Making ThanksGiving ThanksLiving

The days are shorter, the nights are longer.  The autumnal sun dances through the colored leaves – it’s as though God had this in mind all summer long. 

It is right, and quite natural, for us to feel a certain thankfulness for all the blessings that come our way – especially at this time of year.

Thanksgiving is one of the most universal of holidays.  And, as you may have heard me say before, it may also be one of the most Christian.

Locked behind cell doors, Paul admonished his new Christian followers to  be thankful in all things.

For us Christians, thanksgiving is a calling. 
It is an attribute of the life we seek to live. 
It is a definition of a way of seeing ourselves in relation to our God who created us, redeems us, and sustains us through the trials and tribulations that have a way of showing up on our life-journey.

Notice, the Ten Commandments do not start with “Thou shalt not...”
But, rather with, “I am the Lord God, who brought you out of Egypt, therefore . . .”

The entire Mosaic Law is to be followed as an act of thanksgiving.  The basic understanding is that because God is God and enables marvelous things to happen and continues to be involved in my life and in the world around me, therefore, I can do nothing other than live in gratitude.

We Christians live in thanksgiving for what God has done and continues to do for us. 
For us, thanksgiving is really thanks-living.

The Psalmist could sing: This is a day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!  Greeting each day with thanks for another chance to live and to love is a very Christian thing to do.

It is not without merit that many writers refer to ingratitude as the most basest of sins. 

Even Shakespeare could write:
I hate ingratitude more than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or taint of vice.

Thanksgiving reminds us of how much we owe to forces outside of ourselves.

It behooves us to take an inventory of our blessings and offer up thanks in all things.

This year, expand your thanksgiving thoughts to thoughts about thanks-living. 

Lest We Forget: The Role of the Preacher in the American Revolution

Folks in colonial America heard sermons more than any other form of communication.

The colonial preacher was prophet,
newspaper,
video,
Internet,
community college,
and social therapist all wrapped in one. 
Their  influence on all aspects of life in those days was so great, that even contemporary television and personal computers pale in comparison.

Day after day,
week after week,
ministers drew the people into a rhetorical world that was more compelling and more immediate than the physical settlements surrounding them.
Sermons taught not only the way to personal salvation in Christ, 
but also the way to temporal and national prosperity for God's chosen people.

Events were perceived not from the mundane, human vantage point
but from God's perspective.

The vast majority of colonists were  Presbyterian
to whom things were not as they might appear at ground level:
all events, no matter how mundane or seemingly random, were parts of a larger pattern of meaning, part of God's providential design.
The outlines of this pattern were contained in Scripture and interpreted by discerning pastors.
Colonial congregations saw themselves as the "New Israel,"
endowed with a sacred mission that destined them as lead actors in the last triumphant chapter in redemption history. 

Check it out:  http://www.newcelebrations.com/independencedayusa.html

The American Revolution Was a Religious Event

This week we in the United States of America  will celebrate our 241st anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
It is significant for us to remember, many historians agree that when understood in its own times,
the American Revolution was first and foremost a religious event.
At the forefront of the revolution were the preachers.
Think about the influence of the preachers:

Over the span of the colonial era, American ministers delivered approximately 8 million sermons, each lasting one to one-and-a-half hours.
The average 70-year-old colonial churchgoer would have listened to some 7,000 sermons in his or her lifetime, totaling nearly 10,000 hours of concentrated listening.

No matter what denomination,
folks in colonial America heard sermons more than any other form of communication.

Check it out:
 http://www.newcelebrations.com/independencedayusa.html

About Memorial Day

Memorial Day was started by former slaves on May, 1, 1865 in Charleston, SC to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. They dug up the bodies and worked for 2 weeks to give them a proper burial as gratitude for fighting for their freedom. They then held a parade of 10,000 people led by 2,800 Black children where they marched, sang and celebrated.

Thanks to Abstrakt Goldsmith for this nugget of history that most of us never learned in school.

Reclaim Mothers' Day

If there ever was a holiday that needs reclamation it is Mothers’ Day!

Churches all over the United States report attendance on Mothers’ Day as one of the top three of the year - surpassing Christmas and/or Easter in some cases.

But, what is celebrated and valued is no longer a common-cultural experience for most people.

