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Remembering How You Got There Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 22, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 26:1-11 Colossians 3:12-17
“The weather grows cold, the holidays are bearing down on us,” writes Joyce Wadler in the Home Section of the New York Times this week, “and soon we will find ourselves in that seething cauldron of unmannerly behavior: the family holiday gathering. It gets rude in there,” Wadler says, and goes on to document her assertion with a compendium of outlandish stories from Thanksgiving dinners and Christmases past. Take, for instance, the 50 year old New York City writer who invited his mother to Thanksgiving dinner along with a number of professional cooks and cookbook writers. Needless to say, he prepared a feast. All the guests were seated, plates brimming, save for his mother. “‘I’m saying, ‘Ma, come sit down.’ She’s needling around the various foods, and she says (in a tone of complaint), ‘What, no sweet potatoes?’” The writer then goes on to remember the Christmas his gift to her was having the living room painted. She opens the envelope, makes a face and says, “I hoped you’d pay enough for the whole apartment to be painted.” Or when he was 14 and had saved his babysitting money to buy her a brooch. She opens the box and says, “Well, it’s more your taste than mine.” “It wasn’t just the sweet potatoes,” he concludes. “It was a lifetime of…always finding a way to be disappointed.” Or then there was the Thanksgiving dinner that took place when Nancy Cardozo was a 19 year-old nanny. “Food gets served, plates are passed around,” she remembers. “There’s a pause. I’m thinking they’re going to say grace or something. The mom takes a long breath and howls, ‘You never loved me!’” Likely each of us could add a story or two to Wadler’s litany. From Thanksgiving dinners that ended in pitched battles and tears or stony silence to Christmas mornings run amuck amid mounds of wrapping paper and hurt feelings, family gatherings at the holidays can try both heart and soul. According to the head of public relations for the American Psychoanalytic Association, “holidays can provoke ‘temporary regressions,’ in which parents, adult children and siblings, once reunited, revert to decades-old patterns of behavior.” So on the Sunday before some of you find yourself at table with the relatives you have tried unsuccessfully to love, whose politics or mannerisms or meddling or inexplicable meanness are sure to try your temper and temper your gratitude for the day, we turn to Scripture for a word with the power to redeem us from the seething cauldron of unmannerly behavior that is our sin and free us for the supremely human act of thanksgiving. Consider first the context of our table talk on Thursday next. Where do we begin with each other on the day intended for thanksgiving? At the harvest festival, the characters in Scripture began with the story that rehearsed how they got there from here. You will remember from last Sunday that even though the Book of Deuteronomy was set in the wilderness as the twelve tribes were about to cross over the Jordon, it actually was written in the 7th century when God’s landed people had forgotten the story and knew nothing of thanksgiving. Given their run of good fortune, they had exchanged gratitude for self-congratulations and turned the offering of thanks to God into an empty ritual of idolatry. Therefore Moses speaks the first word, the word without which there is no thanksgiving. He matter-of-factly asserts God to be the author of their lives, the cause of their good fortune, the reason for the abundant harvest instead of the nature gods on whom they had come to bet their fortunes. He instructs them to gather the first fruits from the field—later to become a tithe—for a thank offering to God. Considering the same text in The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude, Margaret Visser writes: “First fruits became for the Jews an occasion for remembering that the one God they worshipped had made them out of dust and placed them on the earth with its animals and plants in the first place; the fruit of their labours depended always upon the First Giver.” Then as the offering is placed on the alter, Moses gives Israel the words spoken at table to this day: “A wandering Aramean was my father…” the story begins. It recalls the pathos and pain of slavery, the power and terror of God’s redeeming hand upon their lives, the gift—the sheer gift—of the land they now occupy. “But with this ritual recital of the Israelite’s history of his tribe,” Visser goes on, “something extraordinary happened to the custom of offering first-fruits, thousands of years old as it was when these particular accompanying words were prescribed.” In telling the story of how they got there from here, God’s providence and purposes in human history displace the whims of the gods of rain and harvest, of fertility and prosperity. “The cyclic movement of time—the yearly external return of the seasons—has opened out and made room for the unfolding of a ‘historical’ narrative; cyclic time has become linear….It was a totally new way of conceiving human life.” The narrative of God’s purposes in human history bears repeating on Thursday if our thanksgivings are to be more than ritual. “A wandering Aramean was our father…” the Israelites began. To begin Thanksgiving dinner in this way requires some thought on our part rather than just digging in. I think it no coincidence that the German word “danken (“to thank”) is related to denken (“to think”). Again says Visser, “‘Thank’ and ‘think’ are one: a person given what he or she wants does not just grab the thing that satisfies, but takes the trouble to think about who gave it and what this