The Paradox of Giving Thanks

For Thanksgiving, the sermon I preached this past Sunday evening at a Tallmadge ecumenical Thanksgiving service.

Scripture Reading - Deuteronomy 8:7-18

⁷For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, ⁸a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, ⁹a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. ¹⁰You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you. ¹¹ Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. ¹²When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, ¹³and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, ¹⁴then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, ¹⁵who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous- snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, ¹⁶and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. ¹⁷Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’  (NRSV)

Sermon

Oscar Wilde wrote that there are two tragedies in life.

            The first is not getting what you want.

            The second is getting it.

Getting what we want can be a tragedy.  God was bringing the Hebrew people into the promised land that would be their home, out of slavery in Egypt, and out of the hardship of the forty year wilderness journey.  At this defining moment, God gives them a message for them to remember in the years to follow.  There will come a time when life will be wonderful, when all good gifts will be full and abundant.  They will have all you want of grains and fruit, streams and wells for fresh water, shelter and security in a land of plenty.  And when that happens, they start to think that they did it all for themselves and it is no big deal.

When God freed them from slavery, and when they depended on God for water and manna to eat in the wilderness, they were as close to God as an infant to a mother, knowingly dependent and thankful for God’s constant care.  But when the days of crisis end, their dependence on God becomes more subtle, less obvious and desperate.  When that happens, it is harder to remember that these gifts are given by God.  The paradox of thanksgiving is that sometimes the more we have to be thankful for, the less thankful we are.  “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God” the scripture says, to them and to us.

Reading tough parts of the Bible

The Bible can be a hard read.  Take Exodus, the great story of God freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, with Moses in the lead, who went before Pharaoh and said “let my people go!”  Great story, right?

I was talking recently with a bring high school student in our church who had been reading Exodus, and got into an interesting discussion about some of the difficult parts of the account.  Specifically, why did God harden the Pharaoh’s heart over and over again.  Every time Pharaoh seemed about ready to let the Hebrews go, the scripture says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh did not let them go.  The thing that happens each time is that Moses has to go back again and say “let my people go!”  Then the really bad thing that happens each time is that God sends another plague to convince Pharaoh to listen to Moses.  There are locusts, frogs, the Nile river turns to blood, and at the very end, every first born animal and child of Egypt dies.

Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart?

Why did God keep coming back for more?

These are important questions, and they are not easy.  The picture of God trying to increase the conflict is directly at odds with the revelation of God in Jesus, who endured violence rather than inflict it.  In a problem like this, I believe that we need to interpret one part of scripture in light of the other, and I’m always going to start with the character of Jesus.  Jesus shows us that God is not violent.   This is not to say that we should ignore Exodus.  Instead, we should trust God’s Spirit to be present as we interpret Exodus in light of God’s character.  Maybe Exodus is a story about how any change for good is a process, not easily obtained.  Maybe the ancient Jews couldn’t imagine the thought that Pharaoh could have denied God over and over again, and it was easier for them to assume that God had chosen to harden Pharaoh’s heart, even if it made God seem vindictive.  Maybe the Hebrew people started out understanding God as only caring about them, and grew to understand that God cares for all nations, with the help of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jonah.

Or, you could say that Exodus paints the truer picture of God, and Jesus is the exception.  It would certainly make it easier to be mean to your enemies.

Sermon - The Sound of God's Trumpet

Sermon preached on October 30 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio UCC