Breaking Bad with Thanksgiving

I entered an elevator this week in one of the nearby grocery stores on St. Clair and as I was about to get on there was a woman joining me. She had a cart and got onto the elevator fairly quickly. Outside the elevator there was a great big display in bright orange. Pumpkin pies, apple pies, chocolates, little candies, you name it. Everything that was sweet was there. The door closed slowly, and the lady looked at me and said you guys must be trying to make us feel guilty. So I said, well no, not really. She says, well you are part of the management team here aren’t you? I was dressed in a suit and a shirt and tie. She then went on before I gave an answer, to tell us that she always feels guilty when we put out such displays. She says it’s far too much. You make us all feel guilty. So trying to dissuade her from the fact that I was management, I said well actually you know I’m not part of the management team here. I’m Clergy: Big mistake!

She looked at me and she said, “Hah, well, nothing makes me feel more guilty than religion.” She wasn’t haven’t a good day, was she? She said, “Oh religion, you’re always making us feel guilty. If we have too much, it’s wrong; if we have too little, it’s bad.” I still had two more floors to ride up on that elevator with her. Finally we got off the elevator at the top and I just wished her a very pleasant Thanksgiving. She looked at me and she smiled, and she said “Well, thank you very much, that makes me feel better.” Well that’s why I’m here, isn’t it, you know?

I thought, that woman is saying something that a lot of people genuinely believe and think. She is not as odd or as strange as it may appear. I think ever since we, particularly in urban societies, have left our agricultural and our agrarian roots, we haven’t really quite known what to make of this thing called Thanksgiving. When you’re attached to the land, when you’re working on the land, you realize how dependent you are on the forces of nature, and how dependent you are on really the grace of a higher power to be able to provide the things we can sow but we cannot grow, which was sort of the theme of the children’s moment at the 9:15 service this morning. We can plant, but we can’t be responsible for what happens afterwards.

So we’re not quite sure then in an urban setting where we’re not that connected to the land just what Thanksgiving really means. In fact, if anything, it sort of becomes an excuse, does it not, for overindulgence in food? And in feeling guilty because of that, or finding that there are people who are around us in this city who don’t have some of the things that we have, and so while we’re thankful, we know that the world around us can suffer deprivation, so we’re never quite sure what to do with it. We look at it, we feel a little ill at ease but we sort of go through the façade of pretending that we are truly thankful for everything. The problem is that level of introspection is bad for us. It’s bad because it doesn’t produce anything good at the end. It’s just navel gazing. It’s just an obsession with ourselves.

I’ve always liked what the writer Tomas Halik from Prague once wrote in his great book, Patience with God, a book I’ve quoted before. This passage is worth hearing. He talks about the fact that we are getting a little concerned with ourselves at the detriment of our faith. This is what Halik said,

“Faith is not something we do. Faith is reliance. In our faith we ought not to take ourselves too seriously, or the degree of our knowledge and forms of our conviction. Instead we ought to take God very seriously. Even in religious seeking, it is possible for people to go fatefully astray if they’re so absorbed with their own seeking that they ignore the crucial fact that God is already seeking them.”

This, by Halik, is a fine distinction. In other words, religion and faith is interpreted as sort of our constant response to God, and therefore it ebbs and flows.

Today, you might be full of Thanksgiving, or indeed you might be here with almost no sense of Thanksgiving, as if that is all that really matters. But Thanksgiving never was about us. Thanksgiving never will be about us. Thanksgiving is about God. It is about the recognition of the providence and the grace and the steadfastness of God. That’s what makes our passage from the Book of Lamentations this morning, so powerful. For Lamentations is written by Jeremiah somewhere between 586 B.C. and 516 B.C. In 586, the Babylonians captured the Israelites and forced them into exile, and in 516, finally they made it home and re-built the temple. But in that 70 years they lived a desolate life and nowhere will you see that desolation more clearly than in Chapter One of Lamentations. That’s why it’s called Lamentations. Jeremiah is bemoaning the fact that his nation is in a crisis. There is no reason for Thanksgiving in Jeremiah’s eyes. On the contrary, he uses words like desolate. The young maids have no men, the queen is now a slave, widows are everywhere. There is no great feast, no great meal anymore. No Passover, even, which we talked about last week. Nothing! No reason for Thanksgiving at all. Everything is dark and turbid and dreadful. Lamentations is that. It’s a lament about how rotten things are. But the question is, how does the Bible, and how does Jeremiah take us out of that?

