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For God's Abundance
This week, we will gather with our families around card tables, dining room tables, cafeteria tables and restaurant tables to celebrate this most quintessentially American of holidays – Thanksgiving. And what is the most important part of this day? Oh, we give lip service to being with our family and counting our blessings, but really, secretly, we know what it’s really about – the food. The special dishes we bring out once or twice a year. The side dish that makes Thanksgiving, well, Thanksgiving. The secret family recipe that is closely guarded. The pie purchased from your favorite store. Few of us invite our friends and family over to sit around and eat saltines and drink water. At Thanksgiving, the food is the focus.
But when we gather around the table and begin to share what we are thankful for, our conversation begins to shift from the material things for which we are grateful and toward the important thing: the Maker of all things for whom we should always give thanks.
What a subtle but a powerful shift, from material to the Maker, from created things to the Creator, from the food to the fellowship. It’s so easy to get caught up in theactivity of the day, in the preparation and in the travel, that we focus more on the menu and less on the guest list. We can focus more on our relationship with our stuff than our relationship with God and our neighbor.
At its heart, Thanksgiving is not just a once-a-year holiday but is an attitude of the heart. For As followers of Jesus, our entire life is centered on relationship – our relationship to God, to our neighbor and to the stranger.
Think back to your most meaningful Thanksgiving day. What about that day was so special or moved you? It probably wasn’t the fine china, the abundance of food or who won the football game after the meal. It probably had something to do with the people who were or were not around the table.
My most memorable Thanksgiving came when I lived in Philadelphia with several other young adult missionaries. We were from around the East Coast: Juan was from Brooklyn, Jennine from Virginia, Camille from Alabama and I was from South Carolina. We lived too far from our families to travel home, so we decided to celebrate together. I don’t remember what we ate but I do remember the joyful conversations that took place around that table. We came together not because of blood or family ties but because of Jesus Christ who connected us together.
Jesus knew a thing or two about relationship. The feeding of the 5,000 from our scripture lesson today was more like the feeding of the 15,000 or 20,000 since 5,000 didn’t include women and children. They were out in the wilderness with Jesus, who had tried to get away for a few minutes of peace and quiet. When he realized that wasn’t going to happen, he set about the business his Father had given to him: preaching Good News to the poor, releasing the prisoners, restoring the sight of the blind, and setting free the oppressed.
When the disciples realized that dinner time was fast approaching, they started to panic and became completely hung up on the menu – what could they possibly get to feed all these people – and not on the guests themselves. They didn’t see the young widow with four small children who was at the end of her rope. They overlooked the man with the withered leg who was carried out to this deserted place by his friends. In their frantic state they missed the elderly blind woman who had stumbled here by following the scent of the sweaty crowd.
Jesus looked out onto that crowd, he had compassion for them, and he noticed them. He paid attention to the guest list. He fed them not from obligation but out of devotion. He met their needs not because he was a show-off with his heavenly powers but because his heart ached for their hunger. He provided bread and fish for them not because it was a secret family recipe but because looking them in the eye with love was more filling than any 10-course meal.
Jesus was always more concerned about who was around the table and not what was on it. As his followers, we are compelled to do the same as we care for our neighbor. Not just care – but love our neighbor, be involved in intentional relationship with the neighbor we know and the neighbor we will never meet. It is important to us who is around the table.
It’s why we celebrate Bread for the World Sunday and why we collect canned goods for the Sunday Morning Breakfast Mission in Wilmington. It’s why we collect shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child, full of trinkets and candy and small stuffed animals that may not mean very much to our children but will be more than a child in El Salvador or Croatia. It’s why we build water collection tanks in Tanzania and chapels in orphanages in Uganda. It’s why we take meals to new parents in Lincoln University and provide luncheons to grieving families in Jennersville. It’s why we take cookies to our volunteer firefighters and our emergency room and our library in West Grove. We care about who is around our table.
This Thanksgiving, who will be around your table? With whom will you break bread? Who is missing? As we enter a holiday season of our own as Advent begins next Sunday, who is around the table of the Lord as we gather? With whom do we break bread? Who is missing?
How would our community as a congregation and your community as a family change if we asked ourselves that hard question – who is missing here? Who is God calling us to reach out to with love? How can we make a place for orphans from Africa who have slept in mud, watched their parents die and live with HIV? How can we invite to the table half of America’s children who will spend time on food stamps? How can we add a chair for those in our own community who speak a different language, eat a different food, and wear different clothes? How can we set an extra place this Thursday for our next door neighbor who lives far from her children and will eat a frozen dinner in front of the TV this Thanksgiving?
We know that it’s not about the menu, but it’s about the guest list. It’s not about our stuff but about our relationships. We know that it’s at the very heart, the very core, the very basic offering thanksgiving for God who creates us, who redeems us and who loves us. This Thanksgiving, as someone asks you, “What are you thankful for?” how will you respond? Amen.