THANKSGIVING 2008
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

November 23, 2008

Luke 17: 11:19

We are on the precipice of the official holidays. Thanksgiving is but four days away. Christmas is a mere month in the future. This year on the national scene will be much different. The last six or seven years we turned on our televisions to discover that last year's sales records had been eclipsed and the economy was roaring forward. Our pension funds were doubling and home prices were out of sight. Sadly, so it seems, so was good old common sense, out of sight. An interesting thing about common sense, it seems to be out of vogue for long periods of time, but it always gets its job back in the end. When life gets out of whack common sense is always there, ready and eager to provide the very boring and sane common sense that the world seems to need with regularity.

If our economic world has not been bad enough lately, with the stock market losing nearly all its value gains since the last recession, at the end of this week we heard about the newest economic worry and anxiety, deflation, an actual fall in prices. I'm willing to be big about what it takes to keep an economy running competitively strong. I'm willing to pay more to go green for the environment even though burning oil and coal is so much cheaper in the short term. I'll bite the bullet. Though I think I understand the long term consequences of real prices dropping too far down, a little deflation has been for most people who have been struggling to keep their heads above the water the first bit of economic news to have something to be thankful about in a long, long time as speculative pricing has boosted costs for basic necessities far beyond the reach of a majority of the world's people.

An interesting sidebar to hunting for reasons to be thankful at this economic time: if prices were to drop 1% for a year, that would provide a buying boost, if incomes remained steady, of $60 billion dollars available to spend in this economy. That's the same amount that the BIG 3 automakers are asking from us taxpayers.

Thanksgiving, it must be about more than my personal, the national, or the global economy. There are several web sources for preaching materials. I favor one or two of them with regularity. It is a great time to be a preacher. With the click of a button there are more preaching resources than ever before in history. I hit the button the other day and where there are normally, let's say, 150 different sermons, there were three thanksgiving sermons to review. You see, Thanksgiving is a national holiday and not part of our normal religious routine. So perhaps it is about the economy, really.

Those English pilgrims did have a meal with their Native American allies back in 1630. Those native folks in Massachusetts had literally saved those early English settlers' lives by teaching them how to plant crops native to the northeast, how to cook with them, and how to hunt in a land much different than the lands they had come from. The pilgrims had their very survival to be thankful for. Of course, they believed with great hubris that God had ordained that they should survive, not that the Native Americans were decent folks, giving folks all on their own. No, the pilgrims were Calvinists through and through, and believed in manifest destiny, that demanded that whatever or whoever was in this new land was there for the benefit of the new Europeans come ashore. Those Pilgrim Fathers were not long-term thankful to the native folks. It came as a surprise to the native Americans in the Massachusetts area that the pilgrims were going to stay and call this land home. The native tribes believed wrongly that the pilgrims, after a good meal or two would, like our in-laws, go home. You and I both know that it got very ugly after that first Thanksgiving. The native tribes have never celebrated with us again and I must admit that I remain a tad sad and very awkward celebrating a national holiday that has at its mythical core the near extermination of a whole culture of people. My thanksgiving prayer always includes a memory statement of heartfelt repentance for those millions who were killed and displaced so that we might be living here today.

Mark Twain commented over a hundred years ago on this reality when he wrote:

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank th e Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments .

Some will say that such realities just take a good holiday and ruin them of their happiness and purity. Of course, my struggle is how to be thankful or what is there to be thankful for in the midst of these horrible realities of cultural genocide, and millions of our neighbors out of work, and retirement savings that have dwindled along with our home values. By the time I get to my thanksgiving prayer of Thursday... all of these things have to be present or I'm rather sure that God finds my prayers of thankfulness rather empty.

Abraham Lincoln often gets over-used in our politics, but it is to him that we must go back and find the impetus for this holiday, for it was Lincoln who made official what one woman had been fighting to achieve for most of her adult life.an official designation of a national holiday of thankfulness. A few of you here remember that that former President Franklin Roosevelt tried to change Thanksgiving from the 4 th to the 3 rd Thursday of November in an attempt to extend the Christmas shopping season by one week as an aid to the economy during the Great Depression. Back then several groups referred to it as Franksgiving and celebrated the Democratic Thanksgiving on the 3 rd Thursday and the Republican Thanksgiving on the more traditional date that we still use today. That old story should cause a few of us to cough on our turkey as we celebrate the Republican holiday.

Lincoln's thanksgiving proclamation was born with a nation at war with herself. In 1863 the war had already killed nearly 500,000 US citizens. Given how small our population was at that time in history, these were tremendous losses. Farms were decimated and food supplies desperately low. Injured and severely maimed soldiers were coming home by the hundreds of thousands and families were in crisis emotionally, spiritually and economically.

