|
Saying Thank You
Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle November 21, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill 2 Chronicles 5:11-14 Ephesians 5:3-20
Four days from now, we will gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. With family and friend seated around the table, surrounding a gluttonous feast with all the trimmings, we will come together this holiday upcoming for the declared purpose of giving thanks. Many of us will do what we have always done, the same family will be together, the same relatives will delight, the same relatives will annoy, and it will be another Thanksgiving. For others, things will be different- the chair emptied by death or divorce or distance, the chair added for marriage or childbirth or new friendship or a different table in a different house, with different people and different food, but the purpose is still the same. The holiday says we come together as thankful people. Thanksgiving as an official holiday has been around for 221 years. With the United States Congress “taking into consideration the many instances of divine goodness to these states … the present happy and promising state of public affairs … particularly the harmony of public councils,” the Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1783 was issue and so began what we know. Of course, almost a century and a half before the government put its stamp of approval on this day set aside to give thanks to our Creator, 35 pilgrims at Plymouth gathered with 90 Wampanoag Native Americans. At Governor Bradford’s direction, they celebrated the first Thanksgiving feast, praising God for the year and first harvest at Plymouth. You know the picture, you probably learned about it in kindergarten, pilgrims donning their black and white garments and hats, along with the shoes with buckles, Indians (as we called them then) with face paint, leather tunics and headpieces with five colors of feathers. The pilgrims show up with the perfectly roasted turkey on a platter, and Indians walk out of the woods with the deer slung round the neck and a few stalks of corn in the hand. Thanksgiving, of course, from its beginning, has been romanticized. I think of what we all learned of heads bowed and prayers spoken, but then I think of the reality I later learned of how harrowing that first year really was for the Pilgrims, how only half survived the ordeal, of how all but three families dug graves the first year to bury the wife or the husband or the child, of how the provisions they brought along for that first winter didn’t last, of how the barley and the peas never grew, of how real a threat starvation was for them. I have to imagine that while they sat round that first table of feast, they did give thanks and ask God’s blessing, for they knew that it was only the Spirit of God and his grace that could sustain. But I also have to imagine that their gratitude was restrained in some sense, given the grief and disappointment that had doubtless become companion to them all. If we are honest, the same is still true. For as we come around to take our places at the table this Thursday next, in our hearts and minds will doubtless be more than thanksgiving and praise to God. As always though as rarely spoken, there will be lament, anger, grief, disappointment, bitterness along with the turkey and dressing, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. It is always true of human life that blessing and bane go side by side. It is always true that though there may be plenty of ways in which we count our blessings one by one and end up surprised at what God has done, it is always true, I think, that we may count up the not so blessed situations, too. But for us, we who would follow Christ, we who confess our chief end “To glorify God and enjoy him forever,” thanksgiving is bigger and broader than simply the fourth Thursday in November. It is different than setting aside the darker parts of the reality of our lives from one day and counting our blessings. Thanksgiving, for those who trust in the living God, is our purpose and our vocation. The Bible is replete with calls for thanksgiving. From Genesis to Revelation, over and over again, we hear stories of those who gave thanks, be it on a mountaintop, in a valley, round a table, or in worship. Over and over again we are bidden to do the same, “Give thanks to the Lord your God.” “O give thanks to God for he his good, his steadfast love endures forever.” Over and over again, it is made clear to any who have eyes to see or ears to hear, that thanksgiving is a pretty big deal. Our text from 2nd Chronicles is no different. It comes just as Solomon’s temple has been completed, in all its glory, and the ark in ushered into its now home. With elders and priests and holy vessels, with sacrifices too many to count, the ark was placed in the inner sanctuary, the most holy place, and then the party began. Listen again to what happened, “It was the duty of the trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals, and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord … the house of the Lord was filled with a cloud, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the lord filled the house of God.” Their thanksgiving, the thanksgiving of this people even after their beloved David had died, was so great and so grand, the glory of the Lord filled the temple. Their gratitude to God was so deliberately pronounced and so heartily proclaimed that the end result was that the priests could not stand to minister. This was the community of God’s people who, like us, knew all the complexity of life. They knew the challenges of living in community probably better than we. They knew the pain of loss and the anxiety of change. But still, they were a people who gave thanks to God even so. How much things had changed by the time Paul wrote the letter to the Ephesians, and how much more things have changed by this time some two thousand years later. The letter to the Ephesians celebrates the life of the church, the unique community established by God through Christ. As such a letter, it has to do with how Christ’s people live together and live in the world. It is a letter about the church’s self-identity and a letter about how Christians in the church ought to live as Christians in the world. Paul, or Paul’s follower who might well have