Thursday, November 26, 2024
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Thanksgiving Eve Eve
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 12:03; children’s sermon starts around 13:36; sermon starts around 19:32)
Reading: Matthew 6:25-33
In the children’s sermon, naturally, we talked about things we are thankful for. We talked about how it feels to be thanked when we do something nice for someone else. I asked the kids why we make such a big deal out of thanksgiving, why it’s so important to give thanks. We talked about how giving thanks shows respect to others and makes them feel good and appreciated. And we talked about how showing gratitude benefits us as well. Being thankful means remembering that we have good things in our life to be thankful for – and even more importantly, it reminds us that we have people in our lives who care about us and love us enough to do nice things for us. Giving thanks helps us to be joyful. And it builds up our relationships with others. God is pleased when we give thanks, and gratitude helps us grow even closer in our relationship with God.
Who all here tonight has ever helped someone else learn to drive? I imagine a lot of the parents here have done so. If you had to sum up that experience in one or two words, what would you say?
I remember how anxious my dad was back when I was learning to drive. In fairness, I was a nearsighted teenager with poor spatial reasoning – and already in my early teens, I was beginning to develop a bit of a lead foot. The first time Dad let me drive his vehicle out on the highway down to Norfolk, I swear you could audibly hear him stomping on the imaginary brake on his side of the car the whole way there.
But now that I’m older, and I have a car of my own, I get it. The few times I’ve let someone else drive my car, I’ve also sat anxiously in the passenger seat, trying to keep my own feet from looking for that imaginary brake. Even sometimes when I’m riding with someone else in their vehicle – I still can’t help myself from checking their mirrors or looking over my shoulder every time they change lanes, that sort of thing.
I just think, somewhere inside us, we all have this deep-seated human need for control. We have this need to feel like we are each in command of our own lives – the captain of our own ship, or the driver of our own vehicle, as the case may be. And to me, this desire for control makes a lot of sense. Because, in reality, so much of what happens in this world is completely out of our hands. And that’s stressful. For better and for worse, life is unpredictable. And so seeking a sense of control is often our way of dealing with our fears and anxieties.
That’s why, out of all of Jesus’s commandments and advice, I think the hardest one to follow might be the one we read in our reading for today: “Do not worry.”
Easy for you to say, Jesus!
There’s no shortage of things in our lives to worry about – our health, our finanances, our housing, our jobs, our relationships – and these worries only increase when we have families depending on us to provide. The pressure to be successful and productive can overwhelm us with worry.
But Jesus follows up this instruction not to worry by cutting straight to the heart of the matter: “Look at the birds of the air,” he says, “they don’t plant crops or harvest or gather anything into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don’t have jobs! They don’t spin yarn or know how to sew, yet I tell you, even the great King Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as stylishly as one of these.” If this is how God provides for birds and grass, how can you think for a moment that God won’t do at least as much for you?
Jesus is teaching us, his followers, to have faith. He’s teaching us to let go of our need for control, our need to know all the answers ahead of time – and instead to trust that God’s got us covered and always will. That’s not always easy. When times are tough, it’s hard for us to imagine how God could possibly pull us through – but rather than worry about how, Jesus urges us simply to trust that God will.
So he says to us: “Seek first the kingdom of God.” He points us toward all that God has done and is doing in the world and in our lives – so that instead of gazing inward toward our own worries and anxieties, we look outward to see God’s power and love in action. It’s a shift in perspective that allows us to see our lives more clearly, to recognize the many, many ways that God has already blessed us and been faithful to us all our lives long.
And that, at last, opens us up to true gratitude. Gratitude doesn’t change anything about the facts of our life. Our health, our finances, our jobs, and so on will still be the same, no matter how grateful or ungrateful we are. But gratitude helps dispel the cloud of worry that hangs over us. It opens our eyes to see God’s abundant love at work in our lives and in the world. And it opens for us a way into deep and abiding joy.
There will always be plenty of things in this life to cause us worry. And I don’t quite have Jesus’s audacity to just tell you not to worry. But I do know that we can trust God behind the wheel of our lives – and we can give thanks, knowing that God will always be there to bring us safely home.
This is the Day 
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