Lincoln—not a traditional Christian by any means, he refused to join any church—was nevertheless a person of great faith and belief that God was dearly and deeply involved in the lives of people and nations. Lincoln gave his people quite a sermon in his proclamation as he sought to remind his nation that despite the ugly daily realities of war, slavery, families fighting against families, a spiraling national debt, and destruction of the nation's infrastructure—that there were many principles, hope and present realities to be very, very thankful for. Lincoln believed fervently that a people who did not recognize what there was to be thankful for could not sustain the long and good, difficult fight that was still before them.

We have from our Scriptures this morning a very famous story that challenges us to ponder the root of our thankfulness. There were ten lepers, all of whom were healed and only one returned to give thanks to Jesus.

Let's try to understand this Scripture by allowing ourselves to look into what we know about it. These ten suffered from some sort of skin disease which may or may not have been what we call Hanson's disease, the horrifying condition in which limbs and digits lose their circulation, deteriorate, decay and fall off. Whatever the actual condition, a variety of words are used in the Christian Scriptures and we just don't know any more than to say that what these folks had was visible and it resulted in them being declared unclean.

The matter of being physically and ritually unclean was far more problematic than having the disease itself; it multiplied the problems. “It incorporated a self-understanding, which could be variously defined as “unacceptable” or “incomplete” both to other humans as well as to God. Being unclean, …especially to extremists…, could mean “…no one…paralyzed in his fe et or hands, or lame, or blind, or deaf, or dumb, or smitten in his flesh with a visible blemish…” would be allowed into sacred settings because holy angels are also present there” (J. Jeremias, D. Zersen). A bad zit day in most of our adolescen cees could have condemned us and did many.

That the text places the lepers along the Samaritan/Galilean boarder is more than just a geographic issue. These outcasts were seriously marginalized people, living on the fringes of society. To faithful Jerusalem temple-based Jews their ugly cousins were the Jewish Samaritans who worshipped God in their temple at Mt. Garizim . It was a horrific division not so unlike the hatred and contempt one hears between New York Yankee and Boston Red Sox Fans. I hesitate to say it is like IU verse Purdue, but try to imagine with me that these people hated each other and in where we find Jesus this morning was in the border area between them. He is wandering through a leper colony, a huge community of displaced persons, probably from both sides of the divide, living on land in communities where no self-respecting person would ever live, where opportunity did not exist and where newcomers showed up daily, exiled from their communities of birth because of something as minor as a serious skin condition. There was no property value in that area……no one wanted to live there, no one wanted to invest there. This was the place for displaced people, broken toys, broken lives and yes, as you might suspect, a good place to live if you were wanted by the law. Even to visit there resulted in your being at least temporarily unclean and you had to go get ritually cleansed. So the easiest thing to do was never go there and, of course, THERE WE FIND JESUS.

Jesus is fussin' with us this morning. He was causing problems in his day as well. Given the Jewish attitude toward unclean people and foreign people, Jesus attends to the request of some seriously outcast people. Jesus stands over against his entire tradition saying that ritual and ceremonial and legal laws of segregation, fences between countries, are not really important to God. God accepts each and every person, regardless of his/her situation, and invites one after another into a relationship, a community of persons in which forgiveness cancels sin and love empowers action. Jesus invites them to cross over into a land of promise. JESUS COMES INTO THE LAND OF THE LIVING DEAD AND COVERS THEM WITH THE LIVING GRACE OF GOD. That is Good News.

It is very understandable that one of the recipients of that grace, of that love, of that acceptance, dropped down on their knees and gave thanks to Jesus. But, for the life of me, it is equally understandable that the other nine took off and ran forth to claim their new life in God, the grace that made them whole, that brought them fully into the community of God's people. I believe they were thankful and they expressed it every day for the rest of their lives.

I would have a difficult time on Thanksgiving sitting down at our table filled with many good foods if I did not first join with all of you around this table and most significantly give of my wealth and share with the thousands in our county who need our giving in order to have the basics in their life.

On Christmas Eve there will be women and their children who come from homes where either mother and/or children are being actively abused by their fathers…, they will come in cold, scared, hungry and feeling very displaced. They will come to Middleway House and the presents that the children receive on Christmas Day will come from those of us who tear off a tag from this wreath and make available thanks to the efforts of our youth group who are heading up this project. If you want to know what grace looks like, imagine with me the face of a mother able to give a present to her child because someone cared enough in give in advance.

I am able to sit at my personal thanksgiving table because I am with you gathered first around this table that welcomes all, that invites all to sit at this table, to eat from this table, to be equal at this table, this universal table of love and acceptance that knows no distinction between men or women, gay or straight, colors of skin, academic credentials or job placements or politics. All are welcomed and all are challenged to get up from this table and go forth and find those who don't feel welcomed, who have not been welcomed and to stand amongst the most outcast ones like Jesus did and bless them with the assurances that they are loved, that they are accepted and that here, at God's table, all are welcomed, as we have been, and for that we are a thankful people.

Amen.