Remaining Grateful

Colossians 1:11-20

It is Thanksgiving week. It finds us in a place that few, if any, of us imagined being. The surreality of the Presidential campaign blossomed into the other reality of the results. People around us are on edge. Some families are seriously worried about the annual feast on Thursday as they deal with one another’s revealed polarities in ways that go far beyond an argument over the mashed potatoes. Our racial and ethnic divides now seem like thick walls, both actual and imagined. We witness the strange liberation of some to be as ugly as they want, believing that all codes of common decency are defunct. It is Thanksgiving week in a strange, new world. 

Yet, as always, there is much for which to be grateful. Our passage shows us a very real, very tangible path into thanksgiving that is authentic and holy.

It begins by directing us to the great promises of our faith.

We are with God. If Jesus did nothing else, he reconnected in himself humanity and God. He is God with us; but he is also us with God. In so being, he binds us to our Maker. He overcomes and eradicates all the divisions between ourselves and God that come through sin (realizing that sin is far more than moral failure, but rather anything that alienates or isolates us from God). On the cross, Jesus enters the abysmal existence of being apart from God, bringing God directly into that abyss. 

Abysmal. It is a word we shy away from. It is a word we do not like to use because of what it says about someone’s life—a life of despair, a life without hope. We pass the homeless collecting change for a meal and feel a brush with the abyss. We watch a parent grieve the loss of a child and feel the weight of the abyss. We see a scrawled graffiti demeaning someone different and we recognize the script of the abyss. Jesus promises to be even there, bringing the light and love of God even there.

If God is there, then we can make it. There is a path to the other side of any and all suffering we encounter. We know that suffering is momentary. We know that what comes this day will pass as night falls, bringing another day, another moment, and another opportunity. There is still far to go on whatever journey we travel. There is hope.

That is the promise of endurance writ large for us—an astounding promise, an unbelievable promise—we can travel this road before us because it never ends, not in the weighty, empty nothingness of a desert highway, but the path of continual discovery and continual redemption that fills us with hopeful joy—this will pass into that, and there will be God with grace for all.

How can it be true?

Because Jesus is the Word made flesh. He is God’s promise kept. He is sure and worthy of acceptance.

But what does that mean?

It means that in Jesus is the embodiment of God, meaning further that he is the embodiment of God’s love, a love so great that it brought all creation into being, infusing it with purpose, meaning, and worth that nothing can take from it. God wills that all that is will find its fruition and culmination in the perfection of the Seventh Day, the great holy Sabbath when all is at rest in God and God at rest in all.

That is high poetry. That is a glimpse of something yet to come. How is it at all relevant here and now?

Its relevance is that it is a call to us to a way of being within the world. Within the church, we gather in the name of the promises of God. To do so, though, is to gather knowing that we are also the implements of those promises. If anyone is to know of the love that is God, revealed in Jesus, they will do so only through us acting, speaking, and being in our own embodiment of that love, following the example of Jesus’ embodiment of that love. 

What does that look like?

If as you gather at the family table on Thursday, someone decides it is the place to launch into an invective about the election, unleashing raw anger or vindictiveness, intervene. Gently turn the topic to something more beneficial for all. Or if that fails, offer the observation that if the vote revealed nothing else, it revealed the absolute necessity of renewed listening to others, especially those who are radically different from ourselves so as to breed understanding because it was the lack of such understanding that fired and fueled the animosity and anger of the election cycle. 

I had a wonderful lunch with four Presbyterians after the election of Donald Trump as President. I could not have better sat with a more diverse group of people in the four folks with whom I had lunch. Two were women, two were men; two were Asian, two were white; three were pastors, one was an Elder; and two were Trump voters and two were Clinton voters. 

We could have avoided the election altogether, but we decided a better course would be to actually talk about it, trying to understand how each of us got to the place we were on Election Day. 

An immediate revelation was that stereotyping does not match reality. Those in each political camp were not where one might have placed them based on conventional wisdom. The second revelation was that people were not in each camp because of what has been communicated as the rationale for being in each camp. The third revelation was that people tended to vote for a program instead of a person.

What was most profound to me was the power of actually talking with someone else. As long as we remain aloof, living within generalities, we can maintain assumptions about someone else. Personal contact tends to destroy such assumptions, for we are forced to deal with another human being, with whom we share far more than we might expect and with whom the divisions become more and more superficial. Bigotry’s greatest power comes with its demand that there be no interaction between those who are different. Therefore, our hope and our peace come through direct engagement and interaction with other human beings.

So, here is the blueprint for a true and real Thanksgiving. Jesus reminds us of the bigger, transcendent reality of God that overshadows and overwhelms our present reality, no matter how weighty or grievous it feels. Second, Jesus offers us a way of being with one another that transcends and transforms all of our interactions with one another so that peace can prevail, a peace rooted in the other-centered, self-emptying love that is of and from God.

Thanks be to God!