The word Thanksgiving always takes me back.  Especially to memories of childhood.  For some reason, I have warmer, happier memories of Thanksgiving than I do of Christmas.  Maybe it was the weather.  Maybe the food.  Maybe because Thanksgiving was more about giving thanks than getting gifts.  Maybe it was the flag football games or the smell of cotton gins in the cold, dry air.  We didn’t have a color TV back then and one year dad got one on loan from a department store so we could watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in color.  I don’t know why for sure, but the word Thanksgiving takes me back to some very warm and happy memories.  How about you?  This morning, even as we think about giving thanks the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the scripture asks us to think forward, to something that has yet to happen but will happen as certainly as anything that has ever happened. 

Yet, before the scripture can take us forward, we must go back to the moment in time it was written, near the end of the first century A.D., as best we know.  The same John who wrote the gospel of John and the three epistles that bear his name, was coming near the end of his earthly life.  In what we call the book of Revelation, John was writing a last word of encouragement to some of the earliest churches.  It was a terribly difficult time.  Terrorism wasn’t something they read about in the morning paper, something happening in other places to other people.  Terror was being visited upon Christians by authorities using their power to persecute the church.  Some of the torture the early Christians suffered for their faith in Christ was unspeakable.  One of the reasons it is so hard for us to understand the book of Revelation is because none of us have ever suffered for our faith as these people suffered or lived so close to the edge of total annihilation.  Some of the language of this book is foreign to our ears because it only makes sense when living for Jesus is about to cost you your life.

John wanted to give these early Christians hope and he started by pointing back to what Christ had already done for them.  “Grace to you and peace from . . . Jesus Christ . . . the firstborn of the dead . . . and the ruler of the kings of the earth.  To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood . . . be glory and dominion forever and ever.”  That’s always a very good place to start with thanksgiving, pointing back to what God has done for us through Christ.  Pointing back helps remember that the foundation of all of our hope, present and future, is in the work of God in creation and re-creation through Christ.  He was the first to be raised from the dead, the “firstborn” of what God intends to be a very big family of people raised from the dead.  Jesus is our big brother in this family of faith.  He has set us free from what would have been our own death because of our rebellion against the rule of God in our lives. 

Certainly, we should thank God for the blessings of daily food and shelter and jobs and family.  But, wouldn’t all of that be meaningless if death still had us by the throat?  Of course, for some people, death still has them by the throat.  Though they say they believe in Jesus, they still fear their own death more than they fear anything else.  When Christians pray, it is rare to hear them say “Amen” before thanking God for his forgiveness their sins.  The closer and closer we get to the bottom of what forgiveness means, the freer we are from everything that causes us anxiety and fear, even death itself.  In Christ, God has set us free.  But, that is not all he has done.

What God started, he will also finish.  “He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him . . . ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”  Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the language of the New Testament.  John is painting a word picture here.  God will not only write the first and last word of human history, he is the first and last word.  He is the source of all that is and he is the source to which all that is will ultimately return. 

Do you see the hope here?  John is asking these Christians to lift their heads above the suffering of the moment, to see beyond it to what God will yet do and, even in the meantime, to find meaning in their suffering by remembering their place in the work of God in this moment.  He has “made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father.”  Here is the reason for all true thanksgiving.  What God started in Christ he will finish.  In the meantime, he has given us a place of service in the rule of his grace in this world so that even our daily lives become a part of what God will yet do when Jesus returns to finish his work of redemption.

This past Sunday, I quoted something Weston Ware said when he emceed the Maston Foundation Dinner a week ago Friday.  Weston quoted Reinhold Neibuhr who said, “Nothing worth doing will ever be finished in our lifetime.  Therefore, we must work with hope.”  This past week, Weston said, “That’s a great quote.  We should work with hope.  But, you didn’t tell us what work we should do with hope.”  Actually, I thought Weston would have been satisfied that he got quoted at all.  It turns out that I all I did was set him up to ask the tougher question.  “What work should we doing?” he asked.  Thanks for asking.  It’s a great question. 

This past few weeks we’ve been talking about spiritual formation, the process of our spirits, our character, being shaped and molded and transformed by the presence of the living Christ within us.  Spiritual formation, however, doesn’t just happen as we sit around and contemplate great eternal truths.  It happens as we actually do the spiritual work we’ve been given to do.  In time, we believe what we do, or not.  James was not kidding when he wrote, “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (James 2:17).”

The scripture promises us that only faith, hope and love will transcend time as we know it (1 Corinthians 13:13).  Whatever we do as an act of faith in God through Christ, in the hope that Jesus is Lord of life and death and as expression of the God of all grace and mercy, his priestly work, serving and caring for all of his children, will ultimately be validated when Jesus returns to join us in finishing his work in this world. 

