Praising God
Commentary
I learned a lesson about thanksgiving while working as a parish pastor. One of my duties was to call on inactive members of the church. As I listened to the tales of why seemingly good people had quit coming to worship, I found only one common denominator. All of these inactives insisted, for a wide variety of reasons, that they just weren't getting out of church what they expected. They weren't being sufficiently "fed" or helped or inspired.
At first this struck me as odd, because I wasn't brought up to think I was supposed to get anything out of worship. Not necessarily. My parents used to load the kids into the car on Sunday morning because, as my mother would say, "God blesses us six days a week and when Sunday comes we go to church to say thanks." As the years went by, I discovered that worship services could be very meaningful, sermons enlightening, hymns uplifting. But still, deep down inside, I never really thought I was going to church to get fed or helped or inspired. I thought I was going to give thanks and praise to God.
The inactives, it seems, missed this lesson. They assumed that what happened on Sunday morning was for them, not for God. Based on this observation, I have begun talking to other church members about why they come to church. I view those who come because of what they are getting out of it as potential inactive members. Whatever factors draw them (the pastor, the liturgy, the programs, the fellowship with others) may change. Or they may change. What will never change is the magnificence and goodness of God. None of the inactives I visited ever told me, "I quit going to church because I decided God is no longer worthy of worship."
Thanksgiving Day is one occasion to emphasize this fundamental aspect of worship that often gets lost in our efforts to minister to people's needs. As the people of God, we are called to minister to one another, but we are also called to minister to God, offering praise and thanksgiving to the one who is so good to us.
Joel 2:21-27
Very little is known of the prophet Joel, and his book is notoriously hard to date. The theme, however, is clear. A locust plague has ravished the country and Joel addresses the people about its significance. Typical (deuteronomic) themes emerge: the plague was God's judgment, revealing the need for national repentance. But the prophet also affirms God's continuing care, promising recovery and restoration. The text for today reflects this confidence.
The text promises that things will be as before. This is interesting. The great hope of this prophet is not for a Paradise where the wolf and lamb shall feed together and the lion eats straw like the ox (Isaiah 65:25). Rather, it is the world as we know it. A couple good rains, a full harvest, and Joel will be more than satisfied.
What is needed, the prophet thinks, is recognition. See verse 27. Now that the people have experienced calamity, they will be more likely to recognize as the gifts of God what they had previously taken for granted. The old Appalachian proverb says, "You don't miss your water till the well runs dry."
The poetic language of the passage is beautiful. The prophet extols first the land, then animals, and finally God's people to trust and thanksgiving. This order of addresses is basically the same as the order of creation in Genesis 1. The imagery is revealing of God as concerned with all of nature. God not only cares for people, but also for soil and animals. We may think immediately of the God who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field -- our Gospel text for today!
The ecological concerns are obvious. The earth is the Lord's (Psalm 24:1)! What better way, then, to show thanksgiving for God's creation than to care for it?
1 Timothy 2:1-7
This text raises a number of significant theological points, but it has been chosen for this day because of its first two verses. Paul is presented as encouraging Timothy to recognize the importance of prayer.
The first three words are notable: "First of all ..." One implication is that prayer is not everything. It is only the first step. We pray, and then we do all the other things that follow. Another implication, however, is that prayer is the first step. All the other things may count for nothing apart from this. You will know your own self, your own congregation, your own community, better than I. But, in my experience, the first of these two implications gets stated repeatedly even though no one disagrees with it, while the second is stated less frequently and perhaps is neglected.
Verse one uses four different words to speak of prayer. Many commentators have tried to establish a typology of prayer based on this, assuming the words must refer to four different things. The classic presentation goes back to Origen, who thought the second term ("prayers" in the NRSV) referred to general petitions for the will of God to be done; the first ("supplication") to specific requests related to personal needs; the third ("intercessions") to similar requests regarding the needs of others; and the final term ("thanksgivings") to the giving of thanks. I suspect this milks more out of the text than can be sustained, but certainly the author does want the community to have a rich and varied prayer life.