written this letter, knew well the challenges of the Christian life. He knew well the pagan influences of culture as well as the particular difficulties of life in community, of life in the church. So to the church, he says, “Entirely out of place is obscene, silly and vulgar talk, instead let there be thanksgiving … by filled with the Spirit as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual song among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything …” Paul was talking about the specific things that had become somewhat acceptable in the society around them but would bring the church to ruin if such things eased into acceptability there, and, in a very different way from what happened in Solomon’s, would make ministry impossible. These words are strangely still so very relevant. For still the community of Christ’s people struggle with how to live together, with how to live in a fast changing culture, with the ways in which they need to adapt and change and which ways they need to hold fast to tradition and stay the same. The denominational infighting of the last quarter century alone illustrates the point. But my thoughts today are not quite so focused on specific struggles. My thoughts, on this Thanksgiving Sunday, have more to do with how a general and societal lack of gratitude translates into life in the church and the damage done when silly and vulgar talk, not just off color words but hurtful and even hateful words, seems to have more of a place in Christian community than thanksgiving. For you see, we have become a people in which real gratitude is hard to come by. Sure, we can count our blessings and we do. Thank God that was only a cancer scare and not the real thing. God must have been watching over me when that car swerved so it didn’t hit mine. Providence is definitely on my side because my portfolio is still looking decent. When asked to say what we are thankful for, we would doubtless list our families, our homes, and our health. But beyond that, we are a people, a society, a culture, who have become so very quick to complain, who are so very quick to criticize, who feel so very entitled to so very much that when we don’t get it, you can bet we break into silly and vulgar talk, you can bet we break into the hurtful and the hateful. That is true is of people outside Christ’s church and of people inside Christ’s church. And surely, when it comes to the church, without a corrective and hearty measure of thanksgiving, ministry becomes impossible. There are many days when thanksgiving or gratitude seems but a distant ideal. Now to be sure there are exceptions, there always are. There is so much that is life giving and good in the church, there are so many people who are gracious and generous. I think of that and them this Thanksgiving. But also, perhaps out of cynicism, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of despair, I think of the constant complaining that things are not good enough, of the critique liberally offered but suggestions for positive change strangely absent. I think of the tendency to expect service rather than cooperation, of the gossip, silly and slanderous, which thrives on misinformation and bitterness. I think of the constant crankiness which I have yet to wrap my brain around. And all those things, I confide in you, worry me. They worry me because they can be so very damaging and life inhibiting. They worry me because they have a way of seeping into any community and becoming normalized, that is, becoming acceptable. They worry me because they are contagious. But mostly they worry me because I think they have all the potential in the world to make ministry, within Christ’s church and without, near impossible, because they are so far from what we were created for, you and I. Thanksgiving, I am convinced, is not so much about simply counting our blessings and saying our prayers, it is about doing what we were created to do, about being faithful to what we were made for. Of course, it is easy to read though the Bible and think, with C.S. Lewis conclude that with its relentless harping about praising and glorifying and thanking God, God must be saying, " What I most want is to be told that I am great and good." But Lewis went deeper and in a little book on the psalms made the interesting point that the act of thanking God was actually for our benefit, not God’s. The psalmist knew something important, Lewis said, namely that not to praise and thank God was to miss something essential, and furthermore, that there is a connection between expressions of gratitude and personal happiness. He wrote, "I noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced minds praised most; while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible." Thanksgiving is for us, too. For it changes our perspective on everything, when we day by day say our prayers for all the good we have been given. There are days when those prayers come harder than not, there are times when those prayers barely can find voice for the cries of anger and lament we would rather speak, but there is something to be gained, a way in which we are healed, even from our greatest woes, by thanking God. “You come to the Bible …” and its calls to praise … “through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel like hell, you sing anyway,” writes Kathleen Norris. It is not a denial of our chaotic and complicated lives, nor it is a dismissal of the real pain in which so many live, it is the simple truth that I think Governor Bradford knew and that those gathered round the first table of thanksgiving knew, that in all the harrowing and hellish times of life, singing anyway does something to us. Thanking God changes us. Perhaps then, our prayers this Thanksgiving might not be simply words of thanks for the good things of the year past. But perhaps with those words, we might add a prayer that we might be made all the more thankful day in and day out, that our gratitude for this precious things called life, for this incredible gift of community, for this unparalleled gift of a God on whom to call, might so spill into our lives that we will be changed and we will be freed to do the ministry for which each one of us was made. May we be given grace, then, to say thank you. Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving, to God our Creator, triumphantly raise. Amen. |