Some years ago, at a church I was serving, around this time of year, I was giving the children’s sermon down in front of the chancel rail surrounded by our children, and I’m just certain that I had a message regarding the importance of Thanksgiving. At the end I invited the children to pray with me, and the way that we did that was I would make a statement and they would repeat the same statement. And I think I began by saying, ‘We thank you for our parents,’ and the children chimed in, ‘We thank you for our parents.’ But, in the back one small distinct voice went off on a different track. I heard, ‘We thank you for our parents.’ This one voice said, ‘We thank you for nothin’.’ We went on to the next petition, ‘And in addition we thank you for our teachers.’ All the other children chimed in likewise, except for that one small, distinct voice that said, ‘We thank you for nothin’,’ and it continued in that fashion until I said, ‘Amen,’ and I couldn’t wait to open my eyes and learn the identity of this bold little heretic, only to discover that it was my daughter, Jessica, who was four years old at the time.

You and I have learned, those of us who are adults, we’ve learned not the exhibit, at least publicly, the honesty of a four year old, but as we move toward this day of thanksgiving, and as we celebrate a sense of thanksgiving this morning, I wonder if there isn’t the possibility that our minds might be in the right place, that we might be moving through the liturgy and saying the right things, but what if our hearts were in a different place? What if our hearts were saying, ‘Lord, thanks for nothing?’ What if we felt that we’d been through a meat grinder? We were surveying the world situation, I noticed this recent report out of an American agency, this is their prediction, ‘“US economic and political clout will decline over the next two decades, and the world will be more dangerous, with food and water scarce and advanced weapons plentiful,” US spy agencies projected on Thursday.’

The leader of the International Monetary Fund predicted the worst of the economic global recession is yet to come. There are many concerns. Many of you have opened up the statements from your pensions or 401ks to discover fully one-third have evaporated into thin air. You may feel like the Chinese student last week who went to a zoo in China and stood in front of the panda bear cage and was admiring the adorable and cuddly Yang Yang, the panda bear, and he was just overwhelmed with this desire to give Yang Yang a hug and to get a hug from Yang Yang. You know we all know that pandas are adorable little creatures, we’ve seen the cartoon voiced by Jack Black, and we just know the way that they are. So, he scaled the fence and approached the bear and went up to give him a hug, and Yang Yang bit him something fierce and tried to tear him to shreds. We want life to be cuddly and cute. We want to approach the holiday and to have those Kodachrome moments, and we don’t always get what we want.

Sometimes we might be disappointed and find ourselves saying, ‘Lord, thanks for nothing. Thanks for nothing.’ So, I thought we should examine the question of Thanksgiving this morning, give it some serious consideration, because we may want to cancel Thursday and all the arrangements involved. We may want to get on the phone or send out the e-mail, ‘No reason to come by this year. There’s just really nothing to be thankful for.’ Listen carefully to this psalmist, as I read to you Psalm 111, to get his opinion, or her opinion.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

So the psalmist has weighed in on the issue and said it is a right and good thing to give thanksgiving. But what if the psalmist drank the Kool-Aid, as we say? What if the psalmist was under the influence of some very charismatic or magnetic leader that was really misguided or leading them down the wrong path? Let me give you an example. This past week we marked the thirtieth anniversary, on November 13, 1978, of the Jonestown tragedy. Many of you remember Jim Jones, charismatic church leader and religious figure, began the Peoples Temple in Indiana, moved it to San Francisco in California, then moved the entire church to become a commune down in Guyana. The People’s Church there, established on socialist principles to share, egalitarian, following their leader’s command to do anything, gathered together, and each person of great faith, in their fashion, faith not so much in God but in their leader, they all gave thanks with great gratitude for the privilege of drinking the Kool-Aid. The makers of Kool-Aid want you to know it was actually Flavor Aid, but it was laced with a toxic amount of sedatives, poison. 900 people willingly gave thanks for the opportunity to take their lives, and we don’t understand that.