Because there was a need for Israel to, what I call this morning, break bad. There’s a need to sort of break out of that. Some of you will have watched, no doubt, the television series over the last five years called Breaking Bad. I must admit I’d never seen it until somebody who’s young and cool and hip said you know, you really should watch this if you want to get with the real world. So not being in the real world, I decided I’d watch a couple of episodes of it. I watched the last two, and they’re about as dark as you could possibly get. But Breaking Bad was great. I can see why it grabbed people. It grabbed people because it’s a story, very simply, of a man who is diagnosed with lung cancer, and after he’s been diagnosed he doesn’t know how he’s going to provide for his family so he, along with a student of his, get into the business of creating meth, of creating drugs. It seems that every time they do something, they hit a dead end. It’s just one tale of woe after another tale of woe. It is breaking bad, and bad it was.

The original writer and the person who conceived of this actually though, wanted it to convey a message. It wasn’t just a program for the sake of a program. It was a program that had, ironically, sort of Biblical proportions. This is what the writer said about the show. He writes, “If religion is the reaction of man and nothing more, it seems to be that it represents a human desire for wrong-doers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. It galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for a biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I’d like to believe there’s a comeuppance that Karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says that this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well, but I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I cannot believe that there isn’t also a hell.” What the writer is saying is he wants some justice in the world. That for somebody that has done wrong he wants to have it set right.

In many ways, the passage that we have from Lamentations is similar. It is sort of the recognition that things have gone bad and the people of Israel had gone through many times of badness. In fact when you look at the history of the Bible it is the flow of having good things happen followed by bad, followed by good, followed by bad: Being in Egypt, being set free, being attacked by the Assyrians, being set free, being attacked by the Babylonians, being set free. It’s a continued ebb and flow of breaking bad with something good and then going back into bad again. The people of Israel were starting to feel guilty because they couldn’t understand why this was happening. Is it something we’ve done wrong that is causing this cycle of badness? Is it because of our transgressions that something terrible has taken place? They’re guilt-ridden and they don’t know what to do about it. They don’t know how to break the cycle of bad. They don’t know if they should be punished, they don’t know if in fact they are being punished by being forced into exile. It was all about them. The laments, the pain, the anguish, it’s all about them.

Then comes in Jeremiah, he introduces a whole new way of breaking bad. He says you break bad with Thanksgiving. The steadfast love, he says, of the Lord lasts forever. His mercies never end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. Now you notice it’s not God speaking here. It is Jeremiah in the midst of this lament and all this guilt pointing to God. Addressing God and saying your mercies are new every morning. Your faithfulness is there. Your steadfastness is there. When everything is falling apart, you are still there in the midst of it. In other words, Jeremiah sees that breaking bad occurs when God breaks in. When in the midst of all the guilt and the questioning and the uncertainty, God is the one who is steadfast and will be with the people. God in other words is making a sacrifice, really, for these broken people.

A story that I read, I think it was in Cornerstone Magazine, a Christian magazine, about a father writing in a letter describing something that happened in his own home Thanksgiving weekend. He had two daughters, and they were rascals. The two little girls went out to play in the garden on Thanksgiving Day. He had planted some wonderful things, ready to be grown for the next spring, so he didn’t want any of the bulbs or any of the seeds to be touched. But also there was some products and some beautiful things from the garden that they were going to use for the Thanksgiving dinner. So he says to the little girls, “Don’t go playing in the garden.”

The little girls said “OK, that’s fine, that’s OK, that’s alright.”

The father goes inside. A few minutes later he comes out and what are the girls doing? They’re playing in the garden. What are they doing destroying things? So finally father comes and says, “Now look, I’m sorry, you can’t do this. If this happens again, you will not be sitting down with us for Thanksgiving dinner.”

Girls said “Fine, Dad, no problem.”

Father goes inside. Somebody destroys some more plants. Father comes out, sees what has happened. He said, “I warned you, I warned you that if you did this, then you wouldn’t be sitting down and having Thanksgiving dinner with us. I want you to confess now. Which one of you, or both of you, destroyed those plants and destroyed those things?” They wouldn’t say. So he says, “Go to your room.” They go to their room.

Finally dinnertime comes around and the mother calls the girls down to have dinner and invites them to sit at the table. The girls sheepishly come down the stairs, and they don’t know what to do. So finally the mother says, “Sit down, we’re going to have Thanksgiving dinner together.”

The girls are looking at each other wondering what’s going on. Then they realize their father is not at the table. The girls say to their mother, “Where’s dad? Why isn’t dad at the table?”

She said, “Well, he did say that unless you confessed, you would not be sitting down at the table and having Thanksgiving dinner with him. So he has decided that he would leave and let you have Thanksgiving dinner on your own.” The father had made the sacrifice for the sins of the daughters.

The Book of Lamentations is exactly that. Whatever the people of God had done wrong, whatever they had not given thanks for, whatever sin they’d committed, whatever devastation they had, the recognition by Jeremiah is God’s mercies, God’s mercifulness is new every day. God breaks bad by breaking in and doing something.

