A Thanksgiving Sermon

Into the More

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 22, 2015

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-33

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy Thanksgiving! Yes, I know. Our country’s official Thanksgiving day isn’t until next Thursday, but I suppose it’s better to mark it in church early rather than late. Besides, next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, and we’ll want to focus on that change of the church season next Sunday. So today Thanksgiving it is. We Congregationalists like to think that Thanksgiving is somehow especially our holiday, what with all the stories of the Pilgrims celebrating what we call the first Thanksgiving. I’ve heard some things recently that suggest that those stories are mostly made up and aren’t real history, but never mind. Thanksgiving it is. Thanks be to God.

Now, for most of my life I have loved Thanksgiving. That’s partly because I love the traditional Thanksgiving meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy. Especially the gravy, although frankly I can do without the cranberries. But there’s more to my old love of Thanksgiving than that. For much of my life my late wife Francie and I would take our two children to my parents’ house in Eugene for Thanksgiving. We’d stuff ourselves full on Thursday, then on Friday we’d leave the kids with their grandparents and go spend Friday and Saturday on the Oregon coast as a little personal get away time together. We’d come back to Eugene on Sunday, pick up the kids, and drive home. The traffic was often horrendous, but otherwise we always looked forward to that break every year. Those were some very good times.

So yes, I have loved Thanksgiving, but there’s something I need to confess to you. This year I’ve really been struggling with the notion of giving God thanks for the blessings in my life. It’s not that I’m not grateful for those blessings. I am. Here’s what I’m struggling with. How can I give God thanks that I have a dry, warm home, plenty to eat, a good education—more education than anybody has any reason to have actually, good health care, a safe community to live in, good work to do, a loving family, and so many other blessings when I know that so many other people in the world don’t have all of those things, or may not have any of them? Maybe all the images of those Syrian refugees who have lost everything makes that question especially poignant for me this year. When I give thanks for all of the blessings I enjoy it feels to me like I’m somehow putting myself above all those other, less materially fortunate people, or worse, that God has put me above them. I find that feeling very uncomfortable. I don’t think God loves me more than God loves anyone else. I don’t think that God has somehow chosen me for a blessed life and chosen others for a difficult or even impossible life. When I thank God for my blessings I just can’t help thinking of all of the people who don’t have those blessings. The homeless. The mentally ill. The physically ill with no access to health care. The lonely. The hungry. The refugees—these days especially the refugees. The victims of violence—these days especially the victims of violence too. So many other ways in which people’s lives are difficult or even impossible while my life is neither difficult nor impossible. I’ve really been wrestling with my difficulty with Thanksgiving this year. I have, fortunately I guess, had some thoughts about how to resolve my difficulties with Thanksgiving, and that’s what I want to share with you this morning.

I think the reason I have so much trouble with Thanksgiving is that I’ve thought that Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for the wrong things. I’ve thought that I was supposed to give thanks to God for all of those material, earthly things in my life that I think of as blessings, but as I’ve wrestled with the very notion of Thanksgiving this year I’ve come to the conclusion that those things are not what Thanksgiving is all about; and it was our reading this morning from Matthew that led me to that conclusion. In that text Jesus tells us precisely not to worry about the material things of our lives. He says “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.” He’s telling us those things are not the things we’re supposed primarily to be concerned with. Not that those things don’t matter at all. He tells us in our passage not to worry about what we will eat, drink, or wear and says “indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” Yes, we need them, and other things as well. Jesus fully recognizes those realities of human life. But he’s telling us here they aren’t the most important things. They are not primarily what God wants for us. They’re necessary. God knows they’re necessary, but they sure aren’t what God want us to focus on. I think we can say in this Thanksgiving season that they are not the things for which God most wants us to give thanks.

