Return to give thanks

This last weekend was Thanksgiving. Sorry, America, we have Thanksgiving too, and it is in October, as God himself intended.  But there's a reason that we have it in October, don't you know, which is that Thanksgiving is a harvest festival, and as a harvest festival, it takes place in October, close to harvest time, not in November, when the field are frozen and white.  But yes fine, dates aside, both sides of the border have a festival of Thanksgiving, and we turn to God and render thanks, perhaps one time all year, for the wonderful blessings we have received.

The bigger issue, of course, is that we are less grateful than we ought to be about every day.  You can see that in the meals that we eat at thanksgiving.  I'll explain what I mean.  For Thanksgiving, you probably have a fairly typical spread - something like Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, brussels sprouts, buns, gravy, all that good stuff.  But the thing is, no matter how big or small your Thanksgiving meal was, there's a good chance that it was bigger and richer than a standard weekend meal.  And this is where we get to start examining things in detail.

For our average meal that we eat in this nation, is far more luxurious, far more decadent than most anyone in human history could have hoped to consume.  For example, and I chose it because it is a well known example, the Romans in the time of empire are listed by Wikipedia as living 'very luxurious lives,' and yet their diet was 70% cereals and legumes.  White bread was an extreme luxury, as the poor ate tough bread made from barley, not wheat.  Sweetening was limited to whatever honey could be acquired, and cane sugar was an exotic ingredient.  Not in absolutely everything as it is today.  Food shortages were relatively common, and most things would have been tough and bland according to our modern palates, as salt in a pure form was a luxury.  And this is with a people who lived luxurious lives.  Can you imagine the poverty in diet of a nation, of a people that weren't luxurious?  In the modern world, we are used to food being so hyper-palatable, as so easily hitting our bliss point, than even food that would have been standard fare not so long ago in human history is deemed unfit for human consumption.  Consider the humble pumpkin, why don't you? These gourds are food, you know, and yet the average household here has them only as decoration, and tosses them out on the first of November.  You are considered strange if you actually eat your jack-o-lantern, which was a food long before it was decorative.  

So where to go if your  normal meal is several hundred times more decadent than what humans have eaten for centuries? Well, there's really nowhere to go, if you see what I mean.  The meal gets bigger and richer, with cabbage rolls and perogies, but ultimately, we fail to recognize that our standard meal is so rich and flaky that hundreds of generations would consider it beyond possible to have something so delicious, and yet we bolt that down almost without thinking.  People who are asking about the goodness of God will frequently ask me why God sought fit to take their mother, father, or grandparent right when they needed them the most.  Well, consider this, that the average life expectancy of people in Canada is now around 82 years, and for most of human history, it was far under 50.  Again, on the topic of the goodness of God, people will ask why God took their pet dog from them when they were ten, without realizing that peak decadence is having an animal in the house that does no work at all.  It isn't a hunter, a guard, or a shepherd, it's just another mouth that you brought into the house because it would be cute to do so.  Most humans couldn't possibly conceive of having livestock in your home that does nothing for you except hoover up food and vet bills, but here we are.

So yes, we aren't good at considering all the blessings that we have, and as usual, once you forget the magnitude of the blessings that you are enjoying on a regular basis, then you will grow fairly cold in your celebrations of them.  We are a species that tends to want to look for novelty, for the next thing, we consume and we move on.  Most of all, though, we forget what we have just done with alarming speed.  We forget the meal we have just eaten, the possessions we have just acquired, and the family we have just seen. The heart of the human grows cold unless it is enlivened purposefully with thanksgiving.

So consider the lepers who were healed by our Lord Jesus Christ. Consider the lepers who had to stand a long way off and shout to him, begging for salvation.  They had to stand a ways off because they were unclean, they would contaminate people by being close to them.  Their lives were reduced to existing in a world of only lepers, they were cut off from everyone, and suffering from a debilitating, disfiguring disease which would destroy them socially as well as physically.  They genuinely needed to have healing which would have completely changed their lives in almost every way.  Jesus did, of course, have mercy on them, and told them to show themselves to the priests, which they did.  Upon doing so, they were healed.  And this was a wonderful thing, to be sure.  It was a wonderful thing to be healed not just of an infection or a disease, but to be healed of social ostracization, a wonderful, blissful thing.  And after they were healed, they did what you would expect them to do, which was to, with overjoyed hearts, go back to their homes, their lives, their families and communities.  It was a joyous time.

