Thanksgiving Homily 2018

Do not fear, O soil;
be glad and rejoice,
for the Lord has done great things!
Do not fear, you animals of the field,
for the pastures of the wilderness are green;
the tree bears its fruit,
the fig tree and vine give their full yield.

O children of Zion, be glad
and rejoice in the Lord your God;
for he has given the early rain for your vindication,
he has poured down for you abundant rain,
the early and the later rain, as before.
The threshing-floors shall be full of grain,
the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

I will repay you for the years
that the swarming locust has eaten,
the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter,
my great army, which I sent against you.

You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
and praise the name of the Lord your God,
who has dealt wondrously with you.
And my people shall never again be put to shame.
You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel,
and that I, the Lord, am your God and there is no other.
And my people shall never again
be put to shame. (Joel 2:21-27)

• • •

I want to talk with you for a few minutes this morning about what a pastor should not say to the congregation on Thanksgiving.

It is hard to preach about giving thanks and being grateful. To me, it always sounds like a scold. Like a parent saying to a child, “Look how much we’ve given you. You should be thankful you have parents like us. Think about all those children who don’t have a nice home and a loving family and all the advantages you have.” We’ve probably all heard that before, and many of us have given that speech. How did it work out for you?

I hate to stand in front of a congregation and say year after year, “You should be thankful.” We all know that anyway, and I can’t believe it’s going to change anybody’s heart or disposition just because I’m standing in front of you saying, “You know, you really should be more grateful.” It’s bad preaching, it’s not the gospel, it’s bad human psychology, and it’s actually kind of rude, don’t you think? Who likes to be called an ingrate?

But there’s another reason a pastor should not preach this way on Thanksgiving, or, in my opinion, at any time. You see, as we come together at any given moment, we are all in different places. And we can see this in our text this morning from Joel.

Some of you have come here this morning specifically to say “Thank you” to God. Your life is in a good place now. You are feeling blessed. You have what you need and more, and it is no chore whatsoever for you to express gratitude. In fact, it’s quite natural and easy for you. Of course, it might help for someone to remind you where all these blessings come from, because we do have a tendency to forget and take them for granted. But even though you may not have intentionally voiced your feelings, you have the feeling inside, and you’ve come here to express it.

This text describes some people who look around them and see fig trees and vines full of fruit, threshing floors piled high with grain, vats filled with oil. There’s plenty to eat for man and beast, the pastures are green, the rains are falling at the right time, and there is a spirit of contentment and satisfaction.

These are times we might call seasons of ORIENTATION. All is right with the world. The Bible is filled with praise psalms and texts that describe what it is like in a time of blessing, when life is ordered aright and filled with goodness. If you’re here today and in one of those seasons in your life, I don’t need to stand up here and tell you to give thanks, because you feel it and are ready to join in the spirit of Thanksgiving today.

But this text also describes another kind of season that the Jewish people had gone through. Joel writes about years of crops eaten up by swarms of locusts, devastating the land and impoverishing the people. He mentions the word “shame” here several times. During those hard times, when people were poor and hungry, they felt ashamed, embarrassed , marginalized.
Maybe you’ve been through a tough time like that. Perhaps it wasn’t crop failure, but another kind of financial problem, or maybe a serious illness or an addiction, or a family problem like a divorce or serious family conflict. It’s possible that some of you are there right now. It’s hard to be at church at a time like that, isn’t it? It’s hard to put a smile on your face when people ask how you’re doing, and say, “I’m fine.”

We might call this a season of DISORIENTATION. Everything in your life seems topsy-turvy. You can’t seem to get a break. You feel lost, alone, and you wonder what to do, where to go. Now imagine that this is where you are and you come to church this morning, and I stand up here and say, “You ought to be more thankful.” How would that make you feel? Would that be a sensitive and pastoral way to speak to you?

You’re not ready to say “thank you” when you are in a season of disorientation, and no one has the right to demand that from you. Instead it is our job as a church family to be there for you, to help as we might be able, to sympathize with your situation, to pray for you, to weep with you, to care for you. So I refuse to stand up here today and say, “You should be more thankful,” knowing that at any time, there might be someone here who would only get beaten down more by hearing those words.