So what does God want us to focus on? For what does God want us to give thanks? About all he says about that here is: “Is not life more important than food…?” He is telling us, I think, that life is more than its physical requirements. Life is more than we usually take it to be. Jesus here is inviting us into that more, into the more that life can be, the more that God wants our lives to be. So if that’ what Jesus is doing here, and I think it is, he presents us with a bit of a problem, doesn’t he. He presents us with a pretty significant question: Just what is the more that life supposedly is? Just what is the more that Jesus is inviting, or calling, us into?

Again, he doesn’t really answer that question here as directly as we might like. Jesus has a really annoying habit of presenting us with questions that he never quite answers. He does that on purpose, of course. He does it because he wants us to be active participants in discerning what the life of faith is for us in our time and place. He doesn’t want us to be merely passive recipients of prepackaged answers. He invites us on a quest, a quest for what he usually calls the kingdom of God, which we can take as a metaphor for the way God wants life on earth to be. He says life is more, then invites us to figure out for ourselves what that more is.

Of course, he doesn’t leave us on our own to do that. Jesus is our access to God’s grace. Jesus is our access to inner peace. Jesus is our access to spiritual strength and the courage to face whatever life throws our way with trust in God’s love and solidarity with us every step of the way. That inner peace and strength is what he’s talking about in this passage. He tells us to look at the birds of the air. He says that God sustains them and will sustain us too. He tells us to look to the lilies of the field, that grow and flourish in God’s grace just as we can if we will, as he says here, just stop worrying. “Do not worry,” he says. “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour” to his or her life? It’s a rhetorical question of course. He means that none of us can. “So do not worry,” he says. “Do not worry about tomorrow,” he says. That’s the message that comes through in this passage. Don’t worry. Trust God. Focus on the “more” of life, on the deeper things, on spiritual health more than physical health, on spiritual riches more than material riches, on God more than on the world.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that I find those instructions often difficult if not impossible to live by. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a bit of a worrier. I tend to fuss about things more than I should. Perhaps some of you do too. Maybe that’s why I find this passage from Matthew so powerful. It’s telling me something I really need to learn. It’s telling you those things too. Don’t worry, it says. Trust God. God will see you through whatever you have to face in life. You are safe with God, even when you aren’t safe at all by the world’s standards. God cares about you and for you, and that’s the most important thing you need to know. Those are powerful words indeed. Words of comfort in times of troubles. Words of strength when we feel week. Words of courage when we are afraid. Words of solace when we grieve. I may find them hard to remember and to live by. Maybe sometimes you do too, but there they are. We can always turn to them. We can always find what we need in them. Thanks be to God!

Thanks be to God indeed. See, we can give thanks for material things I suppose, as long as we always remember to pray and to care for those who lack the material things they need. But these words are what we can truly give thanks for. They are so much more important than mere material things, and they are God’s words to everyone not just to us. They tell us that God is always there for us, caring for us, loving us, and holding us always in God’s unfailing arms of grace. For that I truly say thank you God. Thank you for coming to us in Jesus Christ and showing us your unfailing grace and love for all people. These things of God are the “more” into which Jesus calls us, and for that more we can truly give thanks.

So this week as we celebrate Thanksgiving, lets remember what we can truly be thankful for. Let’s remember the more of life. Let’s remember the more of God. Let us appreciate the earthly benefits we enjoy and give thanks for them, but even more than that let us enter into Jesus’ more. Let us remember God’s grace and the spiritual gifts God offers all people. Then we can truly be thankful in the way Jesus calls us to be thankful. Thank you God. Thank you for being who you are. Thank you for showing us who you are in Christ Jesus. Thank you that you are always there for us and for everyone. For that more than anything else, thanks be to God. Amen.

Are We Drunk

Are We Drunk?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 15, 2015

Scripture: 1 Samuel 1:4-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I wrote most of this sermon before the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday. I haven’t changed it, but I think that in times like these, times of grief and fear, times of anger and outrage, the message I crafted before the attacks is if anything more important after the attacks.

