To Thank Is To ...
Sermon
SEEK GOOD, NOT EVIL
that you may live
This ritual of Thanksgiving is a ritual of identification. A traditional American parade ritualizes the sacredness and centeredness of money in American life.
This Deuteronomic ritual identifies God as the center of thanksgiving and is our way of saying so. One does not thank anybody if self is the center. Thanks, then, may be little more than the oil of social facilitation. The thanksgiving of this text expresses a relationship of debt. It calls forth one's history - not of one's lifetime alone, but that of all previous generations.
Once the Israelites came to the land that God had promised to give them, they were called to remember that their ancestors were once homeless, that they became powerful in Egypt, that they were humiliated and ill-treated, suffered all kinds of cruelty, even the cruelty of slavery. Then God brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm. They were to recall and recite out loud all of this history as they brought their gifts of tithe.
Note how the accent is not on the people's destitution but God's restitution. They are because he is. Note also in this text that, despite the wanderings, the wars, the privations, the hard work of the people, this passage accents "the first fruits of the land I have given you; when you have entered into the land which I have given you; he brought to us this place and gave us this land; the first fruits, O Lord, which you have given me; all the good things which the Lord has given."
The text identifies them as receivers, not because of merit, but because it is God's nature to give himself richly. After all that God had given them, must he still remind them to give thanks? Much of the Old Testament history is a history of their thanklessness, their indifference, and self-satisfaction, especially in moments of great affluence when one would think they would remember God most - but when they remembered him least.
Isn't that much of our own personal and national history? Because we happen to live in a country (reflect on that word "happen" for a moment) which is rich in soil, in mountains, in forests, we think somehow that we produced it all. We heap thanksgiving on ourselves rather than God. If we respond that our minds and our hard work have done all this, we have only to ask, "Who is the source of our minds? Who is the source of our energy? Who is the source of our ingenuity?" We recognize quickly that it s all God's gift, no matter how you cut it.
It is hard to recognize God as the giver in a culture which praises the "self-made woman" and "self-made man" as national achievements, who cheer people who make their first million before they are thirty, who laud people who achieve mastery, as though mastery were ever a solo job; who laud people who dominate others and carry out that domination internationally through the ruthless exertion of our national and industrial powers on others, regardless of the price we make them pay for our exploitation; in a country where to be number one is the highest accolade. How then do we realize that the source of it all is none other than the giver God?
Moreover, the necessity and the felt need for thanksgiving is harder come by for us than for the Dueteronomic Israelite. We are, most of us, at some experiential distance from the ritual of seed, root, stem, leaf, and fruit. It comes to most of us through stores, in cartons and packages, not on stalks of grain, not in the udders of cows. Joseph Sittler highlights this dilemma. A modern man "crouches over levers of a crane and guides it to lift stone from Indiana, which he has never touched, to the top of a construction job in Omaha, where it is fixed in walls he need not look at, designed for purposes he has nothing to do with, by men whose names he does not know and whose faces he never sees."
It is difficult, then, to have a sense of dependence that is the lifeblood of thanksgiving. When we calculate all we have been given, we easily bypass the essentials highlighted in Luther's explanation of the first article of the Creed: "I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them; also clothing and shoes, meat and drink, house and home, wife and children, fields, and cattle and all my goods; that he richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life; that he defends me against all danger, and guards and protects me from all evil; and all this out of purely fatherly divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me."
The experience of the crane operator is at some remove from Martin's. That of the computer analyst, and that of the 747 jet pilot are even more so. While one would think that the new complexity would heighten the sense of thanksgiving because of the wonder and amazement of it all, more often than not it actually results in boredom. Grade school children are bored. High school children are bored. College students are bored. My own children never bring up the subject of the wonder of traveling across the skies at speeds upwards of four hundred miles an hour. They have all traveled much. They are all quite unimpressed.