giving means. Gratitude is not only an emotion, but also a matter of thought—a form of awareness. It arises from realizing what has been done for us by others, from appreciating their kindness and our good fortune, and also from contemplating and reacting in awe to such things as the wonder of life and even the marvel that is our own consciousness.” Pause before you pass the mashed potatoes or reach for the gravy, says Moses in so many words. Even before grace is said, in the presence of family and friends and the blessings of this life, think together about how you got there. Think about those who have gone before you whose faith and hope have landed you safe on Canaan’s side; think about the generations you cannot even fathom whose blood still courses in your veins; think about the darker days, the hardest times, the disappointments and heart aches and griefs, the seasons when trusting God in the night watches was all that got you out of bed in the morning; think about the first day when you held the child whose neck you would like to ring but for love’s sake will not when the company leaves or the hand no longer around the table that you held for the last time in death that holds you even now. Think about the life you have been given by the same God who brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Chances are that thinking in this way will be indistinguishable from thanking the God who alone has given you all things. But more, for this is a story that has the power to change each and every person around the table. Read this historical narrative into the lives of all the relatives you have tried unsuccessfully to love and you we just may notice the same hand that brought the Israelites out of Egypt working to redeem your mother from disappointment and your grandfather from meanness, your Aunt Esther from the lies she tells and Aunt Jane from the sauce and you from your excessive need for control. “What I often say to my patients and myself,” said the psychoanalyst to the reporter, “is, ‘This is temporary. Though in the midst of it, it is hard to believe you are going to crawl out of it when the holiday ends.’” But it is temporary not because you get to go over the river and through the woods to the peace and quiet of your own home: it is temporary because the God who brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand is still at work in you and in those you have been given to love. “What God really wants,” says Visser, “is the one thing [God] has deprived himself of the right to force from us—namely a human person’s desire to change his ways/her ways and choose righteousness.” That is the reason we have been given another story to tell ourselves at table. It is the story of God’s redeeming purposes revealed in flesh: the story of the one who freely chose righteousness, that in him our death-dealing would have no dominion and we would be changed. This time not Moses but Paul, awash in gratitude, hands us the script. No doubt he had grown up at table reciting the words of Moses: “A wandering Aramean was my father….” But for Paul the historical narrative continues around the Lord’s table where he begins, “On the night in which he was betrayed….” This, you will remember, was a dinner set in the seething cauldron of human sin. Yet for all the betrayals we have known or been a party to over the course of a lifetime, it is only the betrayal of those at table with Jesus that is made supremely to serve the purposes of God’s redeeming love. The church therefore named the meal Eucharist which means gratitude, thanksgiving. We take the bread and the cup and think of what God has done for us in him--remember how we have gotten from here to there with his help. We think, as we break bread, about how he is alive and lurking in the mother who always finds a way to be disappointed or the friend who has never been loved or the brother who is still a bully in his seventies or the daughter that sits sulking in silent judgment. We think these things because he is alive; and so we come to the table in expectation that the relatives we have tried unsuccessfully to love will surprise us this time. We return to the table in hopes that we will surprise them too. This would not be our own doing: it would be a gift of God! “Hadn’t Ezra noticed” writes Anne Tyler in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, “that the family as a whole had never yet finished one of his dinners? That they’d fight and stamp off halfway through, or sometimes not even manage to get seated in the first place? Well, of course he must have noticed, but was it clear to him as a pattern, a theme? …It was true that once…they had made it all the way to desert; so if they hadn’t ordered dessert you could say they’d completed the meal. But the fact was, they did order dessert, which was left to sag on the plates when their mother accused Cody of deliberately setting up shop as far from home as possible. There was a stiff-backed little quarrel. Conversation fell apart. Cody walked out. So technically, even that meal could not be considered finished. Why did Ezra go on trying? Why did the rest of them go on showing up, was more to the point….It was almost as if what they couldn’t get right, they had to keep returning to.” No doubt we are in the number of those who will never get it right with one another this side of the grave, and so will keep returning. But our hope is this: that the One who has managed to love Ma and Grandpa and Aunt Esther and Uncle Jack and you and me successfully will be at table too. After the stories are told and grace is said, perhaps it will happen that our eyes will be opened in the breaking of bread, and we will recognize him at last in one another. If this should happen, I tell you the truth: our thanksgivings will know no end! |