Thanksgiving for What?

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

November 23, 2008

Text: II Corinthians 9: 6-15

PAUL’S APPEAL

As is so often the case, Paul’s gems of wisdom are embedded in his letters on practical subjects. Paul is collecting from the various churches in the region money for the poor in the Jerusalem church----similar to our UMCOR relief efforts when there is great need somewhere.

In making his case, he assumes that they are aware of the needs of the Jerusalem brothers and sisters, and that their hearts will be moved to share----out of love for their neighbors. But the clincher is his appeal to their love of God----for the greater honor and glory of God. In addition to meeting concrete needs, he says that their generosity “will overflow in a flood of thanksgiving to God.” (9:12, REB)

I have drawn to Paul’s exhortation as a clue for celebrating Thanksgiving this year. It can be summarized as follows:

Generosity springs forth out of thankfulness as a way of life:
thankfulness to God because of God’s generous love;
and our desire to give others reasons for giving thanks to God.

HOW DO WE GET THERE FROM HERE?

We can learn from Paul’s wisdom in a thanksgiving season when we may be asking, “Thankful for what?”

We may be feeling the pinch and we are bitter about it.

Or we may be like the fellow in the cartoon who was standing up on the therapist’s couch ranting and raving. The man’s wife was saying to the therapist: “Couldn’t you give him something to calm him down until this nation gets back on the right track.”

Times like these can bring out the rascal in even the best of us!

Or we may be a perpetual skeptic. Woody Allen asked: “How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of my electric typewriter? [God should] give me some clear sign; like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.” (Word and Witness, November 18, 1979)

Or we may believe sincerely that since we have worked hard to make what we possess, we are not obliged to thank anybody but ourselves. (There is a reason that Dickens’ “The Christmas Carol” with the “Scrooge” character is a perennial favorite! There is a little of Scrooge in the best of us.)

Or, we may find ourselves in-between in our belief, like George Bernard Shaw who wrote, “I am an atheist, and I thank God for it.”

What makes us into thankful people, having thankful hearts, especially when events have not been kind? How do you get a thankful heart, especially when complaints may come more readily to our lips?

Those who have been in my study know that I am a reader. I am especially fond of pithy sayings, phrases which get at the heart of the matter.

 Many times I forget where I find these pearls. But in August I read Martin Marty’s MEMO column in The Christian Century, and I found myself continually coming back to it, and mulling it over in my mind---ruminating, if you will---- especially as September and October financial reporters dished out gloomy news.

Martin Marty quotes a line from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letter and Papers from Prison.
“God wants us to love him eternally with our whole hearts----not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint. Only a polyphony of this kind can give life a wholeness and at the same time assure us that nothing calamitous can happen as long as the cantus firmus is kept going.”
A definition is in order:
 “In music, a cantus firmus is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition, often set apart by being played in long notes.
“Composition using a cantus firmus was a common technique in Medieval music, forming the basis of organum as well as 13th- and 14th-century motets. In these works the cantus firmus was originally always taken from Gregorian Chant and was the fixed melodic material, moving in long notes, around which other more florid lines, instrumental and/or vocal, were composed. (Cantus firmus.it) For example, the melody line of “A Mighty Fortress” is always distinguishable even when the other more florid lines are surrounding it.

What occurred to me was this: The Triune God is the “fixed melodic” One in whose presence we live and breathe and create. The polyphony (various activities) of our lives requires a controlling voice lest we simply fly off in all directions.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “As long as cantus firmus is kept going.” We cannot know, in the same way that we ordinary things, that God’s gracious presence and activity are in our lives and in the larger world.

But we can have faith that this is so. We live by faith, and we listen for the “fixed melodic” voice (This brings to mind the old gospel hymn: “There’s within my heart a melody, Jesus whispers sweet and low.”)

This strong melodic tune can be heard if we listen closely. Or, to change the metaphor, it can be perceived with eyes of faith, if we search and wait for God. What else is the good news if not that in Jesus, God came to be with us and for us, and that through the Spirit, this God indwelt Jesus is always, already with us even now.

And where shall this God be found?  From father John Wesley, these words express it well: “‘What you seek is here!’ God is about your bed! About your path; God is behind and before you…..God is here, not afar off. Now believe and feel him near. May he now reveal himself in your heart.  Know him, love him, and you are happy!” (John Wesley, “Spiritual Worship.”)

In other words, we get thankful hearts by hitching our hearts to the Triune God.

This attachment to God begins, I believe, with wonder, a kind of a mystical sensitivity to the givenness of life. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “One can never get over the surprise of just being here and now. There is only one miracle: it is life.”  (Source lost)

Believing in God frees us for leaning into life with gratitude, and even with happiness. Can a grateful heart make us happy (content, at peace, not giddy all the time, or amused, but deeply happy)?

It is surely true that thankfulness and happiness do not necessarily follow from favorable circumstances or from how many neat things we have. For we have insatiable appetites in our fallen selves, even as we still “pant after something, something which we do not have…..[and] that something is neither more nor less than the knowledge and love of God, without which no spirit can be happy either in heaven or earth.” (John Wesley)

You and I can be showered with many good things and yet be ungrateful, or oblivious. The difference is found in believing there is a God, that this God is good, that creation and creatureliness are good, to be received gratefully even when laced with struggles, suffering and reversals.

Carlyle Marney told a story about a child he knew who lived in an iron lung. An especially insensitive social worker said to her one day, “I’ll bet there are days when you wish you had never been born.” To which the little girl responded, “Oh no! I wouldn’t have missed living for anything!”

SPREADING THANKFULNESS

Engrafted onto our loving heavenly Father we find that is our  passion to give others reasons for believing in God’s generous love.

Thanksgiving to God for our lives and our salvation makes us generous. We love God because we know how much God has loved us; and we believe that God loves others as much, too.

Paul is unfailingly optimistic about the offering for the poor in Jerusalem. Why? Is he that good a salesman?

No, he knows the Corinthians can be prideful of their great spirit-filledness! But he also knows that the churches in  Corinth have heard the good news of God’s inexpressible gift of grace.  And though they may not have put two and two together, they will want to be the agents of God’s blessings to others. This is who they have been re-created to be.

You don’t have to sell deeply committed Christians on the idea of being generous with their talents, their time and their resources. If Christ lives in them, Christ won’t let them alone until their hearts are opened to their neighbors in need. The chief sign of the knowledge and love of God is the love of neighbor. 

Have you ever, even in a small way, shown kindness to another person? And later they will say to you, “You were a God-send.” And you are a bit embarrassed. But they are thanking God for what you did. What you have done is increasing thanksgiving to God.

God certainly works in mysterious ways, but most of the time through you and through me, incomplete as we are.

Paul also says to them that, when they are generous, God will provide everything they need!  What can this mean?

Surprise! When you and I live gratefully, we can discover how much less we really need. And, if we live in Christ, we can be “content,” even in adverse circumstances. (Contentment is not the state of being satiated-----it is a gift of God, not something earned by self-discipline or the accumulation of “enough.”)

Victor Furnish has written that the Corinthians Christians will not have enough resources to be independent of other people [the motive that we usually have], but they will have enough to be able to help other people. (Second Corinthians)

Having faith in God sees us through the tough times----and can even bring us closer to God; and the same faith awakens in us generosity to others in need.

There is usually a battle going on within us between our cynical, wounded selves and the “made in the image of God and being saved” selves. Thanks be to God that we are saved by grace, not by the consistency of our performance in this battle!  All we can do is remember that “Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.”

In this season, may the Lord of generosity free us to praise, to live doxologically; and to be the agents of love so others will have reasons to praise the God who is always pure, unbounded love.