Scripture: Colossians 3:12- 17

Text: Luke 14:1,7-11

Weekly Bible Study: Bible Study Blog

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I love Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite holidays, because it’s one of the last major holidays that isn’t commercialized. We don’t see cornucopias displayed in August. Frozen turkeys don’t show up in the super markets immediately after Labor Day. I am confident that I have never heard Thanksgiving hymns playing the mall. Sandwiched between an increasingly commercialized Halloween and the insanity of Christmas marketing blitz, Thanksgiving is left alone by advertising gurus.

 

I also love Thanksgiving because it’s a special day of rest before the marathon begins. Some of you feel this as well. Christmas gets pretty crazy for many of us. Ministers have extra demands and you have extra social commitments. For some, Christmas is emotionally challenging, which is hard on you and, sometimes, on us as well. I love Thanksgiving because it is a last chance to take a deep breath, be with family, and rest before the craziness begins. Thanksgiving is the calm before the holiday storm.

 

And I also love Thanksgiving because I love the food. I don’t eat turkey and dressing year round, but I could. There is something about a turkey roasting and pumpkin pie baking that triggers memories. An interesting exercise in gratitude is remembering Thanksgiving invitations you’ve accepted. I remember my first Thanksgiving away from home while at seminary. It was an incredible pitch-in feast. Each guest brought a favorite Thanksgiving dish from their family table.

 

Every time there are fires in southern California, I remember the Thanksgiving I was running a disaster shelter out of our church. We micro-waved turkeys and ran turkey sandwiches up to the fire fighters. When I sat down with Ann and friends on Thanksgiving evening, I nearly fell asleep in the cranberries. It had nothing to do with the tryptophan in the turkey; I was just worn out. But I was very grateful that God was using me to minister to strangers.  

 

You have Thanksgiving memories too. This week, someone told me they once ate Thanksgiving dinner in a grocery store. Another said, “When your kids get married, Thanksgiving gets complicated.” Still another offered, “Not as complicated as when there are second marriages.”  I once knew a couple who always went away for Thanksgiving. They’d lost their only son. There was no way to invite him to their holiday table. So instead of facing an empty chair at their Thanksgiving table, they went on a vacation

 

Some of you will experience grief this Thanksgiving. This is the first holiday without a loved one and maybe, without the one who always hosted Thanksgiving. It will be hard. I’ll be praying for you. First holidays without are hard. It is one of the reasons that we offer our grief service in a few weeks. I hope you come to the service. Whether you can come or not, doing what I suggest that we all do helps. Remember. Remembering is one of the ways we manage grief. Every Thanksgiving, I remember my mother inadvertently spilling green food coloring in the gravy. It manages my grief of being without her, on a day which was very important to her. 

 

Remembering previous Thanksgiving invitations is helpful for grieving and it is helpful for gratitude. Again, this week one said, “The first Thanksgiving we had in a restaurant was wonderful.” I thought, “We were once invited to Thanksgiving dinner and when we arrived, we discovered that we were being taken out to dinner. I hated it. I didn’t like waiting for a table. I didn’t think the food was good.  I didn’t like the waitress. It wasn’t a kid friendly place and our children were miserable. I spent the whole Thanksgiving meal wishing that I was someplace is. Gratitude is not possible when you want to be elsewhere.

 

Have you ever spent Thanksgiving wishing you were some place else? I bet you have.  A common experience many of us share is that deep-seated Thanksgiving longing: a gut level desire to be invited to the grown-up table.  My childhood Thanksgiving gatherings had extended family--cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. This meant a kids table and I was always at it. I didn’t want to be there. I longed to be invited to the grown-up table. Did you have that experience? What happens when you get invited? You hate it. At the grown-up table you have to sit up straight. You can’t play with your food. You can’t talk. You want to go straight back to the kids table.

 

It is just the beginning of longing for something that in the end, doesn’t satisfy. I have a friend who tells about going to a basketball game. The home team had that program where the loudest fan gets a free pizza and is moved to front row seats. When the time for the promotion arrived, he and his son up in the nosebleed section started shouting and waving with everyone else. To their surprise, they got picked. The team mascot took them down in front of the crowd, cameras on them all the way to their special seats. Then they put a gigantic pepperoni pizza in front of them and expected them to eat it. There was only one problem: they weren’t hungry. They had just eaten nachos and hot dogs. Every time there was a break in the game, the camera put their picture on the JumboTron, and with their image, the image of a big open pizza box with an untouched pizza.  Finally, they passed out pieces to the crowd so that they wouldn’t be embarrassed. He said, “I’ll never again try to get front row seats. We were miserable.”

 

Over the next two months, we are going to long for things that don’t satisfy us. We are just beginning a season of desire. We are going to have all of these unreasonable hungers and yearnings. We’ll be pining for all sorts of things that in the end will leave us just as hungry as we started out. Unrequited longing is the enemy of contentment. You can’t experience gratitude if you’re aching for something that you don’t or can’t have.

 

This is one of the truths that Jesus points to in our lesson today. Jesus is invited to dinner at the home of Pharisees for a meal on the Sabbath. “They were watching him closely” (Luke 14: 1b) and clearly Jesus was watching too. He noticed how the guests were choosing seats of honor so, “he told them a parable.” (Luke 14: 7b)  You might have missed that when the lesson was read just a few minutes ago. The passage sounds innocent, like something you would read in the newspaper.

