Month: November 2023

For What Can We Give Thanks?

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Tis the season of celebration. To me, Thanksgiving is the holiday that we in the US of A do best. Everyone can get into it. There’s not the horrible over-commercialization as we have with other holidays. All people living in this great and wounded country are able to reflect, realize and give thanks for so much – despite imperfections and mistakes.

The opening line of Psalm 107 is, “Give thanks to the One who alone IS, for God’s steadfast love lasts for all time.” We all have experienced that life is filled with experiences that are much less than good, and people who do bad things that impact us and many, many others. Still the Scriptures remind us that, “God’s will for us is to give thanks in ALL circumstances, while praying continuously (1 Thessalonians 5:18). 

There’s the rub. How hard it is to give thanks in all circumstances! Yes, it’s easy to give thanks for all the good stuff. Yet so much goes on that seems immersed in evil. People get hurt. Creation is despoiled. Greed and injustice seem rampant. Too much looking out for numero uno. How can we thank God when these kinds of choices and acts mount up day after day?

Let’s go back to Psalm 107. It doesn’t ask us to give thanks for anything that happens, or for what anyone does or doesn’t do. It commands us to give thanks to God because God’s faithful love permeates every moment – no matter what is going down. We give thanks because God is lovingly with us in each and every circumstance that we (and everyone) live through. So, what do we choose to focus on: God’s amazing love that surrounds us, or the misery? We are never abandoned or alone. Our non-stop gratitude is right and good.

 

 

A Little Goes a Long Way

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Jesus was quite a storyteller. Not all of his parables – those open-ended stories that are designed to make you think – are original to Jesus, but he liked to put his own twist on them. One way to tell where a parable ends and commentary added by the editor who put the Gospel in its final shape begins, look for the question. It may be stated or even implied. A parable, like the geometric figure with the same name, invites us into the infinite view of God. It is meant to expand to as far as we can follow.

In the Gospel of Luke (Luke 13:18-21) Jesus tells two very brief parables that convey a united message: the mustard seed and the yeast. A mustard seed is tiny, yet in the right environment, it can grow into quite a large bush. Yeast, for anyone who bakes with it, is a powerful agent of transformation. Think of the difference between flat bread and a fresh from the oven loaf or steaming rolls.

What is Jesus trying to get across? He compares each of these (the tiny seed and the bit of yeast) to God’s Kingdom. The sense that I pick up is that whatever little action we take that  builds up God’s Kingdom (and makes our world better for everyone) has a potential way beyond what we might expect or imagine. Any act of kindness, compassion, integrity,  reconciliation, peacefulness, love has a lasting and powerful effect, because God is with us in the doing. And we may not even know how people have been touched, or how our world has been made more human.