Thank you, Thank you, Thank you

"Thank you, Thank you, Thank you"

Matthew 6:25-33 (from the MESSAGE)
November 22, 2009

25-26"If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss
about what's on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in
fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to
your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free
and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you
count far more to him than birds.
27-29"Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an
inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much
difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the
wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite
like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside
them.
30-33"If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are
never even seen—don't you think he'll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for
you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with
getting, so you can respond to God's giving. People who don't know God and the way
he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your
life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll
find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

In the email I send out weekly to those of you who have email addresses, I wrote that
the title for this week’s sermon was “thank you, thank you, thank you” and though you
rarely see a title in the bulletin—I like the flexibility of changing my mind at the last
minute—I still think that title works well for this text and for this particular sermon. The
three “thanks you’s” come from a piece that Anne Lamott wrote, in which she says
there are really only two prayers we humans pray, with the more common one being
“help me, help me, help me,” and other one, less prayed, but just as important, is the
title of the sermon today. Gratitude, a spirit of thankfulness, the willingness and the
wisdom to see the goodness all around us, that is something many of us struggle with—
we are usually quite ready with our laundry list of woes, but we rarely have our lists of
blessings as ready at hand. That’s not true for all of us, of course, but for many of us it
is, and I am probably one of the them, though I think that is slowly changing, because
as I have continued my conversion process, as I have deepened my journey with God
through Christ, I find myself being more and more hopeful, and I think that has to do
with that lifelong journey of becoming more and more like Christ, slowly, sometimes
imperceptibly, sometimes haltingly, but always going forward, hopefully, always forward.

But before I get to the hope feast that I am about offer, I do want to reiterate something
I said last week, and that was the truth that the great power of Christianity, the great
strength of the faith, is not that it is ALL hope, that it is ALL joy, that it is a religion that
always and only dwells in the light—but rather, that it is a faith that can handle both
shadow and light—and most powerfully, that it tells us the truth about the shadow and
light that often brackets our lives. I have often said that I am Christian because of two
reasons: the first being that God is graceful and loving and so incredibly accepting of
all of us, and the second reason being, for me, anyway, is that Christianity seems to tell
us the truth about the way the world really is.   And the truth of it, at least in this world,
is that there is great joy in this life and there is great sadness in this life, there is the
resurrection and there is the cross, and both are true—those two events symbolize the
human journey, the human experience, and I believe Christianity is true because it
seems to have told the truth about the way of the world, the truth of the matter, no
holds barred. I like that about Christianity, and when I am teetering on the edge of
faithlessness, which is more often than one would think, I try to remember that I believe
in Christ because he told the truth, and lived that truth, that human and divine truth, in
his own life—he knew our joys, he laughed with us, he loved children, he loved people,
he was a man deeply in love with humans, even with their deep shadows, shadows that
swept him into a social and political drama that was not his own, one that would lead to
his death, his unjust death, just because he told the world the truth, the beautiful truth,
and the hard truth. His story, his anguish in the Garden, his pain on the cross, his
doubt and fear on that same cross, all of it seems to point to shadows in this life, and
bear witness to the truth that they too are part of what it means to be human and what it
means to be follower of his. Shadow and light, cross and resurrection, all of it is meant
to show us the world as it really is. Even our joys and concerns, when listen to the
woes and fears and pain of others as part of the worship service, when we rejoice in
the births and successes and happiness of others, that act in our worship service also
reflects the world as it is—and for God’s sake, we need worship, and we need church to
be able to reflect those two realities back at us, so that we too know we are in place
that is telling us the truth about the world as well, just as Christ did.

Now, having said that, know that what I love the most is that our faith seems to tell us
the truth about the hard stuff of life—I don’t know why, but it’s just part of my DNA—and
so I so often fail to see the obvious goodness all around me. For example, Pastor
Miryam Hammond from St. Paul’s UCC called me the other day, late in the afternoon,
when I was walking the dogs on the Kniebes Farm, off of Carmody Road. When I told
her where I was, she asked whether I had noticed the beautiful sunset that had just
happened, to which I replied that I hadn’t. You see, when I am walking the dogs, I
usually listen to my cell phone which allows you to listen to music and podcasts, and
when I walk, I look at the ground, maybe in some effort to watch for mud puddles, or
deer droppings or whatever. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I tend to look at the
ground, I don’t look up and see the good stuff overhead, I don’t see the beauty of the
world because I’m too worried I’m going to fall down in a hole, or soak a shoe in water,
or whatever. I worry too much, like a lot of people, worry about the pitfalls before me,
rather notice the beauty all around me. And, like a lot of people, I think I’ve missed a lot
of those things I need to be grateful for because I am always worried about what I don’t
have, or what trouble I could get into if I take wrong step, or go down the wrong path.
When I said earlier that Christianity tells us the truth about the world, the shadow and
light of it, and how much I love the fact that it tells the truth about the shadows in this
life, what I often fail to recognize is that it also tells me the truth about all the good stuff
all around me as well, all round us, the stuff for which I am asked to say “thank you,
thank you, thank you.”