Most important, these prayers (including the thanksgivings) are to be offered for everyone. Why? Because God wants everyone to be saved (v. 4) and because Christ gave himself as a ransom for all (v. 6). The exhortation to pray for all is consistent with Jesus' demand that we pray even for our enemies (Matthew 5:44). But here it goes a step further. We are encouraged to give thanks for everyone. When we recognize that all people are in some sense God's people, we discover that all people are gifts of God to us (as we are also to them).
We are to pray especially for "kings and all who are in high positions." This letter was written in a society that disapproved of Christians and sometimes persecuted them. Magistrates and kings were typically enemies of the faith. In that context, the directive to pray for such persons may have included prayer for their conversion. The emphasis here, though, seems to be on requesting divine guidance that will facilitate peace and justice (v. 2). There is an implicit recognition that God can work even through the ungodly (cf. Romans 1:13), and for this, too, we are thankful.
Matthew 6:25-33
This text never mentions thanksgiving as such, but it deals with "worry," the opposite of trust and a primary hindrance to gratitude. The well-known words of Jesus regarding birds and lilies are part of the Sermon on the Mount, and they are often mistaken as representing a sort of common-sense attitude toward life. Actually, the entire Sermon on the Mount is directed to a privileged audience (5:1-2), to Jesus' disciples who have accepted his proclamation that "the kingdom of heaven is near" (4:17). The words of this text are not common sense unless one believes this. In fact, if the kingdom of heaven were not near, then Jesus' advice would be foolish.
As we noted with regard to last Sunday's theme of "Christ the King," the kingdom of heaven (or of God) refers to the reality of God ruling human lives. When Jesus says that "the kingdom of heaven is near," he means that God is near to us and will rule our lives. If this is true, then we can live in faith not fear. The last verse of this text indicates that what is most important is "to strive for the kingdom of God." This does not mean that the most important thing in life is to be sure we will go to heaven and be with God after we die, but rather that the most important thing in life is to have God rule us, control our lives, and care for us in ways that affect the quality of our existence now and for eternity.
What prevents us from allowing God to rule? The verse immediately preceding this text gives one answer: no one can serve two masters. To the extent that we are devoted to material things, we allow those interests to control us and we miss out on life as it ought to be. Jesus draws examples from the world of nature to discourage such obsessions. Material things like food and clothing are not bad; God knows we need them. But what do we "strive for" (vv. 32, 33)? And what do we worry about? People can be well-fed and well-dressed and still miss out on life (v. 25b).
The point of the text is not to discourage legitimate concern for necessities of life but to indicate that anxiety with regard to such matters is debilitating. A fundamental trust in the goodness of creation and in the providence of God is essential for experiencing life as intended.
FIRST LESSON FOCUSBy Elizabeth Achtemeier
Joel 2:21-27
Thanksgiving sermons in our time usually take one of two approaches. Sometimes they become "guilt trips," laid upon the congregation because it is so well-to-do compared to most of the other people in the world. On the basis of the guilt aroused, the preacher then urges the congregation to sacrifice some of its comfortable lifestyle for the sake of giving to the less fortunate. Other times, and less frequently, thanksgiving sermons gratefully acknowledge the bounty of life's goods that God has poured out upon the people.
The latter approach stands in tension with the customary beliefs of the congregation, however, because for the most part, we all believe that the bounties of nature and the goods that we possess come not from God but from our own hard work and planning. Without our attention to our jobs -- usually on the part of both husband and wife -- and our careful handling of our finances, we would not have all of the comforts and goods that we possess. Such bounties have not come from the Lord; we have earned them ourselves.
