Entering God’s Gates with Thanksgiving
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
November 22, 2009 (Thanksgiving Sunday)
Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Philippians 4:4-9, John 6:25-35

Deuteronomy 26:1 • When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, 2 you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. 3 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us." 4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, 5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Philippians 4:4 • Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9 Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

John 6:25 • When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" 26 Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." 28 Then they said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?" 29 Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." 30 So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" 32 Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." 34 They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."
35 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

I. Introduction

Tell me if this is familiar to you:

You sit down at the Thanksgiving dinner table. A veritable feast is arrayed before you. Turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes or yams, corn, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce (both the real kind and the kind that has the imprints of the can on it--you know, the kind we all like better), biscuits, butter. And then the pies--apple, walnut, pumpkin pie. A feast for the eyes and for the palate. And you grab your knife and fork and you are all set to dive in when you hear someone say:

"Why don't we go around the table and say one thing we're thankful for?"

You were so close! The food is right there, tantalizingly in reach. And now you have to drum up some kind of sentiment to satisfy your fellow diners. "I'm thankful I only have to do this once a year," says your smart-aleck cousin.

"I'm thankful we can all be together as a family," says the one member of the family, who will later on will do something to remind you why these family gatherings are indeed only once a year.

And then it's your turn. Your turn to answer the big question: what are you thankful for?

But here's a little asked question: what if you're not feeling thankful--at all? What if you're going through one of those times in your life where you're having difficulty feeling grateful for anything? What if every answer you can think of not only sounds trite and somewhat disingenuous--"I'm thankful for my health"--but is representing an emotion that you don't actually feel? Folks could probably come up with a list of things you should be thankful for, but what if you're in a place where you're weighed down by life and you just can't find it with in you to feel real gratitude? Perhaps being thankful for one thing reminds you of something else that you've lost, some other pain you're feeling, and you find it hard to feel a genuine sense of thankfulness, without a tinge of bitterness.

How on earth is someone supposed to "celebrate" Thanksgiving, when giving thanks is far from one's heart?

II. People Who Ought to be Grateful

We can understand why the Pilgrims were grateful. They had a lot to be thankful for.

The pioneers and pilgrims who first came to these shores and who scratched out a living from the earth, had extremely difficult lives. The author Bill Bryson has said, "It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness." He continues:

"They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line."

None of them, except perhaps Captain Miles Standish, knew how to hunt. And since "farmer" meant one who owned land rather than worked it, even the "farmers" on the Mayflower were of little help. Of the 102 pilgrims, 6 died in the first two weeks. Eight in the next month, seventeen more in February, 13 more in March. By April, just 54 out of the 102 were left to begin the colony, half of them children.

For the first couple of months, every time they tried to make contact with the natives, the Indians ran off. Eventually they were visited by Samoset, himself new to the area, and a friend of his named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe. These two Indians showed the pilgrims how to plant corn and catch wildfowl, and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local chief. Thanks to the teaching of Samoset and Tisquantum, (made possible due to the highly improbably fact that these men already spoke English!) the pilgrims survived their first year, had a plentiful harvest. At the end of the year, they joined with the Wampanoags in a feast to give thanks for the harvest and for God's providence, that we still commemorate as Thanksgiving.

Given the hardship they had endured, no doubt they were grateful to be alive. The gratitude they felt was no doubt the result of the stark contrast between what they had and what they might not have had. Life and death situations will do that to you.

But as we all know, in cultures of material plenty it is harder to come by that attitude. We are accustomed to having so much that it is hard for us to always remember how to be thankful. In the recession, we have seen a new thankfulness for the simple things in life and an appreciation for what we have in ways that we had not done in the years previous.

And what about those who lost so much during the downturn that gratitude for what is left is hard to come by? The ones for whom gratitude rings hollow when compared with loss. Or those for whom it is difficult emotionally or spiritually to adopt an attitude of gratitude?

What about the people who are having difficulty following Paul's instructions to "rejoice in the Lord always" through "prayer and supplication with thanksgiving"? Are they left out? What does thanksgiving mean to those who are not in that place to give thanks?

