Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was
1 Corinthians 1:3-9:
I hope that
all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and thought long and hard about what
we are thankful for this year, but while hopefully this year’s celebration was
wonderful, I’m sure that all of us have some story about Thanksgiving not going
quite right. But whatever stories we
might have, I think that Mary Clingman can beat us. For you see, Mary has been a receiving calls
on the Butterball Turkey hotline for more than 30 years. She recounts the time that a woman called and
asked what she needed to do differently to cook the turkey at high altitudes,
when asked how high she was, the caller said, the 32nd floor. Or there was the woman who called to say that
her kitchen was on fire and wanted to know what to do, she was told to hang up
and dial 911. Then there was the person
who called and asked if the yellow netting and wrapping should be removed
before cooking. The answer is yes. But I have to say my favorite was the man who
called to ask if their frozen turkey was still good. When asked how long they had had it, he said
it was at least five years, but they couldn’t really remember. Had it always been kept frozen, she asked,
no, he said, they had moved once and then there was the time that the freezer
stopped working, so it had probably at least partially defrosted a couple of
times, after being told him that the turkey probably was not good and should be
discarded. The man said that’s what he
had figured, so he was glad he had given it to a charity. Or maybe Thanksgiving is more like a post from
Ann, who lives in Miami, Ohio; she said “Thanksgiving horror stories? I have none.
I find the key to family holiday success is buying as much wine as you
think you need, and then doubling it.”
Thanksgiving is the time in which we gather together to be
reminded of the things we are truly thankful for and appreciative of, which
certainly includes our families and friends, we eat too much watch a little
football and simply try and just enjoy the day.
It’s really one of the truly few days in our culture in which there is
not a push to be out working more or working harder; we are actually encouraged
to take some time off to enjoy the important things in life.
Of course
one of the great ironies of Thanksgiving Day, although I also think it’s also quite
appropriate for our culture, is that on the very day in which we pause in order
to give thanks for the things we have in our lives, on the day in which we say
that we are happy and content, or at the very least on the day in which we are
supposed to say that we appreciate the things that really matter, which is not
our stuff, is the very day in which we now go out to buy all the things we just
said we were happy without.
It is
estimated that approximately 140 million Americans will go shopping this weekend,
that’s a little less than half the population, and the American Retail
Federation estimates that we will spend 617 billion dollars in November and
December this year, up about 4% from last year.
The CEO of Macy’s said that while their marketing studies show that
people say they don’t want stores to be open on Thanksgiving Day, that our
actions don’t match that, and sure enough there were an estimated 15,000 people
waiting to get into the Macy’s in New York City when they opened, Walmart
reports 22 million shoppers on Thursday, and Target said they were selling 1800
televisions a minute on Thanksgiving. And
then of course there are the fights and other events that take place during the
Black Friday rush. One of my favorite
lines from Black Friday was following a shooting in California several years
ago in which one parent wouldn’t let go of the Tickle-Me-Elmo doll, of whatever
was the hot seller that year, in which the newscasters said after reporting it,
and I could not make this up, “but don’t worry, shopping was not
interrupted.”
Now some of
you may be thinking or wondering why it is that I am talking about Thanksgiving
when we are now two days past it and quickly making our way towards Christmas,
and the reason is because what we do on Thanksgiving and its aftermath says a
lot for us about Christmas and what we truly consider important, and it was
really summed up by an article that appeared in the London Telegraph which
began “If you thought Hallowe’en, Father’s Day and Starbucks were terrible
American commercial confections, invading our high streets and calendars, then
prepare yourself for another US takeover: Black Friday.” Apparently although Black Friday has been
taking place in America since before world war II, it’s a very new phenomenon
in England, having been first introduced by a store owned by Walmart last year,
but taking off this year, with many of the same thoughts and regrets that we
have, and coming to this conclusion: “The arrival of Black Friday from the US…
confirms how Christmas, once a Christian festival – and largely a German one at
that – has taken on an irretrievably Stateside materialistic sheen.” (Harry
Wallop) And just to show you were it’s
going, Visa estimates that they will be doing sales of £360,000 per minute, although
I have no idea how much that actually is, a 22% increase from last year. So we’re even corrupting the uptight British,
and apparently they aren’t happy about it, although some are thrilled with all
the deals they are getting.
Paul begins
his letter to the Corinthians, as he does most of his letters, with a
salutation that includes a thanksgiving.
