339 Thanks for Nothing

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Thanks for Nothing” originally shared on November 27, 2024. It was the 339^th 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.