1 Thanksgiving Day, 2009, Trinity Church If the starting point of your faith is Original Sin those potentially destructive things we carry around with us then your first response in the faith will likely be confession: confession for what you have done to others and to yourself, confession for what you left undone. The starting point for many Christians, maybe most, is Original Sin. I would like to think, however, that our starting point might not be that, but rather Original Blessing. The idea of Original Sin begins in the chapter three of Genesis with the Fall of Adam and Eve. But Blessing, God s gift of the Good Creation fills the verses of Genesis one and two, before the Fall.. God we learn in these two chapters has created everything Good, the world around us, the birds that Jesus talks about in today s Gospel, the lilies of the field, more beautiful than anything that the richest king, Solomon, could produce. The crowning creation is of course us, the man and the woman, made in the image of God. And most important the man and woman are blessed! Our world is blessed, we are blessed. That means that God has given us full unconditional, no-strings-attached love.... Maybe the closest you can get to the meaning of God s blessing is to think of one person in your growing up years who gave you the most unconditional, no-strings attached love, what the New Testament calls agape. A person who loved you not for what you did but for who you are, a child of God. This person it could be a parent, an older relative, a caregiver, a teacher would not have given that love to you perfectly. But from that person, you would have received a blessing that you carry with you for all the days of your life. Who is that special person? Take a few moments.
2 So if you have received blessing from those who raised you and I hope the church was part of that blessing in your growing up years then you can imagine just how powerful the blessing is that God wants to give us, our God, the creator of a Good World, a world of love and harmony and beauty, the beauty of what Jesus calls the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. My starting point in the faith is Original Blessing. Of course, I must always pay attention to my potential for hurting others even as I hurt myself. I must pay attention to the Fall in Genesis Three what the Church has long called Original Sin. But if we start with Original Blessing and make it our own, we will have the strength to fully examine ourselves just as we are. We will have the strength to see how destruction of one kind or another works in us. We will have the strength to see how Sin lurks at our door, to use the expressive words of Genesis four. (Sin, we are told lurks at Cain s door when he is overwhelmed by his jealousy toward his brother, Abel.) Since today is Thanksgiving Day, today is a great time to give thanks for God s many blessings, that all flow from Original Blessing in Genesis One and Two. Today, I hope we can give thanks for our lives even during the hard times. I wish I could tell you all the wonderful stories of many people I have known from this congregation and other places, who were able to give thanks, even during difficult times, especially maybe during difficult times.
3 One of those persons was Madeline Jones. (Many of you knew her.) For decades, Madeline was one of our most faithful, most talented altar guild ladies. But then she came down with a lethal kind of cancer, so of course I went by to see her. She told me that she did not have long to live, maybe two months. How are you dealing with that, Madeline, I asked. William, she said, I am dealing with it with thanksgiving. What! I asked. Thanksgiving, yes. You see, I was supposed to die from a heart condition over ten years ago. I have given thanks every day I have lived since then, every day for ten years. I don t think of having only two months to live. I thank God that he is giving me another two months of life, that after the ten years he has already given me.... Now that s thanksgiving! And it flows right from Original Blessing. Madeline felt blessed. Three or four weeks ago, in our TLB (Transforming Literature of the Bible) group that Harriet Murrell and I lead each week, we talked about thanksgiving. We were studying the Exodus Event when the children of Israel, who had been slaves in Egypt, crossed the Red Sea to begin their long journey, their long struggle to freedom. You can read the Exodus passage in different ways as you try to figure out just what happened. But one thing is clear: Once on the other side of the Red Sea, once the former slaves know that their journey to freedom has begun, at the campfires that night, what do they do? They do not congratulate themselves for their bravery and their cunning. They do not attribute their escape to sheer luck, to the fact that a
