+I have to be frank with you, writing a sermon based on the Thanksgiving Day propers was a challenge for me this year. It hasn’t been a terrific year. As a matter of fact it’s been the most painful, heart-wrenching and terrifying year of my life. I suppose I should be thankful that I have survived—that I am upright and functioning---but the effort it has taken to just get up and get out each and every day? Well, it required and requires strength I never knew I could muster.
But a sermon is not about the preacher. Or at least it shouldn’t be about the preacher.
But when I looked at the readings for today—the propers for Thanksgiving ---and tried to write a sermon that was only about abundance and gratitude and joy, I got nothing.
And then I realized that maybe, just maybe, what I’ve experienced and what I’ve learned is exactly what I need to say.
And what I’ve learned is this: throughout all that I have been through these past months, the intense grief associated with the death of my wife Pete, throughout all of it, God has been with me every step of the way.
When my eyes opened in the morning and the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching grief flooded my consciousness and all I could do was sob until I was all sobbed out, God was there.
When I was faced with decisions I needed to make, decisions that had two options: lousy and worse, God was there.
When I walked into the darkness of grief, the seeming hopelessness of grief, when I raged with anger toward everyone, everywhere, including and especially God.
God was there.
God wasn’t just there, God was in it, right smack dab in it, with me. Crying with me, raging with me, longing with me, God was there.
And God is with you, too.
So although (perhaps) a Thanksgiving sermon should be about gratitude for all the good, abundant things in our lives, I can’t ignore the fact that sitting in these pews this morning, walking those streets outside the doors this morning, sitting around Thanksgiving Dinner Tables this Thursday are people experiencing intense grief and loss and fear and doubt and anger and sadness. How does one preach an attitude of gratitude to those people…to people like me, people like some of you?
How do we provide a word of hope to this increasingly dark and lonely world? How do we live in abundance when dignity and respect and joy seem to be in such short supply?
Because we do. Because we must. Because we have and because we will.
Why? Because we are Christians and Christians are people who find life in death, who find wholeness in brokenness, who find peace in terror.
And we always have.
From the horrors of living through the exile comes the words of Joel:
“Do Not Fear, O Soil, Be Glad and rejoice,” says Joel to a land that had been ravaged by drought and pestilence. Why should that soil rejoice? Because the fields will again be green, the trees will again bear fruit, the threshing floors will again be full of grain.
Because somehow out of loss and change, out of sorrow and bitterness, comes a new life. Not a resuscitated life that moves us along the same path we’ve always been on, but a resurrected life, a brand new life, a different life, a life that may not take us where we expected or planned to go, but a life that will indeed take us to exactly where it is we need to go.
Why? Because as we read in Timothy: God our Savior desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
And just what is that truth?
That God is with us. Always and in everything.
Even the darkness. Even the sorrow. Even the intractable grief, even in the worry, and the anger.
God is with us.
God was with the Israelites in exile as they sowed their lives with tears and God was with them when they reaped their new life with songs of joy.
My friends, I don’t know what you have an abundance of this year---my prayer is that you have an abundance of joy and gratitude for the great and good fortune you have experienced. May you praise God for all of those good things and may you give out of your abundance to those who need a helping hand.
I also don’t know who among you may be feeling more scarcity than abundance, more fear than joy, more despair than hope, more bitterness than thanksgiving. But I do know what that feels like, I do know what it is to walk that walk and for you-- for all of us--- I have this message:
God is with you. God has been with you, God will be with you. For God does not only reside in the hearts of the joyful, but also, and maybe even more especially, in the hearts of the not so joyful.
God resides there with you so that when your sowing with tears ends, God can lead you in the reaping with songs of great joy.
A Preacher is not to preach about herself, but sometimes, sometimes, that’s all you can do.
Thank you for indulging me and may you too find abundance in scarcity, joy in sorrow and light amid the darkness. As you go out of this place into your own lives with your own challenges and victories, with your own joy and sorrow remember this: our loving, life-giving, liberating and abundant God loves us more than we can ever ask or imagine. And for that we say Alleluia and Amen.
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