And that's the thing, is that frequently, we are too busy enjoying our blessings to be grateful for them.  We have so much, all the time, that we regularly forget that these things exist, or are wonderful things.  Our regular meals are so good that we don't think much of the fact that we have access to more than humans have ever had in human history.  Our regular transportation is so good that we forget that not too long ago, people would never leave their immediate village.  Our regular healthcare is so good that we've stopped getting vaccinated.  You know the drill.  We get really used to things very quickly, which is why the thanks that was rendered to the Lord was as important as it was.  Not because he needed it, but because the leper did.

The grace you say before meals isn't so that God won't take your food away.  That's not how that works.  You don't say grace so that you'll get more food, or so that the food you have won't disappear. Rather, you say grace so that you are grateful with every meal for what you have, Thanksgiving dinner or not.  You don't say your prayers in the morning and evening because if you don't God will take things away from you.  Rather, you are there to be grateful so that you never get complacent with what has been given to you.  If you return and give thanks, as the one leper did, then you will be brimming with joy with what you have, not always looking to what you can have next.  Forgiveness, life, salvation, eternity, joy, health, family, clothes and shoes, all those things that are given to us from the Lord, who reminds us in his word that 'ever good and perfect gift comes from above.'

So don't get complacent.  Be always filled with gratitude, and then you will truly appreciate all the things that God has provided.

Unreasonable

You should know right off the hop that Jesus Christ isn't who you think he is.

For what we think of Jesus is that he is a light cheerleader, but who doesn't cut in too much to what we want to do.  He's the supportive friend, the one who you call up and ask what he thinks about things, and he always says 'what do you want to do?' When you tell him, then he replies, 'Yes, I think that's what you should do, for sure.'  We love that kind of friend, because that kind of friend always finds a way to back us up, and our friendship with them seems to depend on them backing up our prior positions.  So if you're asking yourself what your position on who to date should be, how to vote, what to do with that neighbor who you are having a hard time with, whether to stay with your spouse or bug out already, if you ask that Jesus what you should do, curiously enough he will always seem to echo what you already think about it.

But that's not who Jesus Christ is.  Far from being hyper-malleable, he is hard as nails, and I do mean that very sincerely.  His positions are exacting, especially in a moral way.  And these exacting, moral positions are completely uncompromising.  Now, we have made a cottage industry of making Jesus Christ as compromising as possible, malleable and soft as marshmallow.  He's a bit of a cream puff, and we can rely on him to take on whatever form we need him to.  The thing is, though, a god who conforms himself entirely to your positions, whatever they may be, is an idol, nothing more.  That's what an idol is.  You can tell when Jesus speaks, though, because he is uncompromising, and he certainly doesn't conform himself to what you would like him to do.  Sunday's reading from the Gospel is a classic example of that.  In the reading from Luke 17, Jesus reminds his disciples that if someone sins against you, you must rebuke them.  Good so far, of course. But then Jesus rudely continues, and says 'if he sins against you seven times in a day and turns to you seven times saying 'I repent' you must forgive him.'  This is unreasonable.  We all sort of tend to follow the classic teaching from Tennessee, which says 'Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, won't get fooled again.'  If Christ were an idol, then he would say that if someone sins against you, you are well within your rights to cut them off, ignore them, spurn them and encourage your friends to do likewise. But that's not what Christ says.  He says that if someone sins against you seven times in the day, and seven times repents, you must forgive them.  Non negotiable.   

This is, of course, a hurtful thing to consider, which is what this GK Chesterton quote is all about.  That is, that the Christian ideal has not been attempted and found to be lacking anything.  Rather, it has been found difficult, and left untried even by Christians. Whom amongst us will look at these words of Christ and find them to be perfectly reasonable? Or even more so, who will look at these words, and put them into practice in his own life? To be honest, the majority of people will look at this, and say that there is no possible way that Christ actually intended for this to be the case at all.  Because Christ is only here to request not the good, but the possible.

But what else does Jesus say? He says 'Be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect.'  And he means it.  What he doesn't mean is that perfect is what you happen to be doing right now.  That's not what perfect is.  Perfect isn't where you happen to be at present, and that's the barometer of perfection. You know that from the words of Christ that you refuse to follow.  Rather, perfect is what is perpetually out of reach, but internally what you have always known to be good.  You may kick and scream against Christ's requirements to forgive, but ask yourself if the shoe were on the other foot, and you had wronged someone 7 times in a day, repented and came back over and over again, would you want or expect them to forgive you? Likely you would.  And I can tell how, honestly.  Because you're a Christian.

