Pentecost 27 – Thanksgiving Sunday

Matthew 25:31-46

Today is ”Thanksgiving Sunday” – the Sunday before one of our most wonderful holidays! I know that many of you will be traveling to visit with family members all over the country, and that others of you will celebrate the holiday with friends right here in the area. We wish you a beautiful time, filled with great joy. And may we all return here next week, or the week after, truly grateful for all the blessings of our lives!

Being a native New Englander, Thanksgiving has a special significance to me. Just a little more than an hour from where I grew up is Plymouth, Massachusetts where the Pilgrims settled. A replica of the ship Mayflower is there, as is a real-life re-creation of Plimouth Plantation.

The first church I served is just a half-hour west of Plymouth and was established in 1712, just a little more than 90 years after the Pilgrims landed. The people who founded that church were the children and grandchildren of the Pilgrims. And they – and their descendents – took the celebration of Thanksgiving pretty seriously.

Our worship services were built around The Pilgrim Hymnal, and we would take time every year not only to sing the songs of Thanksgiving, but also to tell the story of those 110 courageous souls who braved the cold waters of the Atlantic on that little ship to come and begin a NEW England. We recalled how many of them died that first winter – more than half the company, fewer than 50 survived! And we remembered how the corn they planted was not successful, requiring them to ration out the corn harvest in the second winter – just 5 kernels of corn per person per day! Some New England Thanksgiving dinners today begin with families gathered about the dining room table, and on each plate are just five kernels of corn – so we will never forget. And we reflected on how the native Americans befriended them, and taught the Pilgrims the secrets of growing things in the rocky New England soil; and how – together – they celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a holiday that embraces all the ideals of the Gospel – complete and radical trust in God – the courage to step out into the unknown to be faithful to God – the commitment to persevere through the most difficult and challenging times – the devotion of caring for one another – the loving of neighbors – the taking care of orphans and widows – the appreciation of the blessings of life, even when they seem small and few.

Thanksgiving has it all. And one more thing: Thanksgiving brings us face-to-face with the theme of Final Judgment.

Over and over in the Bible, the metaphor of the harvest is used to teach about Final Judgment. In the Thanksgiving hymn that brackets this sermon – “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” – we are led from the celebration of our blessings to the accountability of our lives in just one short verse. Did you hear the lyric of verse 2?

All the world is God’s own field, fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown, unto joy or sorrow grown;
First the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest, grant that we, wholesome grain and pure may be.”

So we return to our worship theme this November – “From Here To Eternity!” We have explored what it means to embrace eternity as a lifestyle, and we’ve talked about our loved ones and all the saints in heaven, and last week we held up the importance of not going bananas over wild ideas about the Second Coming, but to work and live every day as though it is THE day God’s Kingdom comes.

And now this morning – on Thanksgiving Sunday – we take up the Final Judgment.

Some people don’t think there is such a thing as Final Judgment – that the idea is just a biblical way of saying to your disobedient children, “Just wait until your father gets home!” The threat is often worse than the reality!

If you are like me and grew up in a world where the threat of judgment was always there but never really happened, you may have come to think that its like Chicken Little’s warning to Henny Penny that the sky is falling. After a time, the threat wears thin. When I was a kid, I belonged to a church that had a gym and some of us would go to play basketball. But our Catholic friends couldn’t go. They were convinced they’d be struck by lightning if they went into a Protestant church. Eventually, we Protestants wore down the Catholics. We were pretty good at getting other kids to commit sin. So the Catholic kids snuck into the gym with us and played basketball. Nothing happened. We all had a great time. And after that, the Catholic kids weren’t so worried about lightning strikes! They even found it easier to join us Protestant kids in thinking dirty thoughts because the threat of going directly to hell or even of going blind just didn’t seem so credible anymore.

Yes, some people poo-poo the idea of judgment, and especially of Final Judgment.

I prefer to defer to the greater wisdom of Jesus who taught extensively about Final Judgment. And what I believe Jesus was trying to get across is that life itself is a gift, and we are accountable for it. Without accountability, faith would allow us to go forward in a church service to accept Jesus in one moment, and then go home and abuse our children in the next. Doesn’t it strike you as somewhat odd how this area of the Bible Belt has extraordinarily high rates of child sexual and physical abuse? All around us we can see people who are full of faith, but empty of love – overflowing with religion, but devoid of responsibility. A suicide bomber sends himself off to heaven by committing murder. A Christian fundamentalist “obeys” scripture by killing Matthew Shepherd, a gay man. An affluent congregation celebrates Thanksgiving by numbering their many blessings while the poor around them go hungry and cold. A Congress that would fight to the death over “in God we trust” votes to cut back food stamps whose ultimate beneficiaries are children. Oh, its easy to see faith without accountability, and not just in others. All we have to do is look in the mirror and we will find it in the reflection there, too.

