Thanksgiving Bible
Stories
Object:
Contents
"Thanksgiving Bible" by Frank Ramirez
"You Can't Go Back" by C. David McKirachan
"Getting Well" by C. David McKirachan
* * * * * * *
Thanksgiving Bible
by Frank Ramirez
Deuteronomy 8:7-18
You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.
-- Deuteronomy 8:10
If we have been born and raised in the United States we can forget just how grateful we should be to live here. But even before there was a United States newcomers to this land were extraordinarily thankful, simply because the land wasn't exhausted, and there was opportunity to better oneself, and they were able to worship God as they saw fit.
Johann Christoph Sauer Sr. (1695-1758)In 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft beat the Soviet Mars 2 to the Red Planet to become the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.In 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft beat the Soviet Mars 2 to the Red Planet to become the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. was born in Germany and emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1724. In a letter written that same year to Germany he said:
"Now we are in a well-blessed land. There are neither guilds nor burdens from the authorities. My host has a well-built house and is a cooper by trade. He has fifty acres of fields and forest....
"All labor is well paid... The spirit of this world promises her admirers a great fortune weekly. When a day laborer or artisan arrives here without debt, he can then buy property in two or three years of 100 acres of fields and forests with wheat, trees, and other gardens, as well as a soundly built stone house. This is more independent than a nobelman's estate in Germany."
His traveling company, John George Kasebier, was equally enthused when he wrote back to Germany:
"As far as this country is concerned, it is a precious land with the finest wheat, as well as unusual corn, fine broom corn, maize, and white beets of such a quality as I never saw in Germany, not to speak of that which I have not seen yet. There are apples in great quantities from trees which grow up wild without being grafted, so delicate to look at that I have not seen the like in Germany."
Sauer settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He was a tailor when he arrived at these shores, but he wrote in his letter that he had done very little tailor work, having taught himself the trade of clock making and was earning money in that profession as well as finding work as a thinker. He soon proved to be extraordinarily well gifted when it came to self-education and self-improvement. He learned 26 different trades, including clock-making, carpentry, surgery, operating an apothecary, and most of all -- printing, including the casting of his own type and the manufacturing of his own inks and paper.
Sauer printed almanacs and hymnals and also edited a German language newspaper. Sauer made it a point not to serve just one denomination but did printing work for many different churches. In a letter back to Germany he wrote, "My small print shop, now started, is dedicated to God, and I hope that during my and my son's lives that nothing shall be printed except that which is to the glory of God and for the material or eternal good of my neighbors."
His crowning achievement as a printer was the production, beginning in 1740 and ending in 1743, of the first Bible in America in a European language (German). He and his son (Christopher Sauer Jr.) printed three editions of what has become known as the Germantown or Sauer Bible.
Printing the Bible was an arduous task. With his hand press he could only produce one sheet that, when folded, created four pages at a time. These pages had to be carefully dried before they could be bound with the other pages. Between each press run of four pages all the type would have to be broken down and then reset to print four more pages. Each Bible had 1,286 pages! Everything was done by hand.
The Sauer Bible remains an artistic success, a beautiful example of the printer's art. However, the project was not intended to turn a profit, and it did not. It was meant to serve the German speaking population of America. Sauer sold the Bible at a reduced price so that the poor as well as the rich could own a copy in their homes. It was part of his way of thanking God for the good fortune of living in America.
In today's passage from Deuteronomy God promises the people they will have every reason to gather in Thanksgiving since: "You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you" (Deuteronomy 8:10). Certainly that has been the experience of many who have come to theses shores ready to work hard and praise God.
(Sources include "Two Early Letters from Germantown," by Donald F. Durnbaugh, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 74 [April 1960], pp. 219-23; Fruit of the Vine, by Donald F. Durnbaugh [Brethren Press, 1995])
Frank Ramirez has served as a pastor for nearly 30 years in Church of the Brethren congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. A graduate of LaVerne College and Bethany Theological Seminary, Ramirez is the author of numerous books, articles, and short stories. His CSS titles include Partners in Healing, He Took a Towel, The Bee Attitudes, three volumes of Lectionary Worship Aids, and Breakdown on Bethlehem Street.
You Can't Go Back
by C. David McKirachan
Luke 17:11-19
I've often wondered if I could go back in time, what would I be able to change without altering the future in some unspeakable way. I've heard it called the butterfly effect. If on our jaunt into the past we smush one butterfly, change something infinitesimal, as days and weeks and years pass, that tiny change would alter the future radically.
But I've known people, myself included, who try to live in the now acting as if parts of our past didn't happen. We try to forget that moment of weakness or arrogance or foolishness. Some of those moments are so powerful that we wince or worry or dream about them. They may be buried by the monster dandruff of time and new acquaintances, logistical alterations, behavioral switches, new habits, new jobs, but those moments, those pot holes, those choices, those lapses, those horrors are still there.