There is one final season described in Joel 2. This text envisages a time when the Lord delivers his exiled people from their season of distress and disorientation. It speaks here of “vindica-tion,” of God “dealing wondrously” with his hurting people, of God restoring, renewing, and replenishing their barren lives with fruitfulness and plenty.

This is the season of REORIENTATION. The Bible calls this “salvation,” or “redemption.” This is being set free, being lifted up, being made new again. Now, once again, if you are here today and you have just been brought back to life, I don’t need to tell you that you should be more grateful. You are grateful, and it’s going to come out naturally.
Here we are, all together. Each one of us is in a different place, with different needs, and able to express different sentiments. It is not my job to tell you how you should feel.

The pastor’s job is not to preach gratitude.

The pastor’s job is to preach grace — the grace of God that has come to us in Jesus Christ.

If you are in a season of orientation today, and all is going well, I encourage you to consider the grace of God that makes it so.

If you are in a season of disorientation today, and all is falling apart, I encourage you to consider the grace of God that is with you to comfort and see you through.

If you are in a season in which God has reoriented your life, I encourage you to praise God for the grace you have received, which turned everything around.

No matter where we are, no matter what season we find ourselves in, God is with us, and God’s grace is here for us.

The gratitude will come naturally when we get hold of that.

And so I commend you to the grace of God today.

Have a wonderful, grace-filled Thanksgiving.

Note from CM: It is Thanksgiving week in the U.S., and I’d like to take each day leading up to the holiday to share a few of the blessings I’m thankful for. I’ve decided this year to focus on some people and things that have had an impact on me personally, so you may find my list a bit quirky. Nevertheless we each have unique factors that have shaped us and made us who we are. You’ll meet a few of mine this week.

• • •

I’m Thankful for Travelin’ Shoes

What do we do, given life?
We move around.

• Stephen Stills & Manassas

•

I’m thankful that God put me in travelin’ shoes.

Though my mobility is dwarfed by others who have, say, grown up in military families, I have moved fairly often in my life. I tell people that, whereas some folks can describe their life as a novel, mine is more like a book of short stories, each with distinct beginnings and endings.

My dad was in the Navy at sea when I was born. My mom went out to Long Beach, California to welcome him home with her new little bundle, and we lived there for a short time.

The first home I remember was in Galesburg, Illinois, where my school life began. We lived in three houses in that town. I don’t remember the first one, but we moved to the second when I started school. I got my first bee sting crawling under the clothesline and putting my hand down on a bee in the grass while mom was hanging wash. Dad taught me how to ride my bike there, and he caught me with my grandpa’s old catcher’s mitt as I learned to throw a baseball. They gave me my first watch and I set it back and lied about it having stopped when I didn’t want to stop playing and came home late for supper. I stayed up into the wee hours one night with the searing pain of an earache and had my tonsils out while we lived there. I don’t remember any of my friends’ names, but it seems now like I must have been outside playing with them all day, every day. I went to kindergarten at the YMCA and learned to swim as part of it.

Then we moved to a different house, one that was a favorite for me. The small attic had been converted and I had the whole thing for my room. We had the best basketball court in the neighborhood and a two and a half car garage in which we made a haunted house one Halloween. We also walked to school, and I recall one Halloween when I was the Mummy, and most of the sheets I was wrapped up in came loose and fell off by the time I reached the building. Most of all, I remember Mark and Jimmy and other friends, playing wiffleball and war and climbing trees and getting in trouble for breaking the neighbor’s windows and throwing tomatoes at the grumpy old man who lived behind us. Dad took me to high school basketball games and the local team did their warm-up routine to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” just like the Harlem Globetrotters. I explored under the bleachers and picked up change that had fallen so I could buy baseball cards.

