Gratitude is a hallmark of November. We celebrate Thanksgiving Day on the 26th, a traditional time to count our blessings and to feast with family and friends. It is also a time to support those in our community who depend on the food we share through the Loaves and Fishes emergency food distribution center (see “In Lieu of….” page 2). In familiar traditions with family, and in sharing with others in God’s larger family, an attitude of gratitude is always appropriate.

This is also the case as we celebrate Stewardship Sunday on November 22. We’ve all heard it a thousand times, but it bears repeating: we would have nothing to be grateful for on Thanksgiving Day or on any day if it were not for God’s beneficent power to create a good world and to put us within it as stewards of the bounty all around us. Everything we have is both a gift and a responsibility, not a possession. When we think of “having” things, it’s easier to engage in hoarding them. When we think of being “blessed” or “gifted” with things, it easier to practice sharing them.

Which brings us to the last Sunday of the month, the first Sunday in the season of Advent. This is the period of four Sundays leading up to the celebration of Jesus’ birth, that day in the long history of human wandering and waiting when God finally reveals what God looks like with a human face. Frederick Buechner describes it like this: “For millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.” It is the way of going all out, of being as vulnerable as it takes to share the power of God’s presence with those who are still encumbered by an attitude of hoarding and wandering and waiting.