Thanks Be to God

November is, by all accounts, a month for giving thanks. Our neighbors know that as well as we do. (Let the turkey consumption and the requisite napping commence.)

Still, the holy work of being grateful is not merely in experiencing the feeling but in naming our particular blessings before the Lord. By analogy, what good does it do my beloved for me to feel grateful for her place in my life if I do not also regularly name that thanksgiving to her? Gratitude is only as good as its specified return. I imagine it is not so different with the living God (Psalm 7:17). As the old song urges, “Count your many blessings. Name them one by one. See what God has done.”

This is one of the features I appreciate about Paul’s numerous epistles. The apostle practices specificity in his thanksgiving. He names before the Lord and before his congregations the particular textures of his gratitude—the spaces and places in which he sees the Spirit of God loose and living among them.

We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers. – 1 Thessalonians 2:13

So it is, in similar fashion, we baptized folk are called to name before the Lord that which has blessed us along our way. It’s not only a November thing to do, it’s a Christian thing—year round. What follows, then, are a few samples from my own growing list of recent thanksgivings to God—gratitude about you, as a congregation, as I come to know you more and more with each passing month.

For instance, I give thanks to God for the wonderful music you make to the Lord week after week. In recent years, you have stretched yourselves—some reluctantly, some joyfully, I’m sure—to lift up to God praise that is as varied as it is vibrant. I commend you for receiving this effort, and for sticking together around a matter that would surely undo a less mature congregation.

I give thanks to God for the strong sense of “What’s next?” I feel among you, especially among your elders and deacons. You are not a congregation the seems shackled to your past; so many of you seem genuinely curious about what the Spirit might yet be up to in your midst. I celebrate what I sense as a holy expectation about the coming years. After all, I suspect God is more interested in our willingness than in our expertise. Those first disciples knew little about what was in store, only that they must go when they sensed themselves called (Matthew 4:19).

More concretely, I give thanks for our sanctuary—the look, the feel, the shape, the function. It feels traditional but not stuffy, open but not rootless. To be sure, a church is not its building, yet the four walls that surround a people’s worship and work is not incidental, either. Space matters, to the extent it helps and does not hinder our calling to be the body of Christ in this place. The first time I walked into your Sunday space (during an interview last winter), I was struck by how handsome, how Reformed (word and sacraments—front and center), and how well-cared for the room is. All this says much about a congregation. It is an honor and a delight to be lead-worshipper among you on each Lord’s Day.

I give thanks that this congregation is, to say it one way, a womb for mission. Tables and shawls and compassion are born here. It feels to me like down deep in the psyche of this place there are old, deep, missional reverberations that will not let this fellowship turn wholly inward upon itself. Key decisions in the past often appear marked with an impulse to consider how you might be, more and more, in service and witness to neighbor and world. I hear: Let the paint chip a bit on the Social Hall baseboard, let the tan tile in the bathroom go another year—there’s mission beyond these walls to consider. I love it.

Finally, more personally, I give thanks to God for the ways in which you have welcomed my family and worried over their needs. What has for months been to us a new place is fast becoming for us our new home, and your gracious “hello” (beginning with those blessed bow-ties) has helped to make it so.

- - -

As I was leading my daughter through the trick-or-treat gauntlet that is Waugh Avenue on the night before Halloween, I bumped into a pack of middle school girls from our congregation, hard at work in their annual canvas. Suddenly one of them had a revelation: “Hey,” pointing at me in fresh realization, “you go to our church, don’t you?”

Indeed I do. A fact for which I am most grateful to the Lord.

From Symbol to Service

I'm thrilled about what Mr. Obama's election represents in the way of race relations in this country. As a child of the deep South, I am especially mindful of what it will mean come January to watch a black family move into our white house. Were she still alive, my paternal grandmother would be mortified at the sight. And for all my great love for her, my feeling is she would deserve the lonely company of her own pitiful indignation. "Pride cometh before a fall."

