisely, it names what we absolutely need, yet cannot purchase, and the movement of such things from one person to another. That movement itself is gift-giving.
Seen this way, Christmas gift shopping can sometimes feel like the opposite of zengyeo. What moves most easily are things we may want, but do not truly need, and things money can easily buy.
What makes zengyeo interesting is the meaning held in the characters themselves. Zeng means giving in a way that adds meaning. In ancient China, shells were currency, signs of real value. So zeng is not about giving away something unwanted. It is about giving something of value in a way that adds meaning, honour, and relationship. It quietly says, you matter enough for this to mean something.
And then there is yeo. Yeo means “together with,” “along with.” It is giving as participation. It carries the sense of being enlarged, even multiplied, by being together. When something is given with yeo, the giver and the receiver are now connected. Life is shared, not just resources. Yeo resists detached generosity. It insists on togetherness.
So zengyeo, taken as a whole, is giving something of value in a way that creates or deepens relationship and togetherness. It is not only about what is given, but about how lives become connected through that giving.
So I ask again: in our lives, and especially this Christmas, what is it that we absolutely need? And what is it that we absolutely need, yet cannot be bought with money? How might we give and receive such gifts in ways that help build the world God hopes for, together?
There are many ways to think about gift-giving, but one matters especially for today’s story. We often assume that gift-giving begins with the giver. And sometimes, the joy of giving can be as strong as, or even stronger than, the joy of receiving. In fact, Jachuchi Yuka titled his book, Why Do We Feel Joy When We Give Gifts?
And yet, gift-giving does not happen when someone gives. It begins when someone realizes, I have received.
We are connected to others through gifts. We are born dependent, unable to survive without nurture and love. And often, only later in life, as our understanding deepens through imagination and wonder, we suddenly realize, that was a gift, freely given, and that through that giving, my life was able to continue. Only then, when it is understood in the past tense, can it truly be gift-giving, zengyeo, life-giving.
And because we know that the gifts we offer may never be recognized as gifts, gift-giving becomes like a letter sent without certainty. It may be misdelivered, forgotten, or discovered much later. And when it is finally received as a gift, it often gives rise to genuine gratitude, and sometimes to a moment of being deeply moved or transformed by the love carried within that gift.
So how, then, does all of this connect to the shepherds in today’s story?
Why does the story begin and end with praise? Why, after encountering the praise of the heavenly host, after hurrying to see the baby Jesus lying in the manger with Mary and Joseph, do the shepherds return and respond with the very same praise the heavenly host had offered?
To be honest, I do not know. And perhaps I will never know. I was not the one who wrote the story. I was not in the fields that night. I did not see the angels with my own eyes. So I cannot know for certain why the shepherds were moved to respond with praise on that first Christmas night. But as Min-Goo and Margaret have preached, we can resonate with it. And that resonance is gratitude.
At the heart of praise is gratitude.
But this is not an individual, palm-sized gratitude. This is we gratitude.
Most decisively, it is gratitude rooted in being invited into God’s sacred giving, the gift of love. It is gratitude that has discovered God’s gifts, awakened to God’s gifts, placed hope in God’s gifts, and longs to proclaim God’s gifts. As Jesus would later say, it is the promise of the peace that passes our understanding, God’s peace and God’s commitment, made visible in God’s most vulnerable gift, in the baby lying in a manger, born among us.
This is not an experience held by one person alone. It is a shared and communal experience, a we gratitude, emerging among the shepherds as a group. It is a miraculous group experience, taking place in the most unlikely setting: a lonely, forgotten field, in the dark, in the middle of the night, a place that felt stuck and lacking hope. And yet, it is there that hearts are awakened and opened to God’s new proclamation of salvation.
It is the proclamation of a new kingdom of God, completely different from the ruling systems of this world, suddenly revealed from the highest heaven and made present on earth as a new path and a new message of peace, through the singing of the heavenly choir and through the cry of the newborn baby. The shepherds’ praise is the natural expression of that awakened, opened and grateful heart.
We gratitude can become a force that allows society, community, and groups to imagine a new social order together.
Within this worldview, this Great Circle of Gratitude and Gift-giving, every being is revealed as carrying God’s gift of love. It is a worldview in which all life exists, is sustained, and can flourish together. In such a world, the dignity of every being is restored. No life, no person, no community is less valuable or disposable. It becomes a declaration that we can move toward a grateful society grounded in the essential and profound sacred gift of all being. (Inspired by Grateful, Diana Butler Bass)
In the first Christmas story, God revealed God’s self: a gift wrapped in the dynamic smallness, gentleness, and vitality of baby Jesus, whose very life was entirely grounded in the freely-given gifts of others. This gift was completely open toward the future. It was a gift given today, one that had to be received when it was opened.
It may not always look that way, but Christmas becomes an invitation to rejoice, not because our circumstances are joyful, but because the promise of God’s peace, the fragile gift embodied in the baby Jesus, opens us to the future. It breaks our hearts open. It awakens our hearts. It expands us to be and to feel grateful together, moving beyond a tribal sense of us and them. This opening leads us, almost naturally, into gratitude and praise as one people, for one another.
This is why every character in the nativity story breaks into praise. This is what allows them to become grateful, together.
And so, even in a society and a season where gratitude is often misunderstood as something tied to individual achievement, possessions, or status, the church, as a circle of gratitude, is called to something different. We can be grateful together. We can forge a shared experience of gratitude, not as debt or duty, but as rejoicing and response, drawn into God’s heavenly song of “peace on earth”. And we can move toward a world in which all existence on this lonely planet is recognized as God’s gift of love.
This is a call to the grateful way. To a grateful society. Not a palm-sized peace, but peace on earth. Transformation. A world where, whether one has a roof over their head or not, is queer or not, has a disability or not, receives government assistance or not, is addicted or not, is an immigrant or not, has status or not, each gifted piece, and you, reveal the face of God and the light of God’s glory. And together, our lives become a multitude of the heavenly starlights of Christmas, awakening to God’s sacred gifts and courageously rejoicing. Gratitude is not only resilience, but also resistance. Gratitude is a political act, and at the same time the most profound spiritual proclamation. Gratitude weaves peace among us. Come, Jesus, come.
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