That’s where we lived when Roger Maris hit 61 homers and I fell in love with watching Sandy Koufax pitch. That’s where we had the weeping willow in the backyard that was like my own personal “Giving Tree.” Dad brought home a dog for me once. We called him Rusty and he didn’t have a tail. He dug so many holes in the backyard that Mom finally had enough and we took him back to the pound. I used to dress up in my dad’s huge hooded sweatshirt, pull it up over my face and head and run around the backyard until Rusty knocked me down and dug through the fleece until he found my face and licked it. I hung grandpa’s catcher mitt on the back of the garage on a nail and practiced my pitching.

There’s a whole rich chapter in a corner of my mind for that place, even though we only lived there a few years. I was young enough that one Christmas I laid awake in bed and looked out the dormer window of my room at the moon, just waiting for the moment when Santa would ride his sleigh across its path. Our street was still paved with bricks. One time I took the word of a neighbor and thought I could run and find the end of the rainbow and get the pot of gold.

Gosh, I loved that place. A few years ago I went back and met my childhood friend Mark, and it seemed we picked up right where we left off over 50 years ago.

From there we moved back to Dad’s hometown, Dixon, Illinois, famous for being Ronald Reagan’s childhood home. It was great to be near my paternal grandparents. Grandpa suffered with diabetes and had trouble with his eyes, but I was the first grandchild and his pride and joy — he loved having us close. Nothing could be finer than watching the Cubs on TV with my grandpa while he sat in his recliner, muttering through each loss and saying, “One day when you pitch for the Cubs, things’ll be different.”

We rented a two-story house on a busy street and I played in the yard whenever I could. Even if no friends were around, I’d toss the wiffleball up in the air and hit it and play my own ball game. When we moved into the house, I found a treasure. Down in the old cellar, under the coal bin, were cases and cases of old pop bottles. We had a little neighborhood store two streets over from us, and I made several trips to turn those bottles in for the deposit money. I’m sure I spent it all on baseball cards.

We walked to school, and sometimes I would take a shortcut by climbing the wall of the old quarry at the end of the street. Our school was at the top of a large hill. One of the streets near the quarry was our usual route — a long and very steep climb — and when we weren’t trudging up or down it on school days, we would ride our bikes or skateboards down it, faster than I’ve ever gone, as I remember. It really is a wonder we survived.

My best friend in Dixon was Randy, and we went to church as well as school together. The best thing of all was singing in the choir on Wednesdays after school. Rosie, our choir director, was an angel to put up with boys like us, and wow, could she make us laugh. Afterwards, I would walk to grandma and grandpa’s house or home for dinner. I sang my first solo on Palm Sunday one year, from the balcony up on the right, wearing a red robe.

That’s also where my mom introduced me to my first phonograph record: “The Best of the Kingston Trio.” But before long it was the Dave Clark Five and the Beatles and the radio, and there was no looking back. Each week WLS in Chicago came out with a “Silver Dollar Survey,” listing the Top 40. I’d go down to the record store and pick one up on the day it was released. For a long time I saved them (wishing I had them now!). Every day after school I’d play in the yard or on the swingset and listen and sing along as they counted down the top songs. When I could I would buy a 45. I had a friend sleep over one night and we were jumping on the bed when he fell off and broke my new “She’s a Must to Avoid” by Herman’s Hermits. My favorite movie was “Pinocchio” and mom and dad bought me the record that had the storybook with it so I could relive the story at home.

One time I cried and asked to be kept home from school because that day I had to dance with a girl. My favorite indoor game was “sock basketball.” We’d hang a wooden box with the bottom cut out up on the wall in our playroom and shoot a ball of rolled up socks at it. Dad still took me to the high school games — he had been a star at that school. One time they let the YMCA kids play at halftime and I think I missed every shot I took. Dad liked the Drum and Bugle Corps. shows on the football field too. That’s also where I started playing Little League and I used to pitch sidearm. We played on fields by the river and the old Borden milk factory. Occasionally dad and I went fishing, and sometimes I went alone. A good day fishing for me was laying on the bank in the sun, listening to the Cubs on the radio.