Whether we like it or not, now is an amalgam of then that are the raw material for now. No matter how we'd like to make them go away, they are part of the bedrock that our center hall colonial of now is built on.
When I went to a reunion of my graduating class from high school, it was one of those moments of embarrassment and gratitude all stirred into the same pot. They all knew me: geek, fencer, football team mascot (a great way to meet girls), singer, proto hippie, and so on. High school was a time of devastating awkwardness and loneliness. It was full of those moments I would have gladly altered, removed from my time stream like teeth crooked and painful. But the reunion revealed less pain than nostalgia and an amazing sense of gratitude. Gratitude for what that time taught me, the tools given for the future, and in retrospect laughter at our mutual silliness and audacity. It was an amazing experience, especially since I had a lot more hair than most of the other guys.
In my first book I recounted this story from Luke's gospel about the ten lepers from the point of view of one of the lepers who didn't go back to thank Jesus. He couldn't because he wanted to leave the horror of that part of his life behind him. But no matter how he tried, it was there, following him, polluting him, holding him back.
I do PTSD therapy for people who have been through horror and find themselves caught in those moments when the world stopped making sense and caved in on them. The chief therapy is to get them to walk through the moment again and again until they can allow it to become a memory and not a living nightmare. They have to go back; they have to remember it to allow themselves to face the now. A now that includes that moment in the past.
We are Christians. At the center of our faith is the cross, a traumatic horror. Our job is to embrace that event and accept our culpability in it. Then we can move on to the resurrection and transformed life. They are all a part of who and what we are. They all make the bedrock of our faith upon which we build our hope and our abundant life. Not only can we go back, we have to if we are to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves and others, and accept the miracle of life and life abundant that blooms before us every day.
At the reunion some of the same tormentors that used to make me sweat tried to pick on me again. I laughed with them. There we stood laughing. But I noticed they were wondering what the heck happened to the geek. I guess I grew up.
Getting Well
by C. David McKirachan
Luke 17:11-19
Therapy is something we probably all need. This business grinds us down, violates boundaries we didn’t even know we had, and invites us to bleed for people who don’t really want help. Yup, we need it. When I’ve had the privilege of digging into the neuroses and glories that are David with the guidance of caring and capable professionals, I have learned so much. The knowledge has been practical and visceral. I’ve come through these journeys a healthier and happier human being, more able to be a person I respect. Once I commented to a friend of mine how sane they were being and they told me, “I’ve paid a lot of money for this sanity and I intend to get some use out of it.” I concur.
One of the bits and pieces I discovered is the role that gratitude plays in my ecology of being healthy. I learned that gratitude is not necessarily an appropriate response to my environment. It can amount to denial and avoidance when we try to be grateful in the midst of pain and abuse. We have some things to deal with before we try to force gratitude onto such situations. The now gets filled up with shoulds and oughts as we try to push away what we need to deal with. It makes honesty really difficult. But I also learned gratitude that is honest, gratitude that looks the power of grace square on and acknowledges the redemptive power of a touch or a moment of quiet or a sunrise, allows us to see honestly our own need and the power of the gift.
Such moments are incredibly powerful, and I consider my ability to participate in them a symptom of sanity. Such moments make us incredibly vulnerable. Sometimes that is not comfortable.
Lepers lived lives that we can’t even imagine. Their sickness made them felons with AIDS from Liberia. They couldn’t work, get a place to live, participate in their families, go to church, get a job, or be a person. They were cursed. Touching them made the toucher unclean, so they wore bells to warn “clean” people they were coming. If you gave them alms, you threw the money or food at them. They lived together, because they had no other community. They died together.
Consider then what it meant to be made clean. Consider the reversal in fortune, in relationships, in identity. Winning the lottery pales in comparison. So why did only one come back?
These people had been changed by their sickness, marked by it. It was a yawning evidence of their vulnerability. That kind of experience would never be forgotten. No matter where they went or what they did, they would remember the clanging of the bell and the fear and disgust in the eyes of the “clean” people looking at them. So, they ran. They ran to new families who had never known them, their old families would never accept them again; new places where no one had ever thrown money at them, new lives. To do anything else would be crazy. To go back to the person that had healed them, who had looked at them, wound in the darkness of their curse, and had made them healthy would be to go back to the horror of that vulnerability. Never again. They had beautiful, clean lives to live. They were fine… except for their dreams.
Only one went back. Only one was willing to face the horror, embrace it, and so embrace the gift of healing and redemption. And he was not only given the gift of physical health. The Lord told him, “Your faith has made you well.” It could be translated clean. But we know what Jesus meant.
That guy had guts. I feel sorry for the other nine.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 27, 2014, issue.
