Thanksgiving Day

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Thanksgiving Day
PROPER: A, B, C
PLACE: St. John’s Parish, Kingsville
DATE: November 27,1997

TEXT: Matthew 6:25-33 - Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat? or What will we drink? or What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father know that you need all these things. But strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these thing will be give to you as well.

ISSUE: We Americans are indeed often anxious about our lives. Our focus, according to the Scripture, needs to be on the fact that God provides us what we really need. Keeping focused on God makes us truly aware of what we have to be thankful for: We are God’s people with mission and meaningful purposes.
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The passage from Matthew today is directed by Jesus to peasant people of his time. They were indeed anxious about their lives. They lived day to day, hand to mouth. Not only were wages minimal, but they were heavily taxed. Like us Americans who are often anxious about our old age, our retirement, and whether or not Social Security will hold out, the peasants of Jesus time struggled with each day.
Jesus, however, comes to them with this message not to be anxious. Neither men nor women. “Consider the birds of the air,” he says. (The Aramaic word for Birds is a masculine noun.) “They neither reap, nor sow, nor gather into barns.” Reaping, sowing, and gathering was men,s work.
“Consider the lilies of the field,” says Jesus, “They neither toil nor spin.” (The Aramaic word for lilies is a feminine noun) And, of course toiling (or making clothes) and spinning was women’s work.
Jesus makes an appeal to the whole of the community not to be anxious about their lives. Anxiety will not add anything to their lives. Their focus is to be upon God who is the Giver and the Provider of all things needful. The poor of Jesus’ time are to place their faith and confidence in the bountiful love of God to provide for them all that they need. They are to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all the other things will come. Jesus assured them of God’s love and caring.
Most of us in the next few weeks ahead will be just as likely to be anxious about what we are going to buy and get for Christmas. We are likely to be anxious about getting the perfect gifts and planning for the most beautiful and the most perfect of all Christmas seasons. Perhaps the passage needs to speak to us as much as it needed to address the anxiety of 1st century peasants. This is a time and a season to contemplate the Kingdom of God. It is a time for us to focus on what God is doing and has already done in our lives. It is a time to consider what God calls us to do and be.
On Thanksgiving Day in our country we pause to give thanks. More often than not our first items of thankfulness for which we are grateful may well be all the stuff and junk we have accumulated in our garages, basements, and attics. Aren’t we a blessed people, because we have so many possessions. In some sense they are. But our affluence is hardly all that there is to be thankful for. Usually we think of possessions as something we ourselves have gotten and accomplished. After all we are supposed to be self-made men and women. What of those who are poor and dispossed in terms of posessions? Are unaffluent to thought of as the cursed of God?
We can also be grateful for good schools, for this good country founded upon the principles of democracy and our forefathers who provided this form of government. We can be grateful for those who have been dedicated to healing and health. Tremendous strides have been made in so many scientific and medical areas that have given real comfort and hope to our lives. Are the uneducated, the diseased and the victims of tyrannical governments also the cursed?
We also have in many instances family, children, spouses, friends, people who love us. These are surely a precious gifts for which to be grateful. We may be truly blessed to know and enjoy the comfort and the deep inner peace that comes from being loved by others. Yet there are those who are alone and depressed.
Our own being is special. We have the remarkable ability to reason, to have memory, to be skilled with so many varieties of talents. Loss of mental capacity and loss of physical abilities are often seen as great tragedy and a partial living death.
What is, however, the great issue for us as Christians, as a people of God, is that every good and perfect gift is from God. All that we are and all that we experience in our lives comes from God the Creator. And while there are times when we forget to be grateful, and times when we are intent upon being anxious, greedy, and self-involved, we are still given the comfort and the knowledge of a forgiving and loving God.
We may well gather here this morning to thank God and to be truly grateful for the inestimable bounty and love of God. But it is also important that we respond to the God who has given us so much to be sharing and giving in the way we live our lives.
Young immature children often have great trouble with the concept of sharing. They see sharing a toy as losing it to someone else. They become very anxious and will fight, cry, or throw a tantrum to keep what they believe to be their own. It is only through the process of growing and maturing that children come to learn that sharing in community is as much fun if not more so.
In our world to be a greedy anxious people is immature and destructive. To be anxious about what we will eat, or drink, or wear, and thankful for being more fortunate than others is truly a sinful and immature way of being. To grow in maturity and to be a sharing and giving people makes for a very different kind of world. To seek God and his kingdom is to discover that all things from the very beginning are God’s possessions. He has shared them with us and for that we can indeed be grateful, for life is a wonderful, wonderful gift from God. To share it with others, to share the wealth, to share forgiveness, to share love, to be God’s own giving people is surely the way we live out our thankfulness for all that God has given us and it is truly a healthy way a responsible way of living.
Do not be anxious for all the possessions. First seek God and his Kingdom, his way, and rejoice and give thanks for the ability to share the abundance.