November 20, 2022 – Thanksgiving Sunday
Job 14.1-22
Matthew 5.1-12
The Blessings We Call Trouble
Thanksgiving Sunday
The most popular radio programs in New York City in the ’30s and ’40s, were shows like “The Lucky Strike Hour,” “The Mobil Oil Hour,” “Morning Showers,” and “On the 8:15.” And if you happened to be among the listening audience in those days, chances are excellent you will have heard three singing brothers who appeared both as featured artists and as singers of commercial jingles; the name of the act was “The Landt Trio,” three brothers originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania named Dan, Jack, and Karl Landt. They started out, as many did in those days, in vaudeville, enjoyed about fifteen years of success on the radio, but with the advent of television in the fifties, their popularity waned, and Landt Trio went their separate ways. Karl Landt went into the insurance business in Armonk, New York, became active in the Methodist Church in general and in the peace movement in particular. I got to know Karl after he retired and moved with his wife Christine to the Litchfield Hills in western Connecticut – the Landts were active members of my Bridgewater church. Karl was a man of tremendous faith, and naturally I was attracted to both his Christian advocacy and his musical career; even into his seventies and eighties, Karl possessed a crystalline tenor voice. But what I will remember most about Karl, who has long since gone to sing with the heavenly choir, was a sermon he once gave in church he titled “The Blessings We Call Trouble.” It was a sermon about the ways life’s difficult and sometimes bitter experiences nonetheless bring with them lessons that eventually become blessings in our lives. It was about keeping our eyes and hearts open to see and understand what God is saying to us even through those times of difficulty and anxiety we would prefer to avoid. Karl’s sermon left an indelible mark on my faith understanding, and though I will always remember his sermon, I will not steal it; Karl’s sermon will always remain Karl’s, but I believe he would not mind my borrowing his title this morning.
It may seem a little dissonant to speak of trouble at Thanksgiving time. I mean, in addition the herculean culinary preparations so many people undertake in getting ready for Thursday’s great feast, many of us also find ourselves taking time to make the appropriate spiritual preparations. For a lot of people this means the mental ingathering of all the blessings we can call to mind; we give them names, and prepare to offer God our thanks for them. However, in today’s busy and occasionally troubled world, sometimes this takes more effort than we would care to admit. So it is natural that when we come to church the Sunday before Thanksgiving, one of the things we’d like our minister to do is to help us to name and count those blessings, and maybe even give us a good idea or two for the great Thanksgiving grace we suspect we may be called upon to say at Thursday’s table. What we probably do not expect, never mind desire, at a time like this is to be reminded of the predicament of Job, that “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.” If we wanted trouble at our Thanksgiving table, we would have invited Uncle Joe to dinner. No, what we want is a happy gathering, a day filled with the blessings that leave our troubles behind.
But we know deep down this is not really possible. About fifteen years ago novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote an article titled “The Impious Impatience of Job,” an apt title since anyone who has read Job know he is neither pious nor patient before God. Ozick writes, “Like almost no other primordial poem the West has inherited, the book of Job is conceived under the aspect of the universal – if the universal is understood to be a questioning so organic to our nature that no creed or philosophy can elude it.” Job plumbs the human condition like few other works can.
Testimony to this is the fact that Job has been approached and appropriated by writers from Laurence Stern and Johann von Goethe to William Safire and Archibald MacLeish. And it is appropriate this morning that MacLeish in particular wedded the story of Job to the Thanksgiving table in his Pulitzer Prize winning play, J.B. J.B., as you may remember, is a modernization of the story of Job. As the curtain rises upon the very first scene we find J.B. and his wife Sarah at Thanksgiving dinner with their five children, who oooh and ahh at the gobbler on the table, and respond to their father’s question about what day it is in delightfully childlike fashion: “Turkey Day! Cranberry Day! Succotash Day! When we can all have white, and giblets to bite, and two kinds of pie, and squash in your eye! And mashed potatoes with puddles of butter, and gravy and such… And all eat too much!” But J.B.’s wife Sarah, bringing her children down to earth, unknowingly foreshadows the tragedy which is about to descend on the household, offering her own interpretation of why we give thanks: “God doesn’t give all this for nothing: a good home, good food, father, mother, brothers, sisters. We too have our part to play. If we do our part, He does His, He always has. If we forget Him, He will forget. Forever. In everything.” And on this sobering, and I hasten to add theologically dubious note, you might say the die is cast, and the fate of the family is set.
