About Us - Worship Services | Wellington Square United Church

Last Week's Sermon

Giving Thanks in Darkness available for download here>>

Orville’s Sermon – Thanksgiving, Sunday, October 10

Giving Thanks in the Darkness

(Part One- a Thanksgiving reflection –part from John Tapscott)
“Jesus said, ‘Were not ten healed? Where are the nine? Can none be found to come back and give glory to God except this outsider?” Then he said to him, ‘Get up. On your way. Your faith has healed and saved you.” Luke 17:18 & 19
I confess to having become a bit disappointed with Thanksgiving Sunday over the last few years. Thanksgiving Sunday has become a rather low Sunday, with below average attendance.
And I contrast that with the Thanksgiving Sundays I remember as a young person, – and then earlier in my ministry. I know it’s quite possible to overstate these things and look back as if it were much better in the past, but I do think in this case it’s true. Thanksgiving Sunday used to be a big deal, with the churches decorated and quite full of worshipers on Sunday morning singing all the favorite Thanksgiving hymns.
As a teen in Windsor, I remember the front of the chancel decorated with many of the traditional items –the vegetables, pumpkins, apples, coloured leaves. AND there were specific reminders of Windsor’s blessings – a wheel rim from a GM plant, a complete dashboard from the Chrysler assembly plant, and a steering wheel from the Ford truck plant. It was stimulatingly specific.
But times have changed, and the reason of course, is that Thanksgiving weekend has become more important to many people than Thanksgiving Sunday and worship.
Perhaps another reason is that as we’ve become increasingly urbanized we’ve lost touch with the rich bounty God has provided in nature, which was the original basis of the Harvest Thanksgiving service.
At Thanksgiving time I often reflect on the passage which we hear this time of the year from Luke chapter 17. Jesus healed ten lepers and sent them on their way, with only one in ten returning to give Jesus thanks. Jesus said, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?” And that’s the reality of our situation – so many people enjoy God’s blessings but often fail to give thanks to the Giver of those blessings.
Now God does not take away those blessings from those who do not give God thanks and praise. That’s not God’s way. Jesus did not take the healing away from the 9. And yet a further blessing came to the one who gave thanks. Jesus said to him, “Rise and go your way, your faith has healed and saved you.” He was not only made well in body, but in spirit as well. That’s the great power of faith and thanksgiving. It confirms and stabilizes a correct perspective; And our thinking CAN get a little out of whack!
Two friends bumped into one another on the street one day. One of them looked REALLY down, almost on the verge of tears. His buddy asked, ‘What has the world done to you, my old friend?”
The sad guy said, ‘Let me tell you. Three weeks ago, an uncle died and left me forty thousand dollars.’
WOW! That’s a lot of money.”
But you see, two weeks ago, a cousin I never even knew died, and left me $85,000 free and clear.’
Sounds like you’ve been blessed…’
‘you don’t understand!’ the sad man interrupted. ‘Last week my great-aunt passed away. I inherited almost a quarter of a million.’
Now his friend was really confused. ‘Then, why do you look so glum?’
‘Well, this week… NOTHING!’
And that’s the trouble with receiving something on a regular basis. Even if it is a gift, we eventually come to expect it.
Someone once suggested to me a way to test a person’s character.
Give him (or her) $10 a day for a month. Then stop, and see what the reaction is. The natural tendency is that if we receive a gift long enough, we come to view it as an entitlement. We feel hurt, even angry, if we don’t receive it any longer.

It’s the same way with the blessings God gives us every day… the comfortable home I live in, the beautiful scenery around me, the clean water that I drink. But after receiving these gifts (and a multitude of others) for years, I sometimes fail to be grateful. I’ve come to expect these good things.
And when one of them is removed for a short while (like the water being cut off) , I get upset. Make an effort today to recognize the blessings you’ve come to take for granted.
Focus on what you have rather than on what you don’t have, and see if it doesn’t improve your attitude.
Cultivate the gift of gratitude.
And so even if our Thanksgiving Sundays are less than what they once were, we don’t give up on them; Faith, and true Thanksgiving make us rich towards the God who is rich towards us in so many, many ways. AMEN.

