Giving Thanks Always

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn MA  November 19, 2023

Mt 15:29-39   Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled, and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Most of the time, when we read and study this passage, we want to look at the amazing miracles – the blind, the maimed, the mute, the lame…. All healed.  And there’s no doubt that’s amazing… it’s for sure something we can’t explain, don’t understand, and can’t reproduce here today… not the way Jesus could. 

And sometimes, that inability to make miracles happen today, to cure the sick, restore the maimed, etc., leads us astray… we’ll be saying either “wow, I can’t believe that happened then, because it’s so unscientific, so Jesus must be a fake” or we think, “wow, that church must not be true because they don’t do those miracles”.

I think that no matter which option we choose, when we do that, we miss the underlying story, the one that the miracles illustrate, the one that really matters, the one that can and does happen here and now, maybe even every day.

So, this morning, let’s look beyond the science of those miracles, and think about what the rest of the story has to say to us today.

After the crowds had come and all those people had been healed, everyone was tired and hungry.  Jesus noticed.  And he told the disciples to do something about it.  The disciples were lost for a minute – there were no quick marts, no fast food restaurants, no caterers right down the street.  Then Jesus invited everyone who was staying to sit down.  He blessed the seven loaves, the fish, gave thanks, broke them and shared the food out.  After every one of the thousands there had eaten their fill there were baskets full of leftovers.  Now, that’s a miracle, too.

Jesus gave thanks to God for what they have.  It was the act of giving thanks that made the meal enough.  It was giving thanks that turned a long day and a crowd of tired hungry people into a community.

It is giving thanks, being grateful which is the real miracle of this story.  And it is the practice of giving thanks which can bring joy and satisfaction into our world.

It’s not easy.  

Our world is filled, more than we can remember, with things for which we don’t want to give thanks.  Mean people.  Bullies in school.  General nastiness.  Poor health – even COVID.  Money problems…. The list goes on and on.

Giving thanks is not a fake way to just pretend these bad things are not with us.  They’re here, they’re real, they hurt in all kinds of ways.  What giving thanks in these circumstances can be is a way of declaring that the bad cannot, will not win.  It can be a kind act of defiance.

Defiance, you know, so often is the label we put on that loud “no” or a slammed door.  But that’s not the whole of defiance… and maybe it’s often more like anger that looks like defiance.  This kind of defiance, this kind of saying “thanks” is not about getting back at someone or something; it’s about saying that the bad will not win, that kindness, thanksgiving, love triumphs over all.

Last Thanksgiving my family gathered for a great time together; a few days later, my sister-in-law became ill, and spent most of the winter in and out of the hospital.  Christmas was awful; we didn’t know anything that day, and certainly not how to celebrate with her ill and with an unclear diagnosis.  

She spent something like four days in the UMassMemorial emergency room on one of her admissions, tucked away on one of the side corridors, mostly in dim light, nothing to see, nothing to do, no tv, not even a chair for a visitor – just laying there, waiting for a room to open up.  

It was easy to be angry at UMass for not having a room for her; it was harder to give thanks for that hall space, or for those wonderful nurses, or even for the gruff guy at the entrance who searched our backpacks when we came to visit.  

But we had a choice about which way to look at things.  Most of the time, we chose thanksgiving.  Sometimes we were just angry or frightened, but we found that when we could come up with even one thing (hey the woman at the nametag desk recognized me)…. It was a little better.  And this year, at Thanksgiving, we’ll be glad to all be together once again, glad she’s still with us.

This kind of thanksgiving, I think, is closely related to forgiveness.  It’s not about forgetting the bad.  It’s about not letting the bad control our lives all the time every day.  It’s about recognizing that our world is not perfect, that bad things happen, but good things do as well.  The late Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, wrote:  “In a world without forgiveness, evil begets evil, harm generates harm, and there is no way short of exhaustion or forgetfulness of breaking the sequence.  Forgiveness breaks the chain.  . . . It represents a decision not to do what instinct and passion urge us to do.  It answers hate with a refusal to hate, animosity with generosity.  Few more daring ideas have ever entered the human situation.”

Thanksgiving does the same thing.  It breaks the chain of anger and frustration which so tarnishes our lives.  It puts things into perspective, allowing us to deal with them without their continuing to break us.  We still name the bad, and at the same time, we can name the good in our world.  

When Jesus gave thanks for the measly seven loaves and just a few small fish, it changed his world.  Let us give thanks this season for the good that has happened in this midst of all the bad…not pretending that bad hasn’t happened, or that we’re hurt or struggling from time to time, but remembering that in Jesus’ name, good has overcome evil for all time.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child