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"THANKSGIVING
CHALLENGES" November 18, 2001
Text: Psalm 145: 13b-21 I do not know about you, but for me, thanksgiving is often a challenge. I am not talking about the challenges related to celebrating the holiday we call Thanksgiving. Although, God knows, from time to time preparing for the company that is coming and dealing with certain kin folks can be challenging. But I am not talking about the challenges of holiday celebrations. Today I am going to talk about a more basic challenge, the challenge of genuinely offering thanks to God. There are several reasons offering genuine thanks to God can be a challenge. Today I am going to talk about three of them. One challenge is being so busy both gratitude and God are more or less pushed aside. It is not that we are unable to make a list of blessings we have received. On the contrary, if we paused to think we could make a long list. Our problem is we are just too busy to make such a list. We are so focused on what we must do -- even when what we must do is write thank you notes to some friends -- we are insensitive to all we have to be thankful for. Focused on our very full agenda and what we call our obligations, we become insensitive to the activity of God's grace at work in our lives. The result is we deny ourselves the joy of gratitude. Too busy to count our blessings, we are unable to experience the abundant life Jesus mentioned. Insensitive to our blessings, offering thanks to God becomes either a meaningless ritual or something we very seldom do or both. Another thanksgiving challenge some of us face is that of being able to offer thanks to God with integrity. We are aware of the blessings in our lives but we are reluctant to give God the credit for them because we think that will imply God is unfair. This challenge to thanksgiving has to do with our deep belief that God loves everyone. But if God loves everyone, why is there such inequity in blessings? Why do we have it so much easier than others? The perception behind this challenge to giving thanks is that if we give God credit for our blessings then we think we will be implying God must have refused to bless others who not only have less than we do but who suffer much more than we. We think we can protect God from being blamed for the injustices in life by not viewing our blessings as gifts from God. There is something admirable in this sacrifice. However, such a sacrifice is a great waste because God does not need our protection. The problems of inequity and injustice are problems related to sin and evil, not to God. Sin and evil are the result of choices we humans have made and continue to make. God did not create us to be sinful. God created us to be faithful, loving God as God loves us. But for us to be able to love God means we are able to refuse to love God. Being given the freedom to love God with all we are and have, placing God at the center of our living also means being given the freedom to choose something else to shape and influence our lives. God, in refusing to create us as some sort of robots, gave us freedom of choice so that we would have the ability to love, and when God did that, sin and evil became possibilities. Once we humans began choosing to center our lives in things other than God, the whole system of creation got out of sync. As person after person has chosen to center their living in things other than God, the problem of sin and evil have become more and more complex and destructive. Think of our sin as individuals as individual drops of rain. When the rain drops of sin and evil of all the people in the past and present are added together, the result is a terrible and terrifying raging flood of sin and evil roaring out of control all over the world. Maybe the reason we tend not to talk about sin and try to think of evil only in terms of special effects in movies is that to have a clear perception of the power of sin and evil may be too frightening for us to handle. Maybe this is why so many of us have a very limited concept of sin and irrelevant perception of evil. But when our concepts of sin and evil are inadequate, we are also left with inadequate ways of understanding the inequities and horrors in life. I suspect our inadequate perception of sin and evil explains why some of us think that if we thank God for our blessings we will imply God is unfair. And so, we deny our blessings and cut ourselves off from feelings of gratitude in an inappropriate attempt to protect God from charges of injustice. I think it is our fear of despair that is behind all this. We are afraid to focus on the reality and power of sin and evil because to do so might drive us to give up on the human race. But God did not and has not given up on us humans. God is at work redeeming the creation. This is what the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection are really all about. This is what the Church, when it really is the Body of Christ, is all about. It is what our living is all about, when our living is truly faithful living. God is at work through history, and through us, redeeming the fallen creation. This is the good news at the heart of the Gospel. To be sure, there are inequities and terrible injustices. But they are not the result of God playing favorites and being unfair. They are the byproducts of our human sin and evil. We we were not created to live in sin. We were created for faithful living. And when we live by faith. we live confidently trusting God, and confidently trusting that the final chapter about humanity, will not be written by sin and evil but rather by the redeeming grace of God. When we refuse to experience gratitude to God in some confused effort of trying to protect God from charges of injustice, we not only demonstrate our inappropriate understanding of sin and evil but we also reveal our very anemic perception of God's redeeming grace. Refusing to be grateful is refusing to acknowledge the ways God is able to work in our lives. And when we refuse to acknowledge and celebrate the way God's grace is at work in our lives, we are handicapped in our ability to be instruments God can use in helping others discover God's redeeming grace at work in their lives. There is one more thanksgiving challenge I want to mention. I think it is the greatest challenge of all. It is the thanksgiving challenge Job experienced. It is the challenge to thanksgiving that comes with suffering. For me the greatest suffering is the suffering a parent endures while dealing with the suffering of his or her child. I remember John Claypool talking about what he went through as his elementary school age daughter fought her losing battle with leukemia. She was a beautiful child who had many gifts and much potential. And as she dealt with the reality of her illness, she developed a wisdom far beyond her young age. When she died, John cried the agonizing cry of all parents in his situation: "Why?!? With all she had to offer, why did she have to die? Why has she been taken from us? ... from me?" And John had to endure the anguish of silence. No one had an answer to his: "Why?" anymore than we have received an answer when in the face of undeserved suffering we have shouted into the universe: "Why?" John Claypool said he wrestled with his anguish for a long time. Then, one day the insight came (perhaps from God), that there was another question he also needed to ask. It was an even deeper and more profound question: "Why had he been privileged to have this wonderful daughter?" The question was not just the painful puzzle of why had he lost what he had lost; it was also the profound question of amazement: "Why had he been given what he had been given?" This did not erase all his sorrow and heartache, but it put a new light on that sorrow and heartache and that new light, was the light of gratitude. He still did not have an answer to the question of why his daughter died. It is one of the questions he said he would ask God when he got to heaven. But another of those questions would also be, why had he been so blessed as to have ever had such a daughter? And I suspect the answer to this last question will have something to do with grace. I suspect suffering, especially suffering beyond our understanding, is a major challenge to our offering thanks. We ask: "Why all this suffering?" as if an answer to that question would ease our pain and heartache. But somewhere deep within us, we know better. What is more helpful, when we are anywhere near where John Claypool was, is for us to be given and to be able to embrace the second question. Why were we ever so blessed in the first place? This question will not do away with our anguish, but it will place our heartache in a new light -- the light of gratitude. This morning I have talked about three challenges to our offering thanks. As we move toward the Thanksgiving holiday, let's make time in our crowded agenda to count our blessings so that we are able to experience the joy of gratitude. And may we be so aware of God's redeeming grace dealing with sin and evil, that even as we agonize over injustice we are able to recognize, enjoy and thank God for the blessings we have received. And when we are caught in the anguish of suffering, may we have the insight John Claypool had so that we are able to endure our pain and heartache in the light of gratitude. God help us deal with all the challenges that make thanksgiving difficult for us. Amen. Pastoral Prayer We have come here with
a variety of concerns
and problems. God, all too often
we enjoy the blessings
you have given without
any sense of gratitude.
We are like a spoiled
child who has been given
yet another toy. We enjoy
the gift but genuine gratitude
to the giver is missing.
God, forgive us.
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