Still, the proof of Mr. Obama's greatness will be in the pudding of his decisions. The only thing wrong with the current brand of youthful idealism that has bumped him into office is its hasty willingness to elevate symbol too far over service. Any among us who choke on his skin color should be called out for what you are, but social progressives can also be (unwittingly) condescending when they look straight through a man and only see their cause on the other side. Symbols don't save. Said Ms. Doolittle to the Professor: "Don't talk of love. Show me."

After 72 hours of happy celebration, let us remember that symbolic figures are only as helpful to the common good as the quiet decisions they make behind closed doors. Thomas Friedman, himself in awe of this week, is still right to ask, "Obama will always be our first black president. But can he be one of our few great presidents?" To his query I add my own: Will he call us all to do the hard work of rebuilding our country by tightning our belts, or will he let us continue to think we can live today on tomorrow's bill?

Given the terribly complex matters we face at home and in the world, what will matter most in the end is how Mr. Obama inhabits his new role, how he functions as a consistent tone-setter and example. Words matter a great deal, but only those who have never had to make any hard decisions out on the lonely point of leadership would impulsively, even if innocently, smother the burden of private character under the blanket of public cause.

Hopefully, four years from now, we will not have had to choose between the two.

Mr. Obama, we celebrate the skin you are in. Absolutely we do. Still, what we need now is sagacious leadership--red or yellow, black or white.

Advent Talk

Like many important efforts dependent on clear thinking and hard work, "theology" has lately suffered a bum rap at the hands of those who assume it is the sole purview of brainy elites. (A colleague of mine landed in a new church. About the previous preacher one member gushed: “He was very smart. I couldn’t understand most of what he said.”) This is distressing for those of us invested in “equipping the saints” for thinking and living the faith.

Theos = “God.” Logi = “word, speech, utterance.”

Put them together and you get God-talk, God-speech. Add “Christian” as a sacred prefix, and suddenly the church finds itself in a living God-conversation anchored in the life and witness of the scandalous New Testament Jesus. Good theology (talk) requires a brain, but loses its necessary humility if it becomes brainy. It can get along better when propelled by intelligence, but wisdom is the more necessary ingredient. It is aided by the professionals who write and publish, but their work never supersedes ours.

Good Christian theology is the primary responsibility of the same inimitable congregations wherein that faith is first lived. Like politics, it is a local affair. Theos-speech is that daring act of discussing within our ranks what the astonishing life Jesus just might have to do with our own. Together we steward a strange and wonderful story about a baby precariously born to peasant parents, tendered in a feeding trough while visited by curious herders, and promised for generations as the agent of God’s new life for the world.

Now there’s a matter up for God-discussion.

Good theology asks: What does this tale have to do with our own?

Soil Tests

They are like trees planted along the riverbank,
bearing fruit each season.
Their leaves never wither,
and they prosper in all they do.

- Psalm 1 (New Living Bible)

A chief challenge of the times in which we live is the reality that most of us are cut off from the real sources of our food. Ask a child from whence cometh apples and—no real fault of her own—she is likely to say “from the store.” Never mind the toil of those who labor in groves far away; never mind the remarkable yield of such productive creatures as fruit trees—doing their thing season after season. Fruit just happens in our world. Unlike in earlier generations more agrarian than our own, most of us (but not all of us, Mr. Johnston) are afforded no daily connection to its source.

The convenience of the produce section of Giant Eagle not withstanding, there are implications to this cutoff for our Christian faith. Spiritual fruit does not simply happen in our lives. Just as no famer would propose standing before a bare field and shouting “make fruit!” … so we cannot expect our lives to bring forth signs of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-25) without a proper planting, tending, and harvest. It turns out that modernity contains an ironic twist for believers: The more convenient the world around us, the more challenging it is to nurture within us a deep and abiding Christ faith. Last time I checked, Giant Eagle doesn’t carry piety.