It’s a really important story, but it may be one you aren’t very familiar with. It is the story of the birth of Samuel. Samuel is a very big deal in the Old Testament. He is the prophet who essentially creates the kingdom in Israel, anointing first Saul then David as king. Now, there is a pattern to the births of several major characters in the Bible. They are born to women who, biologically speaking, can’t conceive children. These women turn to God for help. God hears their prayers and, as the Bible puts it, “opens their wombs” so that they bear a son. That son turns out to be a major figure in the history of Israel. The first of these women is Sarah, wife of Abraham. God blesses her very late in life with the son named Isaac. Mary is the last of these women, and her conception is even more miraculous than is Sarah’s because with Mary, as Matthew and Luke tell the story, no man is involved in Jesus’ conception at all.

We met another of the women of the stories of divinely assisted conception in our reading just now from 1 Samuel. Her name is Hannah. She is married to a man named Elkanah, who has another wife besides Hannah. So much for the supposedly biblical idea of marriage, but I digress. The other wife has had children, but Sarah hasn’t because, as the text says, God has “closed her womb.” So she goes to the central place of Israelite worship before David moved the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and David’s son Solomon built the first temple there. That place isn’t a temple, it’s a tent, called the Tent of Meeting. There’s a priest who is in charge there whose name is Eli. Hannah prayed to the Lord her God that she might conceive and bear a son. She prayed silently, but she moved her lips, apparently mouthing the words she was saying silently to God. Apparently that wasn’t how people normally prayed at the Tent of Meeting, for Eli promptly assumes that she is drunk. “How long will you keep on getting drunk? Get rid of your wine,” he says to her. Hannah explains that she hasn’t been drinking but was “praying here out of great anguish and grief.” That, by the way, is a good reminder to us pastor types not to jump to conclusions about or parishioners, for we’ll probably be wrong about them, but again I digress. Eli blesses her, she has relations with her husband, conceives a child, and gives birth to the prophet Samuel. It’s a really good story, and it tells us that Samuel will be someone special even before the text gets into stories about him.

Hannah apparently is the first person we come to in the Bible who prays individually rather than collectively. That alone makes her pretty remarkable, for personal, individual prayer became such a strong part of the Christian tradition. Hannah is then a good model for us. She hurts. She grieves her inability to do what women in her time and place were mostly supposed to do, namely, bear children, especially sons. She prays to God for relief from her distress. Good move. She is a great biblical model for at least one primary thing that we should do in our times of troubles. She turns to God. She models turning to God for us. We’d be well advised to follow her lead in this regard.

Yet there is more to Hannah’s story that can inform our own spiritual lives than just turning to God in prayer when we face difficulties. For one thing Hannah prays individually, but where she does it is important too. She doesn’t do it at home, not of course that we can’t or shouldn’t pray at home. Not at all. But in this story when Hannah is moved to turn to God in prayer she leaves her home and goes to a special place. She goes to her people’s central place of worship, that Tent of Meeting I just mentioned. In other words, she goes to church. She doesn’t go to any place anything like our contemporary churches, and she isn’t attending anything like a worship service, but she isn’t just at home either. She is at a place her religion considered sacred. She went to a place where she would feel closer to God. She went to a place of prayer and worship. She’s a good model for us in this regard too. We know, I suppose, that we aren’t actually closer to God in church than we are anywhere else, for God is present everywhere and always. Still, I don’t know about you, but I often feel closer to God in church than I do anywhere else. That makes church a particularly good place to pray. But there’s a broader lesson here too. Many people have places where they feel the presence of God more strongly than they do elsewhere. For many people in our part of the country that place is somewhere in nature. In the mountains. On the sound. In the San Juan Islands. If you feel closer to God in some natural setting, then that setting is a particularly good place to pray. Not because God will hear you better. Just because you feel closer to God there.

And there’s one more thing about what’s going on in Hannah’s story that is perhaps a bit less obvious to us. Our text says that Hannah is unable to conceive a child because “the Lord had closed her womb.” The story believes that it is God’s fault that Hannah is childless. Now, that doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that God directly causes the things that happen on earth, either globally or in our individual lives, at least not as directly as this story supposes. Our story here expresses one of the foundational beliefs of the ancient world that produced the texts of the Bible. In that world people did believe that everything that happens on earth, both globally and in the personal lives of the individual people, was the doing of God or of one or more of the gods. Hannah apparently believes the same thing. God, her god Yahweh, is, for her, the cause of her distress. We may not believe that God causes anyone distress like that, but for purposes of this story we have to accept that Hannah believes that God does and that God did in her case.