Copyright 2014 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"Thanksgiving Bible" by Frank Ramirez
"You Can't Go Back" by C. David McKirachan
"Getting Well" by C. David McKirachan
* * * * * * *
Thanksgiving Bible
by Frank Ramirez
Deuteronomy 8:7-18
You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.
-- Deuteronomy 8:10
If we have been born and raised in the United States we can forget just how grateful we should be to live here. But even before there was a United States newcomers to this land were extraordinarily thankful, simply because the land wasn't exhausted, and there was opportunity to better oneself, and they were able to worship God as they saw fit.
Johann Christoph Sauer Sr. (1695-1758)In 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft beat the Soviet Mars 2 to the Red Planet to become the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.In 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft beat the Soviet Mars 2 to the Red Planet to become the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. was born in Germany and emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1724. In a letter written that same year to Germany he said:
"Now we are in a well-blessed land. There are neither guilds nor burdens from the authorities. My host has a well-built house and is a cooper by trade. He has fifty acres of fields and forest....
"All labor is well paid... The spirit of this world promises her admirers a great fortune weekly. When a day laborer or artisan arrives here without debt, he can then buy property in two or three years of 100 acres of fields and forests with wheat, trees, and other gardens, as well as a soundly built stone house. This is more independent than a nobelman's estate in Germany."
His traveling company, John George Kasebier, was equally enthused when he wrote back to Germany:
"As far as this country is concerned, it is a precious land with the finest wheat, as well as unusual corn, fine broom corn, maize, and white beets of such a quality as I never saw in Germany, not to speak of that which I have not seen yet. There are apples in great quantities from trees which grow up wild without being grafted, so delicate to look at that I have not seen the like in Germany."
Sauer settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He was a tailor when he arrived at these shores, but he wrote in his letter that he had done very little tailor work, having taught himself the trade of clock making and was earning money in that profession as well as finding work as a thinker. He soon proved to be extraordinarily well gifted when it came to self-education and self-improvement. He learned 26 different trades, including clock-making, carpentry, surgery, operating an apothecary, and most of all -- printing, including the casting of his own type and the manufacturing of his own inks and paper.
Sauer printed almanacs and hymnals and also edited a German language newspaper. Sauer made it a point not to serve just one denomination but did printing work for many different churches. In a letter back to Germany he wrote, "My small print shop, now started, is dedicated to God, and I hope that during my and my son's lives that nothing shall be printed except that which is to the glory of God and for the material or eternal good of my neighbors."
His crowning achievement as a printer was the production, beginning in 1740 and ending in 1743, of the first Bible in America in a European language (German). He and his son (Christopher Sauer Jr.) printed three editions of what has become known as the Germantown or Sauer Bible.
Printing the Bible was an arduous task. With his hand press he could only produce one sheet that, when folded, created four pages at a time. These pages had to be carefully dried before they could be bound with the other pages. Between each press run of four pages all the type would have to be broken down and then reset to print four more pages. Each Bible had 1,286 pages! Everything was done by hand.
The Sauer Bible remains an artistic success, a beautiful example of the printer's art. However, the project was not intended to turn a profit, and it did not. It was meant to serve the German speaking population of America. Sauer sold the Bible at a reduced price so that the poor as well as the rich could own a copy in their homes. It was part of his way of thanking God for the good fortune of living in America.
In today's passage from Deuteronomy God promises the people they will have every reason to gather in Thanksgiving since: "You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you" (Deuteronomy 8:10). Certainly that has been the experience of many who have come to theses shores ready to work hard and praise God.
(Sources include "Two Early Letters from Germantown," by Donald F. Durnbaugh, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 74 [April 1960], pp. 219-23; Fruit of the Vine, by Donald F. Durnbaugh [Brethren Press, 1995])
Frank Ramirez has served as a pastor for nearly 30 years in Church of the Brethren congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. A graduate of LaVerne College and Bethany Theological Seminary, Ramirez is the author of numerous books, articles, and short stories. His CSS titles include Partners in Healing, He Took a Towel, The Bee Attitudes, three volumes of Lectionary Worship Aids, and Breakdown on Bethlehem Street.
You Can't Go Back
by C. David McKirachan
Luke 17:11-19
I've often wondered if I could go back in time, what would I be able to change without altering the future in some unspeakable way. I've heard it called the butterfly effect. If on our jaunt into the past we smush one butterfly, change something infinitesimal, as days and weeks and years pass, that tiny change would alter the future radically.
But I've known people, myself included, who try to live in the now acting as if parts of our past didn't happen. We try to forget that moment of weakness or arrogance or foolishness. Some of those moments are so powerful that we wince or worry or dream about them. They may be buried by the monster dandruff of time and new acquaintances, logistical alterations, behavioral switches, new habits, new jobs, but those moments, those pot holes, those choices, those lapses, those horrors are still there.
