Grateful for the Future

Thanksgiving Eve 11.25.15

Westwood Lutheran

…then it was said among the nations,
   ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ 
³ The Lord has done great things for us,
   and we rejoiced.

Happy Thanksgiving! I love this holiday that still, somehow, has some purity in its practice – it’s hasn’t been overdone by Hallmark or included mass amount of greed or getting.  Tomorrow is day set aside for gathering and feasting and simply letting our words be words of gratitude. Will your Thanksgiving include uttering those words, listing and naming what you’re grateful for?  I’ve seen quite a few social media waves with people posting images or words of thankfulness for every day of this month – spreading out the meaning of the day and so much of it is thankfulness for what has been, what was given, what was fixed or restored or offered.  It’s a sweet idea and fills my screen with gratitude, for which I am grateful! Our gratitude flows out of our nostalgic view, from hindsight comes the blessings counting and the good gift naming.

Our psalm reading, Psalm 126 is a looking back kind of psalm, one that remembers and names what was good and life-sustaining.  Psalm 126 was written by a person, or maybe a whole people who knew, first hand, what wandering in wilderness is like.  The author of this psalm knew about homelessness, physical hunger, loss of identity, the feeling of the absence of God – the author was most likely an Israelite who had been sent away from his own land.  The author of Psalm 126 is a refugee.  

…then it was said among the nations,

   ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ 

³ The Lord has done great things for us,

   and we rejoiced. 

The wandering mass of God’s people eventually found a land and heard of God’s favor once again.  And then the psalm was penned through the memory of what had happened and the gratitude came out of hindsight.  The Lord has done great things for us! The rejoicing and the thankful hearts all come to life through memory and acknowledgement of what had happened.

The Hebrew people were not always thankful, in fact they are notorious for wavering back and forth with God about being abandoned, neglected, and left to starve and rot out in the desert.  Their thankfulness is typically short-lived with their fickle memories and uncertain faith in God.

Our thankfulness is usually dependent on our memories, on what we choose to lift us as memorable and worthy of being counted around the Thanksgiving table or uttered in our prayers. This makes me nervous, for I fear that my memory is like the Israelites – picky and short-term, prone to fear and doubt. Is our gratitude confined to the past? Can we only be thankful for what has been and even then we survey what has come to us in this life and lift up the good, trying really hard to forget the hurtful stuff – and our Thanksgiving lists become trite. How else can we know what we’re thankful for if it hasn’t been done or given?

Just a few moments ago we sang a song from the Taize, which is a monastic community in France that gathers thousands of people every year for chanting and silence, prayer and intentional community.  Their music is often short and repetitive with words of prayer and power.  And the song we sang today wasn’t set in the past tense – it is a song of gratitude, but it’s pointed toward the future!

 “In the Lord I’ll be ever thankful, in the Lord I will rejoice” it’s a future statement – it’s a faith statement! “In the Lord I will be ever thankful…” this kind of thankfulness is not dependent on our memories; it’s not about yesterday or last year…and there is strength in that kind of statement.  Did you hear it?

What if gratitude was the powerful force with which we went into tomorrow and the next day? What if gratitude was our statement of faith for the ventures of which we cannot see the ending?

Fear is often what carries us into the unknown.  Fear is all over the place these days and with good reason.  There are gun shots in our city, there is sexual abuse in our churches, there is hatred and suspicious between people and public servants.  I am not grateful for any of it! And I’m mostly left doubting and despairing, I’m mostly left with fear for the future.  So I near words that are not hinging on my own memories,  we need stories that tell of courage and justice and new creations.  We, as people of faith, need songs to sing:

…In the Lord I will be ever thankful, in the Lord I will rejoice.  

Look to God to not be afraid lift up your voices the Lord is near. 

Lift up your voices the Lord is near.

We are children of a God who has done great things for us in the past, and this God is on the move, bringing the kingdom of God ever and always in our world, our city, our churches and we are called, as reconciled and freed children to be a part of God’s movement into tomorrow and the day after that! We are called to be a part of our families and our church communities, to be in our neighborhoods and in the streets, we are called to be God’s hands and feet and voice in this place – so what will carry us into tomorrow?  Fear and weakness are certainly a part of us, but what if gratitude was the power and the guiding force that went before us?

Looking back and knowing the stories of our faith is a major way that God reveals who God is in this world.  Knowing the stories of the Israelite, of the prophet Joel who spoke of creation being renewed and knowing the stories of Jesus who tells us not to worry or store up treasures in heaven, these are all stories that reveal who God is – so we look back, we hear the stories of God’s great faithfulness to all people and we say thank you.

Just in the same way that gathering with multiple generations and hearing the stories of the grandparents or telling the stories of the people now gone helps the growing generations to know where they’ve come from, what their family line is all about – it helps us all know who we are.  So we look back, we hear the stories, we say thank you.

And in the hearing, in the compassionate listening we are changed! People of God your story now includes the refugees that penned Psalm 126. And the stories of the refugees, of the once barren earth, the stories of a Savior trying to teach and shape a people of faith are our stories for which we give thanks.  And it is these stories that launch us into tomorrow’s journey of faith.

Does tomorrow’s journey of faith include the refugee, the barren earth, the doubting, the fear, the protester and the prophet, the teacher and our Savior? Yes, it does! So go into your future, into God’s future, not with fear, but with thankful hearts that are made of stories of faith that over and over tell us, and tell our city and tell our families that God is indeed near to us.

…In the Lord I will be ever thankful, in the Lord I will rejoice. 

Look to God to not be afraid lift up your voices the Lord is near.  

Lift up your voices the Lord is near.

Amen.