November 22, 2009 Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost,
Thanksgiving, Reign of Christ and Neighbors in Need Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 95; Joel 2:21-27; Matthew 6:25-33
The Prophet Joel said, “Do not fear.” He said it to his people because they
were afraid, and for very good reason. He said, “Be glad and rejoice,” because it
was a time of anguish and weeping in the land, a time of war and economic
hardship and a plague of locusts. Nature was thrown out of balance, threatening
all life. And Joel said, “Do not fear, be glad and rejoice.”
At times of violence, joblessness and environmental destruction, as at
times of sickness and death, it takes a prophet or an angel, it takes a messenger
from God to help us look at the facts around us and understand why we should
not fear and weep, why we should trust and give thanks.
Football stadiums are not the only fields of conflict and struggle on
Thanksgiving Day. Within each of us there is a struggle between two ways of
seeing life, and it is a struggle with far more at stake. It is the conflict between
our fear or anxiety or discontent and the hope and trust in God that make
gratitude possible in a world where loss and hardship come to all. This is a life
and death struggle. As the King James Version says, “Where there is no vision,
the people perish.” Our pew Bible translates the same verse, “Where there is no
prophecy the people cast off restraint.” The vision we need to live and live
rightly is a prophet’s vision that sees God in all things, and so can hope and trust
and give thanks even in the worst of times.
Of course, we can be thankful without that vision. We can be
thankful when things are going well for us, when we get a lucky break, when
pleasure, comfort and success come our way. Or we can be thankful when things
are not so good if we have mastered the useful spiritual tools of avoidance and
denial. But this is a fragile gratitude. When the locusts descend upon us or war
breaks out, when climate change threatens or stocks crash, when we lose our job
or fall sick with no health insurance, then our minds will be full of darkness.
Then we will lose our bearings and self-restraint and we will perish, according to
the Biblical wisdom, unless we have gained this other kind of vision, the
prophetic vision of the light that shines in the darkness that the darkness does not
comprehend or overcome.
So if we are having a hard time feeling as grateful and hopeful as we
would like this Thanksgiving, if we are feeling fear or worry, frustration or rage
at life’s threats and unfairness, or just feeling numb, then it would be worth
whatever struggle it takes to gain a prophet’s vision of God’s truth and light.
Jesus was a master of this vision. He tried throughout his ministry to
coach his followers so they could acquire it. The Sermon on the Mount is full of
this coaching, including today’s passage. Jesus teaches us not to worry about our
material needs and well-being. He tells us to live in complete trust. He says,
“Strive first for the realm of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things
will be given to you as well.” Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, in the opening
Beatitudes, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
What Jesus is calling for is a single focus to our life, a focus on God’s
realm and way of being. As the Christian existentialist philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard wrote, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Jesus is saying that if
that one focus and object of our will is God, then we will come to see God when
we look within and around us. We will see how God is providing for our needs,
how all things are working together for the good. We will have prophetic vision,
and become prophets ourselves, messengers of God. One of the messages we will
be given to bear will be gratitude and hope, even in the worst of circumstances.
Viktor Fankl was a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi death camps,
including Auschwitz. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from us but one thing:
the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
This past week the Valley News carried a five-part article on our neighbor,
Carmen Tarleton, who survived the brutal attack that left her blind and burned
over most of her body. The doctors did not think she would survive that attack.
The article makes it clear that Carmen’s choice of attitude got her back home to a
relatively independent life with her two teenage daughters, as much as the
miracles of modern medicine did. That attitude has been a singleness of focus,
the willing of one thing. The article described her as praying at times, it talked of
her gratitude and hope, but it does not seem to be God that is her focus or her one
will. It is more a practical, simple focus on the present task at hand, doing what
her will to live is demanding of her in this moment. In the last line of the last
article, Carmen says, “I just do what I’ve got to do and move on.”
This is one of the secrets of prophetic vision. Jesus said in the next verse
after today’s passage, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring
worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” We think of prophecy
as being about the future, but the fact is that prophetic vision is much more about
life in the present.
There are three reasons. First, prophetic vision comes from purity of
heart. Purity implies simplicity, and to be simple we need to be grounded in the
present. As soon as we start living in the future or the past, we are dividing
ourselves, making our lives complex. This is not to say we do not remember the
past or plan for the future, but purity of heart means to do so mindfully,
remaining aware of what we are doing, living fully in the present.