Especially is such a secular attitude connected with our views of the natural world. We modern, twentieth-century Americans have largely divorced God's working from the realm of nature. To be sure, most of us believe that God created the world in the beginning, but now we think the world operates automatically by itself. All the processes of nature proceed on the basis of natural law, and God has nothing to do with them. Nature is a closed system, proceeding according to the laws inherent in it, and there is no place where God interferes with that process. Should he do so, we would call it a miracle. But customarily miracles do not happen. Nature operates by itself. It is devoid of the working of the Lord.
Our text from Joel and, indeed, the whole of Scripture including the New Testament lesson from Matthew contradict our secular views. The natural world and all its processes were created and are continually sustained by the action of God, says the Bible. Here in our Joel passage, it is God who causes the fruit trees to bear and the vineyards to bring forth their grapes. It is God who sends the rain upon the earth and causes the grain to grow. It is God who causes all plants to grow after locusts have stripped the land bare. Without the action of God, such bounty would not be given.
To give further examples, the Scriptures are quite convinced that there continues to be a round of the seasons, because God promised that "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22) -- and God always keeps his promises. Hundreds of biblical texts affirm that God controls the appearance and movement of the constellations and other heavenly bodies (e.g., Job 38:31-33; Mark 15:33), just as he can change the earth's very geology (e.g., Amos 8:8; Matthew 27:51-52), or control the wind, the rain, and all the elements (e.g., Psalm 147:16-18; Matthew 5:45). The order of the natural world in all its parts, says Genesis 1, is dependent on its Creator, and were he not to sustain that order, the world would return to chaos (e.g., Jeremiah 4:23-25; Psalm 104:9).
In the biblical view, God therefore uses the natural realm for his own purposes, as is evident in the New Testament accounts of Christ's crucifixion. As a judgment for sin, God can bring a famine upon the land (e.g., Jeremiah 14:1-10), or ruin the wheat harvest with rain at the improper time (1 Samuel 12:17-18). In the attempt to get his people to repent of their sinful ways, God can send famine and blight, locusts and plague (e.g., Amos 4:4-13).
As a result, catastrophes in the natural world, say the Scriptures, can be visited upon those who are unfaithful to their covenant with the Lord (Deuteronomy 27--28) -- catastrophes that scholars have named "covenant curses." It is with such covenant curses that Joel is concerned. All of the natural disasters that the people have experienced in Joel's time -- mainly locust devastation and drought -- are covenant curses that have come upon Israel for their faithlessness to the covenant.
Here in our stated lesson in Joel, however, those covenant curses are to be done away with, and the blessings of the covenant will be lavished upon the people. God has changed his attitude toward his chosen folk, not because they deserve it. Rather, God has become "jealous" for his people, says Joel 2:18, because they have been mocked by the foreign nations. God has unmerited pity on Israel, and so now here in our passage, he reverses all the effects of his curse and turns them all into blessing, restoring all those natural goods of which Israel was previously deprived.
Such a scriptural witness raises enormous questions in the minds of a modern congregation. Does that mean that every time we experience a natural disaster, God is punishing us for some sin? No. There are natural calamities that take place in the biblical story that have no connection with God's judgment (e.g., the famine in Genesis 12:10). What the Bible is saying, however, is that the lordship of God over the natural world is fact, and sometimes God does indeed use nature for his purposes of judgment and salvation. Thus, probably the biblical attitude to have in our scientific age is at least to ask, whenever we experience a disaster: Is God trying to tell us something? Nature's calamities should lead us to examine our lives and to repent of our unfaithfulness.
More than that, however, this text from Joel on this Thanksgiving Day should lead us to correct our secular view of the world. We are in fact dependent creatures living on a dependent planet that would not exist and whose order would not be sustained were God not to create and sustain us and our world. Because we daily experience that common and unmerited grace of God that causes "the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45); because we are surrounded on every side by a world overflowing with beauty and wonder and vitality; because our heavenly Father feeds the birds and clothes the lilies of the field in a glory exceeding that of Solomon; and because he gives us our daily bread and lavishes on us more care than he lavishes on all creation, we can join in this salvation oracle of Joel's and "be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things."
