Thanksgiving Wisdom 3. God's Love

As tens of millions have travelled in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families, it is a reminder of how much love there is in families.  Isn't it?

Maybe, maybe not.  

The public health officials travelling to gather in mixed ages from different States may just be the most dangerous thing a group can do towards each other mid-pandemic.  Endangering each other is not love.  And here lies an example of the problem with love. 

We define our own love.  And we will not be told what love really is by anyone else.  Including God.

John Robinson, the Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, was wise enough to see that self-defining love is true of just one being - God.  He wrote:

God loveth himself first and most as the chiefest good

Jesus made the same point in the prayer to His Father in John chapter 17.  

“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.  

God lived, love lived, before any human love.  And any human love is to be defined by God, not human beings.  And this offends us very much, but that doesn't change its truth.

Love in the creature ever presupposeth some good, true or apparent, in the thing loved, by which that affection of union is drawn.

Our love is a victim of our unreliable attraction to things and people, sometimes worthy, sometimes pleasant, sometimes dodgy, sometimes criminal. But our love reaches out to what attracts us.  But God?

But the love of God, to the contrary, causeth all good to be produced in the creature.

His love gives the goodness rather than seeking it out.  Jesus came to seek the lost, the sick, the unlovely, the dead, the criminal, the leper.

Like all Western Countries - but bigger and better of course - the United States has a culture of self-defining love. Holywood has helped it along fabulously.  Yet 400 years ago those pilgrims were fed by their Pastor a view of love which would draw out holiness rather than Holywood.  And may that wisdom not disappear from either side of the Atlantic completely.

Thanksgiving Wisdom: 2. Scripture and Knowledge

The coronavirus virus has done strange things to people's view of science.  People have disregarded it and depended upon it all at once.  Not two groups of people, one disregarding, the other depending, but a kind of overlapping internal confusion.  

Christians have struggled with this too:  praying for a cure from science and from God and not sure if God likes science.  Praying to God about the worrying data and fearful modelling while wanting to ignore the fear and trust 'the promises'.

John Robinson offered this wisdom to his people: 

When we avow the Scriptures perfection, we do not exclude from men common sense and the light of nature.  Yea, we ... beg of God as necessary for their fruitful understanding the light of His Holy Spirit.

Or to put it another way. the Scriptures teach us that God is the giver of all good gifts, so the benefits of science are from Him.  The work of scientists using the light of nature and common sense is no less from God than the Biblical promises they (maybe unwittingly) fulfil by supplying us with more safety. 

Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 4. Wind beneath my wings (Bette Midler)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and this time number 4 - 'Wind beneath my wings' performed by Bette Midler  . . .

Why it's good for a funeral:

It thanks God (just about).

Why it's bad for a funeral:

It's all about the other person - presumably the dead one - so a bit late to sing it to them.

Line that's most like a Christian song:

Thank God for you.

Line that's least like a Christian song:

So I was the one with all the glory.

A Quote from (singer) Bette Midler:

'I celebrate everyone's religious holidays.  If it's good enough for the righteous, it's good enough for the self-righteous I always say.'

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

It seems doggerel to me, and I'm nobody's hero.

A better Christian alternative:

Thanksgiving

Christians frequently bemoan the way Christmas is celebrated without Christ.  In the USA a similar issue exists with Thanksgiving, the great family, national holiday that occurs today.  

Year on year I go to school assemblies during our harvest period, mostly in October (the same month as originally celebrated in America).  It is a matter of wonder to me that you can have a fully-fledged all-school harvest without mentioning God once.  Or singing anything to him.  The trick is to call it a Festival, not a Thanksgiving.

When the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest 'safely gathered in' in October 1621 they knew exactly what they were doing - they were giving thanks to Almighty God and his providential care.  Not only so, but it formed part of a pattern in which they had already held days of thanksgiving for other deliverances along the way.

Ah, we may think, those were very devout religious people and times have changed.  Awkwardly, for this view, there were nearly double as many Indians - native Americans - at the first thanksgiving as European settlers.

You do not have to be very devout to recognise that a greater Providence has laid out kindnesses that seem scarcely deserved in this world.  If humanity is all there is there is nobody to thank, no reason to be grateful and the world loses a whole vertical dimension as it dissolves into the shallowness of human experience alone.

Harvest

Of all the special days, even including Christmas an Easter, there are none that have more messages for the soul than harvest thanksgiving. This is what Victorian preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said of it - and he was in the middle of the world's largest city at the time;

'If you have an opportunity to journey into the country during the next three weeks, you will, if your heart is rightly attuned, find a marvellous mass of wisdom couched in a cornfield. Why I could not attempt for a moment to open the mighty mines of gabled treasure which are hidden there.

Think, beloved, of the joy of harvest. How does it tell us of the joy of the redeemed if we, being saved, shall at last be carried like shocks of corn fully ripe into the garner!

Look at the ear of corn when it is fully ripe, and see how it bends toward the earth! It held its head erect before, but in getting ripe how humble does it become! And how does God speak to the sinner and tell him, that if he would be fit for the great harvest he must drop his head and cry, "Lord, have mercy upon me a sinner."

And when we see the weeds spring up amongst wheat, do we not recall our Master's parable over again of the tares among the wheat; and are we not reminded of the great day of division, when he shall say to the reaper, "Gather first the tares and bind them in bundles, to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn."

O yellow field of corn, you preach well to me, the minister, "Behold, the fields are ripe already to the harvest." Work yourself; and pray you the Lord of the harvest to send forth more labourers into the harvest."

And it preaches well to you, O man of years, for it tells you that the sickle of death is sharp, and that you must soon fall. But it cheers and comforts you, for it tells that the wheat shall be safely housed, and it bids thee hope that you will be carried to your Master's garner to be his joy and his delight for ever. Hark, then, to the rustling eloquence of the yellow harvest.'

Hands

For the first time in absolutely ages we sang Nun danket alle Gott - well, Catherine Winkworth's translation of it - this morning.

One reason I chose it was because I heard it introduced by a nationally famous worship leader recently. "With hearts, and hands - we've all got hands haven't we?" he raises his hands as in prayer -"and voices". Cue the band. Cue a congregation thinking Martin Rinkart might have been encouraging some expressive hand movements in worship.

This was so far off the mark as to warrant a redemption, I thought.  Most of the people around Pastor Martin at the time were using their hands to bury corpses . . .

How much richer the truth is!