Psalm 136 To Give Thanks: a Thanksgiving Day reflection

 

Today we’re spending some extra time in church to stop and tell God, “Thank you!” Today is Thanksgiving, a day when all Canadians are called to stop and give thanks for what we have. For followers of Jesus, we turn to God to give thanks, knowing that everything we have comes from God. It’s easy to think that we’ve earned what we have, that our hard work has gotten us to where we are at in life, but the reality is that there are always others who have worked harder than we have, are smarter than we are, have more skills and talents than we do, and yet we still have more. God, for his reasons, has blessed us with what we have, no matter how much or how little, and we’re called to be thankful.

But there’s so much more to be thankful for than simply stuff. Psalm 136 is a psalm that simply rings out in thankfulness, repeating over and over again, “His love endures forever,” reminding us of the reason of our gratitude, a refrain of praise that, by the end of the psalm, is firmly planted deeply inside our hearts and minds. We give thanks to God for he is good and his love endures forever. This first verse sets the tone for the rest of the psalm. The word for good in Hebrew is ‘tov’ and means morally good, desirable, pleasant, kind, and merry. Think of a person you know who is kind, happy, morally good, and friendly and you have a tiny glimpse of what God is like. This is someone that most people are attracted to, someone that you want to know and have in your life. This is why sharing your faith doesn’t need to be scary, because Jesus is someone that most people want to know, want to have in their life.

Our God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, there’s no one greater than God, no one who can do more, or love more than God. God’s great love is especially shown in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our sin. Imagine what Jesus took on himself, all the sin and brokenness of the world, just because he loves you so much that he wants to be with you for eternity. His love endures forever! The God who made the heavens and the earth, the artist who created all the flowers, the night skies, the seascapes and landscapes, all the beauty and wonder in the world, loves you enough to die for you because he wants you to be with him forever.

God saves his people out of slavery and oppression. The psalmist is referring to the time Israel spent as slaves in Egypt and the oppression they faced there under their Egyptian slave masters. God hears his people’s cries and he responds. God still hears the cries of those who are slaves and oppressed, whether it’s young girls and women enslaved for their bodies in our country, or slaves in other countries around the world, and he still responds and calls us to be his presence in working for freedom for the slaves in the world. God can save you from the things you have found yourselves a slave to, he can save you from the brokenness in your hearts and lives, he can restore you again. Through Jesus’ death on the cross and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we’re saved from our slavery to sin, to addiction, or to the lies of Satan that keep telling us that we’re not worthy to be saved or loved. Psalm 136 reminds us that God’s love endures forever, his love for you never comes to an end and his love can free us, renew us and restore us.

God protects his people. The psalmist here talks about how God protected his people during the time right after God led them out of slavery from the nations around them who wanted to destroy the Israelites. As God led them out of slavery, God guided them, showing his people where to go and when to go, even dividing the Red Sea so they could get through the sea on dry ground, and then protecting his people by swallowing up Pharoah and his army in the water when he closed the path through the sea back up over them.

God has given us his Holy Spirit to protect us from our sin, addictions, anxiety, and all the other things that can break us and hurt us by reminding us of everything that Jesus taught, by praying for us when we’re unable to pray and talk with God. When we feel that we are being attacked by fear, worry, anxiety, and more, God doesn’t leave us to fend for ourselves, but, as Jesus promised his disciples, he will never abandon us or leave us alone. The Holy Spirit is not only God with us, but is God in us because his love endures forever, and he will protect us. And when we fall, when life gets hard and feels like we’re alone and forgotten, when we’re at our weakest, Jesus is there.

We’re reminded that God provides. He remembers us in our low estate and frees us from our enemies. He gives food to every creature because his love endures forever. Today is Thanksgiving, a day where many of us will eat an extra special or large meal with our family and loved ones. We often measure our thankfulness by how much food is on our tables and in our freezers, and sometimes we believe that the more we have, the more God loves us, but we need to hear this verse a little more clearly, “he gives food to every creature.” God’s love endures forever, but is also too big to keep only for only his people, but his love extends to every creature. Often God provides through us and the wealth and abundance he has given to us to share.

As followers of Jesus, as children of God, we’re called to live lives of thankfulness and gratitude. Ann Voskamp writes, “Practicing gratitude means being thankful, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything that you receive. It is learning to live as if everything were a miracle and being aware on a continuous basis of how much we’ve been given. Living a life of gratitude does not mean that life is perfect. It also does not mean that we live in denial of the burdens that we carry or somehow rise above the challenges that we face by choosing blissful ignorance. Rather, it is simply affirming that there is good to be found in our lives even in the midst of chaos and difficulty. It shifts our focus from what life lacks to the abundance that God has given us.”

Ann Voskamp also shares some of the benefits that come from living with a sense of gratitude and keeping a gratitude list, writing down 3 things every day you are thankful for. These are based on different studies, “It’s habits that can imprison you and it’s habits that can free you. But when thanks to God becomes a habit — so joy in God becomes your life. And with this habit of keeping a gratitude list?  You:

1. Have a relative absence of stress and depression. (Woods et al., 2008)

2. Make progress towards important personal goals (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)

3. Report higher levels of determination and energy (Emmons and McCullough, 2003)

4. Feel closer in their relationships and desire to build stronger relationships (Algoe and Haidt, 2009)

5. Increase your happiness by 25% — (Who wouldn’t want a quarter more happiness!) (McCullough et al., 2002)”

Faith and thankfulness go hand in hand and impact our daily lives, which is why we show up here on Thanksgiving, not just because the government gives us a day off, but because God’s love endures forever, it flows into us, out of us, and into the world, and back to God himself. Go from here with hearts filled with thankfulness and gratitude and may it flow into the lives of those around you.