 

If it were that simple, I could sit down and we could get out of worship early. But Jesus is telling a parable, not commenting on etiquette.

 

Jesus isn’t prescribing Christian behavior. In fact, all of us rushing to the worst seats at a dinner would be just as ridiculous as everyone trying to get the best seats. This message becomes a cartoon if we interpret it that way. Can you see it? “Look at all the Christians playing musical chairs with the worst seats in order to get recognized.”  The parable isn’t about recognition; it is about longing. It’s about what we think we need in our lives to be happy.  The first century Greek historian Plutarch said that in small, trivial acts character is most accurately reflected.[i]  The actions of those who dined with Jesus that night reveal dissatisfaction with their lives. They long for something more, hoping it will be better than what they have. Jesus knows you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven hungry. Longing is the enemy of contentment. You can’t experience gratitude if you’re aching for something that you don’t or can’t have.

 

As we approach Thanksgiving, I wonder what you long for. Those of us who grieve long for the missing loved one to be with us, but all of the yearning and aching won’t invite them back to the table. My mother always longed for the perfect meal and the perfect atmosphere where all would be happy and joyful, attentive and engaged with not a word of discord. It never happened. When I orchestrate our family thanksgiving meal, I fall into her trap. I wish the dressing was better or that I’d ordered a smoked turkey or that our kids wouldn’t rush through the meal in hopes of an early dismissal.

 

Some of our longings are deeper seated.  Some yearn for better health or a stronger relationships or financial health. Others want a better job or a better house or a different life. We live in a noisy world which can destroy gratitude when you start worrying about global warming, terrorism and war. Before you know it, you can spend too much time worrying and suddenly, gratitude and inner peace is as elusive as the seat of honor by the host.

 

I invite you to a different Thanksgiving dinner, one that steps away from longing and embraces gratitude. If longing is the enemy of contentment, gratitude is the antidote. This antidote has to be cultivated and it is easier to do than you think.

 

Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis is a pioneer in the field of gratitude research. That’s an interesting job. “Bob, what do you do for a living?” “ I study grateful people.”  I’d rather have his job than the job of someone who studies cranky people. Emmons believes that gratitude is the “forgotten factor in happiness research.” By this he means that you can find a cornucopia of self-help books in the bookstore but generally missing in these books is gratitude.  “Religion and philosophy have long embraced gratitude as an indispensable component of health, wholeness, and well-being,” says Emmons. “But science has come a bit late to the concept.”[ii]

 

He points out a number of examples. In a study on organ donors who were recipients of the “gift of life”, that is transplants of heart, liver, lung, kidney or pancreas, those who actively expressed gratitude, either directly or indirectly in journals, felt better, recovered more quickly and functioned at a higher level than those who did not.  But gratitude doesn’t just impact the health of sick people who are getting better. It can dramatically change your physiological state. A 1995 study out of the Institution of Heart Math in Boulder Creek, California discovered that appreciation or gratitude dramatically impacted the physiological state known as resonance. Resonance is the efficient working together of the heart and lung and blood pressure and brain patterns, where even the electrical impulses of the skin are synchronized. The study found that stressful emotions like anger, or frustration or longing caused the resonance of the body to be more erratic or out of sync. But when one is filled with gratitude, love and compassion, the entire body functions better. Gratitude has profound health effects. This is what Paul is saying to us when he writes, “…let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” (Colossians 3: 15-16).

 

Gratitude brings joy   A 1998 Gallup survey of American teenagers and adults found that 95 percent of respondents felt at least somewhat happy when expressing gratitude and over half felt extremely happy. People who see themselves as grateful---to others as well as to creation---are healthier, more energetic, optimistic, empathetic, and less vulnerable to clinical depression. They make more progress toward important personal goals, are less materialistic and more easily satisfied with what life brings them.

I won’t ask for a show of hands, but think about it. Do you want these qualities in your life? Do you want health, energy, optimism, empathy, freedom from depression, success, freedom from materialism and satisfaction? I’ve known a woman for probably fifteen years who always has a complaint. In fact, I was once at a banquet with her where she was furious about where we were sitting. She spent the entire evening complaining about it, and missed the wonderful program.  Her discontent has completely supplanted her gratitude. [iii] 

 

Thousand of years before the Gallup study, the Psalmist wrote, “O give thanks to the Lord for he is good…for he satisfies the thirsty and the hungry he fills with good things.”  (Psalm 107: 1a, 9)  Jesus watches the crowds, sees that there is a lack of the kind of contentment that comes with gratitude. So he tells them a parable. It’s not about where you sit; it about the attitude you bring to Thanksgiving.

 

Here is my invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. Between now and Thanksgiving, keep a daily gratitude journals. Write down each day, what it is that you are thankful for. See it on the page. You’ll be surprised how well it will prepare you for Thanksgiving. Within just a few weeks of keeping daily gratitude journal, individuals across all walks of life, even the chronically ill, find themselves happier, more optimistic, sleeping better and feeling more connected to others.[iv] That’s my invitation for your Thanksgiving dinner. I am quite convinced that if you accept it, you will not only begin understand Jesus’ parable, you’ll also feel grateful… even if you have to sit at the grown-up table.

 

Maybe your first entry will be our theme verse. Say it with me.” O give thanks to the Lord for he is good…for he satisfies the thirsty and the hungry he fills with good things.”  (Psalm 107: 1a, 9) 

 

 

           

           

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