Sermon from November 25, 2007 I am contemplating writing and publishing a volume of poetry. I might capture the essence of these proposed pages of verse in a title such as Ashes to Order. I would dedicate this collection to the sanitation workers of America. My inspiration for this unprecedented tour de force comes from the two faithful guys of Econo-Haul garbage removal service.
Sermon from November 25, 2007
I am contemplating writing and publishing a volume of poetry. I might capture the essence of these proposed pages of verse in a title such as Ashes to Order. I would dedicate this collection to the sanitation workers of America. My inspiration for this unprecedented tour de force comes from the two faithful guys of Econo-Haul garbage removal service.
Every Friday, around 6:30 a.m., year after year, rain or shine, hot or cold, including holidays (except Christmas), they lift our green giant of a trash can, empty its contents into the back of their truck, and dispose of the trash in a way that satisfies the State of Delaware and leaves our house smelling good and our yard looking tidy.
They carry out this routine in a way that I can only call discreet. Unless I am looking for their arrival, I hardly hear the truck engine or the trash compactor even on a summer morning with my window open. I hear no complaints. They leave no mess. No one knows their names. Like Melchizedek in the Bible, they arise out of an unknown past and disappear into a mysterious future, high priests of indispensable civic order.
Leaving two cans of cold drink for them on a hot day seems an unworthy pittance for the service they perform. Imaginations far inferior to any assembled here will realize that without them, urban life would become unlivable in a matter of days.
We Americans have a curious attachment to the idea of independence. We celebrate the Declaration of Independence. We feature independent school districts. Teenagers clamor for their independence. Parents in their old age don’t want to be dependent on their children. Life insurance companies and venerable investment firms suggest financial independence, if we just buy their products and invest with them.
We are in danger of believing our own propaganda. The reality is far different. The Continental Army could not have done it without German soldiers and the French fleet. School districts are notoriously dependent on their tax base. Teenagers rebel against parental authority only to subject themselves shamelessly to peer pressure at school.
We get the idea. What we might not get is the first casualty of our incessant talk about independence. People who forget their dependence on more people than they will ever know just to step outside the door each morning also forget to be thankful. Gratitude is the supreme victim of independence.
Since September, we have been talking bravely about building bridges to people, even those who are uncomfortably different from us. As we build those bridges, and other people cross them into our lives, a context is created in which they will discover what kind of people we are.
Our values and behavior will become more obvious to them. They will be interested to know how we handle the enduring challenges of truth, money, sex and power. I hope they will discover that we are an immensely thankful people. Within this context, let’s look through the biblical lens at the habit of thanksgiving. Let’s drop anchor in the deep waters of the New Testament, first in Luke 17:12-17.
Only One Came Back
As he (Jesus) was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. Do you think those ten guys ever sat around and said to each other, “If I get rid of this filthy disease, let me tell you what I’m going to do”? The dreams of the hopeless can be vivid at times. To find their dreams suddenly within reach must have been intoxicating. They must have laughed out loud, touched each other’s skin, wept for joy, jumped up and down. “Where do I go first? Whom do I see? Won’t the priest be surprised? What will my family think? Maybe I can get married.”
The story Luke has told leaves all that out. True to his purpose, he highlights one action that goes to the heart of the human condition. One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him – and he was a Samaritan.
Those pesky Samaritans pop up throughout the four Gospels. Jews and Samaritans, who were half Jewish, didn’t like each other; but they had much in common. Both worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Both honored Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the fathers of their nations. Both celebrated Passover. Both cherished the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Unfortunately, Samaritans rejected Jerusalem as the place to worship God, and that alone earned them the hostility of Jews.
So, when Jesus put a Samaritan in a favorable light, He did not win many friends or influence many people. He jarred people. No doubt He did it with a smile on His face and an arm over their shoulders and a tone of voice, which as much as said, “Am I the only sane person around here? Did you see what I saw?” Verses 17-19 tell what He saw.
Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
That’s it! No commentary! Luke moves on to the next story and leaves us wondering what all the hoopla was about thanksgiving. But the kingdom of God is as if a woman should plant ten seeds in ten pots, and only one blossomed. That one blossom made her so glad that she named it Thanksgiving.
That’s all well and good, but we would like a little more explanation. What’s the big deal about giving thanks? It’s just words, isn’t it? That may be, but when we read the Psalms, thanksgiving is everywhere. The Apostle Paul said to the Thessalonian congregation, Give thanks in all circumstances – 1 Thessalonians 5:16. The apostle also took us behind the curtain of the everyday and showed us why thanksgiving matters so much. Let’s drop anchor next in Romans 1:20-23.
It was a heart-wrenching company of outcasts. As befitted their social ostracism, they stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” That’s not a bad prayer to pray at any time, at any place. You don’t have to be a leper to feel your distance from God. Jesus’ response to them models God’s compassion. When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.
Theology of Thanks
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. You’ve heard people say, “How can you look at the stars or a newborn baby or the complexity of genetics and not believe there’s a God.” The apostle agreed but took the conversation significantly deeper at the end of verse 20.
