Bringing Past and Present Together in Gratitude Nov. 18, 2001

Psalm 100, Deuteronomy 26:1-11, John 6:25-35

I know this seems to be coming from the wrong season - since we usually sing this song on Good Friday, or some other time in Lent - but have you ever thought about the oddity of the words in the old spiritual that asks “Were You There When they Crucified My Lord?” At the literal level it seems like a pointless question to ask. The literal answer is “No, I wasn’t there! How could I be, since it happened 2000 years ago? How could I be there when they crucified my Lord?” But faith sometimes cuts across the boundaries of time and space - bringing past, present and future into one powerful reality, into God’s great Now. Faith enables us to say “Yes, I was there. I was there - a guilty accessory to the crime. I was there - grieving at my loss. I was there - to receive the forgiveness crafted by God out of nails and wood and blood. I was there - to celebrate the amazing joy of resurrection...... I was there when they crucified my Lord - and that makes all the difference in the way I’m living now!”

Faithfulness, expressed in prayer and liturgy, can enable us to share in the saving acts of God, not just as a historical memory but as a powerful experience, a participation in God’s love. That’s the point of the words we read from Deuteronomy today.

The instructions come from Moses, near the end of his life, still on the journey toward the Promised Land which he will never get to enter. Even so, he looks ahead, confident that his people will get there, and he gives instructions about an annual ritual of thanksgiving to be observed in the generations to come.

At harvest time, says Moses, everyone should make an offering of the first fruits. It’s the first fruits - not the leftovers, that the people were to bring to the place of worship, acknowledgement that God had kept his promise. And then, after presenting their gift, the people were to recite a prayer, re-telling the miraculous story of how God brought the people to freedom.

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” begins the prayer. In other words, poor, landless, dependent, needy, nomadic...... The recitation goes on, telling about how the early Hebrews went to settle in Egypt, and of the trouble that came to them, but listen to the pronouns it uses:

“When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors....” Notice that the recitation doesn’t say “The Egyptians treated them harshly.” No “They afflicted us. We cried out to the Lord.” This worshipper in the promised land, generations after the fact, knows himself to be a part of that event. “The Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power and with signs and wonders, and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.........” This person offering the harvest gift wasn’t literally there. It might have been his great, great, great (etc.) grandfather who was there at the time of the exodus, but that doesn’t matter. He knows that that “The Lord brought us out..... and brought us to this place.......”

And then that prayer-maker jumps back to the daily reality. Having been spiritually and symbolically immersed in God’s saving past, he makes his thank offering for the here and now: “So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.”

Do you always feel happy? Do you always feel confident, secure, contented? Of course not. I don’t and I’m sure no honest person does. We’re the people of God but that doesn’t give us an exemption from the daily circumstantial feelings of human reality. On September 11^th we felt grief and fear and anger and fury just like everyone around us. When our loved ones die we often weep in loneliness and grief. When we’re facing a discouraging situation in our lives, or come up against a problem that seems insurmountable, we may feel weak, or momentarily hopeless. There are times when we do wrong - in spite of what we know to be right - and then - in spite of what we’ve been taught about forgiveness - we may be plagued with guilty feelings. Moment by moment, situation by situation, we may feel the same worries and doubts and concerns that all human beings face. Our commitment to God doesn’t give us a free pass from these things.

But faith can free us from the tyranny of the moment. Faith in God helps frees us from the chains of the immediate emotion - good, bad or otherwise - and gives us the realization that we are a part of God’s saving history. We can know ourselves to be saved, empowered, loved and blessed - regardless of whether this particular moment is uplifting or not.

That ancient Hebrew farmer came with the first fruits regardless of the situation. He might have had a bumper yield, or maybe it was a year when the locusts had eaten half his crop, but he went with his thank offering all the same. He would remember his ancestor - that poor wandering Aramean. He would recite the saving acts of God, how “God led us out of bondage,” and with spiritual imagination take his place among the blessed. He would know - not just a remembering, but with a deep kind of spiritual recollection that is more than mere recitation of facts. He would know that his life was much more than whatever this year’s crop happened to be. He would know that he and his were in God’s mighty hands, just as in the Exodus. And having taken his place among the saved people of God, he would make a statement about today - giving his gift as an affirmation of gratitude, and a statement of faith that the one who had brought him through exodus would surely be with him now.

There’s a strength in such faith. There’s a power for overcoming the doubts that come in hard times and the equally-crippling complacency that comes with good times. There’s a spiritual strength that arises when we come in thanksgiving and commitment and know ourselves to be a part of the whole saving history of God.

I hope that our thanksgiving observances this year might be in the spirit of that Deuteronomy prayer. I know that life is not very easy at the moment, and that there are hard realities we can’t ignore. The security we took for granted prior to Sept. 11^th is no longer a given. Our nation is involved in conflict, and some of us may have loved ones who are directly involved. The economy is struggling, and some may be worried about their jobs. We’ve made a lot of changes in our church, some of which are hard to get used to.... Some among us may be dealing with health concerns, worries about our kids, grieving the loss of loved ones, or any number of human struggles. How do we make thanksgiving to God in such a time?

I invite you to make your thanksgiving in the model of that Deuteronomy prayer, and I’m going to close this short sermon, not by telling but by doing. I’m going to pray in the Deuteronomy pattern, but the prayer will include some blank spaces, some quiet moments, in which you can silently fill in your own examples. Let us pray together:

Lord God, as we come to this year’s Thanksgiving, we do praise you for all that you have done for us, and we are grateful for the harvests we have gathered in our lives. Like those Hebrew farmers, who acknowledged you as the creator of their fruits, so we give thanks for the ways you’ve enabled us to be productive - in our jobs, in our families, in our relationships, in our church life....... Our lives have produced - some richly, some sparingly - but for all that has bloomed in our lives we give thanks........ and here in the silence we name in our hearts the gifts you have given......

O God, we remember those who came before us in this journey of faith - like the wandering Aramean in the ancient prayer...... We remember our Biblical ancestors - especially some whose struggles and triumphs are similar to our own...... We remember our American forebears - Pilgrims, settlers, slaves, Indians...... Patriots, statesmen, laborers, spiritual leaders..... We remember some ancestors that are special to us - parents, grandparents, friends......... We remember these, and the ways in which they trusted you, the ways in which they knew your saving power....... And now, in silence we recall our own particular “wandering Arameans,” the ancestors whose stories are uniquely connected to us.......

And as we scan the long record of your saving power, O God, we thanks you for all that you have done for us...... You brought us through the Red Sea and into a land of plenty..... You sent your son to be a savior for us, dying on the cross for our forgiveness, and rising from the dead to be our sign of hope...... You brought us to America, this land of freedom and opportunity, blessing us with liberties and a richness of life that is beyond measure...... You blessed us with the gift of a life-giving church here in Hyde Park - sending us a farmer-coal merchant-preacher named Alonzo Sellick to get the church going, and innumerable dedicated pastors and lay people to continue the work for more than 170 years....... You have led us forward, blessing us in so many ways, and in silence we recall other signs of your love and saving power.

And now, O God, amidst the blessings and fears that are so real to us at this Thanksgiving 2001, we make our gifts to you. We give you our loyalty, our trust, our devotion. We give you the promise that we will serve you in our jobs, our families, our church - using the gifts you have given. We give our love. We give you what is yours already - our very lives - acknowledging you as our only Lord and savior....... In our silence, Lord, hear the thank offering prayers we make........

O God, hear our prayers, in the name of Jesus our Savior. Amen.