Sermon
I have ordered my Christmas cards from Shutterfly a few times, so I get paper ads and especially a holiday publication from them every year. I have found myself noticing the models and families and settings that advertisers put in things like these catalogs to see if they're keeping up with the times, or if they have a little social justice juice to the statements they make and the audience they would like to acquire, based on who and what they present. I don't really give it a lot of thought, but this year's advertising booklet for Shutterfly was really up with the times – specifically 2020, and it made me laugh. Not only did the mock photos do a good job of including all of the varieties of families that are around us every day, representing differing ethnicities, ages, same gender couples, mixed race families, funny and standard settings, but they also included photos that represented the insanity of 2020. Included in their sample cards were all the “bad” photos that families don't choose because the kids are wiggling or picking their nose, or wailing, or running away, or grown ups making faces. With captions like “This will have to do. Love, The Smith family” My laugh was a kind of sigh of relief and it surprised me a little. I think that I like others am harboring a lot of anxiety about the holidays, beginning with the great shift in cases of COVID-19 that is causing us to re-think Thanksgiving. Many of us had already re-thought our Thanksgiving plans and now are shifting to even more restrictive behaviors. The relief that I felt seeing the mock Shutterfly photos was because they were so honest! The truth of 2020 is that nothing is normal. I could imagine myself, when experiencing the pressure to be or feel the old normal, saying “This will have to do.”
We all want the truth. When chaos happens we just want to understand what we're dealing with. I mentioned to some of you that a friend of mine died from cancer a few weeks ago. She was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer about two years ago. I went with her to the hospital just before she was going to begin chemotherapy to a chemo class. That's a thing. It was about three hours of hospital oncology nurses telling it like it is. I felt sick to my stomach when we left, just thinking about the huge struggle people face trying to get well. As if they're not already feeling scattered. I saw her all the time in the last two years and we talked about all kinds of things, much of it being quite frank about her feelings and my questions. One thing she really hated was get well cards. She was never going to be a cancer survivor she said. She would die, or she would be in remission but she was never going to be well. We talked about what people meant when they said get well, hope you're well soon, etc. She never wanted people to feel sorry for her but if they were interested she was going to be truthful and stay positive. She hated it when people were trying to be positive but didn't grasp what her truth was. She wanted honesty. She wanted the truth.
In 2016 the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year was “post-truth.” They defined it as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.1 Sigh. Four years later and the phrase “post-truth era” isn't funny anymore. The German language society Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS), describes this “post-factual age” as “the growing tendency of “political and social discussions” to be dominated by “emotions instead of facts”. They add “Ever greater sections of the population are ready to ignore facts, and even to accept obvious lies willingly. Not the claim to truth, but the expression of the 'felt truth' leads to success in the 'post-factual age'. And in the Friday segment of PBS News Hour David Brooks made the following comment about current events. He said, “[But] a friend of mine, Jonathan Rauch, says it's like the fire hose of falsehoods strategies that disinformation campaigns use and have used against the United States. And that is where you just fill the air with lies. It's not necessarily that people believe your lies. It's that people don't believe in anything.”3
As we approach Thanksgiving this week and look for things we are thankful for, it might be difficult to lose any cynicism we have. It might be tempting to say something a little too rosy. It is important that we stay in the land of truth. I was talking to someone the other day about having so many conversations online, on zoom, not in person, not as often, and how that changes our conversations. She said that what she had noticed anyway was that even if the conversations aren't the ones she thought she would have, there is a lot more intentionality in the communication. There are social clues between people when we are in person that we don't experience in the 2-dimensional world of Brady Bunch squares. So we have to be even more clear, even more intentional about what we do want to say. Although we have been doing so many new things this year, many of which put us in situations that remind us of what we have lost, where in the newness are the things that we are grateful for? What new things are we doing now that have turned out to be unexpected and good? If we stay in the land of truth, what can we be thankful for right now?
The answer begins really, with everything Tamra said last week. If we start with the simplicity of justice, kindness and humility, complicated things can become clear. That clarity, based in truth leads us to deeper and larger truths. Today's text is another place of deep truth. The entire psalm is an invitation to be close to God.
Pastor David McLemore says that this psalm is a perfect way to understand the Christian faith. 4
1. “To live with thanksgiving, we need truth to support it (vv. 3, 5).
2. To live with thanksgiving, we need feelings to spur it (v. 4).
3. To live with thanksgiving, we need actions to complete it (vv. 1, 2).”
We are given seven verbs to describe what we should do, and more importantly, two reasons to do them. The first truth is this: “the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” And the second truth is this: “the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”
These are truths we need in order to live with thanksgiving. We can't be truly thankful about something that is not true. We are God's. God is good. God's love is steadfast – chesed – the very nature of God's love is that it is steadfast. And God is faithful to all generations.
In verse 4, we read, "Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise.” These are feelings we need in order to spur us to thanksgiving. And we need the actions of verses 1 and 2 to complete our lives of thanksgiving. "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing."
Truth, feelings, and action. Pastor David McLemore says, “The order here is important. It's what makes Christianity unique. We receive truth first, then feelings of thanksgiving start to burn, then we express those feelings through actions. What makes Christianity unique is that we receive everything by grace. We don't work to earn it. We receive salvation by faith alone through Christ alone. Then once we've received that, we realize how thankful we are and we respond in good works. That's how thanksgiving works. It's a response to something given.”4
There are those who say “There's always something to be thankful for.” And they see those who can't be thankful as selfish, or too negative, or a downer. Instead of judgment people need understanding and assistance and empowerment if not just a clean pair of socks. Or people who look to be just fine but are not. Those who cannot see or feel anything to be thankful for have a truth that is impossible to know unless we have lived their life. If that is you, the message to you today is that you are God's too. God's love for you is steadfast. God created you too and wants you and cares about you and your wellbeing.
To a world in a time when access to God was tiered, and one could only get so close, and gods were full of judgment and punishment, the psalmist writes, Come! “Come into God's presence with singing!” Not just some of you, not quietly and afraid but “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.” “Worship the Lord with gladness!” What a beautiful message that must have been! We worship God who is our ultimate care giver, the ultimate shepherd. In Jesus Christ we know that God personally, and can be sure that God's love is constant and is for us always. For that we are most blessed, and most thankful.
Amen.
1 "post-truth"
2 Post-truth politics and why the antidote isn’t simply ‘fact-checking’ and truth
3 Shields and Brooks on the danger of Trump’s refusal to concede