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Thanksgiving Sermon 2009 Rev. Dr. Eileen Sypher
This Time Out of Mind Mark: 8:1-9
Following a season of devastating floods in Connecticut and still deep in a season, like our own, torn and terrified by economic depression, Governor Wilbur Cross opens his 1936 Thanksgiving Proclamation with an unusual phrase and a generous thought. Time out of mind…time out of mind, he says, “it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver.” Cross’s generosity toward God is extraordinary given the times. And his evocation of some other kind of time for us to contemplate, a time he describes as out of mind, is similarly surprising. One would think Cross would focus on the troubles at hand. Yet he does not. He calls us to take a time out, to look outside of our troubled time, our troubled world time, our troubled personal times. How inviting these words are: consider, he says, larger time than our own. Today we gather here in various conditions. For some the pressures of preparing the dinner ahead stir us. For some, facing this day ahead with yet another beloved absence at the table seems overwhelming. For some, this day of feasting brings with it worries about tomorrow, our unemployment. Perhaps this is our first Thanksgiving Dinner in a soup kitchen. But for all of us, Cross’ words, framing our gospel reading this morning as they do, are like an outstretched welcoming hand to all who gather here. “Time out of mind,” Gov. Cross says. “Time out of Mind”: that is what this day is. Let everything else go. Beneath all its movement, beneath all agitation, worry, this day takes its true place in some other kind of time than we understand. And it is a good time. A very good time. It is God’s time. On national holidays such as this, our day already is placed on a larger map, a huge horizontal procession, like a mural, with our Pilgrim ancestors to the far left and we some dot of color somewhere to the right of them. We also remember this day on the horizontal mural of our own lives, past Thanksgivings with our families and friends. We are awed here as we consider the generations before us who have come here on this day. Within this deep memory, our own little days take their place. Placing ourselves on this mural of history can comfort us, especially in those times in our lives where we do not see the path ahead of us. The path is larger than our often cluttered and wayward paths. But such a horizontal procession of our history can also overwhelm us. How small we seem! How insistent the march of time! And yet there is another time than this, another time than the inescapable march of days toward who knows what end. We are here to remember this day to be in that time. We are here to remember that the moving forward pilgrims looked up as they moved forward. They looked up, and in that looking up they stopped. And then all their forward momentum, their steady, often fruitless work, had meaning and direction. They looked up. They looked up and saw God looking at them. God descends with a powerful vertical stroke. God intersects our horizontal histories often with a bold and sudden stroke, and we must stop. The mural of horizontal history, our histories, is intersected by God’s vertical line. And that is what we are gathered together here this day to consider: this vertical time of God’s, time out of mind. Our very coming here in the midst of our busy day is a way of saying, God is with me, with us, God is guiding my life and our lives. It is, we know, the hardest thing to stop. And yet our coming here helps us to stop. We’ve interrupted our cooking, our travel. We’ve walked up the old steps and in the doors this morning and put our very bodies in a new position. We have readied our bodies, and so our souls, to be in God’s time. There will be nothing else like this in the day ahead. There is no need to rush up the steps. The door is open. We do not need to knock and wait for the host. The shelter of this roof is always here. It is not mine nor thine, so we need never feel left out in the rain looking in to a window of warmth from which we are excluded. We do not have assigned seats around any table, nor is there any head or foot. We all face forward, face the Bible on this pulpit, waiting for it to open again and come alive. None of us has a position above the other here. Rich or poor, famous or ignored, everyone is the same here. We come here as children, spiritually open, spiritually naked before God. And we come forward down the aisle to be in God’s time. And we come to give everlasting thanks for this. We come to kneel in our hearts, to acknowledge our true position as a beloved child of God among other every other beloved child of God on this earth. This is our true position as we enter this place, to kneel in our hearts and give over our own minds. God’s mind. God’s time. Once we are inside, and seated, the bell ceases. It will be heard no more for a while. The clock is gone, the one upstairs never works, thank God! We mark time here not by the watch, the kitchen timer, our cell phones, but rather by singing old hymns and hearing familiar old words and marveling at the beauty of this place, whether we know it so well or whether it is brand new to us this hour. Hymns and gospel and prayer, these mark our time here, God’s time, a time in God’s mind and not our own. And as we sing, we can hear echoes of those no longer here and of those who will in their own time no longer be just here. When we leave here shortly, reverse our steps to return to a different time, we will take with us a deep memory of what this hour has felt like. Much of this memory will be something we cannot speak of or even tell about to another. But we will also be able to take with us the words from our gospel reading. These are words to remember and tell. And so I try to open for you a little this gospel story. May its light and truth continue to break forth in you when you leave this place. May you be able to take this reading, opened here a little for you now, and lay it like a transparency over your whole day, letting all the parts of your day gather into it. The gospel today opens before us another Thanksgiving. It’s not often called a Thanksgiving scene, but it is all the same, this. Four thousand people have gathered somewhere to hear Jesus. I don’t know the place or the year, nor does it matter to place and date this Thanksgiving. It happens already somewhere out of time and beyond place. Four thousand people, a crowd beyond our imagining in what seems like a small space, a hill or a plain in the desert, four thousand without any invitations, any planning, hearing by word of mouth perhaps that he is there. And they have come in all sorts of conditions of dress, I am sure. And some are already hungry when they arrive. They’ve failed to prepare, that powerful was their desire merely to be in his presence. And then, most astonishing, they don’t leave until he sends them away. They are hungry in body, but they don’t leave. Instead, they wait, they trust and their trust is fulfilled. Jesus recognizes their hunger and feeds them. Jesus feeds them, and not they themselves. Putting this transparency over our day, our tables, whether we are one or twelve or twenty take their place beside all the tables of those gathered to give thanks. All the tables of those gathered now, but even more than now, all gathered before and all gathered to come. Our table is not alone and it is never empty. All we have known and loved and the numberless others we do not know sit at it. Putting this transparency over our day, our food appears now as a gift, a miraculous gift, and a gift that will fill us no matter what the condition of our feast. Our meal may be modest, but it tastes so good. And putting this transparency over our day there is a presence among us, in the middle of our tables, the middle of our living rooms, full or empty as they may at first seem, a presence of God and his Christ. It is so serene this presence, so serene that we stop and we are amazed. May your day ahead be such a day in God’s time, a day full in every way.
Amen.
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