You see, that whole “looking at the ground” thing, looking for the things to avoid, well, I
think that is what Jesus is warning us against, when he tells to not worry about what’s
on the table, and how fashionable our clothes are, or whether or not we’ll have enough
money to buy food, or good clothes, or any clothes for that matter. It’s a radical thing
that Jesus does here, when he tells us not to worry about our futures, and its especially
hard to hear in the midst of the worst recession we’ve seen in decades. It’s almost
seemingly Pollyannaish the way that Jesus tells us to look at the birds of the air as a
model for living our lives, to cast our cares upon the wind, almost, as birds themselves
do, as they fly, free and unfettered. And it would be, IF we didn’t know that Jesus tells
us the other side of the story, IF he hadn’t told us the truth about the cross, about the
shadows in this life. And so it seems more real, seems more true, because of who says
it, this one who knows what will greet him at the end of his life on this earth, and yet,
even with that knowledge, can tell us to trust God more deeply, to let go our feverish
need to prepare for every pothole, every unforeseen calamity, most of which we could
never have been prevented in the first place—it’s never the holes in the ground that we
can see that get us in trouble, that cause us to trip, indeed, it’s the hidden ones that
end up being the biggest trouble or something of the sort. But it’s the ones we think we
can see that we worry about, the ones we think we can control—if we work more, save
more, plan more, do more, then we will be safe, then we won’t have to worry about
money or food or having enough stuff, because there will be enough. And yet, if there
is anything this recession is teaching us, and every recession and depression does
this, is that there are some things one can never prepare for, disasters that loom
ahead that are simply unforeseen…

And, so says Jesus, if that is the case, why worry about what we cannot control? Look
at the birds, look at these ones, as the model for one’s life. Or maybe look at the
wildflowers, whose beauty is not because they have spent hours in front of the mirror,
but because they are what they are, made beautiful because they have been made by
God. And if I am going to continue to look down and miss all those sunsets at the
Kniebes Farm, hopefully I’ll notice the beauty underneath my feet, a beauty made real
not by hard work, but by the hand of God. In Eugene’s Peterson translation of this text
he has Jesus telling us to focus less on the getting, our own getting, our own
preoccupation with safety, the safety we think stuff can bring us, so that we can focus
more on God’s generosity, God’s giving to us, and not only to us, but to all. The world
may be full of shadow and light, crosses and resurrections, but if we—and I—focus too
much on the cross, we won’t see any resurrections; we won’t see the wildflowers
underneath our feet, and the sunsets overhead—all we’ll see are the storm clouds and
potholes, thinking that is all there is. But, of course, that is not all there is, and that is
not mostly what is—but it might seem that way if we focus too much on the cross to the
exclusion of what happens days later in that empty tomb.

And I think that is what thanksgiving is meant to do for us Americans, to remind us of
what we have, to give thanks for what is, rather than what was or what we think should
be, or what we had hoped to be. You know, I think it’s so interesting here that Jesus
doesn’t do something we often do, which is to compare what we have or don’t have to
what another being has or doesn’t have, to other people—instead, he points to nature
rather than other people as the compass with which to understand how good God and
life has been to us, and how good and faithful God will always be with us. Think about
it: how many times have we told ourselves or told others that we ought to look at those
less fortunate than ourselves in order to see how good we have it, compared to those
other people who don’t have as much as we do. The problem with that formula is that it
makes the wrong comparisons, according to Jesus, and it sets up in competition with
each other, comparing and contrasting what we have to what our neighbor doesn’t
have, and so it never ends, this endless ladder of people looking down on the person
below them in order to compare their suffering relative to someone else. But Jesus
doesn’t do that—he doesn’t say, “look, look at Bob and Sue, at least you have more
than them, at least you have a job, at least you have your health, at least you have
some savings,” and on and on it goes. No, instead, Jesus says to look to the earth, to
look at nature, at the other parts of creation to get a sense of how deeply God is for us
and not against us, a God who will take care of us, even now, even in the worst of
times. We certainly know bad times in Michigan, in the past few decades, and we know
tough times as a church, even, but in order to see how good God is, we’re not to look
at Texas or China, or Illinois, or the mega church down the street, or any other place
that has seemingly done better than we have done lately—we are being asked to look
at the wildflowers of Michigan, and the sunsets that are always taking place over our
Great Lakes.

And so, on this, my fourth Thanksgiving with you, I am thankful. I am thankful to God
for how God has been faithful to us, to this place, to this congregation for so many
years. And I am thankful for my families, my family of choice, and my family of blood,
and my family of faith, and I am glad that God has been so good to me. And I am
thankful to so many of you, for your faithfulness to the work God has for us a
congregation, and I am thankful for your continued support of my ministry amongst you,
and your willingness to try new things, and to be pushed to the edge a bit. I am
thankful for my partner who continues to loves me despite being the flawed person that
I am, and I am thankful for my family whose faith and belief in me sometimes seems
unwarranted, and undeserved. And I want us, on this Thanksgiving, during these
difficult times, to give God thanks, to let go of the worry that will not give us another day
on this earth, and to look around, keep looking around, but when we look, don’t look
next door, at the house next door—look at the sunset, look at the wildflowers, and
notice, over and over again, in ways that I have spent a lifetime failing to do so, to
notice how beautiful this world is, and how faithful God has been to the earth. I promise
I’ll do that next time I walk on the Kniebes farm, I’ll look up, and I’ll look around, and I
won’t worry as much about the potholes I can and cannot see, because I’ll remember
what Jesus said…but I want all of us to do the same, because if we spend too much
time looking down, and not around and not up, we’ll miss it, we’ll miss all the goodness
of this world, all of which is so often right in front of us. Amen.