Best of all, we can praise the name of the Lord our God, as Joel says, because the Lord is in our midst, and we know that he alone is our God and our loving heavenly Father.
At first this struck me as odd, because I wasn't brought up to think I was supposed to get anything out of worship. Not necessarily. My parents used to load the kids into the car on Sunday morning because, as my mother would say, "God blesses us six days a week and when Sunday comes we go to church to say thanks." As the years went by, I discovered that worship services could be very meaningful, sermons enlightening, hymns uplifting. But still, deep down inside, I never really thought I was going to church to get fed or helped or inspired. I thought I was going to give thanks and praise to God.
The inactives, it seems, missed this lesson. They assumed that what happened on Sunday morning was for them, not for God. Based on this observation, I have begun talking to other church members about why they come to church. I view those who come because of what they are getting out of it as potential inactive members. Whatever factors draw them (the pastor, the liturgy, the programs, the fellowship with others) may change. Or they may change. What will never change is the magnificence and goodness of God. None of the inactives I visited ever told me, "I quit going to church because I decided God is no longer worthy of worship."
Thanksgiving Day is one occasion to emphasize this fundamental aspect of worship that often gets lost in our efforts to minister to people's needs. As the people of God, we are called to minister to one another, but we are also called to minister to God, offering praise and thanksgiving to the one who is so good to us.
Joel 2:21-27
Very little is known of the prophet Joel, and his book is notoriously hard to date. The theme, however, is clear. A locust plague has ravished the country and Joel addresses the people about its significance. Typical (deuteronomic) themes emerge: the plague was God's judgment, revealing the need for national repentance. But the prophet also affirms God's continuing care, promising recovery and restoration. The text for today reflects this confidence.
The text promises that things will be as before. This is interesting. The great hope of this prophet is not for a Paradise where the wolf and lamb shall feed together and the lion eats straw like the ox (Isaiah 65:25). Rather, it is the world as we know it. A couple good rains, a full harvest, and Joel will be more than satisfied.
What is needed, the prophet thinks, is recognition. See verse 27. Now that the people have experienced calamity, they will be more likely to recognize as the gifts of God what they had previously taken for granted. The old Appalachian proverb says, "You don't miss your water till the well runs dry."
The poetic language of the passage is beautiful. The prophet extols first the land, then animals, and finally God's people to trust and thanksgiving. This order of addresses is basically the same as the order of creation in Genesis 1. The imagery is revealing of God as concerned with all of nature. God not only cares for people, but also for soil and animals. We may think immediately of the God who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field -- our Gospel text for today!
The ecological concerns are obvious. The earth is the Lord's (Psalm 24:1)! What better way, then, to show thanksgiving for God's creation than to care for it?
1 Timothy 2:1-7
This text raises a number of significant theological points, but it has been chosen for this day because of its first two verses. Paul is presented as encouraging Timothy to recognize the importance of prayer.
The first three words are notable: "First of all ..." One implication is that prayer is not everything. It is only the first step. We pray, and then we do all the other things that follow. Another implication, however, is that prayer is the first step. All the other things may count for nothing apart from this. You will know your own self, your own congregation, your own community, better than I. But, in my experience, the first of these two implications gets stated repeatedly even though no one disagrees with it, while the second is stated less frequently and perhaps is neglected.
Verse one uses four different words to speak of prayer. Many commentators have tried to establish a typology of prayer based on this, assuming the words must refer to four different things. The classic presentation goes back to Origen, who thought the second term ("prayers" in the NRSV) referred to general petitions for the will of God to be done; the first ("supplication") to specific requests related to personal needs; the third ("intercessions") to similar requests regarding the needs of others; and the final term ("thanksgivings") to the giving of thanks. I suspect this milks more out of the text than can be sustained, but certainly the author does want the community to have a rich and varied prayer life.
