Sermon

Thanksgiving Day, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

“Worrying is praying for bad things to happen.” These are words that my mother, not a religious woman, blurted out one day when some of us in the family were engaged in what we called a Southern “worry fest” over one thing or another.

I was flabbergasted at her remark partly because it mentioned the word “prayer,” but mostly because she was dead on. Worry does share some of the same fervency and some of the ceaselessness of prayer.

We know a lot about worry these days—worry over money, politics, terrorism, and strange, new diseases, to name a few. Out of this, we know a lot about anxiety, both as a pervasive way that life can feel and as a kind of engine that can drive us—drive us to focus on trying to secure our lives and our future in a world that feels shaky and insecure at best.

“Do not worry about your life…what you will eat or drink or wear. Consider the birds of the air… consider the lilies of the field,” God knows what you need. Stop worrying. Jesus says this to his disciples gathered upon the mount to hear his teaching.

In commenting on these words, an ordained friend of mine once said that he thought these were either the most important or silliest words ever said. After all, he said, look at the birds, sure they’re not worrying, they don’t have time to worry, they’re working themselves to death trying to find food and shelter.

And so perhaps the lilies of the field are the better image for what Jesus was trying to get at.

These are either the most important or the silliest words ever said.

There is a story about the Buddha that goes like this. One day he gathered a large assembly of his monks on a mount. They all waited expectantly for him to impart his teaching through the spoken word. On this occasion, however, something different was to happen. For all the words he had spoken to his monks over the years, not many of them truly understood what it was he was trying to say.

At any rate, they were all ears, waiting for him to speak, but no words came out of his mouth. Instead he picked up a golden lotus flower, turned it in his fingers and held it silently before his listeners. Only one monk of those assembled understood, and because that monk had grasped the Secret of the Golden Flower, the Buddha designated him as his successor.

What Jesus and perhaps the Buddha were both getting at in the image of the lilies of the field and in the one golden lotus flower held silently in the hand is this: The simple giveness of life, just as it is, is a great joy and a reason to give thanks.

“Do not worry about your life…consider the lilies of the field.” Jesus says to his disciples and to us.

Yes, the simple giveness of life is a great joy and a reason to give thanks. But back of this in our Christian tradition is a God who is the giver of all life and also the redeemer of all life, a God whose unconditional love for us has the power to secure our lives in a way that our worrying, our bank accounts, our flu shots or our retrofitted dwellings never will. The unconditional love of God, the giver and redeemer of life is the only one who can bring us a sense of peace and wholeness.

Which in a strange and wonderful way allows us to receive the people and things in our lives in an open-handed, non-anxious, non-grasping way.

Today is Thanksgiving. And right about now, my family, after some serious worrying about how the turkey and the other dishes will turn out, is sitting down in Atlanta beginning their meal, the same ritual many of us will be engaging in later today. I love this holiday—complete with all the worrying and the fussing and the feast.

But before we do this, you and I are invited to another kind of feast. We call it the Eucharist and we call the prayer that is said the Great Thanksgiving. It is our dinner party with God and with one another in which we do not have to be anxious about the guest list, the table or the food or the drink. It is a feast about the love of God that comes to us as we live in a real world full of mortgages, illness, and politics and worry. It is the feast of God with God’s beloved, you and me, without regard for how much money we have in our bank accounts or how much planning we’ve done for the future. For Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast.