Christopher H. Edmonston
Thanksgiving Eve Meditation
2006 – 11/22/2006
1 Chronicles 16: 8-14
8 O give thanks to the LORD, call
on his name, make known his deeds among the peoples. 9 Sing
to him, sing praises to him, tell of all his wonderful works.
10 Glory in his holy name; let
the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice.
11 Seek the LORD and his
strength, seek his presence continually. 12 Remember the wonderful works he has done,
his miracles, and the judgments he uttered, 13 O offspring of his servant
14 He is the LORD
our God; his judgments are in all the earth.
Every now and then I run across an
insight or an action from a person or a writer which stays with me. I want to share a few of these episodes with
you, and maybe issue a challenge somehow from these perspectives.
I.
The first: I get a bi-monthly journal called Books and Culture. I really love it. Earlier this year there was a review in it of
a new CD-ROM version of one of the most important books in the English
language. The book, re-released last
year on CD ROM; meaning that you don’t
actually have the book – you have perfect digital photographs of the pages of
the book on your computer screen complete with a computer search engine to find
what you want to on the pages of the book.
The book was, quite literally, the first English Language dictionary
ever published – simply titled, A
Dictionary of the English Language,
However, in his review, he has a lament. It is not about Samuel Johnson’s work as a
lexicographer – or a writer of a lexicon, a dictionary. It is about the computer format. The reviewer, Dr. Alan Jacobs, writes about
paper dictionaries, non-computer dictionaries and searches: “On my way to [look
up a definition for] ‘serendipity’ I trip over [the word] ‘solleret,’ and
discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of
armored knights have a name. But this
sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word on a [computer]
dictionary. The great blessing of Google
[and other computer searches – like for words] is its uncanny skill in finding
what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those
lovely odd things you’re not looking
for. For that pleasure, it seems we need
books” (Books and Culture – Jan/Feb
2006). That is to say that one is
looking something up in a paper dictionary, one cannot turn directly to the
word that we need. The computer goes
right to it. In so doing, we miss out on
the wonderful misses – the
serendipity of missing the mark slightly.
Like going to eat lunch with a friend at a favorite restaurant on
Tuesday, only to find that you were really supposed to be there on
Wednesday. And while there on Tuesday,
an even older friend walks in, and you have a joyful lunch. If you were not there on that day, which
happened to be the wrong day, the friendship is never reconnected. That is serendipity and it is one of what
Archibald Rutledge, for years a poet laureate, called life’s extras.
Rutledge famously wrote:
“Creation supplies us with only two kinds of things; necessities and
extras. Sunlight, air, water, food,
shelter – these are among the bare necessities.
With them we can exist. But
moonlight and starlight are distinctly extras; so are music, the perfumes,
flowers. The wind is perhaps a
necessity; but the song that it croons through the morning pines is a different
thing” (Life’s Extras – pages 4-5).
That is an extra.
I wonder as I end this episode – do we thank God enough
for the extras? The words we aren’t
expecting to run across? The old friends
not expecting to be seen? The maples so
yellow, dogwoods so red, when the leaves could simply turn dull and pasty brown
and fall to the ground?
II.
This past summer in
It was a long week full of light
carpentry, lots of dry-wall sanding – so much so that the girls looked like
older ladies with gray and white hair; made so by the dust they sanded as it
stuck firmly to their blonde and brown strands like powder on a powder
puff. We scraped ceilings and we painted
– oh how we painted. We painted for days
– primed and painted – always white, always with the stress of painting in a
space far too small with far too many people.
You need to know that I was proud of our youth
group. They were in the moment, present
with us – not even complaining very loudly when we took away iPods and Cell
Phones and the like. They worked hard,
very, very hard, in hot and dusty and paint-fumy places. I listened all week for complaints – teen-age
angst at the work and conditions we were facing. I never heard any. So I praised them, and I thanked them and
they felt good the night of our closing worship at the little Presbyterian
Church there in
The morning we left, one of the
women we worked for, an old African-American lady named Mrs. Washington, for whom
we had scraped, and sanded, and painted, and primed for a day and a half or so,
came early before she had to go to work.