Most important, these prayers (including the thanksgivings) are to be offered for everyone. Why? Because God wants everyone to be saved (v. 4) and because Christ gave himself as a ransom for all (v. 6). The exhortation to pray for all is consistent with Jesus' demand that we pray even for our enemies (Matthew 5:44). But here it goes a step further. We are encouraged to give thanks for everyone. When we recognize that all people are in some sense God's people, we discover that all people are gifts of God to us (as we are also to them).
We are to pray especially for "kings and all who are in high positions." This letter was written in a society that disapproved of Christians and sometimes persecuted them. Magistrates and kings were typically enemies of the faith. In that context, the directive to pray for such persons may have included prayer for their conversion. The emphasis here, though, seems to be on requesting divine guidance that will facilitate peace and justice (v. 2). There is an implicit recognition that God can work even through the ungodly (cf. Romans 1:13), and for this, too, we are thankful.
Matthew 6:25-33
This text never mentions thanksgiving as such, but it deals with "worry," the opposite of trust and a primary hindrance to gratitude. The well-known words of Jesus regarding birds and lilies are part of the Sermon on the Mount, and they are often mistaken as representing a sort of common-sense attitude toward life. Actually, the entire Sermon on the Mount is directed to a privileged audience (5:1-2), to Jesus' disciples who have accepted his proclamation that "the kingdom of heaven is near" (4:17). The words of this text are not common sense unless one believes this. In fact, if the kingdom of heaven were not near, then Jesus' advice would be foolish.
As we noted with regard to last Sunday's theme of "Christ the King," the kingdom of heaven (or of God) refers to the reality of God ruling human lives. When Jesus says that "the kingdom of heaven is near," he means that God is near to us and will rule our lives. If this is true, then we can live in faith not fear. The last verse of this text indicates that what is most important is "to strive for the kingdom of God." This does not mean that the most important thing in life is to be sure we will go to heaven and be with God after we die, but rather that the most important thing in life is to have God rule us, control our lives, and care for us in ways that affect the quality of our existence now and for eternity.
What prevents us from allowing God to rule? The verse immediately preceding this text gives one answer: no one can serve two masters. To the extent that we are devoted to material things, we allow those interests to control us and we miss out on life as it ought to be. Jesus draws examples from the world of nature to discourage such obsessions. Material things like food and clothing are not bad; God knows we need them. But what do we "strive for" (vv. 32, 33)? And what do we worry about? People can be well-fed and well-dressed and still miss out on life (v. 25b).
The point of the text is not to discourage legitimate concern for necessities of life but to indicate that anxiety with regard to such matters is debilitating. A fundamental trust in the goodness of creation and in the providence of God is essential for experiencing life as intended.
FIRST LESSON FOCUSBy Elizabeth Achtemeier
Joel 2:21-27
Thanksgiving sermons in our time usually take one of two approaches. Sometimes they become "guilt trips," laid upon the congregation because it is so well-to-do compared to most of the other people in the world. On the basis of the guilt aroused, the preacher then urges the congregation to sacrifice some of its comfortable lifestyle for the sake of giving to the less fortunate. Other times, and less frequently, thanksgiving sermons gratefully acknowledge the bounty of life's goods that God has poured out upon the people.
The latter approach stands in tension with the customary beliefs of the congregation, however, because for the most part, we all believe that the bounties of nature and the goods that we possess come not from God but from our own hard work and planning. Without our attention to our jobs -- usually on the part of both husband and wife -- and our careful handling of our finances, we would not have all of the comforts and goods that we possess. Such bounties have not come from the Lord; we have earned them ourselves.
Especially is such a secular attitude connected with our views of the natural world. We modern, twentieth-century Americans have largely divorced God's working from the realm of nature. To be sure, most of us believe that God created the world in the beginning, but now we think the world operates automatically by itself. All the processes of nature proceed on the basis of natural law, and God has nothing to do with them. Nature is a closed system, proceeding according to the laws inherent in it, and there is no place where God interferes with that process. Should he do so, we would call it a miracle. But customarily miracles do not happen. Nature operates by itself. It is devoid of the working of the Lord.