PART TWO (On Giving Thanks in the Darkness)

“How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become… She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; Lamentations 1:1&2
By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion… How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? Psalm 137:1 & 4

I gave you a pretty traditional Thanksgiving pep talk in part one of my message this morning. Count your blessings. Cultivate an attitude of Gratitude! That’s all Important and valuable. Too a point.
But what about when your life situation and experiences are dark, Full of hard realities, full of grief, pain, discouragement and desolation? What then? Do you come into the presence of God and “on cue” express gratitude.
A good friend told me two weeks ago that the doctor called him in when the test results returned. It’s already touched the liver. Three to six months. That’s it.
Last Monday Nancy & I were in Fredericton. We visited Marion in her new residence in the nursing home. She’s a retired nurse –strong, forthright, balanced, cheerful. 6 months ago she lost John. They’d been married for 65 years, and engaged for 3 years before that, through the war. Marion’s not caving in or giving up, but she’s feeling the loss. She said to us, “It’s really hard, when you lose your best friend and life partner. It’s hard.”
After 2 years the divorce has now been finalized. My friend called me last week. We talked. He’s not sure right now where he’ll live, or what he’ll do this winter. Everythings changed. It is a Thanksgiving weekend unlike any he’s experienced.
The most memorable Thanksgiving sermon I have ever heard has stayed with me, haunting and inspiring me for 33 years. I was a student at Queen’s, and on that October Sunday I went to a local United Church to hear the principal of my Theological College preach.
It was not what I expected.
Professor Bater’s title was “The Challenge of Thanksgiving _‘on cue’_”. He made the point that a date on a calendar will not overcome the realities in life. It’s not always easy or even possible to give thanks, just because a date has arrived on a calendar. Stress and pain in life, can make it very hard to express gratitude.
Sometimes church people don’t understand that.
Elizabeth’s husband had died a horrible, painful death after a long illness. And when he died, it was as if a light had gone out in her soul, so deep and dark was her grief. Why had a good man like that had to suffer so, she wondered. Her grief was made worse by her having been taken on as a project by a fundamentalist Christian church on the edge of town. The guy she had dated in high school had been ‘saved’, transforming him into an insufferably pompous prig. Now, 20 years later, he and his wife and all their church friends were out to ‘save’ her. Elizabeth hides from them when they knock on her door. While she longs to climb out of her grief, she doesn’t want them with their grinning talk of Jesus.
Elizabeth says of these Christians, “They refuse to look at the dark side of things, and they want me to blink it away too. If I can smile in the face of loss, grief, and death, so can they. They’re like children in a fairy tale, singing songs, holding hands. Never mind the dark wood, the wolves and witches (of life).” (Atlantic Monthly, 1991)
Elizabeth would not sing their songs, refusing to flee too quickly from the darkness, and in her refusal may be her recovery and health.
I remember another people who refused to sing: “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept … Our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth… How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Psalm 137:1- 4
They were wrestling with faith questions, God questions – that can confront us when life gets difficult. “How, God? How can I worship, praise, Thank?” What were they up against?
In the 6th century before Christ, the mighty and powerful kingdom of Israel was torn apart by a stronger and more brutal army. The security they had known, the abundance they had long been used to, the happy and care-free freedom they enjoyed, all brought to a screeching halt amidst death, destruction and humiliation. And along with a few Psalms such as Psalm 137 from that period in history, we are also left with a book of poems.
Israel’s poets wrote the lament of a fallen people, the cries of anguish of a people and a kingdom obliterated by the Babylonian empire. You may remember that, two weeks ago, we heard a story about Jeremiah being called to buy a piece of land outside Jerusalem, even in the midst of a terrible siege of the city.
Lamentations comprises five poems from that time; poems which, together, sing a song of great sadness and despair – the swan song of a shattered dream and broken lives.