III. The Christian Life

The text that we read from Deuteronomy describes the practice of dedicating the first fruits of your harvest to God. A person would gather up the first fruits of the planting and then come before the priest with the food. There would be a recitation of the salvation history, beginning with Abraham and the Patriarchs, going through the Exodus and then concluding: " So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." The instructions of the text continue:

You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

I find this interesting not just because it is the ancient Israelite version of Thanksgiving (complete with a dinner involving Levites and the resident aliens we talked about in last week's sermon), but because of the recitation of the salvation history beforehand, because it tells us an important truth.

In Christian tradition, largely a by product of Lutheran interpretations of Paul's writings, there has been an understanding of Judaism as a religion of what is called "works-righteousness", that is, a religion that believes that your merit is determined by whether you are able to perform the rituals of the faith. And so Christians will talk about how their religion is based on salvation by "faith" whereas Judaism is about "works of the Law". But even here, with the commandment about the first fruits, is an important correction to that understanding. Because as the commandment itself makes clear, the commanded behavior takes place after God's saving activity, not before.

That is, the Israelites' performance of the commandments of the Torah were not the requirement for divine favor, they were the response to grace. God liberated the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land because of a covenant promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And that promise was made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob simply because God chose to make it. Through no merit of their own.

The law was not the requirement for God's election of Israel, it was the response in thanksgiving to the grace that had been already shed upon Israel.

IV. Lives of Thanksgiving

What that means, is that as with so many of the most important things, thanksgiving is not an emotion, it is a behavior, a way of living. This is a lesson for those who cannot muster emotions of thanks and for those who can.

For us as Christians, who proclaim a God of love and grace, we are reminded that we seek justice, we love mercy, and we walk humbly with God not in order to earn Eternal Life, but we do these things because we have already been given the promise of Eternal Life. Our lives as Christians are meant to be lives of Thanksgiving.

That was the lesson that John Wesley understood. Wesley was a very busy Christian as a younger man. He tried very hard to live in such a way that he was acceptable to God. He was up very early every morning reading his Bible, studying the scriptures. He would engage in devotions and regular prayers. He would journal regularly. Engage in acts of mercy and charity. A busy, dedicated Christian, trying desperately to do enough to merit God's favor.

And then it was, at a prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, a meeting Wesley really didn't want to go to, that while listening to someone read Luther's preface to the Book of Romans, he experienced something profound. As he would write in his journal:

About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

And so with this realization of his salvation, did Wesley give up on all the work that he had done--his study, his prayers, his journaling, his works of justice and mercy? No, he was as committed to those acts as he had been before, but now they were not means of pleasing God so that God might find him acceptable. They were the means by which he would show his gratitude for what he had already received. They were the long process of his sanctification, and the working out of his Christian faith in his life.

V. End

There are times in our lives when our hearts will not always line up with our heads. When we will feel a call to respond in love or thanksgiving and will lack the emotion we feel is required. We will hear the words of the Psalmist telling us to "enter God's gates with thanksgiving and into God's courts with praise." And when we're weary and bereft of feeling, we may find that hard to understand.

But when we understand that we are loved and seek to create communities of love for others, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

When we take time out from our busy lives and engage in Sabbath rest and renewal, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

When we gather as a community in worship and study, seeking to go deeper into understanding God's word, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

When we serve the needy and remember the poor, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

When we work for justice, giving voice to the voiceless, calling for the liberation of the oppressed, challenging the structures that bind us, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

When we share the stories of how God has moved within us and within our community, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

When we create a community that is welcoming to all without distinction, embracing the radical hospitality that was Christ's, we enter into God's gates with thanksgiving.

We may not always have the enthusiasm. We may not always have the emotions. But we can have the actions. We can live lives of Thanksgiving, whatever it is we are feeling. And as we live those lives, we live into the reality of God's grace and love, and find blessings for ourselves and others for which we will be truly be grateful.