In view of this seeming confluence of Thursday’s holiday with the biblical story, I want to ask, Why the linkage? What is it about the fate of Job which impels its reader in some manner toward this particular festival? I suppose the superficial reply might be that we don’t always appreciate the blessings we have until they disappear. My very first sabbatical was actually a two-month pulpit swap with a the pastor of a Scottish Presbyterian church way up in the highlands along the River Spey. Among the culture shocks we experienced was that there appeared not to be a brewed cup of coffee to be begged, borrowed or stolen in all of Scotland. Any time we went to someone’s home for a visit, tea was of course the main libation – with single malt coming in a close second – and the only coffee available was instant, and I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t see myself drinking nothing but instant coffee for the next two months. Even the manse we were living in had nothing that remotely resembled a percolator, and so first thing each morning, I would pad downstairs, put the water on to boil, and fashion a makeshift drip coffee maker from a cone shaped colander, a paper towel, and a tall teapot. I never appreciated a cup of coffee so much as I did on those mornings when my Rube Goldberg Mr. Coffee did its stuff. Perhaps the lesson of Job was that he only came to understand the blessings of health and home, of family and livelihood, after they had been taken from him.
But this is a negative lesson, and I’m not certain that an honest reading of Job can support such an interpretation. The positive side of the same equation, and one which I believe is much more consonant with the biblical epic, is that we need to learn to recognize our blessings when they are present as well as when they are absent. Job himself knew and appreciated the value of his wife and children, of his home and health; and what is more, he knew these things were not his by right, but rather they were the gift of God. Those things we value, what we consider to be our blessings, are those things we gather up into our mental Thanksgiving baskets and which evoke a conscious, intentional spirit of thanksgiving in each of us at this time of year.
But there are also blessings in our lives which are not so easy to recall when it comes time for our table-graces, blessings that are not so obvious, but which nonetheless deserve our gratitude, for their source, too, is none other than the Almighty. Jesus lifted up some of these not-so-obvious blessings in one of the most familiar passages in the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus reminded his hearers; “Blessed are those who mourn… Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” Tell me, when was the last time any of us sat at the Thanksgiving table and gave thanks for poverty of spirit, for times of mourning, for persecution and for slander? When was the last time we thought to thank God for the troubles in our lives? These too are the things that Jesus repeatedly called blessings. I will always remember Karl Landt’s reminder: many are the times when we go through a difficult period, and then look back and understand what we have learned from it, but few are the times we remember to thank God for those troubles and the lessons they taught, and fewer still the times we thank God while we are in the very midst of those troubles, troubles which experience has repeatedly taught us will become blessings in their own time.
I want to suggest this morning that Job’s troubles were blessings because they demonstrated that his faith was not the result of his own personal comfort level, nor of the accumulation of wealth and prestige in his life, nor even of the presence of his family around the table, because when all of these things were taken from him, Job still believed, Job was still blessed, because God was still present. Don’t get me wrong; Job did not accept his troubles with equanimity; just the opposite: he railed against God, he shook his puny mortal fist in the divine face and demanded an answer to his predicament. As MacLeish put it in his play, “God is there too, in the desperation. I do not know why God should strike, but God is stricken also.” When all those things we value are removed from our lives, when all those blessings we will sit down this week to enumerate and appreciate are suddenly neutralized, yet faith remains, and this is the blessing.
For the fruits of the earth and the labors of those who harvest them, for hearth and health and home, for the ability to enjoy and appreciate all the good things a gracious God has brought into our lives, we are indeed truly grateful. And also in those times when the good things in life appear elusive, or distant, and it seems that each new day brings nothing but its own share of worry, God is still present and faith still sustains us. A lot of people, like Job, like J.B., no doubt like some of us, discover this the hard way. But if we appreciate what we have while we have it, and more to the point, if we appreciate that it is God who gives us all things, in abundance or with meagerness, then it is to God that our thanksgiving will be directed, and not to those things for which we may be thankful in themselves. Or in simpler terms, at Thursday’s grace, let us remember to be grateful, not so much for the gifts, as for the Giver.