Paul's Prayer Piorities - Thanksgiving

Preached on Sunday, November 19, 2017

Scripture readings: Psalm 119:57-64; Colossians 1:3-14

Along Priest Rapids Lake, Columbia River
Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
October 2017

There was a family where, one day, the father decided that each member of the family would give thanks for one item on the table, for their evening meal. The dad gave thanks for the chicken. The mother gave thanks for the cottage cheese. The oldest brother gave thanks for the potatoes. The sister gave thanks for the milk. Only one item in the meal was left. The littlest brother squirmed, and he asked his dad: “Daddy, If I thank God for the broccoli, won’t he know I’m lying?”

It’s always something. There’s a fly in the ointment, or a bee in the bonnet. Sometimes it’s lot more than that. There might be lots of things that keep us from giving thanks, or being consistently thankful.

For me, it usually boils down to one thing. I was born a worry-wart. I was (and I still am) always thinking about what could possibly go wrong, and I’ve always been able to think of lots and lots of things.

When I was a kid, I almost always won at checkers. It could have been something to be proud of, and I was. But, judging from the comments of my opponents, I would win because I bored them into a state mental numbness. Before I would move, I had to calculate each move to the next dozen possible moves that would come from making that one move. My game would go on, and on, and on.

After that first game, there were kids who refused to play checkers with me ever again. In reality, they must not have had much fun doing it.

Truth is, I didn’t play checkers because it was fun. I played because I could win. I didn’t play with enjoyment. I played with worry. I might not have won so much, if I had simply played for the fun of playing, and then I would have won something far better than winning.

Enjoying the game would have been the greatest success of all. Whether I won or lost, I could have gotten the prize of always enjoying the game and that would be the grace of thanksgiving.

What the Bible calls the Sabbath comes from the fact that sabbath (in Hebrew) means stopping and resting. As part of their sabbath worship, faithful Jews don’t ask God for anything on the Sabbath. For twenty-four hours they don’t ask for anything for anybody.

On the day of stopping and resting, they don’t work, and they don’t ask God to work either. Their only prayers are prayers of thanks, and praise, and blessing.

In the New Testament, this was a huge issue between Jesus and the Pharisees, who condemned Jesus for healing people on the Sabbath. They saw healing as work. Jesus saw healing as giving rest to the sick and the disabled and, best of all, giving them blessing and rejoicing in God.

Our word “bless” comes from the same root as the word “bliss”. The Pharisees made stopping and resting into work through all their rules and disciplines. They stole everyone’s bliss. They made the thanksgiving, and praise, and blessing into a mockery: not at all what God desired.

In Genesis, the seventh day is not what many people think it is. The seventh day is a taste of eternity. The seventh day, in Genesis, was much more of a place than it was a day. The truth is that sabbath is time standing still. There is no sunset or sunrise in the Genesis day of rest. It’s a taste of heaven.

God blessed his special, timeless day and called it holy. Holy, in Hebrew and Greek, carries (in part) the meaning of being special and radically different. If there are any rules or disciplines, it’s the discipline to stop and learn to be happy.

Learn to be thankful. Make your time with God different from all your other time by enjoying what God has done, enjoying what God has given you and made possible now. Stop, and take it in. Everything is bliss.

Learn to be thankful. There’s a strength and power in thanksgiving. It’s refreshing, it’s restful, and it’s hard to learn how to do it, because we want so much, and we worry so much. We’re afraid of losing our game: losing something. Or we’re afraid of not winning something, getting something, fixing something.

In Paul’s Letter to the Christians in the Greek city of Colossae (there’s more than one way to pronounce it), Paul was writing out his prayer of thanksgiving from the inside of a prison. We don’t know, for sure, where the prison was. Scholars only guess: Ephesus, Caesarea, Rome.

The Romans were very civilized, but their prisons were unpleasant places. They were intended to be so. Besides, the Romans had this horrible enjoyment of the suffering of other people.

Paul wasn’t in his cell or dungeon alone. He had friends with him who were his partners in ministry. Now they were his partners in chains. One of these friends was Epaphras, who had learned the gospel from Paul in Ephesus.

Epaphras was the one who had taken the good news of Jesus to his home in Colossae. Now, in chains, Epaphras shared the story, the joy, and the worry of his work with Paul.

It had been loving and joyful work in Colossae. And then, perhaps, a problem came up that raised the need for Epaphras to go and see Paul, and ask him for help. So, it was going to Paul for help that led to the adventure of his being arrested and chained up with Paul.

It had begun as a journey of love. Epaphras seems to have been worried, because, along with all his good news was the bad news that his spiritual family started listening to the wrong people. The wrong people were twisting the good news around to make it into something else. You can find that in the letter.

