Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service

Ecumenical Thanksgiving Reflection
November 24, 2019
4pm
Psalm 139:1-10

I’m incredibly thankful to be here with you all this afternoon. This is my first time at this service. One year ago, this service was supposed to be the first thing I did as the called pastor of Our Saviour’s Lutheran church. But my car battery had other plans, and I unfortunately missed the service, waiting for roadside assistance to jump my car. What a year it has been since. It has been a joy and an honor to be part of this service and part of this ministerium. I’ve truly enjoyed getting to know you all through our Lenten and other ecumenical opportunities. I give thanks to God for the colleagues and friends in our ministerium. I give thanks to God for our talented musicians, and I give thanks to God for each one of you gathered here today. I’ve lived in a lot of places in my 27 years on this planet. And I have to say: this is truly a special community, unlike others that I have lived in, and I’m thankful to be part of it and I look forward to what the next years will bring in this place.

As I think about Thanksgiving, I am struck by our first Psalm reading for this afternoon, from Psalm 139. I love this Psalm; yet I would not have initially thought of this psalm for a reading in a Thanksgiving service. This is the reading that starts off our service, and frames our time of thanksgiving together. This is a hymn that trusts/ confesses that our God knows us fully and completely – not just the good things, not just what we want to show of ourselves before God, but our God knows our whole, real, true, and messy selves. We all have those pieces of ourselves that we hide from the outside world, those pieces of ourselves that we keep close because we fear that those pieces of ourselves are too much for others or that those pieces will push others away. Some of us (and I hope we all do) have people in our lives that we can let into those parts our lives and those pieces of ourselves. But my point today is that we hear that we have a God that knows the best and the worst parts of ourselves and our lives.

And not only does God know those pieces of ourselves and our lives, but God promises to dwell with us anyway. Instead of having a God that might turn a back to us, God hems us in, behind and before us, laying God’s hand upon us. Nothing about who we are or what we do can push our God away, for we cannot flee from God’s presence. We ask God to reform the “wicked ways within us,” but even those things don’t separate us from the God that so loves us. God completely and fully accepts us for who we are – both what we show of ourselves to the world and those pieces we want to keep hidden. We hear, in this Psalm, a proclamation that our God dwells with us not just with our joys and celebrations but also with our bumps, our bruises, our scars, our character flaws.

One of my favorite hymns, “Will you Come and Follow Me,” puts it this “will you love the you you hide, if I call your name? Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same?” In our best times, and in our worst, it is God that calls us, our full selves – even the you you hide - , to follow and to be drawn close to God. It is God’s hand that holds us fast. Today, we hear a promise that nothing about who we are or what we do can push God away or can scare God into fleeing away from us; our God is with us and dwells deeply with us.

As Christians we proclaim that God doubles down on that promise in becoming human, in becoming flesh and bone, in Jesus. My seminary Old Testament professor, the Rev. Dr. Ralph Klein, talked about the incarnation of God in Jesus like this. He said, “in the incarnation, it is like God asked, ‘I’m God, not human. But would it help if I became human?” In other words, “would it help you trust that I am on your side if I became like you?” or “would you trust my yes to you and to all humanity if I became human?” or “Would it help you trust in my love and in my covenant if I lived, loved, walked this earth – with its hills and its valleys – and died, like you do?”

What kind of God would do this? Seriously, I think sometimes because we’ve heard the story so often, we forget how radical and unexpected this is. This isn’t something most people would expect a God to do. What kind of God would risk putting on flesh and bones? What kind of God would suffer and die for the sake of a broken humanity and a broken world? This is an incredible act for the divine to take. This is a God that is so radically on our side that God is willing to risk making Godself in our image, in our flesh. This is a God that is willing to so identify with us and be in solidarity with us – in the joys and the struggles that being human brings – that God godself puts on human flesh and experiences it too. God, in Jesus, doesn’t even flee from experiencing death – not just an ordinary death – but the death of a dangerous political convict on a cross. This is a God that is willing suffer, to die, and to conquer death, sin, wickedness in rising from the dead.

In that resurrection, we can trust that God’s final word to God’s people is always a loud and resounding yes. We have a God that can’t let God’s people go. We have a God that won’t let sin and death have the final word for us or for this world. It is God’s life – the new life and the new creation – of the resurrection that has the final word – freeing us from all that threatens us, freeing us from all tries to tell us that we’re not worthy of God and God’s love, freeing us from our own sin, - even freeing ourselves from those parts of ourselves from the you you hide.

So, today, I give thanks because we have a God who knows us so intimately and deeply – the good, the bad, everything in between – and remains with us. I give thanks that we can say “You are my God.” And we can trust that “You are my God” – in the best of times and in the worst of times. Psalm 118 says it another way “with the Lord on my side, I do not fear.” Because we have a God that is so completely and totally on our side, we do not have to fear. And I give thanks that God’s final word to me, to you, to all of humanity is a loud and resounding yes.

I hope that, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, whether you’re gathering with family or friends, whether you’re going to Jimmy’s for the community dinner, whether you’re having a quiet evening at home, you hear God’s yes to you. I hope that whether Thanksgiving brings with it joy or sorrow, companionship or loneliness, or a bit of all of it, you hear God’s promise that God is with you there in whatever the holidays bring. And I hope that, among all the other things we have to give thanks for, we give thanks for the God that knows us inside and out and refuses to let us go. For:


“Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
And settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

Thanks be to God for that.
Amen.