 Dr. Carl Price |
The Thanksgiving Trap
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“Thanksgiving can be a dangerous time of year.” You can defend that statement from more than one perspective. First, Thanksgiving can be dangerous for travelers. Thanksgiving means more people on the highways going to and coming from grandmother’s house, and it means more people on the road who shouldn’t be because the ‘sauce’ they were into was not cranberry. It is one of the highest accident weekends of the year. Thanksgiving can also be a dangerous time of year for the waistline. I know; I’ve stepped on the scales the morning after. The calories on a Thanksgiving table are fearful to contemplate. They are outright formidable, not only in number, but in appearance. Someday maybe I’ll stand in that long line to ask God why the fattening foods not only always seem to smell the best and taste the best, but even look the best. Sort of like the apples in Eden, I guess. And if the calories alone are not enough, it is compounded by all the football games. Someone once described a football game as twenty-two people on the field desperately in need of rest, being observed by seventy thousand people in the stands desperately in need of exercise. At Thanksgiving, you can add several million in their living rooms. But there is a deeper danger in Thanksgiving than traffic accidents, calorie overload and exercise neglect. Thanksgiving can be a time when what is really important to us can rise up and judge us, and that can be a fearful thing. The story in our Scripture lesson this morning is not one that is usually read on Thanksgiving, but it is a good reminder of the trap that giving thanks can hold for the unwary. If you read this story carefully, you will discover that it is about a thankful man. The Pharisee was not an ingrate. He was tremendously aware of all that God had done for him and for his ancestors. The Book of Psalms was his daily fare, and the recital of God’s blessings to the Israelites is found on almost every page of that book. The Pharisee was a grateful man. He was also a good man as far as the accepted standards of morality were concerned. His claims to virtue were neither lies nor overstatements. There is nothing in the story to suggest otherwise. He was not an adulterer, he was not unjust, he did not exhort money from others, he did not work for the hated Romans as the tax collector did. It was also true that tithing and fasting were a regular part of his spiritual discipline. In the early scriptures, fasting was called for on one day a year, the Day of Atonement. By Jesus’ day, the practice had grown a bit; the Pharisees had multiplied that to two days a week . They could even give you chapter and verse on which two days and why: Monday and Thursday, because according to tradition, Moses went up Mt. Sinai to meet God on Monday and came back down on Thursday. But the thanks giving of the Pharisee degenerated into a litany of self congratulations because it was based on comparing himself to other people, as though God played favorites in his world. All you need to do is count the number of first person pronouns in his prayer. And there is that damning phrase in the gospel story: “He stood and prayed thus with himself...” Thanksgiving can slip into that mode if we are not careful, and we can end up with Thanksgiving prayers that, while probably not as sanctimonious and self-righteous as the one that Jesus talked about, still find our gratitude rooted in a list of things that we have and deem important in contrast to those who have less than we do, and implying that it was God’s doing. Anyone who has traveled to some of what we refer to as “Third World countries” experiences a special portion of that temptation. I went through it every time I came back from what is now Congo, formerly Zaire. The temptation is to come home from such places or from seeing pictures about them and talk about being glad to live in the United States. Don’t misunderstand me. I am very glad to live here. But I need to constantly remind myself that this is more an accident of history than the placement of God. And sometimes there lurks beneath the surface of our words, that hazardous, unspoken feeling that since we have so much more in the way of wealth and comfort and standard of living than so much of the world, we must really be, not only better off, but just maybe a little better. After all, good things come from God, do they not? And we tend to always give the most to those whom we like the best, don’t we? So if God has given us so much… Do you see where the temptation is leading? Every now and then I fearfully remind myself that the offer of all the material things of this world came to Jesus in the wilderness as a temptation from the Devil, not as a gift from God. Such a tempting, well-meaning prayer: “O God, we thank you that we are not like other people.” Or the more modern, seemingly more modest version: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Do you see what I mean about Thanksgiving being a dangerous time of year? Again I ask that you not misunderstand me. I am not intending to imply that we should be contemptuous of wealth and standards of living and comfortable homes and good health and national freedoms and all those items that so traditionally end up on our list at Thanksgiving time. Ingratitude is far too prevalent in our time to belittle in the least. So please don’t think that I am suggesting that we should not give thanks at Thanksgiving time. It is just that I have lived long enough now to realize that the kind of gratitude that is called for in the Christian life is an attitude about life in general more than a response to an abundance of material things. By that, I mean that I have seen very grateful people who have next to nothing in the way of wealth or possessions, and I have seen people who seem to have everything except real gratitude. When you stop to think about it, I am sure you could say the same. Ann Landers once published a letter that she received from a young woman after a comment in one of her columns about the consideration and courtesy of writing thank you notes for gifts. The young woman said that she had never written a thank you note and never intended to, that people gave gifts because they wanted to. That letter is its own commentary on the arrogance of ingratitude. What I am suggesting is that the response to material things should not so much be one of “giving thanks” as of being faithful stewards. Giving, sharing, helping—those are the proper responses to material things. When we make them items on our Thanksgiving list, it is too easy to think that we have done our