The second reason why prophetic vision is about the present is that God
can be found only in this moment. If we are going to find God’s realm and God’s
sacred way, if we are going to see God, it can be only here and now. If we are
distracted we may miss it.
The third reason why prophetic vision is about the present is that though it
may be revealing a future event, its purpose is to change the way we are right
now. Prophets tell us of the coming reign of Christ, the coming day when God’s
realm will be established on earth with its mercy, justice and peace for all, but the
reason they tell us is so that we will change our society’s course now, or keep our
hope alive and keep working faithfully here and now to help bring that future to
pass.
If you want to find prophetic vision here in this church, or if you want to
train yourself to have the purity of heart that sees God in all things, you should
consider arranging your life so that you can come to Prayer of the Heart on
Thursday evenings. Prayer of the Heart is a place where we learn and practice
spiritual disciplines that are designed to help us be mindfully present and open to
God. We are striving for God’s right way of being through the ancient Christian
contemplative tradition and through the insights of contemporary psychologists,
brain scientists and spiritual teachers of other traditions. Nancy Kilgore’s
mindfulness courses offer some of these same tools.
One of the principles of this contemplative path is that the fruit is not in
the prayer time, but in life. The fruit is a change of attitudes and actions in daily
living. Bob Hagen gave an example at Prayer of the Heart this week of what can
happen when we practice these disciplines.
Bob was at a large gathering of fellow educators and teacher-trainers
recently. They were discussing the question of how to tell when a teacher is well
trained and when one is not. They had two lists of characteristics that tried to
differentiate the qualities in practical, quantitative terms, but Bob looked at them
and saw through them to another level. He stood up where he was in the back
and said, “What this all boils down to is on the one hand the way of love, and on
the other, the way of fear. The teachers we feel are well trained are teaching from
a place of love. The teachers with undesirable practices are coming from a place
of fear.” Bob told us that the faces that turned to him as he talked looked mostly
baffled, but afterwards one person came up to him and said, “Yes, that is exactly
it.” Thus it has always been when prophets have spoken. Imagine how people
looked at Jesus when he told them to trust God for their food and clothing, or to
love their enemies.
Those who see prophetically may bear messages that are hard to take,
especially messages of doom when they perceive that society has parted from
God’s ways, but when you read the Biblical prophets you find an alternation
between harsh condemnation and comforting reassurance. Today we heard the
prophet Joel say “Do not fear…be glad and rejoice.” But at the start of the same
chapter he said, “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the
Lord is coming, it is near—a day of darkness and gloom.”
Despite such dramatic fire and brimstone pronouncements, prophetic
vision is ultimately a hopeful and grateful vision. The 20th Century theologian,
Reinhold Niebuhr, explained the source of Christ’s prophetic hope. Niebuhr
wrote in an article in Christian Century magazine in 1927, “The experience of
Jesus upon the cross is not one of a dreamy pantheist who imagines God in easy
and magical control of every process in the universe. It was the experience of a
spiritual adventurer who saw life as a struggle between love and chaos, but who
also discovered the love at the center of things which guarantees the victory in
every apparent defeat.”
To see God in all things is to see “the love at the center of things which
guarantees the victory in every apparent defeat.” It is to be able to give thanks in
all circumstances, as the Apostle Paul taught us to do. When we feel that grateful
and can see such overwhelming reason to hope we feel moved to speak and act
on behalf of this love we call God. On either side of the Beatitude “Blessed are
the pure in heart, for they will see God,” are these other Beatitudes: “Blessed are
the merciful, for they will receive mercy…. Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
If you strive first for God’s realm and ways of being, if you seek purity of
heart so that you can see the love at the center of things that guarantees victory in
every apparent defeat, then you will find yourself moved to be merciful when
you hear of a neighbor in need. You will find yourself moved to be a
peacemaker in a violent world. You may therefore find yourself persecuted, or at
the very least, find people looking at you with baffled expressions, but you will
also be living in the kingdom of heaven, right here and now, so who cares what
other people think or do! Fear not; be glad and rejoice, as the prophet Joel says.
But if you find that you cannot follow his advice this Thanksgiving, do not
let guilt or shame trouble your soul, because Jesus included other Beatitudes, as
well. He said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” And
in Luke’s version, he said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the realm
of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” If you are
among those this Thanksgiving, then you can be thankful for the hope Jesus
offers. Do not worry about anything, he is saying, just be fully present to your
truth in this moment and turn your focus and your will to God, and trust that in
time you will be comforted, you will be filled, your vision will change and
gratitude will come.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 11/22/2009