October 9, 2011
Open-Handed Thankfulness
October 9, 2011 – Thanksgiving Sunday
When I was composing the children’s story for today, I found myself looking at some quotes and clips that were actually from Chariots of Fire, and among them is a clip I’m going to show you in just a moment here. Eric Liddell spoke to many groups of people over the course of his time in preparation for the 1924 Olympics, and not all of his words are recorded. Ian Charleson, the actor who portrayed Liddell in the movie, found himself studying the Bible in ways that he never had before, and the words at the end of this clip are actually his, but composed to resemble what Eric Liddell himself would have said to such an assembled crowd.
Chariots of Fire – Where Does the Strength Come From?
Where does the strength to finish the race come from? From within. From the seed that God has planted in each and every one of us, the seed that joins with what others give us, and which spreads from us to yet others when we show out that we know what we have been given.
Thanksgiving Sunday is a day to remember and be thankful. Now, it shouldn’t be the only day on which we are thankful for what God has given us – on your birthday, you should be thankful for life itself; on the birthdays of your children, you should be thankful for having them in your lives, even if on certain particular days you just feel like strangling them; on your anniversary, you’re thankful for your spouse; on Christmas, we’re thankful for the gift of Jesus as he came into the world, while on Easter we’re thankful for the promises of eternal life that He sealed for us in the way that He went out of it. Every day, you should be thankful for the food you eat, the water you drink, the breaths you take, and so on and so forth. As I said to the children, the focus for today is the harvest, the food coming in off the fields to be stored away against the long, cold winter that everyone says is coming again this year. But I think we need to be reminded to be thankful, for the harvest and for everything else, at least once a year, because humanity as a whole is very prone to forgetting where the strength comes from, where the life comes from, where everything comes from. Not from ourselves, but from God.
We forget this because the message of the world is that we need to make ourselves “great.” It’s all about hard work and making yourselves successful, isn’t it? Anyone can do it! The American Dream, and the Canadian one to a certain extent, is based upon the premise that anyone, given enough guts and perseverance, can go from nothing to… well, the sky’s the limit, isn’t it? If you work hard, if you put everything that you have into “it” then you can be successful – it’s all about you. People can sit in church for an hour or so every week of their lives, hearing about trust and faith and putting yourself in God’s hands, and then go out into the world and just get absolutely hammered with the message that you are the one that makes it happen. It’s easy to forget.
I heard a story once about a scientist who was volunteered from among his peers to take a message to God. God said, “What can I do for you?” The scientist replied, “Well, um, you see, we’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t need you any more. We’ve figured so much out about what you have done in this world that, really, we don’t need you to be watching over us any longer.”
The Almighty considered this for a moment. Then He shrugged and said, “All right, I’ll make you a deal. We’ll have a contest. It’s a man-making contest. If you can make a man the same way I made a man, you win.”
The scientist nodded, eager to begin, and reached down to the ground to scoop up a handful of dirt. He looked at it for a moment, examining it for what it was and what it might have, and said, “I think we can do something with this, sure.”
“Not so fast,” said God. “First, you have to make your own dirt.”
Be thankful.
Did you hear that in our Scriptures for this morning?
Be thankful.
Be thankful that God gave you Moses, and that God blessed him with the courage to stand up even to Himself when all of Israel found themselves yearning for a god they could see, and probably ostensibly control.
Be thankful when you come into the land and grow your crops in fields that God has given to you – you didn’t conquer by just your own will; you didn’t settle by just your own desire, and nothing grows just because you put a seed in the ground! It is God who has made this happen; thank Him for what has happened and what you have been given!
And then there’s the story of the ten lepers.
I’ve always enjoyed this story as an example of the limitless nature of God’s love. We draw divisions. We are almost obsessive about dividing ourselves into groups of “us” and “not us.” And, of course, those who fall into the “not us” camp are barely tolerable life forms, whose only aspiration in life must be to find a way to become a part of “us!” Until they can, send them to the outside, shun them, push them away…
Jesus saw ten sick men, asking for help, asking for mercy, and He healed them. It didn’t matter to him that at least one of them was a Samaritan – they were sick and they needed something that He could help them with, and so He did. “Go show yourselves to the priests,” he said, because the priests would have to pronounce them to be clean in order for them to be able to return to their families.
Now, my understanding is that lepers would wrap themselves in bands of cloth and wear cloaks to hide their skin from both the sun and from prying eyes. Someone must have felt something, prompting him to pull back a hood or unwrap an arm, and there, instead of decaying, nerveless flesh, it was whole, warm, complete, healed! Then all of them threw off their wrappings, saw that they were all healed, and went off rejoicing! They praised God for the miracle, and perhaps they cried out to the sky, “Thank you, God, for this great blessing!”
But only one turned back to Jesus Himself. Only one said, “We asked Jesus to have mercy on us. We’d asked God for cleansing for years, and He sent us to Jesus so that we would ask Him to do it. A man or the Son of God, whichever, He had to choose to heal us, so I will thank Him for what I know He did!” Now, the last words that we have Jesus speaking to this man seem to me to be an additional blessing – “Go in peace; your faith has made you well.” There’s been a lot of debate over the years about the difference between “health” and “wellness” – “health” is just that the body has nothing affecting it at a particular moment, while being “well” is a more wholistic description, encompassing body, mind and spirit. The tenth leper was thankful, and was blessed further with wellness. He was also blessed because he, of all the ten, chose to enter into relationship with Jesus, however brief that engagement was! Yes, he might say to his friends later, we all called out to Him, and He in turn called out to all of us, but I went back and spoke to Him, and He touched me, and He blessed me, and He treated me like one of His children. Where that man went, what seeds He then planted in those whom he met throughout the remainder of his life, we can’t say – like so many others, he disappears from the Biblical narrative at this point. But in being thankful, we’re shown that there is even greater reward waiting for us in God’s hands!
Now, I entitled this message “Open-Handed Thankfulness” because I wanted to contrast it against what can easily be called “Closed-Handed Thankfulness.” Those who fall into the latter category are, to my thinking, those who may be polite, may be grateful, may indeed be very gracious about what they receive from others, but they don’t seem to give anything back – they take, but they don’t really give. The way I found myself putting this thought into words was: you may thank God, you may thank others for what you receive from them, but what might others thank you for doing for them?
God has called us to be open-handed in our thankfulness, to pass on what we have received, rather than just hoarding it for ourselves. We are meant to share. We are meant to give. We are meant to bless and be blessings to the world as a whole. We’re not meant to isolate, we’re not meant to divide, we’re not meant to care about differences because God doesn’t look at the surface, but at the heart. We’re meant (to go all the way back to the beginning) to run the straight race, knowing that God is watching over us all the way.
So let’s be thankful, and yet let’s be generous with what we have received from God’s hand.
Let us pray.
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