duty on the matter when we have been polite; that like good boys and girls, we have said our “Thank you, Sir” and can now proceed to devour the goodies that the nice man gave us. I am being hard on us, I know that. This is a time of year marked by generosity—the multitude of bags filled with food, the response to the needs from Hurricane Katrina, the room down the hall that will soon be filled with gifts for Angel Tree. But we have so much left! This is such a subtle thing and we in this country, and especially in communities such as this one, have so many things that we are constantly being told we should be thankful for, that now and then we may need a reminder that real gratitude isn’t really rooted in having a lot of things to be thankful for, and perhaps our situation is better stated that we have so much to be responsible for. And that can be a scary thought. Some of the most grateful people I have ever met, I met on the first visit that Pat and I made to Zaire back in 1977. Some of you have heard me refer to it. We were the guests of missionaries who themselves were models of grateful people. For the most part, they were where they were out of a sense of gratitude of what God meant in their own lives. Everywhere we traveled, we were greeted by people who joyfully expressed their gratitude for the missionaries in their midst and to us for whatever small part we might have had in helping them be there. Oh, there were some who saw us a source of ballpoint pens and digital watches and American dollars, but there were others whose words and spirit communicated a spirit of gratitude that we can never forget. We will always remember our welcome in one small village, where we sat out a tropical rainstorm in a grass thatched hut while children ran around with pans and water jars collecting the water running off the two or three tin roofs in the village. We watched the woman of the house pushing pieces of homemade charcoal under a cooking pot with her calloused hands. A little later, we sat down to eat a meal at a table where our hosts, who might eat meat once a week if they were lucky, killed two chickens and had to borrow chairs and glasses and silverware in order to set a table for three white people, two of whom they had never seen before and would never see again. What is the secret of that kind of living? I know it does not come simply from being told to “be thankful.” About the best we can hope for from that approach is some slight sense of obligation or courtesy. You can teach a child to say the right words—and indeed, it starts with that—but teaching the feeling of gratitude…that is more difficult. Feelings are more caught than taught; we catch them as we expose ourselves to others who reflect that spirit. I think the second worshiper in the temple had found part of the secret. It is so against the grain of our psychology and our culture, and it can be so easily misunderstood and twisted in such sick and misguided ways, that I hesitate to say it. But there it is: He had a sense of his own unworthiness. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” That goes so against the grain of our day. It’s unpopular, we think it is unhealthy, it’s uncommercial, it’s un-American! We are the “you deserve it, you earned it, you’re worth it culture.” If you don’t believe it, watch our commercials! None of that groveling around for us! There is a thin line between what I am talking about and the kind of feeling of unworthiness that becomes a self‑negating attitude that warps personalities and twists people into less than they can and could be. I want no part of that. There is also a fine line between true humility and that travesty of humility that is proud of excelling the humility of everyone else. I want no part of that, either. What I am talking about is an attitude that recognizes how much of life comes to us from beyond ourselves; an attitude that acknowledges that while our part is important and valuable, it is but a small part of a much greater scheme of things; that we are stewards and not owners, and we stand in need of grace and forgiveness as much as the next person. You may have heard the story. It has been around awhile. A man arrived at the gates of heaven and was asked by St. Peter why he thought he ought to be admitted. The man was a little surprised at the question, but he replied that he had attended his church faithfully, to which St. Peter replied, “That’s good. That’s one point.” “How many do I need?” the man asked. St. Peter replied that he needed a hundred points. “Oh,” the man said. “Well, I didn’t just attend. I supported it financially.” St. Peter told him that was another point. The applicant was doing some serious mind searching now, and named a couple of the committees he had served on. He got another point. Beginning to sweat a little, the man said, “I taught Sunday School and served as a youth counselor.” When St. Peter repeated his usual refrain about ‘one point,’ he added, a little indignantly, “It was junior high.” To which St. Peter said, “Oh. Then that’s another point.” He was really sweating now, and remembering some of his Scripture lessons, he mentioned that he had tried to be a good neighbor and serve his fellow human beings. St. Peter nodded encouragingly and said, “That’s good. That’s five points.” The man was relieved for a moment at hearing such a jump in his stock, but then he realized it all still only added up to ten points. He shook his head and said, almost as to himself, “Man! The only way I’m going to get in here is by the grace of God.” To which St. Peter replied, “Welcome to heaven. That’s ninety points.” It is Thanksgiving time. By all means, let us include our land and our community and family and friends in the prayers we offer. Looking at the children being baptized here this morning, listening to the voices of the children’s choirs, watching the faces of parents in the pews, how could we not be thankful? We have eleven grandchildren; they will all be with us on Thanksgiving—how could we not be thankful? On one of my returns from Zaire, when the customs officer asked me where I was coming from and I told him Zaire, he literally took off his cap and bowed and swept it across his chest and waved me along, saying, “Welcome home!” How could we not be thankful? But let’s try not to do it in any comparative way. What we have does not demonstrate that God loves us more than others. Wherever we go to church and however we get there and whatever we go home to, we still need a lot of points. The good news is, whatever our need, God’s grace is sufficient—but we do need to acknowledge that we need it.
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