So the Christian Faith teaches that life is larger than this moment – that there is a life that extends beyond death – and that our ability to participate in that eternal life is shaped by the way in which we live today. In God’s new Kingdom, faith and love will be inseparable, and those who get to live in that Kingdom will be those who’ve learned to live that way – the way of Jesus. So there must be a Judgment Day when lives are accounted for.

Interestingly enough, in Revelation 20 where Final Judgment is described in all its poetic-apocalyptic-ness, there is a scene in which two books are brought out – books that record the meaning of our lives. One is the Book of Life, of those embraced by the love of Jesus. It is the record of those saved by grace. The other is the book of our life-deeds – the indelible record of the works of our hands. Bible students have pondered for ages about why there are two sets of books because, if the Book of Life is about grace – and we are saved by grace – why do we have a book that records our deeds?

Well, probably it is because in the early Church there was the same concern we have today. There were many people who mistakenly believed they could be saved by grace and then go and live any way they wanted to live – St. Paul wrote extensively about that; and there were other people who thought they could save themselves by complying with all the religious laws, but knew nothing about love and living a life reflective of grace. These are the people who killed Jesus.

So the two books that appear in Revelation 20 teach us that both faith AND works are important to God – by our works, we reveal our faith, and because of our faith, we show good works.

Accountability. You and I will be held accountable for our lives.

That’s what Jesus was getting at in Matthew 25 when he told the parable of the sheep and the goats. In the parable, it is Judgment Day. Jesus has come with all the angels. Humanity is gathered before him. The books of our lives are opened. Some are invited to enter the next amazing phase of life described as the Kingdom of God. Others are not.

This parable has long intrigued me. For one thing, ALL the people gathered in the story refer to Jesus as “Lord”, clearly meaning that they are believers! These are people of faith! And yet, only some of these people inherit the Kingdom, and others do not. What’s the difference?

“I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

That’s what Jesus says to those being welcomed into the Kingdom. Then, he points out to the others that they had responded to him differently, in fact, just the opposite:

“I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

And both groups of people, in the parable, are puzzled. “Lord, when did we see YOU this way and do those things, or not do those things?”

And Jesus says, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers or sisters, you did for me.”

Accountability.

In a sense, the Thanksgiving holiday can be for us a time of reflecting upon our own lives and how they are going. As we celebrate the harvest of God’s good and wonderful blessings to us and our children, we are asked to measure our own lives against the standard of God’s gracious generosity toward us. God has given us food and water and friendship and clothing and God has come to be with us in our illnesses and our imprisonments.

The questions Thanksgiving asks are, “To what degree are we like God? To what degree are we like Jesus?” And when we ask those questions, we just may be surprised at how unlike the Lord many Christians are.

One of the reasons I love the Thanksgiving story is because there is a reversal in it. It is not the Pilgrims who turn out to be those living up to the standards of God, feeding the least of Jesus’ brothers.

No, it is Samoset – and Squanto – and other native Americans bringing the food, sharing the cup, offering friendship, clothing, shelter, compassion, and the tools that will lead eventually to freedom! And can’t you just see Samoset and Squanto and all the others on Judgment Day, being joyfully welcomed into the Kingdom of God because of how they treated Jesus.

“When did we ever see you hungry and thirsty, Jesus?” they might ask.

“When you did it to the least of these my sisters and brothers, you did it to me.” Jesus will say.

And for the Pilgrims of that day, and all of us Christians in this day, the question we might just ask ourselves is this:

“Do we live up to the faithful accountability of the native Americans who did not have either the theology or the religion, but who clearly had the love of Jesus?”

The greatest act of Thanksgiving you can do is not to count your blessings, not to say a “thank you” prayer, and not to celebrate a holiday.

The greatest act of Thanksgiving you can do is to offer a cup of cold water to the least of Jesus’ friends.

A cup of thanksgiving!

That is accountability.