ROSLIN-THOMASBURG PASTORAL CHARGE

• October 11, 2015: Thanksgiving Sunday

Joel 2:21-27; Psalm 126; I Timothy 2:1-7; Matthew 6:25-33

Joke:

Last year on Thanksgiving, the childless farmer and his wife gave thanks for all their blessings.

They also prayed that their loneliness of having no children be relieved.  Their prayers were answered and the wife became pregnant.  She gave birth to triplets!  A friend remarked, “See, prayers are always answered.” The farmer then then replied, “Yes, but I never prayed for a bumper crop like this!”

Thought:

As I was contemplating what to write for the Thanksgiving edition of the Moira Valley News, I did some research on Thanksgiving in Canada and was eventually led to the article I copied, edited a then submitted.  At the time, my belief was that this information was new to me.  But it is also possible that the information about Frobisher’s third attempt to find the North-West Passage was part of grade seven or eight social studies and I had completely forgotten that already I knew it.

What captured my attention was not so much the observance of a service of giving thanks for being delivered from the harsh winter, so much as the story in its entirety.

Let’s recap.

The year was 1578 when Frobisher set out on his third attempt to find the Northwest Passage.  The weather that year was particularly terrible and the result was that one of the fifteen ships under his command sank due to the ice and over the course of the journey about 40 men lost their lives.  To us that would be considered a terrible loss but in his day, with all things considered, losing 10% of the crew was deemed as acceptable.  And even though the intended establishing of a settlement was not possible, those that survived gave thanks for God’s provision.

At some time during their stay in the arctic north of what is now Canada, Frobisher and his men came across what they thought to be gold and using picks, shovels and their bare hands, dug and loaded over a thousand tons of the material aboard their ships and then began their return voyage.

I can imagine that the return trip was a bitter sweet period in the lives of those on board.  Their ship mates were dead and their dreams were dashed but at least their suffering was not a complete waste of time.  God had blessed them with a reward – gold.

I suspect we have all shared a similar experience, finding ourselves facing a glass half empty circumstance, struggling to see the glass have full.

Of course we know that when they finally got back to England, sailing with the wind but not moving anywhere near as fast as they could have with empty ships, they were told that all that weight that had slowed their ships so significantly was “fool’s gold”, a mineral (iron pyrites) that is found in rocks and looks like gold but is not worth anything.  All that time, all that work, all that suffering and death for nothing.  Frobisher and his men must have been devastated.  Where was God in all this?

The term “fool’s gold” has come to mean more than just that mineral.  It has also come to refer to something that you think will be very pleasant or successful or of great value but is not.

All those papers, notes and magazines and all that stuff my wife and I had collected over many years that we have discarded during the last couple could be considered a type of fool’s gold.  Those things seemed valuable when we decided to hang on to them but in reality, they became things that slowed us down, cost us more to store than to buy and required more work to clean out than we could have ever imagined.  I used to think that I should hang onto something because it would be very handy to have if I ever had a need for it.  Now I realize how wasteful that thinking is.

Of course, the Bible reminds us of another kind of fool’s gold: the seeking of fame or acceptance, the accumulation of wealth, power or popularity or devoting ourselves to any goal at the cost of family and friends or our health and/or our peace of mind.  Of what value is it to spend our lives achieving and accomplishing if that achieving and accomplishing costs us all we could have been to those that matter most?

I am sure there are lots of other things we could classify as fool’s gold but I only want to talk about one more.  This one is subtle because it really boils down to a matter of degree.  As we give thanks, are we merely thankful for the things that God gives us or are we thankful for our God who chooses to give us those things?  Is the focus of our thanksgiving the gifts or the Gift-Giver.

If we are only thankful for the things God gives us, what happens to us when, from our point of view God stops giving us those things?  If we’re thankful for good health, what happens when our health begins to fail?  If we are thankful for the money in our bank accounts, what happens to us when those account run dry?  If we are thankful for friends and family, what happens when they are no longer around?

Yes, we should be thankful for all the good things in our lives but more importantly we should be thankful that God is a God who provides even when that provision seems lean.  We should be thankful even when our health fails, the money we call ours is gone.  We should be thankful even when friends and family disappear.  But how can we?

Last week I said that Christians, regardless of our stripe, have three things in common.  We have a common faith even though our understanding of that faith varies.  In reality that faith boils down to three words: “Jesus is Lord.”  We have a common mission – to share the love of God with all we meet.  And finally, we have a common goal – to be like Christ.

Becoming increasingly more Christ like is God’s agenda for our lives.  Sometimes, the lesson we need to learn come very easy but often they come through the hardships with which we struggle.

Job asked the question, “…should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?”

It’s pretty much impossible to give thanks to God for the bad things without knowing deep within that God is on our side, that God can and does use hardships to give us an opportunity to grow in our trust of God.  If God were satisfied with being our Sears catalogue or Amazon online, God would be guilty of doing what we are told is wrong – seeking acceptance, popularity and power.

This year, as you gather with others and you are asked to share something for which you are thankful, remember that what being thankful for what God provides us is good but being thankful for the God who provides is much better.