Why would people choose to do that? They were misguided. They had followed the wrong leader. There’s actually some similarities with a group of people who had left England to go to Holland for the purpose of escaping persecution, wanting to worship in their way, following equally charismatic leaders who were typologically fashioned in their mind, following Moses, wanting to lead their people to the Promise Land, and their first idea that they had was to lead this community to Guyana, which had recently been, as Europeans say, discovered by a Dutch explorer. The exotic climate and the marvelous Edenesk nature of this country was very appealing, this land was very appealing, but instead they decided to go to Virginia. These Puritans, to be pilgrims, to cross the Atlantic Ocean on an errand in the wilderness, to found the New Canaan, if you will, the new promise land. So, sixty-five days on the ocean, enduring the hardships of a small sailing ship, there to discover that they actually had not navigated correctly, they were not in Virginia. Stepping off at Plymouth Rock, there to the rocky, very cold climbs of what we now know as Massachusetts, there being greeted by the Native Americans with arrows and hostility, there to have no structures that were built in preparation of their arrival, certainly no Hyatt to check in to awaiting their homes. The initial winter fully taking the lives of fully one-half of their 102 number, and don’t you know that if you’d followed the lead of Bradford or Hutchinson or Winthrop and followed them across the ocean only to be dying of starvation, only to be dying of sickness here in this forbidding and hostile land, don’t you know that you might say, ‘Lord, I thank thee for nothing. What am I doing here? Where’s the blessing in this?’ You know, maybe I’m skewed regarding history. Let’s look ahead to Thursday and the opportunity to gather together as family.

I’m reminded of the scene in Shrek 2 in which the king and queen meet their new son-in-law, Shrek the ogre. And the king looks down the long table and he says to Shrek, ‘Well just what can we expect in the way of grandchildren from you?’ And Shrek, voiced by Mike Myers, bellows back, ‘Ogres!’ and the queen immediately chimes in, ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’ And the king says, ‘Unless they eat their young,’ and it escalates from there into a full food fight. Finally, the queen blesses the mess by saying, ‘Well isn’t it nice for family to get together.’

This coming Thursday, we will be going to my sister and brother-in-law’s ranch in Meridian, Texas, and it’s an opportunity to gather together with family, and that’s going to be a wonderful experience also, with our daughter Jessica, who’s now twenty-six years old will be coming down from Colorado with her boyfriend, whom we’ve met and we approve of. So we’re looking forward to that. And then of course inevitably there is the one relative that I’m really going to have to work with. We’ve had long talks and he already explained to me that initially he felt called to the ministry, but then he realized that God’s will for him was to minister to ministers, and so he shares with me. It’s just one of those unexpected blessings that you run across, and he pontificates and shares, and then I’ll go jump on a Vespa scooter and take off.

But we’ve all got those opportunities and those challenges in which we may say, ‘Lord, thanks for nothing.’ Maybe we should just go ahead and cancel Thanksgiving, then on further reflection I wondered is it really a dearth of bless, or in our consumer mentality are we so all about ourselves that it’s really more just about ingratitude, chronic ingratitude, which we survey and assess and try to decide, ‘Lord, have you delivered for me today, and if not why not?’ You know, maybe it’s got more to do with our frame of mind. An interesting study about Olympic medalists, those who win the gold are of course ecstatic. They’ve devoted so much time and energy to winning the gold, they are fully satisfied. The silver medal winners tend to lock in on the fact that they didn’t win the gold, and they experience their silver medal as loss and failure. The bronze medalists tend to focus on the fact that they almost didn’t get a medal at all, and so they’re just doggone happy to be able to stand up there on the podium with the other two. Isn’t that interesting? The third place winners tend to be happier and more content with their achievement than the second place winners. Maybe it does have something to do with our state of mind.

A true story, a man was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and advised by his physicians to go and put his affairs in order, which he did. He quit his job. He went through all his savings and went out and went on exotic trips and gave marvelous gifts to all of his friends and relatives. For six months he did that. He went back to the doctor for a follow-up visit to find out just how far this dread disease had advanced, only to be told that no, it’s not pancreatic cancer, it was a mere inflammation of the pancreas and you’re fine. He greeted that news with great anger and is in the process of suing the doctor and the hospital. Interesting. ‘You’re not going to die!’ ‘I’m not! That really makes me angry!’ A lot of it has to do with how we process information. The truth of the matter is sometimes our woes, our complaints, are justified.

