Ezekiel 34:  4-6, 15: Ephesians 1:15,16

Thanksgiving humbug

How do we get to gratitude, how do we get to being thankful?  Does it take a major scare of some sort or seeing your neighbor go through something which you avoided?  I have already said the message on thanksgiving Sunday is likely to be to most boring of the year:”give thanks.” Unless, unless we dig a little deeper. This is what I am proposing today. So I wanted to start by us complaining which is the opposite of being thankful it seems.  In our lectionary reading in Ezekiel we find God complaining about how the people are not being well looked after.  These are God’s sheep.  God is not happy and eventually says God will personally guarantee that the people will be taken care of.  This passage can help us, because if God can complain so can we, provided the complaint is legitimate and not made just to be difficult.  I am sure you have all felt at one point or another that when you were sincerely venting your frustration or disappointment or hurt  and someone told you to be grateful for what you had, your frustration just got deeper, because not only are those problems you complained about still there, now you feel guilty for being such a whiner.  It occurred to me that in the church we have two competing narratives or stories.  One narrative is: we come to church, we forget our cares, we praise and thank God and feel better.  The other is the narrative: come to church and be with people you can really share your problems with without worrying what they might think.  In a really healthy church you get both the thanksgiving and the venting.  In the work of the pastor you get both these narratives.  The venting is what you get more of during the week through counseling: people expressing their misery to you but then thanking you for listening.  On Sunday, other than the prayer concerns, it is more a thankful celebration.  Both the complaining and the thankfulness have their dangers.  Complaining can be a way of life.  In Japanese the word is monku-monku.  There is a story of a pastor hanging up a sign in a part of the church. It said:”No monku zone.” Some people always complain it seems. We are wary of that.  We are also aware of how in many cultures criticism and complaint is a way of motivating children and the damage that did.  Boris Johnson, the mayor of London has just written a biography of Winston Churchill and he talks about how Churchill’s father Randolph used to call his son a “wastrel” in his letters to Winston in boarding school.  After he left power Churchill wrote a story where he imagines his dead father sitting next to him as a kind of ghost and he starts telling him about his life and the moment he is about to tell his father how he became successful beyond expectation, whoof the ghost is gone. Charlie Rose who was interviewing Boris Johnson, then said:” Do you know how many men I have had at this table who pretty much said the same thing ‘I did ok, Pop.’”  Complaining can be damaging when it is used to manipulate people, friends.  People spend too much time of their life disproving the complaints people have had about them. Those critical voices are still with me. That kind of complaining can never be good in the long run. But in some ways complaining is also like sneezing or going to the bathroom.  Being positive and thankful all the time is great quality, as long as does not become glib or superficial or condescending.

So the question again is: “how do we get to gratitude? We often treat it as a diversion or distraction from the burdens of life:” yes, you have it hard, but be grateful for what’s not wrong.” But this only lasts a moment.  Then we are back to thinking about our issues and problems.  But we are learning something here.  It’s not thanksgiving or complaining and venting.  This is both.  They are both part of living effectively.  Without the thanks we become sour. Without the venting we become a ball of nerves.   Thanksgiving is not a denial of our problems.  In that sense I don’t think the story of the first Thanksgiving is the right one.  I think someone spun that one to make it an idyllic scene.  I am sure it wasn’t a perfect community and neither was there perfect harmony between the Pilgrims and the indigenous people. We know the diet was probably quite different.  I bet there was some complaining going on.   I bet there was sorrow.  So in a weird way complaint and thanksgiving  may be related.  It is in fully knowing the obstacles life throws before us that we can be fully thankful, that in spite of the things we feel like complaining about, joy is still waiting for us.  The Psalm writer whose words we find in our call to worship did not write because his life was smooth but because despite his struggles a voice rose up inside him.   Paul did not write in Ephesians an expression of sincere thankfulness because he was having a great day, he wrote fully aware of the trials and dangers around him.  Friends, thanksgiving is the joy that awaits us as we take stock of our challenges and navigate through and around them. Thanks be to God!