If you're a Christian, and statistically if you read this blog you are, then  you'll know something about how every worship service works.  You approach the throne of grace, and confess your sins.  And if you're a human being, you don't get forgiven of one sin and have that particular bugbear crossed off of things you do forever.  Likely, you are bringing the same exact issues to Christ over and over again.  Your sins, your issues, your disasters, all the sins you commit are sins you commit week in and week out.  You move to the throne of Jesus Christ of Nazareth over and over again, and you find yourself standing, cap in hand, before his throne with the same issues expecting the same forgiveness.  And you receive it.

This is how you know that your measure for what is good and bad, right and wrong is not based on where you are right now, because what Jesus asks of you is what you expect of him. It's what you expect of the one who is truly and wonderfully good.  That's what this is and always has been all about, you know, the reality that you don't define good based on what is possible for you, but based on what is true and right. And in the holy scriptures, Jesus of Nazareth levels a lot of heavy issues directly at you, and your job is not to take them and make them easier, but rather to say with a loud voice, with confidence, what the disciples said: 'Lord, increase our faith.'  Yes.  Do not change the definition of good to fit what I am capable of doing, rather make me more able to believe what you have said.  Help me to understand what right and wrong are, and believing that, to understand what it is that your grace covers.  Grace covers sins, the real sins that you have.  When you cheapen grace to cover essentially nothing, then you believe in nothing, and have nothing to hope for outside yourself.  

But if you believe in expensive grace, costly grace, the work of Christ that cost him his life, then something wonderful happens: the work that he came to do actually gets done.  His word does what it set out to accomplish, it does not return void.  If you believe in costly grace, then the enormity of what good is actually begins to mean something - you can see the gulf that exists between what you do and what good is.  And you can cling all the more to the cross of Christ because you can take seriously that Jesus doesn't just say things to fill space.  He tells you what good is, and more than that, that he dies to forgive you for when you are not good at all.

The devil is a liar

This last Sunday was the feast day of St. Michael and all angels.  Good so far.  And as pastor Gust pointed out, even the people you know who have no time for Christ and him crucified will still have a nice chat with you about angels.  Because angels are nice, they're fun, and they're some of the more esoteric, mythological aspects of the Christian faith.  Angels are just mysterious to be fun, and the fact that they aren't spoken of that often in Christian worship services, it makes them seem even more mysterious.  Something inscrutable, something that cannot be known much about, yet are still an absolute part of the Christian faith.  You can't have the Christian faith without them, and they seem to show up at extremely important times.  They show up at the annunciation, at the garden of Gethsemane, at Passover and in the fiery furnace.  In fact, a lot of these are really really well known stories from the scriptures, and given that these are central to the story of salvation, you can't really excise angels from the faith.

So we must have angels, well and good.  But what do we do with them? Well, you're a Lutheran, right? And if you're a Lutheran, then you get to do what very few people get to do overall, which is to rely on the scriptures alone.  And if you rely on the scriptures alone, then you will be told what you need to know about the angels.  There are two angels spoken of by name in the Bible, they are named Michael and Gabriel.  And once you get these guys worked out, then you'll know what the angels are all about, and what they're up to.  I'll explain.

We will talk about Michael first, because it is his day.  St. Michael is the warrior of God.  He is the commander of the hosts of angels, the soldier, the mighty arm of the Lord.  When parts of the liturgy call God the "Lord of Sabaoth," it is referring to him as the God of the hosts of angels.  And Michael is right at the top of that.  Michael is the apex warrior in the armies of the Lord.  If the Archangel Michael is a brave soldier or fighter, though, who is he here to fight? And that is a very important question.  The presence of police admits the possibility of crime.  The presence of an army admits the existence of a rival army.  And the presence of a warrior angel represents the presence of rival spiritual forces.  You know what those rivals are, though, don't you.  You know that the devil and all of his angels who were thrown down from heaven, they represent a very real and present threat to you and to your wellbeing.  And this is where things get interesting.

If you have an warrior on your behalf, someone who is going to fight to protect you, then you have to understand what that person is trying to protect you from, and to understand what kind of adversary you are facing.  For most of us, we tend to figure that the devil is one of two things: either made up, irrelevant, a fable, or a roaring lion, prowling around, seeking who he may devour.  There is not a lot of middle ground, not really.  But the way the devil is described in the scriptures is a little different.  He does show up as a roaring lion as well, obviously.  But the way he shows up in our readings from this last weekend is wonderfully interesting.  He is described as the great deceiver of the world.  And that's fascinating.

And you don't know that you're being deceived while you're being deceived.  Nobody can tell that they are being deceived. You can tell if someone is trying to deceive you, for sure, but you have no idea if you are actually being deceived.  That's how deception works.  And when you are being deceived, there's a good chance that you're going to advocate for your deceiver. They seem like your friends, you know.  They always seem like your friends while they are deceiving you.  Manipulation works like that.  You'll always be advocating on behalf of someone seeking your destruction as long as they seem like they're on your side.  And if you believe them, then you'll make it borderline impossible for the police, the army, whatever authorities there are to fight that person.