Boredom is a far cry from the attitude of the text. Boredom is a far cry from Martin Luther's "for all of which I am in God's debt to thank and to praise, to serve and obey Him." In his debt just by being born, just being born puts us in a posture of praise and thanksgiving. In a country which has so many people who have so much, we find it hard to believe it is not really ours, never has been, never will be in any possessive sense. Even the tithe in the text has been distorted to mean God's share. "Once we have given God his share, then we free to do with the rest as we please," the common thinking runs. In truth there is no such thing as "God's share" or "my share." There is only God's. Whether the funds feed the poor or buy me a double dip, chocolate mint ice cream sugar cone, the funds remain God's. The few moments funds are in my hands doesn't change that. There's a fierce kind of scriptural logic about that. "For we brought nothing into this world and we certainly shall carry nothing out." When Nelson Rockerfeller's daughter saw her father in his coffin, she remarked, "He looks so small." To that the pastor said, "None of us is larger than life-size."
The sheer "is-ness" of our relationship to a giver God calls for a "free and glad recognition of our indebtedness to him." The free and glad recognition of lovers' indebtedness to each other, multiplied many times over, gives us some grasp of the vastness of our indebtedness to God. Lovers know they are in each other's debt. What is more, they freely and gladly recognize the debt. Their indebtedness evokes sheer adoration of the other. Their sheer pleasure is endless because their debt is limitless. So it is with their love, knowing no bounds. "It is forbidden," says the Talmud, "to taste of this world without saying a blessing."
This kind of adoration and thanksgiving is not part of our everyday world. "If civilization sobered up for two days would it not die on the third of remorse?" asks Malcolm Lowery.
Thanksgiving is not optional. Thanksgiving grows out of the heart and guts of our identity. We have received the richest of His gifts. God made us what we are, formed us in our mothers wombs. God is forever giving us the first fruits - himself. He never ceases in his giving of first fruits - his Son.
As God detailed his Deuteronomic gift of himself, in that same detail he insinuated Christ into our life. He wove the fabric so closely that our destiny became his destiny. He was thankful as we are thankless. He was crucified because we have an infinite capacity to crucify. He was killed because we are killers. He died, for to be one of us is to die. It is our destiny. And now he has become the first fruits of the resurrection.
We were not there for that specifically, but no matter. God continues to give. He gives his Son to us in baptism where we become what he is because he became what we are. Now we are prime examples of the way God rights wrongs. That means life for us on a new plane altogether.
In the Lord's Supper he gives us the first fruits again, the body and blood of his Son. This covenant is the new covenant in the blood of Christ, the Son of God. This is not a tithe or even tithes. God is giving us totally God. He does this that we might remember the Christ, our life's blood. This remembering is not a test of memory recall. It is a healing of a relationship that has been marred or broken. It is the restoration of his presence. It is new life. The Supper identifies God as the One who died for us and rose again. The Holy Supper identifies us. We are people who had to be died for. That he gives himself to us in the death and resurrection of his Son is our new land. That is the land to which God has led us and which he has given us. He is our new country. No land is like that land.
We come to him as receivers, cupped hands held high, mouths open to receive gifts of life, the gift of God. Luther bluntly calls us "beggars before God." No matter who we are, no matter what our achievements, we are beggars before God.
And when beggars eat, that calls for rejoicing. We celebrate the Sacrament. We joy in the Eucharist as God's giving of himself over and over again, as God once more reaches down with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm with signs and wonders and gives us new life, a life flowing with milk and honey.
If the meal of milk and honey is for beggars, all are included. Rejoicing is neither selective nor restrictive. As we receive, so we give. Rejoicing spills out over everybody and is for everybody - the stranger, the alien, because "your fathers were once slaves in Egypt. It was impossible for them to rescue themselves, "but I brought you out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm; therefore be hospitable to slaves; you were once a stranger in a strange land, therefore be hospitable to strangers.
Robert MacAfee Brown says, "When in the Lord's Supper we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ, it unites us with all others who eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. And it unites us with all others who eat and drink. And last, but not least, it unites us with all others who would eat if they only had something to eat, who would drink if they only had something to drink."
