(Note: This blog entry is based on
the text for “Thanks for Nothing” originally shared on November 27, 2024. It
was the 339th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced
with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Bart Simpson’s Thanksgiving prayer included
the words, “thanks for nothing.” Today, we’re going to see why those are good
words for a Day of Thanksgiving.
Tomorrow is the national holiday of Thanksgiving in the United States.
It’s many people’s favorite national holiday, because there is so little
required of us except to gather people together and share a meal of thanksgiving.
It’s specific to the United States as it is rooted in the “First Thanksgiving”,
when early European immigrants gave thanks for surviving the winter with almost
nothing.
It had once become
a Thanksgiving holiday cliché to say that we take so much for granted in our
country, but we rarely hear even that anymore.
Instead, some of
our own citizens have become so focused on our flaws that they hate our
country, while at the same time people from other countries are literally dying
to get into our country, whatever the costs to anyone and under any
circumstances.
And we continue to
be a generous people as a whole.
Alexis de
Tocqueville was a French diplomat and sociologist who toured the United States
in the early 1800’s to learn about America, and he was deeply impressed with
our singular democracy.
After looking for
the source of American greatness among the attributes and institutions of the
new country, he wrote, “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard
her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius
and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever
ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
Way back in the DOS
days of the Internet, I was online with a colleague who reported that a member
of his congregation worked for the national Butterball Turkey Hotline.
One year, she told
him about someone who called with a question.
“We were defrosting
our freezer out in the garage and, way down on the bottom, we found a turkey
that we think has been there for about three years, and we wondered if it would
be safe to eat,” she said.
“Has it ever thawed
and been refrozen during that time?” the hotline worker asked. “No,” the caller replied.
“Well then, it
would be safe to eat. It won’t taste very good, but it would be safe,” the
hotline worker said.
“That’s what I
thought,” the caller responded. “We’ll give it to the church.”
😊
That’s funny, but I
don’t think it’s far from our current cultural attitudes toward goodness.
The historical
Christian contribution to gender identity was to shift the idea from “the Real
Man” to “the Good Man.” From one who cared only for himself to one who sought
to serve others. Today, we seem to be going backwards.
What is happening
to us today? It’s said that our recent elections were won or lost primarily on
the perceived state of our economy and what would be better for ourselves. It
promoted self-interest first and removing ourselves from the concerns of
others, and a kind of selfish bullying dominance in every aspect of American
life.
Christians are
rightly concerned for the state of the Union and for the state of the world,
and for the state of the Church this Thanksgiving.
We are concerned
about another land war in Europe, in the Middle East, and in the Far East, even
talking in terms of World War III. We know that that wouldn’t end well. Albert
Einstein reportedly said, “I know not what weapons will be used to fight World
War III, but I’m confident that World War IV will be fought with sticks and
stones.” Yet, we act as if we can isolate ourselves from it.
We are concerned
with environmental damage so advanced that we are now fighting brush fires in
New York. In New York! Climate change is reshaping geography. We are concerned
with micro plastics in our food and in our water that are now appearing in our
bodies. Yet we continue to use them for their low-cost and convenience.
We are no longer
thinking about the polarization of our culture, but of its fracturing. We dread
the appearance of certain topics at our Thanksgiving dinners this year that are
no longer limited to one eccentric Uncle, but to every individual with a tribe
on social media. We seem disinterested in focusing on what unites us.
What once was
valued as an educational system has now become at best a variety of vocational
schools, where colleges and universities measure themselves by how much money
their graduates make. At worst, they no longer value critical thinking but
conformity to systems of social indoctrination. Where a liberal arts education
once meant that students were exposed to lots of different ideas, it now means,
at best, that students are exposed to lots of different life experiences, and
at worst to only one acceptable set. All others are subject to re-education.
Liberal Arts programs themselves are struggling to survive. In an attempt to
accommodate to an “enlightened” world view, they tried calling themselves the
“social sciences” and became neither.