So we, as Christians, tend to suffer from a sort of spiritual stockhom syndrome.  That is, we identify with, and defend our captor, our deceiver.  The one who is handing us everything that we say we want, the one who is giving us everything that we say we crave, which works against us, that's the one that we will fight to defend.  It's a lot like that bad news friend that you had as a child, the one that your parents didn't want you to hang out with. Your parents said that he was bad news, and they wanted to keep you away from his influences.  They were bad influences, but back in the day, what you wanted more than anything else was to defend that person against what your parents wanted.  Even if that friend was no good for you, even if you recognize them as bad for you now, at the time, you would have defended them to the moon and back. Even if they were using you.  Especially if they were using you.

People who want something from you are master manipulators.  They will turn you away from your friends, family and community.  They will drag you down until you identify with them only, even if they are harming you by doing it. Like it or not, this is a feature of being manipulated, of being deceived, and we tend to fall for it.  If you're going to fall for it in the world of flesh, why do you think you're immune from it in the world of the spirit? Think about the way that the devil first broke through human resistance - not by threats, not by outright war, but through deception.  When Eve assesses the situation after the fact (post-mortem, but also, hilariously, pre-mortem), she says 'the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.'  Yes, indeed.  Deception, all the way along.  And if he worked that way then, why do you think he would change his tactics now? If anything, they work better than before, because you are easier to deceive, to beguile, than anyone ever has been.  This is the case because you are willing to believe absolutely anything.  You don't know God's word the way you should, so you're essentially ready to believe anything.

So Michael has his work cut out for him.  Even if he could take the shot, you're too busy advocating on behalf of the devil, showing sympathy for the devil, to let him.  If you want to resist the devil and have him flee from you, how are you going to do that? Well, you have to know what you are fighting.  And the only way to know that....is to get in touch with the other angel.  For you see, Michael and Gabriel work together, you know.  The word of God and the sword of God, they work in tandem to protect you.  For God is wise enough to know that you are tempted to follow the seductive voice of the devil.  He knows how easy you are to deceive, how you will follow the voice that seems good to you.  You'll follow the one that promises you the most.  But the reason that you were given the scriptures, and told to follow them completely, is so that the deception that the devil brings to you can be blasted through.  If you want a fun exercise, do a quick word search in your concordance for the words 'deceived' or 'deceive.'  In there, you will find all the tricks that the devil uses to deceive the people of God.  You will find all the times in which the devil thinks he can take advantage of you, where he can play to your pride or to your arrogance.  You will find him working subtly to trip you up, which will work as long as you are still advocating for him and his voice.  But if you resist him, he will flee from you.  To resist him, you have to know what it is you are fighting against.  And if you know what you are fighting against, then you will ask for help from the Lord your God to fight against him.  And that's where Michael comes in.

The word of God and the sword of God work together perfectly.  They work as a team, designed to bring you out of the clutches of an enemy that likely, you forgot you even had.  The devil is a liar, he is a deceiver, and he will work as hard as he can to make you believe that he is on your side, and all his suggestions are things you should very much like to do.  He practices to deceive, and you'll believe it all until someone reminds you very assertively that you are being deceived.  Until someone confronts you with the truth.  And that's why you need the word of God to identify the problem, and the sword of God to remove it.  Michael is happy to put the devil to flight, delighted even.  But you have to stop fighting and preventing him from doing so.  So when you find all those passages in the Bible that talk about being deceived, realize that these are ways in which you are being deceived.  And God wants to help you with these issues, with these hangups and problems.  And the first step, as it always is, is admitting that you do, in fact, have a problem.  Very few of us know what our problems actually are, which is why the scriptures go to as much length as they do to indicate how you are being deceived. 

The Bible tells you what you have done wrong, tells you how you have overstepped, and tells you how far you are from what you ought to be doing.  The bigger issue, though, is what you do with the fact that you have been deceived.  Most people won't readily admit that they have been wrong, and will essentially perpetually double down on their deceit.  That is, they will almost always insist that they were right the whole time, even though they were wrong, and just continued being wrong forever.  But the forgiveness that you are promised means that you can actually admit that you have been deceived.  You can admit that someone lied to you, and you believed it.  But thanks to Christ, you don't have to pretend that you were right the whole time.  As CS Lewis would say, sometimes the person who gets the furthest ahead is the person who turns back first.