. . . So that men are without excuse, if they reject God or distort the truth about God. But why would anyone reject God or distort the truth about Him? That’s where verse 21 comes in, and that’s where thanksgiving comes in. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
They neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. They did not honor Him or give thanks to Him. They dishonored Him by failing to give thanks to Him. Look at what grew from that root. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. The rest of Romans one testifies to the fearful, accelerating, downward spiral that began with a failure to give thanks to God.
Do parents today still read fairy tales to their children? I confess that I read them to mine, and I will read them to my grandchildren, even if we have to read them in secret in a dark cave, far from the soul-killing diet of television and the Internet. Fairy tales are so much more real than what we often call real life, so much wiser, so much more fun. We must inoculate our children with fairy tales before we expose our children to the toxic culture of entertainment and education.
In fairy tales, great consequences depend on small actions; they often depend on one action. Cinderella may have a splendid coach and glorious gown and a memorable evening at the ball, but she must be home before the stroke of twelve. Thereafter, it all vanishes, and her future happiness will ride on making one shoe fit one foot.
“In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 100)
Thanksgiving is the incomprehensible condition of our happiness. Should we refuse gratitude as the condition of our happiness, then our pursuit of happiness would chase will-o-the-wisps down one dead-end street after the other.
But why? I only know that people who refuse to give thanks deny their dependence on more people than they will ever know. It is a fearfully short step for them to deny their dependence upon God. This misbegotten illusion of independence became the foundation of the modern world 300 years ago at the birth of the Enlightenment, and it is still the fiction in the foundation of most universities and of our disdain for the past.
A Failed Experiment
I daresay that most of us would be hard-pressed to say much about the Enlightenment, just as most of us would be hard-pressed to say much about the mechanics of a city’s sewer system. But we know at least that the sewer system is out there. Few in the college graduating class and even fewer in the high school graduating class of 2008 will have any idea that the Enlightenment happened and still shapes the education they just received.
The idea of the Enlightenment was simple: think for yourself. You might just as well say to a baby: fend for yourself. People don’t think for themselves, as if they were independent of what the human race had thought before. All good thinking builds on the accumulated wisdom of the past. All education is the laborious task of passing on to a new generation the accumulated wisdom of the past.
The idea of the Enlightenment caught on, because of the power of modern science to explain the working of creation as no one had ever explained it before. This achievement truly eclipsed all previous scientific efforts. The past was irrelevant to the new science. Intoxicated by the new science, very influential people drew the conclusion that the past was irrelevant to everything else.
And so the illusion was born that we have only ourselves to depend on, if we are to build this new world that science inaugurated. And if the past is irrelevant, and we have only ourselves to depend on, thanksgiving seems a quaint holdover from the past. We are the strong. We are the self-sufficient. Thanksgiving, except as a superficial social courtesy, has no place in a world where we have only ourselves to depend on.
The Age of the Enlightenment is coming to an end. The lights of the Enlightenment are dimming. Many a tenured professor and many a college administrator are presiding over an intellectual culture that often does no better than the cynicism of Pontius Pilate, when he asked, “What is truth?” – John 19:38. We see the same cynicism in those wealthy and upwardly mobile entertainers, athletes and knowledge workers, who snort cocaine grown in the cocoa fields of Columbia.
The condition of our happiness lies buried under the rubble of a failed philosophy. We may not believe in truth any more, but we cling to our independence. We bluster, and we do not give thanks to God, but we are profoundly unhappy.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
To turn from this spiritual wreckage and come into the Church is like coming in out of a cold rain to a welcoming fire. Here a sense of dependence is alive and well, because a relationship with God is alive and well.
We are a congregation with money, but we remember that the Lord our God gives us the ability to produce wealth (Deuteronomy 8:18), and we give Him thanks and even give away our money as a gesture of thanks to God. We are a congregation of people who will live to ripe old ages, but we remember that we don’t even know what will happen tomorrow, and we say with thanksgiving to God, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that” – James 4:14-15.
Because I am a pastor, people often admit me to their sorrows. What has struck me over and over is how uncomplaining and patient people are in the face of personal suffering, how often they praise God in the midst of their suffering, how often they praise God for their suffering, because they believe God is at work there. Give thanks in all circumstances is not a pious slogan; it is a godly reality in people whom we might expect to act quite differently.
For many years now, I have sought to express my thanks to people, whose lives have made my life good. I have stood at the final resting place of C. S. Lewis in Oxford and thanked God for Lewis’s achievement and its effects in my life. I visited Blenheim Palace, the boyhood home of Winston Churchill, as a tribute to the man who rallied a nation in the face of the darkness that engulfed Europe. I try never to miss the opportunity to thank people in uniform for what they do to serve our country. Every Thanksgiving, I try to write a letter of thanks to someone who shaped my life. I thank God for His indescribable gift of Jesus (2 Corinthians 9:15). It’s hopeless. The list is too long; my debts are too great; but I soldier on in gratitude and a solid sense of dependence.
Let’s be a thankful people. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations – Psalm 100:4-5. Not forgetting for a moment the indispensable service of trash collectors.
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