Still, “those who delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night, they are like trees planted along the riverbank.” This is not mere moralizing on the Bible’s part. Think less of the psalmist wagging his finger at us and more of a disciple who has lived long enough to figure out that soil matters—where we plant our lives makes a difference. The psalmist can look back over his life and appreciate that good farming makes for “bearing fruit each season.” (Matthew 13:3-8)

Remember this background when your Stewardship Packet comes around this month. Without much reflection, we are tempted to look upon pledge cards and time commitments and the like as a narrow one-way street. “The church needs more from me,” we might sigh, scribbling down some hasty numbers. Turn it back in on Sunday, and we’re off the hook for another year.

But I invite you to eschew this flattened view of discipleship. Instead, consider this matter of stewardship as a busy two-way street. There is no doubt that a congregation needs from God’s people their time, talent, and treasure in order to do the ministry Christ is calling it to do. The arrow pointing from you to the church is clear and obvious.

But there is also an arrow flowing toward us. We need the church. We need it in our lives to call us to attention, to take notice of our walk with Jesus, to consider the soil in which we are planted. Stewardship materials are soil tests: Am I bearing any fruit? Am I growing or dying? Am I planted by streams of righteousness or by ditches of degeneracy? Am I cutoff from the true source of my life or is there living water flowing through me? (John 4:13-14) It is the difference between casually plunking a bag of apples down in your cart and spending a day in an orchard—planting, fertilizing, harvesting.

One of our Active Elders recently said it well from the pulpit: “God is not an accountant. God looks at our hearts.” This is another way of inviting us not to confuse the apple (our giving) with the tree (our lives). God desires our hearts, not our wallets; still, our wallets—perhaps more than anything else—will likely show in what kind of soil we are planted. Our fruit will tell us what is really going on with the tree, if we are open to learning.

Let us be open to learning. You could make quick work of your Stewardship materials and be done with it. That is your choice to make. But your pastor invites you to dig a little deeper. Let us all commit to take some soil samples in this new season, to remember again the source of our abundant life. Let us press beyond an easy, convenient faith to instead discover (again!) the “joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked … but [instead] delight in the law of the Lord.”

From whence cometh your fruit?

Hydration

Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. It will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. - John 4:13



The vexing danger of dehydration lies mainly in the fact that we just don’t know how thirsty we are until someone gives us cool water to drink. Absent a good and deep well, the body struggles to find moisture where it can. Meanwhile, most of us have a tremendous capacity for convincing ourselves that we feel “just fine”—our outer assurance belying our inner starvation. A few out there imbibe whatever liquid will grant them release from their reality; many more are awash in a saccharine sweetness that, while wet, does little to sustain them. Some understand quite well that they are parched, but assume that it is simply their lot in life to whiter and die. Whatever the response to our dehydration, there is not much that can replace the simple, satisfying nourishment of water.

The liquid of the New Testament, liberally spilled out on a given Sunday morning, does not run far over dry, parched land. For this reason alone, it is reassuring to know that the spring is inexhaustible.

Notes for Jumpstarting a Challenge

Christian stewardship is, at bottom, the conviction that everything we have (our stuff, our time, our money ... even our lives themselves) are all gifts from God and thus belong to God.

Lots of people in our culture talk about "self-made" men and women, by which they mean people who have worked hard and pulled themselves up into success by their own strength and effort. We Christians respect those stories, but we do not choose to think about our lives in that way. If anything, we are God-made people: We are created by God, and whatever success we achieve in this life is ultimately a credit back to that creating God--who loans us the abilities and time, talents and strength to labor and love and live.

When you look upon your life in this way -- given by God, owned by God, blessed by God -- then giving to others in need, giving to the church's common ministry, and giving to efforts God nudges us to give to ... these become easy efforts, glad gestures. We give with a grateful, cheerful heart, because we know God is behind it all anyway.

So our theme for tomorrow - memories - is not really about memories, per se (like going to the beach, or your favorite childhood toys, etc.) but about our memory of God's faithfulness to us in the past. This includes the specific ways God has blessed you in your particular life, but it also includes those larger, all-encompassing blessings that are gifts to all of us even if we cannot yet see them as such. This world to live in; food and air and water; families to raise us; crops to feed us ... each of these, God's global gifts.

