Sermons - Pastor Katie Ladd
Thanksgiving Ecumenical Service
11 /27 /04
Matthew 22:34-38
In the South, where I’m from, there is a way of doing sermons that is very different than out here. Down there, especially in black or rural churches, the congregation and the preacher make the sermon together in what is known as “Call and Response.” In my old church in Nashville – a church in which a good number of folks couldn’t read English, read at all, or sit still and quiet for very long, we used call and response so that everyone was in some way a preacher. Every week the preacher would say, “God is good” and the folks in the pews would say, “All the time.” Then, the preacher would call, “All the time” and the folks would shout back, “God is good.” Let’s give it a try… “God is good” (wait for “All the time). “All the time (wait for “God is good.). Now we’re gunna try this throughout the sermon tonight so stay alert.

God is good… On this Thanksgiving Eve, out on the streets of Seattle about 3-5 thousand people are roaming. About 8,000 are without permanent housing. In overly warm and stuffy shelters, in soup kitchens, under the breezeways of churches and in our parks, people just like you and me try to find a place to rest, a little shelter from the cold rain, or a warm dinner to fill their stomachs. I have to admit that I don’t like preaching Thanksgiving services because I don’t thank God for my abundance, as though God gave me the undeserved gifts of home, safety, and family while withholding such gifts from others. It’s hard to celebrate this holiday when I know my Native American brothers and sisters have lived for centuries under the iron fist of my government, first killed, then displaced, and now struggling for simple dignity. I think about people who may sit in this very sanctuary, by all standards of society privileged, who grapple every day with real demons – depression, addiction, bitterness, disappointment, and loneliness.

I remember the cold rainy Thanksgivings of my childhood, when my whole family -- 50 or 60 of us -- would gather at my grandmother’s house for a potluck Thanksgiving. My cousin Jim and I, one year apart, were always given the honored job of ringing the old cracked green bell to signal everyone that it was time to eat. We would line up around the large kitchen with its slightly warped linoleum floor, flow out the door and through the dining room into the living room while Papaw Jesse said grace in his deep booming voice. The whole world stopped during his grace. But then, when I was about 8 or 9, I learned that Thanksgiving wasn’t so great for everyone. I learned that the idealized story of the Pilgrims and the Indians didn’t happen quite as I had been told. I was sad for the “Indians” killed by small pox, the ones killed by the Army, the ones dislocated so white people new to this land could claim their land. This was one of my first moments of disillusionment. It was a hard one – one I’ve never been able to quite get over.

All of us experience disillusionment. Disillusionment drives us from the places where we were born and even out of the churches that nurtured us. Disillusionment drives us to psychiatrists and to cynicism. Our fondest dreams of family, country, and church get challenged and sometimes the only apparent response is give up on finding an answer and walk away. It is hard to believe that God is good, much less commit ourselves to loving this God with our whole heart, our whole soul, and our whole mind. Forget about loving our neighbors.

But Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest in Georgia, believes that disillusionment may not be so bad. She says that “down in the darkness below… our dreams – in the place where all our notions about God have come to naught – there is still reason to hope, because disillusionment is not so bad. Disillusionment is the loss of illusion – about ourselves, about the world, about God – and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth. Disillusioned, we come to understand that God does not conform to our expectations…Disillusioned, we find out what is not true and are set free to seek what is – if we dare.”

We find ourselves gearing up in the church for the Advent season. During the next four weeks, we will be asking ourselves where God can be found. In the birth of a baby? In the lives of the poor? In the midst of mourning? In the eyes of a drunk? In the daily disappointments that meet us just as they are in the people and things that bring us joy? For people who read the same Bible that I do, the answer is yes, in all of these things. God meets us right where we are. If we have made it through our wilderness, it is easy to see God present in our midst. If we are still walking through our deserts, our wildernesses, struggling with disillusionment, God walks with us. God does not abandon us on our path. God walks every step, tastes the salt in every tear, laughs in every joy, and pulls and pushes us along the way.

In our Gospel tonight Jesus is being tested yet again by the powerful around him. Threatened by his teachings and his growing following, the powerful attempt time and again to fault Jesus. As we read these stories some two thousand years later, we have a leg up on those present at the time. We know the ending. We know his identity. We know things they did not. We know that Jesus embodied God’s grace – made the Word flesh. He did not bow to the powers and principalities moving in around him. No, he stood strong and claimed boldly his beliefs. Can we love this God made known in and through this man? If you answer yes with me then you can say, “God is good….All the time….”

The power of God is not a directive power, but a redeeming one, a delivering one. The story of our forerunners, the Jews of antiquity, held on to the story of deliverance – deliverance from the flood and deliverance from slavery. God stepped into their midst as a rainbow, a burning bush, the law, words in the prophets’ mouths, and ultimately as covenant. We dream up language to describe God all the time. Some of our imagery belongs to tradition; some of our imagery belongs only to us. This helps us touch the mystery of God. To be disillusioned is to let go of our attempts to categorize, manipulate, reduce, define, and direct God and to enter into the mystery of God all around us, even as we walk through the hard times or stand in hard places. One of the great saints of Christendom, St. Anselm said that “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” So let us use our imagination to touch the divine, but to remember that God is greater than anything we can imagine. God lives in trees and the earth, in the miracles and the mundane, in the infant and the elderly, in the capable and in the incapable. God reaches out to humanity – God reaches out to all of creation – just where we are and because of that we can declare that “God is good…All the time…”

Let us be thankful for disillusionment, even though it is painful. It opens our hearts to feel with aching sadness for those who suffer around us. It opens our souls to experience God in people and places where we would never have found God before. It opens our minds to believe that God is revealed in and through the most magnificent and the most diminutive of creation. When we see God in and through all that there is, we reach out to our neighbors, believing that we are as worthy, but not more worthy than any of the rest of creation. We reach out to our neighbors not out of pity, but from a place of solidarity. We reach out to change the systems that break the world. We reach out to one another in love to challenge the powers and principalities that strive so hard to keep so many down while building up only a few. About a God that calls us into this scary but holy work we can do nothing but claim “God is good…All the time…”