St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, November 27, 2011
Advent Gratitude, Advent Hope – Rev. David Mundy
2 Corinthians 9:6-15 Mark 13:32-37
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Happy Thanksgiving! Well, this confirms your suspicions over the last while . . . the minister has “lost it.” We are Canadians here with a few exceptions, and so we know that the real Thanksgiving happened near the beginning of last month and this other Thanksgiving which happened this past Thursday is merely a pretender.
In truth Thanksgiving in the United States is a truly big deal, even more important than Christmas as a travel time amongst Americans and a four-day weekend rather than three in Canada. They tend to do things bigger in the States, don’t they?
Honestly, even though we don’t focus on parades and football games, the way our American cousins do, the theme of Thanksgiving isn’t all that different between the two countries. On Thanksgiving we give thanks, as simple as that. And if we are Christians we come to worship on Thanksgiving weekend, whenever it falls, to thank God for the fullness of life and the abundance of life.
What is unique in the States this year is that Thanksgiving Sunday and the first Sunday of Advent, the season of expectant waiting for the coming of Christ intersect. One Christian pastor has blogged about decisions over what decorations and colours need to be up in the sanctuary, the rusts and browns of Thanksgiving or the blues and purples of Advent. She offers:
The turnover between Thanksgiving and Advent is intense. But I've found that the more fully I'm able to celebrate Thanksgiving's gratitude for abundance, the more likely I am to focus clearly on the Christmas hope of Christ's coming. So, although it's a fluke of our secular calendar, the confluence of both holidays together is richer than either of them is on its own.
In a way, the U.S. holiday can give us Canadians a sort of Thanksgiving do-over. You may have noticed that Thanksgiving weekend used to be an occasion to go to church here in Canada. Churches used to be full on Thanksgiving Sunday as people gathered together to acknowledge that God is the source of our abundance and blessing. Now it is a time when everyone uses the long weekend to head off somewhere.
On this first Sunday in the season of Advent in the Christian year, we have the opportunity to give thanks “thanksgiving” and celebrate the theme of hope. Don’t you think that “hope springs eternal” when we are truly grateful for all we have as blessings and gifts from the God we have come to know in Christ?
Our scripture readings today are a mash-up of Thanksgiving and Advent readings with the passage from the apostle Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth speaking to us about gratitude and generosity and thankfulness. Paul encourages his readers to plant the seeds of gratitude for abundant life in Christ and he says that a stingy planter gets a stingy crop. He then points to the extravagant love of God. In The Message paraphrase we read:
God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you’re ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist puts it,
God throws caution to the winds
giving to the needy in
reckless abandon.
God’s right-living, right-giving ways
never run out, never wear out.
Well, are you grateful and thankful, as well as hopeful this morning? Do you feel that you have been blessed by the God of abundant and extravagant love and are ready and willing and able to respond in kind?
This scriptural image of God responding to the needs of the world with reckless abandon stretches our imaginations and challenges the tight-living and tight-giving mind Set of our times.
It’s everywhere isn’t it? These past week politicians in our province were telling us that we should brace ourselves for tougher economic times in the days ahead because the global economy continues to be in turmoil. It’s hard to be hopeful when we see these dark clouds looming on the horizon and we can be left with a sense of scarcity rather than abundance.
Yet in the past month I have seen international surveys that list Canada as one of the ten best countries in which to live, one of the ten most peaceful countries, and one of the happiest countries to live in around the world.
Christian congregations can slip into this cautious and anxious way of being as well. We have the freedom to worship as we choose and we have been blessed in so many ways. Yet as individuals we convince ourselves that we just don’t have any more time or energy or money to support the life and work of the community which is the body of Christ. Rather than being grateful and hopeful, cynicism and pessimism seep into the pores of our lives. We run a “hope deficit” that is more serious than any financial shortfall.
I was in a meeting with a group of my colleagues in a ministry from different denominations earlier this week and we ended up in a conversation about the challenges of being church leaders in the 21st century. These are faithful people whose deepest desire is to serve Christ. All of them were puzzling over why it is that our culture has drifted away from God when we are so blessed. One of them made what felt like a grim observation that we were competing for the twenty percent of the population that still goes to the church. It sounded as though we were all picking away at the leftovers rather than sharing together in God’s feast, but I think we all understood where he was coming from.
Dr. Craig Barnes is a thoughtful pastor and Christian writer who offers this perspective on gratitude:
Being thankful is not telling God you
appreciate the fact that your life is not in shambles. If that is the basis of
your gratitude, you are on slippery ground. Every day of your life you face the
possibility that a blessing in your life may be taken away. But blessings are only signs of God's love. The real blessing, of course, is
the love itself. Whenever we get too attached to the sign, we lose our grasp on
the God who gave it to us. We are not ultimately grateful that we are still
holding our blessings. We are grateful that we are held by God
even when the blessings are slipping through our fingers.
Barnes is reminding us of what we probably all know already but need to
hear again from time to time. Even in the most challenging and discouraging
times in our personal lives and in the Christian
community we can express our gratitude and live our gratitude. We can do so
with a sense of hope and we can stay alert and ready for the possibilities of
ministry in Christ’s name, even in these changing times. The gospel reading we heard today encourages us three times to be alert and
awake for the coming of the Christ, and we can take it to heart.
How can we be both grateful and hopeful as Advent begins? Every year I
think of a story I shared with you early in my
time with you from a pastoral charge I served near the beginning of my
ministry. There were two congregations on the charge, one larger and growing
with lots of young families, the other small and aging and working hard to get by. The small congregation often felt that it was lost in all
the enthusiasm and optimism of the larger church and the members would get
discouraged and grumpy.
One of the few younger families in the congregation had an infant
daughter who had been born with severe cognitive challenges
which affected her motor skills. As the first year of her life progressed it
became increasingly apparent that she would not be like other children in
virtually every way.
Her parents took her to a clinic in the States
where they were taught patterns of movement for their little girl to stimulate
her brain and her limbs. The challenge was to do this several times a day with
a team of at least four people. It was a huge commitment. When they returned,
they asked for the help of their church family and soon
most of the congregation was involved. I went one day to watch what they did
and I was surprised to see what a mixture of people were involved. Along with
one of the parents there was a teen and an elderly woman who walked with a cane who nonetheless got down on her knees to do her
task of moving one leg in the prescribed pattern.
No one involved really had any idea of what the outcome would be. This
was experimental, and the parents had been cautioned that it could take months or even years to see positive results, if at all. This
was an act of hopeful generosity on the part of everyone involved for a cause
they knew was good, even if they weren’t sure where it was going.
As I say, this simple commitment has come to
mind dozens of times through the years.
As we are about to come to our
communion table today I’ll leave you today with a two minute invitation to a
different way of being in our world, the way of Advent gratitude and Advent
hope because we are Christ’s new creation.