Deuteronomy 8: 7-18
NPMC
Psalm 65
Thanksgiving Day
2 Corinthians 9: 6-15
October 12, 2008
Luke 17: 11-19
Anita Retzlaff
The Scandal of Praise
In our moment of silent prayer this morning we still our minds and become
quiet before the Lord, giver of life and love. We recount the joys we have come
to take for granted: love, work, warmth, freedoms of so many kinds. We take
stock of our losses: those whom we have loved and are now gone from us, guarded
health, loss of security, time moving relentlessly along. In the palpable
confluence of all the things that make up our lives and our memories, we give
God thanks for what we have known and experienced. Let us pray…. Grant us O God
the ability to be thankful, for it is in and through gratitude that we come to
know you most intimately. AMEN
Praise of God can be scandalous in our times! Lest you think this an absurd
observation, let me pose a question. Is there a time when it is not right to
give God praise and thanks? I suspect our immediate response - at least my first
thought - is to say “no, we are taught to give God praise in all things.” On
second thought, however, we are inundated with the difficult things of our lives
for which we are not grateful.
On the morning of September 11, 2001 a professor friend of mine stood in front
of the chapel gathering at a local seminary and read a psalm of praise. Some of
the students were scandalized, they were angry, offended, even traumatized. How
dare she recite a psalm of praise minutes after the twin towers in New York City
explode into fire balls, collapse and kill many innocent people? Some felt that
this was not a time for praise - just about anything else maybe - but certainly
not praise!
Is there a time when it is not right to give God thanks and praise? We do not
give God thanks when we receive the diagnosis of cancer. We are not at all
grateful for the stunning financial losses world wide this last week. Thanking
God for a family breakup is heartless and praising the Lord for the devastation
of war in so many places around the world is simply wrong-headed and perverse. I
think we are all agreed on that. I do believe, however, that our thanks to God
remains active and articulate even through the dark valleys and unsettling
crises that we face, for praise of God is what keeps our hearts warm and
compassion alive -through anything and everything. To the world this is
scandalous: based on the assumption that in our thanks and praise we are
reveling in misfortune and inviting God to bring it on, that as Christians we
must endure unhappiness happily. Not so.
There are significant insights about thanksgiving and praise that our scripture
offers this morning, namely that we give thanks in the midst of hardship, that
God is the focus of our gratitude, that praise is not just a feeling or emotion,
that we question society’s view of what is fundamentally necessary and finally
that praise doesn’t produce – for us, it is response - to God.
“The LORD your God is bringing you into a good land,” announces the
story-teller. Stated in many different ways throughout Deuteronomy (this last
book in the story of Israel’s wanderings in the desert) the affirmation of God’s
promise and intent comes out of a situation of difficulty. All is not well for
Israel. The milk is not yet flowing and the honey is scarce. The land and the
promise that we read of has not yet become a reality for God’s people. They are
still finding their way, security is not yet a reality and the people remain
wanderers, homeless. Times are difficult and anxious, yet in the chaos and
disorientation of the moment Moses tells his people that it is God who finally
delivers them, it is God who gives them power to achieve stability and it is God
who has journeyed with them through all things, good and bad.
“Remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so
that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing
today.” (Deut. 8:18) Remember God! for when you begin to relax, Israel, when you
begin to enjoy a time of prosperity you will be at risk of forgetting,
forgetting to praise God for deliverance and for daily sustenance and for
plenty, abundance. Remember God! even, and especially, in the dark times, for
all that you desire, all that you have lost, all that you have, has been given
you. It is gift.
Were we, you and I, to recognize the gift-like quality of life, to see most
things as gift, we would have a different perspective on what we think we need
or should have. If we were to imagine that every friend, relationship, security
and challenge were a gift from God - a God-send - we could not experience
anything about our lives as commonplace or expected. Rather, everything we are
and everything we have would have a special purpose and would be an intentional
contribution from the heart of God. Would that help us to change our perspective
from one of feeling scarcity to that of living in abundance, expecting a shift
in our experience from absence to presence or opening ourselves to the
possibility of love instead of hatred?