She came and met me just after dawn – I was the only one up at that
point, and she brought donuts. Krispy
Kreme donuts. Good donuts.
“Thank you! O you are a blessing! Please tell them I said they were a
blessing!” I told her I would pass on
her words. Later that morning, as they,
our teenagers motored through the donuts, I told them of their source. And right then, it clicked. A few of them got it – how grace and
gratitude and true thankfulness works and it was a pure moment of God inspired
awe and joy. A woman they had not met
had fed them. Just as teenagers she had
not met had repaired her home. That’s
how God works and it is a mystery. My current
“writer of the moment,” Don Miller, writes, “Too much of our time is spent
trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to
feel awe” (Blue Like Jazz, page 205).
I wonder as I end this episode – do
we let ourselves feel awe? Are we
thankful for it? The awe that comes in a
mystery so simple as donuts for breakfast from an unexpected source? Awe that happens when the doctor says that it
is not cancer? Awe in the face of the
big beauty of a sunset or of a Thanksgiving table full not only of food, but
filled with loved-ones? Awe that there
is grace and awe that in humility we can be bearers of it?
III.
And lastly this story – about a
former teacher of mine and of my wife, Colleen:
an English professor at Davidson whom I bumped into this past
summer. He told me he had found some old
books in the Library and he was going to mail me one.
A week or so later, I received in
the mail an 1854 copy of Keble’s The Christian
Year published from the 21st London Edition. The Christian
Year was a collection of thoughts in verse for the entire Christian Year
and for its time was, after the Bible, the most read of all Christian Books.
This Sunday coming up is Christ the King
Sunday – the Sunday before Advent. They
didn’t call it that 152 years ago. They
called it Sunday Next Before Advent. And for Sunday
Next Before Advent Keble writes:
O
watch and pray ere Advent dawn!
For
thinner than the subtlest lawn
Twixt
thee and death the veil is drawn
But
love too late can never glow
The
scatter’d fragments Love can glean
Refine
the dregs, and yield us clean
To
regions where one thought serene
Breathes
sweeter than whole years of sacrifice below.
This beautiful book has given me
much thought and sits on my desk, a reminder of thoughtfulness – earned not by
me but given through the thoughtfulness of an old teacher, a mentor, and a
friend. In it are found page after page,
gem after gem, of beautiful Christ inspired thoughts and verse.
This episode makes me wonder: Do we take the time to be thoughtful like my
friend Gil
IV.
King
David, about whom we read in our scripture, has a clue when to give
thanks. Here the war is over, the ark is
restored, it is to be a time of peace and prosperity. And in response to his episode he writes and
shares this Psalm found here in 1 Chronicles:
8 O give thanks to the LORD, call
on his name, make known his deeds among the peoples. 9 Sing to him, sing praises to him, tell of
all his wonderful works.
10 Glory in his holy name; let
the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice.
11 Seek the LORD and his
strength, seek his presence continually.
12 Remember the wonderful works he has done, his miracles, and the
judgments he uttered, 13 O offspring of
his servant
14 He is the LORD
our God; his judgments are in all the earth.
I suspect the loneliest people we can ever know are
people who have nothing to give thanks for.
I also suspect that the greatest spiritual distance we might ever feel
from God is found in a life without thanksgiving. Do we give thanks for the little extras in
our lives or do we take them for granted?
Do we give thanks for mysteries of grace all around us? Do we give thanks for being able to give
freely from our good hearts and kind souls?
Our lives are filled with episodes of thanks and
thanksgiving. Our lives are filled with
extras. Filled with mysterious
graces. Filled with the love of old
friends. Filled with moments, like
David’s, of restoration. Thanksgiving is
about these things. Thanks be to God for
thanksgiving and for episodes that remind us of God’s gracious love and of the
blessings we might be thankful for.