Then one day it was off again, to a new life in a new subdivision with new friends in the suburbs of Chicago.

I moved to the Chicago suburbs during the years we used to call “Jr. High.” Now, it’s “Middle School.” My folks built a brand new house in a new subdivision. Dad had been transferred to his company’s office in Wheaton, Illinois. We were on the move again, starting a new adventure. I can still see the tears in my grandfather’s eyes as we drove away.

The community into which we were moving was made up of “immigrants” like us — folks who had come from other places to take jobs in the burgeoning western suburbs of Chicago. Families with baby boom babies like me were filling the subdivisions and schools. I got my first job as a paperboy in our neighborhood. We were in “section three,” which was still under construction. I started in the late fall and remember the panic of watching the late afternoon skies grow dark while I tried to find street signs and addresses on unpaved lanes and cul-de-sacs. I finally gave up, crying, and Dad drove me around and helped me get the papers delivered.

The school I attended was not one of the newer “Jr. Highs” but a K-8 elementary school. We had a dress code, and I was sent home the first day to change because I wore blue jeans. For boys, hair had to be neatly trimmed above the ears, collared shirts tucked in and belts worn. No sneakers were allowed. Girls had rules about skirt length and make-up was forbidden, as I recall.

I entered the school just as we were all being immersed in adolescence. Thrown together like refugees on a ship, we became close, so close that today, over forty years later, we who lived through those junior (and then senior) high years still feel like best friends, and we reunite whenever we can.

From Chicago, several years later, we moved east and everything was different. That move initiated new chapters and additional journeys to places I’d never dreamed. But those are other stories for another day. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Vermont, then back to Chicago, and to Indianapolis and central Indiana, where we’ve now lived longer than anywhere else. This past January, we returned to the country here in the heartland and are writing the next chapter.

As one who has moved a lot throughout my life, I’ve developed an ongoing, nagging sense of “What’s next?” As I said, my life has not so much been a novel as it has been a book of short stories, each with a definite beginning, middle, and ending. The characters in each tale continue to live in my mind as they did when I knew them. They don’t cross into the other worlds and the other experiences of my life, they exist within distinct ecosystems that somehow each remain unique and special inside of me. Life has been a wonderful journey of moving through these separate stories, each one holding its own meaning and significance. It’s hard for me to fathom that one day the book will end, the final chapter will be written, and the cast of characters in that final story will take their last bow.

Until then, I thank God that he gave me travelin’ shoes.

Note from CM: It is Thanksgiving week in the U.S., and I’d like to take each day leading up to the holiday to share a few of the blessings I’m thankful for. I’ve decided this year to focus on some people and things that have had an impact on me personally, so you may find my list a bit quirky. Nevertheless we each have unique factors that have shaped us and made us who we are. You’ll meet a few of mine this week.

• • •

I’m Thankful for the Radio

That’s why God made the radio
So tune right in, everywhere you go
He waved His hand, gave us rock ‘n roll
The soundtrack of falling in love
That’s why God made the radio

• The Beach Boys

•

•

I’m thankful for the radio.

Garrison Keillor has been a “radio man” in the sense that performing on the radio has been his vocation. I call myself a “radio guy” in the sense that the radio has been my constant companion through life and a joy, encouragement, inspiration, and education for me.

My earliest memories of the radio took place when I was in early elementary school. I lived in Galesburg, Illinois, and our town was basketball crazy. The high school team was one of the state’s best teams, and we had Dale Kelly, one of the best players in the state. My dad used to take me to games, but when we stayed home, I listened to them on the radio, laying on the bed and keeping score. I still enjoy sports on the radio as a main means of access.

We moved to Dixon, Illinois a few years later, and a new kind of radio caught my attention and fascination. It was the mid-1960s and I began listening to music more or less constantly. I can still recall coming home after school, setting my transistor radio outside near me, and swinging or playing while WLS in Chicago counted down the Top Ten. I bought the occasional 45 or album, but it was the radio that I listened to most.