That’s why when I look at the world and when I see people who are anguishing and are guilt-ridden or are wondering if in fact they should even enjoy the pleasures of life. They need to understand that it’s not always just about them. It’s actually about the ongoing grace of God, a God who, according to the Book of Lamentations is merciful all the time and the people need to wait on that mercy, because God is there, even if they don’t realize it.

There was a letter to the editor in The Toronto Star this morning that upset me greatly. It upset me because it was a letter that was basically decrying God and those who believe in God on Thanksgiving. It was a reason for people not to come to church. The basic argument that he made was one I hear all the time, and that is if God is so good and God is so kind and if there’s providence, why is it that some people in the world are fed and others aren’t? Why do some go hungry and others sit down at lavish meals? The writer was trying to make everyone feel guilty or else blame God. No answers, just the blaming of God.

Yet there was an honesty about this letter because I think deep down in our hearts, we do ask ourselves the same thing. Even people of faith are wise enough to know that you ask that very same question sometimes. It appears that in fact there is an unevenness to the world.  There are a myriad of reasons for it, but what was fundamentally wrong about the article was that it misunderstood God. It was looking at God only through the eyes of the lament of the people. It wasn’t actually looking at God as God is actually revealed, particularly in Scripture. Because if we look at the God who is revealed in Scripture, the mercies of the Lord, the steadfast love of God are not just happening to those who are affluent and rich and have their great meals and have all their wonderful pleasures, but it’s a God who also identifies with those who do not. That he’s there with those who lament, that he’s equally present amongst those who are in need. And from His justice and His equity, calls on the world and those who have, to care for those who have not. The new every morning steadfast love of God is not just born out of thankfulness for all the joyful things that we feel guilty about in the lobby of a grocery store, but there about even the most difficult things in life.

I read a modern parable not long ago. It’s a little Hallmark card-ish, if you know what I mean, but I thought it’s profound, it’s deep. It’s a story about a woman, we’ll call her Sandra, who had had a terrible year. She had been pregnant but had been in a car accident and lost her child. Her husband had lost his job. Money was hard to find and it was her family time to provide Thanksgiving dinner to the extended family. She decided she wanted at least to put on a nice table and so she went to the local florist and she asked for some flowers for Thanksgiving. The florist, who we’ll call Julie, said “What kind of display would you like?”

And the women said, “Well, I’ve had a bad year and I’m not really feeling very thankful and I don’t have a lot of money and I can’t afford a great big bouquet, so maybe just some cut flowers in a vase; that’ll be nice.”

Julie said, “Fine, that’s OK. You’ve had a rough year, have you?”

She said “Yes, yes I have”

“You might want the Thanksgiving Special, then.” Then all of a sudden the conversation ended and a gentleman came in.

The gentleman walks up and he says very quickly, “Can I pick up my Thanksgiving Special?” so Julie goes back and she gets the box, and it’s tied with ribbon and he just wants to make sure that it’s right. He opens the box, and there are roses, a dozen of them. But there are no heads on the roses, there’s only the stems with the thorns on them. He thanks Julie for them, closes the box, pays the bill and leaves.

Sandra’s aghast. “What on earth is that?!”

Julie says “That’s the Thanksgiving Special.”

“But why on earth would anyone buy stems with thorns on it for Thanksgiving and not have the roses and the flowers?”

And Julie says “Well here’s the reason. This man three years ago lost his wife to cancer. He felt there was no joy in life whatsoever and he’d always bought his wife roses and so he came into the store on a particular day because he didn’t know what to do on his own for Thanksgiving. He wanted to get some roses to remember her by. But when he saw them, he was so overwhelmed with grief he couldn’t stand it so I took the heads of the roses off and I just simply gave him the thorns. And I said to him, ‘if you can give thanks for the thorns and you get to the point where those thorns can be meaningful for you, you will always be able to appreciate the flower. But if you never come to terms with thanking God for the thorns, you will never enjoy those flowers when they bloom.’ She said there have been so many people I’ve shared this with that it’s become my Thanksgiving Special. So, do you want the Thanksgiving Special or do you want a dozen roses with the flowers on?

She said “I will take the Thanksgiving Special because if I have grabbed those thorns and can still give thanks, this will be a true Thanksgiving.”

In the midst of Lamentations, Jeremiah says the same thing. In the midst of the destruction and the exile, “Remember, oh Israel, every morning that you get up, every day that you arise, God’s steadfast love endures. His mercies endure.” Thanksgiving then is not just for the great meal and the bounty of the earth and the glorious things that we should recognize come from the hand of our maker, but Thanksgiving should arise even when there are thorns and exile and barrenness.

The one thing that separates those who have a real and a genuine faith in God is that they give thanks for the thorns as well as for the flowers. Anyone can give thanks only for the flowers, but that, my friends, is the true nature of faith. That’s how you break bad. You break it with a true Thanksgiving. Amen.