And of course, as Christians, the superlative gift that blesses us all (and which we remember each week in our gathering and sending) is the gift of Jesus as Christ. That he is a part of our history, our shared story, is our biggest clue that God loves us, that God wishes us well, and that this same God is willing to do what it takes to set our lives and the world to the right.

This is good news, because at 17 (or consider my Ella, only 4) you may say to yourself ... "I'm not certain I have any specific memories of God's blessings in my particular life." And yet, one could say that our Lord Jesus--his life, his dying, his rising--is a part of your memory, because through baptism and through your faith your are connected to HIS life, HIS story, HIS blessings. That's the mystery and blessing and burden of faith.

So stewardship (our taking care of the gifts of God in our lives) begins not with guilt (I guess I HAVE to give) or obligation (I guess I SHOULD give) but with joy (I know I CAN give ... back to God ... to those in need ... to God's church). If we think of our lives as solely our own, in that self-made sense, we are likely to be stingy and selfish. If we think of our lives as immeasurable gifts from a loving God, then we are likely to be generous with what we have. After all, we know it is a gift to us in the first place.

Consider this metaphor: When I was in high school, I might have been tempted to say to myself: "Geez ... my parents ... nothing but a nuisance and a drag with their rules and regs and expectations. I'm moving out on my own." But had I done that -- moved out on my own -- I would have quickly discovered all of those things they were doing for me that I had not really considered or taken seriously: food, roof over my head, an allowance, a sense of right/wrong, help when I was sick, encouragement when I was down, etc. It would surely not take long for the absence of these generous gifts, and the challenge of producing them by myself, to call me back home.

So upon moving back in, I would therefore be moved to live in a certain new way under their roof. I would be more grateful for all of the sacrifices they make for me, more aware of the costs they incur for me, more loving toward them and more appreciative of the fact that countless bodies around the world do not enjoy even one third of those gifts. In other words, I would seek to be a better steward of their many gifts -- both obvious and subtle -- that they give to me every day.

It is not so different with the Christian life. We are sometimes tempted to "go out on our own." "Who needs faith, what with its high expectations, commandments, and demands." But a little while on our own, absent the faith, hope, and love the undergirds our living, we are likely to come back to God with a fresh sense of gratitude for all that God for us on a daily basis -- if we would but open our eyes to see it.

So when we remember God's faithfulness in the past (as Israel is reminded to do in the Old Testament passage for tomorrow - Deuteronomy 9:7-18), we are again made aware of all that God has done for us, and we are nudged and prodded and called to live differently in the future -- with joyful hearts, with an eye toward those in need, with open hands and not tight fists.

Has there been a time when you took someone or something (or even God) for granted for awhile, only to realize the hard way that your life would be very different, likely a lot less, were it not for that person, that gift, or our God?

or

What are some of the specific ways you can look back over your life, and your family's life, and see God's gifts and blessings to you? What would your life be like had these gifts (people, things, time, etc.) not been given to you and your family by God? What decisions could you make in the future to make certain God know you are grateful for them?

or

Who is a Christian you know (in your family, neighborhood, church, etc.) who exudes gratitude? What do you know about their story that points to how God has blessed them? What do you learn from watching how they live their life?

Challenge us along these lines.

Tempest

Come, Spirit tempest. Move across our watery chaos,
bringing winds and water for disturbing your church.
Come ashore with righteous indignation: circulating
over our slumbers, troubling those firmer idolatries.

Come, Spirit tempest. Blow with Word-winds across
our complacent comfort. Shake loose from moorings
the lines of numbing entertainment; pry us free from
worship at the feet of Convenience. Unsettle us again.

Come, Spirit tempest. Scour our crowded lives with a
purifying wind. Prune away the deadwood of empty
words and easy sentiment. Gather up the life-litter we
so heedlessly overlook. Strengthen us for new living.

Come, Spirit tempest. Bring a howling, hallowed word.

Genesis 1:1-2, Acts 2:1-2