It has affected the
Church and its internal relationships, as was once said in the back and forth
between Evangelical Christians and Mainline Christians in the early 1970’s, “I’ll call you a Christians if you call me an intellectual.” 😊
About 40 years ago,
in a gradual movement, seminaries decided that their main concern was academic
respectability, and no one gets promoted in the academic world for saying that
everything we believe is true but, as in the “social sciences” professors are
rewarded for generating something new. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is
new to us. Seminaries were founded to form pastors. They became places to make
professionals, and then to make more
professors. They became places whose expressed purpose was to train students
away from their “Sunday School faith” in order to make them critical thinkers.
What they did was to enforce, through the coercive power of grades and
gatekeepers, another form of thought conformity, not transformed lives.
That is why we are
now more concerned with adopting progressive policies than with implementing
them. Yet, the denomination of which I am a part, the ELCA, is the whitest
denomination in the USA. Like evangelism, we like to talk about it, but we
don’t want to do anything about it. Look at our official churchwide
resolutions. We’ve made works righteousness the message we give to the world,
not faith alone in a living relationship with the one true living God.
Pastors once needed
to receive a call from God to the ordained ministry. Now “call” is synonymous
with “job”. Being a shepherd is now being a community organizer.
Rather, the Church
serves God, not an institution, not a culture, and especially not an
institutional culture.
The Church seeks an
educated clergy, not an indoctrinated clergy, unable to look to God at work in
their transformed selves or to think critically,
That is why using
the Church as a tool for good delegitimizes both the Church and the good, but
some people are fine with that. Some within the Church long for its collapse.
And when it does, will believe that they have pursued a noble cause, naively
and ahistorically believing that something better will arise. We are about to
celebrate the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Who among us thinks that they
can improve on that, Jesus, the head of the Church?
A.I. is making us
question the value of humanity itself.
Yes, things change.
But they don’t just change. Change requires initiative. That’s all. It
most certainly does not require a majority, or even a plurality, just
acquiesce, conformity and indifference.
We are concerned
about the changes around us this Thanksgiving, but are we worried? No. In fact,
at the root of the Christian life, we Christians experience the peace that
passes human understanding. Whatever our emotional state, there is a state of
being at our core that is unshakable because it comes from God. And because of
that, we can give thanks in every circumstance because that peace, even joy, in
all circumstances, is a gift from God in a living relationship with God.
In the Gospel text
that will be read in the vast majority of churches tonight or tomorrow, in
celebration of our national day of Thanksgiving, we will hear the words of
Jesus in Matthew 5:26-33,
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what
you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is
not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look
at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and
yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And
can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And
why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even
Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But
if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is
thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore
do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What
will we wear?’ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all
these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these
things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his
righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
34 “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring
worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
Bart Simpson, in
the long-running TV show, “The Simpsons”, was once asked to pray before the
family’s Thanksgiving meal.
He bowed his head,
folded his hands, and said, “Dear God, we paid for all of this stuff ourselves, so thanks
for nothing.”
I think that that
prayer is pretty common, even if people don’t say it out loud.
But the second part
of the sentence, by itself, is still pretty good.
Nothing can
separate us from God. Whatever our circumstances, God is always there, not
because we empty ourselves and open our hearts without fear or selfishness, but
because when everything else is taken away, when it seems like there is nothing
inside of us. God is always there.
In fact, we are
grateful for the nothing that allows us to realize that we are set free by God
on the cross, that the Holy Spirit continues to call, gather, enlighten, and
make holy the whole Christian church on earth, we are never alone.
That’s why, if our
personality changes with age, if we experience the side-effects of medication,
a traumatic or mystical experience, if our life experiences push us in a new
direction, none of these can reach us at who we are. They cannot touch whose we
are. We belong to God.
God created
everything out of nothing, not no thing. There were no things. When most of us
try to picture nothing, we picture empty space, but even empty space is a
thing.
Before God Created,
there was no space. No height, no width, no depth, no time. Nothing.