Whether we like it or not, now is an amalgam of then that are the raw material for now. No matter how we'd like to make them go away, they are part of the bedrock that our center hall colonial of now is built on.
When I went to a reunion of my graduating class from high school, it was one of those moments of embarrassment and gratitude all stirred into the same pot. They all knew me: geek, fencer, football team mascot (a great way to meet girls), singer, proto hippie, and so on. High school was a time of devastating awkwardness and loneliness. It was full of those moments I would have gladly altered, removed from my time stream like teeth crooked and painful. But the reunion revealed less pain than nostalgia and an amazing sense of gratitude. Gratitude for what that time taught me, the tools given for the future, and in retrospect laughter at our mutual silliness and audacity. It was an amazing experience, especially since I had a lot more hair than most of the other guys.
In my first book I recounted this story from Luke's gospel about the ten lepers from the point of view of one of the lepers who didn't go back to thank Jesus. He couldn't because he wanted to leave the horror of that part of his life behind him. But no matter how he tried, it was there, following him, polluting him, holding him back.
I do PTSD therapy for people who have been through horror and find themselves caught in those moments when the world stopped making sense and caved in on them. The chief therapy is to get them to walk through the moment again and again until they can allow it to become a memory and not a living nightmare. They have to go back; they have to remember it to allow themselves to face the now. A now that includes that moment in the past.
We are Christians. At the center of our faith is the cross, a traumatic horror. Our job is to embrace that event and accept our culpability in it. Then we can move on to the resurrection and transformed life. They are all a part of who and what we are. They all make the bedrock of our faith upon which we build our hope and our abundant life. Not only can we go back, we have to if we are to accept ourselves, forgive ourselves and others, and accept the miracle of life and life abundant that blooms before us every day.
At the reunion some of the same tormentors that used to make me sweat tried to pick on me again. I laughed with them. There we stood laughing. But I noticed they were wondering what the heck happened to the geek. I guess I grew up.
Getting Well
by C. David McKirachan
Luke 17:11-19
Therapy is something we probably all need. This business grinds us down, violates boundaries we didn’t even know we had, and invites us to bleed for people who don’t really want help. Yup, we need it. When I’ve had the privilege of digging into the neuroses and glories that are David with the guidance of caring and capable professionals, I have learned so much. The knowledge has been practical and visceral. I’ve come through these journeys a healthier and happier human being, more able to be a person I respect. Once I commented to a friend of mine how sane they were being and they told me, “I’ve paid a lot of money for this sanity and I intend to get some use out of it.” I concur.
One of the bits and pieces I discovered is the role that gratitude plays in my ecology of being healthy. I learned that gratitude is not necessarily an appropriate response to my environment. It can amount to denial and avoidance when we try to be grateful in the midst of pain and abuse. We have some things to deal with before we try to force gratitude onto such situations. The now gets filled up with shoulds and oughts as we try to push away what we need to deal with. It makes honesty really difficult. But I also learned gratitude that is honest, gratitude that looks the power of grace square on and acknowledges the redemptive power of a touch or a moment of quiet or a sunrise, allows us to see honestly our own need and the power of the gift.
Such moments are incredibly powerful, and I consider my ability to participate in them a symptom of sanity. Such moments make us incredibly vulnerable. Sometimes that is not comfortable.
Lepers lived lives that we can’t even imagine. Their sickness made them felons with AIDS from Liberia. They couldn’t work, get a place to live, participate in their families, go to church, get a job, or be a person. They were cursed. Touching them made the toucher unclean, so they wore bells to warn “clean” people they were coming. If you gave them alms, you threw the money or food at them. They lived together, because they had no other community. They died together.
Consider then what it meant to be made clean. Consider the reversal in fortune, in relationships, in identity. Winning the lottery pales in comparison. So why did only one come back?
These people had been changed by their sickness, marked by it. It was a yawning evidence of their vulnerability. That kind of experience would never be forgotten. No matter where they went or what they did, they would remember the clanging of the bell and the fear and disgust in the eyes of the “clean” people looking at them. So, they ran. They ran to new families who had never known them, their old families would never accept them again; new places where no one had ever thrown money at them, new lives. To do anything else would be crazy. To go back to the person that had healed them, who had looked at them, wound in the darkness of their curse, and had made them healthy would be to go back to the horror of that vulnerability. Never again. They had beautiful, clean lives to live. They were fine… except for their dreams.
Only one went back. Only one was willing to face the horror, embrace it, and so embrace the gift of healing and redemption. And he was not only given the gift of physical health. The Lord told him, “Your faith has made you well.” It could be translated clean. But we know what Jesus meant.
That guy had guts. I feel sorry for the other nine.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 27, 2014, issue.
Copyright 2014 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