Paul wrote his letter as a reminder. He wanted the Colossians remember that Epaphras had told them about a Jesus who was in control of everything. Epaphras had told them about a Jesus who was the source of every good motivation and ability to steer them closer and closer to the Father, though his cross and his rising from the dead.

Paul reminded them that they had already died to sin and were safe in Jesus. Paul encouraged them to maintain their rest, and their enjoyment of Jesus, trusting that Jesus was more than everything to them: “giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:12-14)

The new creation of their lives had been launched. Jesus was their sabbath: their blessing, their bliss, their holiness, their difference. But they were, in some ways, unsteady. They were forgetting who Jesus is because they were forgetting to be truly thankful for Jesus: thankful for what he has done for us.

And so, how else should Paul begin to help them and set them straight but by giving thanks for them? The prayer tells us that Paul knew that he was living in the kingdom of light and the kingdom of Jesus. He only wanted the church in Colossae to be as sure of this as he was.

Paul knew that they already knew it. Paul was only reminding them. He wrote: “All over the world this gospel (this good news) is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth.” (Colossians 1:6)

They lived in a world ruled by the grace of God. Paul knew, from Epaphras, that they understood this. He knew that they understood that the power, and strength, and peace of this grace was working in them and through them. They knew this.

Paul’s prayer begins with thanks and it ends with thanks. Paul sees and draws a pattern on the page. The thanks at the beginning of the prayer is Paul’s thanks for them. The thanks toward the end of the prayer is the thanksgiving of the disciples in Colossae for everything and everyone. Paul believes that his prayer of thanks for them will lead to their prayers of thanks for all of God’s gifts, especially the gift of Jesus.

Paul gives thanks because he trusts the abundant grace of God that certifies these disciples to be the gifs of God, no matter how unsteady they seem. Paul gives thanks because he lives in a world ruled by a God who is light and love, and those disciples will give learn to give a truly energizing thanks for the same reason. They will learn that the thankfulness that went up to God for them was part of the power that would lead them to send up their own thankfulness to God, for everyone for whom they were worried and concerned, and for their own lives as the gift of God.

If you can’t give thanks, if you can’t be thankful, you are not living in a world ruled by a God who is light and love. Where will your prayers go, in such a world of your own making?

We don’t live in our own world. We live in God’s world. If you live in a thankless world of your own making, you might think that you’re talking to some kind of God, some kind of Father, some kind of Jesus, but it’s just words. There’s no true faith without thanks. There’s no real prayer without thanksgiving.

Now that can seem pretty scary and threatening, and yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Thanksgiving is enjoyment. It’s resting in the power and grace of God. Thanksgiving is the knowledge that God is in you, but also that God begins where you end: where you stop.

In Psalm 46, the prayer becomes a place where God suddenly speaks to the person who is praying. God says: “Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46:10) God’s talk, here, about being exalted isn’t bragging and boasting. God is saying that there will come a time when everyone knows that God is with them, and keeps them safe, and makes them fruitful, and makes them glad.

They will know that God’s strength goes infinitely beyond the boundaries of their own strength. Where they must stop, God goes on being God, for their joy and their comfort, and their rest.

Do you want to be fruitful? Do you want to be glad? God is at work all around you. God is at work in you, and God can easily work through you. You are surrounded by the gifts of God, and this will not fail.

Truth isn’t only fact-hood. Truth is faithfulness. “God’s grace in all its truth,” that Paul gives thanks for in the lives of the Colossians, simply means “the gifts of God that will not fail.” Grace means gift. Truth means something that will not fail or let you down. This is the kingdom of light. This is the kingdom of the Son.

Our reading in Psalm 119 tells us that having God as your portion, or possession, means that you “get up in the middle of the night to give thanks” to God. (Psalm 119:62) Usually we wake up in the middle of the night because we are worried, or stressed, or angry, or afraid. When we get older, we start waking up in the middle of the night for other reasons. Imagine that your only reason for waking up in the middle of the night was because you were bursting with thanks.

If you can give thanks, then you can live in peace and rest. You can enjoy the game, and you don’t have to worry about losing or getting. The game of simply playing, the game of simply thanking, is the prize.

The first two successful colonies in the beginning of our nation’s story were Jamestown, and Plymouth of the Pilgrims. Actually, neither of them thrived for very long, but they lasted long enough to set the tone for our people. They lasted long enough to raise the basic question of what it means to be us. What is our truest heritage?

Jamestown was created by people in search of gold and gain. Plymouth was created by persecuted and endangered people who were searching for rest and peace. Those who were searching for rest and peace created our first Thanksgiving.

Which dream, which driving force, represents us; represents you and me? Getting? Or thanking!