Only God. And from
this, God created every thing that exists, AS AN ACT OF WILL! God spoke and it
came into being, including us!
And we rejected
God. And we continue to reject God and everything good that comes from God and
everything that we have been given by God. And God STILL died for us on the
cross. And God STILL loves us!
It is only when we
realize that we are nothing before God and that we have no merit of our own
that we can claim, that we are able to realize the enormity of what God has
done for us. It’s only then when we know the beginning of our walk with
God.
Some wonder if that
is still the case with us.
Maybe we take what
we have for granted because we have had so much of it for so long.
What Jesus calls us
to stive first for is “the kingdom of God and his righteousness”. It can only come as a gift. And for that we give thanks
above all else. We thank God for the nothing from which we came, and for the
everything that He has made us to be in a living relationship with the one true
living God.
Jesus does not
commend poor people because they are poor, but because they are more likely to
depend upon God when they know that they do not have the resources to depend on
themselves. They are more generous givers, as a percentage of income, than the
rich as well. The rich think that they have everything that they need, that
they have earned it, and when a whole people do that, things do not end
well.
How do we end our
selfish declaration of independence before God?
I saw a celebrity
interviewed on TV the other day and the subject of his past addiction came up.
He said that one of the things that helped him get off of drugs was a
counsellor who told him that if he could find one thing in his life to be
grateful for, it would help in his recovery.
Gratitude, what
some call an attitude of gratitude, can be powerful, it can pull us out of
ourselves, but it can’t take us very far by itself. This person said that that
insight came in the context of a 12-step program that had opened his awareness
of God.
Gratitude isn’t
enough. It must be directed to the source, and the source of all goodness is
God.
I watched an old
video of comedian Yakov Smirnov the other day online. He was well known in the
1980’s and often appeared on The Tonight Show when it was hosted by Johnnie
Carson.
He had immigrated
with his parents from the former Soviet Union and often ended the stories of
his experiences with the tag line, “What a country!)
The only story I
remember him telling was about going to an American grocery store and seeing
powdered milk. You just add water and you get milk. And then going down another
aisle and seeing orange juice power. Just add water and you have orange
juice. “And then I went down another
aisle” he said, “and I saw baby power, and I thought ‘What a country!’”
In 1985, at the end
of his first appearance on the Tonight Show, he said,
“It’s Thanksgiving
and I’ll tell you it’s my favorite holiday. I like parades without missile. (I'll take Bullwinkle over a tank any time!)
Now when I first
was explained about Thanksgiving in America I said wait a minute, it doesn’t
make sense.
I mean, for every
freedom and all the opportunities you’ve got here, the only thing you got to say is, “Thanks”? It just didn’t seem like
it was enough.
My parents and I
had our first Thanksgiving in a little apartment in New York, and we joined
hands and my father said a prayer to good food and our health. And then
something happened.
Instead of
releasing our hands we couldn’t let go. We kept holding on to each other
tighter and tighter, and we realized that we were together and we were free.
Really free.
And here we were,
three grown people, looking for a way we could possibly show our appreciation,
and we couldn’t.
And now I know what
it is. It’s “Thanks”.
Good night.”
We are grateful,
and if there is any day of the year to say “Thanks”, from the heart, this is
it.
But we have
received more than freedom and affluence and a good name.
We have received
nothing. God speaks to us from nothing. God speaks to us when we are nothing.
God’s nothing is infinitely greater than any thing we make for ourselves.
How did the prophet
Elijah know the presence of God. We see it when an angel of the Lord has
visited him and then the word of the Lord came to him and speaks in I Kings
19:11-12,
11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord,
for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that
it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but
the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord
was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire,
but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
We say “Thanks” for
everything that is good, for it comes from God.
And we say “Thanks” for nothing, for it is in nothing that we know that God is always with us, the pure presence of God who became human flesh, suffered, and died for sinful human beings on the cross, and then rose that we might repent, believe, be baptized, and live forever.