Significant numbers of our congregation have not had a positive mothering experience - for one reason or another. 
And, of course, a number of our congregation are male and could never experience motherhood.
Other increasing numbers of folks have experienced a loss that precluded them from ever experiencing motherhood.
Others, through choice, or through no fault of their own, have never and will never experience motherhood.
And, still others experience mothering through persons not typical to a culture of 100 years ago. 

It turns out that mothering is a very sensitive issue to very large numbers of people - and it takes a skillful preacher to be sensitive to their issues and craft a sermon that speaks to the needs of all in this day and age.

It is interesting to note that the one person responsible for creating and encourage the widespread adoption of a nationally recognized mother’s day, Anna Jarvis, lived long enough to see what was happening and spent her latter years trying to change the emphasis. 

As we think of a way of celebrating Mother’s Day in a new way, there is much to give fodder to our thought.

Consider the first call for a mother’s day came from Julia Ward Howe, who dreamed of an international gathering of mothers pledging to protect their sons and daughters by ending all war.

And, most recently, a group of folks in the US call for Mothers for Action to work for peace on Mothers’ Day.

For years, after giving nod to the fact that all of us have mothers, I have proceeded to give homage to the roll of women in our church and in our faith.  The preacher doesn’t have to look far for sermon points to lift up the role of women.

Taking a clue from the original call for a mothers’ day, we would do well to consider mustering interest in supporting a “cause” near and dear to mothers’ hearts:

Promote awareness of working mother’s issues.
Support a local women’s center.
Get involved in a Big Brothers / Big Sisters project.
Go to a nearby Senior Citizens Center
Support or start a day care center for working women

We received a special offering on Mothers’ Day to support Baby Manna in Philadelphia which supplies baby formula for poor mothers in Southeast Pennsylvania.

The Birthday of A Whole New World

Easter is about transcendence.
It is about creating and choosing new life.
It is about new heavens and a new earth.
It is about a new way of doing religion.
It is about new joy-full living.

Today, along with Christian the world over, we celebrate Easter Sunday –
the single defining event for the faith we hold.

For the fact of the matter is that before Easter there were no Christians!
Before Easter there was no church.
Before Easter there was no Christian theology, no Christian world-view.

Easter is the birthday of a whole new world –
a whole new life –
a whole new way of living –
a whole new way of looking at the world –
a whole new religion!

Easter re-creates our cosmology,
it provides a new perspective on the order of things,
it expands our understanding of things temporal and things eternal.

In Isaiah God announces a re-creation of the
world – new heavens and a new earth,
a new relationship between God and the whole creation,
a new expression of faith,
a new Jerusalem:
a place full of joy and happiness –
"Be glad and rejoice forever in what I create" –
a place where even God will be full of joy.

e.e. cummings has an Easter expression appropriate for each one of us:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky; and for everythingwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birthday of life and of love and wings: and of the gaygreat happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeingbreathing any -- lifted from the noof all nothing -- human merely beingdoubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake andnow the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I thank you God for this most amazing day!
I who have died am alive again today!
Now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

Every year now for nearly twenty centuries, Christians have been coming together at this time of year to celebrate the single most important event of their history!

Since Jesus was a Jew, and lived as a Jew,
and preached as Jew,
and spent his entire ministry among Jews,
it was quite natural for his followers to tie this Easter event with the traditional Passover Celebration.

For centuries, the Passover had been celebrated each year to remind people of their unique history and of their unique relationship with their God.
What Passover was to the Jews, Easter became to the followers of Jesus.

For truly, it wasn't until after the Resurrection that the disciple's eyes were opened and they saw for the very first time:
that what they had experienced with this man from Nazareth was indeed a whole new thing.
It wasn't until after the Resurrection that they began to call him the Christ –
and saw him to be the fulfillment of the Passover –
the promise that been made each year over and over again for centuries.

So clear was this to the early Christians, that they began to meet on the first day of each week at dawn to celebrate Easter –
the coming of the new time –
the new creation –
the new week –
remembering the fulfillment of the Passover.

Our story goes that the women went to the tomb that morning concerned about how they were going to move the stone that blocked them from doing their ministerial task with the corpse.

Even though they were concerned and anxious about it, their faith moved them on down the road just knowing that somehow the obstacle would be removed, and they could do what they needed to do.