I had a rectangular, battery operated transistor radio that I used to take to bed with me at night. I laid it under my pillow, or sometimes directly against my ear, and fell asleep to the Dave Clark Five, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits, and the Beatles. This was all before FM radio ever came on my radar. It was AM all the time, and at night strong signals from other parts of the country would sometimes fade in, giving me a sense of being connected to the wide world.

Of course, that all changed as I came of age. Then it was FM, album rock, and hi fidelity. And until radio became all corporate and programmed, that’s how it was.

When I began my adult life in Vermont, we had no TV. Cable was not available up in the mountains yet, and we weren’t so sure we wanted a television anyway. But we loved the radio. Whether it was the daytime programs, news, or reports from people like Paul Harvey or Earl Nightingale, or the local stations, we had the radio on.

That’s also when we started to listen to NPR shows like All Things Considered and Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. The local FM stations were eclectic and quirky, and we could always fill our evenings with interesting entertainment, interviews, or stories.

When Gail worked second shift at a small hospital in a little town over the mountain, I would go to pick her up and listen to a station that played old time radio dramas and mysteries. I loved sitting in my car and getting lost in those tales.

I’m still an NPR guy, and as I drive around the city going to visits I have it on most days. Today’s radio music stations are mostly a wasteland, as far as I’m concerned, but every once in awhile I’ll scan through and catch a song. We do have a station here in Indy that is less programmed and geared toward college-age and young adult listeners, and it’s pretty good. I mainly listen to find artists I haven’t heard before. Public radio has several good music shows: The Folk Sampler, Thistle & Shamrock, Live from Here, All Songs Considered, for example. I watch more TV these days, but occasionally tune in and enjoy these programs. And if I’m in a classical music mood, there’s plenty of that, especially on the Bloomington NPR station out of Indiana University.

As you might imagine, the best thing of all for me is listening to baseball on the radio. And this is a golden age for that. With MLB.com, I can subscribe to their audio feed and listen to any and every game all year long.

That’s my happy place: listening to baseball on the radio.

But whatever I’m listening to, I’m thankful for this fantastic technology, this medium that highlights the power of words, the human voice, and the gift of sound. I’m thankful that it has been such a faithful companion, such a friend, such a part of my life and being.

Note from CM: It is Thanksgiving week in the U.S., and I’d like to take each day leading up to the holiday to share a few of the blessings I’m thankful for. I’ve decided this year to focus on some people and things that have had an impact on me personally, so you may find my list a bit quirky. Nevertheless, we each have unique factors that have shaped us and made us who we are. You’ll meet a few of mine this week.

• • •

I’m Thankful for Francis Schaeffer

A quiet disposition and a heart giving thanks at any given moment is the real test of the extent to which we love God at that moment.

• Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality

•

I give thanks today for Francis Schaeffer.

As I was pondering this today, I came to the conclusion that he might have been my first guide out of the evangelical wilderness. Funny thing is, I came to know him through his writings when I was first entering evangelicalism, before I had any clue I might one day leave.

Schaeffer and his wife Edith founded L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland in 1955 in their home as a “shelter” (the meaning of l’abri) where young people could come, ask questions, and learn about the Christian faith. The L’Abri Fellowship website lists four main emphases of the ministry that developed there and spread to other branches around the world:

(1) Christianity is objectively true and that the Bible is God’s written word to mankind. This means that biblical Christianity can be rationally defended and honest questions are welcome.

(2) Because Christianity is true it speaks to all of life and not to some narrowly religious sphere and much of the material produced by L’Abri has been aimed at helping develop a Christian perspective on the arts, politics and the social sciences etc.

(3) In the area of our relationship with God, true spirituality is seen in lives which by grace are free to be fully human rather than in trying to live on some higher spiritual plane or in some grey negative way.

(4) The reality of the fall is taken seriously. Until Christ returns we and the world we live in will be affected by the disfigurement of sin. Although the place of the mind is emphasized, L’Abri is not a place for “intellectuals only”.

