“Thanks & Giving”
Deuteronomy 8:7-18; Matthew 25:31-46
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 23 November, 2008
Reign of Christ Sunday
Thanksgiving Sunday
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 We have been talking a lot lately about how troubled our world is, and for good reason: these are, indeed, troubled times. We have been at war in Iraq for more than 5 years, with no exit strategy in sight. Countless other parts of the world face war, and violence erupts on a regular basis in Baltimore city. Natural disasters hit our own and other coasts, and fires rage in California. Then there’s the economy. Food pantries and homeless shelters have seen an influx of new clients, and whether or not we’re there yet, we worry about how we’ll pay our bills.
In short, our world does not much resemble the one described in our reading from Deuteronomy: “a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing.” It doesn’t seem much like our Psalm: “You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness.” The reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians falls on deaf ears: “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that [we] always [have] enough of everything.”
Our scriptures contain many such tales of God’s abundance. God will provide for all of our needs, we’re told. God will present to us a land flowing with milk and honey, we read. God’s blessings will be too many for us to count. We should cry to God with songs of thanksgiving! We should praise God with our every breath, the scriptures tell us!
...Instead of praising God with songs of thanksgiving, we worry about how we will pay our bills -- maybe even how we will put food on the table. We read scriptures like today’s and put them aside, because they don’t seem to fit our current situation. But here they are this morning. How do we deal with scriptures like these in times like these? And how do we treat a holiday like Thanksgiving, when we’re not too sure about “thanking God for abundance”? I suggest that the first thing we do is to count our blessings. Yes, life might be hard for us right now. Business might be slow, we might be worried about money, we might be concerned about loved ones serving in the military. We might have serious health problems or be worried about loved ones who do. We might wonder how we are going to provide a Thanksgiving dinner -- or any dinner. Life might be hard in different ways for those of us here. But we all have at least one thing in common: Regardless of whatever else is going on in our lives, we have been blessed with the ability to join together and worship at St. Mark’s this morning. We were well enough to get out of bed. We have eaten recently enough to have the energy to get here. And here we are. There’s one big blessing for which we can give thanks to God: we have the strength to worship in a community of faith this Sunday morning. Here’s another one: Every one of us here is invited to a Thanksgiving dinner after church today. Whatever our plans are for this Thursday, today we will have a sumptuous meal and a loving family with which to share it. Blessing Number Two.
My guess is that you will, in fact, come up with many more blessings once you sit down and really think about it. We have more abundance than we ever would have imagined. I think, in fact, that it may be easier to count one’s blessings during difficult times. During times of plenty, we have so much stuff that it becomes almost too much to quantify. We begin to take life for granted and think that our abundance is strictly the result of our own hard work. We leave God out of the equation. But during times of struggle, there’s less to count. We might spend a fair bit of time complaining to God about having less. But then we realize that we have still been blessed with much, and we are able to express gratitude to the God who gave it to us.
What, then, do we do with all of our blessings once we’ve counted them? How do we respond to the God who has given us much even when we think we have little? We first, of course, respond by falling to our knees and praising God. But once we have given thanks for God’s “indescribable gift,” what do we do with the blessings that we have?
“for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
We express our gratitude to God by caring for God’s children. Whether we live in a beautiful home and eat a fancy meal every night, or whether we live on the streets and eat out of a trash can, there is always someone who is worse off than we are. Christ commands us -- whoever we are -- to drop whatever we are doing and care for those people who are suffering. If you have food or water or clothing beyond what you absolutely need, then you are called to share it with the one who has none. And you do not require any material wealth in order to welcome the stranger, take care of the sick, or visit the prisoner. Any one of us can do that, and that is a blessing that we can all count among what God has given us: the ability to care for our neighbors.
The beautiful thing about this morning’s scriptures, in light of the Thanksgiving holiday we will celebrate in a few days, is that they apply to every one of us. I implore you to center yourself in prayer and realize that God has, in fact, provided you with an “indescribable gift.” And I ask you to come to terms with the fact that whoever you are, or wherever you are on life’s journey, you have something to give to those who are less fortunate than you.
These are hard times for all of us, for a lot of different reasons. But following our scriptures will make the world a better place. Feeding one another, welcoming one another, caring for one another, and visiting one another will improve the state of our world...and it will be serving Christ directly.
Being a Christian means being able to turn to God when things are tough. It means thanking God for even the tiniest blessings. And it means taking care of our neighbors, God’s children, remembering that they come in every color, nationality, description. They are the immigrant, the convict, the AIDS victim, the upstanding, healthy American citizen who comes to church every Sunday. Christ himself takes every form.
Let us give thanks for our blessings, for our diversity as humankind, and for our ability to help one another. Now let us pray.
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