Like all good writing, it captures the sense of a specific time, but also speaks for all times. The story of Jerusalem and Israel has profound meaning for us, and for our own time, and the experience of lament resonates with our world.
We read how Jerusalem falls, and at the same time, we mourn great loss through earthquakes in Haiti, flooding in Pakistan and mudslides in China. We read of Israel’s great loss of life, even of women and children, and at the same time we watch, as friends and family members suffer with illness, as living turns into dying, and unseen enemies attack their immunity and dignity. And at times, we all have wondered, like the poets and people of Israel wondered, “How, God? How can this be? How can I be expected to be grateful when this is happening?”
How? How can we believe, carry on, Give Thanks, trust.
There is a lot of anguish in the world, and at times, it can be overwhelming. So many people to help, so many communities in need, so much devastated nature to redeem. It can all seem so overwhelming that we can be tempted to remain in lament.
We are encouraged to honestly lament suffering and pain, and also to bring hope as we link our lives with those who suffer. This is no less than God’s will, and what God does for us. It is no less than the calling of our whole lives, in every time and place.
I read a story this week about a young girl who is late coming out of school. When she finally comes outside, her mother asks her why she was late. The little girl answers that her friend had dropped a favorite doll she had brought in for show and tell, and she was very upset. “So you stayed behind to help her fix it?” the mother asked. The daughter responded, “No, I stayed to help her cry.”
I don’t think that I and our church always do well in the darkness. I tend to present the Christian faith as an exercise of reason, a faith that is intelligent, rational, logical and beneficial – that helps you live and enjoy life more – a means of enlightenment for the illuminated.
So Thanksgiving is a natural, logical activity for people who observe and think (as I said in Part One). But life is not always that simple, is it? Our years are complex and convoluted, full of the routine and mundane, punctuated by moments of terror or seasons of despair.
There are periods of stress and pain and darkness. It’s not logical or healthy to ignore that, suppress it, and force gratitude. Sometimes the situation calls for a lament, tears, anguish, silence, waiting.
We will not understand our God, or truly link with our God until we recognize that God is the one who enters and confronts the darkness.
The Psalms and the Lamentations give us permission to stare into the abyss, into the darkness, to admit to the dark places in our world where there is more chaos than creation; made to be honest about those corners of our own hearts where there is darkness and pain too deep to express.
Throughout the Bible, light is the quality of God. Do you remember the opening lines of the creation story in Genesis? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now… darkness was over the surface … and God said, ‘Let there be light,” (Genesis 1)
And then we are fortified because the scriptures explain the impact of the coming of Jesus. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5)
“The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” (Matthew 4:16)
It is the peculiar nature, of our faith to assert that, in entering our darkness, God is preparing to take back the night. Darkness shall not be the last word.
And so even on Thanksgiving, and especially on Thanksgiving, we bring to God our experiences of loss, disappointment, failure, fear, anguish and pain. And we seek, we wait and we trust, grateful that in Jesus we have the God of mercy and resurrection. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
‘Teach us, O loving God, to be honest about the darkness, to be courageous in calling out to you when it grows dark in our lives, then to be patient in waiting with You, for the coming of the your dawn. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Orville James,
Wellington Square United Church.
October 10, 2010

Credit & thanks for ideas and material from: John Tapscott, Andrew O’Neil, Wm Willimon)

Wellington Square United Church

View full calendar

Last Week's Sermon

Giving Thanks in the Darkness

PART TWO (On Giving Thanks in the Darkness)

View PDF

Orville Explains & Defends the United Church

Become a subscriber to our videos on YouTube

Sermon Notes and Online Messages

I've Been Thinking...by Rev. Dr. Orville James

New Testament in a Year

Baptism Sundays

Communion Sundays

The Bands

Service Times