Thanksgiving is for Giving

I once brought a high school youth group to New York to work at the soup kitchen at Holy Apostles.  They saw a lot of things that opened their privileged, suburban eyes to life as much of the rest of the world knows it.  Before we left, I asked the group to reflect on what they had learned.  One girl, a high school senior who lived in a gated community with a house on the water and a large boat tied to the dock at the end of her back yard answered the question readily.  “I learned to be thankful for how much I have,” she said. 

On Thursday of last week, one week before Thanksgiving, I returned from a pilgrimage introducing bishops and other church leaders to the Episcopal Church’s ministry in Haiti.  They, too, saw a lot of things that were not part of their normal experience.  Now almost four years after the devastation of an earthquake, there are still tens of thousands living in tent cities, admittedly much fewer than before.  Many schools and churches, although there has been remarkable progress, are still in temporary open-air facilities.  Piles of rubble and garbage are largely, though not entirely, gone from the streets.  Cholera remains a problem.  So does hunger.  We witnessed some of the pent up frustration flow over in civil unrest.  I wondered about the question I had asked my youth group and if the church leaders I was with would answer the same way—“I learned to be thankful for how much I have.”

Is that what Thanksgiving has come to mean, being thankful for how much we have?  If that is so, thankfulness has gotten linked with keeping what we gave been given, which makes it antithetical, rather than receptive, to generosity.  If that is so, what have the people of Haiti to be thankful for?  Where are they left when it comes to our Thanksgiving holiday?

If Thanksgiving is about being thankful for how much we have, surely it must be being thankful for how much we have to give and not how much we have to keep.  When thankfulness gets mixed up with who has the right to keep what, that’s a problem.  Thankfulness is more properly linked to participating in the giving and not in being the recipient of the giving. 

Here’s what I learned in Haiti.  I’m thankful for how much I have to give.  I hope that’s what all of us on that trip may have learned, how much we have to give and the spirit to do so.  That’s what makes for Thanksgiving.

Of course, all that might at first glance leave one wondering again about the people of Haiti.  If Thanksgiving is properly linked to how much we have to give, what again have they to be thankful for?  The answer, I think, is what they taught me in the days leading up to Thanksgiving week.  They gave me a great gift indeed, which is to seeing being thankful differently than I may have been inclined to see it before. 

Some of us have material gifts to give.  Some of us have spiritual ones.  I am grateful for the material gifts I have been given to give away.  And I am even more grateful for the spiritual gifts the people of Haiti have been given and shared so generously with me now over many trips there.  Thanksgiving is for giving because giving begets more giving.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Peace,
+Stacy

Persistence

The prophet Isaiah paints a picture of the new world God is creating from the old as stunning today as it was so many years ago. 

No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.  They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.  They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.  They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD-- and their descendants as well. (65:20-23)

He sums it up:  I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. (v.18)

As stunning as God’s vision of new heavens and a new earth may be, I cannot believe God doing so would be as easy as the snap of the divine fingers.  After all, the old way is the way it is because it was working for someone.

Isaiah concludes with a beautiful vision. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox (v. 25).  Surely he knew that the wolf was not going to greet the new order with quite the same enthusiasm as the lamb, nor the lion from quite the same perspective as the ox.  The wolves and lions, I suspect, might be expected to voice a dissenting opinion on the joy God promises.  Perhaps they might even be expected to resist, in the nature of wolves and lions, with teeth bared.

Jesus, for one, knew that the coming of the new did not mean the old would go away quietly.  Nation would rise against nation, the coming of the new would be betrayed by those closest at hand, family and friends, and God’s allies in the new vision would be hated and persecuted.  For us, Jesus said, “by your endurance, you will gain your souls.”  I prefer to think of it as persistence.

God’s new dream for the creation will, in the end, prevail, but we would be naive to think the old was going away without a fight.  For God said, according to Isaiah, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.”  (65:17)

Peace,
+Stacy

Grace is Not Limited by Law

The big theological debate of Jesus’ day was about the resurrection.  The Pharisees, along with Jesus, believed in it.  The Sadducees did not.  The answer has to do with the law and its limitations. 

The Sadducees looked to Torah and found nothing there about the resurrection.  Indeed, the law does not speak to the resurrection explicitly.  In fact, Deuteronomy, particularly surrounding the death of Moses, strongly suggests that there is no resurrection. 

The Pharisees believed differently.  Their argument is not directly from Scripture but on the implication of Scripture—from the kind of God Scripture describes, well, there must be a resurrection. 

Jesus makes something of an argument by implication himself in this week’s gospel reading (Lk. 20:27-38).  Based on the description in Genesis that God is the God of the patriarchs, Jesus concludes that God is only the God of the living and not of the dead and it really wouldn’t make much sense if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were just dead and not raised to new life.  Well, it is something of a logical sleight of hand since the plain sense of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is that God is the God of Abraham in his life and of Isaac in his life and of Jacob in his life, not necessarily then and forever. 

But I don’t think Jesus is pulling a logical trick here.  Jesus is asserting that grace cannot be limited by law.  On the merits of it, I think you have to give the Sadducees that purely on the basis of Scripture, meaning in this case the Torah, you certainly couldn’t require a belief in the resurrection if indeed you can derive one at all.  On the other hand, if grace is not restricted by the letter of the law, there is plenty of reason to hope.  That, I think, is Jesus’ point. 

At least that is the way it is for God, that God’s extravagant grace cannot be limited or controlled by law (which, by the way, is an expression of God’s grace, not its antithesis).  The question is whether we share enough of God’s generosity for it to be that way for us.

Peace,
+Stacy