Colossians 3:1-4 To Reorient Ourselves on Jesus

 

It’s amazing how much information is thrown at us each day, not all of it good, healthy, or true. Because many of us are online each day, we’re susceptible to all the stuff coming at us. To make things worse, Google and other online platforms have developed algorithms to send us only stuff that we’re already sympathetic to seeing or hearing; we call this living in an “echo chamber.” As I read and see the online comments, it seems as if many people have lost the ability to think well with a Christian worldview. While working onboard ship in the naval reserve, we were taught how to navigate by the stars, just in case our ship lost power and our electronic compass went down. We oriented ourselves in the northern hemisphere on the North Star, and in the southern hemisphere on the Southern Cross. This helped us figure out where we were and how to get where we needed to go. As Christians, we orient our lives on Jesus.

Part of what Paul is doing here in this letter is speaking into a heresy that’s creeping into the church at that time that says Jesus is less than fully divine, less than fully God. In Colossians 1:19, Paul reminds us, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,” and in Colossians 2:9, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” Paul emphasizes that Jesus is not simply a man raised to be with God in heaven, but Jesus is fully God as he is fully human. This is why we can place our complete faith in Jesus and orient our entire life on him.

This heresy that Jesus is not fully God is still found in a number of faith groups loosely connected to Christianity today. These faiths believe in Jesus, but make him less than fully God. They make us more and Jesus less. Whenever you hear someone putting more faith in themselves and less in Jesus, you know that they’re drifting away from Jesus and Scripture. This is why Sundays when we get together to worship and praise God, pray together, and dig into the Bible is so valuable because we’re reminded of who Jesus really is instead of who we make Jesus out to be to suit what we want to believe.

This is why we’re asking ourselves the question “Why Church?” We need the church community to help us each week to reorient ourselves on Jesus. Paul calls us, “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” Set our hearts on things above; make sure that the things you love most, make sure that the things your hearts desire more than anything else are heaven focused, are Jesus focused. Set your minds on things above; make sure that your thoughts and beliefs are rooted in Scripture and Jesus rather than the things of this world. This is why our worship services are grounded in Scripture, this is why we take a good part of each worship service to reflect on what God has revealed about himself and the world in the Bible.

Our passage flows out of Colossians 2:20–23, “Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” Paul’s talking about how some leaders are basing our salvation on doing or not doing certain things. Doing certain things and not doing other things may seem to make us wise, but Paul points us straight to Jesus instead; to how we have died to those ways of thinking and believing and find our identity and value in Jesus and through Jesus. We don’t change in order to earn our salvation; we’re changed because of our relationship with Jesus.

This whole idea of reorienting ourselves, on turning our minds and hearts back to Jesus is found in many places in the Bible. Paul, in Romans 12:1–2, calls us to renew our minds, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” This is about giving our complete selves to God, body, mind, heart and souls to be shaped by him.

Peter comes at this same thought a little differently, 1 Peter 1:13, “Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.” Peter calls us to set our hope on the grace that’s coming at Jesus’ return. Our hope is strong and confident because we’re God’s chosen people being built into a spiritual house with Jesus as our cornerstone. The very foundation of who we are as a church and as individuals is Jesus Christ. Paul and Peter both keep focusing us on how we should live and love; talking about how our daily lives are supposed to be oriented on God and Jesus, shaped by Jesus’ teaching and life, by Jesus’ great sacrifice on the cross for our sin.

In Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae, you can hear that Jesus’ return is on his mind as he encourages the people to keep focused on Jesus and to keep focused on how they live with God and each other so that they look like Jesus. Just before our passage this morning, Paul has a number of warnings for them, reminding them that their identity is not in what we do, but about who we are connected to, Jesus Christ, our head. In chapter 2:19, Paul talks about those who get focused on the wrong things instead of staying focused on Jesus, “They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.” Professor Sandra Polaski writes, “the text reminds us that life in Christ is a unity with Christ that involves the focus of our whole beings on what is “above,” that is, the things of God.” This is what Paul is getting at when he uses this body image of Jesus and us, the church; he uses a crazy picture of a body that has lost connection with the head, making it paralyzed.

Sundays, we come together to worship and reorient and reconnect our minds and hearts back to our head, who is Jesus, and away from the things that have consumed so much of our thoughts and effort during the week. We get reconnected to the power that gives us strength and clarity about who we are. It’s not always easy because we bring our whole selves into church on Sunday, and often find it hard to separate from our fears and worries that have lived with us through the week and may even have disconnected us from Jesus. This can paralyze us because of all the messages being thrown at us, the anger, the divisiveness, the craziness that is presented as truth which so many people are often ready to believe. In this chaos, it’s no wonder that people are asking what’s really true and who we really are.

Over the past 18 months especially, I have embraced Jesus’ invitation to come to him. Matthew 11:28–30 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus offers us rest in a safe environment, but he also offers us a way to walk through life by taking his yoke on ourselves. A rabbi’s teachings were often called his yoke, and his students would be encouraged to wear his teachings. Jesus is telling us to allow his teaching to shape our souls, our life and even how we see and understand the world around us. This is another way of encouraging us to reorient our hearts and lives on Jesus, and the promise is that it will help us walk through life with knowledge on how to live, know what to believe by comparing it to Jesus’ teaching and life, and know who we are supposed to be as followers of Jesus and children of God.