Sermon for Thanksgiving Weekend November 27, 2022 San Carlos Community Church

Today is the first Sunday of Advent at the end of our long and most welcome thanksgiving holiday.?I find that once you accept that this dark cold time of year has indeed arrived and that it’s not going to go away any time soon, you can begin to enjoy it.?It is a time to cherish friendships, to read some good books, to send Christmas cards the old-fashioned way through the mail, to invite friends over for food & drink.?Put up Christmas lights.?

Concerning notable events in history this time of year, Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland on November 25, 1835.?He made a lot of money in the growing steel industry, then gave much of it away.?He founded libraries – most people know that.?What most people don’t know is that he donated millions to churches for new organs so that, in his own words, “beautiful music would lessen the pain of the sermons.”

Did you know that the American Heritage Dictionary gives two definitions for the word “preach”?:

Preach.?1. To deliver a sermon.?

2. To give religious or moral instruction, esp. in a drawn-out, tiresome manner.

All I can say is that I do my best to make sure that my utterances here on Sunday morning match definiton number one and not definition number two.

Cartoonist Charles Schulz was born in Minneapolis, Minnestoa on November 26, 1922.?He proposed to a red-haired gal when they were both very young.?She turned him down. ?He moved out west to Santa Rosa, California shortly thereafter, married, raised a family and led a very pleasant life.?Charles gave a lot of money to local charities and to the Sonoma County Regional Airport, which is named - yes - Charles M. Schultz Sonoma County airport – yes - there are statues of Peanuts characters in the airport and the information desk looks exactly like Lucy van Pelt’s psychiatry booth in the cartoon strip.

On a more somber historical note, this time of year 81 years ago the German Army was on the outskirts of Moscow.?It looked like the city would fall and the government have to flee; but the temperatuve dropped suddenly, the snow began to fall and the German Army slowed to a crawl because they had not brought the right kind of motor oil.?The soldiers did not have winter gear or camouflage gear for fighting in the snow and so they missed their chance for quick victory.

Lessons here, which I’m sure those people in California who drive up to the Sierra to ski know well:?winterize your vehicle; bring warm clothes; it’s not a bad idea to have a sleeping bag in your vehicle and some power bars.

For my brief and hopefully not too tiresome sermon today, I will develop what I said last week about justice.

The Bible is concerned with many things?and many issues.?Things the bible is concerned about include especially water, land and people.?Concepts and issues the Bible talks about a lot include: truth, fairness, salvation, redemption, promise, forgiveness, justice, and many others.?

How do we behave in an ethical manner??How do we get what we want and need out of life without hurting others, without being unfair??How do we know when we have our fair share?

How especially do we cooperate with our friends and neighbors in order to get the things we need without hurting others, for ethical issues multiply exponentially the more people are involved.

Human beings have been around in our present form for a rather long time.?It is at least 50,000 years since there has been substantial genetic change in our species, perhaps 150,000 years.?That’s a long time and a long history.

We think of the bible as a very old book and it is, some 2,000-3,000 years old.?There had already been a long history at the time of its composition, plenty of triumph and tragedy, plenty of war and peace and pestilence.

Thus the Bible records a lot of yearning for better times, for a better form of government or rule, for someone who would be a better king than the ones who came before.?If you read about the kings of the Old Testament, you find a lot of complaint.?Biblical authors did not like very many of them and absolutely despised a lot of them and for good reason.

So eventually we get this prophecy from Isaiah:

?. . . out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of the?Lord?from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plough-shares,

and their spears into pruning-hooks;

They shall beat our swords into plowshares, because??Because the Messiah has come and

“He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples”

In that day we will have a good, wise king to reign over us.?The good king will give just orders and we will all obey them.?Problem solved.?We will not need to fight anymore because everyone will be confident that their complaints will be heard and everyone will be compensated fairly.

We Christians believe that the Messiah has indeed come, the very Messiah talked about by Isaiah and the other prophets, but the Messiah does not quite reign on earth in this way.?Just look around for the past 2,000 years and we can see that God simply does not issue clear orders.?Perhaps he does, but we do not understand them.?International disarmament (swords into plowshares) just has not happened yet.?Or does God indeed reign and the problems we endure are simply of our own making?

To help us answer that question this morning, I call upon our own prophet-king, Abraham Lincoln and read now from his proclamation of a national celebration of Thanksgiving in 1863.?Listen for how thoroughly Biblical this proclamation is:

???????It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their

dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and

transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine

repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime

truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that

those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

???????We know that by his divine law, nations, like individuals, are

subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world.?May we not

justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the

land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to

the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

???????We have been the recipients of the choicest of bounties of

heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity;

we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever

grown.

???????But we have forgotten God.?We have forgotten the gracious hand

which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened

us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts,

that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and

virtue of our own.?Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become

too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving

grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

???????It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly,

reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one

voice, by the whole American people.?I do therefore invite my fellow

citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at

sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and

observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and

praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

May Almighty God add a blessing to this Thanksgiving meditation by President Abraham Lincoln.