Though the history of our Thanksgiving holiday is complicated and layered, observing a Sunday of Thanks feels worthy in any season. Here is my sermon this week. May we all find reasons for gratitude in the midst of everything.
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I ran into my friends Becky and Dave while I was grocery shopping yesterday. Becky is a CE minister and Dave is a pastor. We talked about a lot of things, but we ended up talking about church as well. For reasons I don’t now remember, at one point Dave said, “I just heard something the other day that really hit me: ‘Every tradition was new once.’”
He’s right. Just like nothing lasts forever, nothing has gone on forever either. Even long-lasting traditions change from year to year, sometimes in ways people don’t even notice. At the heart of any tradition lies a memory that people want to keep fresh and meaningful. When traditions lose meaning is when the story gets lost and what mostly remains is the repetition. A good tradition carries more than the idea that “we’ve always done it that way.”
What the word really means is a handing over or a handing down of experience and beliefs, and though we think of it in terms of generations, the real action happens much more in the present tense, in how we treat each other every day.
The young church at Philippi was not old enough to have many traditions. The Christian faith was not that old, either. Part of the reason Paul’s letters end up as scripture is because they were some of the earliest writings of the whole enterprise. They were still figuring things out, still making things up, without much to go on other than the oral tradition of the stories of Jesus and the face to face, heart to heart relational contact that brought people together.
Paul wrote this letter to the Philippian church not quite thirty years after Jesus walked the earth, and he was in prison at the time that he wrote it. Paul founded the church, which was located in Macedonia, part of what we now call Greece, and many historians consider it the first church in Europe, which speaks to why Paul felt so attached to them. Key to the church beginning was the conversion of a woman named Lydia, who was described as “a seller of purple.” She was a leader in that first church.
Once again we see that traditions get lost when we forget to tell the story.
Paul was in prison when he wrote the letter. What we are reading is the last page, the closing words, meant to wrap up what he had been saying to them and give them a word of encouragement and exhortation. So, from prison, he said,
“Be joyful in God at all times! Again I say, be joyful! Let your gentleness show in your treatment of all people. God is near. Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks. Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.”
Joy, gentleness, trust, thanks, and peace are all interwoven together, and in the middle of it all he says, “God is near.” God is in the middle of it all, even though he was in a prison cell and the little church was trying to survive in a city that didn’t understand them.
This week, a folk singer named Todd Snider died suddenly. He was overtaken by a case of pneumonia. He was fifty-nine. Todd was an engaging, irreverent, and magnetic guy who had lots of friends, so his death hit the folk music community hard. A couple of days after his death, another singer named Will Kimbrough posted a song on his Facebook page as he tried to express his sorrow and the chorus said,
I will not get over you. I will live in disbelief
but if I know one thing that’s true
I have more gratitude than grief
I was just beginning to think about this sermon when I listened to the song, and it struck me that the last line kind of put our passage to music: I have more gratitude that grief. Will isn’t saying his thanks replaces his sorrow, just that it is what he choosing most to feel.
Paul wasn’t saying act like nothing is wrong. He was saying, in the middle of it all—where God is with us—choose to find ways to be thankful, to be gentle, to be trusting, to be joyful. Have more gratitude than grief.
Kimbrough’s song reminded me of another written by an artist named Glen Phillips who wrote a song for his daughters called “Grief and Praise.” The chorus says,
though all that you love will be taken some day
by the angel of death or the servants of change
in a floodwater tide without rancor or rage
sing loud while you’re able in grief and in praise
The best traditions—the things we repeat—are not things we hold onto for dear life because of we are afraid of losing something. When it comes to this life, we are going to lose everything. Those kinds of traditions foster fear and anxiety, even when they mean well.
The traditions that will feed us and foster growth and meaning are those that take our losses seriously and still keep going. Coming to the Communion Table is one of those because it is rooted in loss that knows death is real and love is stronger than death. So we sing loud while we’re able, in grief and in praise.
That what we call a Sunday of Thanks falls the week before Advent begins offers us a chance to expand our own traditions. I’m not thinking so much of the history of the American holiday of Thanksgiving, but of this being a day to focus on being grateful in the way Paul talked about it.
We, like many, name the Advent candles each week: peace, hope, joy, and love. I find myself thinking of this Sunday of Thanks as an early Advent Sunday. We may not have a candle, but gratitude is a good foundation to the other four because it calls us to open our hearts beyond our grief and pain. As we will sing in our closing hymn,
for the wonder that astounds us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God.
Paul finishes his letter with this admonition, this version from the Message translation:
Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.
We can’t control much of what happens, but we can choose how we see it, how we interpret it, how we contribute to it. That doesn’t mean we act like nothing bad is happening or there is nothing wrong. It does mean we choose our focus. We sing in both grief and praise. When we look at the whole of our lives, we have more gratitude than grief.
And we remember God is with us, and we are all together. Amen.
Peace,
Milton