So what does she do? I might expect her to get mad at God. To say to God OK, if that’s how you’re going to be, forget it. I’m done with you. You’re being mean to me, so why should I give you anything? Why shouldn’t I hate you? I mean, that’s how we humans often react to people we think are doing us wrong, don’t we? Sure we do. I’m sure lots of people have reacted to God that way when things in their lives have been hard. It’s a perfectly understandable reaction. It’s understandable, but it’s not at all what Hannah does. Instead she turns toward, not away from, the One she understands to be the source of her grief. That is a profound expression of the nature of faith. God is God even when we think God has somehow turned against us, not that God ever actually does that of course. I suppose Hannah hoped that God would listen to her and change God’s mind about her. Indeed in this story Hannah does become pregnant and bear a son, but somehow I want to ask: Would Hannah have turned against God if, as she surely understood the matter, her prayer hadn’t been granted? I don’t think so. I at least like to think that Hannah’s faith would have remained strong to the end of her life even if she had never borne a son.

Now, like I said, I don’t believe that God causes things on earth nearly as directly as Hannah apparently did; but I think there’s still a lesson for us in the way she turned toward God not away from God. We hear all the time that people give up on the faith when their prayers aren’t answered the way they want. Yet we can learn from Hannah, I think, that that’s precisely the time to turn toward God with more prayer, not to turn from God with less prayer, or worse, no prayer at all. I don’t mean that if we just keep praying God will eventually do what we think we want God to do. No, not that, but something else.

I once read a message on a church reader board in Monroe that sums it up really well. It read “Prayer doesn’t change God. Prayer changes us.” That reader board message from a church with which I would probably disagree on almost everything reminds us that we so misunderstand prayer. We think the purpose of prayer is to get God to do what we want. Or to get God to give us what we want. Maybe that’s why Hannah was praying the way she was, but even if that is true it doesn’t change what prayer really is. Prayer really has one purpose and only one purpose. That purpose is to bring us closer to God and to make us feel like God is closer to us. Not to bring God closer to us, because God is always as close to us as God can be, closer, as it says in the Koran, than our carotid artery. No, not that; but to make us more aware of God’s intimate closeness to us at all times and in every circumstance. Maybe when we become more powerfully aware of God’s closeness we can find the resources we need to bring about the thing we’re praying for. Or maybe we find the spiritual strength to live without the thing we’re praying for. Either way, what prayer mostly does is bring us close to God and make us more aware of God’s closeness to us.

Praying has become sort of an odd thing to do in our culture, so many of our people have given up on faith. It has become so odd that when people see us praying they may think we’re drunk. They may think a sober, rational, sensible person wouldn’t be doing such a thing. Well, they’d be wrong about that. Prayer is the central practice of any life of faith. That’s why we pray when we’re alone. That’s why we pray together here at church. That’s why we teach our children to pray. To our secular culture it can seem odd at best and intoxicated or even deranged at worst. So be it. We people of faith know its power. We people of faith know its benefits. Not that we get everything we pray for, for we don’t. Not even that we have to use words to pray, for often silence is the most powerful form of prayer. No, we’re not drunk when we pray as Eli thought Hannah was. We are in fact as sober as we can get. So let’s keep on praying, shall we? It is what God wants of us. It is what we know we are called to do. We know how powerful it is. So let us be together in prayer, today and always. Amen.