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have co-authored the Left Behind series.  It’s a best-selling book series based on a belief about the end of time known as dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is but one way of interpreting what the Bible says about the end of time based on the teachings of English minister, John Darby about one hundred fifty years ago.  Darby popularized the belief in what is known as the “rapture.”  The word “rapture” is not even found in the New Testament but describes a time in the future when all Christians will be suddenly and instantaneously taken from earth.  According to this belief, the rapture will be followed by seven years of horrible suffering for all of those who are “left behind.”  At the end of the seven years, Jesus will return and establish his rule on earth for one millennium, one thousand years. 

It wasn’t until my adult years that I became aware just how much this theology of dispensationalism had influenced my thinking about the end of the world, about how some had used the fear of being left behind to goad me to be absolutely certain I was saved, even if that meant being baptized multiple times, which I was.  I think these people were well intentioned.  But, these evangelists would come to town and leave me behind believing that my salvation was more about how absolutely certain I was that I had said the right words with the right intensity than I was absolutely trusting that “Jesus Christ (is) the firstborn of the dead . . . and . . . loves us and (has) freed us from our sins by his blood.”  I didn’t want to be left behind.  So, I got “saved” more than once.

One of the problems I have with dispensationalism is that it describes “a world that is spiraling down morally . . . a world from which God removes first his own Holy Spirit and then his besieged and nearly defeated Christians so that he can finally judge unbelievers apocalyptically and lethally (Tony Campolo, Adventures In Missing the Point, How the Culture Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel, Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo, Zondervan, 2003, p. 59).”  The scripture certainly deals with issues of ultimate judgment and even spiritual death for those who choose to reject the only hope of salvation God offers in Christ.  As I understand the gospel in general and John’s Revelation in particular, God will not abandon his creation, he will redeem it.  The whole history of the world is about God’s presence in the world and about his “guiding (it) toward becoming the kind of world (he) willed for it to be when it was created (ibid, p. 59).”

This year, more than ever, I am thanking God for my salvation because the older I get the more I appreciate how much I need it.  The more and more I truly understand how utterly hopeless I am without what God did for me in Christ on the cross.  This Thanksgiving, more than ever, I will thank God for what he has done but I am also thanking God for what he will yet do.  That my life has meaning now because all that I do in this very moment in faith, hope and love will transcend my own earthly existence and is even now becoming a part of God’s grand scheme to redeem this world.  My life has meaning now because of what God has done in Christ and because of what God will yet do in Christ for me and through me!  Thanks be to God!

I’ve wondered how those of you who were here forty years ago have remembered the events surrounding the assassination of John Kennedy, just three miles from this church.  Two-thirds of all Americans weren’t even alive November 22, 1963.  I remember specifically where I was, in Mrs. Bells’ fourth grade class at Colonial Heights Elementary School, when the principal came over the intercom and announced the news that would shape my world more than I could have ever imagined. 

Just this week, I learned about one of the lives forever altered that day has always been overshadowed by the bigger story.  Just a few blocks from this very sanctuary, that same November 22, Marie Tippit was widowed when her police officer husband was murdered on Tenth Street by Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Aside from her unspeakable grief was the fear of not knowing how she would provide for the three children she was left to raise alone.  Very shortly, however, 40,000 letters poured in from all over the world including some $600,000 from people expressing their sympathy for her and their gratitude for her husband’s sacrifice.  One of the first gifts she received was $25,000 from Abraham Zapruder, the man whose 8mm film captured the best-known pictures of the actual assassination.  That was the amount of the first payment he received from Life magazine when they purchased the film from him (Michael Granberry, “Pain lingers for Tippit’s widow, The Dallas Morning News, November 21, 2003, p. 1).  $25,000 was a lot of money 40 years ago, probably four or five times the average annual salary of most people.  It’s just a reminder that, when some humans are at their worst, it only gives others the chance to be at their best.  Where one grave injustice was done, it only gave opportunity for justice to be done as well.

What is it that gives the ability to be at our best day after day, to give sacrificially to others, to think of them first instead of ourselves, to live for something more than what gives us immediate gratification and comfort?  What is it?  I don’t know what motivated Abraham Zapruder.  I do know that only hope can motivate someone from merely believing that Jesus conquered death to actually following him to the death of self as true faith demands.  Hope born of a faith that, if we act in love and faith, what we do will outlive us and become part of a bigger, more glorious story.  Only when you are thankful for what God will yet do, can you work with hope.

So, we work with hope.  We do the work of sacrificial giving, of giving ourselves away.  We do the work of forgiving.  We do the work of serving others whom we might not think deserve it.  We do the work of loving the unlovable.  We do the work of praying for those who abuse us and who won’t forgive us.  We do the work of grieving when we suffer unspeakable loss.  We do the work of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick and dying.  We do the work of not waiting any longer for someone else to tell us what work to do and get to work finding the work that is ours to do and then actually doing it.  We do all of that work with hope because we believe that as we labor, we are even now building his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Thanks be to, “him who is and who was and who is to come . . . to him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.”

Thanks be to God for what he has done and for what God will yet do!