United with all others by this feast, we serve all others. May the day of the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas basket and the Easter ham never pass. But we need to pass beyond them all. I believe it was Matthew Fox who said, "I understand social action to be structured justice, to see that people get a fair share of the blessings that God has given us."
T.V., properly maligned for feeding so much sawdust to the mind and the heart, will not let us forget the cruel starvation in Ethiopia and Sudan. It takes systems and structures and organizations to meet the needs of God's people, our sisters and brothers, on that massive scale. Whole church bodies, industry, and government need to band together to feed those who are now strangers in their own land, bedeviled by starvation, a cruelty intensified by governments fighting civil wars and hindering the food supplies from getting to the starving and the hungry. We have to see that this kind of starvation never happens again.
Individualism has been praised in our culture, and often in the church, and has, thereby, become an obstacle to needed community action. What is true about me is not so much that I am an individual, as that I am related to you. I am what I am, not because, "I believe in me," as one of the ads says. I am what I am because of what Christ has done for me. I am related to you because of what Christ has done to you. If that is true, I cannot stand by and watch you starve or be bent out of shape by injustice or watch your mind and heart lose vision because you don't have opportunities to learn.
What I am, is driven by this: "This interior resonance of recognition, begetting, or evoking praise and thanksgiving, is a function of the particularity of grace itself. For grace has its marks. Whenever men encounter grace it is the shock and the over-plus of sheer gratuity that announces the presence, as indeed, it invented the name. By gratuity is meant a primal surprise, the need-not-have-been of uncalculated and incalculable givenness. 'Amazing' is the only adequate adjective; wonder is the ambience. For amazement, wonder, and grace occur together. '... they were amazed at the graciousness of his words ...' " (Joseph Sittler)
Amazed by the mighty hand and the outstretched arm, amazed by "Child of God, you are marked by the cross of Christ forever;" amazed by "My body, broken for you; my blood shed for you;" amazed by "As I have done this for you, so you also ought to do it for one another," we praise God and feed the neighbor.
To be identified, to know who we are and whose we are and what we are sent to do, that's Deuteronomic. That's contemporary. That's thanksgiving. Amen
This Deuteronomic ritual identifies God as the center of thanksgiving and is our way of saying so. One does not thank anybody if self is the center. Thanks, then, may be little more than the oil of social facilitation. The thanksgiving of this text expresses a relationship of debt. It calls forth one's history - not of one's lifetime alone, but that of all previous generations.
Once the Israelites came to the land that God had promised to give them, they were called to remember that their ancestors were once homeless, that they became powerful in Egypt, that they were humiliated and ill-treated, suffered all kinds of cruelty, even the cruelty of slavery. Then God brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm. They were to recall and recite out loud all of this history as they brought their gifts of tithe.
Note how the accent is not on the people's destitution but God's restitution. They are because he is. Note also in this text that, despite the wanderings, the wars, the privations, the hard work of the people, this passage accents "the first fruits of the land I have given you; when you have entered into the land which I have given you; he brought to us this place and gave us this land; the first fruits, O Lord, which you have given me; all the good things which the Lord has given."
The text identifies them as receivers, not because of merit, but because it is God's nature to give himself richly. After all that God had given them, must he still remind them to give thanks? Much of the Old Testament history is a history of their thanklessness, their indifference, and self-satisfaction, especially in moments of great affluence when one would think they would remember God most - but when they remembered him least.
Isn't that much of our own personal and national history? Because we happen to live in a country (reflect on that word "happen" for a moment) which is rich in soil, in mountains, in forests, we think somehow that we produced it all. We heap thanksgiving on ourselves rather than God. If we respond that our minds and our hard work have done all this, we have only to ask, "Who is the source of our minds? Who is the source of our energy? Who is the source of our ingenuity?" We recognize quickly that it s all God's gift, no matter how you cut it.