But notice something very important about what Paul says, “I give thanks
to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given to you
in Christ Jesus.” That is he is thanking
them for their faithfulness in some ways, but who Paul is actually thanking is
God. He is giving thanks to God for
them, and thanking God for what God has given to them, including God’s grace,
but also for the spiritual gifts that they have received. And Paul does not say if you have every
spiritual gift, and a flat screen TV, or that $99 Xbox, then you will be truly
happy and truly blessed. Instead Paul
says that they have already received everything they need, they have already
been enriched in God and that God will strengthen them to the end, a phrase
that should sound sort of familiar after what we have been talking about for
the past few weeks. But notice also that
what they receive, what we receive, is a gift.
Can we earn a gift? No, it’s
given freely, and thus when we hear in advertising that we will get a free
gift, that’s a redundancy, because if you have to pay for it, it’s not a
gift. But a gift is freely given without
cost, and it is what we receive from God, and we know that why? Because God is faithful.
So we are
called not merely to give thanks, to pause and appreciate what is going on, but
we are called, following Paul’s example, of giving thanks to God where
everything begins and ends, because God is the alpha and the omega. The problem is that most of us are not really
good at giving thanks. That is that we
might say things we are thankful for, but they’re sort of superficial, or the
things that we know we’re supposed to be thankful for, and we don’t really pay
attention to the other things that happen to us or are around us every single
day, that we overlook or totally take for granted. Our preschool program had posted the things
that the kids in the classes were thankful for.
And what I always like about listening to kids is that there is the
total unexpectedness of being appreciative for the things we never even think
of. So one child said they were thankful
for Spiderman. A fine answer. Another said that they were thankful for
cows. Not one I would think of, but a
good answer. But the one I loved the
best was the child who said they were thankful for balloons. How wonderful is that? And balloons are really wonderful things, but
how many of us would really every think to give thanks for balloons? Those are the things we overlook. What if we didn’t approach life that
way? What if we really appreciated the
small things in life? What if we
approached every single day as a miracle and noticed and celebrated all the
things that happened? What if we were in
fact more like Ickey Woods?
How
different would our lives be if we got excited and celebrated silly, simple
things in our life, even things as simple as getting’ cold cuts?
In Viktor
Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl, a survivor of the holocaust,
wrote about one afternoon when the men had all walked back to their barracks
after their day’s labor. They were lying
in their beds, exhausted and sick after having spent the day in a cold
rain. Suddenly, he says, one of the men
ran into the barracks and shouted for the others to come outside. Reluctant to leave their beds, but hearing
the urgency in the man’s voice, they staggered outside. They found that the rain had stopped, and although
dark heavy clouds still hung in the sky, the sun had broken through and was
reflecting on the puddles of water on the floor of the courtyard. “We stood there,” Frankl said, “marveling at
the goodness of the creation. We were tired
and cold and sick, we were starving to death, we had lost our loved ones and
never expected to see them again, yet there we stood, feeling a sense of
reverence as old and formidable as the world itself.” There were obviously lots of things that
Frankl and his other prisoners could be worried about and focused on, and they
were, until someone brought them out of it and they stood in awe at the beauty
of creation.
In an experiment at the University of Michigan, researchers
found that students who kept a “gratitude journal,” a weekly record of things
they feel grateful for, achieved better physical health, were more optimistic,
exercised more regularly and described themselves as happier than a control
group of students who kept no journals but had the same overall measures of
health, optimism, and exercise when the experiment began. In another study researchers found that
people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others, and either to God
or to creation in general, tended to have higher vitality and more optimism,
suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than
the population as a whole. This result
held even when researchers factored out such things as age, health, and income
– equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and
hearty may have more to be grateful for.
In other words, expressing gratitude can not only make you happier but
can make you healthier, and the reverse is also true, that worrying can
literally make you sick. No wonder Jesus
tells us not to worry and to be like the birds and lilies of the field.
Some of you may have heard about the appreciation challenge,
in which you list the things you are thankful for for a certain number of
days. Well I am going to challenge us to
do that for the next 25 days, to list out the things we thankful for so we can
realize that Christmas is not our birthday, that it’s not about the presents we
will receive or even that we may give, but instead about what we have already
been given and to give thanks to God.
And so in your bulletin you will find a sheet to help you do that, and I
invite you to share it on our Facebook page or on Twitter, or in other
places. I’m also going to warn you that
the first few days will probably be easy, and we’ll list the things we know we’re
supposed to be thankful for, but then it will get harder because we have to
concentrate on appreciate other things like our ability to get cold cuts or for
balloons. And let us always remember
that we are not giving thanks for things, because that places the emphasis on
the object, whatever it is, but instead we are giving thanks to God who
provides for us, so that when we come to Christmas we can truly once again
appreciate the greatest gift that the world has ever received, because God so
loved the world that he gave us his only son that whoever believes in him shall
not die but have eternal life. I pray it
will be so my brothers and sisters.