4 mighty east wind came up blowing back the shallow waters of the Sea of Reeds allowing them to cross over. The response of the Israelites and you can think of this as the moment the real nation of Israel began the response was thanksgiving. In one of the oldest fragments in the Old Testament, Miriam took up her tambourine and sang and danced with this refrain. Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously Sing to God, for our God has delivered us from slavery. From that moment on, Israel and later the Christian church, we have been at our best with our songs of thanksgiving for all the good that God has done for us and for the world. But it all began with Miriam s song. Sing to the Lord, sing to Yahweh. At our TLB group that night, each person recalled special things that they were thankful for, and how, when they acknowledged those things, especially out loud to others, they were drawn closer to the God who is always trying to break through to us.... The fascinating thing was that most in our TLB group talked about being thankful during difficult times, not just happy times. Their offerings of thanksgiving were a lot like that of Madeline Jones, thanksgiving for life itself, thanksgiving that we too have been blessed. In the often repeated words of John Hevron s mother: The two most important words in the English language are thank you. I want to close with a story of thanksgiving, a true story; it is one that I first told to a Sunday School class. I tell it now because it makes me realize how important it is that God has given us the capacity to give thanks. The teacher in this story speaks
5 to me still across almost six decades. She made me realize how life-giving thanksgiving is. It happened in Miss Parham s sixth grade class at Craft s Public School in Charleston, South Carolina, where I grew up. The year was about 1950. It was in her class that I had my first lesson on how God created a good world and created in us the capacity to appreciate the good. The lesson came about because of Lee Bennett's stubbornness. He was by far the smartest boy in the class, one of those boy geniuses who go to college at age fourteen, and he kept us well informed of his brilliance. "I can do anything I want to do. I can read any book I want to. I can play the accordion. I balance my parents' checkbook regularly." Lee won all the class prizes except of course Most Improved for the obvious reason that, as he said, There's nothing to improve." He bragged that he never went to church and that he would soon convince his mother that her visits to the church were a big waste of time. "There is no God," he'd say. "And even if there were, we don't need him. We can do anything we want, build anything we want." But then alas came the mockingbird nest experiment. We were studying the birds of South Carolina. Miss Parham showed us a nest that mockingbirds had built in her backyard. Eggs had been laid and hatched in that nest and the "wee" birds had grown up and flown away. "One thing no one has ever been able to do," Miss Parham said, "is to build a nest like a bird builds a nest. We may be able to invent television (this was a long time ago), make the atomic bomb, have Borden's Ice
6 Cream delivered to our front door, but nobody can build a nest the way a mama and papa mockingbird can. Holding the nest, she said, "See how they've taken all these twigs and this moss and these leaves and woven them together so that they are strong enough to protect the eggs from most any storm. When I look at what these birds can do with just their tiny feet and their beaks, it makes me know that there is a God. Only God can make a tree," Miss Parham said with a smile--she had just read us Joyce Kilmer's poem [ Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree ]--"and only God's creatures, the birds can make a nest."... "I can make a nest," Lee said. "There doesn't need to be a God to build a nest. You just need to know what you are doing. Let me try." Miss Parham took Lee up on his wager, and for the next day or two, he spent all of his home time, staying up late at night, his mother told Mrs. Parham later, trying to replicate the nest with the same twigs and leaves and moss that the mockingbirds had used.... Finally, after making a valiant attempt, Lee admitted defeat; but "that doesn't mean there's a God," he said. "Someday someone will figure out how to build a nest, better than dumb mockingbirds!" Miss Parham and this is what I have been getting at followed up the experiment by explaining how, while we human beings can do many fine things, God wants us to know that we can't do everything. "There are certain things that God wants to give us that we cannot give ourselves, she said.
7 He wants to give us the sunrise, the kind you see at the Easter Sunrise Service over Fort Sumter [in Charleston Harbor]; he wants to give us oak trees like we have at Hampton Park, and rainbows and the songs of birds and the nests they build. You see this way we will always have thankful hearts, knowing that God is doing wonderful things for us that we cannot do ourselves. And God wants us to have thankful hearts, for that is what makes us most human." Lee only frowned. Later I heard that he d become a Methodist minister. But that s another story. Happy thanksgiving everyone. May you claim God s blessing, Original Blessing, and always remember, if you soon forget everything else about this sermon, that thanks-giving is life-giving. And the two most important words in the English language are thank you. It is with this spirit of thanksgiving that we will best serve friend, family, and those Jesus called the least of these our sisters and brothers.