Of course, we know, when they arrived at the tomb, the obstacle was moved all right,
but they were the first to discover,
and the first to hear,
that something very significant –
something very out of the ordinary –
had happened.

The Jesus they knew so well;
the Jesus they were friends with;
the Jesus they thought they understood;
the Jesus they lived with;
the Jesus they saw defeated and overcome;
the Jesus they watched die;
the Jesus they placed in this tomb --
their friend, Jesus of Nazareth
was much more than they ever thought or understood.

Not only was their religious practice changed significantly;
but now, the known laws of the physical universe were overcome as well.

They came to work on the corpse of Jesus –
and they heard the incredible words:
"Why look for the living here among the dead?"

This made no sense.
They saw him die.
They placed his lifeless body here in this tomb.

And again, the messenger of God spoke:
"Go back where you came from.
Go back to Galilee.
There you will find him.
Alive and well, just as he said you would."

It was the a re-creation of the world –
a new heaven and a new earth –
new definitions of life and religion –
the birthday of a whole new world –
the birthday of life and of love and wings.

Easter announces to all that the presence of Christ cannot be snuffed out.
That God transcends the boundaries of space and time.
New boundaries of our life and faith have been drawn up.
A new heaven and a new earth have been created.

There is a new Jerusalem,
a new religion wherein God and his creation are not so far apart:
Where God no longer dwells above us,
or in ark in the Temple,
or even solely in the confines of a particular person who lived in Galilee some 2000 years ago.
This is something totally new: "a new heaven and a new earth" wherein God is constantly present with us where we live our lives –
defining anew what it is to be human,
what it is to be alive,
what it is to die.

This transcendence of space between God and man,
this transcendence of time between birth and death,
this transcendence of God between heaven and earth is what is behind our celebration of Easter today.
It is what is unique about our Christianity.
It is what enables us to live fully and abundantly.
There is tremendous power at work here:
power largely unrecognized and largely untapped;
but power that can give each one of us a new lease on life.

Some of you may be familiar with the work of Bernie Siegel.
Dr. Siegel is a surgeon and works primarily with cancer patients.
For several years now, an important part of Dr. Siegel's practice and research is with what he calls "exceptional" cancer patients –
patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses –
most given a very short time to live.

Dr. Siegel sees patients sometimes individually, and most times in groups,
and helps them to choose to really live in the limited time they have left.

Time and time again, Bernie Siegel, and other doctors who are doing this now, observe something that is almost beyond belief.
Given just months or weeks to live,
facing their inevitable death, and coming to terms with their mortality,
patients, more often than not, consciously change their way of living.

Time and time again, these doctors see from that day on, these patients do only what they really want to do.
They don't let something go unsaid, because they know there may not be a tomorrow.
They became quick with hugs,
quick with "I love yous",
quick with "thank yous",
quick to show appreciation and quick with "I am truly sorry."

Once having made that choice,
and, this is the totally unbelievable part,
and until you have been there, it is so hard to understand, but we need to learn from it:
100% of his patients say that their lives are infinitely better than it was before they were diagnosed with their terminal illness.

They reported things went better for them.

Relationships with other people were more positive.

Life was more fuller, richer.

Days and time had meaning.

Each day was greeted with thanksgiving.

They had new enthusiasm for living – even though they knew their days were numbered.

And, do you know what?

Truly remarkable things happen among the patients.

Once they choose to live each day to the fullest, they actually stop dying!

Oh, they all do die.
We all do.

But, these patients all live well past the expected time limits of their disease, and they live healthier – even with their terminal illness,
and they are freer of pain during their illness.

Through Dr. Siegel and his faith in what they can do and can be, these terminally ill patients come to know what Jesus called an abundant life.

Bernie Siegel writes:
We must all confront the reality that no one lives forever.
Illness and death are not signs of failure;
what is a failure is not living.
Our goal is learning to live – joyously and lovingly.

And, you know, that is exactly what we are about here at Christ Church in Drexel Hill!
Helping people connect with these timeless truths of our faith.
Helping people live more fully, more abundantly, like Jesus said.

I have spoken of my interest in some of the findings of recent comprehensive studies of peoples' health.

One of the findings of one of the studies, hidden among many findings, and virtually ignored by the press, was this:
They found that people who go to church regularly were healthier over all than people who did not go to church regularly.