Our text from Joel and, indeed, the whole of Scripture including the New Testament lesson from Matthew contradict our secular views. The natural world and all its processes were created and are continually sustained by the action of God, says the Bible. Here in our Joel passage, it is God who causes the fruit trees to bear and the vineyards to bring forth their grapes. It is God who sends the rain upon the earth and causes the grain to grow. It is God who causes all plants to grow after locusts have stripped the land bare. Without the action of God, such bounty would not be given.
To give further examples, the Scriptures are quite convinced that there continues to be a round of the seasons, because God promised that "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22) -- and God always keeps his promises. Hundreds of biblical texts affirm that God controls the appearance and movement of the constellations and other heavenly bodies (e.g., Job 38:31-33; Mark 15:33), just as he can change the earth's very geology (e.g., Amos 8:8; Matthew 27:51-52), or control the wind, the rain, and all the elements (e.g., Psalm 147:16-18; Matthew 5:45). The order of the natural world in all its parts, says Genesis 1, is dependent on its Creator, and were he not to sustain that order, the world would return to chaos (e.g., Jeremiah 4:23-25; Psalm 104:9).
In the biblical view, God therefore uses the natural realm for his own purposes, as is evident in the New Testament accounts of Christ's crucifixion. As a judgment for sin, God can bring a famine upon the land (e.g., Jeremiah 14:1-10), or ruin the wheat harvest with rain at the improper time (1 Samuel 12:17-18). In the attempt to get his people to repent of their sinful ways, God can send famine and blight, locusts and plague (e.g., Amos 4:4-13).
As a result, catastrophes in the natural world, say the Scriptures, can be visited upon those who are unfaithful to their covenant with the Lord (Deuteronomy 27--28) -- catastrophes that scholars have named "covenant curses." It is with such covenant curses that Joel is concerned. All of the natural disasters that the people have experienced in Joel's time -- mainly locust devastation and drought -- are covenant curses that have come upon Israel for their faithlessness to the covenant.
Here in our stated lesson in Joel, however, those covenant curses are to be done away with, and the blessings of the covenant will be lavished upon the people. God has changed his attitude toward his chosen folk, not because they deserve it. Rather, God has become "jealous" for his people, says Joel 2:18, because they have been mocked by the foreign nations. God has unmerited pity on Israel, and so now here in our passage, he reverses all the effects of his curse and turns them all into blessing, restoring all those natural goods of which Israel was previously deprived.
Such a scriptural witness raises enormous questions in the minds of a modern congregation. Does that mean that every time we experience a natural disaster, God is punishing us for some sin? No. There are natural calamities that take place in the biblical story that have no connection with God's judgment (e.g., the famine in Genesis 12:10). What the Bible is saying, however, is that the lordship of God over the natural world is fact, and sometimes God does indeed use nature for his purposes of judgment and salvation. Thus, probably the biblical attitude to have in our scientific age is at least to ask, whenever we experience a disaster: Is God trying to tell us something? Nature's calamities should lead us to examine our lives and to repent of our unfaithfulness.
More than that, however, this text from Joel on this Thanksgiving Day should lead us to correct our secular view of the world. We are in fact dependent creatures living on a dependent planet that would not exist and whose order would not be sustained were God not to create and sustain us and our world. Because we daily experience that common and unmerited grace of God that causes "the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45); because we are surrounded on every side by a world overflowing with beauty and wonder and vitality; because our heavenly Father feeds the birds and clothes the lilies of the field in a glory exceeding that of Solomon; and because he gives us our daily bread and lavishes on us more care than he lavishes on all creation, we can join in this salvation oracle of Joel's and "be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things."
Best of all, we can praise the name of the Lord our God, as Joel says, because the Lord is in our midst, and we know that he alone is our God and our loving heavenly Father.
