Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis 1 Thessalonians 5:16-22

Thanksgiving Sunday November 20, 2005

“Living with Great-fullness”

A man named Charles Moore recalls Thanksgiving at his house when he was growing up.

Aunt Dorie would come drunk and weep at the table. No one ever knew why, and no one asked. Grandpa refused to speak to Grandma. My older brother showed his face only at the meal.... In trying to make everything perfect, Mom would always have a migraine, and Dad would be steaming because Mom didn’t feel well. Oddly enough, Thanksgiving was the one time Dad said his “own” grace before dinner....At Thanksgiving, he quietly, almost tearfully, thanked God for the many blessings that had been bestowed upon us. I always waited anxiously for something more, something of love to break in after the prayer. Some hidden secret in Dad’s heart was trying to reveal itself to us. But with the “Amen,” the silence was broken and the business of carving and passing dishes swung into full swing. The moment of grace had slipped away.

Charles had come upon a very important discovery, even though he glimpsed it so fleetingly. It is deep gratitude that opens the door that stands between the confusion and pain and tangles of our lives to the experience of abundance, completeness and joy. It seems like gratitude should be so simple, especially for us 21^st Century Americans who are among the most comfortable, affluent people the world has ever known. But true heart-felt, tear-stained gratitude is as rare as it is crucial for true happiness. Why is that? Maybe it’s because we tend to focus on the gift itself rather than how profoundly blessed we are to receive it. Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

Playwrite Eugene O'Neill described a time when he looked up at the myriad of stars hanging in the heavens as deep as he could see. He said, "For a moment I lost myself--actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the...high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life....[I belonged] to Life itself! To God!....For a second you see–and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning!"

This is a beautiful description of the sense of great-fullness at its highest and deepest. The night sky was a beautiful gift that O’Neill enjoyed. But he received it in a way that didn’t just give him enjoyment. He let it fill him, flow through him, redefine him, and give him back to himself humbler, yet abundantly blessed.

When we look at the spread of good food set on the Thanksgiving table on Thursday, we might feel some thankfulness, and we or somebody will dutifully thank God for it. At the same time, we’ll be thinking that our paycheck or hard work in the kitchen had at least something to do with it being there for us to enjoy.

But what if we opened up to the mystery that our very life will be sustained by this food, which came out of the earth as peas or potatoes, or that was ground up meal that got transformed into drumsticks and breasts by a turkey who gave its life that we might live. What if we realized that the atoms from this food have been cycling through the earth, air and water for eons as parts of plants, animals, dirt, rain, and rocks, and once upon a time were parts of stars and meteors. Our work did help put it here on the table, but it also took the work of farmers, processors, truck drivers, warehouse workers, stock boys, and cashiers. All these people and plants and animals have given their time or their lives so that we can have this meal, which our body will break down into blood cells and muscles and bones and energy, and use to give us eyesight and mobility, and to fight diseases and regulate our body temperature when we take a walk outside after dinner. We can be dutifully thankful for this food. Or we can be in awed awareness that we are part of the miraculous, intricate web of life. It’s not just that we have received a gift. Our life is a gift; we are a gift; it is all a gift, and we are part of it and have a place in it. That’s an experience of great-fullness.

And maybe you’ll be looking around the table at the faces of your family or friends at that meal. You are thankful they are in your life, and that you have them to love, even though you hope to goodness Josh remembers to clean up his language in front of your in-laws, and please don’t let Uncle Jim start launching into his political opinions.

You can look at them that way, and that’s probably how we look at each other most of the time. But we can look at our loved ones in a different, deeper way. Richard Wehrman captured that in a poem he wrote for Thanksgiving:

Here we step off the shore
Into deep water.
Here we leave everything that protects us,
To hold hands
Around the table of our Life.
These hands held–the ones on your left and your right–
Are God’s investment in you:
They are wealth beyond measure,
A deposit to the bank of your heart.

Stop, look around you!
Here is your wife or your husband.
There sit your child, your brother or sister.
There are parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, your friends;
Even the Dead, all those Elders who bred us;
So sit the absent,
Long loved and distant,
Living now dearly in the house of our heart.

Each one round this table
Is Arabia’s jeweled treasure;
Whom do we know here, we would trade
For mere gold?

Some invisible Great Ones came here before us;They lit our small candle, they
Gave us this life.
They buried a great treasure, they
Sent us to find it.
May we honor them well and the First One who made us:
May we find each our brightness,
Our prism of Soul.

For we are Ourselves the Gold of Thanks-Giving,
And each to the other,
Today, at this meal,
A Joy to be spent without restraint!

This experience of great-fullness helps us see beyond the flaws we are all-so-familiar with in our family members, to the gifts that we are to each other–God’s investments in us.

On this Stewardship Sunday, I also want to say that this church is something I feel a great-fullness about. I am thankful for each and every one of you. I may not tell you this individually, but there’s not a person here that isn’t important to me, whether you’ve been here all your life or just a few weeks. And I’m very thankful for all the ways you give to this church so graciously and willingly and ably in more ways than I can count, including the pledges of time, talent and treasure you have offered today.

But I carry inside me more than just thankfulness for each of you and all your gifts. When we come together in a spirit of humility, openness to God, and generosity, something awesome and wonder-full happens. Newcomers and old-timers, babies and senior citizens, the multi-talented and the challenged, all become knit together into something bigger than ourselves. We become what the Bible calls the “body of Christ,” and we begin to sense Christ’s own heart beating in the midst of us. In this body, “the sorrow of one is the sorrow of each, and the joy of one is the joy of all.” Our vision is lifted beyond ourselves, and we see people we don’t even know with Christ’s eyes, as a part of God’s whole family. And we come to see our own lives as ministry–as Christ’s hands reaching out to the world around us. As we do this, we begin to create a new kind of order of faith, hope, peace, and love in this mixed-up world, an order Jesus called the kingdom of God.

To be a part of this miracle that God is creating through us gives me more than thankfulness. It gives me “great-fullness.” It makes my heart and soul sing, as though this is what we were created for. To say thank you for being a part of this with me isn’t enough. All I can do with great-fullness like that is to let my thanks giving become thanks living--to return the gift with my life.

Hear again Paul’s words to the Thessalonians: “Rejoice always”–Don’t break up our life into what we’re thankful for and what we resent, but receive it all as a gift and offering ourselves back in joy. “Pray without ceasing”–Let our very lives become a prayer to the One who gives us life and calls us to faithful service. And “give thanks in all circumstances”–Know that “all things can work for good for those who love God.”

This is how we live out our great-fullness–because Eugene O’Neill did see the truth when his soul became both lost–and found–amid the stars: “We belong, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than [our] own life. We do belong to Life itself. We belong to God,”–now and forever. What a profound joy, and what a great-fullness, to know that and to live it.