And hidden among the findings of another large study was this:
People who go to church regularly live longer than those who do not go to church regularly.

Do you hear this?
It's a fact:
People who go to church are healthier, and
people who go to church live longer, than those who don't.

Why do you suppose that is?

Because of some other studies and reading I have done, I found some clues, and I have compiled several reasons why folks who go to church live longer and are healthier than those who do not.

Scientific studies from several fields of inquiry provide evidence that there is real healing power in many of the things that we practice, and teach, and experience here in church.
In the past, I have told you about studies that prove that there is healing power in prayer,
that there is healing power in laughter,
that there is healing power in attitude,
that there is healing power in forgiveness,
that there is healing power in ritual,
that there is healing power in coming together as community,
and, today’s message is that there is healing power in transcendence.

Easter is about transcendence.
It is about creating and choosing new life.
It is about new heavens and a new earth.
It is about a new way of doing religion.
It is about new joy-full living.

Indeed, the chief characteristic of this new world ushered in at Easter is joy and happiness.

Our Scripture describes a God full of joy,
and a joy-full people living in thanksgiving for a full and abundant life.

And that's what we are about here at this church.

Christ Presbyterian Church is "A Center of Faith for Living Abundantly."

Jesus said, "I have come that you might have a fuller, more abundant life."

There are people in this room who know exactly what I am saying, and have experiences to prove it.

And the promise is made to each one of us:
You can live a better, fuller, healthier, longer, more abundant life.
God intends this for you.
And we know how.
Join us, or put another way, let us join you.

This Easter Sunday, when facing the choices all of us make every day, choose life.

Choose to live each day to the fullest.

Choose to be a part of the most powerful force in the universe: the presence of Christ in the world today.

I thank you God for this most amazing day!
I who have died am alive again today!

Amen.

The congregation of Christ Presbyterian Church in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, heard this sermon during the Easter celebration April 24, 2011.

A Message for Good Friday: Giving Up the Ghost and Tearing of the Veil

We are all familiar with the creation stories in Genesis.
The familiar story with its rhythmical structure of seven days occurs in chapter 1.
And chapter 2 of Genesis begins another story of creation.

Now, really, both of these accounts were actually written fairly late in Jewish history –
most probably at the time of King David, when for the first time people had the leisure to sit down and write the stories that had been handed down by word of mouth for centuries.

Verse 7 of the second chapter of Genesis appears to express one of the earliest, most primitive concepts of  the Jew's relationship to God.
Here, God is pictured as     a potter:
Then the Lord God formed (molded) a man from the dust of the ground,
and breathed (a loud breath) into his nostrils the breath of life.  Thus man became alive!  (Gen2:v7)

It seems that from the beginning,
they understood every person's breath is God-given –  life itself –
for the human is critically related to Yahweh,
the God that shared his breath –
the symbol for life itself.

You see, the thing that made the body alive was God.
God was intimately related to your life experience. [Therefore, a life without God was an absurd proposition.]

    Actually, by the time these stories were written down (at King David's court) the understandings of God had changed somewhat.
I’ve talked about this before.
Through the years a concept of God developed that they could put in a box.

At a risk of over-simplifying it:
you may recall that they were a nomadic people, they traveled a lot –
they traveled through lands occupied by people with other religions.
They saw that these religions had their holy places:
they had holy mountains,
there were holy caves,
and there were even holy wells.
Well, having no geographical references for themselves these wandering Jews knew that their God could not be confined to geography.
Their God was not to found in a particular place.

Their God was a traveling God –
but they came to feel that their God did need a home –
God needed a place to be,
a place to rest.
So they built God an ark, a throne, so he could be comfortable.
And they carried this ark wherever they went.
It became a symbol of assurance:
that God was with them as long as they had the box for him.
(We have a lot of stories about people stealing the ark.
So history began to be recorded in terms of who has the box –  who had God on their side.
God was wherever the ark was.)

This, then, became a real issue with David as he set out to bring together two nations of people  –  each with their own traditions and history.
David thought: The way to unite the country is to unite their religion.
So, let's build a house to put the ark in.
It will be a temple and will stand in the capital city as a symbol of God's presence in our new nation and people will always know where they can come to meet the Lord.
We'll put his box there and everyone will come to know that's where he sits!


