Giving Thanks

John Silber, the former president of Boston University, told the story of how he, when as a first-year student at Yale Divinity School, learned that Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, was to speak at Yale, he got himself selected to take Dr. and Mrs. Buber back to the airport. On the trip back, with Mrs. Buber sitting in the back seat, John Silber asked, “Dr. Buber, if I asked you to prove to me that God exists, could you do so?” Buber responded by asking Silber, “Are you asking this from a deep concern to know God, or only out of curiosity?” Silber replied, “I guess out of curiosity.” Buber replied, “How bourgeois,” and turned away and never spoke again. We stress that Christians ought to be givers. In our worship service, we always have a time of offering. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” And yet, in the light of Thanksgiving and approaching Christmas, perhaps we ought to recover a sense that Christians ought to also be good receivers. It is blessed to give; it is also blessed to be open enough to receive. None of us were born Christian. Someone had to share their faith with us, and live it before us. And yet, we also had to have the faith to be receptive to the notion that God might be other than the God we had pre-conceived intellectually. Anyone who attempts to be open to a living God must also be open to surprise, and willing to be shocked by what a free, wild, and living God might have to say to us. In Hebrews 10, we read; “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” In other words, we must be free to be receivers as much as givers. This is one of the great challenges of practicing a revealed religion. We talk about reality, the truth all the way down, which God has shown us to be true. Of course, there are many instances in the world that cause one to doubt the truth of what we proclaim, yet we believe that God has actually revealed to us the truth; a truth that we could not have accessed on our own, but the truth, nonetheless. We may not fully understand that which is revealed to us. We may spend the rest of our lives trying to make sense of what we have been shown of God, by God; yet we have confidence through our faith that what we are being shown is true. Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, said, “No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it . . . All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.” This Thanksgiving, may we truly be grateful for all that we receive through Christ.    

Pastor Jan