This Thursday, down in Morgan, Texas I’ll have the opportunity to preside over a worship service. Let me share with you the circumstances. My brother-in-law bought the Methodist church building in Morgan, Texas. It was abandoned by the Methodist Church, this white frame, historic church building was abandoned, so my brother-in-law bought it. I guess he’s the bishop of the Methodist Church in Morgan. He called me last year and informed me that I would be preaching a service on Thursday. I said, ‘No I’m not. I’m on vacation on Thursday.’ But he explained the circumstances. They had sent out word through his friend, all throughout Meridian and the surrounding countryside, the Methodist church that had been closed will be open for Thanksgiving, and we had some ninety people show up to come and worship together. Among those people our good family friend John and his wife Rochelle. I can picture them in that historic pew in that historic, beautiful sanctuary there. Last winter Rochelle, John’s wife, was in a car accident and was killed instantly along with three other people, and this Thursday I know John will be in the pew along with Rochelle’s parents, who will be coming down from St. Louis. My question is, what am I going to say to those folks, in the way of thanksgiving, knowing that their lives since that terrible tragedy has been a living hell, as they’ve lived out again and again the sense of loss and the legal entanglements that have followed all that. What do you say to people who have experienced great loss, when you’re talking to them about being happy and joyful regarding Thanksgiving? I think I’m going to share with John, and the congregation, a story that I heard recently about a woman who graduated from nursing school and was going on her first assignment in the hospital to care for her first patient. She was reading the record. It was a fourteen year old girl who’d been in a dirt bike accident and her leg had been amputated. So the nurse, here she is out of nursing school, she’s going to meet with the patient in physical therapy. What do you say to a fourteen year old girl who’s recently lost a part of her leg? So, she’s going somewhat reluctantly up, and she sees the young girl in the Whirlpool bath, and before she can think of what to say, the young girl pulls her injured leg out of the Whirlpool and says to the nurse, ‘Look. Look how much I have left!’ and goes on to explain to her that because her leg was amputated below the knee she’ll be able to be fitted out with a prosthetic leg that will give her a great deal of mobility. If it had been amputated above the knee that would not have been the case. ‘Look how much I have left!’ She was very excited about that which remained.

‘Look how much I have left.’ Even though we might have lost a loved one, and be a great grief, as we look around and assess, we realize we’re still surrounded by additional loved ones who depend on us and need us to be alive and to be present and to fulfill our covenants. Look how many wonderful people we have left in our lives. As you receive that dreaded statement regarding your 401k or your pension plan and you look up and you morn the loss of thirty percent of those funds, you might turn it around and say, ‘Look how much we have left,’ knowing that around the world there are so many women and men and children who have no funds at all, no investments, who are wondering where in the world will their next meal be coming from. It’s an important statement to make, but it’s a choice that we have to make if we would truly experience thanksgiving with our entire heart. The gifted heart surgeon met with his patient before the surgery and he explained the open heart surgery and the patient said, ‘Doc, are you going to fix my heart?’ And the gruff surgeon said, ‘Sure.’ They had a successful surgery. Days later the surgeon met again with the patient. ‘Doc, will my heart get enough blood supply?’ And the doctor said, ‘All that it needs,’ and walked out of the room. Three weeks later the patient was checking out, and his wife went up to the surgeon to thank him and said, ‘What about his quality of life?’ The surgeon turned and stared at her harshly and said, ‘Madam, I have fixed his heart. His quality of life is up to him.’ And that’s true.

In Jesus Christ, God has fixed our hearts. We have been absolved of sin. We’ve been given a gift of great grace and great love. Our hearts have been fixed, but our quality of life is up to us. I want to share these words with you.

The life of thankfulness-biblically speaking-is lived in view of the hard things of existence. As the life of thanksgiving deepens, we discover that the more mature prayers of thanksgiving are not those offered for the obvious blessings, but those spoken in gratitude for obstacles overcome, for insights gained, for lessons learned, for increased humility, so that we might say that when despair tries to take us under, we chose life. When we wonder what God could possibly be thinking, we chose trust. When we desperately want relief from unrelenting reality, we chose perseverance. And when we feel oppressed by disappointment or sorrow, we chose gratitude and thanksgiving.

When we look around, survey our lives and say, ‘Look at all we have left.’

Amen.