I got caught in exactly this kind of perspective shift these last days. I have
been pondering the notions of scarcity and abundance in our world as I was
preparing for this morning. At the very same time that I was lauding the
opportunities that God gives us to experience life as abundance I was personally
caught up in a time of real anxiety and stress. It came out of my daily life and
relationships - and my financial situation - on this particular week. Plagued
with anxiety I was obsessing about whether or not I would have enough; enough
love, enough money, enough energy, enough! enough! – you name it. I caught
myself red-handed! Be still! “The LORD your God is bringing you into a good
land.”
The focus is God, not us. That is the nature of praise. We give God thanks not
because everything we get in life is what we want, not because we don’t think
about ourselves at all but because God is the source of life and gift and all
that we know. That is why we praise God. Vitality comes from God! That
confession too is scandalous in a market economy that wants us to believe that
we are the centre of all that matters; our needs and the things that we can buy
will make us successful. In other words, we are self-made and self-sufficient.
And when we are so centered on the self, we have no need of praise to God.
Actually we have no need of God. We are the gift to ourselves; everything we do
and say is a gift of our own making.
On the contrary! In such a set up one is forced to live from a perspective of
scarcity. We will always need more and it will always be up to us to find ways
to soothe ourselves, to reduce our anxiety about being completely and suddenly
without means. The financial crisis around the world these last days has shaken
all of us. We have all lost something: peace of mind that our financial plans
were secure, that our futures were predictable, at least so far as we could make
retirement projections. For some, that is now in question. We have lost more
than peace of mind. We have lost money. That is very significant. I do not make
light of this.
Very bluntly stated it is significantly more difficult today than it was even
last week to view our little corner of the world from a perspective of abundance
instead of scarcity. Which means to me, that whatever happens to us today or
next week or next year, we are invited to take courage from God’s promise in
Deuteronomy that we “may eat bread without scarcity.” It is not a promise that
all will be as we wish or even that we will not suffer but rather that somehow
God will give us what we need to survive and maybe eventually even to thrive.
Thanksgiving and praise is a way of life, not just a feeling or emotion. Praise
is an orientation toward God, one that distinguishes between what we suffer and
enjoy and the source of our life and being. In a communication that I received
from Mennonite Church Canada this week, Deborah Froese writes that Henri Nouwen
viewed thanksgiving as a discipline and she quotes him as saying, “The
discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and
have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.” It may
be offensive, scandalous to some, that we practice the discipline of gratitude
and praise in the face of pain and suffering. This is something for us to think
about carefully.
We are challenged to turn our backs on society’s remedies for stress: spend
more, eat more and drink more; entertain yourself. Keep busy! Purchase your way
out of pain. Anesthetize your fears! The scandal of the faithful is to turn from
that toward God. Spend what is appropriate, eat, drink and seek entertainment in
moderation. Do the work of God in the everyday activities that make for
wholesome living. There is no need to hide amidst overindulgence or quake in the
expectation of scarcity but rather praise God as a way of life and live as
though we believe there is enough. “The LORD your God is bringing you into a
good land.” Remember this.
Thanksgiving is not superficial glee or unexamined exuberance; it is deep peace,
deep gratitude. Thanksgiving is what we bring in, what we reap from the daily
walk; thanksgiving is the harvest of our lives. Though this sounds at first
blush like we can produce something marketable by means of the discipline of
thanksgiving it is rather that we respond with the quality of our lives, that
the end result is faithful remembering of God’s mercy and love. Paul writes in 2
Corinthians, “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not
reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able
to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough
of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” (2 Cor. 9: 7-8)
We have our part in proclaiming the abundance of God and living the discipline
of praise. We have a choice; we make up our minds as to how we will navigate
life. So today, on this Thanksgiving Day we praise God for life in abundance,
for each other and for the amazing gift that we have in the heart of a God who
never lets us go. Thanks be to God. AMEN