It is hard to recognize God as the giver in a culture which praises the "self-made woman" and "self-made man" as national achievements, who cheer people who make their first million before they are thirty, who laud people who achieve mastery, as though mastery were ever a solo job; who laud people who dominate others and carry out that domination internationally through the ruthless exertion of our national and industrial powers on others, regardless of the price we make them pay for our exploitation; in a country where to be number one is the highest accolade. How then do we realize that the source of it all is none other than the giver God?
Moreover, the necessity and the felt need for thanksgiving is harder come by for us than for the Dueteronomic Israelite. We are, most of us, at some experiential distance from the ritual of seed, root, stem, leaf, and fruit. It comes to most of us through stores, in cartons and packages, not on stalks of grain, not in the udders of cows. Joseph Sittler highlights this dilemma. A modern man "crouches over levers of a crane and guides it to lift stone from Indiana, which he has never touched, to the top of a construction job in Omaha, where it is fixed in walls he need not look at, designed for purposes he has nothing to do with, by men whose names he does not know and whose faces he never sees."
It is difficult, then, to have a sense of dependence that is the lifeblood of thanksgiving. When we calculate all we have been given, we easily bypass the essentials highlighted in Luther's explanation of the first article of the Creed: "I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them; also clothing and shoes, meat and drink, house and home, wife and children, fields, and cattle and all my goods; that he richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life; that he defends me against all danger, and guards and protects me from all evil; and all this out of purely fatherly divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me."
The experience of the crane operator is at some remove from Martin's. That of the computer analyst, and that of the 747 jet pilot are even more so. While one would think that the new complexity would heighten the sense of thanksgiving because of the wonder and amazement of it all, more often than not it actually results in boredom. Grade school children are bored. High school children are bored. College students are bored. My own children never bring up the subject of the wonder of traveling across the skies at speeds upwards of four hundred miles an hour. They have all traveled much. They are all quite unimpressed.
Boredom is a far cry from the attitude of the text. Boredom is a far cry from Martin Luther's "for all of which I am in God's debt to thank and to praise, to serve and obey Him." In his debt just by being born, just being born puts us in a posture of praise and thanksgiving. In a country which has so many people who have so much, we find it hard to believe it is not really ours, never has been, never will be in any possessive sense. Even the tithe in the text has been distorted to mean God's share. "Once we have given God his share, then we free to do with the rest as we please," the common thinking runs. In truth there is no such thing as "God's share" or "my share." There is only God's. Whether the funds feed the poor or buy me a double dip, chocolate mint ice cream sugar cone, the funds remain God's. The few moments funds are in my hands doesn't change that. There's a fierce kind of scriptural logic about that. "For we brought nothing into this world and we certainly shall carry nothing out." When Nelson Rockerfeller's daughter saw her father in his coffin, she remarked, "He looks so small." To that the pastor said, "None of us is larger than life-size."
The sheer "is-ness" of our relationship to a giver God calls for a "free and glad recognition of our indebtedness to him." The free and glad recognition of lovers' indebtedness to each other, multiplied many times over, gives us some grasp of the vastness of our indebtedness to God. Lovers know they are in each other's debt. What is more, they freely and gladly recognize the debt. Their indebtedness evokes sheer adoration of the other. Their sheer pleasure is endless because their debt is limitless. So it is with their love, knowing no bounds. "It is forbidden," says the Talmud, "to taste of this world without saying a blessing."
This kind of adoration and thanksgiving is not part of our everyday world. "If civilization sobered up for two days would it not die on the third of remorse?" asks Malcolm Lowery.
Thanksgiving is not optional. Thanksgiving grows out of the heart and guts of our identity. We have received the richest of His gifts. God made us what we are, formed us in our mothers wombs. God is forever giving us the first fruits - himself. He never ceases in his giving of first fruits - his Son.
As God detailed his Deuteronomic gift of himself, in that same detail he insinuated Christ into our life. He wove the fabric so closely that our destiny became his destiny. He was thankful as we are thankless. He was crucified because we have an infinite capacity to crucify. He was killed because we are killers. He died, for to be one of us is to die. It is our destiny. And now he has become the first fruits of the resurrection.
