"God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good." I first heard this expression about 30 years ago in a black church. And since then I’ve heard it a lot coming from evangelical Christians. Lately, I’ve noticed many of my Lutheran friends are saying it, too.

And it bugs me. Not because I don’t believe that God is good. God is good. Absolutely all the time, God is good. But what bugs me is the way people use the expression. Because they only seem to use it is when things are going their way. When they get their job promotion. God is good. Or they find out that lump they had biopsied isn’t cancer. God is good. Or someone finally makes an offer on their house. God is good. They’re all caught up in their happiness and they want to give credit where credit is due, so they’ll say, God is good.

But if God is good all the time, why don’t I hear people saying God is good when they lose their job? When that lump turns out to be cancer? Or when they have to file for bankruptcy?

In today’s second lesson we hear Paul admonishing the church in Thessalonica to "rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances."

Is this saying that even when there’s nothing much to give thanks for, you should still pretend like there is and thank the Lord anyway? Is it just some kind of Pollyanna advice that encourages us to bury our head in the sand and ignore reality when our lives are ready to be flushed down the toilet? Or does it mean that we have good reason to thank the Lord in all circumstances, especially when it looks like our lives are ready to be flushed down the toilet?

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. For several reasons. First of all, there’s the food. I love the turkey and the stuffing and the gravy. And then, there’s the opportunity to be with people I love. But the older I get, the more uncomfortable I feel when I sit down to a huge feast surrounded with people I love. It’s easy to give thanks for blessings like that. But I’m increasingly aware of the fact that life isn’t all about me. And it’s hard for me not to think about people who aren’t sitting down to a huge feast surrounded with people they love. Where is the blessing for them? Surely God doesn’t bless some of us and deny others, does he?

I came across a Thanksgiving message from another Lutheran pastor that listed some of the reasons we may have to be thankful. It goes like this…

• If you own just one Bible, you are abundantly blessed. One- third of the world does not have access to even one.
• If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed thanthe million who will not survive the week.
• If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people around the world.
• If you attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death, you are more blessed that almost three billion people in the world.
• If you have food in your refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and aplace to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the worlds wealthy.
• If your parents are still married and alive, you are very rare, even here in North America.
• If you hold up your head with a smile on your face and are truly thankful, you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.

Is this the way God blesses us, by giving us stuff that other people don’t have? Do we thank God because we don’t have to live the wretched lives other people do? That sort of list doesn’t make it for me. God isn’t just my God. God doesn’t exist to give me all the stuff I want at the expense of others. I can’t give thanks that I’ve been spared when others suffer.

In the play, Angels in America, Prior, a character living with AIDS, tells a story on his sickbed about one of his ancestors. He was a ship captain who made his living bringing whale oil to the Old World and immigrants to the New World. When his ship sank off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter storm, Prior’s ancestor, the captain, went down with the ship. But the crew escaped and took 70 women and children with them in a big, open rowboat. As the weather got rougher, the crew started to look around and they thought the boat was too overcrowded. In an effort to make the ballast right, they picked up survivors and tossed them into the sea. But the boat was leaking. And as it sank lower, more people were sacrificed. By the time the crew arrived in Halifax, only nine people remained on board.

Prior says, "I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, smiling men, irresistibly strong, seize… maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time for only a quick intake of air, you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown."

As Prior tells the story, he’s a throwaway person suffering from AIDS and, of course, he identifies with those being thrown into the sea. But, I’m not a throwaway person. And my mind goes to those nine people who are in the boat and make it to shore. I wonder… did those nine survivors give thanks to God for delivering them? Sometimes, when I look at the way I live as a middle-class American, and I consider the way other people live, I feel a lot like the nine men who made it to shore in that boat. And that’s nothing for me to celebrate. I may have some things to confess, yes, but nothing to celebrate.

And yet, I do thank God in all circumstances. The story from Angels in America reminds me of why. The crew in that lifeboat assumed that the problem of the sinking boat had to do with the boat’s ballast. Now, I’m not a sailor, so I had to have a conversation with a friend who is to find out what that’s all about. He tells me that on a sailboat, the ballast is the keel. It’s the part of the boat that’s below the surface, the part that nobody sees. It’s where the most critical weight on the boat is because it keeps the boat from capsizing. It also points the boat in the right direction, especially when you’re going into the wind. Sailboats with lighter-weight keels, or sometimes no keels, are very tippy. They can be fast, but they require extra expertise and a lot of work to sail.

That explains the story I heard about a man named Michael Plant, who set off on a solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1992. He was an expert yachtsman and had made the trip several times before. His brand-new sailboat, The Coyote, was very high tech; there were few like it in the world.

Plant’s support team monitored his trip by satellite and radio. Everything was smooth sailing. Even when a storm disrupted the communications, no one worried about it. After all, this guy was one of the best sailors in the world. His boat was equipped with state-of-the-art navigational equipment. They figured Plant would resume radio contact when everything settled down.

When they didn’t hear from him, they tried repeatedly to reach him by radio. Still nothing. So they sent out Coast Guard helicopters to search for him. They spotted The Coyote floating upside down. It’s captain and sole passenger was never found.

How could this have happened? people wondered. Everyone knows that sailboats are very hard to turn over. Their deep keels and massive rudders right themselves. But as the boat was examined, the cause of the tragedy became clear. For all its beauty and technological advances, the Coyote didn’t have enough weight beneath the surface. There wasn’t enough ballast below to outweigh the fancy gadgetry above. And so, it flipped over as it lost its ability to balance in the water during a storm.

We seem to equate being blessed with what’s happening in the boat. The more fancy stuff we have in our lives and the better they look on the surface, the more we believe we’ve been blessed. But I don’t know if that has much to do with the way God blesses us his people. God’s blessing is found beneath the surface. It’s the keel that gives our lives direction and keeps us from capsizing in a storm.

The relationship we have with God is what blesses us. We would do well to work at developing that relationship so that more weight is given to our lives below the surface and less above the surface. For when we find ourselves in a time when we’re struggling to stay afloat, it will become apparent to us how blessed we are. We’ll understand that being blessed is not about having everything go our way, but being blessed is experiencing and knowing that no matter what happens in this life, God will see us through it.

Our blessings are not measured by the piles of food we display on our table, or by the number of friends who surround us for the feasting. Our blessings are measured by the weight and depth of the relationship we have with God. That’s the kind of blessing Jesus tells us to strive for. It’s why he can say: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who mourn. It’s also why he could say: don’t spend your life fretting over what you’re going to wear or what you’re going to eat. Above all else, seek the kingdom of God.

There’s an old Celtic fisherman’s prayer that says: "Dear God, be good to me; the sea is so wide and my boat is so small." It’s so true. The sea is so wide and our boat is so small. And our boats are blessed, not because of what they carry inside them or how they look above the surface, compared to other people’s boats. They’re blessed because of what’s happening below the surface, the part no one can see. It’s the relationship we have with our God that blesses us. In all circumstances we can give thanks for that.

Yes, God is good.