This overview concludes with this statement from Edith Schaeffer:

We are as concerned for living as we are for thinking and from the beginning the concern has been that the truth is as much exhibited in everyday life as it is defended in discussion. We do not do this perfectly of course but depend on the Lord to bring forth a measure of reality in our daily life.

I wouldn’t sign off on all of that, but I think you can see that there are several things here which show the profound and seminal influence Schaeffer had on my own approach to faith:

First, I appreciated the idea that questions are welcome and that people should not just simply accept dogma. The Schaeffers not only said this, but modeled it by welcoming people into their home who were seeking genuine life and spirituality, and in many cases had been hurt by force-fed religion. Though Schaeffer came across as “intellectual,” in fact the points he made were usually simple and foundational, and the fact that what I read in books was actually worked out in a community of teaching and interaction gave it a special kind of life and power.

Second, Schaeffer’s emphasis on the arts, history, and culture was a breath of fresh air in my narrow fundamentalist Bible world. Again, he wasn’t always right and he often gave only a surface perspective, but compared to the separatist “Bible only” (as interpreted through dispensationalism) greenhouse where I was planted, it seemed shockingly open and broad in its awareness of and appreciation for the world of ideas and culture. There was a humanity to it that was lacking in the black and white space where I lived. Though it took me a long, long time to escape that constricted world, thank God I did. Schaeffer did for me what, for example, folks like C.S. Lewis did for so many others: he cracked the door open to a God-soaked world and what Michael Spencer called “Christian humanism.”

Third, I learned from him that true spirituality is a matter of Christian freedom in Christ as faith works through love. In a very real way, Schaeffer prepared me for engaging Luther (who reveled in Christian freedom) many years later. Note the phrase in point three above: “true spirituality is seen in lives which by grace are free to be fully human.” I think you’ve probably heard that said in several different ways here on Internet Monk. I can thank Schaeffer for introducing me to that perspective.

Now, let me be honest and say that there are many things not to like about Francis Schaeffer. Son Franky has written of his father’s dark moods, his anger, and his abusive behavior within the family. Francis Schaeffer is also one of the leaders responsible for evangelicalism becoming a culture war religion in the U.S., beginning in the late 1970s. Because of the emphasis that Schaeffer and others adopted, Michael Spencer was able to make this observation:

Every day I listen to and read Christians whose consideration of other persons is on the basis of politics and cultural conflict. Not the Gospel. Their anger and frustration dominates, not the Gospel.

And then there is this: Francis Schaeffer had strong roots in fundamentalism. His first church, the Bible Presbyterian Church, was a breakaway fundamentalist branch founded by Carl McIntyre, the notorious fundamentalist and anti-Communist radio preacher. Schaeffer went to Europe on a dogmatic mission — to dissuade pastors and church leaders from the “heresies” of Karl Barth. It was only when he began to fully comprehend what he called the “ugliness” of his denomination and the way churches were splitting and separating in vividly unloving ways that he took a different course. However, when I heard him speak in the early 1980s, he sounded exactly like some cranky fundamentalist zealot associated with the likes of McIntyre. Thankfully, Francis Schaeffer was able to temper and even disavow a lot of that at L’Abri and in most of his foundational writings, but in some ways it never left him and it contributed to his stridency in the culture wars.

I owe a great deal to Schaeffer, who was able, especially in the 1960s and early 70s, to challenge the lack of love and anti-creational separatism in evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity, especially as it impacted seeking young people. But let’s admit it, he was a fundamentalist at heart.

Nevertheless, I don’t want to downplay my gratitude for how God used Francis Schaeffer as an integral part of my own spiritual formation. Early on in my adult life, he began to show me that life is bigger, richer, fuller, more God-soaked, and more relational than I could imagine.

If you’ve never read much Schaeffer, I’d suggest beginning with True Spirituality and The Mark of the Christian. These two books teach the view of spirituality and community that he came to embrace, directly countering the weaknesses and failures he saw in his fundamentalist background. I do not recommend his later books, starting with How Should We Then Live? (1976). That’s when the culture war stuff begins.