We were not there for that specifically, but no matter. God continues to give. He gives his Son to us in baptism where we become what he is because he became what we are. Now we are prime examples of the way God rights wrongs. That means life for us on a new plane altogether.
In the Lord's Supper he gives us the first fruits again, the body and blood of his Son. This covenant is the new covenant in the blood of Christ, the Son of God. This is not a tithe or even tithes. God is giving us totally God. He does this that we might remember the Christ, our life's blood. This remembering is not a test of memory recall. It is a healing of a relationship that has been marred or broken. It is the restoration of his presence. It is new life. The Supper identifies God as the One who died for us and rose again. The Holy Supper identifies us. We are people who had to be died for. That he gives himself to us in the death and resurrection of his Son is our new land. That is the land to which God has led us and which he has given us. He is our new country. No land is like that land.
We come to him as receivers, cupped hands held high, mouths open to receive gifts of life, the gift of God. Luther bluntly calls us "beggars before God." No matter who we are, no matter what our achievements, we are beggars before God.
And when beggars eat, that calls for rejoicing. We celebrate the Sacrament. We joy in the Eucharist as God's giving of himself over and over again, as God once more reaches down with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm with signs and wonders and gives us new life, a life flowing with milk and honey.
If the meal of milk and honey is for beggars, all are included. Rejoicing is neither selective nor restrictive. As we receive, so we give. Rejoicing spills out over everybody and is for everybody - the stranger, the alien, because "your fathers were once slaves in Egypt. It was impossible for them to rescue themselves, "but I brought you out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm; therefore be hospitable to slaves; you were once a stranger in a strange land, therefore be hospitable to strangers.
Robert MacAfee Brown says, "When in the Lord's Supper we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ, it unites us with all others who eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. And it unites us with all others who eat and drink. And last, but not least, it unites us with all others who would eat if they only had something to eat, who would drink if they only had something to drink."
United with all others by this feast, we serve all others. May the day of the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas basket and the Easter ham never pass. But we need to pass beyond them all. I believe it was Matthew Fox who said, "I understand social action to be structured justice, to see that people get a fair share of the blessings that God has given us."
T.V., properly maligned for feeding so much sawdust to the mind and the heart, will not let us forget the cruel starvation in Ethiopia and Sudan. It takes systems and structures and organizations to meet the needs of God's people, our sisters and brothers, on that massive scale. Whole church bodies, industry, and government need to band together to feed those who are now strangers in their own land, bedeviled by starvation, a cruelty intensified by governments fighting civil wars and hindering the food supplies from getting to the starving and the hungry. We have to see that this kind of starvation never happens again.
Individualism has been praised in our culture, and often in the church, and has, thereby, become an obstacle to needed community action. What is true about me is not so much that I am an individual, as that I am related to you. I am what I am, not because, "I believe in me," as one of the ads says. I am what I am because of what Christ has done for me. I am related to you because of what Christ has done to you. If that is true, I cannot stand by and watch you starve or be bent out of shape by injustice or watch your mind and heart lose vision because you don't have opportunities to learn.
What I am, is driven by this: "This interior resonance of recognition, begetting, or evoking praise and thanksgiving, is a function of the particularity of grace itself. For grace has its marks. Whenever men encounter grace it is the shock and the over-plus of sheer gratuity that announces the presence, as indeed, it invented the name. By gratuity is meant a primal surprise, the need-not-have-been of uncalculated and incalculable givenness. 'Amazing' is the only adequate adjective; wonder is the ambience. For amazement, wonder, and grace occur together. '... they were amazed at the graciousness of his words ...' " (Joseph Sittler)
Amazed by the mighty hand and the outstretched arm, amazed by "Child of God, you are marked by the cross of Christ forever;" amazed by "My body, broken for you; my blood shed for you;" amazed by "As I have done this for you, so you also ought to do it for one another," we praise God and feed the neighbor.
To be identified, to know who we are and whose we are and what we are sent to do, that's Deuteronomic. That's contemporary. That's thanksgiving. Amen