    And the temple was built, and became the house of God.
His box was placed in one end of the building and a curtain was put in front of it – the reredos.
It was called the “Holy of Holies”.
[The curtain was loaded with symbolism –
it protected the people from perishing should they see the Lord face-to-face.
It served the function of keeping God's presence shielded from the people.]

Now, all of this had become quite institutionalized by the time of Jesus.
The temple with its curtain, and the ark, was an important part of the religion.
For the Jew, there was no question what one had to do in order to be religious, to fulfill the law.
Leaders, Rabbis, spent their entire lives studying the law –
and as new situations and questions came up, they wrote new rules to amplify the old law.
The Rabbis were the authority and it was unquestioned  (except maybe for a few splinter groups from time to time.).

    Of particular significance is that Jesus came preaching and teaching  on his own authority –
far outside the established authority of his tradition.
They would say to him:
you totally disregard our tradition.
How can you go around preaching such
contemporariness?

    And he would say:
It seems to me that I don't come to put an end to your traditional ways, so much as I come to fulfill the promises of our tradition.
For instance, look at me.
I live in the same relation with my Father (your God) as described in the ancient poem of our tradition.
I live and breath because God lives and breathes in me.
God is in me as long as I'm alive.
As long as I breathe, God dwells in me and I live in God – so, in this sense, my body is more of a temple in the traditional sense,
than that building is where you go to worship and hope to find God.
This is what I preach.
And whenever the religious law encourages this understanding – it is valid – and whenever it hinders it, it is invalid.
You think you know how to be religious?
You don't!
Your organization gets in the way of your faith!

The New Testament writers took great pains to point  out to us that Jesus came to fulfill the scripture –
he quotes the Old Testament and interprets the tradition anew.
His respect for tradition and history is not questioned.

Neither is his authority,
and his authority is unquestionably contemporary to his time.

Now today, ironically, most of us Christians have the same concepts and attitudes about our Church and our  religion as the Jews did about their  temple and their  religion at the time of Jesus, don’t we?

We have fostered the concept that the church building is God's House –
we should come here hoping to find God –
and we should enter, then,  with appropriate reverence
and appreciate the use of music, prayers and ceremony that will uplift our hearts and inspire our souls so our faith may grow.

There are things we expect from our religion, aren’t there? –
and there are things we are comfortable with –
and we identify those things as "traditional" when the tradition may be not really be very old.

In a real sense,  my call as a laborer among God's people is to seriously come to grips with tradition (religion) that goes back beyond the past 50 or 60 years, even beyond the past 400 years, and beyond the past 2000 years –
attempting to see the contemporary situation our fathers and mothers in the faith faced,
and how they expressed themselves the way they did (and why they did it that way).
And then, facing the situation today, [the world around us in the year 2012],
attempt to react in the same manner and express the same faith –
the same hope for life –
that was expressed in those old situations.
(This manner informs the things we do here in our worship service on Sunday mornings.)

The Easter story is one of encouragement,
of hope,
of enabling dreams and visions of what could be –
if only....

For the story is that Jesus lived as a Son of God –  God lived inside the physical confines of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

And that was the message the disciples were finally beginning to understand –      until Good Friday.

[Now understand that at this point, Jesus was no different than a dozen other God-men in religious history.]

    But, the significant difference comes when Jesus dies.
There, on the cross, we are told, he gives a loud cry –
all that was in his lungs comes out.

He dies.
The presence of God escapes from his body.

Jesus the man, then, is lifeless – 
the body is dead
(and later disappears).

God left the confines of this "body temple."

Not only that, but each Gospel writer carefully records the message that,
when this happened the curtain in the temple was torn in two –
from the top to the bottom.

God came out of the stone temple –
through the curtain.
No more to be separated and encapsulated in a box or a house.
No.  God is not there any more.

God is no longer in the body of the man from Nazareth.
And God is no longer in that box in the temple!

    Where did God go?

    The message was – into Galilee –
back into the world where his followers lived and interacted, as Jesus said he would.
And his disciples were to go there.
That's where they would find him.
Where he said they would:
feeding the hungry,
clothing the poor,
healing the sick,
involved in making the life around them more human,
more hopeful,
more enabling.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.  
Because I know the rest of the story . . .

Hear the rest of the story in church Sunday  . . .

 The congregation of Christ Presbyterian Church experienced this message Easter Sunday, 2012.