A Beautiful Vision

A Beautiful Vision

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 1, 2015

Scripture: Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy All Saints Day! Today is All Saints Day you know. Or maybe it’s All Souls Day, which for our purposes amounts to the same thing. I suppose we all know that last night was Halloween. I don’t know about you, but frankly I’m not crazy about Halloween. Perhaps that’s because my dog seems hardwired to the doorbell and the front door. Whenever anyone rings the bell or knocks on the door, he instantly goes ballistic. Woof woof woof! At full volume. It’s very annoying, so I very much prefer it when no one comes to my front door. But of course the American Halloween tradition is people, mostly but not exclusively children, coming to your front door, knocking or ringing the bell, and hitting you up for candy. So I always arrange for me and my dog not to be home, or at least to try to make it look like we’re not home by turning off the porch light and the light in the front room and hiding out in the back of the house. Not very hospitable I know, but it reduces the number of times the dog gets set off. Yes, some of the kids who come to the door are really cute, especially the little ones, but still. If you like Halloween, fine. I don’t much.

Which doesn’t change the fact that today is a significant day in the church calendar. It is All Saints Day, and we can understand the terms saints here as referring basically to everyone, or at least to every Christian, which is what the word originally means. It’s a day for remembering those who have gone before us in the faith and a day for remembering loved ones who have passed into the next life before us. The lectionary readings for All Saints Day seem geared to remembering those who have passed and to envisioning a future reality that is, frankly, a whole lot more pleasant than the world’s present reality. Our passage from Isaiah dreams of a day when God will prepare a rich feast for all people. It says God will wipe away the tears from all faces, a beautiful image of a world free of pain and grief. Our passage from Revelation picks up and repeats that image in some of the most beautiful language in the New Testament. It dreams of a new earth on which God is present with the people. Picking up that image from Isaiah it says that God “wipe every tear from their eyes,” meaning, I think, the eyes of all people. It always surprises me when I remember that such a beautiful image is in Revelation, a book that is full of images that are anything but beautiful. Our readings this morning give us a beautiful vision of a future time for all people. In that time all will feast and celebrate. God will be immediately present with all people. There will be no more chaos (that’s what the bit about no more sea in our passage from Revelation is about). There will be no more pain or grief, even no more death. It is a vision of a world transformed from a place of sin and hurt to a place of grace and joy. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Well yes, it’s beautiful. We humans create beautiful images of a future time and a better world like these because we know deep in our souls how imperfect, how flawed, our present world is. We know something just isn’t right. We know about all the violence that afflicts God’s world and peoples’ lives. We know about the injustice and the poverty that prevail over so much of the earth. We know about the pain and the grief we have experienced in our own lives, and we know about the pain and grief our loved ones have experienced too. We know that we don’t always do what is right and that we leave undone many things that are good, and we know that pretty much everyone else does too. We know that life could be better. We know that the world could be better than it is. So we dream of a better future, and we create some really beautiful images when we do.

Which, I suppose, is all very well and good, but here’s the thing. Do you think God wants us just to sit around and wait for a better world to come about through divine intervention? Sure, that may happen someday, but it hasn’t happened yet. It seems to me naïve at best to think that God calls us just to dream of a better future or just to hope that God will get moving and do something about it. I think those beautiful visions of the Bible serve a different purpose. I think they are there to show us not what God is going to do but to show us what God wants. They are not there to placate us, they are there to inspire us. They are there not to get God moving but to get us moving.

We all know saints whom we have loved and who have passed into God’s everlasting arms of grace. They lived in a world that was far from perfect. So do we. We can’t fix everything that’s wrong. We can’t make every vision in our texts a reality. I don’t know how to eliminate death, for example. But we can do a whole lot more than we’ve done. We can make the world a better place.

So today we remember our loved ones who are gone. We all have them, or we all will. We all honor them in our own ways. We keep them alive in our memories. We give thanks for the love we shared with them and ask their forgiveness for ways we may have wronged them. All of that is indeed very, very good. But we can do more. We can move the world closer to the kingdom of God, if only by a little bit. We can make the world they have left and we still inhabit a better place. We can make God’s beautiful vision a little bit more real. We can do it in memory of those who have gone before us. We can do it to the glory of God. Shall we? Amen.